Day: October 1, 2005

Nobody at Warner Bros. told

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Nobody at Warner Bros. told me about any screenings of Carroll Ballard’s Duma, which has been called an excellent & moving kids-and-nature movie by Scott Foundas and Roger Ebert, and it’s now hitting me I have to pay to see it at a theatre this weekend ….great. If I don’t go it’ll probably be yanked and then I’ll have to wait four months for the DVD.

Reactions to Susan Stroman’s The

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Reactions to Susan Stroman’s The Producers appear to be sharply divided at the very least, and that’s not just another way of saying the reactions are “mixed.” The movie has a lot of fans. A guy who attended last Thursday’s research screening wrote that “even though my entire group (myself plus three friends, all of whom see a fair number of flicks) despised The Producers, there were those in the audience who were clearly having a good time. They were clapping after every song. But for me, all the zip and brains of Mel Brooks’ original 1968 movie have been sucked out in favor of sight gags, ugly cliches and awful song-and-dance sequences. Susan Stroman, the director, proves herself completely incapable of creating a movie that doesn’t look like she dropped a camera in the center aisle at the St. James and went to sleep.”

Hmmm….a moderately interesting piece by

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Hmmm….a moderately interesting piece by the N.Y. Times‘ Sharon Waxman about a recent visit to the set of Paul Weitz’s American Dreamz, a $19 million political satire that will stick it to Team Bush. My first thought was that the film could date very quickly, depending on what happens in the news…but maybe not. Dennis Quaid is playing a “clueless, if good-hearted head of state named Staton…Marcia Gay Harden plays his Laura-like wife who calls him ‘Poopie’…Willem Dafoe, a senior presidential adviser of the Karl Rove kind, gives the president ‘happy pills’ and fits him with an earpiece…Hugh Grant stars as the gratuitously nasty host of a popular television singing contest called ‘American Dreamz.’ And a novice actor, Sam Golzari, plays Omer, a suicide bomber with a penchant for American show tunes.” Weitz tells Waxman, “If people don’t have anything to say about [this film], it will be really disappointing.” Get it out soon, fellas!

The L.A. Times’ Claudia Eller

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The L.A. Times‘ Claudia Eller and John Horn are now saying that studio execs are admitting that last summer’s slump was mostly about cruddy movies, and probably wasn’t a harbinger of a permanent downturn in theatrical revenues. The reason for this sudden candor is that Hollywood has just experienced four punchy weeks at the box-office (grosses 17% higher than what they were last year from Labor Day to last weekend) due to the popularity of The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Transporter 2, Flightplan and Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride. To which I say again — it’s the admissions, stupid. The number of people going out to movies has been steadily declining for the last few years. It’s great to have had a robust four weeks, but it now costs $10.75 to buy a ticket at the Grove…hello?