Day: June 13, 2005

Great news! After weeks and weeks of waiting and loads of political horseshit, it’s finally being announced that Clive Owen is committed to playing the lead role in Michael Davis’s Shoot ‘Em Up, a very hip-funny absurdist urban actioner fron New Line that will start shooting in January ’06. This is an excellent move on Owen’s part, and a major score for Davis. Anyone who doesn’t remember the 3.2.05 piece I wrote about Davis and Shoot “Em up, here it is.

The white-faced freak has walked…hooray for the white-faced freak. Celebrity wins! Paving the way for more friendships with boys, more “hand-holding,” more Jesus juice, etc.

Wanna know why Mr.and Mrs. Smith did as well as it did last weekend? Read this story by Maureen Story in today’s New York Times (“Forget About Milk and Bread. Give Me Gossip!”) I will say no more. Just read it. Remember how everyone was saying after 9/11 that the country and the culture will never be quite so frivolous again as it was before that tragedy?

Don’t you just love the American public? More specifically, the moviegoers (let’s just say it — those really deep women out there who read the tabs and are total fools for the Brangelina mythology) who just had to see the thoroughly rancid Mr. and Mrs. Smith to the tune of $51.1 million last weekend, and thereby rewarded director Doug Liman and stars Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie for making the biggest piece of shit of their careers?? (Variety said that “boosting Smith were older femme adults, who don’t usually turn out for actioners but do read the celeb weeklies and watch tabloid TV chronicling the are-they-or-aren’t-they star pairing.”) Let’s just be happy that the Smith success makes it that much easier for the next grossly expensive big-studio piece of shit to get greenlit. And also that all of those wise and perceptive American moviegoers (most of them under 35, I’m guessing) also decided to blow off Cinderella Man last weekend (it was down 48% from the previous weekend). The story of Jim Braddock is basically a corpse now, just waiting to get picked up and carried out of theatres because so many millions of American moviegoers didn’t show up over…what? Russell Crowe’s phone-throwing episode? Because Ron Howard’s boxing film is too quality-skewed to compete in the mindless summer season? Because Univeral didn’t push the family angle heavily enough in the ads? A good movie is a good movie, darnitall, and every indication is that those who’ve seen Cinderellla Man really like and speak well of it. It just doesn’t add up that a movie as worthy and emotionally effective as this one would just stumble and run out of gas like this.