We almost had two Samuel L. Jackson snake movies being released within a month of each other — — Snakes on a Plane (New Line, 8.18) and Black Snake Moan (Paramount Vantage, 9.16) — but no longer. Paramount Vantage has decided against opening Craig Brewer‘s Moan in September and in favor of a February ’07 release. Brewer’s script is about a fire-and-brimstone bluesman (Jackson) who tries to cure a sexually promiscuous young woman (Christina Ricci) of her wicked, tawdry ways. Reactions to recent screenings have delivered positive comments but also ones like “quirky”. I wouldn’t be surprised if it debuts at the ’07 Sundance Film Festival in January.

With every new review that comes in, those Rotten Tomatoes ratings of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (Disney, 7.7) keep sinking lower and lower. The overall rating is 52% positive, and the cream-of-the-crop rating is a lousy 40%. My fave quotes so far: (1) “Calling a summer movie ‘action-packed’ is supposed to be a compliment, but there’s nothing so tedious as nonstop excitement.” — Salon‘s Stephanie Zacharek; and (2) “It’s a franchise movie — a product — that is pretending to be a lot hipper than it is.” — Christian Science Monitor critic Peter Rainer.

Werner Herzog has been “Werner Herzog” for 35 years or so, and the Academy waited until yesterday to invite him to become a member? Is it because someone finally noticed that he’s based in Los Angeles and using the same post-production houses and going to the same parties?

Wait, I just figured it: this is a makeup gesture to one of the world’s most visionary filmmakers to apologize for the Academy’s documentary committee failing to list Herzog’s Grizzly Man, the most critically hailed doc of ’05, among the initial qualifiers.

I asked Clerks 2 director-writer-costar Kevin Smith for a comment about the still-slacking-in-their-30s syndrome described in a piece I wrote earlier today called “Party On.”
I started things off a bit flippantly by asking if guys wanking their lives away in their 30s is an indication of the social fabric coming apart, and here’s his reply: “Naah — blame Bill Murray, the original slacker hero. We all grew up watching Stripes. It had an impact.
“I think some filmmakers like me (who aren’t overly creative…or overly talented, for that matter) are afforded an extended adolescence by virtue of what we do for a living. I mean, we basically ‘make pretend’ and get paid for it. So maybe we like to portray that lifestyle cinematically because, at this point, it’s all we know?
“George Lucas, at a young age, painted a canvas with Wookies and Death Stars; some of us can only paint a corner of a canvas with characters who like to talk about Wookies and Death Stars.
“I’ve been writing about these types of characters for twelve years now, so it’s not a trend for me as much as a mantra. For me, I think it has a lot to do with my father, who spent his entire adult life working for the U.S. Postal service, doing the 11 pm to 7 am shift, canceling stamps. Soul-killing work, that, but his generation didn’t have the luxury of picking a dream job or following whimsies; you got married and you got a job, period.
“My generation was the first to be very vocal (not the first to actually live this way, mind you, but to be VOCAL on the subject) about a willingness to ‘play the game’, so to speak, but only according to our own rules. Sort of a ‘Yeah, I’ll get a job, but since it’ll be doing what I want, it’ll never feel like a job.’
“And while, in theory, that’s a good m.o. (and in some cases, like mine, somewhat achievable), it’s not very practical.”

Nikki Finke has posted a clip of Rick Moranis imitating a certain very-hyper Hollywood producer on a Canadian SCTV episode that ran…I don’t know when it ran but figure sometime around ’83 or ’84. It’s a total howl. The guy Moranis is spoofing is almost certainly producer Joel Silver (V for Vendetta, The Matrix) as he was 23 years ago. Moranis worked for Silver when he played a secondary role in Streets of Fire (’84), which Silver produced. Saul Rubinek did another excellent Silver impression in Tony Scott‘s True Romance .

You have to at least give N.Y. Times Allison Hope Weiner props for having the brass to play fast and loose with the rules, obviously at a risk to her reputation. It’s called unbridled hunger. Boiled down, Weiner emphasized her attorney credentials over her journalistic ones to Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles authorities as part of an effort to interview incarcerated wire-tapper Anthony Pellicano on 6.14. Times spokesperson Diane McNulty has told L.A. Times reporter Chuck Phillips that Weiner “identified herself as a New York Times reporter.” After being told by a guard that “only immediate family members and lawyers could see the inmate, Weiner then [said] she was a journalist and a lawyer. “But not Pellicano’s lawyer,” McNulty said. “[She] was very clear and forthright about her intentions and who she was.” Phillips’ piece quotes from the New York Times ethics code as stating that “staff members may not pose as police officers, lawyers, businesspeople or anyone else when they are working as journalists.”

If you’re going to try and reach the unhip masses by advertising a mock-satiric snake movie with an on-the-nose, way-too-explicit poster and thereby ruin the fun of it…if that’s the deliberate plan, then you should really ruin it like the Europeans have here. But if you want to half-ass it, do it the New Line way.

This European poster for Snakes on a Plane poster is obviously less subtle than the U.S. version.

