The red-band trailer for Andrew Fleming’s Hamlet 2 (Focus, 8.22.08), which did pretty well for itself at Sundance ’08. It’s about an eccentric high-school-drama teacher (Steve Coogan) enlisting his Tucson, Arizona, students as he conceives and stages a politically incorrect musical sequel to William Shakespeare‘s Hamlet. Costarring Catherine Keener, Amy Poehler, David Arquette and Elisabeth Shue.

Slightly different weekend numbers (i.e., different than Steve Mason‘s) came in an hour ago. Mason had The Forbidden Kingdom at $19 million for the weekend vs. $18 million earned by Forgetting Sarah Marshall. But a rival studio estimate has the Kingdom at $21,175,000 vs. $16,858,000 — a gap of almost $4.5 million. Expelled, the right-wing propaganda doc, came in ninth with $3,400,000 and $2200 a print…dead. And 88 Minutes, the Jon Avnet-Al Pacino thriller, will earn a lousy $6,992,000 by Sunday night.

The three strongest impressions I have about Morgan Spurlock‘s Where In The World is Osama Bin Laden? (Weinstein Co., 4.18) are, in this order, trivial, critical and philosophical. I’m not afraid of admitting to trivial concerns, in part because I also know a worthy belief (or hope current) when I hear it.

Impression #1 is that since the Super-Size Me days, Spurlock has become super follically challenged and needs to talk to the Hair Club for Men. Impression #2 is that the tone of most of the film is way too flip and dumbed-down — it seems aimed at the dumbasses who wouldn’t want to watch a film about the east-west cultural divide and the nature of Islamic anti-U.S. fervor unless the filmmaker uses a chuckling whimsical tone and tosses in a few jokes. Impression #3 is that the final few minutes of Spurlock’s film say “the right thing,” which is that we need to try to find our common humanity and build whatever bridges we can, and to do that we need recognize the purist crazies in our respective cultures and isolate them.
This gives me a chance to talk again about Adam Curtis‘s The Power of Nightmares, which articulates the third point in a much more profound and penetrating way than Spurlock’s film does. Anyone who hasn’t seen it, whether they go to Spurlock’s film or not, needs to do so. It’s easily downloadable right here.
I wrote about it three years ago. “This new three-hour doc weaves together all sorts of disparate historical strands to relate two fascinating spiritual and political case histories, that of the American neo-conservatives and the Islamic fundamentalists,” I said. “The payoff is an explanation of why they’re fighting each other now with such ferocity (beyond the obvious provocation of 9/11), and why the end of their respective holy war, waged for their own separate but like-minded motives, is nowhere in sight.

“That’s right — the Islamics vs. the neo-cons. You might think the United States of America is engaged in a fierce conflict with Middle-Eastern terrorists in order to prevent another domestic attack, but what’s really going on is more in the nature of a war between clans. Like the one between Burl Ives vs. Charles Bickford in The Big Country, say, or the Hatfields vs. the McCoys.
“It’s not that Curtis’s doc is saying anything radically new here, certainly not to those in the hard-core news junkie, academic or think-tank loop, but it makes its case in a remarkably well-ordered and comprehensive way, which…you know…helps moderately aware dilettantes like myself make sense of it all.
“The film contends that the anti-western terrorists and the neo-con hardliners in the George W. Bush White House are two peas in a fundamentalist pod, and that they seem to be almost made for each other in an odd way, and they need each other’s hatred to fuel their respective power bases but are, in fact, almost identical in their purist fervor, and are pretty much cut from the same philosophical cloth.
“It says, in other words, that Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz have a lot in common with Osama bin Laden. It also says that the mythology of ‘Al-Qeada’ was whipped up by the Bushies, that the term wasn’t even used by bin Laden until the Americans more or less coined it, and that the idea of bin Laden running a disciplined and coordinated terrorist network is a myth.

“Nightmares doesn’t trash the Bushies in order to portray the terrorists in some kind of vaguely admiring light. It says — okay, implies — that both factions are too in love with purity and consequently half out of their minds.
The three chapters are titled Baby, It’s Cold Outside (about the growth of both camps from the `50s through the `80s), The Phantom Victory” (about the Reagan years and how the Neo-Cons and the Islamics got together in battling the Russians during the Afghanistan War) and Shadows in the Cave (about how things have gone from 9.11 until the present).
“This conclusion leaves us with a feeling that we ought to stand up and act like good reasonable Gregory Peck-styled liberals and separate ourselves from these guys and their nutbag holy war, and maybe send the Islamics and the neo-cons off to a desert island and let them fight it out alone with clubs and knives.” This is almost precisely what Spurlock says at the finale of Where in the World is Osama bin Laden?. minus the desert-island idea.
“The neo-cons and the Islamists ‘believe that the main problem with modern society is that individuals question everything,’ Curtis told a reporter for London Time Out last October, ‘[and] by doing that the questioners have already torn down God, that eventually they will tear down everything else and therefore they have to be opposed.’

