Jeffrey Wells

Sony is projecting a $23 million haul for The Social Network‘s opening weekend, according to Box Office.com’s Phil Contrino. $8 million on Friday, $8.9 million on Saturday and a projected $6.1 million for Sunday.

That’s okay because The Social Network will hang in there for the long run. But it’s not the balls-out opening I was looking for. No way it’s the movie’s fault or that of the marketing. It’s simply the failure of a good portion of the American public to come out of their gopher holes and breathe in the cultural air and smell the fresh-brewed coffee. It’s all those 20something slackers thinking they’ve got enough Facebook in their lives without absorbing a movie version plus Average Joes wondering if it’s absolutely essential to see theatrically plus the slouchy mentality and class resentments of Joe Hinterland Popcorn.

Learning Italian, the fourth Kevin Costner-Kevin Reynolds collaboration, is now in pre-production and set to shoot in Sicily and Germany sometime soon, or at least in time for a 2011 release. An apparent period “comedy” (set in the mid to late ’80s?), plot is about some kind of low-key CIA agent (Costner) stationed in an Italian coastal town who’s assigned to monitor a KGB agent. “When both are called back to their respective countries,” the boilerplate synopsis reads, “they decide to concoct a fake threat so they can continue to live in Italy.”

It doesn’t sound, in other words, like a coiled-spring hijinks comedy as much as a laid-back, quality-of-life mood piece with heh-heh laughs, possibly in the vein of Local Hero or Billy Wilder‘s Avanti or that line of country. The education alluded to in the title refers, I’m guessing, to a laughing Mediterranean way of life more than language.

What’s the difference between “heh-heh” laughter and “no-laugh funny”? I don’t know. Maybe no difference. You tell me. The definitions have to be sorted out.

The KGB agent part is apparently uncast but HE is respectfully begging Costner to not choose an actor who will torture the audience to death with a thick Russian accent. That means don’t hire Mickey Rourke. Not after that tearful “I remember a Bosnian woman I didn’t save” scene in The Expendables. In my view that one scene wiped out all the good will Rourke built up during his entire “Rourke is back and he’s sorry for being a dick in the ’80s and early ’90s” Wrestler campaign.

When Learning Italian was first announced last February everyone recalled the stormy relationship between Costner and Reynolds, particularly their arguments and editing-room lockouts during the making of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and especially Waterworld, which Reynolds left towards the end of filming. And yet, according to Deadline, the two have remained friendly. I’m predicting they’ll come to physical blows during the editing of Learning Italian.

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).”