Day: May 10, 2005

Box-office commentator Paul Dergarabedian sums it all up in a much darker way than he (probably) realized in Sharon Waxman’s New York Times story that ran yesterday (5.9). It’s about Hollywood suits biting their nails and furrowing their brows over ’05’s sluggish business so far, and more particularly the underwhelming response to last weekend’s openers, Kingdom of Heaven and House of Wax. “The marketplace is obviously in a malaise, and it’s going to take movies like Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith to get us out of it,” Dergarabedian said. He means it’ll be a huge hit, of course, but good God…if there’s one thing Sith doesn’t accomplish, it’s make anyone feel like they’ve been lifted out of a malaise. This is the aridity of Hollywood in a nutshell — a film that everyone will go to but not that many will truly enjoy being described as some kind of restoration trip that will set things right.

In his review of Monster-in-Law in last Friday’s Hollywood Reporter, Kirk Honeycutt called it “a deeply dispiriting movie, not just because it is grindingly bad but because Jane Fonda actually chose this for her comeback after a 15-year absence from the screen.” Correction: Fonda didn’t exactly select Monster-in-Law as the very best comeback vehicle she could find. She decided to do it as a fallback thing after (a) she auditioned for but didn’t get the Cloris Leachman alcoholic-mother role in Spanglish (director James L. Brooks felt she wasn’t quite right), and (b) after she blew off a chance to play Orlando Bloom’s mother in Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown because she didn’t think the role was big or fully-written enough. I reported this in some detail in my 12.28.04 column. (It’s the third story from the top.)

I’m at the Amsterdam airport, my plane for Nice leaves about three hours from now, and writing a WIRED item about this no-big-deal fact is, no argument, lame. And yet…I’m sitting in the “communication centre” on the second floor, and for 10 Euros you can get a wireless hookup for 24 hours, and it’s awfully damn nice to plug in right away on foreign soil and use your laptop as a U.S.-based phone. I’m referring to Vonage’s Soft Phone software, which lets you call the States for a flat fee of $10 for 500 minutes. It works fine as long as you have a decent set of headphones with a microphone.