Dennis Hopper has been getting a lot of respect and affection lately. I could write about him for days and never run out of material. He’s like some kind of Mt. Rushmore figure now, beloved for his hipster authenticity and storied wackness. With the exception of Frank in Blue Velvet and the wackjob villain in Speed, the crazier or more eccentric or self-destructive Hopper seemed to be on a personal basis, the better he seemed to be on-screen. The saner and healthier he got, the less he seemed to bring.
Dennnis Hopper a day or so ago at Mann’s Chinese, in Giant (’56), during his extra-bad period in the late ’70s, with Daria Halprin in the early ’70s.
I tried to interview him at a Manhattan hotel in ’80 about Out Of The Blue, and he kept me waiting for over two hours — guess why? But at least now I can say I blew off a Dennis Hopper interview, etc. I have that memory. He came down to the lobby at the last minute as I was walking out, and I remember that hyper look in his eyes.
I could write about Hopper’s degenerated, cowboy-hatted Tom Ripley in The American Friend (“I know less and less about who I am, or who anyone else is”) until I’m blue in the face. Or his jabbering photo-journalist in Apocalypse Now. I remember quite liking his direction of Colors (’88) and The Hot Spot (’94). I don’t know why a guy like Hopper would direct something like Chasers (’94) except for the money. I guess that was it.
I’ve never even seen The Last Movie (’71), which destroyed his cred as a serious/rational/trustable director. It screened at the Aero in January 2009. I’d buy it in a second if it came out on Bluray or DVD, even.
Hot Tub Time Machine is at least as funny as The Hangover if not funnier, and it’s certainly much wilder, and it grossed a lousy $4.5 million yesterday? Which is only $900,000 more than the $4 million earned by the second-stanza Bounty Hunter, which people with taste and brains are said to despise? What happened?
Standoffish women is what happened. Plus the fact that HTTM only opened in 2700-plus situations compared to 4,055 screens for How To Train Your Dragon, the weekend’s top-grossing film, and 3384 runs for Tim Burton‘s second-place Alice in Wonderland.
Definite interest among under-25 males for HTTM was a relatively okay 46, but a not-so-hot 30 among over-25 males (i.e., guys who were young in the ’80s). Clash of the Titans (4.2) has a definite interest factor of 59 among under-25 males by comparison, and Kick Ass (which doesn’t open until 4.16) has an under-25 definite interest at 67. Hot Tub managed to wrangle a mere definite interest 31 from under-25 females, and over-25 females only gave it a 26.
I know what this film is, I know how well it played with the crowd I saw it with, and a $13 or $14 million weekend gross just doesn’t seem to add up. It’s not a disaster — it’ll end up with $45 or $50 million domestic — but it doesn’t seem proportionate to what HTTM actually is.
How To Train Your Dragon took in $12.2 million yesterday and Alice pulled down $4.7 million.
Those stories about Motherhood‘s $131 gross in London are almost a good thing, press-wise. Now there’s a slight curiosity factor, at least, whereas before no one cared. This day-in-the-life drama, directed by Katherine Dieckmann and starring Uma Thurman, has found historical distinction. To paraphrase former Secretary of State Edwin Stanton, “Now it belongs to the ages.”
Motherhood opened stateside on 10.23, and had made $92,900 by 11.15. The DVD/Bluray came out on 2.23.10.
I’m a little confused about why this story broke today when the IMDB says it opened in London on March 5th — three weeks ago! — but we’ll let that go. Here’s another IMDB link that seems to indicate it opened on 3.7, but maybe not. The N.Y. Post story saysMotherhood opened in London “last Sunday,” or 3.21. What?
Let’s keep in mind, at least, that Motherhood got thumbs-up reviews from the Hollywood Reporter‘s Stephen Farber, Entertainment Weekly;s Owen Gleiberman and the N.Y. Observer‘s Rex Reed.
If the London wipe-out story hadn’t appeared, I probably never would have seen Motherhood. Now I’m thinking I will.
It’s unusual to see two trailers for the same film that (a) use different titles and (b) present the film in a somewhat different light. The movie is Jake Goldberger ‘s Don McKay (Image Entertainment, 4.2), a spider’s web drama that plays like a cut-rate Coen brothers film. It’s fairly awful. Drink hemlock, stab yourself with a pen knife, jump off a 30-story building, etc.
