Day: April 8, 2007

“I’ve made about 120 movies. I think maybe six are good. The two pictures that I’m most remembered for are two pictures I never thought would be successful. I thought The Magnificent Seven was going to be terrible. And I turned Bullitt down four times. I thought, ‘This’ll be another dumb picture with a car chase.'” — Robert Vaughan speaking to The Observer‘s Sanjiv Bhattacharya.

What are the other four? My choices are The Young Philadelphians, The Man from Independence, The Bridge at Remagen and The Towering Inferno. None of these are wonderful, but they’re decent.

“To to be a well-known actor growing up in Hollywood, and to have money in your pocket is like having died and gone to heaven. Hollywood is where every beautiful girl in the world between the ages of 18 and 22 comes to become movie stars. By the time they get to 24, most of them are gone, but we got them while they were there.”

An interesting piece by Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke about how The Weinstein Co. flipped off the core audience for Grindhouse by refusing to book the Quentin Tarantino- Robert Rodriguez film in actual grindhouse cinemas like Portland’s Clinton Street Theatre.

“I received some very interesting info this weekend from Seth Sonstein, the owner/programmer at the Clinton Street Theater, detailing how he tried in vain to convince The Weinstein Co. to allow his venue to play the pic,” Finke begins. “The Clinton is a unique single-screen indie art house considered a true Grindhouse in Portland, Oregon. (For instance, it just ran a film series that included original 35mm prints of Switchblade Sisters, Crazies and Spook Who Sat By The Door.)

“Looking at the email exchange, I can see that TWC’s branch sales manager Keir Gotcher kept giving The Clinton the run-around. “I wanted to give you some insight into Grindhouse being a flop,” Sonstein wrote [and explained]. “We begged The Weinstein Company for a print of this film. In the end they would not give us a print.

“Also, Dan Halsted runs the Grindhouse Film Festival out of The Hollywood Theater in Portland, and Weinstein would also not release a print to him. (Dan knows more about Grindhouse films then anyone in the country.) So I attest that the distribution was botched on this film.”

“To not just ignore a movie’s base, but actually rebuff it, makes no sense,” Finke concludes.

With the whiners and haters making Hollywood Elsewhere such a pleasant place to be in recent days, I thought I’d share a letter from a longtime reader named Alexandro Aldrete, who lives in Monterrey, Mexico. Sometimes it helps to consider the perspective of someone outside the country — someone with different cultural references and whatnot — to see things in a fresh light. (And I’m not saying he’s right or wrong or anything in between.)

“The reason I’m writing is because the comments situation has gotten to a point where it’s frankly pathetic,” Aldrete begins. “You must have the most consistent group of whiners on the internet. There’s nothing you can say without receiving dozens of useless posts about how outraged they are by what you say.

“The last one about Easter Sunday is particularly funny in the self-righteous indignation that everyone felt because of what you said about American families watching The Passion of the Christ on DVD. How you are a bigot, an asshole and so on.

“You totally got it right about the director of Porky’s too. It’s refreshing to read some honesty from time to time. I don’t always agree with you (The Aviator sucked? Wedding Crashers was a truly pleasant experience?) but I enjoy it nevertheless. Your site was frankly more fun when you had the ocassional reader response. Now it’s like you’re the evil teacher in the teenage-girls-with- emotional-issues classroom. Everyone is oh so sensitive and melodramatic about everything.

“I hardly read any of those comments anymore because they depress me. Your readership needs a sense of humor. And when you have people that feel that you must be stopped for saying that Eddie Murphy has been a money-grubbing whore, that twenty-something girls at Starbucks laughing out loud can be a pain in the ass, and that the numbers show in a very cold non-judgmental way that the majority of the American movie going public (and worldwide movie going public for that matter) has low, low, low fucking taste (at this point I don’t think that’s even debatable)…well, those persons need a little less self importance.”

What are three darkest and most traumatic disasters of the past six years? 9.11, Katrina and the Asian tsunami, right? The last two were about awful floodings, drownings, hundreds of bodies, stench, misery on a massive scale…really horrific wrath-of-God stuff. And yet everyone’s ho-humming about the summer’s biggest (i.e,, the most grossly expensive) comedy, Evan Almighty (Universal, 6.22), being about God (Morgan Freeman) deciding to bring the absolute worst super Katrina-tsunami of all time down upon the world.

We all know that Universal isn’t going to drown everyone while trying to make us laugh, and that God, despite ordering Evan (Steve Carell) to build an ark big enough to hold all the animals, will reverse course at the finale and say something like, “Evan, you’ve kept your word and fulfilled your task…God is pleased with you….now go home to your family because I’ve changed my mind about bringing about the most ruthless act of mass murder in the history of the planet.”

But even with this cheap turnabout ending, doesn’t a film with all these echoes and intimations (i.e., about how homo sapiens has screwed the world up so badly that God has decided to wipe the slate clean and start all over again) at least make you crack a smile? I personally feel that that the threat of cataclysmic disaster involving the death of hundreds of millions is fucking hilarious.

