Allan Bacchus of Daily Film Dose is attempting to recreate a new AFI Top 100 American films list, but one based upon the fanboys/cinephile/blogger point of view. He’s using the same guidelines and procedure as the AFI (enabling a ‘shadow’ list to be created) and is inviting HE readers to participate. A ballot can be be downloaded from the blog posting. He’s looking for 1500 voters, which is what the AFI had. It would be good if a significant percentage of the 1500 voters (presuming he accumulates that many) could be drawn from rank-and-file online journo-bloggers.

A YouTube clip that lampoons celebrity couple reality shows was sent to me this morning. The kicker is that “Michael Bay” is introduced and, according to the sender, the guy who portrays him does so to a tee. I’m sitting in a low wifi cafe in Los Alamos, California (north of Santa Barbara about 25 miles), and loading a video file will take eons. But if anyone who knows Bay has a reaction…

HE reader Nate West took exception yesterday to my description of Charlie Wilson’s War — the reading of Aaron Sorkin‘s script, I meant — as “a feel-good ride.” He said that a line I used about the admirable actions of the three main characters (played by Tom Hanks, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Julia Roberts) having consequences that reverberate throughout the world today is an oblique reference to a certain catastrophic 21st Century event.
“The real story of Charlie Wilson’s War isn’t about victory,” he concluded. “It’s about blowback. Perhaps those seeking a feel-good ride aren’t interested in such ironies.”
My answer was yes, it’s mostly a feel-good ride…until the last 19 or 20 pages. Yes, it’s about blowback, as in “no good deed goes unpunished.” Which, of course, is the most common definition of irony in the book.
Truth be told, I’m not quite sure how I feel about the ending. It’s striking and of course it delivers a turn in the road — call it an end-of-the-third-act thud — and it’s obviously truthful. It’s just that I don’t know what the movie is saying about the journey of our three characters except the obvious, which is that they performed craftily and wonderfully until the whole thing turned around or metastasized several years later at which point they were left with very mixed and confused feelings. Which will be true for the audience also, I suspect.
But it’s a hell of a good ride (and wonderfully written in that smart, sassy, Sorkin-esque way) for the first 136 pages. And that ain’t hay.

I took another stab last night at reading Aaron Sorkin‘s script of Charlie Wilson’s War, and now, on page 32, I’m finally feeling the heat of it. (I don’t know why I couldn’t get into it before.) I’m particularly revved about what Philip Seymour Hoffman will do with the part of Gust Avrakotos, a Middle Eastern intelligence operator. The script is a pleasure to read, but Hoffman’s part is delicious. It’s like ice cream.

Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts in Charlie Wilson’s War

Charlie Wilson’s War is the true story of how a play-it-as-it-lays, cruise-along Texas Congressman (Tom Hanks), Hoffman’s CIA agent and a rich Houston socialite named Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts) joined forces to lead “the largest and most successful covert operation in history,” according to one synopsis.
The efforts of these three, it says, “contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, with consequences that reverberate throughout the world today.”
I finally saw Charlie Ferguson‘s No End In Sight last night, a brilliant but devastating doc about the Bush administration’s disgusting mismanagement of the situation in Iraq following the March 2003 invasion. The pain and rage we’ve caused over there is incalculable. I came out of this film seething with anger at the Bushies. It made me want to see them strung up. And now along comes this big-studio upper about Americans — three likable renegades — doing the right thing and making it up as they go along and changing history.
Charlie Wilson’s War is based on truth, but it reads like a feel-good ’80s nostalgia ride for people who want to remember a time when Americans were effective in that area and even liked, as opposed to how things are today in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The MIke Nichols film is about Charlie, Gust and Joanne travelling the world (Joanne not as much — Roberts’ role is smaller than Hoffman’s and much smaler than Hanks’) and forming unlikely alliances among Pakistanis, Israelis, Egyptians, arms dealers and lawmakers. “Their success was remarkable,” it says here. “Funding for covert operations against the Soviets went from $5 million to $1 billion annually. The Red Army retreated out of Afghanistan.
“When asked how a group of peasants was able to deliver such a decisive blow to the army of a superpower, Pakistani President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq responded simply, ‘Charlie did it.'”

