If you’re going to try and reach the unhip masses by advertising a mock-satiric snake movie with an on-the-nose, way-too-explicit poster and thereby ruin the fun of it…if that’s the deliberate plan, then you should really ruin it like the Europeans have here. But if you want to half-ass it, do it the New Line way.
Family Argument
A couple weeks from now, I’m guessing, we’re going to start seeing pieces about how Steve Carell is messing with his funnyman handle by playing a suicidal gay gloomhead in Little Miss Sunshine (Fox Searchlight, 7.26).
The lead graph of these pieces will be a rhetorical question — will those who loved Carell’s broadly funny shtick in The 40 Year-Old Virgin (and who can’t wait to see him in Get Smart) go for the mixed-bag, funny-dark humor in his latest film?
Steve Carell doing the old leaping-from-the-van action in Little Miss Sunshine
I’ve said a couple of times before that Carell’s performance in Little Miss Sunshine is his best ever. He’s ten times funnier in this than he was in Virgin. Funnier because he’s playing an ascerbic, very bright Marcel Proust scholar — one who feels quite real and fleshed-out. The laughs may be fewer in Sunshine, but when they happen they seem richer and more invested in something tangible.
Not that this will stop square-peg journalists and their editors from running “Carell is stepping out of the box” pieces. They know, after all, that a lot of people out there like their movie comedians to be funny in a broad and familiar way. These are the good folks who just say no when comedy stars turn up in quirky dark-current laughers, as Jim Carrey found out when he made The Cable Guy.
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It may be that even Christina Applegate, Carell’s Anchorman costar, is feeling a bit alienated by Little Miss Sunshine‘s in-and-out tonality. She addressed the crowd before it played last Sunday night at the LA Film Festival closer, and all she did was snip, snip, snip about how unusual it was and that it goes into dark places, blah, blah.
And then I spoke to a critic friend the next day and he was saying, “I dunno… Carell does a lot of moping in this thing…it may not go over.”
This was after he read my rave review, which I put up the following day (7.3). He also said, “I guess we saw different movies.”
I responded by saying, “You are once again holding down the fort on a small island with three cocoanut trees for sustenance, and a few kindred souls for company.”
And he said, “Well, I’m not sure what that means. Are you presuming that I think that anything that’s popular is bad, or that I like movies that only a `few kindred souls’ like and dislike all else, or that any movie that isn’t popular is bad?
“How do you know that Sunshine will be a hit? Have you done a measurement? I have absolutely no idea how many folks will like Sunshine, and neither does any- one else.
“What I mean is, you need to consider the possibility that it might tank when it opens.”
And I replied, “What this means is that when a film like Sunshine has actual recognizable humanity and doesn’t act like The 40 Year-Old Virgin but gets laughs and at the same time has the character and cojones to rapel down into the caves of darkness only to climb back out and be hah-hah funny again…that’s really unusual.
“You can’t just sit there and go ‘Gee, I don’t know….it didn’t work for me and people in general may hate it.’
As if this needs to be pointed out, a scene from The 40 Year-Old Virgin
“The basic theme of Little Miss Sunshine is that as fucked and miserable as families may feel in each other’s company, they’ll stand up and support each other when dealing with the outside world. That’s a basic truism — families all over the world are like this — and don’t take this the wrong way but you have to be made of silicon chips not to recgognize that.”
I had written earlier that “people went apeshit for Little Miss Sunshine at Sundance last January, and again last Sunday night.”
And this guy replied, “‘Apeshit’ is a wildly exaggerated term. I’ve seen ‘apeshit’ only a few times recently — maybe Me and You and Everyone We Know at Park City’s Raquet Club, and portions of the Palais audience for Babel or Volver. I shouldn’t have to tell you that the Sunshine audiences in Park City or at the Wadsworth last Sunday in no way provide sober gauges for how it’ll be received by real audiences.
