Would you believe a brand-new computer developing a serious sound-drive glitch and being unable to generate any sound after two weeks of use? I have no choice in the matter. Hence my tardiness in getting stuff up for the next few hours, being at the total mercy of the Geek Squad at the Best Buy on lower Broadway.

Bryan Reesman‘s 12.17 N.Y. Times piece considers the tribulations of “Oscar Hell” week — i.e., Academy members having to see every last film in a relatively short space of time (mid November to late December, although they have until early January), and, apparently for a majority of Academy members, mainly on DVD screeners. The reality is that a lot of films — the lower-budgeted indies without big stars — simply don’t get seen.
“You’d be amazed how many smaller movies don’t even get the cellophane cracked by academy members, because they’re into looking at the higher-profile films first,” says publicist Murray Weissman. “They just don’t have time.”
Motion Picture Academy officials, Reesman writes, “claim indifference to the frenzy that they have unleashed by compressing the Oscar season.” AMPAS spokesperson John Pavlik says that Academy members “should have been seeing the films throughout the year, not waiting until the week after Christmas to start watching movies.” And Pandemonium Films honcho Bill Mechanic (who’s also a former member of the academy’s board of governors), says, “There’s probably a greater volume in December than there used to be, but if you’re a caring member of the academy, you do your work.”
Just as a relatively modest percentage of kids in your high-school English class did their reading and turned in their homework with absolute regularity, so goes the Academy’s approach to “doing the work.” Most of them do it catch as catch can; some are outright slackers.

I can’t find it on Amazon, but I’ve been told that Warner Home Video will release Alexander Revisited: The Unrated Final Cut on 2.27.07. I presume this isn’t a put-on. Oliver Stone‘s epic will arrive in its third incarnation with more than 45 minutes of never-before-seen footage restored into the tale of the Macedonian conqueror. The nearly four- hour version will arrive (naturally) with a 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer and Dolby Digital 5.1 audio track. Selling for $24.98, it says. This is not, just to be clear, the “Director’s Cut” DVD that came out last August, but a new incarnation.

Universal Pictures chairman Marc Schmuger has said the following to the Wall Street Journal about Evan Almighty, which looks like the most expensive comedy ever made: “You’ve got…a PG-13 movie that men, women, children and audiences of all ages are going to want to see and you’ve got the eye candy of great spectacle and visual effects. That adds up to a movie we’re supporting to an enormous degree.” It’s taken from a WSJ piece, excerpted here by Hollywood Wiretap‘s Nancy Vialatte, about how comedies are the new tentploes…right. Tentpole movies are necessary evils — producers and studio chiefs have no choice in the matter — but to guys on the street like me, they’re instant avoiders unless they have a certain attiudinal spark.

All the implied downward-swirl indications about American Pie and Scary Movie 2 costar Natasha Lyonne are probably valid — the girl needs help. And there’s certainly no excuse or upside in exhibiting unruly behavior or missing four court hearings and all that. But there are very few readers of this item who haven’t momentarily lost it and used a colorfully vicious expression in the midst of a heated argument. Lyonne’s choice of words during an argument with a neighbor was to threaten sexual molestation of the neighbor’s dog. Audiences would laugh if that phrase was used by Samuel L. Jackson in a Quentin Tarantino movie, but because it’s part of a legal complaint and has been the lead in various tawdry news stories about Lyonne’s latest meltdown, “I’m going to schtup your dog” is in her Wikipedia biography from here to eternity.

