Day: June 26, 2011

Memo to Brad Bird, Bad Robot and Paramount: Please don’t give us another effing Mission Impossible Tom Cruise franchise flick! Don’t create action sequences based on the principle that you have to top the last similar-type sequence in the last big budget-busting action movie…begging you! Just figure out what your movie is about and do what feels right for your own purposes and then play it real and to hell with the competition.

I know you won’t do this. I know you’re going to be playing the same old “top the last action movie” game. I know that big studio tentpole actioners are the sworn enemies of movies like Drive. And I know exactly how I ‘m going to feel as I sit there in the 8th row at the all-media, getting bludgeoned and pounded into submission.

Watch the Italian bootleg trailer (i/e., “bootleggia“) and tell me if my suspicions seem correct or excessive or whatever.

Directed by Bird-o with a story by J.J. Abrams and Tom Cruise, obviously starring Cruise as Ethan Hunt with Ving “Mr. Hillbilly Rapist soon to be in agonizing pain” Rhames, Simon Pegg, Paula Patton, Jeremy Renner. Anil Kapoor (Slumdog Millionaire) and Michael Nyqvist (the ’09 version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo).

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol opens on 12.16.11.

I wrote last year about the death of my Siamese cat Zak from pancreatic cancer at age 15. He stopped eating toward the end, prompting me to put Gerber’s baby food on his nose so he would at least lick it off. He was obviously finished. Any country vet would have taken one look and said, “Take him home and make him comfortable, and if you want to put him to sleep towards the end, we’ll do that for you. I’m sorry, but he hasn’t long to live.”

When I took Zak to TLC Animal Hospital in West Hollywood they managed to extract $600 or $700 for observation and stabilization fees before putting him to sleep. Caring shysters like TLC know full well that pet owners want to do something (i.e., spend something) when their pet is dying, and so they step right up and show love and concern for your pet and offer consolation to the owner[s] and get that money. They’re trustworthy professionals, but they know how to vacuum your wallet.

I’m mentioning this because a couple I’m friendly with just lost their dog. He was diagnosed with cancer about two and a half months ago. They were told by a vet that the cancer couldn’t be cured but that the tumor could be removed and that this would probably buy their dog some time, perhaps as much as a year. So they dropped $10 grand on the operation and subsequent medical attention, and the poor dog stopped breathing a few hours ago, just like that.

Are you going to tell me that the vet didn’t suspect that the removal of the tumor wouldn’t really help that much? Are you going to tell me that the vet didn’t exploit the emotions of the couple?

If you were a vet and you knew the dog/cat was a goner, would you persuade the owner to pay for an expensive operation that would maybe extend the pet’s life for a couple of months but tell them it might keep the pet alive for a year, just to keep them sweet and in a spending frame of mind? If you were a pet owner and you had $10 grand to spend on a pet but you knew it would only extend the pet’s life for a couple of months, would you drop the money or just take the pet home and make him/her feel loved until the time came to put him/her to sleep?

“Chris Weitz‘s A Better Life, which follows a gardener in East L.A. who struggles to keep his son away from gangs and immigration agents, found strong numbers in a limited debut. On four screens, Life managed a $60,000 gross, averaging a strong $15,000 per screen.

“Distributor Summit Entertainment noted that 92% of the audience rated the movie ‘excellent’ or ‘very good’, which bodes well as the film continues its platform release pattern over the coming weeks (including an expansion into 11 theaters on July 1).” — from Peter Knegt‘s 6.25 Indiewire box-office report.

Fine, except A Better Life is not “about a gardener in East L.A. who struggles to keep his son away from gangs and immigration agents.” It’s about an illegal-alien Mexican dad who lives in Echo Park and works as a tree surgeon in West LA homes who enlists his teenage son, who regards him with pity and contempt, to help him recover a stolen pickup truck. At the most the son has a flirting relationship with Hispanic gangbangers. It’s not about “son, what can I do or say to persuade you not o hang out with gangbangers….you’ll end up dead or in jail!” Tiresome much?

Weitz’s movie is nowhere near that kind of thing. A Better Life is basically The Bicycle Thief without the very last story beat that pluralizes the term and turns the title into The Bicycle Thieves.

Last night Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu‘s “Nike: Write The Future” ad won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Festival of Creativity

Inarritu and dp Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki shot the footage a year and a half ago (January and February 2010) in Manchester, London, Madrid, Turin, Los Angeles and Kenya.

“It was made to to be show during the World Cup soccer tournament,” Inarritu says in an e-mail from Beijing. “And it was an insane massive production because the logistics of shooting during the winter in Europe and the amount of football soccer stars plus Kobe Bryant, Rover Federer, Homero Simpson and even Gael Garcia Bernal playing a cameo as Cristiano Ronaldo.

“It was the most visited online ad n 2010 and because most of the players did a very poor job during the World Cup, in the viral crazies people said that it was a ‘cursed’ commercial. But thanks to the Spanish guys the commercial was saved !! Anyway, it was a fun globally interconnected narrative experiment.”

Some kind of congratulations are in order, I suppose, for Dream House costars Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz, who quietly married a few days ago. This would be a good time, obviously, to check out the Dream House trailer, but I can’t find it anywhere. What’s that about?

Dream House is a Universal/Morgan Creek production, and those guys know that any film coming out in 90 days has to at least have a teaser up. Wait — I don’t even see a website.

Jim Sheridan‘s haunted-house thriller shot roughly 13 months ago with additional shooting completed last December, and it’ll finally open three months from now (on 9.30.11) after bailing on a 2.18.11 opening, and there’s still no trailer? I don’t what to say except hubba-hubba, shake a leg, move it or lose it, etc.

There’s reportedly a movie called Cars 2 (don’t care, won’t see it) that will make $67 million by late tonight. Take no notice of the projected $31 million that Bad Teacher will earn this weekend. The C-plus CinemaScore grade plus Boxoffice.com’s Phil Contrino declaring the word-of-mouth is “toxic” is a fate-sealer. And The Green Lantern dropped over 65% with an expected $18 million for the weekend. Justice is served.