The weekend’s big winner was Shawn Levy and Ben Stiller‘s Night At The Museum, which is looking at $33 to $35 million by Sunday night. The big tank was McG and Matthew McConaughey‘s We Are Marshall, which may end up with a piddly $7.5 million in 2,606 situations. (A fairly decent sports film…too bad.) And Robert De Niro, Eric Roth and Matt Damon‘s The Good Shepherd is a fourth-place ho-hummer with an estimated $9 million or so in 2,218 theaters.
Gabriele Muccino and Will Smith‘s The Pursuit Of Happyness will be a second-place finisher with about $15 million, maybe a bit less. Rocky Balboa will be third with roughly $14 million — an impressive comeback by the previously all-but-washed-up Stallone.

James Cameron has half-anecdotally announced in a 12.19 Independent interview that Avatar, his long-awaited return to feature filmmaking, won’t hit screens until 2012. Yeah, I’m joshing: he actually said 2009, but what’s the difference? The guy seems afflicted with a near- terminal case of foreplay syndrome — a condition in which the victim becomes far more intoxicated with the rigors of preparing and diddling around (and endlessly talking about same) than pulling the trigger.
A casting breakdown I was sent about 10 months ago for Project 880 (i.e., Avatar) reported (or indicated) a November ’06 start date, which seemed to synch with a generally-understood projection that Avatar would be finished in time for a summer or fall ’08 debut. Repeating: the longer a cherished dream project festers and meanders, the higher the odds of it feeling like a fizzle when it finally arrives.
“I remember going with a great sense of anticipation to each new Stanley Kubrick film and thinking, ‘Can he pull it off and amaze me again?'” Cameron tells Independent interviewer James Rampton. “And he always did. The lesson I learned from Kubrick was, ‘Never do the same thing twice.’ I always want to find something mentally engaging, [and] Avatar is not like anything else I’ve done…nor were Titanic or Terminator or Aliens.
“I’ll spend many months completing the special effects on Avatar, and it will not be released until the summer of 2009. It’s quite a challenge — and for that reason, I embrace it.”

“Much of the media would have you believe that [Christopher Guest‘s] For Your Consideration isn’t as sublime as A Mighty Wind, which three years ago was thought to be not as funny as Best in Show. They’re all brilliant. What the philosopher and literary critic G.K. Chesterton said of Charles Dickens‘ fiction I would say of Guest’s movies: Sit back, relax and savor them, not just as individual movies but as slices of the greater Guest.” — Baltimore Sun critic Michael Sragow writing in the 12.22 L.A. Times.

N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott”s Ten Best of ’06 list has eleven ties for eleventh place, and one of them is the late Fabian Beilinksy‘s The Aura, which I finally saw last summer (a year or so after it was completed) and was pretty much floored by. It’s a seriously unusual psychological crime thriller. IFC will have the DVD out next April.

With one or two exceptions, Tthe Florida Film Critics Circle have delivered a totally non-mind-blowing roster of ’06 superlatives: Best Picture — The Departed; Best Actor — Forest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland; Best Actress — Helen Mirren, The Queen; Best Supporting Actor — Jack Nicholson, The Departed (a sloppy call — Nicholson’s performance is just another standard high-styler; Best Supporting Actress — Cate Blanchett, Notes on a Scandal (good call); Best Director — Martin Scorsese, The Departed; Best Screenplay (Original or Adapted) — William Monahan, The Departed; Best Cinematography — Guillermo Navarro, Pan’s Labyrinth; Best Foreign-Language Film — Pan’s Labyrinth.

The African American Film Critics Association has named The Last King of Scotland‘s Forrest Whitaker as Best Actor of 2006. I don’t want to leap to conclusions, but I think this falls under the heading of “shocker.” Put it this way — is there any group out there of any half-serious standing ready to stand up for any other Best Actor performance? Dreamgirls‘Jennifer Hudson named Best Supporting Actress, Eddie Murphy as Best Supporting Actor, Bill Condon as Best Director….yup. One good thing: the under-acknowledged Akeelah and the Bee was named the years’s fourth best film .

