A friend says, “I agree on your take about the downturn of King Kong‘s ticket sales. But look everywhere else also — all the Oscar contenders are petering out at the box office. Brokeback is stalling and so is Munich. Geisha is a bomb. It’s not just Kong…it’s everything except, I guess, Walk the Line.”

The first time it hit me that the public was starting to really rebel against allusive or metaphorical broad-brush movie titles was when it was decided in 1984 that Taylor Hackford’s remake of Jacques Tourneur’s 1947 film noir Out of the Past…a title with an obviously haunting quality…would be retitled as the dumbly-macho and aggressive-sounding Against All Odds. That was 21 years ago, and now things have downshifted to the next level of primitivism with New Line’s upcoming Snakes on a Plane (currently slated for August ’06). The fact that Samuel L. Jackson (a once-cool actor whose willingness to bend over for anything is putting him in competition with Cuba Gooding) is starring and former stuntman David R. Ellis (Cellular) is directing should give you pause. Don’t misunderstand: Snakes on a Plane is an unmistakably great idiot-level title. The Sydney Morning Herald‘s Garry Maddox reported a few days ago it “was a reader favorite after a Herald website discussion about film titles earlier this year.” And I’m not saying that if all film titles were reduced to their primitive childlike essence that the same brilliant-jokey effect would be realized. But I am saying we have truly arrived at a new stage of cultural devolution with the acceptance and celebration of this title. It represents the turning of another page in the great Will and Ariel Durant 21st Century novel called “The End of Civilization (As We Once Knew It).” How different, really, is Snakes on a Plane from “Camels”, which is what my son Jett used to call Lawrence of Arabia when he was two?

Variety has recently let some folks go, they’re cutting back at the L.A. Times, some Time bureau chiefs have received pink slips, etc. The reasons are varied, but all of this is tracable in part to diminishing ad revenues on the print side. And not just in the movie-ad realm. This shouldn’t figure as far as Variety‘s ad revenues are concerned, but ad buyers are realizing more and more how little impact print ads are having on younger viewers (my sons never buy a newspaper or even a classy monthly glossy like Vanity Fair), and they’re acting accordingly.

There’s something missing in this AP story about the King Kong shortfall. It says that Peter Jackson’s film “eked out” a box-office win last weekend but “has little so far to be thumping its chest about” because it’s “falling well short of blowout blockbuster status like that earned by such box-office gorillas as the Star Wars, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings franchises.” And it has the relentlessly bland Paul Dergarabedian saying one reason is the 187-minute length: “They can’t show it as many times during the day, so that may have lessened its box office strength,” blah, blah. But the story seems averse to considering the basic fact that few if any moviegoers out there in Ticket-Buying Land are over-the-moon about Kong. My reading (based on the e-mails I’ve received) is that they’re a good deal more negative than the critics, and even the ones who like it are feeling a bit underwhelmed. This is the deal: 2/3 of Kong is a rousing ride but the movie as a whole isn’t good enough to blow anyone away or set new box-office records…and that’s that. It’ll make $250 million domestically and be an overall hit, but it’s still The Gorilla That Never Quite Roared. If anyone had predicted this outcome in late November when the Kong buzz was bubbling and spilling over the rim, that person would have been dismissed as a blabbering, saliva-dribbling fool.

I’m just doodling here and the man on the street will shed no tears, but could the situation at Paramount right now be analogous to the reign of terror in France (1793 to ’94) that led to many impassioned people feeling the kiss of steel? Distribution chief Wayne Lewellen…whacked. DreamWorks’ TV distribution honcho Hal Richardson moving in and the Paramount exec now handing this…soon to be whacked. As Slate‘s Edward Jay Epstein wrote a little more than a week ago, Paramount Pictures chief Brad Grey bought DreamWorks in large part in order to make up for a lack of Paramount-generated films, since DreamWorks has a good number of projects in various stages of development. Point #1: “The true brilliance of Paramount’s high-profile acquisition of DreamWorks is that it will serve to divert from, if not totally hide, Paramount’s own failure to assemble a full slate of films for 2006-2007. And point #2: “When [the acquisition] deal closes, Paramount will essentially become, at least for the next two years, DreamWorks. Of course, many, if not all, of the people who work at DreamWorks will lose their jobs, and the people at Paramount who created the near-meltdown will take credit for the films they’ve acquired. But, as they say, that’s show business.”

Reader Sean McDonald feels there’s a valid analogy between sex scenes directed by Steven Spielberg and Paul Herhoeven. Spielberg “has no idea how to end this mess” — i.e., Munich — “so he chooses to do it half a dozen times, each time less engaging than the last, only to push me over the edge with the most ridiculous sex scene ever put on film. My friends and I could only come up with the flopping-goldfish pool scene in Showgirls as more ridiculous.” This warrants a list…the dopiest (i.e., most excessive) boot-knocking scenes of all time. Suggestions?

