“I’m not sure that’s it’s really a dramatic medium. I think it’s closer to poetry.” — from Errol Morris‘ 2002 short film about the wonder and mysticism of movies, and how they affect various people from different walks of life.

Prom Night is the weekend’s #1 film with an expected $25.1 million tally by Sunday night. David Ayer‘s Street Kings will be a distant second with $12.4 million. Roberty Luketic’s 21, hanging in there, will be third with a projected $9,973,000. Nim’s Island will be fourth with $8,568,000, and poor Leatherheads, down over 50% from last weekend’s opening haul, will earn about $5,819,000 for a fifth-place showing.
Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who will be sixth with $5,792,000. Smart People will be seventh with $4,816,000 and $3700 a print …not good. The Ruins will be eighth with $3,139,000. Superhero Movie! will come in ninth with $3,069,000 and Drillbit Taylor — people are still actually saying to each other, “Hey, let’s go see Drillbit Taylor” — wil do about $2,095,000.
I didn’t get any numbers for The Visitor but Young @ Heart, which opened in four theatres, will do about $46,000 at roughly $11.500 a print…not bad.

DVD Talk’s Randy Miller implied it, Defamer‘s Stu VanAirsdale said it bluntly and I’m seconding the motion — director Paul Thomas Anderson needs to come out of his effete rabbit hole and deliver a much more fan-friendly DVD of There Will Be Blood. Because the one that came out last Tuesday is niggardly and flat-out disdainful of the faithful.

In his 4.8 review of the two-disc TWBB release, Miller wrote that Anderson “has gone on record stating that he no longer records audio commentaries, [which is] especially disappointing after the terrific tracks included with Boogie Nights and the like. With no direct participation from the cast and crew, these extras can’t help but feel a bit detached.”
In a rant piece that went up yesterday afternoon, VanAirsdale didn’t pussyfoot around.
“If you’re going to charge us for two discs, you’d better make the second one worth our dime,” he said in an open letter to Anderson. “Which gets us to this new two-disc ‘collector’s edition’ of There Will Be Blood, which Paramount Vantage released April 8th. Pardon us, but what the fuck is this?
“We’re sitting here with our favorite film of 2007, looking for your commentary. Nothing. We bust out the second disc. Photo clippings from your research? Three deleted scenes — only one of which features, you know, editing? And, finally, an exhumed silent short about the history of oil drilling? Really? $30 for two discs and all we get is a public-domain two-reeler from 1923?

“Look, PTA, we know it’s probably not your fault. There’s probably a commentary sitting on some hard drive in Vantage boss John Lesher‘s office waiting for the precise moment when ‘collectors’ will be ready to part ways with another $30 to hear it. There’s probably behind-the-scenes footage with Scott Rudin arriving on location in Marfa, Texas, overdressed and throwing a BlackBerry at the assistant whose weather forecast turned out 15 degrees cooler than the actual temperature.
“We know there are interviews with you, Day-Lewis, Paul Dano and Ciaran Hinds floating around. We know because it’s you, and we expect great things. Not…this.
“So get with the fucking program already, PTA, and stop jerking us around with the most stingy, shabby, half-assed miscarriage of DVD justice since Mulholland Drive.”

“I live in rural Pennsylvania and am surrounded by the people Obama just described. Shit, some of them are even my family members. What Obama said is 100% true. These people have nothing going for them so they hang on to religion and guns for dear life. Now should Obama have made that comment? Probably not. But the people he just alienated weren’t voting for him anyway. Or Hillary.” — HE reader “Redmond,” posted this morning.

I concur 100% with Toronto Star critic Peter Howell when he says that “just one person saves Smart People from being completely wretched, [and] it’s the presence of Thomas Haden Church.”

The problem, unfortunately, is that Haden Church wears a truly wretched moustache in Noam Murro‘s film, and it wrestles with his performance. He’s still the film’s most winning actor (slightly more engaging than Ellen Page, and much more so than the growly and curmudgeonly Dennis Quaid), but every time you look at him your eyes go right to his upper lip and it’s like…why?
This led me to lament almost all moustaches everywhere. I realize that some actors look better with them. Or they did in the good old days. Clark Gable, Ronald Colman, William Daniels in The Graduate, John Hillerman in Chinatown, etc. Robert Redford’s ‘stache in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid looked terrific. But almost everyone who doesn’t have the kind of face that really and truly needs the augmentation of upper-lip hair looks awful when they grow one. I mean terrible and sometimes even comically miscalculated at times. The word doofusy comes to mind.
Black guys, for whatever reason, almost always look good with moustaches. Who can imagine Billy Dee Williams without one? Except for Denzel Washington — they don’t work for him at all.

