“When The Last Picture Show came out, in 1971, it was acclaimed not only as the breakout hit of a young gun (the director, Peter Bogdanovich, was still in his early thirties) but also as a dusty remembrance of things past,” writes New Yorker critic Anthony Lane.

“The movie was set twenty years before, in a small Texas town, where even the young folk — played to perfection by Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd, Timothy Bottoms and others — bore the look of natural-born elegists, and where the quest for sexual services (led by Cloris Leachman, as the wife of a sports coach) seemed less a matter of lust, let alone joy, than a desperate bid to delay the dying falls of love.
“Nowadays, we are the nostalgists, and it is Bogdanovich’s film (which the director David Gordon Green selected for a July 20 screening at BAM) that asks to be treasured as the product — indeed, the standard-bearer — of a faded age. There was a time when movies themselves felt like small towns: rooted fast in their environments, and alive to the wistful chatter of minor characters as they crossed paths and then went on their way.”
And the most small-towny moment in the entire film was Ben Johnson‘s soliloquy about change and “gettin’ old” and a love affair he had about 20 years back with a girl, and a silver dollar she probably still has.

“You wouldn’t believe how this country’s changed. First time I seen it there wasn’t a mesquite tree on it. First time I watered a horse at this tank was more than 40 years ago. I’m probably just as sentimental as the next fella when it comes to old times.”

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Today’s hit films are having shorter runs in theatres than they did 20 and 25 years ago, says this 7.14 Gregg Kilday piece in the Hollywood Reporter. I had suspected as much before reading it. The burn rate on everything is faster today than it was during the Reagan-Bush era.
The most interesting portion of Kilday’s article notes that while Iron Man and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull lasted in theatres for eight and seven weeks respectively — the ’08 summer’s two longest runs so far — 1984’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom spent 12 weeks in the top 10, and ’89’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade spent 10 weeks in the top 10.
“Today, eight weeks in the top 10 — which generally requires that a movie is playing in at least 1,000 locations — is a significant achievement,” writes Kilday.
In the good old days of the mid to late ’80s computers were using Flintstones-level technology and IBM Selectrics were the writing device of choice. The interactive darting-eye video-game aesthetic was in its nascent stages. Attention spans were probably longer back then, and the across-the-board instant gratification principle hadn’t yet taken over. Some GenXers were in their early 20s, but most were in their teens. GenYers were toddlers and tweeners and GenD kidz — those born in the early ’90s and later, easily the fastest-information-processing generation of all — hadn’t been conceived.
So yes, it was a somewhat slower, almost entirely analog world back then, and so, yeah, of course, hit movies tended to hang around longer.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the general pattern for the average super-hit movie of 2020 will be five or six weeks and out. I wouldn’t be surprised if all movies, big and small, were to open everywhere in all media simultaneously. I wouldn’t be surprised if we have no DVD or Blu-ray retail stores whatsoever by 2020 — and it’ll be a profoundly sad thing when this happens, whether it’s five or ten years from now. Stop what you’re doing and shed a tear for the future of the DVD and Blu-ray community of movie lovers worldwide.

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Edited and posted this morning by The Jed Report.

The campaign calendar between now and November 4th, per the Vegas-based Jed guy. I for one don’t have these dates memorized backwards and forwards, or even partially.

Because images are everything and because many people out there (i.e., “low information voters”) can’t be bothered to read articles or photo captions or process anything at all except in terms of their gut, Barack Obama loses because of the New Yorker cover. We are a nation of fourth-graders. This, in any event, is the view of Newsweek‘s Jonathan Alter, a fair-minded guy who (to judge by his “Countdown” appearances) is some kind of Obama admirer, or at least not with the dissers.

Earlier today N.Y. Times reporter Brooks Barnes posted a piece about the amusing YouTube reaction videos to the trailer for Beverly Hills Chihuahua (Disney, 10.3) that have been running since late April. The best one, for me, is the thoughtful bearded guy below — understated, unforced, honest, believable.

The second best video is the one starring Adam, the guy with the nicely trimmed beard and the pretty eyes who goes “wow.” The third best is the one with the two Latino guys. The fourth best is the young slacker guy.

In the wake of Meet Dave‘s still-born arrival, a very well written manifesto by Defamer’s Stu Van Airsdale (unless someone else wrote it) that doesn’t call for Murphy’s retirement (like the Vulture guys have suggested) or going back to stand-up or moving to Myanmar, but an announcement that the man absolutely and incontestably doesn’t matter to anyone. The piece is called “Why You Don’t Care About Eddie Murphy.”

“More than any recent bust by Mike Myers or Jim Carrey, Meet Dave‘s disastrous showing owes less to Murphy’s presence than to 20th Century Fox’s miscalculation of what that presence means.
“This is important. The half of the so-called marketing quadrants that made Norbit a hit — men and women under 25 — weren’t there to see Eddie Murphy. They were there for the Trick — the concept, the execution, the ease of it all, however crude, stupid and condescending. Basically, they were there for the movie part of it. They weren’t yet born when Murphy was Murphy; they didn’t know any mighty had fallen, nor from how far up.
“Fox counted on that perspective, however, in foisting ‘Eddie Murphy in Eddie Murphy in Meet Dave‘ — even if Murphy was too far gone for our liking, he had proven reliable enough for a few of the studio’s recent family romps. Right? Doctor Doolittle? Right? Maybe our kids would dig it, while we barely tolerated it for their sake, and, by summer dog-days extension, for our own.
“Except ‘our’ kids don’t care. They’ve got better things to do. And we don’t care that they don’t care. And we don’t care that the millions of others who don’t care (their numbers reflect indirectly in Meet Dave’s box-office trough) don’t care either.
“All we feel is sort of a relief at no longer having to pretend to care — no more calling for Murphy’s head or lamenting his choices. That it should happen to such a household name reinforces only its novelty, not its unlikelihood; actors are forgotten and disused all the time. Eddie Murphy’s indelibility is his only entitlement; he’s achieved that much, Oscar losses and all.
“His value, though? His very place? Gone. And this is us, shrugging.”

After 21 months on the job, the fate of Dominick Prizzi has descended upon L.A. Times publisher David Hiller. A car pulls up, a guy gets out….he doesn’t even hear it. I don’t mean to sound cavalier about all the pain that’s going around in Dead Tree-ville. Pain, in fact, is probably too mild a term for what some people are experiencing and feeling. And I’m very sorry. But so many people are getting zotzed it’s a little bit like a gangster movie, admit it.

“Now a revered commodity thanks to The Office and Extras, Ricky Gervais is making a rare journey to the U.S. to do standup,” writes Variety‘s Phil Gallo. “A precision-oriented writer with well-oiled timing, Gervais instead goes deep into non-politically correct territory, riffing on autistic kids, the Holocaust, AIDS and gay sex, diseases and the pervy behavior of his schoolmates, the belly laughs shifting around the Kodak Theater as nerves are struck. On his opening night in the States, Gervais’ no-nonsense approach hit every bull’s eye.”

I don’t think I’ve ever reported about a breakup story in this column’s four year history (and I’d like to avoid it henceforth), but Vanity Fair is reporting that Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman are “no longer f***ing.”

For a reason I can’t quite figure, this strikes me as sad news. My feelings are somewhat akin to the VF line that “their union was the binding force that kept Hollywood from exploding in a mass chain reaction of irony and sexual frivolity.” So was there some kind of…you know, subtext to those competitive “I’m F**king…” videos they both made earlier this year? The Vanity Fair story said that reps for Matt Damon and Ben Affleck had no comment on the breakup.