We all need to bow our heads and observe a moment of silence for the dear & departed title of Clint Eastwood‘s second Iwo Jima movie, which up until recently was called Red Sun, Black Sand. It now has a much blander title — Letters from Iwo Jima.
The title change is revealed on page 64 of this week’s Entertainment Weekly (a “Fall Movie Preview” issue with Daniel Craig on the cover), and was confirmed this morning by a Paramount staff publicist.

The original title had a poetic tint with allusions to the flag of Japan and the black sand on the beaches of Iwo Jima. The new title uses the words “Iwo Jima” — very clear, that — but it has no alliteration and no sense of mood or tone. It could be the title of a PBS documentary about an American mother in Iowa receiving letters from her son Caleb. It suggests dullness, softness…and gives no hint that it’s a film with an all-Japanese cast. Which, of course, is a very scary concept for typical American filmgoers.
Based on a story by Paul Haggis and Iris Yamishita and a script by Yamashita, Letters from Iwo Jima was made as a kind of mirror-companion piece for East- wood’s Flags of Our Fathers (Paramount, 10.20), which is about the legacy as well as the reality of American troops fighting on Iwo Jima. Letters, which Warner Bros. is distributing domestically (Paramount is handling it internationally) in January ’07, deals with the battle for Iwo Jima as experienced by Japanese troops. It stars Ken Watanabe (Memoirs of a Geisha) as General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, who led the battle against American troops for several weeks.
The new title probably alludes to the details of the conflict being revealed by letters written by Japanese soldiers to loved ones back home. The Japanese translation of Letters from Iwo Jima, as provided by the IMDB, is Iou Jima kara no tegami. It sounds sucky either way.
Nothing happens on a Clint Eastwood movie without Clint’s approval, but this has the whiff of something pushed along by Warner Bros. marketing. I called Haggis this morning to get the scoop (no reply so far), but five’ll get you ten some- body at Warner Bros. thought Red Sun, Black Sand sounded vague and arty, or they tested it and Average Joes said the same thing.
I could also suppose that the WB marketers may have appealed to Eastwood by reminding him that a similar- sounding film that he directed and starred in — 1990’s White Hunter, Black Heart — bombed.
This is the same kind of bottom-line marketing call that led to Taylor Hackford‘s 1984 remake of Out of the Past being retitled as Against All Odds. The movie-title mantra is always “make them simple and plain — metaphor and alliteration have no currency any more.”
Don’t call that Alfred Hitchcock-Cary Grant movie North by Northwest — call it Framed Innocence or Run For Your Life. If that 1959 classic never existed and a producer wanted to use that title for a new movie today, the marketing guys would test it and people would probably scratch their heads and say, “North by northwest of what? I don’t get it.”
In such an environment what chance does a title with the words “red sun” have? I don’t know if Red Sun, Black Sand was tested, but if it was I’ll bet 95% of the people who responded said, “What does that mean? The movie takes place in a desert or something? But hold on…what kind of desert has black sand? I’m confused.” And I’ll bet 99.5% of the people out there don’t know or care what Japan’s flag looks like. Don’t kid yourself — we live in Moron Nation.
Ask Jay Leno about this. I saw him do a question segment with people on the street on the Tonight show a few years back, and he asked a young girl to give the last name of a recent president whose first name was “Jimmy.” She didn’t know. “He used to be a peanut farmer…” Leno hinted. The woman still didn’t know but she took a stab. “Jimmy Peanut?”, she said.

Let the word go forth from this time and place to friend and foe alike, but particularly to Hollywood Elsewhere loyalists, that starting today & forever after everyone is going to have to register in order to post comments to articles. I’ve done it and it’s a relatively quick and simple process. HE’s webmaster Jon Rahoi tells me it’s safe and anonymous — you won’t even have to leave your e-mail address. I had to do this because some moronic spammer posted 52,000 comments yesterday and shut down the reader-response capability for two or three hours.

Step Up (Disney), Friday’s #1 film, dropped 20% on Saturday so Talladega Nights (Columbia) rushed in like a fool and took the #1 slot with $22,404,000. That’s a 52% drop from last weekend due to high-octane word-of-mouth.
Step Up could’ve been the champ but its teenage-girl supporters got most of their rocks off Friday when it made $8,499,000. The take dropped on Saturday to $6,834,000 and so the film will wind up with something close to $20,007,000 as of Sunday evening.
World Trade Center was being projected yesterday to end up with about $25,700,000 for its first five days (it opened on Wednesday, 8.9) but it did a little better on Saturday than expected — $18,274,000 for the three-day weekend — so the five-day cume is now $26,075,000. Not bad, but not exactly cause for popping open bottles of Dom Perignon.
The fourth-place Barnyard will end up with a weekend tally of $10.082,000. Pulse (#5) will finish with about $8,200,000, Pirates (#6) with $7.367,000, Miami Vice (#7) with $4,547,000, Zoom (#8) with $4,477,000, The Descent (#9) with $4,452,000 and Monster House (#10) with $3,444,000.

I wrote a couple of days ago that I’m nursing doubts about Emilio Estevez‘s Bobby (Weinstein Co., 11.17), but in fairness I should acknowledge that a bigwig from the electronic side of entertainment journalism has flipped over it, or at least is telling people that. This person is also saying that the two standouts are Sharon Stone and — hold onto your hats — Lindsay Lohan. The Weinsteiners are showing it to a select few before the big Bobby unveilings at the Venice and Toronto film festivals as a “work in progress” (i.e., a euphemism for “Harvey doesn’t think it’s quite there yet”).

