Day: November 29, 2008

The Guardian‘s Simon Hattenstone is calling Benicio Del Toro “Hollywood’s finest mumbler since Marlon Brando. He is never better than when mumbling his lines. Except, possibly, when he has no lines to mumble at all. He loves nothing more than paring a script down to nothing. No one can grunt, wince or wheeze their way through a movie quite like Del Toro.

“Which makes his new film, Che, the perfect vehicle for him. In the movie, to be released in two parts (The Argentine and Guerrilla), Del Toro’s Che Guevara grunts through 253 minutes of action. This is a walking, rarely talking, gun-toting revolutionary wheeze machine. His performance makes Che in turn one of the most boring and most captivating films I have seen.” He doesn’t really mean “boring.” He just settled on that word as he punching the piece out. He trying to say “conventionally undramatic.”

“Politician, writer, traveller, biker, doctor, guerrilla and poster boy: few people have a more fascinating story than Guevara. But director Steven Soderbergh and Del Toro as good as refuse to tell it. There is hardly any narrative — we simply watch him hacking his way through the jungles of Cuba in part one and Bolivia in part two. It is a sublimely contrary piece of film-making. Only in the last minute does Soderbergh even attempt to humanize his protagonist as he reveals that he has left his four children at home.

“Hollywood trade paper Variety said Guerrilla had all the excitement of a military training documentary. And yet such is the physicality of Del Toro’s performance, the way he inhabits Guevara, that you can’t take your eyes off him.”

You’d never know it from their website, but I think/trust/have been told that the National Board of Review crew will decide their annual movie awards slate on Wednesday, 12.3 The LA Film Critics Association (LAFCA) site says they’ll announce their choices on Tuesday, 12.9. (Wait, don’t they usually vote on a Saturday? I was expecting them to vote on Saturday, 12.6.) And then the New York Film Critics Circle will vote on Wednesday, 12.10.

I’m rooting for a Revolutionary Road upset over Slumdog Millionaire from either LAFCA or NYFCC. Not because I’m against Danny Boyle‘s film in any way. I just think Sam Mendes‘ film needs a little advance traction to get rolling with the L.A. pueriles who are saying they don’t care for it because it’s too morose. I’m telling you, that Death of a Salesman play is such a downer — what a loser! And all those Shakespearean tragedies besides…God! Can’t we have a little hope and happiness in our lives, something to feel good about with the economy being the way it is?

I guess I can imagine Milk taking it in Los Angeles to symbolically refute the passage of Proposition 8. Maybe.

That 11.27 projection about Twilight making $55 million over the five-day Thanksgiving holiday and $37.5 million for the three-day weekend came from a solid estimator, but Twilight‘s business fell off after Wednesday and now it’s going to come in second to Four Christmases with a significantly smaller take. Here are the latest numbers:

The three-day on Four Chistmases is $31.5 million, and the five day will be $46.5 milllion. Twilight is looking at a three-day total of 27.4. million, off 61% from last weekend’s three-day total. The five-day projection is for $40.5 million. The new long-range expectation is $150 million, give or take.

The third-place Bolt is looking at $26.4 and $36.1 million. Quantum of Solace is $20.3 and $29 million. Baz Luhrmann‘s fifth-place Australia will take in $14.3 and $19.5 — bad news for such an expensive film. Madagascar 2 is $14.2 and $19.3 Transformers 3 is 12.0 and 19.2. Role Models is 5.3 and 7.9.

The limited-release Milk is projecting $1.5 for three days and $2 million or five. Encouraging per-screen average — 3-day weekend estimate is $39,000 a print in 36 theatres. Slumdog Millionaire, playing in 49 theatres, is looking at $1.4 million and $1.9 million at 27,000 a print.

There’s an obvious note of African-American machismo in Barack Obama ‘s recent comments to Barbara Walters about not wanting to get a “yappy girly” dog. He said he wanted a “big rambunctious dog.” This sounded like a reference to a golden retriever or lab or Irish setter, but his comment reminded me that I’ve never once seen an African-American guy walking a dog on a city street that wasn’t just large, but also fearsome-looking. Pit bulls, bulldogs, dobermans…that line of country. Tell me I’m mistaken.

Cue the Glenn Kenny contingent so they can start calling me a closet racist, but not once — not a single time — in all my decades on the streets of New York, Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco have I seen a black guy walking a pure face-licking love dog (which golden retrievers are a prime example of). Is there a p.c. way of saying that there seems to be something in the male African-American experience that responds to the concept of a muscular guard dog with an innate willingness to snarl at strangers and get aggressive at the drop of a hat? Probably not.

Somebody please tell me they’ve seen or heard differently. I realize I’m not supposed to say this, but I’m just saying. I’m a golden retriever man myself. I’ve had two — one fell off a Hollywood hills balcony and broke his back and had to be euthenized, and the other I had to give away due to travel. Breaks my heart.

The more I think about it, the Documentary Short List omission that’s growing more and more in terms of unjustness (and I’m sorry for not thinking of this right off the top) is the one for Gonzalo Arijon‘s Stranded, which opened theatrically last month.

In my heart the emotional import of this film is second only to James Marsh‘s Man on Wire. It was omitted, I’m guessing, for the usual pedestrian taste-bud reasons. The blue-hairs figured that the Andes plane-crash soccer-team cannibalism story of the early ’70s had already been done a couple of times before and why jump into the whole thing again? And because the image of starved young men eating strips of human flesh in order to survive unnerved them.

The chief differences between Tom Tykwer‘s The International (Sony/Columbia, 2.13) and Tony Gilroy‘s Duplicity (Universal, 3.20), the two early ’09 urban thrillers that star Clive Owen, seem to be (a) Gilroy’s is a bit lighter and more caper-ish, (b) Tykwer’s is a bit heavier, darker, apparently toying with a Parallax View vibe, and (c) Owen looks a tiny bit heavier in the Tykwer than in the Gilroy, in which he needed to look hot and buff for his romantic scenes with Julia Roberts.

They both look to be 70s’-styled escapist programmers, which is fine. And they both seem visually and tonally similar — i.e., the same kind of upscale urban backdrops. Okay, the Tykwer seems a bit bluer and grayer. It will also hit theatres five weeks before the Gilroy.

The International features a shoot-out scene in Manhattan’s Guggenheim museum. And of course, a guy falls from one of the upper tiers of the circular walkaround and goes splat on the stone-floor rotunda below.

It’s interesting to compare the British International trailer with the U.S. version. I was a bit more attracted to the British one, but that’s me.

The International is the out-of-competition opener for the Berlin Film Festival, which launches on 2.5.09.