Day: October 2, 2010

If it’s based on a comic book and not directed by Chris Nolan, Sam Mendes, Terry Zwigoff or Bryan Singer, it’s probably going to tax your patience or, more likely, flat-out exasperate or infuriate. This is my belief.

Update: My initial posting was tapped out prior to a screening of Robert Schwentke‘s Red (Summit, 10.15), and I was feeling a little bit of an anticipatory “uh-oh.” I was initially only thinking of Singer’s X-Men flicks and Nolan’s two Batman movies. I should have also been thinking about Mendes’ Road to Perdition, Jonathan Mostow‘s Surrogates, Zwigoff’s Ghost World and Art-School Confidential, and the Wachowski’s V for Vendetta.

Thank you, Terrence Malick, for giving me one final finger by apparently having decided to open The Tree of Life at the Berlin Film Festival. First you blew off Cannes 2010 and then you signed with Fox Searchlight, which resulted in a decision not to release in 2010, and now this. Now I’ll have to shell out big dough to fly to Berlin in February, or suffer a certain loss of face by not being at the very first screening of The Tree of Life.

The Berlin booking isn’t confirmed but an allegedly well-informed guy named Cedric Succivalli has, according to In Contention‘s Guy Lodge, tweeted that The Tree of Life‘s French distributor EuropaCorp “has confirmed a February 23 release date, obviously ruling out a Cannes appointment three months later.” Malick’s last two films have played Berlin so draw your own conclusions. Sundance is almost certainly a dream.

You’ll only see this in hotel-room hallways during junkets, but whenever a big star needs to make his/her way from one room to another, he/she will always be flanked on all sides by his/her publicists in military formation. One publicist in front of the celebrity, one behind and two on either side — a phalanx of five. The idea, I guess, is that if some nutjob journalist or hotel employee makes a wrong move, the publicists will be able to block.

Sidestepping for the time being the near-certainty that Tyler Perry‘s For Colored Girls (Lionsgate, 11.5) will be regarded as a rank embarassment by people of taste, this is a relatively alluring poster. Congrats to Lionsgate’s Tim Palen and his marketing team. Seriously.

I can relate to this. I was once an Arjuna-quoting Bhagavad Gita mystic, but I gradually gave it up for the bolt and the buzz — for a be-here-now philosophy and the lure of fast living, fast women, big-city life, the drama of it all, vodka-and-lemonades (before giving those up in the mid ’90s), a movie-chasing life and great-looking T-shirts.

I had about twelve minutes with Fair Game director Doug Liman about an hour ago — not long enough. We talked a bit and I recorded it all (which I’ll either post as an audio file or use as the basis for another piece), but it seemed as if we barely got going before Movieline‘s Stu Van Airsdale was being ushered in for his quickie session. The quote that sticks in my head was Liman saying “I’m tough on myself.” Down with that. The more demanding you are on yourself, the better it is for your audience.

Fair Game director Doug Liman on 10th floor of Manhattan’s Four Seasons hotel — Saturday, 10.2, 2:45 pm.

I understand why government guys and security people always drive officials and/or clients around in big, black, gas-guzzling Escalade SUVs. It’s because these vehicles say “macho badass,” “king shit,” “armour-plated,” “no messing around,” “heavweight,” “formidable,” impenetrable” and all those other studly statements. I am nonetheless sick to death of the sight of them — sick of watching SUV convoys cruising through big-city streets and down big highways in action thrillers. I’m looking for a variation of any kind…anything.

Let Me In‘s $1.9 million Friday earnings and likely $5 million weekend tally is a shocker. One of the finest films of the year hands down and easily one of the best vampire flicks of all time — so far above above the level of the Twilight films that they’re not even in the same ballpark– and Joe Popcorn has…what, blown it off?

