Month: March 2007

When it’s all said and done on Sunday evening, Zack Snyder‘s 300 (renamed in a roundabout way by L.A. City Beat critic Andy Klein as Go Tell The Spartans to Go Fuck Themselves) will end up with $30 million give or take. That’s a more-than-50% plunge from last weekend, but it’ll still be at $110 million or thereabouts by tomorrow night. God help us…God help us all.

Some commentators have been clucking, “My, look at the stunning disparity between what the critics and the ticket-buying public love and hate…critics sure are out of step with Joe Gorilla.” That’s certainly true on this end — I am way out of step with fans of 300, and I’m absolutely beaming with pride as a result. This is a stale and tired-ass thing to say, I realize, but every firing synapse tells me that 300 is yet another metaphor for the end of moviegoing civilization as some of us have known it for the last, oh, 30-plus years.

Snyder, in my book, now ranks at the top of the list of villain-class Hollywood directors like Michael Bay, Stephen Sommers, Shawn Levy and Roger Kumble. There’s never been a dumber, emptier and more sub-simian influence upon narrative cinema than the graphic novel, and 300 is the clank of a sword striking a metal shield and the dumb-thunk sound of tens of millions of graphic-novel-worshipping moviegoers going, “Whoa…looks cool.”

I paid to see 300 last week (I paid money to see it!) and liked exactly two things — Lena Headey‘s skimpy dress (and of course her big shtup scene) and the scene when the crouching Spartans are chuckling with each other about how the dense shower of 10,000 Persian flying arrows are causing them to fight in the shade. That was good — the film was on to something during that very brief moment.

It’ll be nip and tuck as to whether Premonition, the poorly-reviewed Sandra Bullock thriller, takes the second place prize with an estimated $18 million, or whether Wild Hogs takes in a bit more than $18 million and edges out Bullock. Hogs, in any event, will hit $100 million sometime today or tomorrow. Dead Silence will come in fourth with $7 mil or so. Chris Rock‘s I Think I Love My Wife is sputtering and may finish with just over $5 million tops….not good.

Calling Jeff Okun, the Blood Diamond teardrop special-effects ace who got into a friendly debate with me a few days ago. This Ronald Reagan teardrop photo on the cover of the 3.16 Time magazine isn’t up to Okun’s level. It looks like a glob of digital glycerine mixed with saline fake-boob solution. I just watched the Blood Diamond DVD and I’m much cooler with Jennifer Connelly’s.

Ocean’s Thirteen is going to Cannes so the festival can throw the spotlight on George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Al Pacino …fine. Nobody’s going to trash this latest Steven Soderbergh-er like The DaVinci Code or Marie Antoinette got trashed, even if it’s on the level of Ocean’s Twelve, which I have a special affection for because of the improvised Julia Roberts-pretending-to-be-Julia Roberts scene in the Rome hotel room with Bruce Willis.

I was just wondering why, in mid-March, Alison James‘ Variety story about this didn’t veer into speculation about some likely (or somewhat likely) Cannes frontliners. Like the Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell did a month ago. Surely James has her sources and has heard a few things?

Howell assembled a list of Cannes-favored directors (i.e., men whose films have routinely been invited to the festival in years past) and simply cross-referenced it with their latest efforts which are slated to open in ’07.

I checked back with Howell yesterday morning, and he’s still betting on Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones being there this year — Dylan being the subject of Todd Haynes‘ I’m Not There and the Stones having been portraited by Martin Scorsese in a “career-spanning documentary on the Rolling Stones, with concert footage from their ‘A Bigger Bang’ tour.”

I’m agreeing with Howell in half-expecting to see the following turn up in Cannes (and if they do it’ll he a hell of a festival): Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood, Michael Moore‘s Sicko, Joel and Ethan Coen‘s No Country for Old Men (I read the excellent script for this last year — it told me the film could be Fargo-level), Hou Hsiao-hsien‘s The Red Balloon, Michael Haneke‘s Funny Games, Michael Winterbottom‘s A Mighty Heart (the murder of Daniel Pearl movie), Wong Kar Wai‘s My Blueberry Nights, Gus Van Sant‘s Paranoid Park, Hector Babenco‘s El Pasado and Ken Loach‘s These Times.

