Month: December 2008

Three and a half days ago — an eon! — Australia director Baz Luhrman acknowledged to a Hollywood Reporter staffer that “there are those [who] don’t get” his widely disparaged film. Or rather, he meant, “a lot of the film scientists don’t get it. And it’s not just that that they don’t get it, but they hate it and they hate me , and they think I’m the black hole of cinema. They say, ‘He shouldn’t have made it, and he should die.'”

Nobody I know thinks Baz Luhrman is anything close to the black hole of cinema. They think of him, rather, as the cinematic adrenochrome dealer. A whirling, pixie-dust-sprinkling, gray-haired avatar of big, pumped and extreme. The wizard of cranked-up razmatazz for the sake of…well, cranked-up razmatazz! Mr. Look-at-Me, Look-At-What-I-Can-Do!

How badly, honestly, has Luhrman been hurt by the reception to Australia? What producer or distributor in the world, honestly, would begin to even consider funding/distributing a Baz Luhrman version of The Great Gatsby, which Lurhman mentions in the article? If I had the wherewithal and the freedom to say “yes” or “no,” I wouldn’t even flirt with the idea of of getting into bed with Luhrman on this project. Who would?

Yesterday morning Jim Carrey‘s Yes Man was projected to pull in around $18,681,000. This morning’s Steve Mason/Big Hollywood report says it’ll do a tad less — $18.1 million and change.

The second-place Seven Pounds was looking at a projected $15,500,000 yesterday morning. It’s now expected to finish tonight with around $16 million — a soft opener for a Will Smith film, and probably headed for a final tally that will be comparable to the grosses for Michael Mann‘s Ali.

The fourth-place Four Christmases will be just shy of a $100 million cume by late tonigh, the fifth-place Twilight will have about $158 in the till, and Bolt will be about $5 million shy of $100 million by late tonight.

Slumdog Millionaire expanded by 420 runs to about 600 runs total, and is expected to bring in about $2,500,000 or $4300 a print.

The new limited arrival was The Wrestler, which took in $200,000 in 4 runs.

The Reader held to the same eight runs it had last week and dropped around 48%. Bad sign.

Frost/Nixon stayed at 39 runs and dropped 43%, earning $9000 a print. Uni’s strategy is to hang in there until the early January Golden Globe awards and Oscar noms.

Gran Torino, which apparently is going to expand somewhat next week, possibly adding some 300 odd runs, added 13 screens this weekend, up to 19 runs from last week’s six, and made about $432,000. It held well with $22,700 a print.

How could the Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell, whose opinions have often stirred me and which have always warranted respect, fall for the emotional dog food being peddled by Seven Pounds, the Gabriele Muccino-Will Smith movie?

Howell says he’s “inclined to give the picture passing marks for two reasons. The first is that Smith is not trying to make us love him…this is no small risk for Hollywood’s most genial superstar.” Bullshit. Smith’s character may be rude or anxious or perplexing at times, but at no time is Seven Pounds not trying its darndest to present this guy, thorny as he is in certain respects, as decent, caring and compassionate.

The other reason, says Howell, “is that Smith’s acting, and that of co-star Rosario Dawson. It’s deeper than we’ve seen from either of them, and they click. We have no reason to like his character” — again, bullshit — “or to totally trust hers, but we feel as drawn to them as they do to each other.” Oh no, we don’t! It is impossible to be drawn to any characters in a big-budget sensitivity-session confection such as this one. It’s just another Smith job, is all it is. And all Smith films work on more or less the same principle.

I’ve read a few filmmaker biographies in my time, mostly about legendary types (David O. Selznick, John Huston, etc.) I’ve read two Montgomery Clift bios and two or three about Marlon Brando, and I thought I was Brando’ed out. But this 12.20 Daily Mail summary of Alice Marshak’s paperback cheapie, Me and Marlon, is obviously authentic (being a first-person account) and a rendering of Brando as a hugely pathetic figure. Marshak wrote this because she needed the money, obviously, but I believe what she’s written.

Yesterday The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil ran some comments from a few journo-bloggers about whether Andrew Stanton‘s WALL*E might be Oscar-nominated for Best Picture instead of just Best Animated Feature, which this widely loved and admired film is obviously destined to be nominated and win for.

I was the only one who didn’t just say no, it probably won’t be nominated as Best Picture but bluntly and unequivocally no, it shouldn’t be nominated for Best Picture because (a) it belongs in the animated category, period, and (b) winning in that category is a very honorable thing so what’s the problem?

“WALL*E, to use a nationalistic metaphor, is a splendid Mexican classic,” I wrote. “It stands tall on its own terms, and its makers have every reason to be proud. But it’s a Mexican film and not an American one, and there’s no need for it to cross the Rio Grande and obtain American citizenship. It’s fine as it is. It’s a great animated film, and will win the Oscar in that category, and that’s fine. Did Luis Bunuel need to become an American citizen in order to feel complete and verified as a film artist? As Sylvester Stallone said to Brian Dennehy in First Blood, “Let…it…go.”

