All The King’s Men preeming at the Toronto Film Festival…great. (I’m half-convinced that I ran this news recently but I’ve just done a search and apparently not.) The movie stands or falls depending on whether Sean Penn’s Willy Stark exudes the right kind of whistlestop man-of-the- people charisma. That’s the whole ballgame.

In response to Friday’s item about those six fall-holiday Columbia films that may be high-pedigree, a guy I know who’s seen Running With Scissors and Stranger Than Fiction wrote in and shared. “Scissors I’m in love with,” he began. “It will be hard to beat Annette Bening for Best Actress this year, and both Jill Clayburgh and Brian Cox are standouts in the supporting cast. [The film] has a weird sense of blending the styles of Cameron Crowe and Wes Anderson that is hard to describe, but it is a fun film that ultimately really, really works.
Stranger Than Fiction is on similar turf, [although] it falls apart ever so slightly in its third act. Seriously, it felt like best-of-the-decade material for much of the running time until the end failed to capitalize, at least in my eyes, on the promise of the first two thirds. But it’s a touching tale, and Will Ferrell is as good in the flick as Jim Carrey was in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And watch out for a feisty Maggie Gyllenhaal, who’ll have World Trade Center and Sherry Baby to help push her toward supporting actress recognition. Who knows what changes will occur or have occured on these prints since I saw them, but both were at the very least capable and likely awards outings. I expect screenplay nominations for both to be a serious possibility.”
For what it’s worth, I spoke to another early viewer of Stranger Than Fiction and he disagreed with the other guy’s assessment of a third-act problem.

Now that everyone’s had a gander at Pirates 2, it’s time for everyone to submit a 50 to 75-word quickie review. Keep ’em tight, but also include observations about what others were saying on the way out. What was the vibe in the theatre during the show? How many people took separate cell-phone, bathroom and popcorn breaks? C’mon, be honest… were the critics who slammed it all that wrong? Or are the ticket-buyers just loving it to death ?

This is landmark: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest did $54.2 million yesterday counting the take from Thursday’s midnight screenings. One projection from a rival studio for the three-day weekend is $138,600,000. Spider-Man‘s three-day record of $114.8 million has been busted…blasted apart. Cue Paul Dergarabedian!

That’s because today’s (Saturday, 7.8) take is expected to be in the realm of $42 million on top of an estimate of $38 million for Sunday…figure $40 million per day. Friday was nearly $55 million (another studio is estimating that figure) because of Thursday midnight AND the eager-beaver, opening-day-adrenaline factor. And the inevitable word-of-mouth dropoff is another factor in the projections for today and Sunday.
Poor Superman Returns did only $7,032,000, and is being projected to do about $23,414,000 for the weekend. That’s roughly a 57% plunge from last Friday and a projected 55% downtown for the weekend. Considering the size of last weekend’s take during a major holiday sojourn plus the competition, the word is “give Superman a break…it didn’t collapse and everyone knew it couldn’t sustain in the face of Pirates,” etc.
The Devil Wears Prada did an estimated $4,928,000, which looks like a 40% to 45% drop from last weekend’s $27 million haul. I had heard an earlier Friday estimate of $6 million, and I said to myself, “Whoa…good hold.” Then I heard the $4,928,000 figure.
Click is expected to do $12,345,000 for the weekend. The $9,043,000 that Cars is expected to do will push it over the $200 million mark. Nacho Libre will do about $3,684,000 and The Break-Up…I can’t find yesterday’s figure but it’ll end up on Sunday evening with about $114 million.

Someone else has finally written a strong gripe piece about John Ford‘s The Searchers. The author is Stephen Metcalf, and his article ran yesterday (Thursday, 7.6) on Slate. I took a stab at expressing my divided feelings about Ford and his post-1948 westerns in a piece that I ran in mid-June. (Apologies for last night’s Slate/Salon mixup.)

Between 9.22 and 12.15, or in less than twelve weeks’ time, Columbia will open six films with high-pedigree profiles that could figure in the year-end award cycle — a high-powered political melodrama, a bloodless period costume drama, and three-and-a-half heart/relationship movies of an upscale bent. And although it’s not currently discussable, the studio may release still another relationship flick (a good one) before the year’s end. That’s a lotta refinement.
Steven Zallian‘s All The King’s Men, a reputedly feisty political melodrama with Sean Penn in the lead role, will be first out of the gate on 9.22.
Sofia Coppola‘s Marie-Antoinette, which I hated after seeing in Cannes (although I respected the craft and discipline that went into making it) opens on 10.20. It’s probably a lock to land the same kind of tech Oscars that Memoirs of a Geisha wound up with last March.
The heart/relationship flick of uncertain strength (i.e., the halfer) is Ryan Murphy‘s R-rated Running with Scissors (10.11), about a young man’s tumultuous relationship with his self-centered, bipolar mom (Annette Bening).
The first full-on relationship flick (i.e., one with a clever-cat stylistic approach) is Mark Forster‘s Stranger Than Fiction (11.10). I tried reading Zach Helm ‘s script last year and found it clever (maybe too clever), but I’ve been told by someone who’s seen it that it plays quite nicely. The cast includes Will Ferrell, Emma Thompson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Queen Latifah and Dustin Hoffman.
On 11.24 The Holiday , a relationship drama written and directed by Something’s Got to Give‘s Nancy Meyers, will open with a cool-sounding cast (Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Jack Black, Ed Burns) and a story about a kind of swap deal — an American girl (Diaz) with relationship woes and a British woman (Winslet) going through the same shit.
The last entry in the heart-relationship cavalcade is Gabriele Muccino‘s The Pursuit of Happyness (12.15), a father-son relationship drama with Will Smith as a beleagured dad.

