In this National Post piece about movie-theatre manners, author Michael Reid fails to mention one of the worst offenses out there — i.e, people claiming that nearby seats are saved without territorial jungle markings. Under-20s are the primary culprits. They’ll point to three, four or five seats and say, “Sorry, these are saved.” Not without markings they’re not!
As I explained last summer, everyone needs to adhere to “a basic Animal Planet view that you can’t ‘save’ seats without marking them like dogs and wolves and coyotes mark territory by urinating on the ground, or the way Alaskan gold miners stake claims with little piles of rocks in Henry Hathaway films.
“All you have to do is put something on the seat — a jacket, a magazine or an L.A. Weekly page, even a folded paper napkin. But you can’t just point to three or four seats (or six or ten seats…there has to be a limit) and say, ‘These are saved.’ Certainly not when the lights are going down. You can try this with one or two seats, maybe, but not with three.”
The next 17 year-old kid who says “sorry, these are saved” without markings is gonna have to lay it out with me.

HE reader Alejandro Aldrete of Monterrey, Mexico, is angry that Disney/Pixar has sent only dubbed prints of WALL*E to local theatres, in contradiction of the usual-usual. I’m guessing that the Mexican distribution exec has probably decided that subtitles aren’t necessary for a kid’s film, and would certainly hurt business — brilliant.
“WALL*E arrived today in Mexican cinemas all over the country, and I believe in most of Latin America,” Aldrete writes. “I don’t know about the other countries, but apparently, even though today in my city of Monterrey, with nearly 5 million people and counting, and with WALL*E in hundreds and hundreds of theatres playing every hour from 10 am to midnight, I can’t find one single print of this film that isn’t dubbed into Spanish.
“Dubbing is common on Latin American television, but for the theatre run most films are subtitled. Only kiddie films get here dubbed to cinemas, and usually with one or two prints with subtitles. Yet in the last few years, animated films have stopped coming here with subtitles. Last year it was the same situation with Ratatouille, and even common people around here know it’s a crime against any film of that caliber to not be able to get seen as it is intended in it’s original version.
“My problem with Disney/Pixar on this is that they damn well know Pixar films have a special appeal to adults and film buffs. In the past with The Incredibles and Finding Nemo, I would go to a subtitled showing of those films and have a great time because I knew I was watching something ten times better than any dubbing they could come up with, and also because subtitled showings tend to have less kids fucking around and making noises. So it was a nice deal.
“I personally feel insulted and not taken into account as a loyal costumer of Pixar that they have decided to not bring here one single copy of WALL*E in it’s original form with original audio. Is it too much to ask that they send a bunch of subtitled prints to Latin America for the film buffs? The ones that will keep buying their films in 30 years? I mean really, how greedy can you be to think that you’re losing money by giving us one print in a hundred?”

Meryl Streep is not going to be Oscar nominated for her performance in Mamma Mia!. Okay, possibly a Golden Globe nomination or win…maybe. But forget the Academy. However good or wonderful Streep may be in this upcoming ABBA musical, AMPAS members will stick to the straight and narrow and nominate for her Doubt, if they nominate her at all.
My perception is that Mamma Mia!‘s reputation went south with the hip crowd once the Hollywood Reporter‘s Ray Bennett flipped for it. That was it — the death knell. Those actresses playing the girlfriends of Amanda Seyfried going “oh…my…God!” were just icing on the cake.

In his 7.2 piece about William Holden and the ongoing Holden retrospective at Lincoln Center (which goes until 7.15), Michael Atkinson hits the nail on the head in discussing the brusque anxiety and rattled melancholia that always simmered in the characters Holden played — there, obviously, because they defined Holden himself.

“Truth be told, Holden’s character-role capacities ranged only from narcissistic American jerk to self-loathing American lug,” he writes, “but his best movies are implicit inquisitions into that personality — like Sunset Blvd., Sabrina [and] Mark Robson‘s The Bridges at Toko-Ri.
“By the time of David Lean‘s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), a big-budget production looking for a disillusioned American Everyman sickened by his own lack of heroism needed only go to Holden.
“As Holden aged, his richest vein was the bitter personification of the costs of progress and the loss of frontier — he became, almost inevitably, the angry Old Guard facing melancholy supersession by the young, by modernity, and by the press of time.”
And yet Atkinson doesn’t mention Holden’s performance as Frank Harmon, a cynical L.A. real-estate agent in Clint Eastwood‘s Breezy (’73), which is part of the retrospective. Atkinson obviously thinks little of the film but his “angry Old Guard” comments about Holden fit Harmon to a T. Breezy is just pretty good — mature, straight, measured — but Holden’s acting lends a solid gravity force in every one of his scenes.

