Two changes with 20th Century Fox’s The Family Stone. One, they’ve decided to do a platform-release on 11.4 (i.e., the original opening date) in 800-plus theatres, and then go wide on 11.11. (The theatre tallies were wrong before…sorry.) Two, they’re cooking up a new one-sheet that will presumably try to sell what it actually is (a sharply-written family comedy with heart) as opposed to whatever that upraised wedding finger one-sheet conveys. Which is what exactly? Marriage sucks?…my husband sucks?…I’ve changed my mind? It’s catchy (I showed it a woman friend who’s out of the loop and she went, “Aha!”) but it has nothing to do with the film.
I said before going to the Toronto Film Festival than I hoped Niki Caro’s North Country (Warner Bros., 10.14) wouldn’t just be another dramatization of a sexual-harassment issue, which seemed old-hat to me. And I’m afraid N.Y. Times writer Caryn James is also on the money when she says the following: “While it seems to be a film with a cause, [North Country] refights a battle that took place long ago. As one of the few women working in a mine, Charlize Theron faces insults and discrimination in a role that seems conceived with an Oscar campaign in mind. Women still suffer in jobs that have traditionally belonged to men, but the blatant discrimination her character faces — her boss flat-out says she has no right to take a job away from a man — has no vital connection to the present. A truly provocative film would deal with the backlash against sexual harassment laws, the contemporary sense that political correctness has gone too far. The sitcom ‘The Office’ (both the British and American versions), with its troglodyte boss and a human resources department that stages seminars on appropriate behavior, says more about harassment today.”
It occured to me last weekend in the course of the Family Stone junket in Pasadena that right now, a healthy portion of the publicity team at 20th Century Fox is (a) female, (b) married and (c) with child and on the verge of going on maternity leave, or with recently arrrived kids at home. When Fox marketing exec Jeff Godsick was told a couple of weeks of still another impending birth and a request for maternity leave, he allegedly replied, “Hmmm…maybe I’m pregnant?”
Nobody cares about the James Bond casting process. I might have mentioned this once or twice before, but the franchise is a kind of cultural tumor…about a character and a mindset that has nothing to do with anything in our world today except for the bizarre fact that when a Bond movie opens several million people pay to see it (which I attribute to mindless habit)…about a character who mattered in the world of the early ’50s to early ’60s, and then degenerated into a fey figurehead of a series of special effects-and-gadgets movies during the ’70s and ’80s, and whose legend over the last eight to ten years has been further marginalized by the most clueless producing team in the history of mainstream filmmaking, Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli. That said, Variety‘s Katja Hoffman, quoting London’s Daily Mail, says that Daniel Craig has probably been chosen. I love this sartorial acknowledgement: “Brit thesp, who plays the second lead in Spielberg’s terrorist thriller Munich, would be the first blond Bond.” The clincher for me is that “Craig’s publicist only offered a ‘no comment'” to Hoffman, and that the authorities at Eon Productions, the producers of the Bond franchise, “were said to be ‘in a meeting.'” The only way the Bond franchise can ever really get going is for Wilson and Broccoli to be removed from the equation, which will never happen so forget the whole thing. Craig will pocket a nice paycheck and get to buy a much bigger home…great.
“I’ve always viewed life as material for a movie,” The Squid and the Whale director Noah Baumbach says to N.Y. Times profiler Deborah Solomon, and thereby flashing his hard-core obsessive filmmaker credentials. “I am sure there will be a backlash against The Squid and the Whale,” he also says, “but I am hoping it doesn’t kick in for at least three months. I do like having books on my shelves. I do value that life. I love Bob Dylan. And I love Philip Roth. I am reading ‘The Professor of Desire’ now, which is about the great Philip Roth struggle between being the good boy and being the bad boy. I have to remind myself to sit because my joints ache…I am the sort of person who is too anxious to sit down.” This settles it…anyone who frets and suffers and can’t sit down gets my vote.
That two-year Touchstone production deal that has been handed to Rod Lurie and his Battle Plan Productions in the wake of Disney-owned ABC bouncing him off the new ABC hit series Commander in Chief, which Lurie created, in order to make way for the new creative honcho Steven Bochco….well, I’m told it’s pretty rich. Like $4 million rich. It’s face-saving tribute money. Lurie created the show, wrote it, ran the whole ship…and then (a) “creative differences” arose or (b) Lurie was overworked or (c) Disney/ABC felt the show could be better sculpted…whatever. They got Lurie to be cool and gracious about bowing out by handing him the $4 million as a kind of we-love-and-respect-you- but-we-need-you-to-go-away payoff. Lurie, an adult and a good hermano, will keep his exec producer credit and move on to other things, etc., and life will go on.
Doctor: [Your wife is] not so sick, my lord, as she is troubled with thick-coming fancies that keep her from her rest.
