Day: April 9, 2007

The quietest opener of the coming weekend has to be Lonely Hearts, a period police procedural set in the late ’40s and early ’50s, which means all the actors will be wearing bulky-ass trenchcoats and fedoras and talking like they’re in costarring with Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past. It’s a little bit strange that there’s zero buzz around this thing and the fact that the opening is being so faintly promoted because it’s got a few big names — John Travolta, Salma Hayek, James Gandolfini, Jaredo Leto, Scott Caan and Laura Dern.

This obviously suggests that the movie, directed by Todd Robinson and released by IDP Films (a Samuel Goldwyn subsidiary), has problems, but I’ve been told that Hayek’s performance is pretty good. The story was the basis of Leonard Kastle‘s The Honeymoon Killers (1970), a cult favorite that starred Tony Lobianco and Shirley Stoller.

Robinson is the grandson of Nassau County Detective Elmer C. Robinson (Travolta), who helped to capture and convict “Lonely Hearts” killers Raymond Fernandez (Leto) and Martha Jule Beck (Hayek). Robinson stayed with the case right to the moment that Fernandez and Beck were electrocuted at Sing Sing Prison in 1951.

The story “is about how Ray and Martha travel around together posing as brother and sister, preying on lonely, vulnerable women. Their scam first milks them of their life savings and ends in the murders of several innocent women. They’re a warped and dangerous duo who leave a bloody trail behind them. As their investi- gation progresses, Robinson and partner Charles Hilderbrandt (Gandolfini) become obsessed by the case. It eventually invades Robinson’s personal life and isolates him from those he loves,” etc.

Every time I buy a few things for the refrigerator, I’m kinda forced to contemplate the seemingly tortured, sadly dysfunctional relationships of Brangelina and Tomkat. It’s genuinely sickening the way the tabs keep hammering away. I’d become a loyal customer of any sensibly- priced market that doesn’t stock them, just to avoid looking at those damn headlines.

I’ll admit to a deep-down rooting interest in wanting to see Katie Holmes break free, but that’s mainly because I’ve been brainwashed by the writings of anti-Scientology guy Mark Ebner. If I were Brad or Angie I’d commit to an absolute lifelong pact to stay together no matter what, just to be able to say “fuck you” to the tabs.

There are two films opening this weekend with decent tracking — Perfect Stranger (73, 21 and 8) and Disturbia (54, 31 and 8). The others are as follows: Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters (35, 26 and 3), Pathfinder (30.26 and 2), Redline (43, 25 and 1) and Slow Burn (32, 26 and 1). No tracking on the smaller openers — Everything’s Gone Green, Lonely Hearts, Private Fears in Public Places, Red Road and Year of the Dog. Fracture (New Line, 4.20), the Anthony Hopkins-Ryan Gosling thriller from director Gregory Hoblit, is at 42, 31 and 2.

They may be some younger readers out there who can’t tell right away what Hollywood guy is reputed to have said the following with a straight face, but whose wisdom is actually under-rated at times:

(a) “Go see it and see for yourself why you shouldn’t go see it”; (b) “If I could drop dead right now, I’d be the happiest man alive”; (c) “Don’t pay any attention to the critics — don’t even ignore them”; (d) “I don’t think anyone should write his autobiography until after he’s dead”; (e) “That’s the way with these directors, they’re always biting the hand that lays the golden egg”; (g) “I don’t want yes-men around me — I want everyone to tell the truth, even if it costs them their jobs”; (h) “You’ve got to take the bull between your teeth”; (i) “Give me a smart idiot over a stupid genius any day”; and (j) “A verbal agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.”

Take the first line and turn it around a bit and you’ve got Lem Dobbs‘ classic line from The Limey — “You could see the sea out there if you could see it.” And I agree with the smart idiot-stupid genius comment — he’s saying he’d rather listen to an uneducated guy with horse sense than a PhD with his thumb up his ass. And some of the other lines aren’t so bad. The only emphatically dumb ones are (h) and (j).

When the Sons of Hollywood threesome is flown to Afghanistan later this year for their fight to the death, put Brandon “Greasy Bear” Davis on the plane with them.

Randy Spelling, David Weintraub and Sean Stewart — the young stars of a new Entourage-y reality show called Sons of Hollywood — are giving an excellent impression of being diseased and over-priveleged lowlife scum — representatives of the very thing that Islamic fundamentalists despise about western culture and values. I’m saying this because they need to consider and even accept this opinion because once they do, there is a chance for redemption.

The producers of Sons of Hollywood need to fly these bozos to the mountains of eastern Afghanistan for a hand-to-hand combat with three Taliban fighters, or maybe just three poor guys who believe in the legend of Osama bin Laden. Make it a fight to the death with knives. If Spelling, Weintraub and Stewart are killed, it is the will of Allah. But if they kill the Taliban guys, then they’ll have my respect and they can fly back to Hollywood and act like spoiled assholes all over again and nobody will put them down ever again. I won’t, at least.

Harvey Weinstein has told Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke that he’s “incredibly disappointed” with the piddly $11.6 million that Grindhouse brought in last weekend, and that he’s thinking about re-releasing the movie around the U.S. “in a couple of weeks” as two separate feature-length movies — Quentin Tarantino‘s Death Proof (only longer with deleted sex scenes put back in) and Robert Rodriguez‘s Planet Terror with extra stuff also. (Which is what the European release plan has been all along,)

“Quentin’s movie goes out first in competition at Cannes,” Weinstein told Finke. “He’ll do an extensive four to five month tour. And the trailer will be all Quentin’s. Then we’ll release Robert’s a couple of months later. By splitting it up, we’re going to do a hell of a lot better internationally than we did here.”

Weinstein added that even in Grindhouse‘s TV deal with Starz Entertainment Group, it’s been sold as two separate movies. “Our deal with Encore is that they can play it any way they want.”

Weinstein said that length and audience education issues were the main reasons why Grindhouse did so cruddily in theaters last weekend.

“Our research showed the length kept people away,” he said. “It was 3 hours and 12 minutes long. We originally intended to get it all in in 2 hours, 30 minutes. That would have been a better time. But the movies ran longer, the [fake] trailers ran longer, everything ran longer. [Plus] we didn’t educate the South or Midwest. In the West and the East, the movie played well. It played well in strong urban settings. But we missed the boat on the Midwest and the South.”

“Educate the south and midwest” about how cool it is to savor the brash cheesiness of exploitation moves from the ’60s and ’70s? You can’t just explain the too-cool-for-school appeal of Grindhouse and expect people to go, “We get it! Thanks for wising us up!” People go for this or that movie for their own reasons. You can’t educate them into “getting” something. Either it reaches them on their own terms or it doesn’t.