L.A. Times Claudia Eller on the exceptionally bad ’06 that Warner Bros. has suffered through so far. The bombing of Poseidon, Lady in the Water, The Ant Bully and ATL “could lose more than $120 million combined for Warner and its financial partners,” Eller reports. And let’s not forget about the under-performing of Superman Returns. “The price of failure is high,” WB chief Alan Horn tells her. “It’s not just the financial cost. It’s reading about it in the newspaper.”

The new dayglo mustard-yellow backdrop of Movie City News is too much. I debated whether or not to say anything, but it’s an eyesore. It’s butterscotch pudding on peyote. There was a lady who lived two or three blocks from our home in New Jersey when I was a kid who once painted her house teal blue, and you needed sunglasses just to look at it. She was within her rights but taste cannot be taught — it’s a result of a thousand distastes accumulated over time, and either you get it or you don’t.

This home video clip shows a younger George Bush — it looks like it was shot in the late ’80s or early ’90s — in a flip party-down mode. The Huffington Post put it up this morning, apparently to remind everyone that he often talks and acts like a shallow frat-boy asshole and that he used to like to drink. This is pretty much the same Dubya who starred in Alexandra Pelosi‘s Journeys with George — playful, goof-offy. I don’t see the big slam factor here. This is who the guy more or less is. Is there anyone out there who didn’t know this?

Laughed Some, Seen Worse

The consensus is already getting around: Snakes on a Plane is sorta kinda tolerably entertaining. As in sometimes hilarious, amusingly cheesy here and there, never out-of-this-world brilliant, fitfully amusing…a guiltless B movie all the way.

Rachel Blanchard in David Ellis’s Snakes on a Plane (New Line, 8.18)

Make that a B-minus. Watching cheeseball thrillers can make you feel like you’ve got a virus of some kind, and this one definitely put something in my blood. But it has maybe seven or eight good laughs (okay, nine or ten), and a good ending with Keenan Thompson (the cool fat-ass in the orange shirt) delivering some funny lines. And I loved it when Gerard Plunkett, playing a snarly-ass middle-aged businessman…I’d rather not spoil. But Plunkett does two things that are quite funny.
It’s significant that Snakes didn’t irritate me all that much. It’s also significant, however, that watching it felt so uneventful that I couldn’t make myself write a review last night after I got home around midnight. It’s hard to get it up when all you have to say is “I wasn’t in pain.”
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I was shaking my head at times at the some of the over-acting and tepid dialogue. The first 15 or 20 minutes (i.e., set-up sections shot on one of the Hawaiian islands) is on the level of, say, a Charlie’s Angels episode from the early ’80s, and that’s pretty damn awful. Byron Lawson’s performance as Eddie Kim, the criminal who arranges for a big crate of poisonous snakes to be unleased on a Honolulu-to LAX jet, is the worst element by far.
The damn thing is overlit for the first 25 to 30 minutes, in the manner of big-studio movies of the mid to late ’60s. Director David Ellis knows, I’m sure, that when planes take off the really bright lights in the cabin (i.e, the ones that are turned on when a plane lands) are never used, and also that most of us know that. But he flood-lights the hell out of these scenes anyway, and this just takes you right out of it.

Samuel L. Jackson, Flex Alexander

But Snakes never turns bad-bad. It’s lazy, goofy and often sloppy. Ellis isn’t a terribly clever action director — not in my book. But he’s not incompetent and the film isn’t horribly crafted. It’s just not very hip.
I just wish Ellis had gone more nutso. I wish that someone had gotten sucked out of the window as the plane is approaching the coast of Los Angeles and that the camera had stayed with this person as he/she splashes into the Pacific…and lives. I was hoping one of the really big snakes would eat the baby. I wanted to see one of the big snakes act like a phallus and sexually invade one of the terrified females. (Elsa Pataky, I was hoping.) Well, why not? This movie isn’t about logic or sensitivity — it’s about pushing the bounds and making the fans howl. As long as we’re talking about snakes-as-penises, why not have one of the fat black guys get anally penetrated by a python?
Most of the snakes are CGI-ed or substandard animatronic. I didn’t believe anyone was being threatened, not for a second. It’s about cartoon snakes on a plane. And stupid sound effects with the snakes hissing and growling and whatnot. A lot of this film is really quite lame.

