“Screen comedy is at its best when it pitches its tent close to the poverty line. The minute the effects budget swells, it starts to crush the life out of comedy, which needs empty spaces to roam and some quality alone with the audiences in order to enlist its complicity in its subversions. It is, I think, a universal truth of movie-making that effects are never funny. They can sometimes wow you, but they can’t make you laugh, and [Johnny] Depp cannot stand up to the hubbub they create. No actor can. He can only serve them, which involves him in derring-do that any actor could do about as well as he can. He needs to be involved with us, not with the lunking machinery of the movie.” — Time critic Richard Schickel on…uh-oh, I’m going to get attacked again for running another anti-Pirates item. But I swear I’m running Schickel’s piece because it happens to be very well-written.

The summer is over. I can feel it in almost every phone call I’ve made over the past four or five days. Everyone’s talking about September, about the Toronto Film Festival, about fall slates, Oscar campaigns, possible Oscar contenders either dropping out or being added, etc. The first viewings of Miami Vice and Lady in the Water will happen next week, there’s Snakes on a Plane on the way and ComicCon happens later this month, but the turn-your- brain-off, cruise-along, what’s-the-next-idiot movie-we-have-to-see? summer mindset is just about done. I realize it sounds silly to write off the seven weeks remaining between now and Labor Day, but mid-July is when the Oscar campaigns start to be formulated and when journalists start to disengage from You, Me and Dupree-type films and look forward to more nutritious fare.

The Pirates 2 opening-weekend numbers should be assessed in context. If it beats Spider-Man‘s three-day opening-weekend record of $114.8 million (established four years and two months ago), it would be thorough and fair to compare the number of theatres Spider-Man opened in to the 4,133 “situations” where Pirates 2 is now screening. And if it doesn’t break the Spider-Man record …well, ask “Ari Gold” — Jeremy Piven‘s Entourage character — what the industry will think about that. And let’s also consider what the second-weekend falloff percentage might be. If you look at what this film really is as opposed to what average moviegoers (i.e., those fine folks won’t read the critics or consider those Rotten Tomatoes ratings) are hoping it might be, is it realistic to suggest that anything less than 45% to 50% revenue drop will happen? I’m just asking — I don’t know anything. I’m just saying that before analysts start writing their euphoric gush pieces over the coming Pirates haul (complete with an expression-of-ecstasy quote from Paul Dergerabedian), they should step back and think it over a second time.

Wim Wender’s “last five films were made in America, something he says he never intended, [and] the next will be made in Germany, probably in collaboration with [one] of the pillars of the ’70s New Wave, Peter Handke,” reports The Age‘s Stephanie Bunbury. “Perhaps Don’t Come Knocking” — Wender’s latest film, which he made with his Paris Texas partner Sam Shepard — “represents the end of another era in Wenders’ career. For more than a year now Wenders has had everything in storage, preparing to leave the [U.S.] for good.” In other words, Wenders needs to “go German” again and revitalize that haunted romantic-Teutonic existential gloom thing. Good move, but this article, perhaps unfairly, seems to portray a once-legendary artist scurrying back home with his tail between his legs.

The thoughtless vulgarian in me would get a kick out of playing this Taxi Driver video game…I’m half-serious. It was designed by Papaya Studios, and was supposed to be distributed by Majescoe Entertainment.

The idea is, of course, grotesque, and yet there’s something about the perversity of a video game allowing the player to become Robert De Niro‘s Travis Bickle, everyone’s favorite nutbag taxi driver, and get that Mohawk haircut and put on that Army surplus jacket and that sliding-gun arm device and go hunt down Harvey Keitel ‘s Lower East Side pimp and who knows how many others? Maybe Peter Boyle‘s burly cab driver or Charles-Pallantine-for-President staffers Albert Brooks and Cybil Shepherd or maybe Pallantine himself…it’s totally diseased beyond measure.
The Taxi Driver game was announced last year, but I became interested again when I read this 7.6 Guardian interview with Paul Schrader, screenwriter of the original 1976 Taxi Driver , which Martin Scorsese directed. It said that Schrader and Scorsese, appalled at the idea of the game, tried to have it stopped only to learn that they’d signed away the power to do anything about it in their original contracts.
Majescoe was supposed to issue the Taxi Driver game earlier this year, and (I’m obviously not plugged into the video-game world) yet I couldn’t find any reviews or even a release date. I called Majescoe this morning and was told they had severed their deal with Papaya. The numbers I called after this — Papaya’s Irvine office #, plus several for reporters and reviewers who write for video mags — didn’t lead anywhere because everyone’s at the VSDA Convention in Las Vegas. If anyone knows why Majescoe backed out, please inform.

Now is the time for all friends of Pirates 2 to rally round and provide a little positve counter-spin to all those pans by the big-gun critics, which of course will have zero impact on the coming weekend’s massive opening numbers. The point is, are you a supporter of “joy” or aren’t you? If so, you have to stand up and do what any friend would do at this stage.

