Jeffrey Wells

“Mid ’70s punk music was basically about two words — ‘fuck you.’ But sooner or later you knew a band was going to come along and say something different, and that was Joy Division. Punk said ‘fuck you’ — Joy Division said ‘we’re fucked.'” — a comment heard near the halfway point of Grant Gee‘s Joy Division, which the Weinstein Co. acquired for distribution last Thursday.

It seems facile to say, as two HE readers have, that big-name female actresses should think about steering clear of Joel Silver projects following this weekend’s shortfall performance of The Brave One.

Jodie Foster‘s vigilante film, nicely directed by Neil Jordan, is an emotionally developed, decently written effort. This in itself place it heads and shoulders above Silver stinkers like Gothika (in which Halle Berry starred and suffered), The Reaping (Hilary Swank vs. Biblical plagues) and The Invasion (which failure of which underlined Nicole Kidman‘s lack of commercial potency).

Still, if you were an agent repping a major female actress and she was offered the lead in a Silver film, wouldn’t you give it a bit more thought now than you would have six months or a year ago?

Now I’m hearing that The Brave One won’t even make $15 million this weekend, which was a shortfall in itself. A competing studio’s projection says it’s only going to do $13,761,000….way short of that $20 million ballpark indicated by last week’s tracking. What slowed it down? Some of the reviews were fairly rough, but aren’t reviews supposed to be meaningless these days? Perhaps not with slightly older women, the Brave One‘s targeted demo. I’m guessing (not having canvassed or called around) that the young-male action crowd wasn’t that into it.

Here’s an IGN link to a quickie teaser for Francis Coppola‘s Youth Without Youth (Sony Classics, 12.14). Tim Roth, a 2.35 to 1 aspect ratio, a hot lady in black underwear, and Bruno Ganz‘s voice saying “we’re running out of time.” The teaser is preceded by a flashy, aurally abrasive spot for Volkswagen.

Yesterday’s over-before-it-began Sidney Lumet interview at the Hotel Intercontinental, the primary subject being Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. We also discussed the bizarre mis-marketing of Find Me Guilty as well as Lumet’s affinity and respect for William Wyler‘s The Best Years of Our Lives.

Ethan Hawke in Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead

Peter Lauria‘s New York Post analysis of the Weinstein Co.’s financial situation, which has lately been pummelled by negative rumors, states the following: (a) “The studio’s debt-to-equity ratio is running at an even 1-to-1, according to a source who has seen its finances, which compares to Lionsgate’s debt-to-equity ratio of 0.14-to-1; (b) “A second source who has seen The Weinstein Co.’s finances said the studio has ‘several hundred million dollars of liquidity’ available and that its debt-to-equity ratio is by no means problematic because ‘as losses turn to profits, it will go completely in the opposite direction’; and (c) a statement from Bob Weinstein that ‘debt is good, you use debt to acquire…If I wanted to access a billion dollars more debt from Goldman tomorrow and I had something worth buying or taking over, we’re now in a game where we can do that…we never were able to do that at Disney.”

But the best quote belongs to Harvey: Fuck everybody. We are back to being No. 1 in profitability and gross.”

My guy hasn’t called this morning, but Fantasy Moguls’ Steve Mason is reporting a shortfall for Neil Jordan and Jodie Foster‘s The Brave One, which was expected to reach or slightly surpass (according to tracking) $20 million this weekend. It opened with a relatively weak $4.8 million on Friday, says Mason, which will translate to a projected $15.1 million haul. As the wounded Steve McQueen says at the end of The Sand Pebbles, “What the hell happened?”

And bravo, American audiences, for the smart, sophisticated choices you’re making among the weekend’s three limited openers — the relentlessly vapid Beatles-music flick Across The Universe, the slithery-perverse Russian penis movie Eastern Promises, and the sad and solemn procedural/Iraq War drama In The Valley of Elah.

Naturally, Julie Taymor‘s Beatles film did “blazing” business on 23 screens ($9114 per situation) and David Cronenberg‘s Russian crime flick averaged $10,971 in 15 situations. And of course, Elah did the least amount of business, managing an “unspectacular” debut at 9 locations, having earned about $40,000 on Friday for a $4,492 average. Paul Haggis‘s pic should bring in $130,000 for the weekend.