Elsa Pataky

I would have had a better time if Ellis and New Line has done a shot-for-shot remake of Tobe Hooper and Piers Haggard’s Venom. Seriously — that’s a pretty good deadly-snake exploitation flick. It’s just about a single black mamba and when one of those babies bite you, forget it.
There is one totally brilliant moment when Flex Alexander is chatting up Rachel Blanchard and he’s interrupted by the sound of a guy sitting nearby blowing snot out of his nose. Flex and Rachel look at this guy and we see him wiping his pants with his snot in order to get it off his hands. I usually despise gross-out humor but the absolute lunacy of this bit is inspired. Why show a passenger doing a point- lessly gross thing? The fact that Ellis does it anyway is a stroke of mad genius. He should be proud of this bit…seriously.
Samuel L. Jackson is pretty good, not great — but the moment when he yells out the big line (“I’ve had it with these mothahfuckin’ snakes,” etc.) is very neat. Todd Louiso is a very subtle and gifted actor who’s under-utilized here. (Naturally.) David Koechner and Bobby Canavale…forget it. They’re fine but in a film like this all performances are a losing battle.

Keenan Thompson

I hope Elsa Pataky lands more roles in U.S. films. She’s hot and fetching and I liked her in that Maxim spread. Her eyes say dirty things.
The flatness of much of this film is conveyed in the opening titles. First of all, it’s a mark of mediocrity when a film begins with a helicopter shot of a big scenic locale. It’s the director saying to the audience, “All right, relax…I have no imagination and you’re not the brightest bulbs on the planet for paying $10 bucks to see this thing, but that aside, here’s the scenic area where our story begins.”
Sure enough, Snakes starts with a lame helicopter shot. Sun, surf…breaking waves! Then we see a title card that says “SNAKES” (beat, beat) and then comes the addition of “ON A PLANE” — and as soon I saw this, I knew what I was in for. This, sadly, is the predominant Ellis touch rather than some guy wiping snot on his jeans.

First Warner Bros. said Curtis Hanson‘s Lucky You wouldn’t be going to the Toronto Film Festival. That in itself was a mild uh-oh. Then WB bumped the release date from 9.8 to 10.27. (The latter release date is currently proclaimed on the official website.) Now Hanson’s gambling movie has been bumped to 3.16.07. Obviously there are further concerns. Perhaps the mid-March date — over six months from now– is about allowing Hanson to do some additional shooting and tweaking.

USA Today‘s Scott Bowles is reporting that despite the Snakes on a Plane cult following, “the R-rated movie is tracking softly” and none of the 265 AMC theatres that showed the New Line thriller last night at 10 pm “sold out of [their] advance tickets…fans weren’t exactly camping out to see the first screening.”
I’ve been talking about very high tracking negatives all along (i.e., the “definitely not interested” percentage has been over 20%). I heard yesterday that the positive interest factors had actually downticked, but take this with a grain. The upside is that the movie isn’t bad.
Variety‘s Ben Fritz and Dave McNary have written that Snakes “is tracking like a normal late-summer horror film, which would indicate a bow in the high teens. But studio is hoping all the hype and buzz could translate into something much bigger, possibly as high as the 30s.” New Line is showing Snakes at 3555 situations.
One of my regulars said this morning that Snakes has been tracking like Dimension’s Pulse which opened last weekend in 2323 theatres and took in $8,203.822. (The total to date is $10,557,845.) With Snakes playing in roughly 1200 more theatres, Variety‘s forecast of a weekend total in the mid to high teens seems more likely than a Sunday-night tally in the 20s, much less the 30s.
Another guy says Snakes is doing better than Pulse. which had only teenaged girls to count on. Whereas teen aged males are seriously onto seeing Snakes, etc. I still say mid teens.

Toronto Star critic Peter Howell lashes Snakes on a Plane with a friendly wet noodle. And Houston’s Joe Leydon doesn’t even lash it.

Derby Girl

I know award-quality when I see it, and Sienna Miller‘s capturing of Edie Sedgwick — the doomed mid ’60s scenester and Andy Warhol girl who died in ’71 at age 28 — in George Hickenlooper‘s Factory Girl (Weinstein Co.) totally rates. It may be the most eerily accurate reviving of a dead person I’ve ever seen in a film. And yet Miller projects dimension and gravitas in spades — an unmistakable sadness and snap and aliveness like nothing I’ve gotten from an actress in any movie so far this year.

Sienna Miller as Edie Sedgwick in George Hickenloooper’s Factory Girl (Weinstein Co.)

