I’ve been told that a $70 million-plus haul for The Bourne Ultimatum this weekend is out of the question. I’ve been thinking that it might just happen because the word is out that it’s the best action film in many a moon — an instant genre classic — and that it’s not particularly sadistic or even brutal, and that these elements may result in heavier-than- normal patronage from teens, women and family auds. The counter-argument is that Casino Royale opened to $40.8 million and The Bourne Supremacy did $52.5 million “so there’s very little family/four-quadrant element to this, so it virtually can’t jump to those upper numbers,” as one guy put it.

Why were films like Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Porky’s, American Pie and The Last American Virgin “both commercially and artistically successful? Because the creators drew from real-life experiences, and therefore made movies that reflected the genuine nostalgia they felt for those experiences.

“These films weren’t made from an assembly line, where a group of old men sitting around a boardroom tried to come up with ‘shockingly hilarious’ bits to stitch into a sex comedy. These films — well, except perhaps for Porky’s — had sincere characters and solid story construction upon which to hang the naughty bits.”
So says a rant by The Rec Show’s “Ray” about a 7.30 Michael Fleming story in Variety about an alliance between Maxim Films and Screen Gems to make a series of young-guy horndog movies.

Which director working today is the ultimate anti-Antonioni? A filmmaker who not only expresses an overwhelming indifference to the “haunting nothingness” element woven into the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, but whose films seem to be strenuously arguing with this — films that seem to say over and over that there’s no such thing as spiritual ennui or alienation, and that each and every particle of each and every moment in our lives is filled with vibrancy and connectivity. Or should I ask if there’s any filmmaker at all out there who seems to be at least aware of this age-old current? Or has “nothingness” become so prevalent that alluding to it in any way, shape or form would be regarded by audiences as a big “duhhh”?

When I wrote my Ingmar Bergman obit yesterday morning, I called him “one of the four or five greatest film directors of the 20th Century.” And now Michelangelo Antonioni, the director of such drop-dead classics as L’Avventura, Blow-Up, L’Eclisse, La Notte and The Passenger who also belonged to this select quartet or quintet, is dead also. He and Bergman passed the same day — yesterday — according to most news services. An old man dying is never a tragedy, but two guys of this stature going within hours of each other…whoa.

The shallow view of Antonioni’s unquestioned genius period — L’Avventura to Blow Up — is that no one ever made better movies about the elite classes in the grip of exquisite nothingness. The longer, fuller view is that no one ever made better films about nothingness, period.
Very little happens in these and other almost-as-good Antonioni films (like Il Grido, Red Desert, Zabriskie Point)…but they’re all inescapably haunting. A little voice tells you each and every time you’re watching L’Eclisse or L’Avventura, “I can’t precisely explain to myself what this film’s about, but I know each and every frame is a bringer of some kind of fundamental, deep-down current…I can feel it in my soul.”
In his landmark films of the early to mid ’60s, Antonioni captured a certain spiritual ennui — feelings, intimations and observations of profound emptiness, alienation…a drifting-away from meaning and tradition. He was capturing the beginnings of the modernist flu that was infecting the moneyed classes back then, and has since enveloped everyone everywhere (even the guys in Entourage), and he did so with such immaculate composition and clarity that you can watch these films today and come away stunned at their immediacy, altogetherness and absolute lack of anything resembling fat. They do not date.

Pop in the Blow-Up DVD and chapter-flip to the moment when David Hemmings, portraying a hip London photographer who simultaneously knows everything and nothing, is snapping pictures of that couple in that park in suburban London — a younger woman and an older, well-dressed man, standing maybe 50 or 60 yards away. The thing that absolutely wows is the way a strong wind is rustling some nearby bushes and branches of trees, and how Antonioni somehow makes this primeval activity seem absolutely fraught with existential spookiness, and at the same time perfectly natural and innocuous.
James Toback once told me a story about a coarse-sounding distributor (he may have been a bigwig with a company called Brut Films, which financed Fingers) who referred to this visionary artist as “Tonioni.” I’ve always laughed at this knowing there’s a measure of implied respect when even the worst people know about a certain film artist. It doesn’t matter if they get his or her name right; the fact that the brutes know him means everything.
The essence of Antonioni’s visual style is a frequent use of “lengthy tracking shots of human figures against a barren natural landscape or a scene of urban sterility,” a highbrow essayist once wrote. “He’s a visionary of emotional alienation, so morbidly convinced of the apartness of people that he sometimes ends his film by photographing figures in a landscape. There’s a feeling of social breakdown — a profound unease under the surface of things — permeating his work, but this is also accompanied (and this is the nub of his work) with a spellbinding visual grace.”

