The only thing wrong with this generally first-rate trailer for Peter Berg‘s The Kingdom (Universal, 9.28) is a single line of narration — spoken by some Don La Fontaine-y sounding guy and also printed on-screen. There’s also a curiously “off” image of Jennifer Garner on the right side of the ad art. Take a close look below and tell me she looks like Garner. Because she looks like…I don’t know, 20% Garner and 80% Mandy Moore?

The Kingdom, which I saw three or four weeks ago, is about a team of crack FBI investigators (Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper, Garner, etc.) sent to Saudi Arabia to explore the specifics behind an explosion that has killed several Americans inside a Riyadh residential compound. The problem with the narration is that it says that “they have come to catch a killer.” At no point in The Kingdom does anyone hypothesize, much less suspect, that there’s a single guy behind the bombing. Never…not for a second.
The idea of a lone nut killing anyone in that area of the world is ludicrous — every American death, every IED, every sniper shot from the top of a building is a group effort. The Middle East arena isn’t about “find the lone psycho” — it’s about “how do we stop thousands of psycho Islamic jihadists from wanting to shove a spear into the chest of the Great Satan?” But the Universal ad person who wrote the copy said to himself, “Fuck that…it sounds cooler if they’r’e trying to catch a lone killer than a hundred wackos. Screw it…let’s make it sound like it might be The Silence of the Riyadh Lambs.”

What The Kingdom really is, when you break it down and take off the sunglasses, is an episode of CSI: Riyadh with a totally riveting third-act that recalls the trapped-diplomat-ambush scene in Clear and Present Danger…in part. There’s a lot more hide-and-seek, shoot-and-run energy besides this. It’s real fine stuff, but first you have to get through those first two acts, which are…well, fine. By this I mean that they’re acceptable, moderately satisfying, engaging as far as they go, no significant potholes.

A non-industry movie fan named Michael something-or-other (one of his portrait photos is identified as “miraulam”) who works as a florist but also attended Comic-Con ’07 has either created or posted on his “Various and Sundry” blog one of the most sexy and transfixing CG montage pieces of famous Hollywood actresses I’ve ever seen.
Spanning 80 years of big-star faces, the piece is unfortunately called “Women in Film” …but we can get past that. What’s awesome is not just a melt-morph from one face to another — an easily achievable effect — but the creator having chosen the right similar-looking faces and then tilting their heads and blending their expressions in just the right way so there seems to be some kind of genetic connection between them.
After a while it starts to seem as if the souls of all these actresses are blending into each other, and thereby making them (in a sense) into one and the same lady — born and created and refined by the same celestial force…all with a separate but at the same time identical something-or-other. Trippy stuff for a Saturday morning. For a while there I felt a little memory-lane mescaline thing.

The IMDB has been asking readers to name their favorite Ingmar Bergman film in tribute to last Monday’s passing of the legendary Swedish director. So far 46% of the respondents have said they haven’t seen a Bergman film. I’m not surprised — I would have predicted that more like 60% or 70% would have said this, given the cinema literacy levels out there. 19% said that The Seventh Seal (i.e., which they know because of the much-parodied chess-playing scene) is their favorite, but 11% said they’re not Bergman fans at all. Only 0.7% picked The Silence — my favorite because it’s the sexiest.

My Bourne Ultimatum prediction of a $70 million haul (or just shy of that) was fairly close to the mark. The Paul Greengrass/ Matt Damon/Tony Gilroy/ Frank Marshall thriller did $24,504,000 yesterday (including coin from a few Thursday midnight screenings), and one studio projection has it making $70,071,000 by Sunday night. It might wind up closer to $67, $68 million….we’ll see.