Most of those asked — The Envelope‘s Scott Feinberg, USA Today‘s Suzie Woz, The Envelope‘s Pete Hammond, Entertainment Weekly‘s Mark Harris, Coming Soon‘s Ed Douglas, Hollywood Reporter‘s T.L. Stanley — said a Best Picture nomination probably isn’t in the cards for WALL*E, although two or three said it could gather a lot of one-point votes and therefore slip in as a fifth-choice contender.

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone said this could happen if the concept of WALL*E as a “protest vote” — i.e., against what some see as an array or relatively marginal or unexceptional live-action Best Picture contenders — gains traction. I’ll be cool with that if it happens because I like all protests against anything and everything. I’m very much of a three-pronged-pitchfork-and-burning-torch kind of guy.

John Anderson‘s 12.21 Washington Post piece about the difficulty of selling nice Nazis reminded me of Marlon Brando‘s Christian Diestl in The Young Lions. It’s a 1950s “sell” job, all right — a sanded-down, somewhat romanticized but still tolerable idea of what a decent WWII German soldier might be like, one who believes at first in National Socialism and later not so much. But I like this scene for the quiet conviction Brando brings to the words “I would do it.” This scene isn’t bad either.

With President-elect Barack Obama having nominated Colorado Senator Ken Salazar for Secretary of the Interior, a 12.19 Public Policy poll revealed that Democratic Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, cousin of film director George Hickenlooper and subject of a forthcoming GH mini-series called Hick Town, is a very strong contender against the top two potential GOP opponents. JH beats Bill Owens 54 to 40, and Tom Tacredo 54 to 37. So maybe he’ll be appointed to fill Salazar’s seat.

George Hickenlooper, Barack Obama during filming of Hick Town.

Martin Scorsese‘s The Last Temptation of Christ, perhaps the most fully and radiantly spiritual Hollywood-funded film about Yeshua of Nazareth ever made, opened 20 years and 4 months ago. I saw it on opening day at the Plitt theatres in Century City. I came out of the theatre moved and moist-eyed, and outside there was a raging mob of Orange County goons protesting the sexual-marital scene between Willem Dafoe ‘s Christ and Barbara Hershey‘s Mary Magdelene — completely missing what the last temptation meant, too fearful and ignorant to even see the film.

It was then that I fully realized what a haven for moronic thinking the Christian right represented and in fact was. I’ve never forgotten that experience and that lesson.

I just re-watched Last Temptation on DVD and it still blows me away, the last 20 minutes in particular, and double-particularly that magnificent death-and-salvation simulation with the leader running off the reel and the white, red, yellow and blue lights piercing through. I’m imagining a right-wing Christian zealot watching it and saying, “Jeffrey, this film is against the law that we believe in!” and my saying, “Then your laws are against my heart, and the art of Martin Scorsese.”

As much as I love and cherish Bottle Rocket, shelling out an admittedly reasonable $26 and change for a Criterion Blu-ray version doesn’t seem all that vital. It’s not like it’s renowned for its shattering, eye-melting visions of Dallas, Fort Worth and Hillsboro, Texas. Although I’ll probably spring for it anyway because of my Blu-ray heroin habit, which requires a fresh new experience every week or so.

Owen Wilson, Luke Wilson during the final scene in Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket.

…two days ago (which makes it the fourth time) and the only thing that’s been bothering me is that Leonardo DiCaprio ‘s Frank Wheeler tends to speak in cliches when he’s feeling awkward or emphatic — “don’t make me laugh!,” “you were swell,” “ain’t that somethin’?” and so on. And I don’t like the actorish way he always says “huh?” after every declaration or suggestion. But those are the only beefs.

Obviously the critics groups, SAG and the HFPA have greater concerns or there would be more awards love for Revolutionary Road than just that Golden Globe Best Actress nom for Kate Winslet‘s performance. What bothers me is the suspected banality of their reservations, which you can sum up as follows: “Go sell the hopeless emptiness of life someplace else — we’re all stocked up here.”

I abhor people who text in movie theatres with others sitting around them. Loathsome behavior. But if two guys are sitting in a den or living room and texting each other about a show they’re watching, who cares? That’s almost the way it was when Bill McCuddy and I texted each other through the last 60% of Seven Pounds as we sat in Sony’s seventh-floor screening room on Madison and 55th.

One, there was no one in our vicinity at all — we were in the rear seats, and the other two guys in the theatre were several rows in front of us. And two, sitting passively and open-pored while watching Seven Pounds was simply not an option. If this had been even a semi-absorbing, half-tolerable film, it would have been boorish and unacceptable to text…but we had to do something. It was Will Smith and Gabriele Muccino vs. poor little Jeffrey Wells and Bill McCuddy — we had to fight back and respond WHILE THE FILM WAS PLAYING. It demanded immediate action.

If anyone had been remotely near us, or if there was the slightest chance that our text screens might have provided even the slightest distraction for anyone, I would just sat there and taken it and suffered silently.

The Washington Post‘s Dan Kois has written a sharp, concise but slightly too contained profile of the Oscar publicist trade, with special attention paid to the highly accomplished Lisa Taback, based in Los Angeles, and 42West’s Cynthia Swartz and Amanda Lundberg. “It doesn’t matter what [journalists and Oscar bloggers] think,” says Lundberg. “It matters what people who have a ballot think.”

Oscar publicist/strategists Lisa Taback, Cynthia Swartz