Why does quality never seem to figure in Eloi determinations about what to see? The better reviewed a film is, the less Average Joes want to see it — is that the equation these days? Was it the one-sheet image of Chloe Moretz lying on her side in a semi-tuck position, which alluded to something semi-delicate and/or atypical? The trailer advertised a straight horror experience, but the fact that Let Me In is a much more sensitive and multi-layered thing shouldn’t have gotten in the way. I understand modest returns on a film like this, but $5.5 million? What happened?

My second viewing of Doug Liman‘s Fair Game (Summit, 11.5) convinced me all the more that it’s one of the best made adult-level political thrillers of this century. Really. Liman’s chops are Pakula-plus. The shooting, pacing and cutting are as good as this sort of thing gets. And like I said during the Cannes Film Festival, there’s immense comfort and satisfaction for guys like myself in any smart, well-jiggered film that eviscerates rightie scum.

Fair Game star Naomi Watts, director Doug Liman during this morning’s press conference at Manhattan’s Four Seasons hotel — 10.2, 11:50 am.

Fair Game “is a stirring, suspenseful and immensely satisfying adult drama, brilliantly directed and written and acted, especially in the latter case by Sean Penn and Naomi Watts,” I said last May.

“I’ve been hoping to like it all along, but the complexity and intelligence brought to bear upon the story of Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame vs. the Bush administration — a tale of courage, cowardice, betrayal and bureaucratic denial all wrapped up into one — still came as a surprise.

“I really and truly wasn’t expecting it to be quite this deft and assured. It seems to me like a revival of the spirit of the paranoid Alan Pukula of the ’70s with governmental-spook flavorings that harken back to Costa-Gavras and John LeCarre (or, more particularly, the British TV adaptation of Smiley’s People).”

The American moviegoing public has decided to give The Social Network a first-weekend tally that’s either (a) a little bit better than Wall Street 2, or roughly a three-day tally of $21 million, according to box-office analyst Steve Mason, or (b) closer to $25 million, based on reported Friday earnings of $8.5 million, according to a box-office analyst Nikki Finke.

$25 million is cool, but it still doesn’t fully calculate given universal hosannahs from every critic (except Armond White and a couple of others) and talk in every corner of the room of The Social Network being the Best Picture contender to beat. None of that means diddly squat to Archie and Reggie and Susie Creamcheese in Flyover, USA.

What’s happening? A lot of people out there are saying what a youngish woman told me in a Lincoln Center-area Starbucks about a week ago: “I spend too much time as it is on Facebook…I’m not sure I want to see a movie about it.” And if there’s one guiding principle that many younger filmgoers live by, it is to not read reviews or even follow the lead of the aggregate numbers at Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic and go only by their gut (and what their friends say) in deciding what to see.

$21 million isn’t bad — it’s fine — but $25 million would be better. A significant portion of the public (i.e., the smarter, big-city, more engaged sector that reads reviews and picks up on what’s happening) is obviously responding. And there’s always the chance that The Social Network business could uptick today as it’s skewing a bit older and the 25-plus crowd tends to wait until Saturday or Sunday to see new films.

Finke reported last night “the reason may well lie in the film’s elitism which may be keeping more mainstream audiences away.” Elitism? As in “not dumb enough”? “Left coast, right coast, and a smidge of Chicago only,” a rival studio exec told Finke late last night. “The rest of the country could care less.”

Fandango numbers on 9.29 (with Social Network advance sales accounting for 32% of the total) suggested a weekend tally in the low 20s. “If it was selling 50% to 60% of the total right now, we’d be looking at the mid to high 20s,” an analyst told me. “But a lot of openings have been mild recently. Wall Street 2 only did $19 million or thereabouts, so I wouldn’t forecast too high a figure for Social Network — I’d pull back a bit.”

My 9.29 conclusion: “In Planet of the Earth terms, The Social Network is a movie about orangutans that was made by orangutans, and which is aimed at an orangutan and chimp audience. What Fandango is telling us is that so far the gorillas haven’t gotten on board.”