“We Are The Ones,” the new will.i.am Obama video. More of a stadium-chant thing than a “Yes We Can” spiritual mantra whisper piece, but in synch with the heavier drumbeat of the moment.
I’ve just been told of a Saturday morning box-office shocker as far as tracking data is concerned. Will Ferrell‘s Semi-Pro (New Line) is now looking like it’ll earn only about $15,184,000 for the weekend, according to a rival studio’s estimate. That’s over $25 million less than what Fantasy Moguls‘ Steve Mason predicted just yesterday.
This isn’t a typo — the basketball comedy did only $5,384,000 yesterday.
Semi-Pro was looking like a modest-to-decent opener last Tuesday until a big surge in tracking data two days ago, which led Mason to predict a weekend tally of $40 million-plus.
Is this the biggest tracking wrongo of all time? Something was clearly wrong with the methodology. (Too small a sample?) This is worse than the polling numbers for the New Hampshire and California primaries. Mason has egg on his face and some explaining to do.
Vantage Point is #2 with $11,954,000…off 48% from last weekend. (That’s all? For a movie as bad as thsi one? Another indicator of American taste buds.) The Spiderwick Chronicles will come in third with $8,438,000. The Other Boleyn Girl is in fourth place with 8115 (only 1100 theatres, almost $7000 a print, not bad). Jumper will come in fifth with roughly $7,288,000.
Step Up will be sixth with $5,372,000. Fool’s Gold is seventh with $4,452,000. No Country for Old Men benefitted from the Best Picture win with $4,003,000 and an eighth-place finish. Juno wil be ninth with $3,515,000, and Penelope will come in tenth with $3,197,000 — a disaster.
After speaking with refugees during a recent trip to Iraq, Angelina Jolie has written in an opinion piece for the Washington Post called “A Reason to Stay in Iraq” that the surge — the reinforcement of U.S. troops — is working by creating the beginnings of a haven that will allow humanitarian programs to take effect.
Jolie has done two things with this editorial . She has advanced an idea that the stay-the-course military strategy and goals of the Bush administration in Iraq are synonymous with basic humanitarian goals to help refugees. And she has, of course, strengthened the hand of the McCain campaign’s argument that we need to dig in and stay for the long haul. She’s coming from a caring place and I don’t think she’s being dishonest about what she’s observed over there, but I’m not sure she’s said the right thing.
“I can only state what I witnessed,” Jolie wrote. “It will be quite a while before Iraq is ready to absorb more than 4 million refugees and displaced people. But it is not too early to start working on solutions.”
Which will take decades to successfully implement, right? As a result of our invading Iraq, destroying its infrastructure, scattering the military, creating havoc, spreading misery and inspiring more anti-U.S. hatred among Islamic fundamentalists than had ever existed before, Jolie is essentially saying that the only thing for U.S. forces to do is to remain there for years and decades to try and un-do all the harm and chaos. Does this strike anyone as diseased Orwellian logic on some level?
Jolie works on behalf of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. She’s lobbied the presidential candidates and congressional leaders to step up financing for aid to displaced Iraqis. UNHCR has asked for $261 million this year, which is “less than the U.S. spends each day to fight the war in Iraq,” she wrote.
“When I asked the troops if they wanted to go home as soon as possible, they said that they miss home but feel invested in Iraq,” she stated. “They have lost many friends and want to be a part of the humanitarian progress they now feel is possible.”
Responding to a question from N.Y. Times reporter Jacques Steinberg about charges that journalists have covered Barack Obama more fairly or affectionately than Hillary Clinton‘s, Newsweek‘s Jonathan Alter said “that the attempt by the Clinton camp to weigh various stories represented a kind of ‘silly, even-Steven-itis.
“‘People got it into their head that if you say something good about a candidate, you [also] have to say something bad about him, and if you don√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t, that√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s not fair. What the Clinton partisans wanted was for us to create a phony balance that was at odds with what our eyes were telling us. That√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s not the job of a journalist.’
AP reporter Mike Glover, travelling with the Clinton campaign, told Steinberg that retired AP veteran Walter Mears “used to say that who wins is part of the story. We√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢re covering a candidate who√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s lost 11 straight primaries. [But the reporters travelling with Obama] are covering a candidate who has won 11 straight primaries.”