The first out-of-town, pre-Broadway run for the stage musical version of Mel Brooks‘ Young Frankenstein begins at Seattle’s Paramount theatre on Saturday, 8.4, and closes Saturday, 9.1. The tickets are steep ($175 for orchestra/mezzanine) but they’ll be nowhere near as outrageous as the prices New Yorkers will pay when it starts previews at the Hilton Theatre on 42nd Street on 10.11. (The official opening is on 11.8.) I’m told that premium seats will go for $450 on weekend nights and $375 on weekday nights. I could not in all good conscience part with that much money to see a Mel Brooks musical. I’m happy just watching the DVD of the 1974 film.

The ad slogan for The Bourne Ultimatum (Universal, 8.3) is “this summer Jason Bourne comes home.” But if the Universal marketing guys were to dream up a slogan that honestly characterizes the financial realities behind the making of the third Bourne flick, it might read “the more money an action franchise earns, the more money the next installment will cost. Just ask Jason Bourne.”

That’s a fairly dull slogan so let’s stop cute-ing around and get down to brass tacks. I was told last night that The Bourne Ultimatum, which is locking its final release print over the holiday, has cost more than the first two Bourne films combined, or $175 million. (The Bourne Identity and The Bourne Supremacy both cost $75 million each to shoot, per IMDB and Wikipedia.) The Universal position is that Ultimatum cost $130 million. Big gap there.
I really and truly don’t give a toss how much The Bourne Ultimatum cost. All big-studio movies seem to end up costing a fat pile, and it’s hard to sustain an interest in such things when everything is $100 million this and $200 million that. I just want the film to be good, and a slightly prejudiced friend of Ultimatum tells me it’s “flat-out great, and that’s what should matter most of all.
“One of the things that distinguishes the Bourne films is that authentic, you-are- there, on-the-ground subjective shooting style — that near-verite trademark feel,” he says. “The production visited Morocco, Paris, London, Spain, Berlin and New York, but the Bourne series is not one of those metastasizing, ever-inflating behemoths like some other franchises. [Director Paul] Greengrass has become an even more accomplished director since the last go-’round and his virtuosity is one of the things that is a hallmark for Ultimatum.”
Okay, but I don’t want to experience the same heebie-jeebie, super-shaky handheld photography and spazzy machine-gun cutting that was used in two or three of The Bourne Supremacy‘s action sequences. Some moviegoers went with it, and some (including myself) found it infuriating. I was saying to myself, “Stop whipping the camera around and cutting everything so fast…it’s too much work to follow what’s going on!”

Where were we? Oh, yeah, the higher costs. I’m told that the engorged Ultimatum tab is due to an alleged 35 days of extra shooting above and beyond the original principal photography schedule. (The Bourne Ultimatum began shooting on 10.2.06.) “They weren’t happy with what they had so they kept going back in stages and adding or re-shooting this and that,” is how it was conveyed to me by an off-the-lot source.
This sounds like a pretty good thing from an audience perspective. The more exacting and perfectionist Greengrass and producer Frank Marshall were, the better the final film is likely to be…right?
I tried to get my Universal insider to confirm or question the “extra 35 days of shooting” story, and he replied that “none of that can accurately be told. It’s not a matter of ’35 extra days’ or the schedule starting on this day and going until that one. There were hiatus breaks built into the schedule as well, so it can’t be said that it started here and shot till then. The hiatuses were built in to accommodate the unorthodox schedule.”
All he would say beyond this is that “‘additional’ stuff was shot in all locations. The same was true of Supremacy and Identity.”
Universal’s Bourne Ultimatum website says Identity and Supremacy have earned over $500 million in global box office. Wikipedia says Supremacy did $288,500,217 worldwide and Identity did $213,925,107 million. Supremacy, in other words, made almost four times as much as it cost to shoot (i.e., $75 million), and Identity earned almost three times as much as it cost to shoot (i.e., ditto).
Boil it all down and the higher budget figures (be it the official $130 million or the alleged $175 million) suggest that Ultimatum can’t be the breadwinner that the first two films were.

The Ultimatum friend argues that using a budget-gross ratio formula “loses steam when you consider the nature of franchise revenues and how this series has built considerably from first to second film and how those ancillary revenue streams — everything from DVD to TV, etc — are different for the third in a successful series.”
I told him that I absolutely love that shot in the Ultimatum trailer of Damon jumping from one building to another in Tangier with the camera jumping right along with him. “A very cool CG shot,” I said. But it’s not that, I was told. “The cameraman actually followed the jump and caught that as a practical,” the Universal guys says.
With a crane, I presume he meant. The shot is so smooth and flotating it’s hard to believe it’s not a digital creation. I’ve watched it five or six times this morning. The guy just wrote back and said “not a crane — the cameraman made the jump himself off the roof!” To which I replied, “Oh, come on…!!”