Except that this 1940 title card has…I don’t know, a vibe. The starkness, the shadows, the monochrome sheen, the deco moderne lettering, the odd sideways markings on the road, the fake authenticity of it.

Fantasy Moguls‘ Steve Mason is reporting that even though Will Smith, Akiva Goldsman and Peter Berg‘s Hancock was “flat” from Wednesday-to-Thursday with an estimated $17.1 million and a 2 1/2 day cume of just over $41 million, it’s nonetheless on target for $100 million over the 5 and 1/2 day holiday weekend. But I say no to that.

The truth is that Hancock‘s ticket sales yesterday should have been more than its Wednesday business, which was estimated at $17.3 million. Instead it did $17.1 million — flat-ass. A movie that’s really happening with the public would have jumped to $19 or $20 million yesterday. This tells you the word on the street (i.e., that the third act is an out-and-out disaster) is probably catching up with it.
July 4th is always a dead day, so Saturday’s business will tell the tale. But I’m figuring Hancock will do $80 to $90 million by Sunday night. And if this happens, anyone who reports that figure as an absolute box-office triumph will be less than honest in their assessment. Not that $80 to $90 million is anything to sniff at. It’s just that you can’t expect sales to be rocket-ship historic if the dogs don’t like the dog food. If you make a movie that goes completely insane and blows itself up in the third act, sooner or later people will realize this and respond accordingly.
Kit Kittredge, sad to say for Picturehouse/NewLine, is a flat-out disaster. It did about $1.1 million on Wednesday in 1700 theatres, averaging $600 a theatre. And it $900,000 on Thursday for a $500 per theatre average. Complete wipe-out. Mason pussyfoots by saying it’s “unlikely to top $10 million” by Sunday night. Gee, do ya think so?

Seeing Hellboy II the other night reminded me that the films of Guillermo del Toro are as good as it gets in the fantastical horror realm. They’ve got first-class effects, wit, invention, soul, visual economy, emotional gravitas. The monsters are beautifully particular, the performances have warmth and authority, and the camerawork and the cutting are grabby and fast but this side of hyper.

The problem is this, and it’s not so much Guillermo’s fault as the action-fantasy genre: I’m sick to death of watching stuff getting wrecked and smashed and shattered and blown into a million pieces. I hate the rigid big-studio FX formula that insists upon confrontation and chaos and ruination happening ever 20 or 30 minutes, like some stupid whammy chart. Windows exploded, buildings decimated, cars doing aerial triple-flips, fire hydrants spewing tons of city water, industrial clutter everywhere….what the fuck is this? It’s the same shit in every movie, and it vacuums your soul.
What kind of cretin do you have to be to find this stuff interesting after it’s been repeated 25 or 30 times? How many times can the dumbest moviegoer out there go “whoa!” after seeing a super-hero wallop a slime-covered monster and send it flying several hundred yards into a building or a wall of glass or a concrete bunker, or vice versa? How many times can the hero take a severe beating to the extent that it looks like he’s finished? How many times can a slithering disgusting alien creature try to eat or invade or flatten the heroes? How many times can a moron with a extra-large tub of popcorn in his lap be impressed with loud aural thumpings on the soundtrack?
Guillermo does everything he can to add feeling and humor and humanity to Hellboy II, and he succeeds nicely from time to time, but he’s working within a genre that insists upon showing the same shit over and over, no matter what and no end in sight.
I never thought I’d say this, but in this context I’m a Barry Manilow type of guy. I mean that I loved (okay, liked) the sequence in which Ron Perlman‘s Red and Doug Jones‘ Abe Sapien drunkenly sing along to Manilow’s “Can’t Smile Without You.” And I’m a pretty big fan of Tecate beer. And I liked the bit with Perlman protecting the baby from the madness and other stuff along these lines.

I’d much rather see a televised dramedy series starring Red, Abe, Selma Blair‘s Liz Sherman, Jeffrey Tambor‘s Tom Manning and all the rest of the Del Toro freaks and eccentrics, and made into a kind of Everybody Loves Raymond type deal with monsters showing up maybe once every five or six episodes. If that. Because I really can’t stand watching shit being blown up any more. How can people can sit through the same demolition derby in film after film, over and over, year after year? It’s insane.
Guillermo knows that I’m much more of a Chronos/Devil’s Backbone/Pan’s Labyrinth/The Orphanage type of guy and that I just can’t roll over for the big-studio stuff. It’s always been a big problem for me.
One technical beef: when the giant land-squid monster picks up a Mercedes Benz and squeezes it to death, we should see gallons of gasoline gushing out. Are we supposed to think that the car had no gas in it? I didn’t believe it. Maybe Guillermo can fix this effect for the DVD version.

