I wrote a column piece nearly three years ago that lamented the persistent presence of the soul-stifling industry stooge Paul Der- garabedian, the Exhibitor Relations spokesperson who’s always quoted in box-office stories. My January ’03 piece, called “The Man Who Would Be Dull”, described Dergarabedian as “a nice, depend- able guy who always has the numbers at hand and is always ready to discuss them on Sunday afternoons, when box-office stories are usually written. And yet I feel he’s giving the art of Hollywood box-office analysis an unfortunate taint of roteness and tedium. His pronouncements are almost oppressively mundane. I can’t think of any statistic or judgment he’s ever put forward that was wrong, but to me he always sounds so damn- ably measured, safe, underwhelming and status-quo affirming, which has a kind of Orwellian effect after a while.”

In his well-written distributor-by-distributor summation of the great DVD year that was 2005, New York Times columnist Dave Kehr includes a very curious judgment. He calls Daryl F. Zanuck and Nunnally Johnson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, the 1956 Gregory Peck-Jennifer Jones drama that Fox Home Video recently released as a “Studio Classics” DVD, “nearly unwatchable” and then double-slams it by equating it with Song of Bernadette. Please…this film is entirely watchable for various reasons (an intriguing 1950s time-machine aura, sturdy performances, handsome photography, solid dialogue) and more than respectable if you accept it for what it is: a somber and somewhat stodgy big-studio movie about An Important 1956 Subject, or the struggle of middle-class breadwinners to get along and get ahead while holding on to some vestige of passion about what their lives actually amounted to. Directed and adapted by Johnson (and based on the Sloan Wilson best-seller), this is the sort of overly serious, conservatively-staged and yet persistently probing drama that disappeared a long time ago from the culture, let alone from the Hollywood landscape. Nobody would be dumb enough to attempt a revival of the aesthetic behind it (except, maybe, as a one-shot irony piece like Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven) but if you take this richly colored widescreen film for what it was during its time and where its makers were coming from (and study its depictions of mid ’50s Manhattan and West- port, Connecticut), The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is an oddly haunting thing. And Fox Home Video has done a better-than- average job of restoring it, although I don’t believe their claim of having presented a 2.55 to 1 image (the Scope ratio that Fox used in the mid ’50s) — it looks more like 2.35 or 2.4 to 1.

Here’s a comprehensive, perceptive and well researched piece about the Chinese film market (“Crouching U.S. Studios, Hidden Chinese Market”) by L.A. Times staffer Bruce Wallace. It’s especially concise in explaining the downsides. “The skeptics have a long list of reasons why you can’t do movie business in China,” Wallace writes. “The deplorable condition of Chinese movie theatres, a quota that limits foreign films to 20 a year and one of the worst revenue-sharing deals (just 13% of the ticket take) that Hollywood has negotiated anywhere. Then there are strict guidelines on content. No sex. No religion. Nothing to do with the occult. Nothing that jeopardizes public morality or portrays criminal behavior. But perhaps the most crippling obstacle remains China’s rampant piracy. The frenetic trade in pirated DVDs operates openly on Shanghai street corners, where Hollywood’s blockbusters and prime-time TV shows are sold from rickety stalls and suitcases, all for less than a dollar. It leaves China with a market — or at least a legitimate market — about the size of Peru. What studio executive is going to spend time and energy banging his head against the Chinese politicians and bureaucrats for a market the size of Peru? And yet, and yet…that potential. What if this economic superpower-apparent does open up, gets piracy under control, becomes a cultural Goliath? Because if that happens, what the Chinese choose to watch and how they choose to do so may dictate global trends and tastes for the next century.”

A Canadian exhibition guy named Robert Wales says the reason Match Point sounded so shitty at the Leows Lincoln Square on Wednesday night is because Woody Allen is an old fart when it comes to state-of-the-art sound recording. “Are you aware that Allen has never made a film in stereo?,” Wales begins. “There are going to be differences comparing a big film with a full 5-channel mix to one of Allen’s dialogue-driven pieces. I work for a major theatre chain, and every Allen film inevitably brings us customer complaints about presentation that are almost always related to the fact that they feel they are being cheated because the sound is coming from only one speaker, and therefore something must be wrong. The situation is even murkier when people see the film being presented in digital sound, which to the average person means multi-channel. The truth is that digital sound is able to convey as many (or as few ) channels as the filmmakers intended. I haven’t seen Match Point myself, but I have no reason to expect that Allen has suddenly decided to mix his films in stereo at this stage in his career. Of course, it’s also possible you saw a lousy presentation but given the prominence of Leows’ Lincoln Square I’d be surprised if their presentations were truly substandard.”

I love the term “Fandango paranoia” because I know what it is…I’ve been there myself. It’s defined by New York Times reporter Ben Sisario in a 12.30 story as “[Fandango ticket] purchases made far ahead in the expectation of others chasing after the same limited pool of tickets.” There’s also “Fandango depression,” which results when a given show doesn’t sell out and thus the Fandango purchaser has paid an unnecessary surcharge. “I always feel ripped off when I pay the surcharge and then there are empty seats,” Sisario is told by a gay (i.e., has a “partner”) legal research guy.