“Screen comedy is at its best when it pitches its tent close to the poverty line. The minute the effects budget swells, it starts to crush the life out of comedy, which needs empty spaces to roam and some quality alone with the audiences in order to enlist its complicity in its subversions. It is, I think, a universal truth of movie-making that effects are never funny. They can sometimes wow you, but they can’t make you laugh, and [Johnny] Depp cannot stand up to the hubbub they create. No actor can. He can only serve them, which involves him in derring-do that any actor could do about as well as he can. He needs to be involved with us, not with the lunking machinery of the movie.” — Time critic Richard Schickel on…uh-oh, I’m going to get attacked again for running another anti-Pirates item. But I swear I’m running Schickel’s piece because it happens to be very well-written.

The summer is over. I can feel it in almost every phone call I’ve made over the past four or five days. Everyone’s talking about September, about the Toronto Film Festival, about fall slates, Oscar campaigns, possible Oscar contenders either dropping out or being added, etc. The first viewings of Miami Vice and Lady in the Water will happen next week, there’s Snakes on a Plane on the way and ComicCon happens later this month, but the turn-your- brain-off, cruise-along, what’s-the-next-idiot movie-we-have-to-see? summer mindset is just about done. I realize it sounds silly to write off the seven weeks remaining between now and Labor Day, but mid-July is when the Oscar campaigns start to be formulated and when journalists start to disengage from You, Me and Dupree-type films and look forward to more nutritious fare.

The Pirates 2 opening-weekend numbers should be assessed in context. If it beats Spider-Man‘s three-day opening-weekend record of $114.8 million (established four years and two months ago), it would be thorough and fair to compare the number of theatres Spider-Man opened in to the 4,133 “situations” where Pirates 2 is now screening. And if it doesn’t break the Spider-Man record …well, ask “Ari Gold” — Jeremy Piven‘s Entourage character — what the industry will think about that. And let’s also consider what the second-weekend falloff percentage might be. If you look at what this film really is as opposed to what average moviegoers (i.e., those fine folks won’t read the critics or consider those Rotten Tomatoes ratings) are hoping it might be, is it realistic to suggest that anything less than 45% to 50% revenue drop will happen? I’m just asking — I don’t know anything. I’m just saying that before analysts start writing their euphoric gush pieces over the coming Pirates haul (complete with an expression-of-ecstasy quote from Paul Dergerabedian), they should step back and think it over a second time.

Wim Wender’s “last five films were made in America, something he says he never intended, [and] the next will be made in Germany, probably in collaboration with [one] of the pillars of the ’70s New Wave, Peter Handke,” reports The Age‘s Stephanie Bunbury. “Perhaps Don’t Come Knocking” — Wender’s latest film, which he made with his Paris Texas partner Sam Shepard — “represents the end of another era in Wenders’ career. For more than a year now Wenders has had everything in storage, preparing to leave the [U.S.] for good.” In other words, Wenders needs to “go German” again and revitalize that haunted romantic-Teutonic existential gloom thing. Good move, but this article, perhaps unfairly, seems to portray a once-legendary artist scurrying back home with his tail between his legs.

The thoughtless vulgarian in me would get a kick out of playing this Taxi Driver video game…I’m half-serious. It was designed by Papaya Studios, and was supposed to be distributed by Majescoe Entertainment.

The idea is, of course, grotesque, and yet there’s something about the perversity of a video game allowing the player to become Robert De Niro‘s Travis Bickle, everyone’s favorite nutbag taxi driver, and get that Mohawk haircut and put on that Army surplus jacket and that sliding-gun arm device and go hunt down Harvey Keitel ‘s Lower East Side pimp and who knows how many others? Maybe Peter Boyle‘s burly cab driver or Charles-Pallantine-for-President staffers Albert Brooks and Cybil Shepherd or maybe Pallantine himself…it’s totally diseased beyond measure.
The Taxi Driver game was announced last year, but I became interested again when I read this 7.6 Guardian interview with Paul Schrader, screenwriter of the original 1976 Taxi Driver , which Martin Scorsese directed. It said that Schrader and Scorsese, appalled at the idea of the game, tried to have it stopped only to learn that they’d signed away the power to do anything about it in their original contracts.
Majescoe was supposed to issue the Taxi Driver game earlier this year, and (I’m obviously not plugged into the video-game world) yet I couldn’t find any reviews or even a release date. I called Majescoe this morning and was told they had severed their deal with Papaya. The numbers I called after this — Papaya’s Irvine office #, plus several for reporters and reviewers who write for video mags — didn’t lead anywhere because everyone’s at the VSDA Convention in Las Vegas. If anyone knows why Majescoe backed out, please inform.

Now is the time for all friends of Pirates 2 to rally round and provide a little positve counter-spin to all those pans by the big-gun critics, which of course will have zero impact on the coming weekend’s massive opening numbers. The point is, are you a supporter of “joy” or aren’t you? If so, you have to stand up and do what any friend would do at this stage.