Day: March 15, 2007

Some people who saw Judd Apatow‘s Knocked Up at South by Southwest (including Variety critic Joe Leydon) are doing cartwheels. Leydon is calling it “uproarious…more explosively funny, more frequently, than nearly any other major studio release in recent memory…indeed, even more than the filmmaker’s smash-hit sleeper The 40-Year-Old Virgin.”

I’m sure that’s great news for those of us who didn’t laugh all that much at Virgin. I know I’m not the only one who felt that most of the comedic material in the first hour (i.e., before the better, more emotionally wholesome second-half portion with Catherine Keener) was too broad and coarse and…I don’t know, too snapping- bath-towel? As well as, like, way too Seth Rogen. A nurse ripping off Steve Carell‘s chest hair with a bandage…yawwww! A pretty drunken blonde girl vomits in Car- ell’s lap…funny! I guess I need to watch more ESPN and eat more hamburgers and grow hair on my back.

I’m glad Knocked Up is hitting a nerve — good for Apatow, I don’t begrudge — but Knocked Up has, in my eyes, a massive credibility problem. The problem is that blonde German- descended shiksa women like Katherine Heigl, who plays a successful on-camera correspondent for E! Entertainment in Apatow’s film, never give the time of day to unemployed, stubby-faced party animals like Seth Rogen, especially when he looks like a chunky beer-head who hasn’t exercised since 1997. Not even if she’s dead drunk on shots of tequila.

In real life (i.e., outside the Apatow realm), Heigl women never fuck Rosen-type guys because they can do better and they know it — it’s that simple. The only way it could possibly happen in actuality would be if the Rogen type was (a) extremely rich, (b) extremely funny or (c) extremely well-connected in the enter- tainment industry…but let’s be honest and admit that such situations are excep- tions to the rule.

In short, and to coin a phrase, “Houston, we have a problem.” Apatow does, I mean. If anyone besides myself is inclined to consider such things. I say this realizing that 93% of the audience won’t care. To those 7% — those few, those hallowed few — hold fast!

Reign Over Me costars Adam Sandler, “never making a false step while maneuvering though vertiginous mood swings,” and Don Cheadle, “deftly commingling instinctive decency with quiet desperation, are individually excellent in the film, and bring out the best in each other. And the pic itself transcends its real but relatively minor flaws to score a satisfyingly potent impact.” — Variety critic Joe Leydon in a just-posted review.

Showest has been downgraded, devalued, etc. Nikki Finke reported this a few days ago, and now N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman has done the same. And by George, I think we’ve got it. “Mass events at places like ShoWest have been replaced by one-on-one contact with the exhibitors responsible for the lion√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s share of American cineplexes, like AMC, Regal and Cinemark,” Waxman writes. “Studio executives say they can cover most of the country with a few phone calls or a visit to an exhibitor√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s headquarters in Kansas City, Mo., or Knoxville, Tennessee.”

As this Pete Hammond audio interview with Mike Binder confirms, Reign Over Me (Columbia, 3.23), which Binder directed and wrote, has a gnarly marketing issue that’ll require some expert finessing.

Reign Over Me director-writer Mike Binder (l.); Pete Hammond

The over-30 couples who would absolutely respect and admire and probably love this film are disinclined to attend because Adam Sandler plays the lead, and the under-30 popcorn-munchers who love Sandler’s dumb comedies are (probably) cool to it also because they can smell the quality aura coming off this film and they (probably) don’t want that — they want funny-irreverent Sandler shtick with a low-rent slacker attitude.

This puts Reign Over Me between a rock and a hard place, and one way Columbia marketers are trying to finagle this is by sending Binder and Sandler on a city-by-city promotional tour in which they’ll do live electronic interviews and post-screening q & a’s. The tour won’t include stops in New York or Los Angeles — Sandler wants to avoid dealing with the N.Y./L.A. journo-critic elites (i.e., the majority of whom resent him going in because they believe he’s an avatar of cultural degradation) and concentrate on supposedly friendly hinterlanders.

“This is not the kind of film that we often see big-studios making,” Hammond says in the beginning. “This has more of an indie feel.”

Binder later discloses that he initially wrote Reign with Tom Cruise in mind for Sandler’s lead role (i.e., an emotionally catatonic ex-dentist who spends all his time playing video games, eating Chinese good and listening to The Who and Springsteen on vinyl) and that the Don Cheadle part (an old dental-school friend of Sandler’s with emotional-sharing issues of his own) was going to initially be played by Javier Bardem until he fell out.

“It’s a hard movie to sell,” Binder says. “I don’t have big expectations. My movies never make any [real] money. It’s true. They come out, people say they like ’em, and….I mean, we just saw 300 open last weekend to $70 million dollars.”

Binder says he actually considered cutting an end-of-Act Two scene when Sandler’s character has an emotional breakdown and unloads his pain about having lost his family, etc. It’s a totally “money” payoff thing and perhaps Sandler’s finest moment as a serious actor…and Binder wanted to cut it because he began to feel uncomfortable about what he felt might be a too-heavy emotional impact.

Here, for the fourth or fifth time, is my Reign review from last August.