On top of which is the common observation that many press people dislike — you could use the word “hate” — Clinton campaign staffers. It was obvious that genie was out of the bottle a long while ago. It was re-emphasized recently when MSNBC’s Chris Matthews talked about how the Clinton strategy of “knee-capping” journalists hadn’t worked. MSNBC’s Tucker Carlson has also stated flat-out that he and other journalists are not fans of Sen. Clinton’s staffers.
No surprise that Paramount would cancel HD-DVD versions of Bee Movie (due 3.11), Sweeney Todd (4.1) and There Will Be Blood, given the defeat of that format by Blu-ray. But it seems odd that they wouldn’t have worked out release dates for those titles to come out in Blu-ray.
Everyone knew HD-DVD was dead late last year when word began to get around that Warner Bros. would join forces with Blu-ray. (The announcement came on 1.4.08.) It would have been a mark of dereliction if PHV execs hadn’t heard the rumblings about this last fall and begun to make plans.
If I’d been running things, I would have said in a memo last October or November that PHV should quietly start making plans for Blu-ray releases of all titles in preparation for HD-DVD’s likely and/or eventual defeat. But PHV hasn’t prepared, it seems, or they wouldn’t be saying that the above-listed titles and more “will be released on Blu-ray sometime in the future,” per Nikki Finke‘s 2.29 story.
Taut, economical and fast-moving, Roger Donaldson‘s The Bank Job (Lionsgate, 3.7) is the best heist film I’ve seen in a long while. I don’t want to blow a gasket over this thing because it’s just a good British popcorn film, but entertainments of this sort — tight, tough, well-honed — are few and far between.
I’m starting to think it’s Donaldson’s best film since (no exaggeration) No Way Out. And by my sights it’s the first quality film that Jason Statham‘s ever made. Sometimes I think he’s the new Steve McQueen and sometimes not, but now I finally respect the guy.
The film is based on a real rip-off that happened in London in 1971, known as the “walkie-talkie robbery.” The bizarre distinction was that MI5 (i.e., high-level spooks) planned and monitored it from start to finish in order to recover compromising photos of one of the royals that were being held by a criminal in a safety deposit box in a Lloyd’s Bank.
Their agent is Saffron Burrows‘ Martine, who’s trying to escape a drug-smuggling rap. She persuades Statham’s Terry, a car dealer with gambling debts, to get a small team together to break into a vault of safety-deposit boxes and take the cash and jewels. Half of the film is about the initial job, the other half about the robbers trying not to get stepped on due to having found evidence of police corruption in one of the boxes, and because of some other compromising photos that certain higher-ups want destroyed. It’s all turns messy but also shifty and suspenseful.
Roger Donaldson, Jason Statham
For my money The Bank Job is much better than any of the Ocean’s films because it’s more focused and down-to-it, and without the smirk or the attitude. It doesn’t have the tragic arc of Rififi or The Asphalt Jungle, or the charm of Big Deal on Madonna Street or Topkapi, or the dark undercurrents in Sexy Beast…but it’s got an extra layer of fascination because it’s all more or less true.
I’d say it’s somewhere in the realm of The Day They Robbed the Bank of England, The Great Train Robbery and David Mamet‘s Heist. It doesn’t reinvent the genre, but it honors the trappings and then some.
Special credit is due to screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais for keeping the dialogue straight and smart and always keeping the audience abreast. The standouts among the first-rate case are David Suchet (wearing a gray-haired wig), Peter Bowles, Daniel Mays, James Faulkner, Alki David, Michael Jibson and Richard Lintern.
The Bank Job is going right on my Best of 2008 list. That’s obviously not saying much at this time of year, but for anyone with a liking for well-oiled machines this is a no-lose proposition.
Audiences don’t go to period costume dramas about famous people for absolute historical accuracy, but most of us, I think, want something that feels genuinely “of the period.” As with any film, we don’t want to feel as if actors are pretending to be characters or that the illusion we’re watching wouldn’t have happened without gaffers and lights and costumes and cameras and microphones. We want (most of us, anyway) to believe in a real-deal immersion — an organic sense that we’re literally visiting the past by way of Hollywood panache and a souped-up time-machine.
The Other Boleyn Girl, which opens today, is partly interested in achieving this effect. It does a decent job with costumes, sets and whatnot, and for the most part the performances are quite good. Its main order of business, though, is fulfilling the requirements of a period chick flick aimed at twenty- and thirty-something women who, its producers fear, might get bored or alienated if the real, more complex story (i.e., the one on Wikipedia or in the history books) was used. So it’s been boiled down into a tale of sisterly rivalry, loyalty and mutual suffering under the sexual dominance of ruthless men.
