There’s something vaguely therapeutic about this routine. I listen to it every two or three months. And it wouldn’t be funny if millions didn’t understand that a lot of people out there are in the grip of an obsession, and that they’re compeletely powerless against it. No controlling it, no taming it….slaves under the whip. Doesn’t sound very funny at all, and yet…

I’ve been hearing stuff about the Bill Maher-Larry Charles anti-religion doc for a few months now, and I wasn’t invited to see the “sizzle reel” in Cannes two months ago. (No journalists were — only buyers.) But now Lionsgate has bought the domestic distribution rights, and the plan is to release it sometime “next spring.” Wait…eight or nine more months? One of these guys is an ass-dragger. Why don’t they take another year?

Bill Maher, Larry Charles

Charles (the Borat helmer) “followed Maher all over the world as the irreverent host of HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher interviewed people about God and religion,” according to Michael Fleming‘s 7.12 Variety story. Here’s Maher ranting about religion during his stage show, and a Real Time discussion about how Islam “is not a religion of peace.”

This already famous shot of Jessica Alba for Good Luck, Chuck (Lionsgate, 9.21) is so much better than the mock Lennon-Ono one-sheet I posted yesterday, I’m surprised there’s even the slightest uncertainty.

Gawker is reporting that Hollywood-based N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman will “definitely be joining the Metro desk” under editor Joe Sexton — i.e., moving to New York City — “when her book leave is over later this year. “A single source” told Gawker that Waxman will be on “the religion beat.” Contacted in Cairo where she’s doing research on a book about antiquities, Waxman told Gawker she “[has] no comment because Gawker has not shown itself to function by accepted journalistic rules.” I called Sexton a couple of hours ago and haven’t heard back. I called two others within the organization who might have helped clarify, but no replies from them either.

“The dynamic between celebrities and their audience is shifting,” Variety‘s Anne Thompson wrote in a 7.12 posting. “The critics and the media no longer have the last word. Thanks to evolving technology, moviemakers and stars have new weapons to not only promote their projects directly to moviegoers, but to fight back against what they perceive as misinformation. They are taking advantage of their internet fanbases to promote their projects, skipping the marketing middlemen and interacting directly with the people who buy tickets. Fan sites offer them valuable feedback about what their audiences like and dislike. But they also offer an opportunity to set the record straight. And sometimes, change the world.”

The amazing thing about this motorcycle accident footage is that one of these guys gets right up and runs away, like he’s the T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and the other guy (the one with the red helmet) staggers up and then half-hobbles away, obviously dazed and hurting. If this was depicted in a film they’d both be dead or groaning on the pavement — no way would anyone run from the scene after being in a head-on slammer and then doing a one-and-a-half-gainer in the air. Reality trumps fiction nine times out of ten.

Calling, calling, calling around to try and understand why Bob Weinstein‘s Dimension only yesterday decided to pull the plug on the 7.20 release of All The Boys Love Mandy Lane, a kind of Ten Little Indians/ Cabin Fever-ish slasher film with Amber Heard, Anson Mount, Michael Welch, et. al. A Weinstein Co.publicist told me that no alternative release date has been set.

Amber Heard

There have been indications over the least two or three weeks that Dimension wasn’t working all that hard at promoting this unrated, 88-minute film. When a distributor decides on a release date change it’ll usually be announced a month or more in advance, but suddenly yanking a film eight days before the announced release date with no substitute date mentioned is pretty much without precedent. There was an L.A. screening last Tuesday (7.10) that I missed; the two screenings that were scheduled for next week (Monday, 7.16 at the ESP Culver Plaza Theatre, and Tuesday, 7.17 at the Clarity) have been cancelled.
All The Boys Love Mandy Lane was first shown at last September’s Toronto Film Festival, so it can’t be a matter of the film being unspeakably bad. My first thought when I heard the news was probably the same as everyone else’s, to wit: the current down cycle in torture-porn/slasher films gave the Weinstein brothers the willies, and one of them woke up at 3:30 ayem a week or two ago and said, “We have to yank it and shelve it until further notice! We’re hurting as it is, and we can’t spend any p & a on a genre film that no one wants to see right now.”
There’s an interesting story here but something tells me I’m not going to nail it this afternoon.