Here are two bona fide Terrence Malick quotes — reported only today and uttered only last Monday — about his direction of The New World and thoughts about his future filmmaking plans. Quote #1: √¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢√É‚Äû√ɬ∫I knew [The New World] would have a slow, rolling pace. Just get into it; let it roll over you. It’s more of an experience film. I leave you to fend for yourself, figure things out yourself.√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢√É‚Äû√ɬπ Quote #2: “There’s a good many pictures I’d like to make…we’ll see how many I’ll be allowed to make.” The quotes are significant because Malick never talks to the press. They come from reporter Susan Albert in a story in the Bartlesville, Oklahoma Examiner Enterprise, and were taken from an appearance that Malick made following a screening last Monday of The New World at the Theater Bartlesville. Malick was allegedly raised in or near Bartlesville, which is the headquarters of ConocoPhillips. Malick’s dad reportedly used to work for ConocoPhillips, hence the location.

Screenwriter Josh Friedman (David Koepp nemesis and co- scripter of War of the Worlds, The Black Dahlia) almost worked on Snakes on a Plane and might have…well, who knows what he might have added to the damn thing?…but he really wanted to polish the sucker, but he didn’t see eye-to-eye with some Machiavellian ass-head New Line production executive who is almost certain to shoot himself in the mouth before the year 2010 and the idea went south. Friedman has a blog and here’s his story about what happened…..Snakes on a Plane!…Snakes on a Motherfucking Plane!

You can always tell how a film is doing (or how much confidence it has among exhibitors) by the size of the theatres it’s playing in. I was in Loew’s Lincoln Square last night, located in Manhattan’s heavily Jewish Upper West Side, and Munich was playing in one of biggest auditoriums and to a heavily packed house . I went inside and watched for a bit — large, crisply projected widescreen image, and the sound was strong and sharply defined. But Woody Allen’s Match Point, which was having its opening day, was showing in one of the two smallest, turdiest little theatres in the plex. And the sound was murky, muffled…like it was coming out of a tag sale boom box. A DreamWorks rep should have have been there to see the most enthusiastically reviewed Woody Allen film of the last 10 years being crapped on. The house was packed, but exhibs don’t trust Allen’s drawing power — his films have been fizzling for a long time. And by the way: King Kong was playing in the plex’s other matchbox-sized theatre. This movie is in a limping-along mode and exhibs know it.

“Some of my critics are asking how [Steven] Spielberg, this Hollywood liberal who makes dinosaur movies, can say anything serious about this subject that baffles so many smart people,” the 59 year-old filmmaker said to Roger Ebert during a phone interview on 12.22. “What they’re basically saying is, ‘You disagree with us in a big public way, and we want you to shut up, and we want this movie to go back in the can.’ That’s a nefarious attempt to make people plug up their ears. That’s not Jewish, it’s not democratic, and it’s bad for everyone — especially in a democratic society.”

That “uppity nigger” line from a draft of Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana script was revealed on Boing-Boing earlier today (12.28), and then a link appeared on Defamer. Tim Blake Nelson doesn’t blurt this term out to Jeffrey Wright in the film (certain people probably would’ve freaked) but I’m sorry Gaghan didn’t just let it rip anyway. The rumpus would have been fun.

Two or three times Adam Curtis’s The Power of Nightmares is listed as one of the 2005’s best in the Village Voice‘s 7th Annual Film Critics Poll. I knelt down to pray in front of this film when I first saw it a year ago and spewed my praise in a column piece that ran on 12.17.04…which is why I didn’t think to include The Power of Nightmares in my Best of 2005 column, even though it was shown at the Santa Barbara Film Festival earlier this year and then at the ’05 Cannes Film Festival. (It later enjoyed a well-attended theatrical run at Manhattan’s Cinema Village, among other arthouse venues in other cities.) I’m just laying this out to explain why I didn’t mention it among this year’s best, etc. It is that by boilerplate theatrical standards, and it sure would be nice to have a first-rate digital transfer version out on DVD someday soon….but for me it was a late ’04 film.

I was so taken with Norman Lloyd‘s short penetrating cameo performance in In Her Shoes — he nails it like a champ in one five- or six-minute scene — that the least I could do was write a tribute piece about him last September. Now there’s another actor who’s delivered another one of those rock-solid, feet-planted, holy-shit performances. I’m speaking of Roberta Maxwell, whose acting as Jake Gyllenhaal’s mom in Brokeback Mountain‘s second-to-last scene (i.e., when Heath Ledger pays a visit) totally slays. It’s obvious that Maxwell and her scowling homophobic husband (the great Peter McRobbie) know what kind of relationship Ledger had with their son, but her eyes are a river of feeling…grief, acceptance, compassion…you could take a bath in them. It’s really the interplay between Maxwell, McRobbie and Ledger that brings the sadness home and sets up the final hit when Ledger’s daughter tells him she’s getting married to Kurt. I should have given credit to Maxwell sooner…she really and truly knocks it out of the park.