The older Borat fans lined up yesterday in stronger than anticipated numbers, and so the projected weekend tally has been kicked up to $28,098,000 (according to one studio estimate), or a flat $29 million (according to Box Office Mojo) or $28.6 million (according to MCN’s Len Klady). The cume is now $67.8 million or thereabouts. A guy told me yesterday he and a couple friends went to a 10 pm show last Wednesday somewhere near the Marina, and that it was damn near sold out. I’m guessing Borat will crest $100 million in about 10 days, give or take. Perhaps as soon as next Sunday.
Asked by N.Y. Times editors to choose five comedies they’d want in their knapsack if they were stranded on a remote desert island (i.e., one with electricity, a 36″ Sony flat screen, a table to put it on, a DVD player and an easy chair), none of these funny-ass professionals — Will Ferrell, Judd Apatow, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, Catherine O’Hara, Bernie Mac, Chris Elliott, Christopher Guest, Fred Willard, David Cross, Ricky Gervais, Santiago Segura, Anna Faris plus four others who don’t have very recognizable names — chose Some Like It Hot, okay? Billy Wilder‘s greatest film ever! Recount!
My personal five: Some Like It Hot, The Big Lebowski, Sullivan’s Travels, Dr. Strangelove, Sideways, Flirting With Disaster, Groundhog Day, Prizzi’s Honor, Election, Intolerable Cruelty, Hold That Ghost, Young Frankenstein, Bringing Up Baby, Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life and Planes, Trains and Automobiles . Okay, that’s fifteen…whatever. How about some lists from the readership?
In an otherwise well-reported, technically aware N.Y. Times piece about how director Steven Soderbergh made The Good German (Warner Bros., 12.15) the old-fashioned 1940s way with black and white photography, Michael Curtiz-era lenses, boom mikes and the like, Dave Kehr doesn’t mention the most visually obvious period touch of all — the fact that German has been matted on the sides to give it a 1.66 to 1 aspect ratio rather than today’s standard Academy ratio of 1.85 to 1.
1.66 aspect ratio image, which is how The Good German more or less looks when projected…
I asked Soderbergh at Thursday night’s semi-elite media screening why he hadn’t side-cropped his film to render a boxier 1.33 to 1 image, which was the Academy standard in 1946, when The Good German takes place. “I did,” he answered, “but it seemed a little too much so we [compromised and] went with 1.66.”
1.85 aspect ratio, which is how it would look if Soderbergh hadn’t been so exacting about visual period detail.
There’s a been a conspiracy among film preservationist types to deny that 1.66 to 1 ever existed — they all say that aperture plates used in projectors of the ’50s were set at 1.85 — even if it’s obvious that standard Academy aspect ratio films of the mid to late ’50s and into the mid ’60s were intended to shown at 1.66. Every now and then you meet a smart guy like Soderbergh who says, “Yeah, of course …1.66 to 1 aperture plates were the going thing in the ’50s” but they’re few and far between. DVD companies have commonly masked films of this era with a 1.66 aspect ratio, but the preservationists continue to pooh-pooh it, like it’s a fantasy concept or something.
In an 11.12.06 N.Y. Times story by Ross Johnson about Jerry Bruckheimer and Tony Scott‘s Deja Vu (Disney, 11.22), the details and background of an ultra-realistic explosion — one that was surely inspired on some level by the 9.11.01 Armageddon — are explained.
The World Trade Center explosions are specifically referenced in the following passage in Johnson’s story when Bill Marsilli, one of the film’s screenwriters, describes his reaction to the Deja Vu fireball: “I saw these incredible flames and I just burst into tears. My first thought was ‘My God, what have I done?'”
“As an aspiring screenwriter in September 2001, Marsilii stood on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fourth Street, near his Greenwich Village apartment, and watched in horror as the World Trade Center towers fell. Having struggled to conceptualize Deja Vu since 1997, he stopped writing for a year after the 2001 terrorist attacks, he said. Eventually he returned to the story with another writer, Terry Rossio.”
Later in the story Johnson mentions the fertilzer and fuel-oil explosive used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and compares it to the relatively benign explosives that were used in the film.
On 9.12.01, I wrote the following for a story filed from the Toronto Film Festival: “Those hundreds (more likely thousands) of bodies lying under the rubble in New York and Washington, D.C., have pulverized everyone’s consciousness. Reality has taken over completely. Reality is all. What happened yesterday was beyond horrific, beyond sadistic, beyond the most spectacular Jerry Bruckheimer CGI fireball.
“Those camcorder shots of the buildings crashing down were terrible but awesome. I watched them over and over yesterday and into the night. We all did, I’m sure. It sounds insensitive to even think this, but one result of that footage is that special- effects companies are going to have to get a lot better very quickly. That’s because any huge, computer-created explosion in any new movie is suddenly going to look a lot faker. Reality has raised the bar.”
