Year: 2007

Live Free or Die Hard “is an epic piece of shit,” writes The Hot Button‘s David Poland. And yet “as stupid and incompetently made as Live Free of Die Hard is, I laughed a lot. It is so amazingly bad that it really is kind of good. It’s agonizingly bad, and resultingly, a lot of fun.” A few minutes after reading this, I spoke to a guy who’s seen it (unlike myself) and he shrugged off the Poland-isms. “It’s not that bad,” he said. “It’s just another dumb Die Hard movie. It’s has some good scenes, some material that works.”

“Few documentaries could be as different as March of the Penguins and Ghosts of Cite Soleil, a scary, fascinating documentary about gang life in Haiti’s worst slum. If only due to the access achieved, there has never been anything quite like Asger Leth’s film; it’s amazing it even exists and that the director is still alive. Rough as can be in both content and style, Ghosts will be welcome everywhere tough, provocative docus are shown.” — from Todd McCarthy‘s 6.26.07 Variety review.

Does the appointment of Bob Gazzale as the American Film Institute’s new president and CEO signify any kind of change? He’ll replace Jean Firstenberg this coming November and….then what? Will he re-think the idea of coming up with new variations of AFI Best Lists in order to produce more AFI Awards TV shows (i.e., revenue streams)? Or he’s just going to glad-hand and groove along and continue to let this once respected organization be seen more and more as a remnant of its former self, as something basically flabby and sleepy, as an organizational emblem of Hollywood’s over-50 milquetoasts?

Tarsem Singh wishes he could get more people to watch The Fall, which might lead to a distribution deal down the road. I don’t want to sound like more of a slacker than I already am, but I can’t even make myself read this Patrick Goldstein column about Singh’s situation, much less see the movie. It screened at last September’s Toronto Film Festival, but it sounded a little airy-fairy and nobody grabbed me by the lapels and said “see it!,” so I shined it.

Reminding for the last time about tonight’s Film Independent Poolside Chat at the W Hotel at 7pm. Variety‘s Anne Thompson will moderate, and the guests will be L.A. Observed columnist Kevin Roderick, former Oscarwatch.com columnist Sasha Stone (her site is now called Awards Daily) and myself. Don’t count on Perez Hilton showing — he’s in a very emotional place right now.

Nikki Finke and David Poland passed. I’m back on the bike at 8:05 pm in order to attend the Sicko premiere at the Academy, which technically starts at 8 pm.

In a press release about the forthcoming TCM documentary Spielberg on Spielberg (airing July 9th at 8 pm), George Lucas is quoted as follows: “Steven is the consummate filmmaker. He has an extraordinary ability to make brilliant movies — brilliantly artistic, brilliantly entertaining, and brilliantly successful. Steven’s genius is that he knows, innately, how to communicate through film. He is one of the few directors I know who can actually edit in his head while he is filming.”
Here’s HE’s compassionate revision of this statement, which I’ve sent along to TCM publicists: “Before he compromised and then totally muddied up his once-hallowed reputation with forehead slappers like 1941, The Color Purple, Always, Empire of the Sun, Hook, Amistad, A.I., Catch Me If You Can, The Terminal and Munich, Steven Spielberg was once (i.e., from 1975 to 1982) regarded as a consummate filmmaker. He seemed to have an extraordinary ability to make brilliant movies — stylistically vivid (although not very artistic), often entertaining, and, of course, financially successful.
“The money part is what finally counts for industry mainstreamers who derive satisfaction from showing obeisance before power and kowtowing to the heavyweights. This is built into our DNA — monkeys do the same thing — so try and understand. At the same time please understand that if Spielberg’s films had not been so enormously profitable for so long, TCM would not have produced this documentary. You know it, we know it…and now our cards are on the table.
“Spielberg’s mid ’70s to early ’80s rep was based on the fact that he once knew, innately, how to communicate through film. There was a downside to this, however. What Spielberg communicated all too clearly by having Tom Cruise‘s son turn up alive at the end of War of the Worlds was that he’d turned into a total sentimental sap.”

It’s not exactly a bad time to push Mamie Gummer, but it’s not the greatest time either. She’s Meryl Streep‘s look-alike actress daughter who plays the younger 1950s version of her mom’s character in Lajos Koltai‘s Evening, which opens Friday. There are just two problems. One is that Evening, a baahing little lamb of a movie, is being sent out this weekend into a forest filled with wolves. Another is that Gummer’s obvious resemblance to her mom runs 100% counter to the idea behind Claire Danes portraying a young Vanessa Redgrave, since Danes looks nothing, nothing, nothing like Redgrave when she was in Blow-Up.

Will Ferrell vs. Pearl, the confession machine. “She’s what we call a loose cannon…we don’t control her!”

There are four or five cretins in this photo giving adoring, you-go-girl smiles to Paris Hilton as she got out of the slammer. Blowups of their faces (especially the vapid-looking blonde with the big white teeth and the large African-American guy with the light brown leather jacket) need to be put online and posted on telephone poles and construction sites all over Los Angeles.

No question about it — Ratatouille is going be the #1 film this coming weekend. It’s tracking at 82, 36 and 13, which is very high for a family film. Tracking never picks up on the full b.o. gobsmack of animated fare.
Live Free or Die Hard (20th Century Fox, opening tomorrow) will perform impressively this weekend, but I’m betting that opening day will be the biggest of the five. The word-of-mouth will half-help and half-hurt, and so the Sunday-night total will be strong but short of historic. 89, 40 and 16 means $25 to $30 million for the weekend, maybe $40 million for the five days.
Sicko did terrific business in Manhattan last weekend, but it’s tracking at 47, 20 and 4. Not bad but not great. “People don’t want to see a movie about health care,” blah, blah…but what people don’t seem to understand is that Sicko makes you melt in the final act. I’ve never once teared up in my life over the idea of regular people receiving lousy health care, but Sicko changed all that.
A marketing guy contends that “the real problem with Sicko‘s awareness and interest levels is that Harvey Weinstein “does band-aid spending” on ads and TV buys, and that “money flows through his hands like concrete.”
You Kill Me, expanding this weekend, could use a shot of some kind — 22, 21 and zero.
Evening (Focus Features, opening Friday), a relatiojnship drama aimed at older couples and mature women, doesn’t have much of a pulse…27, 22 and 2.
Transformers is going to be (big surprise) huge — 91, 42 and 13. The head-scratcher is the length — two hours and 20-something minutes for a picture that has to appeal to kids and young teens? The reason for this is that no one tells Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg anything — they’re surrounded by flunkies, cocooned in their own realm.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix is racking up monster numbers even though it doesn’t open until 7.11 — 91, 50 and 15.
License to Wed (Warner Bros., 73), the Robin Williams comedy that preemed last night at the Arclight, is looking weak — 68, 24 and 2. And Captivity, the latest torture porn entry, is at 25, 21 and 1.

After doing an above-average job with a romantic lead role in Catch and Release, Timothy Olyphant is back wearing his evil-and-dangerous mask in Live Free or Die Hard. One-trick-pony villains embody the very essence of movie boredom, and Olyphant has always been a multi-colored performer — a witty darkman with a touch of perversity, a clever kidder, an existential tightrope walker, an absurdist comedian.
I haven’t seen every last Olyphant performance, but his drug-dealer character in Go is, to my mind, still the best thing he’s ever done. He’s been fine in a lot of things since (I liked his work in Deadwood), but he’s never played anyone as darkly brilliant and funny and surprisingly vulnerable as Todd Gaines, the bare-chested wise ass with the Santa Claus cap and the ecstasy tabs. That character was written and performed with just the right balance and attitude.