“In other words,” I wrote, “these camps are both enemies of liberal thought and the pursuit of personal fulfillment in the anti-traditionalist, hastened-gratification sense of that term. They believe that liberal freedoms have eroded the spiritual fabric that has held their respective societies together in the past. Curtis’s doc shows how these two movements have pushed their hardcore agendas over the last four or five decades to save their cultures from what they see as encroaching moral rot.
“I genuinely feel that Curtis’s film is more wide-ranging and sees right into the heart of these warring ideological beasts in a much sharper and more revelatory fashion than Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.
You will probably never see this doc on American broadcast television and perhaps not even on any U.S. cable channels, but there’s something about Curtis’s pointed, relentless and irreverent British perspective that seems to cut right through the cobweb of our perceptions and draw a bead on what’s really happening.”

Spoiler whiner alert (read no further): Residents of mine shafts and deep caves haven’t heard about the third-act alien visitation angle in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but most sentient beings are on to this. I didn’t realize until this morning that this MacGuffin element is based on reality, as 12 crystal skulls of an alleged ancient Mayan or Aztec origins actually exist. The unfortunate aspect, according to John Lichfield‘s 4.19 Independent article, is that they’re fakes.

CHUD’s Devin Faraci has just talked to producer Joel Silver at the Speed Racer press day, and he disclosed that Justice League won’t affect Wonder Woman as the former has been “tabled” — i.e., deep-sixed. I’ve had a couple of sleepless nights over the fate of the Justice League film so it’s profoundly comforting that the issue is finally settled.

“Over on my Hebrew blog I often bitch about how long it sometimes takes for a high-profile American movie to cross the Atlantic and reach screens [in Israel]. Sometimes it takes an eternity, and some films wind up not even playing theatres. Into the Wild and The Assassination of Jesse James were straight-to-DVD releases over here. But with 88 Minutes roles are reversed: this one was released theatrically about a year ago, and is now already available on DVD. Only now it reaches American screens. Too bad for you guys.
“Remember that Avi Lerner and Danny Dimbort, the film√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s producers, are Israeli ex-pats, and that Samuel Hadida, the film√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s French co-financier, has a ownership stake at the megaplex owned by the film√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s Israeli distributors.” — from a 4.19 review on Israeli blogger Yair Raveh‘s column (otherwise known as Cinemascope),which appears in both Hebrew and English.

Roger Ebert‘s attendance at Ebertfest (4.23 to 4.27) is uncertain due to having suffered a recent hip injury after falling during a visit to the Pritikin Center in Florida. He’s now recovering at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. “The show must go on!” Ebert has stated in a press release. “I am doing fine and if the doctors clear me, I will be there to welcome our guests, including Ang Lee, Paul Schrader, Richard Roeper, Richard Corliss, Sally Potter, Christine Lahti, Rufus Sewell, Timothy Spall, Michael Barker and many others. But whether or not I am there, the audience will see some amazing films.”

I’m in San Francisco, my box-office guy hasn’t called, my iPhone is hiding out in the car so I’m going with Steve Mason‘s Fantasy Mogul weekend estimates. I don’t know anyone who gives two shits about The Forbidden Kingdom, but the martial arts pic that costars (as opposed to toplines) Jackie Chan and Jet Li has elbowed Forgetting Sarah Marshall aside and taken the weekend’s first-place trophy. The chopsocky will take in an estimated $19 million vs. $18 million for Judd Apatow‘s emotionally naked galumph relationship comedy that whatsisname…you know, uhm, Nicholas Stoller directed.
Box-Office Mojo reports that The Forbidden Kingdom is playing at 3,151 locations, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is on approximately 3,400 screens at 2,798 theaters, the Al Pacino turkey 88 Minutes is playing on 2,400 screens at 2,168 sites, and Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed enters 1,052 venues.
Mason is reporting a mild case of Apatow fatigue and an “Apa-thetic” audience response to Forgetting Sarah Marshall in view of its $18 million earnings being the eighth-best Apatow opening tally (the first seven being Talladega Nights, Superbad, Knocked Up, Anchorman, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Kicking and Screaming and The Cable Guy). Mason is being too rough on the guy. I predicted a few weeks ago that Marshall would be a good enough-er and a maintainer of the brand, and it seems to be doing that.