wired

The Dukes of Hazzard is killing ’em in the boonies but not as much in the big blue cities. It did $11.9 million on Friday, and will probably wind up with $32 or $33 million for the weekend, but it’s playing “very rural,” I’m told. Whatever…that’s a pretty good haul for a film as atrociously bad as this one. Meanwhile, Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers is doing very nicely for an upscale urban film. Playing in only 27 theatres, it brought in $207,500 yesterday at $7688 per screen. That’ll probably translate into $700,000 for the weekend. That’s good money for a film of this sort.

The more I think about that snaggle tooth sticking out of the mouth of Peter Jackson’s big ape, the more uncomfortable I feel. (Go to “photos” on the official website.) It’s a hint, you see…a very slight indication of the emotional tone of Jackson’s King Kong. That tooth doesn’t exactly say “cute,” but it’s obviously a kind of message from Jackson to his fans that says, “Cut this guy some slack…I mean, he can’t go to a dentist, can he? Consider the vulnerability.” The tooth, in other words, is about intimacy and warmth. I’ve been saying it all along, but this movie is going to be trouble. I could be dead wrong and I hope I am. Jackson’s Kong may reanimate or infuse fresh energy into that occasionally spooky and haunted vibe that Merian C. Cooper created in his original 1933 Kong, but I seriously doubt it. I smell a valentine. This isn’t going to be about a ferocious chest-pounding ape and a blonde he’s fallen for, but about a movie myth digitalized into some textural intrigue here and there (I love the snow on the streets of New York during Kong’s rampage there) but mostly a slicked-up and essentially sentimental Peter Jackson theme ride. If it were going to be about something truly primal and fearsome, that tooth wouldn’t be popping out like that. I’m sorry but it’s really that simple. This movie is going to be about Jackson chaperoning the relationship between his ape and the audience in the same way Alfred Hitchcock was always a presence in his films, always sitting next to us and at the same time “playing” us like an organ. The all-new Kong is not going to consider what it might be like to be covered in the stench of an ape’s breath — it’s going to be about distance and aesthetics and all the money and massive power that Jackson has acquired from his success with the Rings, and the indulgence this has afforded him.

The unfortunate Jackson auteurist element aside, most of us are still keen on seeinng the new King Kong and especially the new Warner Home Video double DVD of the original 1933 film coming out on 11.22.

Owen Wilson telling his attorneys to stop the sale of that
Butterscoth Stallion T-shirt a day or two ago (which I didn’t even hear about until yesterday) is, of course, character-revealing. Wilson sounds very Zen and witty-cerebral in interviews, but he’s obviously thin-skinned about this aspect of his ascension. It’s a very special, very hard-to-achieve thing to become a kind of legend of the boudoir…for people in Oklahoma and Shanghai and Nairobi to assume a certain familiarity with your exploits and talk about you in…okay, in a joshing way, but also as a swordsman deserving a certain respect. How many actors have managed this in Hollywood history besides Errol Flynn? Would Flynn have stopped the sale of “In Like Flynn” T-shirts if there had been a slogan T-shirt market in the 1940s or ’50s? I’m not saying Wilson is “wrong” to want to try and suppress this whole Butterscotch Stallion thing. Maybe I’m under-acknowledging the clownish echoes. I’m saying this kind of notoriety (and really is a kind of flattery, I feel, at the end of the day…I’m really not going into an aloof put-on mode) is rare.

I don’t know USA Today columnist Whitney Matheson and I figure she’s got to have one or two things on the ball to land a gig with a serious nationwide publication, but her stuff is depressingly shallow, inane…it’s like a parody of a writer with some depth who’s decided to put everyone on and pretend they’re the emptiest, least interesting GenXer in the history of the planet. Really, read some of this shit…it’s mind-bending.

