This is my favorite Snakes on a Plane T-shirt so far. And only $14 a pop.

Randy Sharp, director of special projects for the Mississippi-based American Family Association, is encouraging “concerned” (i.e., anti-gay) Christians to contact Wal-Mart regarding the 4.4 release of Universal Home Video’s Brokeback Mountain DVD. Sharp claims the retailer’s plan to distribute the “pro-homosexual film” (according to an AgapePress news story) is evidence that Wal-Mart has strayed from its family-friendly roots. (Excuse me? Wal-Mart is friendly only to the notion of constant commerical expansion and destruction of small-town businesses.) An Advocate story last October reported that Sharp was complaining that American Girl, a manufacturer of dolls and children’s books, was promoting lesbianism.

Toronto Star critic Geoff Pevere, having described himself as a “nearly extinct stone-age geezer” (funny…he doesn’t sound that way in his reviews), laments how common it is to be viciously attacked these days if people don’t agree with your film reviews. The internet, says Pevere, is “the ideal technology for venting intellectually unadulterated spleen…with e-mail it has never been easier to fire a vigorously hawked-up spitball and land a direct hit at someone with whom you disagree. Even better, at someone who can’t see you and doesn’t even need to know your name. (Being mad is never more tempting — or fun! — than when you can be anonymously so.) Where one once had to go through the time-consuming, mentally taxing and rage-tempering process of composing, writing and sending a letter, one can now wish a short, painful and disease-ridden life on someone in seconds. And then go make a sandwich. This used to be called sociopathic.” When I get one of these responses, I (almost) never respond to the vicious language or the emotion, and I usually try to address the particular point or argument being made. 97% of the time, the reply that comes back is always civil and rational, and sometimes even with an apology about having vented so strongly in their initial message.

The two big success stories of the weekend are Spike Lee ‘s Inside Man and Jason Reitman‘s Thank You for Smoking. Lee’s bank-robbery drama was projected to do $25 to $30 million this weekend, and current estimates (based on yesterday’s figures) project a $28.6 million tally, having done about $9.5 million on Friday. And Smoking took in $262,000 in 54 theatres yesterday, averaging about $20,000 a print. I’m sorry to report that V for Vendetta is falling…projected to earn about $13.1 or $13.2 million for the weekend, which is a reduction in business of 47% from last weekend. (Word-of-mouth obviously isn’t fantastic). The Wachowski Bros. film may wind up with $70 million domestic when all is said and done. Touchstone’s Stay Alive, a horror flick, will take in about $11.7 million for the weekend, having done about $4,128,000 yesterday. And Failure to Launch, the Matthew McConaughey-Sarajh Jessica Parker romantic comedy, will do $11.4 for the weekend ($3,474,000 yesterday). No accounting for taste out there…this is a total piece of shit and it’s at $64 million and climbing. Friday’s Variety story by Ben Fritz said the big competish might be between Inside Man and Larry, the Cable Guy. Playing in about 1700 theatres, the latter will do about $6,525,000 for the weekend….a little under $4000 a print.

In his story about the current proliferation of zombies in movies, N.Y. Times writer Warren St. John lists all the recent commercial manifestations required for a story like this to be approved by his Times editor, but he fails to mention one important geographical distinction. Zombie Nation is pretty much anchored in the eastern region of the U.S., the Caribbean islands, New Orleans, and most recently England (i.e., Shaun of the Dead). If anyone has written about, drawn a graphic novel or made any kind of exploitation-horror film about zombie armies in the Pacific Rim territories…Los Angeles, the California desert, Seattle, the Hawaiian islands, Japan, Taiwan, Shanghai, Alaska, etc….I’ve yet to hear about it. (You’d think that one of Japan’s horror-film directors would have taken a poke by now. Made a film, that is, a film about actual hordes of walking dead…and not just this or that individual ghost-zombie.) Jacques Tourneur‘s I Walked with a Zombie was set in the West Indies, George Romero‘s Night of the Living Dead films have all been Pittsburh and/or Pennsylvania-based, 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead happened in England, and Shadow: Dead Riot is, according to reviews I’ve read and stills I’ve seen, set in some generic women’s prison that’s not brand-spanking new. There definitely seems to be something about older cultures (places with longer histories, creakier homes, graveyards that go back to the 1700s) that zombies seem to like. Am I wrong? Has there ever been a movie about surfing zombies on Oahu’s North Shore? Or about zombies shuffling around San Francisco, Portland, Seattle or Vancouver? Think about it. I may be onto something here…