If and when the Weinstein Co. puts Factory Girl into theatres before 12.31 (which may happen, I’m now hearing), Miller will be right in there against Prada‘s Meryl Streep, The Queen‘s Helen Mirren, Notes on a Scandal‘s Judi Dench and maybe Running With Scissors‘ Annette Benning. She’s playing the only tragic figure in the group — the only one who goes to her doom with mascara running down her face.
Miller isn’t just a dead ringer for the real McCoy — she gets her fluttery debutante laugh, that mixture of Warholian cool and little-girl terror, the giddy euphoria, the cracked voice. It’s more than convincing — it’s a kind of rebirthing. (I feel I can say this with some authority having seen the real Sedgwick in John Palmer and David Weisman‘s Ciao Manhattan! way back when, and having looked at her photos for years.)
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Hickenlooper’s film is a kind of rebirthing also. Most of it feels like a mid to late ’60s Paul Morrissey film. It has a grungy Manhattan, Collective for Living Cinema, 16mm street quality, like it was shot two or three years before Flesh and Lonesome Cowboys and maybe a year or two after Empire State and Blow Job.
Hickenlooper gives it discipline and tension, working from a tight script by Captain Mauzner but styling in the realm of the Warhol-Morrissey aesthetic, which could be summed up as “don’t recreate anything, just behave and let it happen.”
This is obviously a nervy approach (the person who recently informed a WWD writer that Factory Girl is “kind of a mess” has probably never seen a Warhol -Morrisey film) but with nerve comes a feeling of other-ness. For my money the raw-funk approach works without the viewer needing a NYU degree in Film Studies.

Guy Pearce as Andy Warhol

I’m not going to do a review because the disc I saw was rough and incomplete — there’s plenty of time to get into it down the line. But I should at least mention Guy Pearce‘s Warhol portrayal, which for me is much drier and colder and more delicious than Jared Harris‘s portrayal in I Shot Andy Warhol or Crispin Glover‘s in The Doors. The rumble in the jungle is that Weinstein Co. execs feels Guy’s performance is Oscar-worthy also.
And Hayden Christensen‘s performance of an obviously Bob Dylan-ish figure is, for me, the most engaging thing he’s ever done.
Here are some thoughts from a critic friend who caught Factory Girl under similar circumstances:
“Sienna Miller’s performance is a revelation on several levels — most importantly of her great solar talent; she’s riveting and charismatic in every instant, whether Edie is in meteor-mode or downfall. Hickenlooper was so right to fight for her to play the role. I’m a highly dedicated devotee of the real Edie so I began watching the film with the bar of expectation set extra-high. Well, old Sienna not only vaulted that bar, she blasted the tiles right out of the ceiling and kept going. Edie Lives.

“I’m also still marveling at Guy Pearce’s otherworldly Andy Warhol — a breathtaking creation of a man whose ghost haunts himself. I’m also deeply impressed with Hayden Christensen’s osmosis of the Mystery-Tramp-Who-Shall-Remain- Nameless. I’ve always thought highly of this young actor — he’s still developing, but his instincts are first-rate. As one who has long loved Dylan, I deeply respected where Hayden was able to fish within himself to bring that very difficult prodigy to light.
“I think of Factory Girl as a kind of female Lawrence of Arabia. I’m serious. Edie is an opaque, enigmatic figure by definition, just as T.E. Lawrence was. There is never any ‘explaining’ such a character — we can only experience them, the way anyone who loved them in life might have. That way we can love Edie. Start slow, and people will adore the rush as the film takes off, and maybe even feel a bit scared on her behalf as we lose sight of the girl she is in the film’s beginning moments.
“I feel quite highly of the energy and verve of Mauzner’s screenplay, and feel that Hickenlooker has gone one better and energized the story. Hickenlooper and Mauzner have located Edie in a kind of ‘permanent present-tense’ (as opposed to a period), and I’m willing to bet audiences will embrace her anew, and with her, the film.”

Sienna Miller, George Hickenlooper at the Spirits Awards last March

MCN’s “The Reeler” has the complete official N.Y. Film Festival rundown: Guillermo Del Toro‘s Pan’s Labyrinth, Sofia Coppola‘s Marie Antoinette (I’d like to hear some ripe New York boos this time instead of French ones), David Lynch‘s Inland Empire (adding the “The” is utterly ridiculous), Todd Field‘s Little Children, Johnnie To‘s Triad Election, Manoel de Oliveira‘s ,em>Belles Toujours , Warren Beatty‘s Reds, Alberto Lattuada‘s Mafioso, etc.

No film festivals, no Oscar lah-lah, probably no Film Comment tribute pieces to Martin Scorsese…just a complex hardball crime flick. Does this poster do the idea behind The Departed justice? What does it tell you? I’ll tell you what it tells me: whatever this movie is, we’re not saying. We’ve got Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon snarling and scowling and that’s all we’re saying. We know it’s not enough, but it’s all you’re getting from Warner Bros. marketing. But watch the trailer, why doncha?