Neil LaBute‘s The Wicker Man, which Warner Bros. won’t show to the press, is apparently going to be the biggest peformer this weekend. 72% general awareness with a 34 definite interest and a first choice of 11. We’re looking at a four-day weekend (Labor Day holiday is on Monday, 9.4) so figure somewhere between $15 and $20 million.
Crank will probablycome in second among the newbies — 45 general awareness, 32 definite intrest, first choice 8.
The Illusionst, which I finally saw two or three nights ago and is better than I figured it would be, is going wide. And there’s also Crossover, the decent-looking black basketball movie from Screen Gems.
Samuel Goldwyn’sLassie, a first-rate family-geared film that I saw on DVD last night, could do some real business if it had a more aggressive distributor. The problem is that Goldwyn doesn’t have any money. Their rep is “good taste, no pockets.” If you go with Goldwyn, it’s touch and go because they don’t spend anything.
Early tracking on All The King’s Men (Columbia, 9.22) is in — 36 general awareness, 24 definite interest, 2 first choice. It’s early (three weeks out) but right now it needs to chug a can of Monster.
The two hottest looking titles for 9.15 are The Gridiron Gang and Universal’s The Black Dahlia — both are tracking decently. Paramount’s The Last Kiss isn’t at this stage.
Among the 9.8 releases, Focus Features’ Hollywoodland has a semblance of a soft pulse; The Protector is nothing; ditto The Covenant.

“The movies haven’t been very good the last three or four years, they really haven’t,” author/screenwriter/director Michael Tolkin tells N.Y. Times profiler David Halbfinger. “Everybody knows that. At least that, maybe more. And what [movies] were will never return.

“I don’t think America’s had a good [big] movie made since Abu Ghraib,” Tolkin continues. “I think [that Iraqi prison-torture scandal] showed that a generation that had been raised on those heroic movies was torturing. National myths die, I don’t think they return. And our national myth is finished, except in a kind of belligerent way.”
Tolkin sat for this interview, which was published on Wednesday, 8.30, to plug his new book, “The Return of The Player” (Grove, 8.28).
I’ve been calling Tolkin and runnning into him at parties and various industry fuctions off and on for 14 or 15 years. He’s a good guy to know, although every now and then he can be cautious to the point of being a flatliner.
Tolkin has a very sardonic sense of humor. He’s the funniest down-head I’ve ever met in this town. There was a line in Deep Impact when the astronauts have just committed themsleves to a sucide move that will save the earth, and one of them says, “Well, at least we’ll all have junior high schools named after us” — that’s a Tolkin line.
And never let it be forgotten that Tolkin directed and wrote one of the scariest and eeriest films made in the last 20 years, as well as the most damning film ever made about born-again Christians who believe in the End of Days — The Rapture (1991).
“The source of [Tolkin’s] creative-industrial-complex angst,” Halbfinger writes, “is the death of what he both eulogizes and parodies: the classic journey-of-the- hero story structure, analyzed by Joseph Campbell in the 1940’s, popularized a generation ago by George Lucas through Star Wars , spouted and shorthanded by studio executives ever since, and all but trampled to death, Mr. Tolkin said, by nearly every subsequent action movie and thriller that Hollywood has turned out.
“Or, as Tolkin’s Griffin Mill puts it in the new book: “Physics cracked the atom, biology cracked the genome and Hollywood cracked the story.”

Joseph Stefano, who wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and co-created the ’60s sci-fi anthology series The Outer Limits, died on 8.25 at age 84. He was a very bright guy and fun to talk to. (I did a phoner with him six or seven years ago.) When you have a chance watch the 90-minute “Making of Psycho” doc on Universal Home Video’s most recent Psycho DVD — Stefano is interviewed extensively, and it’s obvious from the get-go that he’s a bright, affable, agreeable sort.