Yesterday Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix sold $18 million worth of tickets — a sharp (and expected) drop from Wednesday’s record $32 million tally. Add the $12 million from Tuesday night and Wednesday’s figure was actually $44 million, and that figure becomes $62 million when you throw in yesterday’s $18 million,. Potter will probably earn somewhere in the mid $60s for the weekend. Make it $65 million plus the already-bagged $62 and we’re talking a Sunday night total of about $127 million.

Since writing a January 2003 slam piece about the exceedingly rote box-office spinmeister Paul Dergarabedian (“The Man Who Would Be Dull”), I’ve wondered every so often if anyone would voice a similar view. I had pretty much given up hope but now, four a half years later, it’s finally happened. New York magazine’s Vulture editor Dan Kois has written a 7.12 piece called “Paul Dergarabeidan Must Be Stopped.”

“How many times can you write, ‘Harry Potter was magic at the box office’ before your will to live evaporates?,” he says in one passage. “That’s where Paul Dergarabedian comes in. Dergarabedian, who worked for box-office tracking firm Exhibitor Relations for fourteen years before starting his own company, Media by Numbers, in December, is the media’s go-to guy for insipid quotes about the box office.”

Here’s how I put it way back when…

“Your eyelids are getting heavy. You’re feeling sluggish, listless…under the weather. You don’t have the flu or even a cold, but something’s wrong and you can’t figure out what.

“Then it hits you — it’s Monday morning and you’ve just finished reading a news story about the weekend box-office figures, and one of the industry analysts quoted was Paul Dergarabedian… that’s it! You were thinking about taking a couple of aspirin and drinking plenty of liquids, when all the time it was just an involuntary reaction to a perfectly likable box-office analyst with a beard and a warm smile and a narcotizing way with words.”

As the photo accompanying the New York piece confirms, Degarabedian has since shaved his beard.

“Dergarabedian is routinely requested by Hollywood industry analysts like the New York Times‘ Rick Lyman, USA Today‘s Scott Bowles, and Dave Germain of the Associated Press to explain the weekend numbers and give some kind of bland, toothless spin about which movie won or lost, and why,” my ’03 piece explained.

“Everybody likes Paul. He’s a nice, dependable guy who always has the numbers at hand and is always ready to discuss them on Sunday afternoons, when box-office stories are usually written. And yet I feel he’s giving the art of Hollywood box-office analysis an unfortunate taint of roteness and tedium. His pronouncements are almost oppressively mundane.

“I can’t think of any statistic or judgment Dergarabedian has ever put forward that was wrong, but to me he always sounds so damnably measured, safe, underwhelming and status-quo affirming, which has a kind of Orwellian effect after a while.

“When box-office snipers suggested last May that the opening-weekend take of George Lucas‘s dreadful Attack of the Clones wasn’t what it might have been (i.e., if word-of-mouth hadn’t been so forbidding), Dergarabedian dutifully rushed to the defense of this contemptible film. ”George Lucas is bulletproof in terms of box office,” he told Lyman. ”Regardless of what the critics say, people love these movies. To be the fifth installment in a series that’s been around for 25 years and still to be making this kind of money is truly amazing.”

“See what I mean?

“When Michael Ciepley wrote in the N.Y. Times that some observers “see the coming of Kill Bill and similar fare as the restoration of a new order” — i.e., some kind of new cycle of cynical fetishized violence — Dergarabedian brought a level-playing-field mentality to the discussion by noting “there will always be a desire by audiences to see more intense, more graphic or, in some ways, more realistic situations captured on film.”

“Can’t argue with that, can we?

“When Men in Black II, last summer’s sequel to the 1997 megahit, earned an estimated $90 million over the five-day Independence Day holiday, Lyman wrote it had broken both the five- day Fourth of July record set by Independence Day in 1996 ($85 million) and the three- day record set by the original Men in Black in 1997 ($51.1 million). And all three movies starred Will Smith.