On one level Evan Almighty is just another God comedy-slash-moral fable (a tradition that goes back Oh, God!) but it’s also arriving in the wake of the industry having been mightily impressed by those Passion of the Christ bucks and deciding to try and grab as much of that religious-right moolah as it can. It’s also following in the backwash of The Reaping, another slick pander-job about God’s Biblical wrath. On top of which Tom Shadyac, the director of Evan Almighty, is said to be a guy who takes spiritual and religious matters fairly seriously.

I don’t know if one is connected to the other or what the overall quilt will look like, but throw this all together and add the certainty of all that mirth-smothering CGI, and the Evan Almighty laughs are going to be mostly about shtick and little else. The bits may be funny, but undercurrent is gloomy as hell.

I can see people who love the idea of checking their brains at the door crowd having a rollicking good time with Evan, but all you have to do is think for 20 or 25 seconds about the content and the sub-currents, and the reasons that went into the greenlighting of this thing apart from an interest in making money, and honestly… what’s to laugh at?

What is Evan Almighty deep down? Basically a religious metaphor concept about a relatively shallow and opportunistic man being touched by a cosmic spirit, and the difficulty he goes through in order to express his state of illumination and be at one with his vision. As such, it may seem to some like a companion piece to what Richard Dreyfuss went through in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Except this time there can’t be a payoff climax (i.e., the world-flood equivalent of aliens landing their mother ship next to Devil’s Tower) because Universal doesn’t want everyone dead.

So Freeman’s change-of-heart scene (or whatever it is that Shadyac and his writers have dreamt up that will prevent the deaths of hundreds of millions) is going to be the equivalent, more or less. of Francois Truffaut‘s Lacombe character saying to Dreyfuss, “I am sorry, Mr. Neary, but the aliens have turned around and flown home.”

The writers of Evan Almighty are Steve Koren, Mark O’Keefe and Steve Oedekerk, based on a story by Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow.

The trailer for Jon Kasdan‘s In The Land of Women (Warner Independent, 4.20) — an intelligent-sounding, well acted, seemingly sophisticated romantic drama about an introspective young guy (Adam Brody) nursing a broken heart who visits his grandmother (Olympia Dukakis ) in the midwest and falls into a semi-initimate relationship with a mother (Meg Ryan) and her daughter (Kristen Stewart) — looks like it might be pretty good.

In The Land of Women director-writer Jon Kasdan

And Brody is appealing in his MySpace site video introduction. The only thing that scares me is that the IMDB says ITLOW was shown at some 2006 Cannes market screenings, which was almost a year ago. And there’ve been no festival or word-of-mouth showings of any kind since? Plus I got this weird mail a while back urging me to RSVP to an all-media screening that’s happening at a secret location. (Will journalists need to know a password to gain admittance?)

I called Mike Binder, a big fan of Brody’s who wants to cast him in an upcoming film, to see if he’s seen the Kasdan film but he didn’t get back. The first screening I know about is the all-media on 4.20. Does anyone have any kind of lowdown or info?

I’m not trying to be a smart-ass, but there are one or two mentions in this N.Y. Times Sharon Waxman q & a with Kasdan (son of Lawrence, younger brother of Jake) that smack of elite lineage.

One is that after completing one year at New York University film school young Jon was asked to join the staff of Judd Apatow‘s Freaks and Geeks, which Jake Kasdan had directed several episodes of, because it was “decided there was a value to having someone fresh out of high school on the staff.” (This in itself puts a scowl on my face.)

Adam Brody, Meg Ryan

The other is Kasdan explaining that he wrote the script of In The Land of Women in record time — four weeks — during a getaway retreat in “my parents’ cabin in Telluride.” That’s it — I’m sold on this guy. Something tells me that cabin has really good wi-fi and a high-def 60″ flat-screen with 80 or 90 Blu-Ray DVDs stacked in alphabetical order and a juicer and lots of fresh vegetables in the fridge and a kind of tasteful-homey vibe. Which helps, you know, when you’re writing because it’s relaxing and all.

I’m presuming everyone knows that Jake Kasdan ‘s The TV Set, about the making of a TV show, opened Friday, just as I’m assuming everyone knows that Lawrence Kasdan is the director-writer of Mumford, Silverado, The Big Chill, Wyatt Earp, Grand Canyon and Body Heat. He also executive produced In the Land of Women (i.e., grandfathered, paved the way, arranged for the financing and distribution).

All of the prominent weekend movies were more or less flat yesterday (i.e., didn’t increase upon Friday’s numbers) and yet Grindhouse dropped 19%. This means it won’t even hit $13 million — this morning’s estimate is that it’ll have $12,123,000 by late tonight.

Today is a dead movie-going day because almost all Middle Americans are visiting family and hiding chocolate Easter eggs and sitting around watching The Passion of the Christ on DVD as they lash each other with cat ‘o’ nine tails.

The rundown: Blades of Glory is #1 with $23,614,000, Meet The Robinsons is #2 with $17,175,00 Are We DoneYet? is #3 with 14,975,000. Grindhouse is fourth with $12123 and The Reaping is fifth with $10,139,000. The Hoax is projecting about $1,418,000 and $6000 a print — fair, okay, not terrific.