Two hits, one bomb among the major openers this weekend. The Pursuit of Happyness is #1 with a projected $27,165,000 tally, or roughly $9525 per print, and Eragon, believe it or not, is #2 with an expected Sunday-night cume of $23,929,000, or $7923 a print. Charlotte’s Web is the shortfaller — $13,145,000 projected at $3695 a print spells weak and sputtering.
Happy Feet will be #4 at $8,910,000 for the weekend…off 31%. The Holiday is #5 at $8,143,000, off 36%…decent hold. Mel Gibson‘s Apocalypto is sixth at $7,629,000, off 49%. Blood Diamond, off 39%, will hit $6,045,000 for the #7 slot. Casino Royale will bring in $6,045,000 for an eighth-place finish. The Nativity Story will be #9 with $5,398,000, and Unaccompanied Minors is tenth with $4,781,000.
The limited hard-ticket debut of Dreamgirls is looking at $279,000 for the weekend, or about $93,000 a print. Theyr’e doing pretty well but crowds are not breaking down the doors. They’re doing about 50% of capacity,although business will bump today. The problem is that it’s angled at a mainly-older crowd. — 35 to 40 and up — and the 10:30 pm show is too late for this group. Young people have no problem with late-evening shows, but under 20s wouldn’t be caught dead seeing Dreamgirls. (My 17 year-old son Dylan, in Manhatan for the weekend, said as much.)
Steven Soderbegh‘s The Good German opened in 5 theatres and will do about 79,000, or 15,737 a print. Irwin Winkler‘s Home of the Brave, also playing limited, died. The weekend projection is for about $22,000 or $7000 a print…Winkler strikes again. It was pretty obvious this film was doomed from the get-go short of ecstatic reviews, which haven’t manifested.

Here’s something to go along with Tom O’Neil‘s impressions/ lessons about the Golden Globe noms, and one delivered by one of Dreamgirls‘ most ardent journalist fans: the dirty little secret (suspected or otherwise) about the Hollywood Foreign Press is that their racial attitudes or predispositions are not, to put it gently, fully enlightened. This water-table element, the journo believes, is the reason there’s a good chance they may blow off Dreamgirls for the Best Picture (Comedy or Musical) award. The tipoff, he believes, was in the HFPA’s refusal to give Bill Condon a Best Director nom. This showed their true colors…where they’re basically coming from.

For me, at least half of the tingly rumble in Richard Eyre and Patrick Marber‘s Notes on a Scandal (Fox Searchlight, 12.27) is in the Phillip Glass score. Here are two tracks. If you let them in, you’ll most likely be hooked. Think of Fatal Attraction but lesbo-ish and with no rabbits. And much smarter with some well-educated English flavoring.

“People are talking seriously about Little Miss Sunshine getting Oscar attention, and if all the tentpole movies hadn’t crashed and burned the way they did, people wouldn’t even be considering it.” — film critic and author John Anderson, interviewed by Variety‘s Andrew Barker about Oscar hopes, hunches, regrets and dislikes.

Writing about Gabriele Muccino‘s The Pursuit of Happyness, Newsweek‘s David Ansen gives it a thumbs sideways: “I respect the movie’s tact, its honest exploration of homelessness, its surprising refusal to exult in the rags-to-riches aspects of Chris Gardner‘s story,” he says, “but I can’t say I was transported. There’s a repetitious, one-note quality to the storytelling — the bone-density machine Chris sells gets stolen one too many times — that adds to the sense of oppression. I didn’t see the ’20/20′ show about the real Gardner that inspired the movie. But I suspect I would have come away more amazed and moved than I was by this honorable but dogged effort.” Views like these are why this film has a substandard 66% Rotten Tomatoes rating.

“Borat is also suing Fox. He thought he was part of a documentary. He didn’t realize it was a comedy. He signed the release form when he was drunk and he was weak from having sexy time. He wanted to make clear that he would have only been anti-Semitic if he knew it was not going out in America.” — Sacha Baron Cohen, speaking at the British Comedy Awards. (Acknowledgment: the preceding quote and YouTube clip is completely and absolutely owned in eternal cyber perpetuity by David Poland and Movie City News because, you know, the link showed up on MCN a few minutes before the HE version. That means I’ve effectively stolen it from MCN, and that Poland and Movie City News have been unjustly violated by yours truly.)

“Kicking off yet another projected cinematic trilogy laden with dungeons, dragons and digital wizardry, Eragon confirms that novelist Christopher Paolini is no J.R.R. Tolkien — but more to the point, helmer Stefen Fangmeier is no Peter Jackson,” says Variety‘s Justin Chang on the just-opened 20th Century Fox release.
“Appropriating all the external trappings of big-budget fantasy but none of the requisite soul, this leaden epic never soars like the CG-rendered fire-breather at the core of its derivative mythology.”

This obviously doomed Rings wannabe, incidentally, has a 15% Rotten Tomatoes rating — one of the all-time lowest in my memory. My favorite review thus far is by southflorida.com’s Chauncey Mabe: “For those who love the fantasy genre known as sword and sorcery — and I count myself in their number — sitting through the movie version of Eragon will suck the will to live right out of you.”