wired

USA Today‘s Scott Bowles is reporting that despite the Snakes on a Plane cult following, “the R-rated movie is tracking softly” and none of the 265 AMC theatres that showed the New Line thriller last night at 10 pm “sold out of [their] advance tickets…fans weren’t exactly camping out to see the first screening.”
I’ve been talking about very high tracking negatives all along (i.e., the “definitely not interested” percentage has been over 20%). I heard yesterday that the positive interest factors had actually downticked, but take this with a grain. The upside is that the movie isn’t bad.
Variety‘s Ben Fritz and Dave McNary have written that Snakes “is tracking like a normal late-summer horror film, which would indicate a bow in the high teens. But studio is hoping all the hype and buzz could translate into something much bigger, possibly as high as the 30s.” New Line is showing Snakes at 3555 situations.
One of my regulars said this morning that Snakes has been tracking like Dimension’s Pulse which opened last weekend in 2323 theatres and took in $8,203.822. (The total to date is $10,557,845.) With Snakes playing in roughly 1200 more theatres, Variety‘s forecast of a weekend total in the mid to high teens seems more likely than a Sunday-night tally in the 20s, much less the 30s.
Another guy says Snakes is doing better than Pulse. which had only teenaged girls to count on. Whereas teen aged males are seriously onto seeing Snakes, etc. I still say mid teens.

Toronto Star critic Peter Howell lashes Snakes on a Plane with a friendly wet noodle. And Houston’s Joe Leydon doesn’t even lash it.

MCN’s “The Reeler” has the complete official N.Y. Film Festival rundown: Guillermo Del Toro‘s Pan’s Labyrinth, Sofia Coppola‘s Marie Antoinette (I’d like to hear some ripe New York boos this time instead of French ones), David Lynch‘s Inland Empire (adding the “The” is utterly ridiculous), Todd Field‘s Little Children, Johnnie To‘s Triad Election, Manoel de Oliveira‘s ,em>Belles Toujours , Warren Beatty‘s Reds, Alberto Lattuada‘s Mafioso, etc.

No film festivals, no Oscar lah-lah, probably no Film Comment tribute pieces to Martin Scorsese…just a complex hardball crime flick. Does this poster do the idea behind The Departed justice? What does it tell you? I’ll tell you what it tells me: whatever this movie is, we’re not saying. We’ve got Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon snarling and scowling and that’s all we’re saying. We know it’s not enough, but it’s all you’re getting from Warner Bros. marketing. But watch the trailer, why doncha?

For those having trouble getting HE to come up on their screen, the reason is that I switched to a dedicated server this morning. This means you have to dump your cache and start anew. If your computer has any lingering cache impressions of the HE’s numerically coded jibberish address (the URL is the same, of course — it’s the pain-in-the-ass coding that’s different), you have to either clean out your cache or just refesh until it comes in.

Neil Burger‘s The Illusionist (Yari Film Group, 8.18) is said to be a pretty good, moderately okay duelling-magician movie set in turn-of- the-century Vienna. Or at least, that was the general rumble after it showed at ’06 Sundance Film Festival. (I won’t see it until this weekend.) It stars Edward Norton, Paul Giamatti and Rufus Sewell .
On the other side of the lake is Chris Nolan‘s The Prestige (Touchstone, 10.20), a duelling magician set in turn-of-the-century London that’s said to be…well, much better . And they’re opening within two months of each other.
The Touchstone/Nolan stars Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale and Michael Caine. I’m not sure if it’s going to Toronto or not, but ti’ve been hearing all along that it’s excellent, top-notch, a tight audience movie, etc. The problem is that I can’t seem to remember the damn title. Putting the word “the” before the word “prestige” doesn’t mean anything. Every time I try to say the title, it doesn’t come.

Witness the British History Boys trailer and take note of a front- and-center hetereosexual coupling scene. (Which was in the play — it just feels a bit more pronunced here.) And no intimations of ball-fondling, although there’s a nicely rendered gay version of “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” (Which is also in the play.) Loads of sunshine-lit photography. I for one am looking forward to not only hearing but digesting every line of dialogue, which you can never quite do from the 22nd row of the orchestra, even when you cup your ears.

When and if I’m ever hit with something that puts me in a hospital, I hope I can muster the stuffings to deal with it Roger Ebert-style. As in spunky, tenacious, moxie-man, life-affirming, etc.

This Haley Joel Osment DUI /pot-possession rap is so far below the Mel Gibson shockometer it’s not funny. My first thought when I read it was, “Tough darts, kid…deal with it.” My second thought was that this might be some kind of left-field karma payback for A.I. and especially that awful Pay It Forward. That sounds unfair and silly but I always partly blamed Osment for those films.
On top of this, who cares? Former child stars always get into trouble in their teens and 20s and beyond, right? Either they get what’s happening at some point and they turn away from a wild drug-booze lifestyle, or they don’t and they end up fried or dead or whatever. Life is hard and you make your choices.
There’s nothing more venal than drunk driving, and yet it was almost routine and a subject of regular amusement among my teenage friends in Wilton, Connecticut, back in the old days. I remember them piling up their cars due to drinking and drugs all the time, and some of them turned out okay. (And some didn’t.) I knew a guy who ran his father’s XKE into a two-foot-deep swamp covered with lily pads. (This was years before Risky Business.) I knew another guy who was so shit-faced that he slammed his car into someone else’s just as he was pulling out of parking space — he didn’t get more than 10 or 15 feet. I remember joking with this same guy one night as I was about to drive home plastered, both of us saying “God is my co-pilot” and that my journey should be titled “a wing and prayer.”

Some “words to the wise” from director Francis Coppola (The End of Youth, Apocalypse Now), as taken from his on-camera opening commentary on the relatively new Patton DVD that came out in late May. (Coppola worked on the screenplay when he was 27 or so.) Every aspiring filmmaker and screenwriter reading this needs to take two minutes and listen.

And here’s a Time magazine q & a with Coppola, which contains a variation on that thing he said a while back about still feeling sixteen and that a filmmaker need the bravery of youth to make a movie, etc. I love reading this because I feel sixteen too. Okay, not always but some of the time. Actually I feel better than sixteen during these cycles because the exuberance is there without the confusion, fear and intimidation that go with being that age.