N.Y. Times critic Stephen Holden once described the Antonioni vibe as “brooding metaphysical mood music.”
In ’05 I was obliged to teach three UCLA extension film classes as part of my deal to host Sneak Previews. So for one of the classes I decided to go loopy and show Antonioni’s L’Eclisse (The Eclipse), an exquisitely composed black-and-white film about alienation and spiritual drainage among the aspiring classes in 1962 Rome.
I told the students this was a movie in which almost nothing happens, and that they may feel bored or frustrated by it initially. But I promised them they would never forget it, and that if they didn’t stop being film buffs they would eventually understand its greatness, although probably, in most of their cases, not until they hit their 30s or 40s.
I acknowledged that it’s essentially a movie about, in a manner of speaking, “nothing”…about a couple of attractive people (Monica Vitti, Alain Delon) eyeballing, toying and flirting with each other and having a bit of sex in the third act, but otherwise doing and saying relatively little, without anything resembling a story between them and certainly without any pronounced conflicts or resolutions.

But it has a certain seep-through effect. There’s a torrent of small things in L’ecclise that stay with you — dispirited looks, hints of eros and emotional voids, meditative moments, intimations of ennui and pointlessness. It doesn’t “say” anything but there are echoes all through it.
I showed them L’Eclisse because I know it’s one of the most sophisticated films of the 20th Century, and because the students would probably never see it on their own (it had recently come out on a spiffy new Criterion DVD) and because, as I said to them before showing it, no one in the commercial or semi-commercial realm is making films like this any more.
Critic and essayist David Thomson wrote the following a couple of years ago: “I can watch the world through Michelangelo Antonioni ‘s eyes forever. He is the greatest stylist of the modern era, and The Passenger may be my favorite film. It’s the one I think of offering whenever people ask that question. And they ask a lot.
“No, it’s not in my top ten, but sometimes I think The Passenger is the one I like the best, by which I fear I mean it’s the film I’d most like to be in, instead of just watching.

“Dream-projecting ourselves into films we really like is what many — most — of us do, I think, when we’re really taken by them. And when we’re watching films that we respect or admire but aren’t that into, that’s all we’re doing — watching from our side of the window.
“Every time I’ve re-watched any of Antonioni’s five or six greatest — La Notte, Blow-Up , L’eclisse, Il Grido, L’Avventura — I’ve felt this exact same urge to dissolve into a spectral cellluloid spirit, and disappear into the world of these films and wander around and maybe never come back. What would it be like to hang around in an Antonioni film after the movie is ‘over’? Mesmerizing, I would think.”

Agreed — Josh Hartnett gives an exceptional, above-average performance in Resurrecting The Champ (Yari Film Group, 8.24). He plays an ambitious sports writer…I don’t want to get into this just yet. (Tomorrow, the next day…it’s a good film and all in good time.) What I asked Hartnett about instead was an earlier performance — the best he’s ever given, if you ask me — in a movie that very few people saw called Mozart and the Whale.

Resurrecting the Champ star Josh Hartnett in 12th floor suite in the Four Seasons hotel — Monday, 7.30.07, 3:40 pm

I didn’t actually see it myself. I saw a sweetened-up version that the producers recut, which they called Crazy in Love in some markets. The real version by director Petter Naess has never been released, and I wanted to know if DVD viewers might one day get a chance to see it.
Here’s how Hartnett explained the blow-by-blow. Here’s the back-story of this film as it’s been told to me, but Hartnett tells it better.
I saw the recut, slightly cheerier version of Mozart and the Whale at the 2006 Santa Barbara Film Festival, and here’s my original review. I liked it even though it was “wrong” version, so I’m figuring the “right” version will be even better.
I called it “a Rain Man-type love story with a jumpy heart…jumpy as in child-like, energetic, anxious.”
Hartnett played a character based on a real-life guy named Jerry Newport who’s afflicted with with Asperger’s Syndrome, which is a highly functional form of autism.

