I paid $48 dollars and change to fill up my Nissan 240 SX today. I’ve been driving this once-proud babe magnet for 10 years and it used to cost me about $31 or $32 to fill it up, tops.
You get told stuff (like, say, Karen Fried becoming the new Oscar consultant for Focus Features or Michelle Robertson becoming the Warner Bros. Oscar consultant) but on the condition that you wait, and what happens? Somebody else breaks it. Happens every time.
“After a comprehensive review of climate change data, the nation’s preeminent scientific body found that average temperatures on Earth had risen by about 1 degree over the last century, a development that ‘is unprecedented for the last 400 years and potentially the last several millennia’,” L.A. Times reporters Thomas H. Maugh II and Karen Kaplan wrote in a story out today. “The report from the National Research Council also concluded that ‘human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming.’ Coupled with a report last month from the Bush administration’s Climate Change Science Program that found “clear evidence of human influences on the climate system,” the new study from the council, part of the National Academy of Sciences, signals a growing acceptance in Washington of widely held scientific views on the causes of global warming.” Whoa…whatta shocker!
Missed last night’s news about the plug being pulled on James Mangold‘s 3:10 to Yuma, which was going to star Tom Cruise earlier this year and then lost Cruise and got Russell Crowe to step into his shoes. Nicole Laporte‘s Variety story quoted “sources” as saying that “part of Sony’s concern was the back-end gross of Crowe, a $20 million star [on top of} another concern that Westerns don’t typically travel abroad.” Mangold says Yuma isn’t a typical ponderous western, etc., but obviously this is yet another shutdown of a big-star movie over concerns about back-end gross participation. Go, ballsy studio execs…kick those stars in the ass! Cut ’em down to size! Stand tall, hang tough…revolution is in the air! (Claude Brodesser on TMZ.com agrees — “Hollywood to Gross Players: Drop Dead.”)
These ass-whoopings of Adam Sandler‘s Click are loads of fun to read, mainly because they’re so damn personal. These critics don’t just hate Sandler’s latest — they hate him through and through. “What’s wrong with this movie isn’t the movie, it’s Sandler himself,” says the Washington Post‘s Stephen Hunter. “His sensibility and sense of humor are aggressively hostile, [and his character] is a selfish, self-absorbed, smug little weenie who turns on everybody at the drop of a hat, who cheats to succeed, who brutalizes his children, who screams at his wife, and who looks to be a pretty mediocre architect in the bargain.” L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas echoes this by calling Click “the strongest dose yet of the anger, self-loathing and infantilism that lie at the heart of Sandler√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s screen persona.” And guess what? Click is likely to do better than $40 million this weekend.
Anne Thompson and Tatiana Siegel‘s Hollywood Reporter profile of Paramount president Gail Berman makes some fair points, but the graph about Mission: Impossible 3 recalled a conversation I had last night with a trade-paper guy about whether or not the Tom Cruise actioner made any kind of real profit. “M:I:3…has earned more than $334 million worldwide [but] did fall short domestically, grossing $130 million,” the Thompson-Siegel story reports. “In retrospect, [studio chairman Brad] Grey’s decision to trim the film’s budget to $150 million and adjust gross-participation deals proved to be one of his savviest moves as studio chief.” Nonetheless, somebody needs to compile an exacting, exhaustive report about how much everything really cost and, factoring in marketing and Cruise’s first-dollar participation (which was still pretty high despite the adjustment forced by Grey), how much money Paramount actually made on this puppy. There’s a view out there that the end-of-the-day profits, if M:I3 was in fact profitable (as it has come to the end of its theatrical run), don’t amount to much.
The L.A. Film Festival kicked off last night with a screening of The Devil Wears Prada at Westwood’s Village theatre. It seemed to go down pretty well with people I spoke to at the after-party, including the tough critics. A tidy, not-quite-pat, cool-mannered studio flick about a tough job and a tough environment. Everyone seemed to love Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci‘s performance, and felt that lead Anne Hathaway and Adrien Grenier held their own.
It was the usual mob scene before the show began with a lot of traffic pile-up, dozens of SEM goons everywhere, and journalists being handed peon-level blue tickets that meant they had to wait in a kind of rush line on the side of the building. (I was one of them.) You had to pay for popcorn and drinks in the lobby, which is unusual for a premiere, but the food-and-drink at the outdoor after-party was ample and delicious.
(a) SEM security goon outside Village theatre — Thursday, 6.22.06, 7:20 pm; (b) Same position,couple of minutes later Thursday, 6.22.06, 7:25 pm; (c) MPRM publicist whom I won’t identify unless she tells me it’s cool, approaching theatre entrance; (d) An employee of high-powered publicist Mickey Cottrell named Pollyanna (l.) and Islander star-producer Thomas Hildreth; (e) Floral arrangement outside entrance to Village theatre balcony.
David Edelstein‘s 6.19.06 review of Nicholas Jarecki‘s The Outsider , a facinating and (to me) touching doc about maverick filmmaker James Toback (Black and White, Fingers), has the following comment: “Jarecki doesn’t get into Toback’s considerable inheritance, which does make maverickdom easier.” I’ve always seen Toback as a jocular existential wise guy flying by his wit and his balls and his ability to charm and seduce. But family money…?
Most of the critics are indicting Adam Sandler‘s Click on charges of ruthless sentimentality in the latter stages. Will this matter to the fan base? Never! But how can any fair-minded person not be moved or at least struck by these damning words from Rolling Stone‘s Peter Travers, one of the biggest bend-over quote whores in world history? “I have a soft spot for [Sandler’s] low-comic high jinks, including Happy Gilmore and even the unfairly maligned Waterboy,” says Travers. “But Sandler has a sappy side that makes me puke. I damn near choked on Click.” Wait a minute…either you puke over something or it makes you choke. You can’t do both.
The fact that director Bryan Singer said on “Sunday Morning Shootout” a while back that the cost for Superman Returns is over $250 million makes the $263 million estimate calculated by Entertainment Weekly‘s Jeff Jensen seem more reliable than the $209 million estimated provided by the Wall Street Journal‘s Kate Kelly. A big chunk is due to costs run up by previous would-be Superman directors Tim Burton ($25 to $30 million), Brett Ratner (between $12 and $20 million), and McG (between $12 and $20 million).It’s all in a pretty good sum-up by Hollywood Wiretap‘s Stephen Saito.
I got 11 right in this Ann Coulter-Adolf Hitler similar-quote quiz. Coulter’s prose style is a little simpler and less turgid than Hitler’s, and she doesn’t go for antiquated debating-society political terms like “bourgeoisie”.
There was a slight rigamarole in late April (or was it early May?) when Variety reported that Woody Allen‘s Scoop would be released in the late summer and one of my Focus Features pallies kept saying, “That’s news to us.” Anyway, it’s official: Allen’s comedy, a London-based runaround about a young reporter (Scarlett Johansson) and an older, somewhat suspicious man of wealth and schwing (Hugh Jackman), will open on 7.28 in the top 100 markets, at a running time of 96 minutes.
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