Fantasy Moguls’ Steve Mason is predicting a $152 million, six-day total for Transformers, but I”ve been told of a lower projection (composed by a competing studio) of $149,851,000. Dreamamount will undoubtedly claim $150 million and change if the actual final figure is anywhere close to that.
The best Transformers earning day so far has been the $29 million and change it took in last Wednesday. It did $22,201,000 yesterday, which was $2 million higher than Thursday’s total but $7 million below Wednesday’s.
Ratatouille‘s weekend projection is $30,878,000 — a good hold. Live Free or Die Hard will take in roughly $17,500,000 for the weekend. License to Wed wll end up with $10,5000,000 for the weekend…a cume of $17.8 or $17.9 million for six days (having opened Tuesday).
Evan Almighty will have a three-day tally of $8,719,000 by Sunday night. Figure a cume of $80 or $90 million. It lost 490 theatres this past week, which is unusual for a big studio film in its third week of play. 1408 will take it $7,091,000 for weekend. Knocked Up — $5,226,000. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer — $4,140,000. Ocean’s 13 — $3,668,000.
Sicko added 280 theatres but is down 24% from last weekend. It will probably earn between $25 and 30 million by the end of the run.

Two things wrong with Stuart Gordon‘s House of Re-Animator idea, which is about Herbert West bringing Dick Cheney and George Bush back to life with one of his green-liquid injections inside the White House. One, he’s a little late. The movie should be coming out, at the latest, sometime early next year, and Gordon doesn’t even have the financing together. And two, a Bush White House Reanimator movie won’t be worth much in terms of home video revenues because it’ll be totally dated as of January 20, 2009. It should have actually come out last year, or in ’05. Otherwise, it sounds hilarious.

“Walking out of a movie means something,” writes Chicago Tribune critic Michael Phillips. “It means a filmmaker has crossed a personal line in the sand. We ‘ankle,” as the show business publication Variety likes to put it, for different reasons. A walkout’s significance depends largely on the pace of the exit (fleeing in revulsion versus schlumping out, bored beyond recognition) in relation to the crimes up on screen.” I’ll never forgot being bawled out by three or four journos at the Westwood Bruin for walking out on Eight-Legged Freaks. As if I’d done something wrong. Who, today, would stand up for Eight Legged Freaks? Hell, who remembers Eight Legged Freaks?

Transformers will “certainly” make more than $150 million by Sunday night, I’ve been told. This is too depressing to write about at any length. If I could have clapped my hands and turned Transformers into a box-office bust, I would have clapped my hands and said “yeah.” I have this image of a 1500-foot tall statue of Micheal Bay striding Hollywood Blvd. like the Colossus of Rhodes, and then the statue suddenly coming alive with people screaming and cars crashing down below. And then Bay hearing the commotion and looking down and grinning, and then putting his hands on his hips and throwing his head back and going, “Hoo-haw-haw-haw-haw-haw!” — just like the big genie in Alexander Korda‘s The Thief of Baghdad.

A trailer for Ang Lee‘s Lust Caution (Focus Features, 9.28), a World War II espionage thriller featuring tasteful hot nude scenes featuring Chinese film star Tang Wei. The Focus copywriter says that Tony Leung (In the Mood for Love) plays Mr. Yee, “a powerful political figure in 1940s Shanghai.” with whom Tang Wei “gets swept up in a dangerous game of emotional intrigue.”

What the copywriter meant to say is that she does a Mata Hari on the guy, having an affair with him as part of a plan to either get information or set him up for a hit….or both. And that things get a little complicated by the fact that she falls in love with him. Ang Lee is a great cinematic painter and we all know it’s the singer not the song, but my God this could be the plot of a Sydney Sheldon novel.

No telling how good Ben Affleck‘s Gone Baby Gone (Miramax, 10.19) may be, but the trailer is very well cut — a solid indication of a pro-level thing. You can sort of tell that Casey Affleck gives a sharp, convincing performance as a Boston-area private dick. Morgan Freeman appears to be doing his excellent usual usual; ditto Michele Monaghan. It feels like this could be Mystic River and then some. You can’t trust feelings and intimations, of course. The proof will be in the pudding, which I presume will be served at the Toronto Film Festival.