“Do you really think that an auditorium full of people from Fox Searchlight, big Fox, and the Los Angeles Film Festival is going to be less than abuzz over that movie?” this guy continued. “I had the distinct impression that there were ‘laughers’ (those nefarious paid folks strategically placed near press during early screenings) seated behind us, and I recognized one outside after the screening.
“Fox Searchlight has has paid good money for bad before — this would hardly be the first time that’s happened, particularly a deal done at Sundance. It may, on the other hand, also do well on its investment. I don’t know, and neither do you and neither do they.”
And then I replied, “You’re speaking as if movies are dice and they may tumble around and come up seven, or they may come up snake-eyes.
“If people don’t like something when it plays in Wichita, then what can you or me or Fox Searchlight do about it? Nothing. But this film is not a pair of dice on a Vegas craps table. It’s a movie with a pulse — a kind of organism with a certain astuteness, a certain alchemy, and a very particular comic tone. (Why am I pointing this out to you? Why don’t you see this?)
“This movie is funny and yet full of raw family material. I’ve got kids, and some- times they do scream and rant and say how much they despise their parents. Seven year-old girls at the dinner table would want to know why their uncle tried to commit suicide, and a lot of them would find it fairly silly that he did so because a love affair with a student fell apart. And every other family has crusty old curmud- geons who tell their sons to fuck themselves and that they can say anything they want.
“And there are hospital bureaucrats who are unfeeling monsters. And there are wicked Orange County witches who live in that horrid Jon Benet Ramsay world. And there are positive-attitude assholes who constantly spout about always winning but who tend to exemplify the other side of the coin. Family members do fight all the time, and wives do attack their husbands as soon as they lose a source of income.
“A lot of it is horrible…despair, gloom, helplessness…and yet it all can turn on a dime and be funny the next minute. It’s a matter of the filmmakers recognizing life as it often feels and behaves and then putting it all together in a darkly ironic, half-comedic, very lifelike form.”
Then the guy said his wife didn’t much care for Sunshine, and that worried me.
“If you don’t like something or don’t think it will go with the general public…well, I can deal with that. But your wife scares me. Your wife and Applegate…a couple of wild cards.”
There are five post-Pirates wide releasers I’m especially interested in seeing this month (or seeing again for the second or third time): Michael Mann‘s Miami Vice (Universal 7.28), Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris ‘s Little Miss Sunshine (Fox Searchlight, 7.26), M. Night Shyamalan‘s Lady in the Water (Warner Bros., 7.21), Kevin Smith‘s Clerks 2 (Weinstein Co., also 7.21), and Woody Allen‘s Scoop (Focus Features, 7.28). I don’t know what to feel yet about Universal’s You, Me and Dupree (7.14). The intriguing moderate and small-timers include Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos (7.7), Edmond, The Groomsmen, Mini’s First Time and The Oh in Ohio (7.14), and Ray Lawrence‘s Jindabyne (7.20). But somehow I’m getting a premonition that Columbia’s Monster House (7.21) is going to be the only mid-to-late-July wide release besides Vice to really pop through.
I called my New Line pallies and apparently this is the approved wide-release poster for Snakes on a Plane (as opposed to the teaser poster). I’m sorry, but it doesn’t make it. It’s not dry or hip enough. In fact, it seems to be trying to make the movie look un-hip by appealing to the Rhodes scholars who need to be told there’s a satirical element…those who haven’t visited Snakes on a Blog or listened to any of the theme songs or watched any of the video spots.
And wipe that steely smile off Samuel L. Jackson’s face …please. And dump that “Sit back…relax…enjoy the fright” slogan. A poster that winks this broadly is totally the wrong way to go.
The only way to sell this movie is as a straight thriller. If you’re making a thriller with yucks and smirks, fine…but never ever say to an audience that this is what you’re doing. Conceal your motive and your agenda at all times. Let the audience discover it (and they’ll love you for it). If there’s something to laugh or chuckle or smirk at, they’ll decide.
Unless it’s already been mass-produced and mailed to theatres, the fact that this poster sucks isn’t the end of the world. New Line marketers just need to suck it in and admit fault and send the art guys back to the drawing board. Wait a minute…a guy named Colin just wrote in and said he saw this poster hanging in a theatre near Union Square.