That story about Mike Nichols doing a low-budget film in the Hamptons is a bogus embarassment. It started with Dark Horizon’s‘ Garth Franklin linking to a column item by Hamptons.com’s Jennifer Tuesday claiming that the “Oscar-winning” Nichols is about to shoot a “teen horror film” in the Hamptons area called Breadcrumbs. It turns out that (a) it’s another Mike Nichols (a guy who happens to have the same name) directing this thing and (b) Tuesday is a brilliant reporter. It feels wonderful to have wasted time on this thing.

“There’s been a lot of talk lately about film critics who’ve lost their jobs and their prestige, but there are worse things that can happen to a writer,” The Oregonian‘s Shawn Levy has written. “And, unfortunately, one of these more serious fates has befallen D. K. Holm, the longtime Portland film and book reviewer, curmudgeon, gadfly, and boulevardier who finds himself battling cancer without the security of medical insurance to help him with the gargantuan bills that his care entails.

“Doug’s medical prognosis is, thankfully, hopeful. But his economic situation remains dire. This is where you and I come in.
“On April 27 at Cinema 21, a benefit will be held to help provide Doug with a financial cushion. Various of Doug’s many Portland friends — including Thomas Lauderdale of Pink Martini, filmmaker Patti Lewis, and bluesman Steve Cheseborough — will perform or present their work, and assorted artworks and dining and entertainment packages will be auctioned off. And donations will be accepted at the door and afterward.
“For complete information about Doug, his writing, and the benefit, as well as details about how you can help if you can’t be there on the 27th, visit this page. And keep thinking good thoughts, yeah?”

Two days ago former Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Entertainment Weekly and L.A. Times journalist Anita Busch testified at the Anthony Pellicano wiretapping trial about the heavy intimidation she received in ’02 (the “stop” note, the dead fish, etc.) at Pellicano’s behest to back off from writing a tough story about one of his clients. Variety‘s Anne Thompson filed a story about it early Wednesday evening.
Busch, thought to be a pretty tough and shrewd reporter in her day, wept a bit, talked about how scared she was about her life back then and whether or not she could financially survive, declared that she “stopped writing” and that she’ll never write a book about the threats, and so on. I never had a dead fish put on my car windshield, but my phone was tapped by Pellicano in ’93 and he tried to shake me up psychologically during the same period. It was unpleasant as hell, and I was angry for a time, but I got over it. You ride it out and you move on.

Keanu Reeves‘ portrayal of his ragged-edge L.A. detective in David Ayer‘s Street Kings is one reason I wasn’t very comfortable watching it. Forrest Whitaker‘s performance, as I explained on 4.5, is another. There’s a costar I did like, however — took to him immediately, decided he was cool. I’m speaking of 26 year-old Chris Evans, who plays a younger cop who pools forces with Reeves around the beginning of the third act.

Chris Evans in Cellular

I was therefore doubly irate at this film when…how can I put this? If you have a strong character with natural charisma, a director should introduce him early and keep him around until the end.
Evans has had decent roles in ’05’s Cellular and Fantastic Four and ’07’s Sunshine, Rise of the Silver Surfer and The Nanny Diaries. But these and Street Kings are second-tier audience movies directed by B-level directors (or, in the case of Sunshine, an A-level director off his game.) Evans has the stuff, I believe, that can move him up the ladder. But it won’t happen if he doesn’t hook himself up with A-level guys — Paul Thomas Anderson, Michael Mann, Wes Anderson, Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu, Alfonso Cuaron, Steven Soderbergh, the Coen brothers, etc.
It seems odd, also, that in her half-joshing review of Street Kings, Manohla Dargis doesn’t even mention Evans. She’s one of the sharpest critics around and I’m not wrong about Evans, so what’s the explanation? I know what I know and I’m right. Evans is the guy you like in this film.
The only problem is that he needs to lose the U.S. Marines haircut, which he had during the Street Kings junket.

