Day: January 10, 2006

It’s over two weeks old

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It’s over two weeks old (heavens!), but this Mick LaSalle piece in the San Francisco Chronicle is one of the most perceptive and well-grounded explanations why theatrical revenues dropped in ’05…and why they’ll continue to drop (putting aside the claims of those who insist that the slump is a statistical myth or wieves’ tale) until something drastic happens. Which of course won’t happen until mainstream films start costing less to make (which won’t happen until things get so bad that superstars and their agents stop holding up the studios for exorbitant upfront pay-or-play fees) or theatres drop their prices or…you tell me. “Was [the slump] just an anomaly [or] a blip?,” LaSalle writes. “Probably not. Was this simply not a very good movie year? To an extent, yes. But something else seemed to be at play in 2005 — the inevitable drift of movie consumers from theaters to home video. The drift has been ongoing, but this year the box office started feeling the pinch.”

Time’s Richard Corliss on the

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Time‘s Richard Corliss on the great Terrence Howard: “He exudes a charismatic musk as DJay, the pimp-turned-rapper in the indie film Hustle & Flow. Those soft eyes, the feline athleticism, a voice that can caress subtlety into any dialogue — viewers get a taste of that, and in a minute they say, ‘This guy’s a natural star.'”

We all know that screw-ups

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We all know that screw-ups happen now and then, and this one’s not a rumor: the Technicolor tech guys who sent out screeners of Steven Spielberg’s Munich on behalf of NBC Universal have messed things up as far as members of the British Film Academy (BAFTA) are concerned. The purchase order on Universal’s part was correct, but somehow it wasn’t carried out right and BAFTA’s 3000-plus members “were sent encrypted ‘screener’ DVDs that were mastered for North America, and can only be played on special [multi-region] DVD players supplied by Cinea (www.cinea.com — a Dolby subsidiary),” according to a Boing-Boing correspondent. “First the DVDs were held up by UK customs, thereby missing the first-round voting deadline. But when they arrived, they would not play on any machine because they had been mastered for Region 1 (North America).” I made the call and an NBC Uni spokesman has confirmed the veracity of the report.

Okay, we’ve figured out the

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Okay, we’ve figured out the best actors to play director Nicholas Ray in Phil Kaufman’s I Was Interrupted, which will cover Ray’s final decade. Candidate #1: Nick Nolte. Candidate #2: Liam Neeson. Candidate #3: Sam Shepard, but Ray’s voice was deep and bellowing so Shepard would have to do something about that aw-shucksy twangy thing. Candidate #4: Geoffrey Rush, but I don’t think so. And Candidate #5: Ian McKellen…maybe.

Brokeback Mountain star Heath Ledger,

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Brokeback Mountain star Heath Ledger, currently in Australia and interviewed at the Melbourne premiere of Ang Lee’s film, had a couple of things to say about Larry Miller‘s refusing to show it in Salt Lake City last weekend. But Ledger’s claim that West Virginia had lynchings “only 25 years ago” appears suspect. According to this June 2005 Washington Post article about Democratic Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia (who was a former member of the Ku Klux Klan), the last lynching in West Virginia was in 1931.

The salivating ambition of the

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The salivating ambition of the Broadcast Film Critics Awards aside, the awards they handed out early Monday evening were right down the middle of the bowling alley — Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture, Ang Lee for Best Director, Philip Seymour Hoffman for best Acotr in Capote, Reese Witherspoon for Best Actress in Walk the Line, et. al. The only hiccups were (a) naming the bizarrely over-rated The 40 Year-old Virgin as Best Comedy, and (b) giving John Williams the Best Musical Score award for Memoirs of a Geisha instead of Gustavo Santaolalla’s for Brokeback Mountain.