“A romanticized, tidied-up version of a complicated real-life love story, Mozart and the Whale is about a youngish couple (Hartnett, Radha Mitchell) with Asperger’s Syndrome,” I wrote. “And this, viewing-wise, is nervy and provocative in more ways than one.
“It’s not calming or swoony like other love stories because the lovers are always in a fairly hyper and unsettled state, which feels a bit challenging, but it seems real and fairly honest and is obviously on a wavelength all its own.
At first you’re thinking it needs a regular-guy character (like Tom Cruise‘s selfish prick in Rainman) to provide stability and perspective, but then you get used to the manic energy of it.”

Will Elizabeth Guider, a smart Variety veteran, being named editor of The Hollywood Reporter (effectively replacing the departed Cynthia Littleton) make any difference in the fortunes of the second trade? This sorta feels like a status-quo, within-the-perimeter move. Not bold or radical enough to keep Reporter revenues from…I was going to say “sliding even further in this, a declining marketplace for print.” Put it this way: does anyone think the Guider hire is likely to improve matters? Not in the view of Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke, who filed this story late Monday morning.

To judge by his lean appearance, Robert De Niro was several years younger when he filmed this promo spot on behalf of the Tribeca Film Festival. It’s for some kind of profile of the festival that was destined to appear “Tuesday on Fox,” as De Niro says. The funny…no, hilarious part comes when the off-camera director asks him to sell it “with a little more energy” and De Niro goes, “I’m sorry but that was energetic….you don’t know what you’re talking about…sorry…I’m not selling cars, okay?” (Posted recently or six months ago — don’t know the story — on GorillaMask.net.)

An excerpt from a Dick Cavett interview with Ingmar Bergman on a show that originally aired August 2, 1971. Key quote: “It is absolutely impossible for me to work with a producer who would try to tell me what to do. If he tries, I would ask him to go to hell.” Here’s a second excerpt with Persona costar Bibi Andersson taking part.

Judd Apatow and Greg Mottola‘s Superbad, easily the sharpest and funniest teen-sex comedy in ages, has an issue of concern. New tracking is in and it’s not doing all that well — 26, 25 and 1. For a film that’s opening in two and a half weeks — Friday, 8.17 — that’s not awful (things can change) but the marketers have to start scrambling. The film clearly sells itself, so Sony should sneak it this weekend. The trailer plays nicely, but it doesn’t really convey how above-par exceptional this film is.
The Bourne Ultimatum, opening this weekend, is running at 91, 56 and 28 — figure a three-day tally in the $70 to $80 million range. Bratz is 46, 13 and somewhere between 0 and 1. El Cantante is at 46, 16 and 3. Hot Rod — 62, 25 and 2. Among the new releases, Underdog — 80,16 and 3 — will probably be the #2 film after Bourne. Rush Hour, opening the weekend after next, looks very good but not explosive — 80, 45 and 9.

The rule-of-three once again applies: French actor Michel Serrault, best known for his role as Zaza in La Cage aux Folles, has died of cancer at age 79.

A South Park episode I happened to catch last night called “Make Love, Not Warcraft” was laugh-out-loud funny and flat-out brilliant. The site says it’s been nominated for a primetime Emmy, which is no surprise. This is one of the most perceptive and subversive takes on the psychology and emotional babycake lives of hard-core gamers I’ve ever seen. I don’t laugh out loud all that much, but I did last night.

This 1964 Bruce Lee interview (which I happened upon this morning on nerve.com) is worth watching for Lee’s expression when he mentions that he majored in philosophy in college. He hesitates for a brief instant before admitting this, and his eyes flick to the side just after.