Incredibly, the people behind Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a right-wing documentary that uses Ben Stein to try and sell the idea of “intelligent design” (i.e., creationism in new clothes), are opening it in godforsaken Los Angeles on 4.18 and have hired Rogers & Cowan to flack for it and arrange for press screenings (one on Monday, 4.14 and another the following day).

The downside is that the film’s only booking is at Mann’s Beverly Center, an old-style shoebox plex (built in 1981) where little movies go to die.
Here’s the best passage in my initial piece about this film, which was posted on 3.10.08: “The irony is that I happen to believe in intelligent design also, in a sense. There is obviously a unified flow and an absolute cosmic commonality in all living things and all aspects of the architecture. The difference is that I don’t attach a Bible-belt morality to this overwhelming fact. To me God is impartial, celestial, biological, mathematical, amoral, unemotional, miraculous and breathtaking.
“However you define the altogether, He/She/It has absolutely zero ‘interest’ in whether you or your great-uncle or next door neighbor are adhering to the Ten Commandments or having an abortion or helping a homeless person or what-have-you. The molecular perfection and mind-blowingly infinite implications of God are way, way beyond ground-level morality.”

Indiewire’s Eugene Hernandez has written that buyers have told Cinetic Media that one reason they’re not interested in Tia Lessin and Carl Deal‘s Trouble The Water, a doc about the Katrina disaster that showed at Sundance ’08, is that it’s “too black.” He also quotes an unnamed distribution exec having allegedly asked, “Why aren’t more white people in the film?”

Defamer‘s Stu VanAirsdale has jumped into this one also, writing that “we’ll take a swag epidemic any day over a gang of rich assholes passing racism off as caution.”
Hold up there, Eugene and Stu. I saw Trouble The Water at Sundance myself, and I wouldn’t pick it up if you held a gun to my head and threatened to strangle my dog with your bare hands. Not because it’s “too black,” but because the blackness in the film — the look of it, the visual language, the cultural vibe and atmosphere — is too low-rent.
I’ll watch a doc at the Park City Library about people who are on the edge of destitution and struggling to hang on, but you can’t seriously expect Average Joes to pay to see this thing….c’mon. It’s one of those “lemme outta here” docs that well-meaning but sadistic film-festival programmers are sometimes attracted to.
On top of which Hernandez and VanAirsdale ignore the thing in this film that makes you want to leave immediately, which is the godawful nausea-inducing shakycam photography that occupies a good part of the opening half-hour or so. I described it thusly last January:
“I’ve almost never felt queasy from jiggly, hand-held photography (I eat films like Dancer in the Dark for breakfast), although I’ll admit that Cloverfield has more than its share. Yesterday, however, I saw the King Kong of hand-held nausea jiggle movies — Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s Trouble The Water, a doc about the Katrina disaster.” (Since racism is part of this very p.c. discussion, I’ll say here and now that I chose the term “King Kong” instead of saying “the Citizen Kane of hand-held nausea jiggle movies” because I wanted to convey a feeling of something that’s (a) much stronger than the viewer and (b) definitely to be feared.)
“Half of it was shot by Lessin and Deal in the usual fashion and is no big challenge,” I wrote, “but the other half is shakycam footage of Katrina’s devastation shot by one of the film’s main subjects, Kimberly Rivers. (The other non-pro photographer is her husband Scott.) The footage is so scattered and whip-panny that I was starting to think about bolting less than ten minutes in.”
I was thinking as I sat there in the second row that Rivers is a complete moron in terms of the visual knack that any photographer needs to bring to shooting anything. She shoots her neighborhood/Katrina footage with an almost malicious disregard for what her audience (either a friend watching it in her living room or a congregation of 600 or 700 Sundance festivalgoers) may be experiencing down the road. Some people just don’t get it and should never, ever pick up a camera, and Rivers — God help Cinetic, Lessin and Deal — is one of them.
If I were running a New Orleans Cinematography School and Rivers tried to enroll, I would smile and put my arm around her and say, “Kimberly, I love you but you’d be throwing your money away. Your gifts lie elsewhere.”