“Asked by Lyman for a quote about this noteworthy event, Dergarabedian said, ‘Will Smith beat himself twice, which is pretty amazing.’

“Ask anyone who really knows this town, and they’ll tell you there’s a lot of drama, humor and intrigue to be found in the box-office battle each weekend.

“This or that movie tanked and some one’s to blame, or a trailer has blatantly lied about the content of a just-opened film and audiences are feeling burned, or a good movie has opened poorly but might have a chance if the distributor will keep it in theatres and wait for the word-of-mouth to catch up. It’s as exciting as anything that happens on a basketball court or on a football field. Just sussing out the different lies the studios are trying to float with the media in order to obscure what actually went down is a trip in itself.

“But you’d never know this from listening to Dergarabedian. Or should I say, you’d never know this from reading those regimented box-office stories tapped out by Lyman, Bowles, Germain and their like-minded colleagues?”

A Pathe Pictures sales rep for Francis Coppola‘s Youth Without Youth asked me this morning to take down that negative assessment of the film that was received from a trusted buyer yesterday and posted soon after. The Pathe guy said he was horrified and that airing this view would be damaging, etc. I told him I was torn between feeling that it was fair to post the comment and at the same time feeling a little bit badly about it. But I finally decided to pull it and wait for reactions from some fair-game screening down the road.
I told the rep that I thought the posted comments sounded too rough, as I said in the item, but also that Youth Without Youth is going to have to face the music sooner or later. Coppola has been keeping it under wraps for months and months, and saying all along that it’s a student film, an experimental film, a personal artsy film, etc. Everyone knows that these are code phrases that mean “not that commercial.” I also said I’m in business with distributors all over (I depend on advertising support) and that I don’t want to be an asshole about this. But given my knowing and trusting the source, I explained again that it seemed fair to air the opinion, especially for a film that was shot in Romania and Bulgaria in late ’05 and early ’06, and has been shuffling and re-shuffling the deck ever since.
I said I suspected that Youth Without Youth might be in trouble when it was announced last May that it would have its world premiere at the RomeFilmFest, which is not a serious film festival, is renowned for being a softball venue, and so far has not been frequented by top-level critics (trade and otherwise) or buyers. I expected way back that it would go to Venice or Toronto first. It may go to Telluride (a prestigious but unofficial venue) but I guess we’ll find out soon enough.
In the end I decided I don’t want to cause pain just for the sake of causing pain or asserting stubbornness. I’d like to see Francis Coppola back in the game and plugging away for the next two or three decades, and I don’t want to preemptively interfere with that scenario. And yet I’ve been asking myself if I’m being a pushover. Is anything on HE ripe for removal providing the person requesting such is sufficiently horrified and believes that the item/story will be damaging enough?

“I’m not suggesting that AICN is in the pocket of the studios. Critics hang out with filmmakers all the time, and get schmoozed at junkets. Recently in a series of blogs, the Guardian tackled [this] issue. But fanboys want to be in the movies they adore and hang out with their heroes. [And these days] AICN’s Harry, Quint, Capone, et. al. now seem to be doing this and as a result, this flawed but thrilling site has become smug and pedestrian.
“So here’s my message to Harry: 11 years on the web is about as long as it gets. It’s time to change, either back to something simpler, or something different. I still get stupidly excited to hear that Billy Crudup might be cast as Dr. Manhattan. I want to hear about an early draft script of the Dark Knight. But every time I read that J.J. Abrams wrote you a nice email, I think that you’re not one of us any more — you’re one of them.” — The Guardian‘s Adam Rutherford ripping into Ain’t It Cool News.

A trailer for Robert Benton‘s Feast of Love (MGM, 9.14), a seemingly upmarket relationship comedy base on William Shakespeare‘s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with Gregg Kinnear playing the hapless middle-class guy whose significant other (Selma Blair) leaves him for another woman, and then the girlfriend he hooks up with later on (Radha Mitchell) fools around with another guy. With Morgan Freman, Billy Burke, Alexa Davalos, Toby Hemingway and Jane Alexander.