We almost had two Samuel L. Jackson snake movies being released within a month of each other — — Snakes on a Plane (New Line, 8.18) and Black Snake Moan (Paramount Vantage, 9.16) — but no longer. Paramount Vantage has decided against opening Craig Brewer‘s Moan in September and in favor of a February ’07 release. Brewer’s script is about a fire-and-brimstone bluesman (Jackson) who tries to cure a sexually promiscuous young woman (Christina Ricci) of her wicked, tawdry ways. Reactions to recent screenings have delivered positive comments but also ones like “quirky”. I wouldn’t be surprised if it debuts at the ’07 Sundance Film Festival in January.

With every new review that comes in, those Rotten Tomatoes ratings of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (Disney, 7.7) keep sinking lower and lower. The overall rating is 52% positive, and the cream-of-the-crop rating is a lousy 40%. My fave quotes so far: (1) “Calling a summer movie ‘action-packed’ is supposed to be a compliment, but there’s nothing so tedious as nonstop excitement.” — Salon‘s Stephanie Zacharek; and (2) “It’s a franchise movie — a product — that is pretending to be a lot hipper than it is.” — Christian Science Monitor critic Peter Rainer.

Werner Herzog has been “Werner Herzog” for 35 years or so, and the Academy waited until yesterday to invite him to become a member? Is it because someone finally noticed that he’s based in Los Angeles and using the same post-production houses and going to the same parties?

Wait, I just figured it: this is a makeup gesture to one of the world’s most visionary filmmakers to apologize for the Academy’s documentary committee failing to list Herzog’s Grizzly Man, the most critically hailed doc of ’05, among the initial qualifiers.

I asked Clerks 2 director-writer-costar Kevin Smith for a comment about the still-slacking-in-their-30s syndrome described in a piece I wrote earlier today called “Party On.”
I started things off a bit flippantly by asking if guys wanking their lives away in their 30s is an indication of the social fabric coming apart, and here’s his reply: “Naah — blame Bill Murray, the original slacker hero. We all grew up watching Stripes. It had an impact.
“I think some filmmakers like me (who aren’t overly creative…or overly talented, for that matter) are afforded an extended adolescence by virtue of what we do for a living. I mean, we basically ‘make pretend’ and get paid for it. So maybe we like to portray that lifestyle cinematically because, at this point, it’s all we know?
“George Lucas, at a young age, painted a canvas with Wookies and Death Stars; some of us can only paint a corner of a canvas with characters who like to talk about Wookies and Death Stars.
“I’ve been writing about these types of characters for twelve years now, so it’s not a trend for me as much as a mantra. For me, I think it has a lot to do with my father, who spent his entire adult life working for the U.S. Postal service, doing the 11 pm to 7 am shift, canceling stamps. Soul-killing work, that, but his generation didn’t have the luxury of picking a dream job or following whimsies; you got married and you got a job, period.
“My generation was the first to be very vocal (not the first to actually live this way, mind you, but to be VOCAL on the subject) about a willingness to ‘play the game’, so to speak, but only according to our own rules. Sort of a ‘Yeah, I’ll get a job, but since it’ll be doing what I want, it’ll never feel like a job.’
“And while, in theory, that’s a good m.o. (and in some cases, like mine, somewhat achievable), it’s not very practical.”

Nikki Finke has posted a clip of Rick Moranis imitating a certain very-hyper Hollywood producer on a Canadian SCTV episode that ran…I don’t know when it ran but figure sometime around ’83 or ’84. It’s a total howl. The guy Moranis is spoofing is almost certainly producer Joel Silver (V for Vendetta, The Matrix) as he was 23 years ago. Moranis worked for Silver when he played a secondary role in Streets of Fire (’84), which Silver produced. Saul Rubinek did another excellent Silver impression in Tony Scott‘s True Romance .

You have to at least give N.Y. Times Allison Hope Weiner props for having the brass to play fast and loose with the rules, obviously at a risk to her reputation. It’s called unbridled hunger. Boiled down, Weiner emphasized her attorney credentials over her journalistic ones to Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles authorities as part of an effort to interview incarcerated wire-tapper Anthony Pellicano on 6.14. Times spokesperson Diane McNulty has told L.A. Times reporter Chuck Phillips that Weiner “identified herself as a New York Times reporter.” After being told by a guard that “only immediate family members and lawyers could see the inmate, Weiner then [said] she was a journalist and a lawyer. “But not Pellicano’s lawyer,” McNulty said. “[She] was very clear and forthright about her intentions and who she was.” Phillips’ piece quotes from the New York Times ethics code as stating that “staff members may not pose as police officers, lawyers, businesspeople or anyone else when they are working as journalists.”