This is a
totally excellent trailer for Paul Greengrass‘s Flight 93 (Universal, 4.28)…you know, the 9/11 movie about the plane that went down in the Pennsylvania countryside because a few brave passengers stood up and did the hard thing. But what’s with the image on the one-sheet [see below]? Flight # 93 was nowhere near Manhattan after the towers got hit, but Universal’s ad guys…well, as the saying goes, “Leave it to the ad guys!” They obviously decided the folks wouldn’t get it unless the burning towers were front-and-center. Talk about clever, creative, Cleo-Award work.

Randy Quaid acted in Brokeback Mountain for peanuts, so you can understand why he’s pissed that he did that, given that the movie has taken in $160 million worldwide. He’s figuring that a portion of the dough ought to be passed around as a retroactive make-up thing. And yet it seems a mite strange that Quaid is suing Focus Features, Del Mar Prods., and Brokeback producers James Schamus and David Linde for $10 million on complaints of “intentional misrepresentation, “negligent misrepresentation” and “recisssion.” (The last term apparently refers to someone having “rescinded” or gone back on a deal point.) I don’t know about this stuff, but shouldn’t Quaid’s agent have stipulated in his contract that if the film turns into a surprise hit and makes, say, over $30 million that Quaid automatically gets paid this amount retroactively, and if it earns over $50 million he gets paid that amount retroactively, and so on? A studio-based person who knows something about contracts and indie-world financing has theorized that Quaid’s agent might have been rebuffed upon trying to even discuss putting such terms in the contract because “of Quaid’s standing…because he’s not big enough…if it had been Matt Dillon [Focus] might have said we’ll give you a bump after the film makes certain earnings,” but they may not have let Quaid’s agent even begin that conversation. Is it really “career suicide” for Quaid to do this, as a certain columnist has suggested? “Kind of,” the studio source said. It’s a rough world out there.

When he recently interviewed former pinup queen Bettie Page, whose life during the 1940s and ’50s is the focus of Mary Harron‘s The Notorious Bettie Page (Picturehouse, 4.14), L.A. Times staffer Louis Sahagun wrote that that “her face remains smooth and fresh, and one can still see the face of the young woman in the old. Her eyes, bright blue, still sparkle.” That’s good to hear because judging by Paige’s reported criticism of the film, she’s not that hip. After seeing the film at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles a few weeks ago, Page reportedly complained about the title. “Notorious? That’s not flattering at all,” she said. “They should have used another word.” The film’s producer Pam Koffler later told Sahagun that, of course, the title “was meant ironically…Bettie Page gained such notoriety for her modeling, but the real person and her life were exactly opposite of all that.” On top of this the New York Post‘s “Page Six” column reports that the 82 year-old Page was “overheard loudly snorting and sighing” during the Playboy Mansion screening. It’s probably a rule of thumb that most older people (especially the over-70 types) aren’t very comfortable recalling or re-living aspects of their foolish youth. Nobody likes to thinks about past mistakes, time wasted, opportunities missed, etc.

What’s the worst DVD commentary track ever recorded? Obviously a subjective call, but Rate That Commentary hands the booby prize to the usually very well-spoken William Friedkin and his commentary on Warner Home Video’s The Exorcist: The Version You’ve Never Seen, which came out in June 2004. Odd…Friedkin is usually very good on the mike. “A slow and uninformative comentary…one of the worst,” “the worst…non-informative and boring…the director is clearly uninspired [and] just describes the events we can see for ourselves. Actually, he also spends a lot of time in silence,” and”I don’t understand why this is the worst commentary ever! Was Friedkin forced into doing it? His commentaries for French Connection and Exorcist (original version) are excellent. Avoid this at all costs, unless you need a cure for insomnia.” I mention this only because Rate That Commentary is worthy scanning from time to time.

