wired

AP reporter Dave Germain is reporting that the 2006 box-office picture is better than last year’s because the movies aren’t as sucky. “[The] studios avoided a repeat of their stinker-of-the-week performance of 2005,” he writes, “when seemingly every Friday brought a big new movie that audiences stayed away from [like] the action bombs Stealth and The Island, the comedies The Honeymooners, Rebound and Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo, the historical epic Kingdom of Heaven and the remakes House of Wax and The Bad News Bears.” Maybe…but it’s worth repeating the view held in some corners and salons that if the “director’s cut” of Ridley Scott‘s Kingdom of Heaven (i.e., the one currently in DVD stores) opened instead of the truncated version that Fox put into theatres, the Average Joe turn-off factor would have been much lower, if not eliminated altogether.

I didn’t see any of the L.A. Film Festival award-winners, but congrats to Steve Collins‘ Gretchen (winner of the Target Filmmaker Award for Best Narrative Feature), Amy Berg ‘s Deliver Us From Evil (Target’s Best Documentary Feature winner), Robert Cary‘s Ira & Abby (Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature), Jeff Werner and Susan Koch‘s Mario’s Story (Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature), Tomer Heymann‘s Paper Dolls and so on. I’m presuming the whole list of winners will be posted on the festival’s site sooner or later.

“It’s also starting to hit me that Little Miss Sunshine has a real shot at picking up some critics awards and Oscar nominations — Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris for directing, Steve Carell and especially Paul Dano for Best Supporting Actor (the latter’s performance is especially good because two-thirds of it is done non-verbally, and yet he hits it out of the park with every facial muscle inflection and eye-roll), Michael Arndt for Best Screenplay, and so on.” — from today’s Sunshine feature, excerpted out of enthusiasm for Dano’s breakthrough perf.

I think I already knew that a truly popular film is a big draw with serious moviegers in theatres and on DVD — in for a penny, in for a pound. A recently-released Neilsen Entertainment survey quoted by N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman refers to “a new core audience of movie devotees who to to the movies most often — 10 times per year or more, which the study calls ‘uber-media consumers’ — are also those who most frequently buy DVDs. In a poll of 2800 moviegoers who bought tickets online, the study found that 83 percent of them also ‘frequently’ or ‘sometimes’ buy the DVD of the movie they saw in the theater.” Very cool, but it’s shocking to me that a polling organization would describe someone who goes out to a movie 10 times a year (the DVD-buying element aside) as an “uber” anything. Ten times a year is nothing. Anyone who’s half-assedly into chasing the culturally dominant or high-intrigue movies is going to hit a theatre at least twice monthly or 24 times a year, bare minimum…and 24 or 25 visits per year means you’re missing about half (sometimes a little less than half) of the very good or excellent films that turn up each year. I see at least three or four newbies each week (that’s factoring in three festival binges per year at Toronto, Sundance and Cannes) plus at least two DVDs of relatively recent films missed in screening rooms a few months back. That’s five per week or 250 films per year. And yet the Neilsen Entertainment pollers regard movie fans who annually see 4% of this total — 10 films — or even those who see 8% of this total — 20 films annually — as “ubers.” I would call these people “dabblers.” I’m pretty sure HE readers are much more ardent than this. Responses?

The people behind Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest have “made everything a little bigger, louder and more expensive. They’ve upped the archness ante, poured on the special effects, and [encouraged] everyone to follow Johnny Depp’s antic lead. The result is an overproduced movie that tries so strenuously hard to be ‘fun’ that it’s a chore to sit through. For all its razzle-dazzle production values, the story itself feels cluttered, hard to follow and hard to care about.” — Newsweek critic David Ansen in the current issue.

The link isn’t up yet, but Matt Drudge is excerpting a Sharon Waxman N.Y. Times story saying that attendance is rising at U.S. plexes after a prolonged draught. “Through the first 25 weeks of the year, domestic box-office revenue — helped by a boost in ticket prices — was up nearly 5 percent, to $4.6 billion, though it still trailed 2004,” the quote reads. “Movie attendance was up about 1.65 percent to 699 million for the first 25 weeks, after a sharp decline the year before. The totals grew last weekend as Warner Brothers’ Superman Returns took in $84 million over a six-day period (i.e., counting Tuesday night).”

David Benioff and David Ayer‘s script for the upcoming Wolverine movie only does a little sidebar origin-story about a twelve year-old Wolverine…fine. All origin stories have the same beats, the same payoffs…and producers in the superhero business have seemed notoriously blind in the past to how sick fans are of seeing another one.