Having done $6900 a print yesterday, it’s expected to earn about $19 thousand a print for the weekend. Business might be flat today (it may even go down a tad — sequels tend to do that) but you never know. John English (i.e., the “jerms” guy) is saying it’ll hit $60 million….wrong! The only “Road to Box-Office Hell” Movie City News guy to get it half-right was “Nikki’s Pals” with a prediction of $65 million. All the others said it would end up in the high 50s.
I was told last Monday that my $70 million Bourne projection was out of the question, that Casino Royale opened to $40.8 million and that ’04’s The Bourne Supremacy opened to $52.5 million “so there’s very little family/four-quadrant element to this, so it virtually can’t jump to those upper numbers.” Well, I’m told that the Universal gang has been expecting between $60 to $70 million all along.
The Simpsons Movie is expected to end up with $23,808,000 by Sunday night. That’s a drop of 68% from last weekend’s debut — a nose-dive. “The people who wanted to see it, saw it,” one guy tells me. “The CinemaScore rating was high, an A minus. But it had a limited audience.”
The third-place Underdog is the second most popular opener with aprojected $12,166,000 for the weekend. 3000 theatres, $4000 a print. I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry will make $10,100,000 by Sunday night. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix will come in fifth with $9,356,000 for the weekend. Hairspray will make $9,158,000 by Sunday evening.
No Reservations is off 45% from its opening weekend for a projected haul of $6,475,000. It’s heading for a cume of $30 million, maybe the low $30s, and it cost…what?….$45 or $50 million to shoot? It’s not going to make back the p & a. It’ll lose theatres next weekend and it has nowhere to go but down.
Transformers, $5,854,000. Hot Rod, $5,344,000. Bratz, $4,084,000. Ratatouiille will make $3,792,000 for a cume of $188 million…it’s be a tough push to $200 million. El Cantante, another new film, will make $2,029,000 in 542 theatres. Becoming Jane is looking at $1,082,000 for the weekend in 542 theatres. The Ten is looking at $131,000 of about $5000 a print.

Keith Richards‘ manager Jane Rose flat-out lied to MTV.com’s Kurt Loder on 4.3.07 when he called to check on the story about Keith mixing his dad Bert’s ashes with some cocaine and then shorting the mixture up his nose. Rose said the snorting story was “untrue” and “made in jest,” but yesterday Richards told an anonymous Daily Express reporter that he “did inhale his father’s remains — just not with blow. ‘The cocaine bit was rubbish,’ Richards is quoted as saying. ‘I said I chopped him up like cocaine, not with.'”
The fibbing may not have been Rose’s idea entirely. When the story was retracted it was presumed that former Disney publicist Dennis Rice or some other lackey in the pipeline had strongly urged the Richards’ camp to make the Bert story go away because dad-snorting would turn off the family audience that Disney was looking to pull into Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World’s End, which Richards had a small cameo part in.

Studio exec #1 on Lindsay Lohan: ”Her troubles are what made her famous. Her films don’t open. She’s a pain to work with. I think she’s done.” Studio exec #2: ”She had the world at her feet, and right now she’d have to pay a studio to get herself into a movie.” Studio exec #3: ”I think she has to stay alive.” — from “I Know Who Killed Your Career,” an 8.2.07 Entertainment Weekly article by Sean Smith.

When you watch There Will be Blood, “expect a film with mesmerizing imagery. Director Paul Thomas Anderson seems intent on creating iconic images for the modern age. In my opinion, the best way to describe the essence of this film is that it will be Kubrickian. For those Anderson fans who’ve been waiting for five years, the trademarks remain intact — the camera follows characters in long-sustained shots, there are scenes of intense emotion, and by God there will be blood. I would not call the material overtly violent, but nonetheless the deaths and murders that the script describes are both horrifying in their graphic rawness and their dark intention. This picture will be a harrowing experience, and not just in its visuals.” — From a script review by Oscar Igloo‘s Robert Cameron.

The high-def trailer for Robert Redford‘s Lions for Lambs (MGM/UA, 11.9). Three story threads — a California professor (Redford) and his students (Derek Luke, Michael Pena, and then later on Andrew Garfield), a high-powered Senator (Tom Cruise) and a journalist (Meryl Streep), and Redford’s two earlier students (Luke, Pena) slugging it out in Afghanistan.

How come we haven’t heard about this very-much-of-the-moment, headline-reflecting drama going to the Toronto Film Festival? Let me guess. The view is that it’s a major stand-alone film that will only be devalued by taking part in a huge, high-toned clusterfuck like Toronto. Or Redford, Cruise and Streep are considered too important to take part in a clusterfuck. Or someone is thinking that a soldiers-in-Afghanistan film vs. two Iraq films (In The Valley of Elah, Redacted) will make for one too many Middle Eastern conflict movies, especially at a film festival commonly regarded as a clusterfuck.

The more golden-hued the lighting, the pricier the clothes, the more spotless the sets, the more perfect the hair on the actors….the more insipid the film is.

I don’t know how many years ago Errol Morris assembled this short, but some of the comments are fairly wonderful. And I love that guy who’s interpreting for Mikhail Gorbachev.

You really have to hand it to Scott Foundas for writing a big L.A. Weekly piece that says Brett Ratner “is a talented filmmaker who deserves to be taken seriously.” If you’re not willing to say the unpopular thing now and then, you’re not worth very much as writer, and for this Foundas has my respect. Even if his proposition — call it a notion — is only half-right.