The coolest thing about John Anderson and Laura Kim‘s new how-to-sell-your-independent-movie book, “I Wake Up Screening“ (Billboard, 3.30), is, of course, the title…although it sounds more like a description of what it’s like to attend Sundance or Cannes or Toronto as a buyer or a journalist than anything else. It’s a how-to manual for emerging filmmakers “about how to (and how not to) get their films talked about, written about”…uhhm, the best way to do this is to get people like me to see it early. Anderson and Kim also “explain how to get their films evaluated, how to put together the perfect team, how to deal with the media” — flattery, early access, invitations to parties — “how to navigate the festival circuit, and how to win friends and influence people,” the press release says. Anderson is an L.A.-based critic who writes for Newsday, Variety and the New York Times, and Kim is a marketing vp at Warner Independent Pictures.

That server shutdown that happened around 10:30 am and lasted about fifteen minutes was one of those unfortunate incidents. Lunar Pages has offered their apologies, and I, too, am offering mine.

A little more than three years ago Variety‘s Michael Fleming reported that former bigtime auteur Lawrence Kasdan (Grand Canyon, The Big Chill, et. al.) was starting work (along with screenwriter Terri Minsky) on a U.S. remake of Sandra Nettlebeck‘s Mostly Martha for Castle Rock. There was moderate excitement about this since pretty much everyone with any taste was fairly taken with the ’01 German-made original. In June 2002, back in my Reel.com period, I ran a rave about Martha, calling it “a culinary Kramer vs. Kramer” about a female Hamburg chef with selfish tendencies (movingly played by Martina Gedeck) having to take care of her recently deceased sister’s young daughter — I also called it “the most succulent, sensually appetizing, food-trip movie since Big Night or even Babette’s Feast .” But Kasdan and Minsky, who wanted to set their film is some foodie city like New Orleans or San Francisco, ran into difficulty (I don’t know what kind) and their movie never happened. In May ’04, however, a moderately painful, obviously Martha-inspired confection called Raising Helen, directed by Garry Marshall and starring Kate Hudson and John Corbett, was released by Disney and wound up earning just under $40 million domestically. It had the same set-up (sister dies in car crash, selfish single professional woman suddenly has to take care of her kids, etc.) although Hudson’s Helen wasn’t a chef — she worked at a modelling agency. I thought that was the end of that saga, but no….there’s a second Mostly Martha knockoff currently rolling in Manhattan’s West Village, and this one is a little closer to the bone since it’s a resuscitation of the Castle Rock-Kasdan project. It’s being directed by Shine‘s Scott Hicks and stars the uber-capitalist, T-Mobile-hawking Catherine Zeta-Jones as the selfishly-inclined lead character (who this time is back to being a chef). The script is by Carol Fuchs, the boyfriend is being played by Aaron Eckhardt and the little orphaned girl is being played by Little Miss Sunshine‘s Abigail Breslin. CZJ’s character is called Martha but the IMDB is calling the movie an “Untitled Scott Hicks Film.” The IMDB chat boards about this film are hilarious — these are hardcore types, of course, but they all loved the original and despise the idea of a remake, they loathe CZJ and they all hope that it flops. I personally think it’s fine — Hicks is a pretty good director (putting aside the issue of Snow Falling on Cedars) and although the sweet European tone of Gettlebeck’s original Martha will almost certainly be lost, this Warner Bros. release may turn out okay. It’s just too bad that Kasdan’s version never happened (the IMDB says his next project is a Tom Hanks father-son relationship piece called The Risk Pool). And I think it’s unfortunate that the Gary Marshall-Kate Hudson version was made in the first place since it probably half-poisoned the well in terms of future audience interest. A fairly sizable crowd saw it, after all, and it’s probably safe to assume some of them will go, “Hey, isn’t this the same old thing?” when they start hearing about the Hicks version.