Two days ago, the Hollywood Reporter‘s Carl DiOrio reported that Semi-Pro “looks like it could be a full-on hit,” predicting that it “will open at least half as well” as Talladega Nights did on its opening weekend, i.e., half of $47 million being about $23.5 million. DiOrio also said that “with solid interest among men and women, something closer to $30 million isn’t out of the question.”
As we all know, Semi-Pro did around $15.4 million. DiOrio’s numbers were whackier, yes, than my prediction that it would take in an “easy” $25 million, but they were nowhere near as loop-dee-loopy as Steve Mason‘s prediction of $40 milion plus. How may others were predicting $25 million-plus grosses? A lot, I’ll bet.
Mason’s reply to Saturday morning’s box-office story said that “audience surveys from the various industry tracking firms don’t always accurately represent what’s really happening in the marketplace. They suggest what may happen, but there is no guarantee of a certain performance. This isn’t unlike what happened in this year’s New Hampshire primary where Barack Obama was shown to have an insurmountable lead in pre-election polls and even exit surveys prior to Hillary Clinton‘s victory.”

Last night’s Saturday Night Live Ohio debate-parody sketch was curiously partisan — a hooray-for-Hillary! thing that was unfunny, repetitive and tepid to boot. (And seemingly inspired by Hillary supporter Tina Fey‘s “Weekend Update” performance last week.) The guy doing Brian Williams (spent several minutes trying to discover his name) was pretty funny, though. And the real Hillary Clinton‘s appearance at the end (supplying “editorial response”) was appealing. But SNL has, in a sense, slit the throat of its own comedic integrity with this piece.

Is there any newspaper publisher more deserving of a negative expose than Wendy McCaw, the owner of the Santa Barbara News-Press who is roundly despised for showing a profound lack of respect for journalistic barriers and ethics? Citizen McCaw, a documentary about how McCaw’s arrogance led to the gutting of a once-respected newspaper, will screen at Santa Barbara’s Arlington Theatre on Friday, March 7th, at 7:30 pm, to be followed by a discussion.

Here are two articles about McCaw’s reign — one in the American Journalism Review, another in the L.A. Weekly. Vanity Fair ran a pretty good piece also but I don’t think there’s a link.

On Thursday, 2.28, the 35 year-old Eli Roth posted the following paragraph at the end of a longish passage on his MySpace blog, to wit:
“I was having drinks with a friend at the Beverly Hills Hotel the other night, and Lindsay Lohan walked by our booth with a girlfriend, checking us out. She then went out to the bathroom, turned around, came back and walked by us again, and mumbled to her friend ‘too old‘ and kept walking. Now, she’s absolutely correct but it was still pretty fucking hilarious. Especially since we were in the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel where the average age is 97. If you look too old in there you’re fucked! Time to hit the Botox!”
The irony is that Lohan looked like she was at least 46 or 47 in those Marilyn Monroe-like Bert Stern photos in that New York magazine spread a while back.

Stanley Kubrick “died almost exactly nine years ago and his shadow still looms large over cinema,” says the Guardian’s Andrew Pulver. “For me, Kubrick’s central achievement is a still unmatched 10-film run of masterpieces, between 1955’s Killer’s Kiss and 1987’s Full Metal Jacket. No other director — not Ford, Scorsese, Truffaut or Fellini — has such a strike rate, and it’s even less likely that someone will ever again produce cutting-edge work in four consecutive decades.
“In my opinion — and it is only an opinion — I only discount Spartacus which, though ambitious, is dated and kitschy, and his final film, Eyes Wide Shut.
“It was to introduce the latter film that Kubrick’s producer (and brother-in-law) Jan Harlan came to London to participate in the Barbican cinema’s ‘Stanley Kubrick 2008: A Film Odyssey’ screening program. I saw Eyes Wide Shut when it was released and felt it was the work of someone well past their prime; I saw it again at the Barbican last week and while I can now appreciate its dream structure and Freudian investigation of the subconscious a little more, it still seems a bafflingly obvious meditation on deceit. Can Kubrick really, as Harlan told us, have considered it his supreme artistic achievement?”
On a scene-by-scene basis, Eyes Wide Shut has always been — will always be — a kind of vacuum cleaner. Turn it on, watch it for three or four minutes and it sucks you in. Like all of Kubrick’s films. Even though it may be the least of them. Which, I agree, it probably is.
I remember reporting nine years ago about the moment when EWS came crashing down the general public. It was at an afternoon screening in Mann’s Chinese. The lord high master of the orgy asks Tom Cruise what the password is. “Fidelio,” Cruise says. “Yes,” the poobah replies, “but what is the password for the house?” And some guy in the 22nd row at the Chinese yelled out “bullshit!”

“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.