Day: August 20, 2005

It’s time to admit something and be done with it. I’ve been a big fan of My Date With Drew since I saw it in April ’04, and I’ve written two or three column pieces about it, and it finally opened on August 5th after a long wait and…it tanked. Box Office Guru’s last posting as of 8.14 had total earnings at $181,041. It took in $85,000 on the opening weekend in 85 theatres. People didn’t care. A good thing was ignored, waved away, dismissed…and that’s what happened. Too bad, but I guess those distributors who said people wouldn’t pay to see it because it’s too much like TV were right. I saw it with a festival crowd and they went apeshit and it got a 68% on Rotten Tomatoes, but ticket-buyers were another story.

“I never found a companion who was as companionable as solitude.” I wish I wasn’t quoting someone…

I was feeling fairly revved about Rachel McAdams after seeing her in The Wedding Crashers in July, and now, after catching her in Red Eye, I’m starting to realize that she’s really quite the comer, and I may be putting it too cautiously. She’s probably the fetching-est actress to come along since…I was going to say Reese Witherspoon but she’s a lot more subtle and far more intriguing than Witherspoon and, for that matter, Julia Roberts when she was good (before the calendar and motherhood and everything else caught up with her). It has seemed for a long time that every actress playing a woman-in-peril uses a lot of the same moves. It’s always primarily about what they’re feeling (fear, anxiety) and all that oh-my-God shrieking and heavy panting, and never that much about what they’re thinking or plotting in order to get back at the bad guy. This is McAdams in Red Eye — she’s emotional and vulnerable, but she never screams or crumples or goes nuts, and she’s thinking all the time…waiting, watching, calculating. She’s got something else going on. In her Red Eye review, Manohla Dargis said, “If you don’t look too closely, if you fail to see past the lissome figure and the dimples that punctuate her smile, you might not notice how [McAdams] holds her gaze a few beats longer than need be, suggesting a depth of intensity uncommon in most Hollywood ingenues.”

This is kind of a Defamer-ish thing but here goes: Hollywood Interrupted‘s Mark Ebner is reporting that a Paramount Pictures staffer has told him that 50 Cent has very impressive equipment. The Paramount guy’s opinion is based, says Ebner, on having seen full-frontal footage of the rapper in Jim Sheridan’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’ (opening 11.9), an urban biopic in which 50 Cent plays himself. Ebner says Paramounters “have seen much of Get Rich and have been astounded by the…size of 50’s [instrument].” He quotes the staffer as saying Sheridan “wants to leave some of the full-frontal stuff in the movie, but there wouldn’t be room for much else on the screen!” I’m presuming the guy who told Ebner this is straight…right?

I’m sorry to say this because I’m a Rotten Tomatoes man all the way, but there’s something very wrong somewhere when The 40 Year-Old Virgin is, according to these guys, the best-reviewed film of the year so far with a 90% positive. Can’t they fix these figures or something? Even though Virgin‘s rating has dropped to 89% since this announcement was posted, let’s consider a few things. One, RT’s review poll only considers the wide releases (no platforms, no little indie releases) which means a higher piece-of-shit percentage. Two, The Forty Year-Old Virgin is, at best, a half-tolerable funny-in-spots comedy. (The critics who gave it unqualified raves should be deeply ashamed of themselves.) Three, the fifth most favorably reviewed wide release of the year was Revenge of the Sith so give us all a friggin’ break.