Howell says to scratch the Adam Sandler pic from the list in his 2.16. piece. (Alexander Payne co-wrote the screenplay, but the final version has been heavily “Sandlerized.”) And scratch David Cronenberg‘s Eastern Promises, which won’t be ready to show until the Toronto Film Festival in September.

I think I know this one. In fact, I’m dead certain. It’s from Pauly Shore‘s In The Army Now.

Changing your agent is like buying a new car. It feels better to drive one with that fresh-car smell, especially if it has a more powerful engine or a better-sounding music system, or because it’s more energy-efficient. I know that cars are primarily about emotion and secondarily about function. That said, I’ve been waiting for Babel director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu to jump ship since around this time last year, which is when his longtime Endeavor agent and ally John Lesher took the job of running Paramount Vantage. He stayed with Endeavor through the award-season Babel campaign out of familial loyalty, but on February 26th it was back to brass tacks. He’s now a CAA guy.

There’s nothing wrong with Cate Blanchett taking a straight paycheck job in the forthcoming Indiana Jones film, which people are somewhat interested in seeing but also skeptical about because Harrison Ford (a.k.a., the guy who catches z’s in the back seat of his girlfriend’s car while she’s shooting on a nearby sound stage) turns 65 in July.

Not only is the stringbean-thin Blanchett great at tongue-in-cheek vamping (she was the best thing in The Good German), but she’ll look like a freshly-sprouted flower in Indy IV alongside Uncle Festus. She probably wants to lighten up anyway after recently completing three heavy roles (in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Golden Age and I’m Not There) following her big melodramatic ’06 run in German, Notes on a Scandal and Babel.

Premonition, the poorly reviewed Sandra Bullock film, tracked at 75, 25 and 19 yesterday morning, which means it’ll earn somewhere north of $15 million. 300 may be #1 again but expect at least a 45% to 50% drop. Chris Rock‘s I Think I Love My Wife — 60, 31 and 11 — will do mezzo-mezzo business, maybe around $10 or $12 million. Dead Silence — 42, 20, 4 — is no Saw. Of all the forthcoming March openers, Blades of Glory (Will Ferrell as a preening, amusingly obnoxious ice-skating champ) is looking the best (64,40, 7). Reign Over Me, opening a week earlier than the Ferrell (3.23), is only at 48, 29 and 2. Not good — the gut-instinct types are shrugging their shoulders.

Reign Over Me is Mike Binder‘s “best film, and these are two of the best performances I’ve seen from either Adam Sandler or Don Cheadle, and that is saying something for both of them,” writes HE columnist Moises Chiullan (i.e., “Arthouse Cowboy”) from South by Southwest.

“What’s that? Sandler isn’t an actor, he’s a comedian? And Cheadle playing the straight man is no big task? Wrong, wrong, wrong.

“Sandler has everything he needs in his tool kit that every great American actor has had: humor, charisma, emotional sensitivity, and depth among them. He usually doesn’t get to show them off. He says he purposely doesn’t read what the press writes because of what it does to you to have to endure that kind of defamation and ridicule. It’s like asking to get picked on at school.

“I don’t think you’re qualified to be a film critic if you can’t objectively give Sandler his due for this movie. I don’t know how Hollywood politics work, but this performance…..you know, I’m not gonna go there, this is enough of a rave already. I’ll put it this way — if you think you saw all the nuance he had to offer in Punch Drunk Love, you’re sadly misled.

As for Don Cheadle, another comment brought up in the q & a was how difficult it is to play the straight man — having the script and knowing everything that’s really going on, but having to spontaneously, moment-to-moment go back to the place where you can’t see in the other guy’s head and feel that helplessness…that’s a bigger challenge than you’d think. Cheadle knocks it out of the park, across a state line, and out of another park altogether.

“You seriously have to see this movie. It’s more relevant than every movie I can think of currently in active, first-run release, and as summer approaches, you never know when you’ll get to see a movie that really has something to say anytime soon.”

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.