Can we talk? Munich‘s 532-theatre release starting last Friday (12.23) resulted in $5.7 million and a $7,706 average….not fantastic but not bad. But this doesn’t portend an ecstatic reception when it plays Boobville in the hinterlands. This Steven Spielberg thriller has been booked into urban uptown theatres where it was expected to do very well…and it didn’t. It played pretty well, and if they couldn’t do seriously vigorous business in these theatres, it’s going to start slowing down and then bombing out when it plays the rube territories. Some of you are thinking I’m so anti-Munich I can’t see or think straight, but ask any hard- nosed analyst and they’ll tell you the same thing. Pretty good numbers in uptown theatres for this movie means not-as-good numbers once it goes wide and then it’s all downhill and into the crapper. Especially given how Munich plays (i.e., repetitively) and especially how it makes you feel when the closing credits come up (emptied out, dispirited), so it’s basically over.

King Kong‘s weekend tallies suffered a sobering 58% drop from last weekend, which is a pretty strong indication that people are not exactly over-the-moon about it, and yet Peter Jackson’s monkey movie edged out The Chronicles of Narnia for the four-day holiday weekend (12.23 through 12.26) with a $31.4 million haul vs. Narnia‘s $30.1 million. Narnia opened on 12.9 (five days ahead of Kong‘s 12.14 debut) and has earned a total of $163.5 million to Kong‘s $118.7 million cume. Variety‘s Ben Fritz has written that “one of the few things that can safely be said is that Narnia has momentum on its side” since the “the C.S. Lewis adaptation fell just 36% compared with last weekend, while Kong dropped 58%.” Kong “had the stronger Christmas day with $8.7 million compared with Narnia‘s $7.3 million…pics were virtually even Friday and Saturday,” reported Fritz. He added that “exhibs called [the long Xmas weekend] one of the toughest-to-read frames they’ve ever seen.”

Still haven’t found the right Sundance accomodation. If anyone knows of any last-minute shares, please get in touch. Maybe I just won’t go this year…I can roll with that. But habits die hard.

Forget that Variety‘s Lisa Nesselson is calling it “a sort of It’s an Adequate Life with token bad guys…as if the color-coded gangsters in Reservoir Dogs decided to get together and form a rainbow.” And that Screen Daily‘s Benny Crick is calling it “a modest directorial comeback.” All I care about Angel-A, which opened in Paris five days ago (on 12.21), is that it’s (a) a new Luc Besson film, his first since ’99’s The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, (b) it was shot in Paris last summer in the depopulated wee hours in anamorphic (2.35 to 1) black-and-white, and (c) it stars Jamel Debbouze (the little deranged guy who worked in the vegetable market in Amelie). I’m totally into it on these terms alone, and what kind of movie fan wouldn’t be? So why isn’t it showing in the foreign film section of Sundance ’06? Here’s the best trailer link I’ve found.

Christian critics feel that Ang Lee’s telling of the sad saga of Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist may be affecting, but is also influencing social norms in the wrong (i.e., contrary to Christian rightist views) way. What are ya gonna do with these people? But speaking from an anti-right Blue State perspective I wonder if there’s any such thing as going sexually-emotionally too far afield in terms of movie subjects? Like the story of Harold G. Hart of Neillsville, Wisconsin, for instance. What if the activity described in this story was the most profound, emotionally deep-down thing that had ever happened or would ever happen to Hart in his lifetime? And if he were otherwise a nice churchgoing guy with good kids? I could see this working as a thread in a David Lynch movie, but I could also imagine myself saying to a Chris- tian film critic, “Okay…I see your point in this instance.”

Here’s a graph by New York Times arts and cultural editor Edward Rothstein in a 12.26 piece that’s critical of Munich, and it’s worth quoting: “If terrorism is solely the result of injustice, then without the injustice there would be no terrorism. So the best response is to work for justice. Threats, vengeance, security strictures — anything other than the addressing of legitimate grievances is ultimately futile. In particular, since killing terrorists does nothing to alter injustice, it will do nothing to alter terror. Instead, it only leads to more injustice, turning the victims of terrorism into mirror images of the terrorists themselves.” For what it’s worth, this sums up what I like the most about this Steven Spielberg film…what it rhetorically says about the Israeli-Palestinian quagmire rather than what it delivers in dramatic/cinematic/European thriller absorption terms. This makes it “worthy” in a very sincere and genuine sense, but anyone who says Munich truly knocked their socks off and rang their bell as a visceral cinematic thing is…well, I don’t see how anyone can say that with any sincerity.