I was puzzled by some of Slate critic David Edelstein’s choices for best films of the year, but no matter. Point is that he hit the bulls-eye when he said that Rodrigo Garcia’s Nine Lives, released earlier this year, “boasts the best performance of the year, by Robin Wright Penn as a very pregnant woman who bumps into her old flame in a supermarket. As she circles the store with her grocery cart, her face alternately flushed and ashen, it’s as if we’re looking directly into her soul.”

Woody Allen’s Match Point “is a champagne cocktail laced with strychnine,” observes New York Times critic A.O. Scott. “You would have to go back to the heady, amoral heyday of Ernst Lubitsch or Billy Wilder to find cynicism so deftly turned into superior entertainment. Mr. Allen’s accomplishment here is to fool his audience, or at least to misdirect us, with a tale whose gilded surface disguises the darkness beneath. Comparisons to Crimes and Misdemeanors are inevitable, since the themes and some elements of plot are similar, but the philosophical baggage in Match Point is more tightly and discreetly packed. It is the film’s brisk, chilly precision that makes it so bracingly pleasurable. The gloom of random, meaningless existence has rarely been so much fun, and Mr. Allen’s bite has never been so sharp, or so deep. A movie this good is no laughing matter .”

Legend has it there’s a significant clue at the very end of Michael Haneke’s Cache (Sony Pictures Classics, 1.11.06)…some kind of visual tipoff about who’s behind the stealth videotaping of Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche’s home, lives, histories, etc. Esquire film writer Mike D’Angelo mentions the clue in a current piece. The clue has something to do with the son of a certain ill-fated Algerian character seen talking to a guy named Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky). Or maybe something to do with a black car driving by three times, or a blue station wagon…I’m a little hazy on the details. Anyone who’s seen Cache (also known as Hidden) knows the motive for the tapings has something to do with shameful French treatment of Algerians in the early ’60s. Cache star Daniel Autiel allegedly told a gathering at the London Film Festival several weeks ago that he’d seen the film three times and didn’t know where the tapes had come from either and neither to his knowledge did Haneke. This film isn’t a whodunit anyway. I don’t know what to call it but it’s way too smart to be concerned with matters of culpability. It’s more into arty obfuscation.

A whole lotta noteworthy critics have submitted their Top Ten films of ’05 lists to Movie City News, and Capote is third-ranked with 242 points, only 8 and 1/2 points behind the second-ranked A History of Violence with 255.5 points. (Top-ranked Brokeback Mountain is way in front with 299.5 points.) Good Night, and Good Luck (212 points) and King Kong (191.5 points) are fourth and fifth-ranked. But if you look at Rotten Tomatoes, which posts another critical ranking system, Capote has the 2nd highest general rating among these five (92%) and the only unani- mous creme de la creme rating (100%) for a tally of 192. The other four’s RT ratings, highest to lowest: Good Night (95% general, creme 95% = 190), Violence (86% general, 94% creme = 180), Brokeback (90% general, 90% creme = 180), and Kong (83% general, 76% creme = 159). What does this mean? Nothing much…who cares what the critics think?…but maybe (and I think the conclusion is obvious) Academy members should guard against considering Capote in a casual light.

Can we talk? Munich‘s 532-theatre release starting last Friday (12.23) resulted in $5.7 million and a $7,706 average….not fantastic but not bad. But this doesn’t portend an ecstatic reception when it plays Boobville in the hinterlands. This Steven Spielberg thriller has been booked into urban uptown theatres where it was expected to do very well…and it didn’t. It played pretty well, and if they couldn’t do seriously vigorous business in these theatres, it’s going to start slowing down and then bombing out when it plays the rube territories. Some of you are thinking I’m so anti-Munich I can’t see or think straight, but ask any hard- nosed analyst and they’ll tell you the same thing. Pretty good numbers in uptown theatres for this movie means not-as-good numbers once it goes wide and then it’s all downhill and into the crapper. Especially given how Munich plays (i.e., repetitively) and especially how it makes you feel when the closing credits come up (emptied out, dispirited), so it’s basically over.

King Kong‘s weekend tallies suffered a sobering 58% drop from last weekend, which is a pretty strong indication that people are not exactly over-the-moon about it, and yet Peter Jackson’s monkey movie edged out The Chronicles of Narnia for the four-day holiday weekend (12.23 through 12.26) with a $31.4 million haul vs. Narnia‘s $30.1 million. Narnia opened on 12.9 (five days ahead of Kong‘s 12.14 debut) and has earned a total of $163.5 million to Kong‘s $118.7 million cume. Variety‘s Ben Fritz has written that “one of the few things that can safely be said is that Narnia has momentum on its side” since the “the C.S. Lewis adaptation fell just 36% compared with last weekend, while Kong dropped 58%.” Kong “had the stronger Christmas day with $8.7 million compared with Narnia‘s $7.3 million…pics were virtually even Friday and Saturday,” reported Fritz. He added that “exhibs called [the long Xmas weekend] one of the toughest-to-read frames they’ve ever seen.”