Directed and written by Goldberger, Don McKay stars Thomas Haden Church (who also exec produced) and Elisabeth Shue with Melissa Leo, James Rebhorn, M. Emmet Walsh, Pruitt Taylor Vince and Keith David in supporting roles.
I was having trouble believing what I was watching. I was convulsing in my seat. It felt like a bad acid trip. I was asking myself, “Is this really happening? Somebody made this movie and I’m watching it?”
I’m stunned and amazed by the disparity between Church in Sideways and Leo in Frozen River and Shue in Leaving Las Vegas and coming away from these films persuaded that these gifted people are fairly golden and sage observers of the human condition, etc. And then you see them in a film like Don McKay and you wonder, “Are these guys trying to commit career suicide ? What happened to their brains? Couldn’t they have told the director ‘hey, this makes no sense’ and somehow improved their performance?'”
I’ll run my full pan (which I wrote this morning) closer to opening day. There’s no hurry.
A shortened monochrome re-edit of Peter Jackson‘s King Kong by a guy named “geKKo” was posted in the summer of 2007. It’s 38 minutes shorter and an absolute improvement. It’s what King Kong might have been if the Universal suits had stood up to Jackson and told him that a nearly three-hour-long tribute to a 1933 film that ran 105 minutes was an exercise in self-mockery.
Other movies regarded as overly indulgent and/or too long have presumably been recut and posted online in similar fashion. This is how it should be now and forever. Other films could surely benefit from this process, but which?
Here are the geKKO re-edit boilerplate notes:
Original film name: King Kong
New film name: King Kong (Vintage Edition)
Film studio name: Universal
Edit crew name: geKKo
Date Original Film Was Released: December 14, 2005
Date Edit Was Released: July 18, 2007
Original Runtime: 2 hours, 57 minutes sans credits
New Runtime: 2 hours, 19 minutes.
Amount of time Cut/Added: 38 minutes
Video: 854 x 480 (16:9). H.264, 1900kbps
Audio: 48kHz, AAC, 128kbps, Stereo
Cuts removed/added/extended :
* Removed Vaudeville and great depression scenes.
* Trimmed dialogue between minor characters.
* Denham is less slapstick, more serious.
* Less sailing around in circles.
* Removed choppy slow-motion shots.
* Removed voiceover by Hayes.
* Shortened dinosaur stampede scene. No raptors.
* Removed falling rock that hits Kong.
* Deleted attack of the giant bugs.
* Removed CG juggling for Kong, who looked just as unimpressed by it as I was.
* Shortened scene with Kong on ice pond.
* Lots of other minor cuts to improve pacing. In total, over 90 cuts!
* Converted to black and white. (Oddly enough the DP at one point suggested to PJ that they shoot the film in black-and-white.)
* Added hair, dust, scratches to simulate old film.
* Added “Vintage Edition” under the main title, and re-editor credit at the end.
* Universal logo changes from color to b&w
* Added chapter markers and metadata info for Quicktime/iTunes/AppleTV.
Comments:
“I actually like Peter Jackson’s King Kong a lot. But at nearly 3 hours long, the plot feels laborious at times. By cutting out a lot of exposition about the island before they find it, it actually makes the island more mysterious once they arrive. And although the CG animation to bring Kong to life is impressive, the green screen visual effects of people running with the dinosaurs looked a bit subpar. Not only that, it was really hard to believe that people could run around underneath dinosaurs and not get trampled upon. Furthermore, having raptors in the movie just made it feel too much like Jurassic Park, so that entire chase sequence was trimmed down considerably.
“The other big CG sequence that was cut is when the giant bugs start attacking. This scene was actually supposed to be in the original King Kong movie (1933) but was cut for being too scary. In the 2005 version, the purpose of this scene was to kill off some minor characters, give Jamie Bell something to do, and make Baxter look heroic by having him swoop down on a rope shooting giant arachnids with his machine gun. But in the end, it did nothing to move the story forward. We really don’t care if Baxter is a hero or not because his story doesn’t go anywhere from there. Also the bug attack came right after the big Kong vs T-Rex battle, so it seemed like an undercard fight right after the main event. Basically, I think WETA wanted to show off their CG skills by having a giant weta bug suck on Adrien Brody‘s face.
“Overall, King Kong is quite the visual effects achievement and a pretty good movie overall. It’s got a solid cast, dramatic moments, a poetic score, intense action sequences, and a little bit of comedy. I would not have re-edited it if it wasn’t a movie I liked. I have to give Peter Jackson a lot of credit for re-making this classic and for introducing the eighth wonder of the world to a new generation.”