It’s not a rumor — several of the performances in Karen Moncrief‘s The Dead Girl (First Look, 12.29) are knockout. And I’m not talking about efforts by guys. This is an honest, penetrating but extremely maudlin film about women suffering greatly — the term “deeply depressing” doesn’t begin to describe — and yet it’s a wow on a case-by-case, actress-by-actress basis.
Brittany Murphy‘s inhabiting of a damaged-goods, irrevocably doomed prostitute/ absentee mom is prickly, agitated and full-on. She’s both pathetic and breathtak- ing. It’s a cliche-ish thing to say that Murphy has expanded her range and career prospects in one fell swoop, but that’s pretty much fact. She’s only on-screen for 20 minutes or so, and there isn’t time for her character to express more than two or three shades of desperation. She’s playing a woman with so many problems that the only question is when, not if, a random collision with this or that predator will take her down for good, but Murphy’s blending of feisty combativeness and sadness feels volcanically alive.
Marcia Gay Harden, who plays Murphy’s mom, has proved again how precise and soulful a performer she can be. Mary Beth Hurt is mesmerizing in a weird, over-the-hill way as a lonely and unbalanced partner of a fiendishly secretive middle-aged man. (It’s obviously sexist of me to report that the twitchy neurotic fox from Interiors and The World According to Garp has been eradicated by age, but it’s a fact nonetheless.) Also top drawer are Toni Collette, Piper Laurie, Rose Byrne and Kerry Washington.
But the color palette in The Dead Girl is pale and splotchy, and the mood of it is down, down…all the way down. Moncrief, who wrote and directed, has invested herself and her cast in an orgy of dingy, hopeless, lower-depths misery. Her female characters (the guys are mostly creeps or louts) are either sad or trauma- tized or badly bruised, or a combination thereof. There’s no question that Moncrief regards them with the utmost compassion and respect, but she’s mainly interested in how it feels to be in their cages — caught, desperate, unable to escape.
There’s a saturation point with films like this, a point at which you mutter to your- self “enough already” as you realize (or re-realize, having been here before) that for some filmmakers being immersed in grief and despair and down-headedness deli- vers a kind of perverse emotional high. Yeah, I know…strange.
Rose Byrne
It needn’t be this way. Rodrigo Garcia‘s Nine Lives — another film with superb female performances — was a more balanced and compassionate piece; you could feel Garcia’s generosity of feeling, as you can with Pedro Almodovar‘s Volver. These men care for their characters; they want them to some how pull through — and I don’t get this feeling from Moncrief at all. It’s not the hurting-women thing that’s hard to roll with — it’s the aroma of futility and put-upon female victimization that Moncrief is obviously queer for.
Moncrief’s Blue Car, which I saw at Sundance ’02, convinced me she was a comer. Now I’m starting to wonder. Why would a director-writer want to go so far down into a well that there’s no sunlight or air?
But once again, hats off to Murphy, Harden, Hurt, Collette, et. al. Murphy is good enough to be considered for a supporting actress honor, but The Dead Girl is going to die so quickly — it’s going to make about $950 dollars, if that — that her only chance is for thousands of screeners to be sent to press and Academy members (like the Lionsgate team did last year for Crash), and I doubt if First Look has the resources to do this, so the odds aren’t favoring.
The loyalty and respect factors among the media in the elite Clint Club run so deep that until very recently, no one had seriously considered actually looking the esteemed director of Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima in the eye and saying straight from the shoulder, “You’ve made an honorable film but it’s not a homer or even a triple, so don’t expect great waves of support from us when it comes to critic awards.” None of the loyalists could ever bring themselves to actually say the words. But now that Flags is sinking fast with the public (it’s losing theatres and will only earn about $2,717,000 for the weekend), no one has to do anything. To paraphrase a Paddy Chayefsky line in The Hospital, Clint’s Iwo Jima film is on the verge of being “simply forgotten to death.” Who could have foreseen such a situation two months ago? How swiftly the tide recedes.
The Democratic surge last Tuesday — “Voters were sick of phony swaggering, blustering and bellicosity, absent competency and accountability [and] were ready to trade in the deadbeat Daddy party for the sheltering Mommy party,” in the view of N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd — is further proof that the winds are favoring for a Barack Obama run at the presidency, and so there really isn’t any need to try and corner the guy. It doesn’t matter what he said or didn’t say to George Clooney because there’s almost no way he won’t be going for it.
Borat‘s Sunday-night total will be just north of $25,000,000…maybe a bit higher when all is said and done. (It did $9,546,000 last night.) Flushed Away and The Santa Clause 3 will come in at #2 and #3 — the former, off 15%, is projected to hit $15,918,000, and the latter, off 19%, will end up with close to $15,715,000.
The fourth-place Stranger Than Fiction will have an okay $14,576,000 by Sunday night with $6490 a print. (Nothing to frown about, but hold the champagne.) Saw III will be fifth with $6.046,000. Sixth-place Babel is doing fine in the blue cities but is being viewed as a hard sell in red America — in 1200 situations it’ll have a Sunday- night cume of $5,029,000, or $4020 per print.
