Month: July 2009

Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke ran a boxoffice update yesterday that said Bruno, which enjoyed a strong $14.2 million Friday kickoff, experienced a devastating 37% Friday-to-Saturday dropoff, resulting in a dispiriting $9 million Saturday haul.

So instead of Bruno earning a potential $40 million or so (which would be indicated by Friday’s earnings, no?) the comedy will finish this evening with about $30 million (a per-screen average of $10,881 in 2,757 situations). That’s okay from a certain perspective but throw in Bruno‘s reported “C” rating from CinemaScore and you have two clear indications that Bruno has no future– that it’s all downhill from here on.

Why the 37% dropoff and “C” score? The Borat retread factor (i.e., been-there, done-that). The brusque and somewhat misanthropic tone (particularly in the Ron Paul sequence). The lack of genuinely hilarious moments. What has everyone heard, felt, detected, observed? A journalist friend told me this morning about reports of walkouts — has anyone witnessed any?

In Michael Powell‘s N.Y. Times profile of Andrew Sarris, it is noted that the legendary film critic has been entirely cut loose by the N.Y. Observer. Which wasn’t supposed to happen. Life is hard and people lie. The solution, of course, is for Sarris to immediately switch to an online berth. As I wrote about his situation on 6.11, “All writers need to keep on chooglin’ until they drop. There is no spoon and there is no retirement.”

The initial reports on 6.10 and 6.11 were that diminishing revenues had forced Sarris’s Observer editors to whack him. It was soon after reported by Dave Kehr, who’d spoken to Sarris’s author-critic wife Molly Haskell, that rumors of Sarris’s dismissal were “not true” and that he would”continue to write on a freelance basis, exactly as Rex Reed does currently.”

A reversal of strategy only three or four weeks later suggests that the editor who assured Sarris/Haskell that everything would be more or less jake (albeit on a freelance basis) was being disingenuous.

“There’s a part of me that looks beyond everything now,” Sarris tells Powell. “I don’t approve of Woody Allen‘s view of death. I acknowledge it, but I hope there’s more time, as there’s a lot of movies I’d like to see and think about.”

What Woody Allen view would that be exactly? The only one I can think of is “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work — I want to achieve it by not dying.”

I said last month that writing is brutal or difficult or at least a slog for most of us, but not writing is a death sentence. Writing keeps you in the game, sharpens your mind, makes you inquisitive, feeds the engine, keeps you on your toes, etc. It is the only thing for a writer to do.

You can tell within seconds that John Huston‘s Moby Dick understands the look and culture of mid 19th Century New England, and that you’re in the company of seasoned actors and a sturdy script. I’ve been a fool for this film for years, largely due to my love for Oswald Morris‘s desaturated half-color, half black-and-white scheme, achieved by the blending of a color and a monochrome negative in post.

If you’d asked me a few years ago (sometime, say, between ’01 and ’03) if I thought Mary Louise Parker was a firecracker, I would’ve said, “Uhh, well…she’s attractive but not really.” MLP used to be a semi-struggling actress who did solid work in films like Fried Green Tomatoes and Angels In America, and on-stage in productions like Proof. Then she began starring in Weeds four years ago and now she’s totally reinvented as smokin’ material.

More power and all that, but this Esquire snap sums it up.

If I gave a damn about comic-book superhero geek culture, which I very proudly don’t, I’d be asking if the casting of Ryan Reynolds as the Green Lantern for Warner Bros. takes the wind out of the sails of the Deadpool movie he’s also supposed to star in for 20th Century Fox.

If you add the minor fantasy figure of Captain Excellent, the blonde-haired spandex superhero Reynolds played in Paper Man, which opened the Los Angeles Film Festival about three weeks ago, that makes three super-stud roles for the guy. Has any name actor ever played even two separate superheroes in the same approximate time period? If I were Reynolds I’d eighty-six Deadpool. No actor should do more than one.

The Lantern deal also means, of course, that we’re going to have two superhero movies with the word “green” in the title within two years of each other — The Green Lantern and Seth Rogen‘s Green Hornet movie. Isn’t that kind of dumb-sounding?? Is there any chance of George Clooney signing to play The Green Gzornplatt for Sony?

A friend sent me two links to two negative Hurt Locker reviews on Breitbart.com — review #1 and review #2. “Right-wing guys have a problem with this film,” I wrote back. “For whatever philosophical, physiological or emotional reason they can’t seem to roll with it. Obviously off on their own beam and preaching to a select chorus.”

“Agreed,” he said. “But thought you might want to put it up on your site and let your readers give ’em what for. Sometimes it’s informative to get opposing views. I would have thought the right-wingers would have rallied behind this film as an example of the bravery and focus of our troops, etc. But I guess unless a movie is directed by a right-winger like Cyrus N. it doesn’t pass the smell test with the conservative crowd.”

The Twitter crowd seems to like it.

The idea is to listen to the clip and name the film it’s taken from without thinking about it. If you can’t name it within 15 or 20 seconds, forget it.

Before this morning I’d honest-to-God never heard of Tiptoes, a 2003 dwarf movie with Matthew McConaughey, Kate Beckinsale, Peter Dinklage and Gary Oldman. I love how the second-rate narrator calls Oldman’s CG-enhanced acting “the performance of a lifetime.” (Thanks to HE reader Mark Smith.)

The primary impression you get from R.J. Cutler‘s doc, which I saw at last January’s Sundance Film Festival, is that Vogue editor Anna Wintour isn’t that much of a horror. It may be a gloss and she may have been performing, but that’s what comes across.

Charles Eastman, one of the most admired and gifted screenwriters of the ’60s and ’70s, has died at age 79. Initially an L.A. playwright, Eastman became a script doctor in his mid 30s on The Americanization of Emily, The Cincinnati Kid and This Property Is Condemned. He later wrote two screenplays that were produced — Little Fauss and Big Halsy and Second Hand Hearts — and a third, The All-American Boy, that he himself directed. He also wrote Honeybear, I Think I Love You, a never-produced piece about a romantically obsessed young weirdo.

Charles Eastman [photo courtesy of L.A. TImes]