It’s not bad, I didn’t hate it, I wasn’t writhing in my seat. But I didn’t believe for a second that I was a fly on the castle wall in sixteenth-Century London. I felt as if I was watching a virtual reality revisiting by way of the editorial boards of In Touch, the Globe, Us and the National Enquirer.
Directed by Justin Chadwick from a script by Peter Morgan, it’s about the intertwined fates of the emotionally driven, vaguely slutty Mary Boleyn (Scarlett Johansson) and her younger, more ambitious sister Anne Boleyn (Natalie Portman) as they sought power and satisfactions through their associations (sexual and whatnot) with King Henry VIII (Eric Bana). But it might as well be about the Hilton or Spears sisters.
Henry VIII; Eric Bana in Henry/Boleyn Girl guise
Almost every step of the way The Other Boleyn Girl sends a message of comfort to its core audience. “Don’t worry about trying to get into the world of 16th Century London,” it’s saying. “We know you’d rather not leave your own lives and attitudes and accessories, even for 115 minutes. So we’re doing everything we can to tailor this story to you and your way of processing things in the year of our lord 2008.”
And so it flirts with the historical accounts of the lives of Mary, Anne and Henry, using what it likes and discarding the rest.
I don’t believe that any 16th-century woman would have had Johanssons’s bee-stung lips. (Generally speaking, British women have had lips like slices of baloney for centuries.) Even if Mary Boleyn had them, I don’t believe she would have kept her mouth suggestively parted all the time (as Johansson does here, as she’s done in every single role she’s had.) She’s either incapable of keeping her mouth closed, or she simply refuses to do it, or her directors haven’t faced the issue. This bothered me when she made The Girl with the Pearl Earring and it’s been driving me more and more insane in the years since.
If the producers had any interest in casting an actor who looked like the actual King Henry VIII, they would have hired Donal Logue. They went with Bana for obvious reasons. By this same logic Steven Spielberg should hire Ryan Reynolds to play Abraham Lincoln. Why not?
The story seems a little rushed at times. People run into each other in the halls, say a few words, make a decision and move on. The actors have been told to do a lot of glaring and frowning. Johansson, in particular. I found this irksome. The film starts to feel oddly “off” during the last third, especially when the matter of incest is brought up in a certain third-act scene. The audience chortled when Portman asks Johansson, in a reference to Henry’s manner of lovemaking, “How was he with you?”
Portman delivers a convincing Anne, though. She has ample amounts of ambition, nerve, chutzpah. But I just rented Anne of a Thousand Days, the 1969 film about more or less the same story (minus the attention paid to Mary), and I’m afraid that Genevieve Bujold does a better job of it.
Kristin Scott Thomas does a superb job as the mother of Mary and Anne. It’s probably the finest performance in the film.
A fantastic five-week Film Forum series celebrating the 90th anniversary of United Artists — March 28th to May 1st. I own 75% of these films on DVD; the likelihood that they’ll look better at the FF (even with the promise of new prints) than they do on my Sony flat-screen is not high. But I love the thought of under-30s catching and enjoying Kiss Me Deadly or Red River or Night of the Hunter or Manhattan or Tom Jones or Orphans of the Storm or Douglas Fairbanks‘ Robin Hood for the first time during this series.
The source of yesterday’s rumor about a DVD of Ken Russell‘s The Devils coming out in May was Warner Home Video’s own online/business website, which is called WHV Direct. The information, however, was a “mistake,” according to WHV exec publicity director Ronnee Sass. She explained that right now “there are absolutely no plans to put out The Devils in ’08,” although the title may make an appearance down the road.
That “easy” $25 million that Semi-Pro was expected to earn yesterday has swollen into $40 million-plus, in the view of Fantasy Moguls‘ Steve Mason.
“When I began reviewing and seeing everything, I was warned by a veteran critic that for every movie that would inspire me, nine would drain my soul. I thought, ‘He just doesn’t like movies as much as I do.’
“Some 6,000 screenings later, I’d say he had the ratio about right. But those exceptions — that Pulp Fiction, that Raiders of the Lost Ark, that No Country for Old Men — kept my glass half-full and the passion alive.” — from a farewell piece by N.Y. Daily News critic Jack Mathews, who’s downshifting and off to Oregon.
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