Brett Ratner

Ratner is a talented filmmaker. Perhaps moderately, perhaps more so. But so far he hasn’t done much with his gifts except make commercial “movies.” And by my standards, he hasn’t put any serious feeling, conviction or high-level craft into any of them. And forget original or innovative. Ratner’s longstanding yen to be a successful, well-paid director and groove with the commercial swing of things gives him a tomcat joie de vivre aura — he’s not Todd Louiso — but his films feel much more like “displays” or “presentations” than anything else.
Ratner is not Karel Reisz, Samuel Fuller or Curtis Hanson. You can’t equate him to middle-range talents who’ve enjoyed admirable flare-up periods like John Frankenheimer or Irvin Kershner. He sure as hell isn’t a stylist like Val Lew- ton. At best he may be Phil Karlson or Mervyn LeRoy. He’s not even Arthur Hiller, who at least made The Americanization of Emily and The Hospital. I’m not one of those who lumps in Ratner with satanic forces like McG, Michael Bay, Stephen Sommers or Roger Kumble, but I do think the best anyone can say about him is that he’s an above-average hack with formidable social skills.
The core of Foundas’ argument is that “it matters to Ratner that his films seem expressive of his personality.” His examples are Money Talks (’97 — Ratner’s first feature), After the Sunset (’04), and “perhaps most of all” the Rush Hour movies.” Ratner, says Foundas, “is there in the preponderance of classic r & b and hip-hop on their soundtracks; in their exuberant celebrations of beautiful women, fast cars and other assorted bling; and in their conscious homages to the movies that made Ratner want to become a director in the first place.”

Scott Foundas

But to me the whole take-Ratner-seriously idea falls apart when you read that the 38 year-old director has told people “that The Family Man is his most personal film.” That’s the film in which Nicolas Cage decides it’s better for his soul, his marriage to Tea Leoni and particularly the welfare of his kid to go back to New Jersey and sell tires rather than live the the uptown life of a well-paid businessman. I always thought that was a cloying and dishonest view of things, and that anyone who would embrace it as something real and profound has a stunted view of human nature as well as bad taste.
I got to know Ratner a few years ago through my friendship with James Toback. Ratner was friendly, gracious and a good fellow when I visited him at his Benedict Canyon home. He picked up the phone after that and all was well.
Then I saw him at Cinevegas in ’02 and happened to ask him at one point why his ex-girlfriend Rebecca Gayheart, whom he had helped with emotional support and legal assistance after her involvement in a terrible accident in ’01 in which a child was killed, wasn’t attending the festival with a short film she’d made (a pretty good one called Me and Daphne) that the festival was showing. Ratner said she couldn’t come because she was visiting family. That was hard to swallow. I felt dissed, in fact, by being fed a half-truth, and I expressed this doubt in a column. The next thing I knew Ratner’s attorney Marty Singer was on my cell phone threatening me.
I took down the sentence about Gayheart’s no-show, but I thought about this later on. Ratner had lied to me, and then he told a pit-bull attorney to get in my face when I wrote that I felt I’d been lied to. I decided from this episode that he’s a snowjobber and a bit of a thug. But a lot of people b.s. a lot of other people in this town, and I decided later on that Ratner was expressing his feelings of loyalty and protectiveness for Gayheart when he had Singer call me. Let bygones be bygones, I figured. But he’s still not that much of a director, and I honestly don’t think he’s on his way up anytime soon.

Stories about the recent suicide deaths of writer Theresa Duncan (Tylenol and alcohol) and then her boyfriend Jeremy Blake (walking into the sea like Sterling Hayden did in The Long Goodbye) are all over the place. L.A. Fishbowl‘s Kate Coe has an L.A. Weekly story in this week’s issue, Chris Lee has an 8.3 story about the tragic duo in the L.A. Times, and Lee says in an online chat with Coe that Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, New York magazine and CNN’s Anderson Cooper are also preparing reports.

the late Theresa Duncan

It therefore felt a bit creepy when by Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone sent me a page of Duncan’s elegant blog (called “The Wit of the Staircase”), dated 2.21.06, that listed “Four Bloggers J’Adore” as follows: “1.Jorn Barger, 2. Lauren Cerand, 3. Jeff Wells, 4. Bad Feminist.” Flattering, okay, but this means there’s something about Hollywood Elsewhere that appeals to the mind of an obviously bright, attractive, 40 year-old woman who decided to off herself. I’m not sure I feel 100% great about this. There’s no romance or transportation in suicide. There is only ink, blackness …plug pulled.
Then Stone wrote once more and pointed out the existence of another guy named “Jeff Wells” whose site is called Rigorous Intuition. So never mind. (Sorry for calling it Rigorous Institution earlier, but a part of me automatically gravitated to that wording. Sound funnier, for one thing.)