It’s no secret that American moviegoers almost always favor films that seem the most emotionally obvious as well as the least challenging and/or complex, and they’ve certainly lived up to their reputation this weekend.

I haven’t read Jamie Curtis‘ screenplay of Lost for Words, which has been described as a story about a libidinous movie star who finds himself falling in love with a beautiful Chinese actress and her female translator, but it certainly sounds like a sell-out project for the great Susanne Bier (Things We Lost in the Fire, Brothers, Open Hearts) to direct.

The synopsis alone sounds coy and randy-cute, like something Hugh Grant would have made in the late ’90s. Jamie Curtis’ biggest credits are having produced The Good Sex Guide, a British TV series, in the early ’90s, and then writing “additional dialogue” on ’97’s Spice World — what does that tell you about her vistas? But the dagger-in-the-chest element is the producing presence of Richard Curtis, the Love Actually director-writer, along with Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner.

One of the most shallow and sickly-treacly British films ever made, Love Actually is Curtis’ testament and emblem. All you need to know about Curtis’ filmmaking philosophy can be found in the following statement, which is on his IMDB page: “If you write a story about a soldier going AWOL and kidnapping a pregnant woman and finally shooting her in the head, it’s called searingly realistic, even though it’s never happened in the history of mankind. Whereas if you write about two people falling in love, which happens about a million times a day all over the world, for some reason or another, you’re accused of writing something unrealistic and sentimental.”

Bier is talented enough to recover from her association with Curtis (who doesn’t appear to have any family ties with Jamie, although they seem similar in attitude), but why is she even going there in the first place?

My suspension of disbelief falls apart whenever anyone in a movie lights up indoors. This always makes me shift in my seat and say to myself, “Jeez, now the place is going to reek of cigarette smoke…why doesn’t the guy go outside or at least open a window?” And I really can’t stand it when a character lights up inside a car without opening the windows because you can always smell it the next day and the day after, even if it was only one person smoking a single cigarette, and it’s always rancid and repulsive.

“I had a few too many vodka and sodas, and I’m feeling it,” confides a friend who’s just gotten back from the Toronto Film Festival. “Perhaps it’s better in the end, but I didn’t see Battle for Haditha or Redacted. Oliver Stone recently said that the Iraq conflict was ‘another generation’s war‘ as he preps for Pinkville. I think he’s right to stay with what he knows, and for this reason Brian DePalma‘s Redacted scares me a little. Iraq may prove to be very complex to bring to the big screen and an even bigger marketing challenge. I wouldn’t want to be Mark Cuban right now, although it sounds like Haditha has some fans.”

In describing the currently-shooting Che Guevara films — The Argentine and Guerilla — in the October 2007 Esquire, Benicio del Toro, obviously a big Rolling Stones fan, tells profiler Chris Jones that “we’re trying not to do Che’s greatest hits.” And then he explains what that means.

“If you’re doing a greatest hits of the Rolling Stones, you probably open up with ‘Satisfaction’ and then you finish the first side of the album with ‘Sympathy for the Devil,'” Del Toro begins. “And then you open side two with ‘Gimme Shelter’ and you close with ‘Start Me Up.’ Well, we’re trying to start with ‘Blue Turns to Grey’ and finish with ‘Stray Cat Blues,’ and then start the second side with ‘Luxury’ and finish it with ‘Infamy’….something like that.”

In my April ’07 piece on Peter Buchman‘s two Che screenplays, I called The Argentine “political and terse and rugged…about how living outside the law and fighting a violent revolution feels and smells and chafes on a verite, chapter-by- chapter basis. They’re about sweat and guns and hunger and toughing it out… friendships, betrayals, exhaustion, shoot-outs and trudging through the jungle with a bad case of asthma. What it was, how it went down…the straight dope and no overt ‘drama.'”

Steven Soderbergh is currently directing the films in Spain. They’re expected to open next year with weeks of each other, although I don’t know what season. Early to mid fall is my guess — I haven’t made the calls.