Day: November 17, 2012

Tim Goodman‘s Hollywood Reporter review of Lindsay Lohan‘s Liz and Dick, posted Friday morning and ignored by HE for roughly 30 hours, is an exuberant piece of writing. And I guess you have to hand it to LIfetime because now I really want to see this piece of shit. The only problem is that I don’t drink.

“It should come as no great surprise that Lifetime’s Liz & Dick movie starring Lindsay Lohan is spectacularly bad…Lohan is woeful as Taylor from start to finish,” Goodman states.

“But, whatever you do, don’t miss Liz & Dick. It’s an instant classic of unintentional hilarity. Drinking games were made for movies like this. And the best part is that it gets worse as it goes on, so in the right company with the right beverages, Liz & Dick could be unbearably hilarious toward the tail end of the 90-minute running time.

“By the time Lohan is playing mid-’80s Taylor and it looks like a lost Saturday Night Live skit, your body may be cramped by convulsions.”

“For a short film on two long lives, Liz & Dick truly drags. Luckily, you can’t take your eyes off of Lohan playing Taylor, which the producers clearly thought would work because they share similar backstories. Except for the part about Taylor being a gigantic movie star and Lohan not being one. Not even a star bright enough to transport you at least halfway to believing she’s Elizabeth Taylor. There is not one minute in this film where Lohan is believable.

“The film gets into Taylor’s weight issues without really bloating Lohan up that much. There’s a ‘Cleo-Fat-Ra’ headline that makes her cry. Richard Burton (Grant Bowler) says, ‘I will love you even if you get as fat as a hippo.’ Seriously, he says that.

“The best moment, apparently, happens after “Burton dies and the late-era Taylor is unveiled for the first time. The moment Lohan appears in this get-up, it’s impossible not to laugh. It really does look like SNL. She can’t really pull off the young, sexy Liz with much believability, so the mid-’80s look is awkward squared. She gets the news of Burton’s death and faints — a straight drop to the floor — that also somehow seems inadvertently hysterical.

“Stunt casting rarely works. But in Liz & Dick it works by accident or for all the wrong reasons. Lohan as Taylor was a bad idea in the dramatic sense, but it’s pure genius both for marketing and for belly laughs and drinking games.”

The 11.16 N.Y. Times “Sweet Spot” (i.e., A.O. Scott and David Carr chit-chatting and sometimes interviewing Times staffers) is about guilty non-pleasures — art forms and entertainments that you’re supposed to like but you just can’t. And the most persistent non-pleasure of the Times newsroom? Lincoln. Scott admits this in so many words. Here‘s the mp3. See what I mean, Glenn Kenny? DDL is in good shape award-wise, but problems with Times staffers indicate trouble with like-minded Academy members.

Boxoffice.com reports that the official Friday estimate for Breaking Dawn — Part 2 is $71.2 million [with] Summit estimating “in the range of $135 million” for the weekend. That’s almost exactly the same amount earned by The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part I, which took in $138.1 million domestic.

“A lot of people have dropped off the Twilight bandwagon,” Phil Contrino maintains. “The last installment of a major franchise should be the biggest, but that didn’t happen here….it’s htting the base only, and even some of the base has grown up and moved on.,..$71.2 million for the domestic weekend,…worldwide will be the thing.”

Contrino also informed this morning that Silver Linings Playbook is off to something of a slow start — $120,416 in 16 theatres for an average of $7526 on Friday. That’s to be expected with two other popular, well-established adult flicks, Skyfall and Lincoln, competing for ticket dollars, not to mention all the low-information viewers flocking to Breaking Dawn.

The long line of cars clogging the Arclight garage last night was ridiculous. I took one look and said “fuck that” and drove off. Effing Twihards and their boyfriends.

People are traditionally very, very slow to pick up on special-quality-type films before or concurrent with a limited opening. People need big familiar concepts (i.e., franchises, right-down-the-middle genre films, comic-book origins), big names and familiar big-movie elements. I wrote in early September that “serious romcom fans allegedly like stupid and sappy, so maybe the girly-girls who like Kate Hudson movies will hold back just a bit because Silver Linings Playbook is too smart and probing and raggedy-jaggedy, but I’ll be astonished if it doesn’t make at least $100 million.”

An SLP guy expects that the film “will do better than estimated as the word-of-mouth will be super strong. The reviews are gangbusters. The audience will find this movie, even if we have to annoy them all the way to the Academy Awards — we will get them. It’s just too great of a picture to ever ever give up on.”

In his 10.2.12 New Yorker piece called “Whatever Happened To Movies For Grown-ups?“, David Denby asked the following: “Have you ever noticed the faces of people streaming out of a good movie? They are mostly quiet, trancelike, zombie-like. They are trying to hold on to the mood, the image, playing the picture over and over in their heads.”

This is not the vibe I was sensing as I stood in an Arclight lobby the other night (i.e., just before the Anna Karenina premiere screening) as a crowd that had just seen Lincoln walked past me. They were a bit glummed out; their faces seemed a little somber and even haggard. No faint smiles; no looks of calm or serenity. Most seemed to be saying to themselves, “All right, that‘s over…where can we eat? In fact, let’s just get a drink.”

Boxoffice.com‘s Phil Contrino went to a public screening of Lincoln last night, and he says “they weren’t going with it…the mood was ‘why are we watching this on a Friday night? People clearly respect Lincoln but they don’t necessarily love it or are really enjoying it. They’re going to tell their firends that Daniel Day Lewis is good and it’s a good movie…but a lot of people will be seeing it almost out of a sense of duty…like a homework assignment.”

Received last night from HE reader “Beenie“: “I just got out of Silver Linings at [Manhattan’s] Lincoln Square. This is the kind of movie that pressure-tests itself. The writing, acting, editing etc. are sublime, but the little moments, the scenes within scenes, are so far above just about anything I’ve seen all year. There were four moments of spontaneous applause in a packed screening, and applause at the end. I saw Argo at the same theater and the appreciation was great but was 50% less in intensity. Keep up the exceptional advocacy. Movies like Silver Linings deserve it.