I somehow missed this 6.30 announcement about Super Size Me‘s Morgan Spurlock‘s Warrior Poets cutting a deal with Hart Sharp Video’s Joe Amodei to deliver four to six docs per year. (Spurlock will “pick” and presumably fine-tune the docs, which have been/will be made by other filmmakers.) Spurlock will release a doc sometime in the mid-fall about commercialization of Christmas (not his own) and his TV series, 30 Days, will soon begin its second season on FX.
If there’s one central message conveyed in Boffo, a slick, agreeable and insightful doc about success, failure and mainstream filmmaking now playing on HBO, it’s contained in the answer to this question:
What’s the one thing that seems to lead to the making of a hit — more than a good script, a perfect cast, the right director, etc.? Or rather, what’s the one voice that a producer or a studio chief needs to listen to above all the others? The answer is, “The one from the gut.”
As producer Richard Zanuck says halfway through Boffo, “Your head can talk you out of a lot of things, but your gut always tells the truth.”
Here’s the first three or four minutes of Boffo. The speakers are (in precisely this order) Danny DeVito, Peter Guber, Peter Bogdanovich, Jodie Foster, producer Brian Grazer, 20th Century Fox chief Tom Rothman, Sydney Pollack, Morgan Freeman, Zanuck and fellow Jaws producer David Brown, and finally George Clooney .
Boffo was directed by Bill Couterie and produced by Variety editor Peter Bart, and is being billed as a celebration of Variety‘s 100th anniversary, but aside from several Variety headlines being shown, the promotional element doesn’t feel all that persistent.
Boffo is very smooth, engaging, and well-produced. However, I have two or three beefs:
(1) Boffo seems more interested in being chummy with its celebrity talking heads and paying tribute to their past successes and being supportive of the industry’s potential for making new successes, and less interested in exploring the whys and wherefores of failure. (There’s a fascinating moment when Morgan Freeman is asked what went wrong with The Bonfire of the Vanities, and Freeman barely answers. His body language and facial expressions, however, speak volumes.)
(2) While it only deals with the monumental failures ( Howard the Duck, et, al.), Boffo doesn’t even mention Last Action Hero…surely one of the most grotesque wipeouts of the last 15 or 20 years. It’s not even a blip on the screen.
(3) Boffo doesn’t deal at all with questions about why and how certain films have failed. It doesn’t get into the word-of-mouth mystique and how various producers and studios have responded to it, or into research screenings and whether or not that’s good or bad or a mixed bag, and it doesn’t mention how bad-buzz spreading through the media has contributed, fairly or unfairly, to the failure of this and that film, and, in line with this avoidance, doesn’t mention how bad buzz on this and that film moves much faster these days via the internet and text-messaging among the under-20-somethings.
A third big gun — L.A. Times critic Carina Chocano — is bitch-slapping Pirates 2 for being tedious, unfocused and overlong: The film “is unsure of what it wants, so it takes the omnivorous approach, and all of the story lines suffer for it. Intermittently fun and high-spirited, Dead Man’s Chest sags under the weight of its own running time, which clocks in at about 2 1/2 hours. That’s a lot of time to commit to watching people chase one another around, turn, and chase one another the other way. At half the running time, it would have made for an amusing time-killer; as it is — no matter how clever, energetic and beautifully designed — it borders on waste.” (Apologies for the Turan boner earlier this morning….haste makes waste.)
There’s a fascinating, well-put thought from screenwriter William Goldman on one of the commentary tracks on the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid double-disc DVD that came out three or four weeks ago. I didn’t transcribe it but I remember it pretty well: “We were lucky with Butch. We had a great director [George Roy Hill], and we had Connie Hall‘s phenomenal photography and a great crew and a solid script and a neat story and the casting was perfect. But if just one of these elements didn’t happen…it tells you that a good script and a good director and the right cast aren’t enough . The photography has to be right on, ditto the score and the editing…and if just one of these elements isn’t exactly right, you are dead. Nobody realizes how important the editing is, or how important the composer is…and there’s no reason for people outside the movie business to realize this, that movies are so fragile and anything can screw them up.”