E-Film Critic’s Erik Childress has another critic-bashing piece out, this one called “The Whores of Summer and the Embargoes They Break.” It’s hard to subscribe to strict black-and-white concepts of ethical shilly-shallying for film critics. Everyone has a remnant of dried jizz on his/her coatsleeve. Nobody is 100% pure. Not even “Rabbi Dave’ Poland.
I guess Childress’ point is that some people whore out too much. They cross the line like Saddam Hussein crossed the line, and here’s Childress dropping bombs and delivering shock-and-awe. I’m not saying everyone is a whore, but I think it was Bob Dylan who once wrote, “Show me someone who’s not a parasite and I’ll say a prayer for him.”
Here’s Childress’s list of “The Ten Dumbest Blurbs Said This Summer”…but what does he mean by this? Does he mean lame, clumsily written, ill-considered, ignorant, willfully misleading…? The word “dumb” doesn’t do it for me.
Anyway, in backwards order…
10. “A movie treat for kids, mom, pop, brothers, sisters, uncles and, of course, aunts…” — Gene Shalit on The Ant Bully. (That’s not so bad.) 9. “So extreme it’s good, so shrewd it’s good, so funny it’s good, so good it’s good.” — Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle, on Snakes on a Plane. 8. “A downright sweet love letter to Latino skate kids” — Dennis Lim, The Village Voice on Wassup Rockers. 7. “Scoop is Woody Allen’s finest film in years.” — Jeffrey Lyons…an outrageous thing to say! 6. “Columbo but hotter. Way, way hotter.” — Out magazine on Shock to the System. 5. “A celebration of the strength it takes to be different. Halle Berry steals the show with a sensational performance.” — David Sheehan on X-Men: The Last Stand. 4. “The best superhero film since Spider-Man!” — Scott Bowles, USA Today, on My Super Ex-Girlfriend. 3. “A true story you’d never expect…” Newsweek (Childress doesn’t say which staffer wrote this) on World Trade Center. 2. “…a fascinating Cain-and-Abel tragedy that foreshadows today’s jihads and crusades.” — Queen Ann News on Beowulf & Grendel. 1. “If you liked March of the Penguins, you’ll love An Inconvenient Truth.” — Eleanor Clift, Newsweek.

As Lewis Beale pointed out this morning, the author of Glenn Ford‘s N.Y. Times obit, Richard Severo, failed to mention Ford’s role in Fritz Lang‘s The Big Heat (’53) — a significant listing on its own, but also a major career-accelerator for Ford. Severo and his editors also left out Delmer Daves ‘ 3:10 To Yuma (’57), an above-average Ford film that received some attention earlier this year after it was reported that Walk the Line director James Mangold was intending to remake it, first with Tom Cruise and then with Russell Crowe playing Ford’s bad-guy role. These are fairly significant omissions, Times guys!

Glenn Ford died today at age 90, and I’m sorry. A good life he had. But let’s be honest and admit the basic facts. Ford broke through with Gilda (1946), but his face and manner seemed a bit too young and smooth back then — he lacked character. He had taken some on by the time he starred in Fritz Lang ‘s The Big Heat (1953), and from then until the mid ’60s he was “Glenn Ford”.

Then his career eased down and stayed that way until the end 40 years later. He worked through the ’70s and sporadically in the ’80s, but Ford never aged or devel- oped into my idea of an especially rich or dynamic man — he didn’t ripen. Ford was always a reasonable middle type fellow. Being fierce and volcanic was never in his quill.
He conveyed steeliness and repression at times, but Ford was mainly about middle-class attitudes and presumptions, soothed feelings, “there, there” and thoughtful, average-guy decency. He peaked with lead perfs in movies like The Blackboard Jungle (’55), Teahouse of the August Moon (’56), 3:10 to Yuma (’57), The Cowboys (’58) , Cimarron (’60) and Pocketful of Miracles (’61) . His last really tight and tangy role was as a cryptic San Francisco detective in Blake Edwards ‘ Experiment in Terror (’62).
At the risk of sounding disrespectful (which I’m not trying to be), Glenn Ford does- n’t travel in today’s culture. He hasn’t for decades. He’s a 1950s man, and that era doesn’t figure into anyone’s consciousness any more.

This is several days late (a bit dusty even), but a colleague heard someone say last night that the happiest person about the Tom–Cruise– leaving-Paramount mucky-muck has to be Mel Gibson…back under the radar!

Roger Friedman reported earlier today that that two guys funding Tom Cruise‘s producton company, Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder and Virginia home builder Dwight W. Schar, are Republicans supporters who give money to Bush-Cheney. Which underlines the obvious reading of this situation, which is that Cruise has gone outside the liberal Hollywood fold to fund C/W Prods. Snyder looks like a rightie with his fleshy overfed face and that white-shirt-and-red-tie combo, which no self-respecting Hollywood creative collaborator would be caught dead in.

“Chinatown it ain’t, not in any department,” says Variety critic Todd McCarthy about Brian De Palma‘s The Black Dahlia, which had its big world premiere several hours ago at the Venice Film Festival.
“Based on James Ellroy‘s estimable fictional account of what was, for 47 years, Los Angeles’ most notorious unsolved murder, this lushly rendered noir finds De Palma in fine visual fettle as he pulls off at least three characteristically eye-popping set pieces while trying, with mixed success, to keep some pretty cockeyed plotlines under control. A literally ripping good yarn is [ultimately] undercut by some lackluster performances and late-inning overripe melodrama.”
Hollywood Reporter critic Kirk Honeycutt says that Dahlia “has the looks, smarts and attitude of a classic Brian De Palma/film noir thriller. During the first hour, the hope that the director has tapped into something really great mounts with each passing minute. Then, gradually, the feverish pulp imagination of James Ellroy, on whose novel Josh Friedman based his screenplay, feeds into De Palma’s dark side. The violence grows absurd, emotions get overplayed, and the film revels once too often in its gleeful depiction of corrupt, decadent old Los Angeles. Disappointingly, the film edges dangerously into camp. No, The Black Dahlia never quite falls into that black hole [but] the second half feels heavy and unfulfilled, potential greatness reduced to a good movie plagued with problems.”