Husband: Cure her of that! Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased? Pluck from the memory of a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain and, with some sweet oblivious antidote, cleanse the stuffed bosom of the perilous stuff which weighs upon the heart?
Doctor: Therein the patient must minister to himself.
There’s one curious statistic in Sharon Waxman’s N.Y. Times story about a new online study finding that Hollywood is “being jilted” by young males who are being lured away by video games and other digital activities. The readings said that guys-under-25 saw “24 percent fewer movies this summer than they did in the summer of 2003, when the same study was conducted. The drop in moviegoing was much smaller for women and for other age groups.” The study contacted 2000 people and used “a random, nationally representative sample of moviegoers who were queried online in August.” The odd bit comes at the end of a graph that says the study, conducted by a Los Angeles-based online reserach group called OTX, “echoed a finding about television viewing that was much disputed two years ago, when Nielsen Media Research charted a sharp decline in prime-time ratings among men ages 18 to 34. That finding, which delineated the growing fragmentation of the viewing audience…attributed to a rise in alternate activities, like video games.” And yet at the end of this graph, Waxman reports that “a year later, the viewership returned.” And what does that mean? (I’m lost.) Otherwise, the OTX study obviously reenforces last spring-and-summer’s concerns about a dwindling movie audience. It also seems to dispute the reported “new thinking” among studio execs, as reported by L.A. Times‘ Claudia Eller and John Horn not too long ago, that the fault, dear Brutus, lies in our crappy movies and not in the public’s changing entertainment habits.
There’s no rejoicing in Mudville over the weekend’s box-office tallies, and particularly Wallace & Gromit‘s $4.2 million on Friday, which indicates a $13 or $14 million weekend…along those lines. Industry spitballers looked at the tracking and figured it would do a lot better…in the vicinity of at least $20 million, if not higher. And something is certainly wrong with the world when Flightplan, a movie that loses its grip in the final act and is now in its third week (having opened 9.23), nudges out In Her Shoes, $3.1 million to $3 million per Friday’s reported estimates. It looks like Shoes is heading for a $10 or $11 million weekend at best, and possibly a bit lower, which is a good $5 or $6 million lower than what handicappers were projecting. And Two for the Money, that piece-of-shit Al Pacino deranged-mentor gambling movie, registers the same $3 million Friday haul as In Her Shoes…? Nice going, U.S. ticket buyers. Don’t consider quality…just watch the TV ads and go with your gut. Hey!
I’ve been holding off saying anything about Thursday’s firing of Par Classics co-prezzies Ruth Vitale and David Dinerstein by Paramount Pictures chief Brad Grey, and here it is Saturday and I still can’t think of anything very penetrating…sorry. And I am sorry about this. Ruth and David are good hombres. It’s totally routine, yes, for new studio heads to clear the decks and discharge in-place execs so they can bring in “their own people,” blah, blah. Grey’s brand-new Par Classics chief will be Lion’s Gate’s Tom Ortenberg, apparently. I have nothing to add to the irony of Ruth and David getting pushed out of the plane at the end of the most profitable period that Par Classics has ever had ($22 million or so earned by Hustle and Flow $8 million tallied by Mad Hot Ballroom). It seems clear that the impetus for Grey’s decision was that bizarre Thank You For Smoking episode during the Toronto Film Festival in which Dinerstein and Vitale got a handshake deal from producer Davuid Sacks, only to wake up the next morning and hear that Sacks had signed a deal for Fox Searchlight to distribute.
Upcoming from Par Classics are Jonathan Demme’s Neil Young concert doc, Robert Towne’s Ask the Dust and Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan. Best wishes and good luck to Ortenberg. Life moves on, I guess.
Go the Capote site and click through to the review section (which has a blurb from yours truly), and while you’re doing that listen to the excerpts from the score by Mychael Danna, brother of Jeff Danna, who also composes for films. The last score by Mycahel that I really liked was for Shattered Glass, but the one for Capote is even better. Listen to it for five minutes or so and it starts sinking in deep. Now I want to buy the CD.
Sometimes people have trouble with simple declarative sentences and laying things bare. If I’d done some calling around on this thing, I would have uncovered the thing of it. In the meantime, we have Rush and Molloy reporting this morning that Warner Independent is dumping Paul Dinello and Stephen Colbert’s Strangers with Candy, a feature prequel to the widely-praised TV series featuring Jerri Blank (Amy Sedaris), a 46 year-old ex-junkie and ex-con who returns to high school in a bid to start her life over. But George and Joanna didn’t say (or even speculate all that energetically) why. Rush-Molloy wrote that “it was was snubbed by indie filmmakers for being ‘too entertaining,'” but that kind of observation obviously has no bearing on anything relating to their item.
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