Day: May 31, 2017

Sooner Or Later All Film Critics Meet The Terrible Bus

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Longtime film critic Rex Reed, who’s been at this racket since the ’60s, has been iced by the New York Observer. Not out of any apparent malice but due to the paper’s dwindling revenues, which have necessitated cutbacks. The Observer‘s top-dog movie critic since the early ’90s, Reed was told last week that he’s toast. In the same way that all steers and cows have a date with the slaughterhouse, all film critics eventually get the axe. Unless, that is, they’re running their own online column in which case they’re bulletproof as long as the ads roll in.

Reed told Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn that “the Observer has been going down the drain financially for quite some time”, or since investment banker Arthur Carter sold the rag to Jared Kushner in ’06. Kushner’s brother-in-law, Joseph Meyer, took control of the paper as Kushner and wife Ivanka Trump moved to Washington.

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What If Snow White Was Fat?

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Don’t kid yourself, Chloe Moretz — the basic premise of Red Shoes and the 7 Dwarfs is that the classic Snow White image would be severely compromised if she turned out to be corpulent. The third act will deliver the standard bromide about true beauty lying within, I’m sure, but look at the trailer, for God’s sake. The dorky dwarves under the bed nearly faint when rail-thin Snow undresses, and then moan with displeasure when it turns out her slim bod is illusory. Is the trailer saying that fat is ugly? No — that it’s disappointing, at least initially. And yet the p.c., Moretz-endorsed line is that traditional physical allure is meaningless. Sure thing.

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Humor Is Always About Pain

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Talk to any comedian — there’s no such thing as “a joke.” There’s only slap-in-the-face reality and the clever spinning of some painful, humiliating experience by way of wit, audacity and imagination. Jokes are always about ghastly things of one kind or another, and in this light there’s no such thing as going “too far,” even in a political satirical sense. I feel that Kathy Griffin‘s severed Trump head appropriately addressed one of the most malevolent gargoyles in American governmental history in tit-for-tat terms. It expressed what I feel about that bloated orange pig, and it provided a satisfying emotional fantasy. But why is dead Trump bleeding from the scalp?

Obvious Judi Dench Oscar Bait

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The “how will this play among Trump supporters?” question is obviously irrelevant as Trump supporters generally avoid this kind of thing (intelligent, dryly humorous, Stephen Frears-ish) like the plague.

All-Media Screenings Will Never Be Deep-Sixed

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Two days ago Deadline‘s Anthony D’Allesandro and Anita Busch reported the following about the Rotten Tomatoes effect on soul-smothering would-be blockbusters, to wit: “Both Pirates 5 and Baywatch started high on tracking four weeks ago, $90 to $100 million over four days and $50 million over five days, respectively. [But] the minute Rotten Tomatoes hit, those estimates collapsed.

“Over the weekend it was heard that some studio insiders want to hold off critic screenings until opening day or cancel them all together (that’s pretty ambitious and would cause much ire, we’ll see if that ever happens). Already, studios and agencies are studying RT scores’ impact on advance ticket sales and tracking.”

I’ve asked this before, but when exactly did the Rotten Tomatoes effect change? Because it wasn’t that many years ago that I was hearing over and over that ticket buyers either (a) routinely dismissed film-critic opinions due to their dweeby, elitist, ivory-tower perspectives, and (b) were too dumb or distracted to check aggregate movie-reviewing sites (i.e., Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic), and that (c) mostly they just decided to see stuff based on gut reactions to trailers and the Twitter/Facebook chatter that followed.

When did all this change? The first stirrings I recall was when The Lone Ranger tanked and both producer Jerry Bruckheimer and costar Armie Hammer blamed critics.

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Paramount’s Pain Isn’t Exactly Rotten Tomatoes’ Gain

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More or less verbatim from Richard Rushfield’s Ankler piece titled “is Paramount Cursed?”: “[There have been] plenty of Paramount films that, on paper, should’ve been okay. But somehow, something just didn’t go right. Every. Single. Time.

“Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard in a glamorous WW2 spy thriller! Sounds great! Reboot The Ring! Monster Trucks that are actually monsters! The kids will love it! A new Ben Hur for the Game of Thrones generation! Scarlett Johansson in a white body suit doing anime! A Martin Scorsese medieval thriller! A new Star Trek!  A new Zoolander! A new Jack Reacher! A bawdy Office Christmas Party with every buzzy comedy star on earth! A medium-budget Michael Bay contemporary war thriller! A Meryl Streep Oscar bait film! A Richard Linklater 80’s comedy! A Tina Fey war comedy! And best of all, Dwayne Johnson in an R-rated comic reboot of a universally known TV series!

“What a line-up! How could most of those not catch fire? Or at least…some? One or two? Okay, the last XXX did well in China. [But] when that much goes wrong in that many ways, it’s time to consider that supernatural powers may be at work and perhaps what you need isn’t a new studio chief as much as an exorcist.

Wells interjection: Brad Grey‘s sad, very recent passing requires Rushfield to avoid stating the obvious, which is that the above-described films were all Grey’s.

“I hear from the Paramount lot that a lot of nerves are getting jangly as they wait for the Gianopulos reign to kick in. Lots of high hopes, but still looking for that brilliant, curse-breaking plan to come down.”

“The trades are dissecting — with Paramount’s help — what went wrong with Baywatch,” Rushfield states. “Lots of finger pointing at Rotten Tomatoes and their blasted 19% score. “A recent internal study at Paramount concluded that younger ticket buyers pay close attention to aggregated scores on Rotten Tomatoes,” reports THR.

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