All right, hold up on those no-one-cares- about-Lassie sentiments. It’s running a 92% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a critic I respect told me a couple of hours ago that he “bawled like a baby” when he saw it a few days ago.
Could this G-rated British programmer be made of the actual right stuff? You can’t blame me for presuming that this modest little film, opening 9.1 via the Samuel Goldywn Co., was just a run-of-the-mill family flick featuring auto-pilot paycheck performances by costars Peter O’Toole and Samantha Morton. Has anyone ever seen The Magic of Lassie (1978) with Jimmy Stewart? Stewart sang a song over the opening credits, and I haven’t forgotten that. It was horrible.
Please understand that HE is not preturnaturally cynical about dog movies, and that the two publicists at Rogers & Cowan who are handling the film for Goldwyn never even sent me a screening invitation (a man-about-town who goes to just about everything didn’t get an invitation either), and also that I tried to track them down a little while ago and they’re out and their voicemail isn’t working. I tried Goldwyn and they’re “out to lunch” also.
The only thing that gives me concern is a review by Onion critic Scott Tobias that says writer-director Charles Sturridge “doesn’t mess with the Lassie formula — he provides plenty of dog-porn shots of the collie bounding through scenery in slow motion.”
Every now and then a movie about a family and a lost dog can be okay, and if you can’t find a place in your heart for flicks of this sort then you shouldn’t be reviewing movies. You have to be emotionally receptive; you’ve got to leave your heart door unlocked in case the right movie comes knocking.
That said, I’m going to admit to something that perhaps I shouldn’t admit to. When I read the phrase “dog porn” I naturally…you know. And I think a lot of us would ike to see a Lassie movie in which Lassie’s brother Laddie develops a special relation- ship with Scarlett Johansson. She could play a rich Scotsman’s unfaithful wife who develops an extraordinary bond with Laddie, and it could be set, like Lassie, in the England and Scotland of the 1940s. I’m not suggesting a stupid dog-porn flick, for God’s sake. I’m thinking of a story that includes genuine tenderness and vulnerability and intimacy of a very special sort. We all know that animal eroticism is very big on the internet and is one of the last remaining taboos, and it’s just a matter of time before the right filmmaker approaches it with taste and discretion. I know it sounds like I’m kidding, but I’m not. Not entirely, I mean.
Nagisa Oshima‘s Max, Mon Amour, a monkey-relationship movie with Charlotte Rampling , broke the barrier back in ’86, Given this precedent, going canine 20 years later, especially in today’s mock-salacious environment, wouldn’t even be seen as nervy.

In an article running today, L.A. Times guy John Horn has listed four likely Telluride Film Festival selections that I haven’t yet posted, to wit:
(a) Adrienne Shelly‘s Waitress , with Kerri Russell as a pregnant, unhappily married waitress in the deep south who falls into an affair with a visitor as an attempt to get out of her situation and redefine her life; (b) Susanne Bier‘s After the Wedding (sure to be strong and absorbing in the vein of Bier’s Brothers and Open Hearts); (c) Florian Henckel-Donnersmarck‘s The Life of Others, said to be “a black comedy about spying in 1980s East Germany”, and (d) Louise Osmond‘s Deep Water,a documentary about a catastrophic sailing race in 1968.
Horn’s other Telluride calls are Infamous (seen it), Fur (said to be a bit too arty for its own good), Babel (great), The Last King of Scotland (featuring Forrest Whitaker performance as General Idi Amin), Roger Michell‘s Venus, Asger Leth and Milos Loncarevic‘s Ghosts of Cite Soleil , and Christopher Smith‘s Severance.

“All of [the] power is lying in the last third of the movie, and you’re slowly ratcheting up the tension along the way,” Wicker Man director-writer Neil LaBute has told Coming Soon’s Edward Douglas. “You have to be very patient and say that I’m making a movie that people can watch and enjoy, but it’s not something that’s going to keep rattling the cage every few minutes. It’s just something that’s constantly twisting, twisting itself so that you’re very caught up in it.
“It’s knowing the genre, knowing how you want to approach that and how you want to surprise with it. You set up situations that look like very familiar ones where audiences are like, ‘I know what’s going to happen.’ You’re going to get close to that girl and then her eyes are going to open to try to spook me, and when that doesn’t happen, you go, ‘Now, why did they do that?’ Because you’re always trying to reward expectations and reward the audience a bit later with something. I tried to know that genre well, and then play against it a bit as well.”