Thank fortune the Wolverine guys aren’t contemplating any such notion. I realize that one description by Latino Review‘s El Mayimbe is hardly the last definitive word, but this is encouraging. The Wolverine flick won’t be out until sometime in ’08 due to Hugh Jackman’s crowded schedule, apparently.

A get-well-soon to Roger Ebert after an emergency operation he went through Saturday night (or Sunday morning…it’s not clear) to repair complications from an earlier cancer-related surgery that happened on June 16. The mid-June procedure was about removing a cancerous growth on Ebert’s salivary gland. Newsvine is reporting that a blood vessel burst near the area of the 6.16 surgery on Saturday night around 8 pm, and that Ebert went right into surgery to have this taken care of.

Has anyone seen this Sydney Pollack-directed turn-off-your-cell- phone spot (which he also stars in) that reportedly began playing in Regal and AMC Leows theatres this weekend? I’ve been searching for it online but I guess it’s not viewable this way.

Here’s a piece listing the screen’s great pirate characters …dismissable. A more diverting subject stirred by Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest are two other eye-filling films about ships at sea, both released in the early ’60s, that aren’t available on DVD.
The one I’d like to see the most is Peter Ustinov‘s Billy Budd, a 1962 Allied Artists release that bombed when it came out. I have fond memories of Budd ‘s widescreen black-and-white Scope (2.35 to 1) photography, and think it’s criminal — derelict — that it’s only been transferred on a pan-and-scan VHS basis so far.

Budd lacks the moral complexity of Herman Melville’s novel but I’ve always found it fairly satisfying. It has four or five fascinating performances including those by Terrence Stamp (Budd), Ustinov (a too-likable Captain Veer, but interesting for the specificity and discipline that Ustinov brings to all his performances), Robert Ryan (an especially dark and decadent Claggart) and Melvin Douglas (Dansker).
The other (and I’ve been mentioning this for years) is Lewis Milestone‘s Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), which falls apart at the end but is moderately stirring in an obvious mainstream-Hollywood way for the first two thirds (or is three quarters?), the high points being the rounding-the-horn and mutiny sequences.
The thing that needs to be captured and restored by a good DVD producer is the high-quality photography, since Bounty was shot by dp Robert Surtees in the Ultra Panavision 70 process (which delivered a 2.76 to 1 aspect ratio) and has really never been seen in its full visual splendor since the roadshow engagements that happened during Bounty‘s initial run in late 1962.

In the late ’90s director Jonathan Kaufer (Bad Manners) used to invite pallies and media allies to occasional DVD parties, at which everyone would decide which cool DVD to watch (films by Bresson or Antonioni or Wilder never seemed to make the cut) while sipping good wine and eating delicious Chinese take-out food.
The parties happened at a big McMansion on Summit Drive in the gated Beverly Park community which Kaufer was sharing with then-wife Pia Zadora and their children, and in going to these parties I got to know their swanky neighborhood a bit. It’s very soothing to bask in the aura of great wealth, but Beverly Park feels a little bit like something built for Disney World in Orlando — “Ostentatious- Rich-People-Who-Don’t-Quite-Get-It Land.” Flamboyant and luxurious and well- tended, but with a declasse faux quality everywhere you turned.

All to say this N.Y. Times Sharon Waxman piece about the residents of Beverly Park struck me as hilarious. The funniest part describes how some residents decided to get in the face of their neighbors Jeanette and Robert Bisno (who live next door to Pheonix Pictures honcho Mike Medavoy and his wife Irena) for essentially degrading the neighborhood with their appalling lack of taste (“Vegas”- style gates, a dinosaur topiary viewable from the street, “an eight-foot abstract sculpture in their front courtyard of what some interpret to be a woman on her back with her legs in the air“).
I was attacked last year when I wrote that aesthetic choices made by people whose last names end in vowels could rarely be trusted, but sometimes the proof is in the pudding. You can’t instill good taste in people. Taste is a result of a thousand distastes, and either you’ve been around and seen the world and developed a sense of some refinement and a respect for venerated aesthetic traditions…or you haven’t.
Zadora and Kaufer’s home, by the way, was built on land where Pickfair, the celebrated Spanish-style home of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, once stood. Zadora and her former husband Meshulam Riklis bought Pickfair in 1988 and destroyed it soon after to make way for their McManse.

I had a very funny Tom Arnold moment six or seven years ago when I was approaching Jonathan Kaufer‘s home for one of those DVD parties, and it convinced me for life that Arnold has a cool attitude. Kaufer would give his guests the number code to get them through the front gate, and yet a group of three or four people — Arnold among them — was standing that night in front of the gate when I arrived. They had the wrong code or something. It was very dark and all I could see were vague shapes. I said in a joking flippant way as I approached, “Hey, how come everyone’s just standing around?” And Arnold said, “Because we’re assholes?”