There are five post-Pirates wide releasers I’m especially interested in seeing this month (or seeing again for the second or third time): Michael Mann‘s Miami Vice (Universal 7.28), Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris ‘s Little Miss Sunshine (Fox Searchlight, 7.26), M. Night Shyamalan‘s Lady in the Water (Warner Bros., 7.21), Kevin Smith‘s Clerks 2 (Weinstein Co., also 7.21), and Woody Allen‘s Scoop (Focus Features, 7.28). I don’t know what to feel yet about Universal’s You, Me and Dupree (7.14). The intriguing moderate and small-timers include Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos (7.7), Edmond, The Groomsmen, Mini’s First Time and The Oh in Ohio (7.14), and Ray Lawrence‘s Jindabyne (7.20). But somehow I’m getting a premonition that Columbia’s Monster House (7.21) is going to be the only mid-to-late-July wide release besides Vice to really pop through.

I called my New Line pallies and apparently this is the approved wide-release poster for Snakes on a Plane (as opposed to the teaser poster). I’m sorry, but it doesn’t make it. It’s not dry or hip enough. In fact, it seems to be trying to make the movie look un-hip by appealing to the Rhodes scholars who need to be told there’s a satirical element…those who haven’t visited Snakes on a Blog or listened to any of the theme songs or watched any of the video spots.

And wipe that steely smile off Samuel L. Jackson’s face …please. And dump that “Sit back…relax…enjoy the fright” slogan. A poster that winks this broadly is totally the wrong way to go.
The only way to sell this movie is as a straight thriller. If you’re making a thriller with yucks and smirks, fine…but never ever say to an audience that this is what you’re doing. Conceal your motive and your agenda at all times. Let the audience discover it (and they’ll love you for it). If there’s something to laugh or chuckle or smirk at, they’ll decide.
Unless it’s already been mass-produced and mailed to theatres, the fact that this poster sucks isn’t the end of the world. New Line marketers just need to suck it in and admit fault and send the art guys back to the drawing board. Wait a minute…a guy named Colin just wrote in and said he saw this poster hanging in a theatre near Union Square.

I somehow missed this 6.30 announcement about Super Size Me‘s Morgan Spurlock‘s Warrior Poets cutting a deal with Hart Sharp Video’s Joe Amodei to deliver four to six docs per year. (Spurlock will “pick” and presumably fine-tune the docs, which have been/will be made by other filmmakers.) Spurlock will release a doc sometime in the mid-fall about commercialization of Christmas (not his own) and his TV series, 30 Days, will soon begin its second season on FX.

If there’s one central message conveyed in Boffo, a slick, agreeable and insightful doc about success, failure and mainstream filmmaking now playing on HBO, it’s contained in the answer to this question:

What’s the one thing that seems to lead to the making of a hit — more than a good script, a perfect cast, the right director, etc.? Or rather, what’s the one voice that a producer or a studio chief needs to listen to above all the others? The answer is, “The one from the gut.”
As producer Richard Zanuck says halfway through Boffo, “Your head can talk you out of a lot of things, but your gut always tells the truth.”
Here’s the first three or four minutes of Boffo. The speakers are (in precisely this order) Danny DeVito, Peter Guber, Peter Bogdanovich, Jodie Foster, producer Brian Grazer, 20th Century Fox chief Tom Rothman, Sydney Pollack, Morgan Freeman, Zanuck and fellow Jaws producer David Brown, and finally George Clooney .
Boffo was directed by Bill Couterie and produced by Variety editor Peter Bart, and is being billed as a celebration of Variety‘s 100th anniversary, but aside from several Variety headlines being shown, the promotional element doesn’t feel all that persistent.
Boffo is very smooth, engaging, and well-produced. However, I have two or three beefs:
(1) Boffo seems more interested in being chummy with its celebrity talking heads and paying tribute to their past successes and being supportive of the industry’s potential for making new successes, and less interested in exploring the whys and wherefores of failure. (There’s a fascinating moment when Morgan Freeman is asked what went wrong with The Bonfire of the Vanities, and Freeman barely answers. His body language and facial expressions, however, speak volumes.)
(2) While it only deals with the monumental failures ( Howard the Duck, et, al.), Boffo doesn’t even mention Last Action Hero…surely one of the most grotesque wipeouts of the last 15 or 20 years. It’s not even a blip on the screen.
(3) Boffo doesn’t deal at all with questions about why and how certain films have failed. It doesn’t get into the word-of-mouth mystique and how various producers and studios have responded to it, or into research screenings and whether or not that’s good or bad or a mixed bag, and it doesn’t mention how bad-buzz spreading through the media has contributed, fairly or unfairly, to the failure of this and that film, and, in line with this avoidance, doesn’t mention how bad buzz on this and that film moves much faster these days via the internet and text-messaging among the under-20-somethings.

A third big gun — L.A. Times critic Carina Chocano — is bitch-slapping Pirates 2 for being tedious, unfocused and overlong: The film “is unsure of what it wants, so it takes the omnivorous approach, and all of the story lines suffer for it. Intermittently fun and high-spirited, Dead Man’s Chest sags under the weight of its own running time, which clocks in at about 2 1/2 hours. That’s a lot of time to commit to watching people chase one another around, turn, and chase one another the other way. At half the running time, it would have made for an amusing time-killer; as it is — no matter how clever, energetic and beautifully designed — it borders on waste.” (Apologies for the Turan boner earlier this morning….haste makes waste.)