“There’s one performance that hasn’t been recognized by any movie critics group or awards organization despite being one of the year’s most widely praised,” writes Pop Machine‘s Mark Caro. “Where’s the year-end love for Daniel Craig, a.k.a. Agent 007 in Casino Royale? Here’s a guy who was widely dismissed and even ridiculed upon being cast in this iconic role, yet the consensus is he’s the best James Bond since Sean Connery and perhaps the closest one to author Ian Fleming’s original vision.”

Here‘s Wednesday night’s Charlie Rose show with the “three Amigos” — Children of Men‘s Alfonso Cuaron, Babel‘s Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu and Pan’s Labyrinth‘s Guillermo del Toro.

A more-than-possible Best Picture scenario: Little Miss Sunshine, the little family comedy-drama that could, wins the Oscar. It wins because (a) it’s the only top-five contender without any nagging negatives, and (b) it’s the only top-five contender that’s really and truly about “us” instead of a film about “them” — a simple but primal insight I’ve just lifted from Oscarwatch‘s Sasha Stone.

The Queen is primarily a story about “them” (the Royal Family, the elites in the Blair government, the British public). Ditto Letters From Iwo Jima (i.e., the doomed, duty-bound Japanese troops of 60 years ago). And The Departed is too impersonal, in a sense, to be about either “them” or “us” — it’s basically about great Scorsese chops suffused with live-wire writing, acting, editing. (This happens to be a very personal thing with me, but that’s another story.)
Dreamgirls seems very much about “them” — Motown culture of the ’60s, black entertainers from the same period, the gents who wrote, directed and produced the Broadway show along with those who produced and made the film. Is there an “us” element in Dreamgirls? I liked a lot of this film, but nothing from my own life seemed woven into it in any way. Am I missing something?
Babel is absolutely about “us” — it’s about kids and parenting and the random nature of interconnected fate that so affects us en masse — and so is Children of Men (which is all about “our” planet and where we seem to be going), The Lives of Others (in one sense about “them” — urban-artist East Germans during the early ’80s — but also about “our” paranoia plus “our” capacity for compassion and growth) and Volver (one of the all-time great family films, but with an “us” focus because it’s so fully about women).
Perhaps the only other film that is as much about “us” as Little Miss Sunshine is United 93, because it shows who we are and what we’re made of. Don’t tell the Academy ostriches about this — it’ll just make them dig their heads all that deeper into the sand.
And yet these five films are all said to have negatives. Babel, I keep hearing from crabby critics, is too much of a stacked deck. The Lives of Others is seen in some quarters as too specifically German (wrong!) and is, of course, German-made and therefore more of a candidate for Best Foreign-Language Film. Volver is Almodovarian and Spanish and looking at the same deal. And a fair-sized portion of the Academy is apparently (I’m hearing) still refusing to see United 93, despite all the Best Picture awards it’s gotten from critics group.s
The films with the two lowest negative factors are Little Miss Sunshine and The Queen — everyone I know either admires or truly loves these two — but Sunshine will take it in the end because it’s more American and more “real” — more about everyone’s day-to-day lives, choices, failings, uncertainties. The Queen, finally, is about how change sometimes comes along out of nowhere and knocks you over, especially if you’re older. But it is also about an exotic culture that is hardly reflects the deep-down American experience.

With mixed feelings, HE is announcing the death of Elsewhere Classic. It lived for a total of nine months, give or take. I created it so people who couldn’t roll with the bloggy format (instituted last March) would feel more comfortable, but you have adapt and go with the times. Plus having a separate parallel column was a drag on memory and resources. I’ve also killed the news ticker, which I added in the summer of ’05. It wasn’t adding anything very significant to the site, although I always liked the energy — the travelling fluidity — of it.

“A movie about the last days of humanity that opens on Christmas Day may seem like a bleak choice for holiday viewing. But Children of Men (Universal, 12.25) is a modern-day nativity story that’s far more moving and even, in its way, reverent than the current film by that name. It’s also the herald of another blessed event: the arrival of a great director by the name of Alfonso Cuaron.

“Though I’ll be coming out with a 10-best list in this space next week, I’ve never been much of one for the year-end obsession with sorting and ranking cultural products in neat rows. But I’ll go out on a limb and say this: [Cuaron’s] dense, dark, and layered meditation on fertility, technology, immigration, war, love, and life itself may be the movie of the still-young millennium.” — from a review by Slate‘s Dana Stevens, posted 12.21.