Enron ogre Kenneth Lay died this morning in Aspen. The cause printed in the N.Y. Times was a heart attack, which it may have clinically been. Of course, the dramatist in all of us can’t help but imagine-presume that what really brought his curtain down — a combination of stress, the shame-horror of doing prison time and, of course, not wanting to die in jail.
Lay was found guilty several weeks ago on six counts of fraud and conspiracy and four counts of bank fraud, and was looking at a very long sentence, and having lived a cushiony lifestyle for so long, he must have been filled with dread at what lay ahead.
I don’t mean to sound heartless about this, but Lay was one of the most heartless corporate pricks of all time, a major conniver whose venal spinnings and maneuver- ings resulted in the ruining of many lives. Take a look sometime at Alex Gibney‘s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and tell me I’m wrong. If anyone deserved the label of “bad guy,” it was certainly Kenneth Lay.
So let’s be honest and admit that Lay’s death this morning is dramatically satis- fying. If anything he got off easy. Aspen is a very beautiful and soothing place and a good place to breathe in mountain air, lie down, close your eyes and bid farewell. A better point of departure, certainly, than some prison cell in some federal facility.
For some reason I’m thinking of that moment in Casablanca when Ingrid Bergman laments that if Humphrey Bogart’s Rick doesn’t help Victor Laszlo by selling him the fabled “letters of transit” that he’ll die in Casablanca, and Bogart snaps, “So what? I’m gonna die in Casablanca. It’s a good spot for it.”
I thought I’d do the radical thing today and not post anything further because everyone and everything has shut down for the holiday. Tuesday the 4th is a flatliner. I hate days off but you can’t fight City Hall.
Superman Returns took in around $13.9 million yesterday (Monday, 7.3). Apparently the Sunday morning estimates were low because no one considered the bad-weather-around-the-country factor, meaning that Superman‘s Sunday haul was probably closer to $19 rather than $16 million, which translates into a five-day figure more like $87.5 million rather than, say, Box-Office Mojo‘s estimate of $84.7 million.
Add yesterday’s $13.9 million to the $87 million-plus and Superman Returns has now crested $100 million with another $7 or $8 million expected today.
But as I’ve said two or three times over the past week, earnings will be down next weekend (low to mid 20s) when the Pirates hit town, and it’ll basically be a Superman toilet-water-swirl from then on.
Nikki Finke‘s souces are telling her it probably won’t make it to $200 million domestically, but I think it just might. But there’s no fighting the general consensus, which is that Superman “didn’t do well enough…it didn’t do what it needed to,” as a plugged-in journo put it Sunday night.
Bryan Singer, Brandon Routh, Jon Peters, Kevin Spacey and especially lightweight Kate Bosworth didn’t quite do the thing…they stirred and delighted a good portion of the U.S. but there were too many naysayers and thus a good-but-not-great showing.
The best move now for everyone involved (and I’m including Alan Horn) is to grab their dark glasses and fishing hats and get in their cars and drive out to the desert and stay there for a couple of weeks until the Great Superman Letdown has faded from memory and everyone has moved on and begun to obsess about the next tragedy.
Another big gun — Variety‘s Todd McCarthy — has slammed Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest for being empty and bloated and too long. He says “there’s not a genuine moment” in either of the two Pirates films, “no point of human contact…they’re baldly concocted, confected, engineered.” (Just as I said in my review that “there’s nothing, nothing, nothing going on inside [Pirates 2]…nothing kicks in within…not ever, not once.”) And he claims the new one “puts the viewer into a bland stupor.” And “why wear out the film’s welcome with a wearisome two-and-a-half-hour running time,” McCarthy wonders, “when a tight-ship 100 minutes would have insured more constant excitement, not to mention giving exhibitors more showtimes per day?”
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