Anytime I hear anyone say “Eye-rack,” it’s hard to avoid thinking that he/she is perhaps a bit of a rube…no offense. Xenophobic, midwestern or southern, doesn’t quite get it, a football fan, possibly Republican or in the military. I used to think the correct pronunciation was “Eehr-rahq” until I met a French director who’d been to the region and said that world-traveller types pronounce it “Uhhr-raq.” I don’t say it that way to this day (it sounds affected), but “Eye-rack” is impossible. It’s almost embarassing to bring it up, but so many people seem to pronounce it this way.

HE reader Pelle Vehreschild, writing from Germany, informs that the German trailer for Juan Antonio Bayona‘s The Orphanage uses quotes from four sources to sell it to the viewer, in this order: Der Spiegel, Time magazine, Hollywood Elsewhere and Variety. Here’s the kickoff page.

I guess some of us aren’t fully appreciating what a huge crossover hit Juno has become, so interested parties are pointing this out by comparing Juno‘s numbers with the four biggest indie hits of recent times — Little Miss Sunshine, Brokeback Mountain, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and Sideways — which also became Best Picture nominees.
Juno grossed $3.285 million on 998 screens last night (i.e., Friday the 28th), Sideway‘s best Friday gross was $1.69 million on 1694 screens, Crouching Tiger‘s best Friday gross was $2.3 million on 693 screens, Brokeback Mountain‘s best Friday gross was $2.019 million on 1196 screens and Little Miss Sunshine‘s best Friday gross was $2.028 million on 1430 screens.
The logic is that since Juno is connecting with paying customers in a bigger way than these other four, it deserves consideration as a Best Picture candidate and then some. Juno is a very spirited, agreeable, good-hearted film with exceptional performances up and down, especially from Ellen Page and Jennifer Garner. I respectfully don’t believe it’s good enough to be a top-fiver, but the current seems to be overwhelming views like mine. I’ll be fine if it winds up getting nominated.

Back in Boston with a gentle reminder: There Will Be Blood is having a midnight sneak in various blue cities across the map. I wonder how it’ll play in Redville. I actually have my suspicions. A friend predicted earlier today it won’t enjoy good word-of-mouth among the plebes and will taper off once all the ubers have all seen it.

More trains and automobiles today, so no more action until later this evening, if that. Meanwhile a question for anyone who’s given the matter any thought — what films due to open in the first quarter of ’08 are HE readers most anticipating other than Cloverfield? I can’t think of a single one other than Sundance premieres. Anyone?

“I fully anticipate this will be a film that will be hard for many people to choke down,” Ain’t It Cool’s “Moriarty”/Drew McWeeny has written about There Will be Blood. “Daniel Plainview, the character played by Daniel Day-Lewis, is one of the most flawed and disturbing ‘heroes’ in film history.
“But it’s obvious that Paul Thomas Anderson fell in love with the character as he was writing him, flaws and all, and decided to follow him to whatever end occurred, not worrying about making it safe or whether or not we’ll ‘like’ Plainview.
There Will be Blood “is unapologetic. It is clear-eyed in its purpose. In a way, it shocks me how direct the storytelling is. This is not a film like El Topo where you’re going to argue about what’s going on or what it means. PTA’s last two films, Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love, were left turns into a sort of oblique artsy playfulness that was maddening to some viewers, and I got the feeling he was sort of going in circles waiting for his best work to arrive. Hard Eight and Boogie Nights were both so authentic, so packed with energy and enthusiasm for storytelling, that I felt like all we needed to do was wait for him to find the right story to tell.
“Imagine if Martin Scorsese had realized at some point that no one was going to give two shits about Leonardo DiCaprio in Gangs of New York and decided instead to just make a three-hour Bill The Butcher movie. That’s There Will Be Blood.”

“Forget Fight Club and Se7en. If you’re looking for the real reason to consider David Fincher a major-league American director, all the evidence is right there in Zodiac. [This] is at once an epic true-crime police procedural and a genuinely chilling study in the nature of unfulfilled obsession. I should know: I’ve seen it three times already.” — from Toronto Star critic Geoff Pevere‘s 10 Best of the Year piece (“Skepticism was a Convincing Force,” 12.28). I’ve seen Zodiac seven times — four times in a theatre, the regular DVD once, and the Director’s Cut DVD twice. I’ll be posting an audio chat with Fincher on Wednesday or thereabouts.

Sooner or later all partnerships come to an end. Sad but not tragic. The important thing is to orchestrate the dissolution as gently and smoothly as possible for the kids’ sake.

Friday, 12.28.07, 3:35 pm

A Manhattan-based online correspondent** has pointed out that There Will Be Blood‘s $100k per theatre average this weekend in two theatres “puts it up there with some of the Disney animated movies, Dreamgirls and Brokeback Mountain, all which ended up making over $70 million.
“It looks like there’s far more initial demand to see the movie than either Magnolia or Punch Drunk Love, although they also opened in more theatres.
“This doesn’t necessarily mean Blood might get a Best Picture nom but it certainly seems that the buzz created by the early praisings has generated exceptional interest and that other movies aren’t proving to have the same strength. (Like Sweeney Todd… one of the few movies to drop from its opening weekend…I wonder if DreamWorks will even be able to expand it as planned.)
“I think at the end of the season, everyone’s going to look at Paramount Vantage as the company that did everything right with Blood from holding it until the last weekend of the year to keeping screenings somewhat sparse right up until the week before critics’ awards… not releasing screeners too far before the movie’s release to avoid it leaking online. (Universal tried the same with Charlie Wilson’s War, but it just wasn’t strong enough a movie).
“I think that the early buzz has created a huge demand to see Anderson’s latest that will continue well into January and I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up grossing more than No Country. (I personally like No Country better, although Blood is very good.)”
** I don’t want to identify said corespondent until he says it’s okay.

People have been screwing up their No Country for Old Men capsule plot descriptions in a small but important way for weeks now. The Age‘s Chris Mathieson, in a 12.26 interview with Javier Bardem, provides the latest example.
He starts with the usual: “When antelope hunter and Vietnam veteran Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles across a drug deal gone wrong, he finds a succession of bodies and a bag containing several million dollars,” blah blah. Then the wrongo. Matheison says that Moss dooms himself and his wife, his young wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald), to a fugitive existence “once he takes the money.”
Nope. Moss and Carla Jean could have moved to Prague and started their own country & western apparel store if he’d listened to his head instead of his heart. The basic deal is that Moss screws himself when he returns to the carnage in the middle of the night in order to bring a jug of water to the bleeding, dying guy he’d spoken to a few hours earlier. Undone by a humane, not-very-bright impulse that Moss admits is “somethin’ dumber than hell but I’m gonna do it anyway.”
Which happens because of another dumb thing — i.e., Moss not bringing a canteen of water with him on his hunt. What guy hunting antelope over miles and miles of parched, desert-like terrain doesn’t carry at least a quart of H2O? Llewelyn, that’s who. “I ain’t got no agua.” So Llewelyn and Carla Jean’s fate is sealed because of two dumb mistakes, which essentially boils down to one — Moss’s absurd denial of the necessity of water on a desert hunt.
The initial dying bad guy scene would be a lot more believable If Moss had pointed to his empty canteen and said to the dying man, “I ain’t got no agua left.” That would have worked.