The Return will have a Sunday-evening tally of $4,871,000, or $2460 a print. The Prestige will have $4,677,000 for a so-far cume of $46 million. (A mezzo-mezzzo hit — obviously heading toward $50 million but well shy of heavyweight status.) The Departed will end up with $4,663,000 for a total cume of $109,202,000. And A Good Year, the Russell Crowe south-of-France reverie, is a stiff — $3,652,000 or $1700 a print.
Clint Eastwood‘s Flags of Our Fathers , which lost 400 theatres, will end up with $2,717,000 for the weekend, or $1700 a print — obviously dying on the vine with a so-far cume of about $30,856,000.
The Queen, still playing limited, will end up with $2,455,000. David Ayer‘s Harsh Times is a fizzle — $1,926,000 for the weekend at a little over $2000 a print. Copy- ing Beethoven, the Ed Harris movie playing in about 26 theatres, wil end up with $68,000 or $2600 a print — dead.
The Guardian‘s Joe Queenan is brutally writing off Scarlett Johansson…dissing, dismissing…tossing her onto the slag heap. “Somewhere along the line” — right after Lost in Translation, he means — “people who should have known better began to cast Johansson in roles for which she was not suited. And once the actress was asked to play anyone other than a 20-something Yank born and raised on the east coast in the waning years of the 20th century, it became apparent that she wasn’t much of an actress.
“Listless and vacant in The Girl With The Pearl Earring, Johansson was hopelessly miscast as an action babe in The Island, passive and useless in Woody Allen‘s Match Point” — not true at all! Johansson is almost Brando-esque in that film –“thoroughly implausible in Allen’s wretched Scoop, ridiculously out of her league as a postwar vamp in Brian de Palma‘s abysmal The Black Dahlia, and now entirely extraneous as a duplicitous magician’s assistant in The Prestige.
“Basically, her acting repertory consists of staring intently at the person she is speaking to, keeping her lips spread apart, and hoping no one will notice that she is no threat to Meryl Streep, and not all that much of a threat to Hilary Duff. Increasingly, the very fact that Johansson is in a film suggests that it will not make very much money, not be any good, or both. Because Johansson has made so many movies in such a short period of time, and because most of them have been so bad, and because several of these movies have been outright disasters at the box office, it’s starting to look like the actress is the kiss of death.”
The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil is reporting that Miramax strategists yesterday decided to not submit Venus star Peter O’Toole in the Golden Globe competition for a Best Actor in a Comedy category, apparently out of concern that Sacha Baron Cohen‘s Borat performance might ace him out. So they’ve entered O’Toole into the Best Actor in a Drama category instead.
To which I can only wonder why Miramaxers thought O’Toole should have been in the Best Actor in a Comedy slot in the first place. Venus is amusing here and there — arch, whimsical, spirited — but there’s no way anyone in a sober state of mind would call O’Toole’s performance even somewhat comedic. Venus is a drama with fizz and bittersweet spritz, but O’Toole’s playing a withered actor who’s getting closer and closer to death, and yet is clinging to life all he can through his feelings of lust and affection for a young girl. A touching situation but hardly a “funny” one.
O’Neil mentions that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s eligibility committee might not agree with the switch and move O’Toole back to comedy, although it usually defers to the preference of the contender. This is insane.
At the very end of Universal’s The Good Shepherd trailer a subtitle appears: The Untold Story About the Birth of the CIA. Well, yeah…I guess. But Robert De Niro‘s spy drama is basically a psychological portrait of a generic workaholic, and the theme is about how an insatiable need for work, earnings, discipline and productivity has a way of eventually separating the workaholic from everything and everyone else. It’s a portrait, in short, of tens of millions of people out there whose marriages are slowly dying on the vine, whose children are growing up alone, whose health is suffering because they eat obsessively and don’t work out enough (if at all). That’s the thread in this film. The late 40s to early ’60s historical CIA stuff (i.e., the particulars about James Jesus Angleton, the real-life spook played in the film by Matt Damon) comes second.
Former Los Angeles Times, Variety and Entertainment Weekly reporter Anita Busch — whom accused wiretapper Anthony Pellicano tried to intimidate a few years ago with that dead fish “STOP!” message left on the windshield of her car — has alleged in a civil lawsuit that former CAA honcho and talent manager Michael Ovitz “participated with indicted private investigator Anthony Pellicano and others to intimidate and threaten her.”
Ovitz’s attorney James Ellis told L.A. Times reporters Andrew Blankstein and Greg Krikorian that his”client “had nothing to do with this. It’s unfortunate that Ms. Busch has chosen to involve him in this matter.”
The idea is to make Ovitz sweat his past offenses and presumably squeeze him for some kind of cash settlement. We all know Ovitz sent Busch that bottle of MSG years ago (she’s lethally allergic to the stuff) and that she’s never had much affection for him either. All fair-minded people hope Bush achieves her goals in this matter because she’s basically conducted herself honorably and because people who strive to intimidate the press deserve the blowback.
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