This Mary McNamara piece in the Los Angeles Times is hilarious. It’s basically a woe-is-me complaint about Focus Features having given her a mere 45 minutes to sit down with director Jim Jarmusch and discuss Broken Flowers at the Chateau Marmont a few days ago. She says Jarmusch loosens up only at the very end, when there’s five or ten minutes to go. Well, it’s always this way. McNamara is spoiled — most of us get a lousy 20 minutes. It’s been like this since…oh, roughly the late ’80s? Mid ’80s? I did an article for Empire in 1990 about interviewing Elizabeth Perkins for 15 minutes about her work in Alan Rudolph’s Love at Large. I wrote it like a ticking-clock suspense thing…13 minutes to go…11 minutes to go…seven!…three!

That Lord of War trailer isn’t the only cool thing coming out of this 9.16 Lion’s Gate release. There’s also that fascinating one-sheet with the armament textures etched into Nic Cage’s face.

How much do you want to bet that Don Scardino’s Lennon musical, due to open on Broadway on August 14th, will totally ignore the central point of John Lennon’s life? You’d have to figure anyone whose name ends with a vowel would probably get John Lennon wrong anyway, especially with Yoko Ono’s support and cooperation being part of the bargain, but the central point is this: the combustability and diamond-sharp edge in the creative output of any genius is often accompanied by personal unhappiness or chaos of one kind or another, and once this artist tries to bring order, mental positivism and serenity into his/her life as an end in itself, it usually means that his/her best work has already been produced. Most of the Pollyanna’s hate this viewpoint because it argues with their belief that positive outlooks are essential components, but it’s true. Once Lennon found personal happiness with Yoko Ono and withdrew into the Dakota and became a good father to Sean and all that domestic stuff, he was finished as a major artist. He was said to be “unhappy” when the Beatles first started to get rolling in ’63 until their breakup in ’69 or thereabouts, but he was at his creative peak all through most of this period. (Same point made by Orson Welles in The Third Man about the productivity of the tumultuous Italians vs. the ordered Swiss.) Art is not about being happy and serene.

All right, I’m sold…Lord of War (Lions Gate, 9.16), a snarky-attitude comedy about weapons dealers, is going to be a guilty pleasure. The trailer had me grinning from the get-go, and toying with the possibility that Andrew Niccol’s film is better than William Freidkin’s Deal of the Century (’83), which trod on the same turf. Nic Cage, Ethan Hawke, Jared “large wang” Leto and Bridget Moynahan are the leads in the newbie. The only thing that scares me is the fact that Niccol also directed Simone, which was the worst piece of shit Al Pacino’s ever been in. But seriously, the trailer is very cool. My favorite bit: a guy in a gray suit comes up to Cage, flashes his ID and says, “We’re with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.” And Cage wearily replies, “And this is not about the alcohol and tobacco.”

I haven’t seen Steven Greenstreet’s This Divided State yet, but it looks like a pretty good red-state-vs.-blue-state doc and we’re all into that, right? It’s opening at San Francisco’s Victoria theatre on 8.4 (wait a minute…isn’t that a Thursday?) and will open at New York City’s Quad on 8.19 and at the Fairfax on 9.9 and a lot of places in between. If anyone’s seen it and wants to throw me a review, please do. And it’s okay if you’re a red-state bubba and you think it’s crap or ungodly…just write it like you feel it.

This morning the Oscar Balloon nominees went into the news ticker. From now until early March of ’06, day in and day out you’ll be seeing those nominees clickety-clacking their way across the top of this column…all part of a new attention surge being devoted to this very serious competition by Hollywood Elsewhere…a competition that will have a decided effect upon the reputations, fates and income levels of many talented people over the next two or three or four years. I’ve also put in a click-down feature right under the main column logo that takes you right to the new updated Oscar Balloon box.

There are five or six reasons why Fernando Meirelles’ The Constant Gardener (Focus Features, 8.26) should immediately rank among film cognoscenti as one of the year’s absolute best, and two of them are the cinematography by Cesar Charlone, who also shot Meirelles’ City of God, and the editing by Claire Simpson, whose best work before this was for Oliver Stone’s Salvador and Robert Towne’s Without Limits. The photography has that fast, on-the-fly feeling and the cutting puts it all together magnificently. It’s all in the timing and the sense of jazzy-musical interplay, but there’s a world of difference between Charlone and Simpson’s work here and the irksome, too-frenetic, slow-it-down-for-Chrissake cutting of The Bourne Supremacy.