I can’t remember the last time I’ve taken such an instant dislike to an actor as I have to Josh Peck, star of The Wackness (Sony Classics, 7.4 in N.Y. and L.A.) It’s lazy to do this, but I can’t express it any better than I did last April: “Peck obviously does well at playing young urban white guys who talk in a street argot that is part imitation ‘black’ and part whatevuh,” I wrote last April, “but in any case suggests a total inability to convey an air of refinement and higher education.

“Is there any circumstance in which any casting director, no matter how whacked, would use this guy to play a small-town cop in Oregon, an assistant to a U.S. Senator, a young suburban dad, a used-car salesmen from Cranford, New Jersey, or anything other than a what-up homie who sells tabs of ecstasy and dilaudid in Tompkins Square Park?
“In other words, Josh Peck is basically Leo Gorcey. Nothing wrong with that, exactly, except that he has one trick and one rap and thassall.”

I can’t embed this Channel 4 promotional ad for a series of Stanley Kubrick films they’ll be showing, but it’s ingenious — a carefully choreographed, superbly designed and exquisitely cast tribute to The Shining. The sets, the haircuts, the mood of it…perfect! Except I can’t find the actor playing Kubrick or Jack Nicholson. I guess I need to watch it a few more times. (If it’s embedded somewhere, please send along the code.)

“Channel 4 has painstakingly recreated the set of Stanley Kubrick horror film The Shining,” the story reads, “complete with look-a-likes of the crew and cast members including Shelley Duvall, for a TV ad to promote a More 4 season of the director’s films.
“The 65-second promotional spot has been filmed as a one-take tracking shot through the recreation of The Shining.
“Viewers get Kubrick’s point of view as he walks through the set, ending up in his director’s chair as the crew prepare to shoot the famous scene of Danny Torrance, the son of Duvall and Jack Nicholson’s characters, riding round and round the deserted corridors of the Overlook Hotel.
“The promo, filmed as a single tracking shot with a cast of 55 actors, was meticulously researched to ‘remain as faithful as possible to the period in which it was shot and the culture of the British studio in the late 1970s”.

I’m sorry, but Meryl Streep‘s use of the word “miasma” in the previous story reminded me of the character named “Miasmo” in Peter Yates‘ The Hot Rock (’71), and that led to finding this scene on You Tube. Hands down, it’s the best acted and most convincing dumb hypnotism scene in the history of American cinema.

In an interview with The Guardian‘s Stuart Jeffries, Mamma Mia! star Meryl Streep has more or less said that the reason she’s starring in this new movie musical is because of the roundabout influence of Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 attacks. More particularly because of the effect that a matinee performance of Mamma Mia! on the Broadway stage had upon a group of 10 year-olds, including her daughter Louisa, not long after the attacks.

Mama Mia! star Meryl Streep; Osama bin Laden.

I knew there was unusual left-field reason why Streep would star in a movie version of an ABBA stage musical! I knew it and now it makes sense.
It was seven years ago and Streep “was in a bit of a pickle,” Jeffries writes. “She had to dream up an excursion for some friends of Louisa, the youngest of her four children by husband Don Gummer, the sculptor to whom she has been married for the past 30 years. Only one problem: it was October 2001 in Manhattan.
“‘Everybody was really dimmed spiritually after 9/11,’ Streep relates. ‘I thought, ‘What am I going to do with the kids?’ So I took all these 10-year-olds to see a matinee of Mamma Mia!. They walked in and they sat there with their heads in their hands. Dimmed is the word. They were sad all the time, you know?
“‘The first part was really wordy, and then ‘Dancing Queen’ started up. And for the rest of the show they were dancing on their chairs and they were so, so happy. We all went out of the theatre floating on the air. I thought, ‘What a gift to New York right now!’ She sent a thank you letter to the cast.”
And that opened Streep’s emotional receptivity door and down the road she was offered the part. In other words, Streep became a Mamma Mia! fan for the same reason that some journalists fell big-time in love with Amelie at the 2001 Toronto Film Festival — i.e., because it was shown right after the attacks and put them in a much better mood. Another way to put it is that Streep joined the Mamma Mia! team for the same reason that Ron Silver became a Republican. Oh…my….God!
“Isn’t this role beneath you?” Jeffries asks. “I’m not strategizing my career moves at all,” Streep replies. “I haven’t got a career that I’m building. When I swim my 55 laps, I try to remember the movies I’ve been in order, and I can’t…the past is just a miasma. There’s no career path.
“I just want to do things that are valuable to introduce into the culture,. This film [Mamma Mia!] is a valuable thing. I knew it when I saw it.”

God grant me (a) the serenity to accept the bad movies I cannot stop from being made that I will probably wind up seeing anyway because I have to try and stay current because I write a daily column, (b) the courage to refuse to see the really bad films that come along that are truly bad for your soul, like Wanted, and (c) the wisdom to know the difference.