I don’t care that much about 24 coming to the end of the road. Eight seasons and I may have watched a grand total of 2 episodes, maybe 3. So what? Who cares? It never rocked my world like The Sopranos. It was fine for what it is, etc., but I don’t see how its absence affects anything or anyone to the slightest degree.
Eleven days ago Showbiz 411‘s Roger Friedman became footloose and fancy free as far as his Hollywood Reporter deal was concerned. The withering trade “simply decided for budgetary reasons not to renew my employment agreement which expires next week,” Friedman toldNikki Finke earlier today. THR editor Elizabeth Guider said that Friedman “was originally hired by Nielsen Corporate in New York last May,” although “he did report to me and to a Nielsen executive on the content side in NY.”
I’m not understanding the specifics behind the higher-ticket-prices-for-3D-movies story. I paid $14 to see Avatar in 3D at the AMC 34th Street and the Lincoln Square. If prices for 3D films at Regal, Cinemark and AMC theatres are going up (“in one case as much as 26%,” according to a 3.25 Wall Street Journal story), does this mean they intend to charge…what, $17.50 or something?
The WSJ headline says “movie chains are [seeking] to cash in on consumers’ willingness to pay.” Isn’t $14 high in itself? What has happened to provoke this other than a decision to rake as much dough as possible? Is the idea to somehow kill or diminish audience interest in 3D?
Movieline‘s Stu VanAirsdale has satirizedL.A. Times film critic Betsy Sharkey for writing glowing things about Atom Egoyan‘s Chloe (and particularly costar Amanda Seyfried) during last September’s Toronto Film Festival, and then going fairly negative in her 3.26 review.
Well, I sympathize because it happens. Any critic who doesn’t admit to having semi-liked or half-tolerated a film at first and then said “what was I thinking?” weeks or months later is not being truthful. Nobody knows everything about everything all the time. The train is always pulling into or leaving a station, and every so often it will lurch and somebody will yank the hand brake. Or tectonic plates will shift in the wee hours. Sometimes a lack of sleep has an effect.
Just as often critics will pan something and then realize down the road they were having a bad day or whatever. Like the critics who ripped 2001: A Space Odyssey or Bonnie and Clyde after their initial exposures, only to re-think things.
I was way too easy on Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull when I saw it in Cannes, although I did say it “lacks the stuffings of a great adventure film” and that I wished Spielberg, et. al. “had attempted at least a superficial injection of a little heart and soul.” I have no explanation other than I should have been tougher and snarlier. (Was I feeling kindly because I spoke to Harrison Ford at a cocktail party a day before seeing it? Pathetic excuse.)
I went fairly positive for Eyes Wide Shut after my first looksee only to pull back after seeing it a second time. Since all Kubrick films always seem a bit fuller or deeper or more thoughtful after the second viewing I expected that EWS would follow suit — but it didn’t. It went down in estimation.
And I praised Tim Burton‘s Planet of the Apes when I first saw it, and I know I’ll never live that down. I also half-panned The Royal Tenenbaums at first only to modify that view after a second exposure a few days later.
“Let me reaffirm that the [Holywood Reporter] offer was real and detailed and made to me by [one of the bosses of e5 Global Media CEO Richard] Beckman during a phone conversation on the night of January 13th.
The offer “consisted of: $450,000 annual salary for becoming editor-in-chief of The Hollywood Reporter. Plus a $1 million Malibu home which, I was told, “you can keep whether you stay 5 minutes or 5 years” in the job. (Why this? Because I had said that some day I want to buy a Malibu condo with an ocean view.) Plus a sum “roughly estimated” at $650,000 a year for my share of several cable TV deals which e5 anticipated making for THR. And so on. Other people know about this offer, too.
“Let me reiterate that I did not negotiate. Instead, I set in motion a dialogue about mutually beneficial business between my parent company MMC and the new THR owners. That discussion continues.” — Deadline Hollywod Daily‘s Nikki Finkeresponding to a statement by Beckman that “there is no truth to the report” that she’d been offered THR‘s editor-in-chief job.
Vulture‘s Lindsay Robertson has listed most of the significant gross-out moments that probably led to Hot Tub Time Machine being R-rated. The one she left out is “a straight man is forced to orally copulate his straight friend in front of a crowd of hooting animals as a result of losing a bet.”
