Day: January 6, 2007

Today is a flying-back-to-L.A.-on-Continental- Airlines day. An hour and 20 minutes before I need to leave and I haven’t even packed yet, so that’s it for stories and postings until I get to Newark Airport ….maybe. In fond memory of the last month or so, some final snaps…

8th Avenue and 53rd…or something close to that — Friday, 1.5.07, 2:50 pm; there but for the grace of God; rain always helps; I just realize what Helen Mirren needs to do to get away from her inevitable-Best Actress-recipient aura of loftiness, which a lot of people out there are getting sick of — she needs to do a carefuly lighted, black-and-white Charlize Theron photo session, and thereby blow the whole prim-and-proper Queen Elizabeth thing out of the water; parking rage; sea bass ordered and slowly consumed (so as to fully savor every bite) at Friday lunch with the Warner Bros. new media publicity guys

Night at the Museum will be #1 this weekend with a projected $26,756,000 — down 27% from last weekend — for a total cume of $166,853,000 — a huge hit and a piece of shit. The Pursuit of Happyness will be #2 with $13,879,000., off 28%, obviously a hangin’-in-there hit with a total grab of $125,037,000.
Bolstered by rave reviews, Children of Men will end up with a Sunday-night tally of $10,313,000 in 1289 theatres, at roughly $8500 a print. You could project total earnings in the $35 million range and you might be right, but I believe in fairies so I’m hoping it’ll at least break $40 million. It’s a great film, after all — a bona-fide classic
Paramount’s fourth-place Freedom Writers will have about $9,846,000 by Sunday night.
Weekend projections for the bottom six of the top ten are as follows: Dreamgirls $8,644,000 (off 39%); Charlotte’s Web,$7,360,000; Happily Never After, 7,001,000; The Good Shepherd, $6,525,000; Rocky Balboa, $6,428,000; We Are Marshall, $5,604,000. And Code Name: The Cleaner will end up with roughly $4,297,000.

The Bourne Ultimatum (Universal, 8.3) looks like the one truly exceptional threequel due out this summer. (How can it be otherwise with Paul Greengrass directing?) But which of the other five will be the worst? I’m sure there are deeply-held opinions.

My money, naturally, is on Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End — another superdooferus Gore Verbinski wankbuster that’ll look terrific and will be about absolutely dead frickin’ nothing except the major participants getting richer. (Will a certain columnist who loved Dead Man’s Chest write after seeing this new one, “Ecstasy! My heart is fluttering with joy!”?) One comfort factor: the presumed return of Bill Nighy as Davy Jones.
Perhaps I shouldn’t underestimate the potential tediousness of Spider-Man 3, the trailer for which makes it look like the Spider-Man version The Empire Strikes Back, with Kirsten Dunst being the lead supplier of Yoda-like “beware of the dark side!” warnings.
Shrek the Third will be harmless. Ocean’s Thirteen — a Sting-like revenge-against- Andy Garcia story — may actually be half-decent. And Brett Ratner‘s Rush Hour 3 will almost certainly be glorious.
Time‘s Richard Corliss has written that “the trifecta of threequels is crucial to Hollywood’s health.” My first reaction to this was the opposite — they’re crucial to feeding the Hollywood disease. But if the big three Threequels are profitable enough, they’ll bring in the bucks that will help cover the shortfalls on artistic- gamble films like Children of Men and others….and that’s a good thing.

Fearless Manhattan journo Lewis Beale has passed along his ’06 superlatives — here are a few: (a) The Best: Inside Man, United 93, Little Miss Sunshine, Half Nelson, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Proposition, Babel, The Departed, Casino Royale, Children of Men; (b) The Worst: The Notorious Betty Page, London, Freedomland, Talladega Nights, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, Fast Food Nation; (c) Underrated: Brick, Find Me Guilty, Hollywoodland, Clerks II, Miami Vice, The Fountain, Apocalypto, Come Early Morning; (d) Overrated: Volver, Borat, Dreamgirls; (e) Full Disclosure: Beale has not seen Letters From Iwo Jima; (f) Guilty Pleasures: Glory Road, Slither, Invincible, Something New.
On top of (g) Best Doper Movie: The Fountain; (h) Best Pre-Columbian Chase Film: Apocalypto; (i) Best Film I Saw In 2006 Which Won’t Be Released Until Later This Year: The Lives of Others, a brilliant German movie about East Germany’s Stasi security system, in which a rigid spy becomes humanized after he is assigned to get information on a noted playwright and his actress lover; (j) Patti Labelle “I Can Sing Really Loud and Shatter Glass” Award: Jennifer Holiday; (k) Great-Looking Grunge: The Proposition.
Beale’s Favorite Scenes: (1) The highway chase in Children of Men; (2) The construction site chase in Casino Royale; (3) The awesomely trippy final 15 minutes of The Fountain; (4) Martin Sheen thrown off the roof in The Departed; (5) Abigail Breslin dancing to “Super Freak” in Little Miss Sunshine; (6) The Motown dance number in Clerks II; (7) A female cop telling a white supremacist what a bullet from a high-powered rifle will do to his head in Miami Vice; (8) Any time Meryl Streep gets bitchy in The Devil Wears Prada; (9) Newark air traffic controllers watching as one of the lethal planes passes [a mile or so] in front of them, heading for the Twin Towers, in United 93; and (10) Ashley Judd not knowing how to deal with a lover who just wants to caress her in Come Early Morning.

It’s interesting that underdog-against-the-overdog movies have been so plentiful in this country (especially recently) since it takes a relatively comfortable middle-class audience of complacent jello- bodies to enjoy them.
If people out there were really hurting due to their own underdog sagas being suffered on a day-to-day basis, I suspect that today’s underdog films wouldn’t sell as many tickets. American audiences emotionally identify with underdogs — it makes them feel good to see themselves as never-day-die believers who finally win the blue ribbon — despite their actual lifestyle realities, which naturally feed into the spiritual.
I’m thinking of typical hinterland Americans…sea lions deciding whether to go out or order takeout as they slumber in an easyboy, half-assedly channel-surfing while their tweener kids sit at the dinner table with iPod plugs in their ears, wearing leave-me-alone expressions.