In the third graph of this profile of Rufus Sewell by N.Y. Times writer Sarah Lyall, the 38 year-old actor is described by Neil Burger, the director-writer of The Illusionist, as “more of a leading man” than a character actor who could villains or oddballs. Only in softball profiles like this do you find such delusion. Sewell isn’t a leading man type in the slightest. He never has been. He’s vaguely villainous, obsessive, creepy, churned-up- inside, glaring. There’s a reason — hello? — he’s played almost nothing but villains these last few years. Sewell is an intense and accomplished actor, yes, and I’d love to see him in “Rock ‘n’ Roll”, the Tom Stoppard play that’s currently performing in London, but…

If you haven’t read my early-bird piece about Mike Binder‘s Reign O’er Me, please do so now. It’ll prepare you more fully for the disappointing but not altogether surprising news that Reign won’t be opening on 12.1 after all. Columbia is going for a March or April ’07 opening, and here’s why:

(1) Columbia has a heavy fall/Xmas slate anyway (four films) and they didn’t want to add another film to that list in the first place, although jazzed reactions to early screenings of Reign told them they have something that works in a big way, and not just with journos like myself;
(2) There’s no question that Adam Sandler‘s performance (he plays a Manhattan dentist caught in an emotional shut-down mode over his wife and daughters having been killed on 9.11) would have stirred talk about this or that acting honor, but Columbia already has two funny guys giving dramatic performances in a pair of high-profile Oscar bait movies — Will Ferrell in Stranger Than Fiction and Will Smith in The Pursuit of Happyness — so do the math;
(3) This weekend’s low-key response to World Trade Center suggests that resistance to 9/11-themed movies is persisting wthin certain demos, and it may be the better part of wisdom to ease up on any more films in this vein and try again in the spring (even though Reign O’er Me uses the World Trade Center backdrop very sparingly);
(4) Reign‘s test screening numbers have been very good, but Columbia has picked up indications that some critics might not be inclined to give a drama with Sandler (who’s despised in elite critical circles) a fair shake; and…
(5) Columbia would release it on 12.1 anyway if Sandler, a very big Sony gorilla, had stood up, planted his feet and said he really wanted it released this year — but he didn’t quite do that. But he did say no print interviews when it does come out, which will make selling the film a bit of an uphill effort;
(6) Columbia feels it can give Reign O’er Me a more enthusiastic, great-guns launch in March/April than early December. It’s a less crazy time and there’s not as much stuff pulling everyone’s attention every which way.

Box Office Mojo is reporting that Alfonso Cuaron‘s Children of Men has been pushed back to 12.25.06 from the previous 9.29 date. It’ll still show at the Venice Film festival, though, and will be released internationally in the fall, starting with the U.K. on 9.22.
The delay is about “giving things more time to accumulate and gather momentum [in the States],” a Universal rep says. “Critical and popular acclaim, word-of-mouth, understanding, exposure, etc. Alfonso has rendered this film with real virtuosity and passion, and we just [decided to wait] to give it some more time for a meaningful campaign.”
A lot of people I know were hoping to see Children of Men soon. Hearing that it has Kubrick-like chops with long sustained shots had me revved. “You should remain revved,” the Uni guy says. “It’s an incredible, startling film.”

This 8.11 posting from Britain’s Film Ick says Terry Gilliam told a London crowd last Thursday night that a deal for him to direct Paul Giamatti in The Owl in Daylight, an adaptation of Philip K. Dick‘s final unfinished work, is “going ahead.” (My mind is melting & the plaster walls are cracking — I know I wrote a four or five-graph story about the Giamatti-Dick project three or four days ago, and now I can’t find it on the site.) If Gilliam directs Owl it will definitely have a mood and a sense of visual drive and togetherness, but it’s also be off to the races in a non-linear, weird-for-weird’s-sake, impressionistic sense, if you follow my drift. For a lot of people, that’ll be a fine and cherishable thing, but I’ve nearly had it with Gilliam. His movies are always about his brushstrokes first, acting second, story third and intelligibility fourth.

Another noteworthy Film Ick/Terry Gilliam item: Tideland, the Gilliam film that people were calling “unwatchable” at last year’s Toronto Film Festival & which inspired seven or eight critics to walk out of during a screening I happened to attend, “is now playing with a filmed introduction in which Gilliam helps the audience get into ‘the right mindset’. Gently amusing though possibly rather redundant, the film is a single shot of Gilliam addressing the camera, and offers nothing as elaborate, funny or pointed as ‘The Dress Pattern’ — Gilliam’s introduction to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which you can see on the Criterion [DVD].”

When all is said and done Talladega Nights (Columbia) is expected to be the #1 film on Sunday night with $22,871,000. It was down 52% from last weekend(indicated by that B CinemaScore), but the cume will be roughly at $90,800,000so it’s going good . Step Up was #1 Friday but will come in second with $21,241,000, or so the experts are saying. World Trade Center will end up with about $25,700,000. Barnyard will be #4 with $9,509,000, Pulse (#5) with $8,818,000…nobody cares about the lesser numbers. Miami Vice, whipped, will come in ninth with $4,427,000…a real shame. Little Miss Sunshine added 90 theatres and looking at a $2.5 million weekend haul, for an average of $16,7000.

The surprise-heat movie of the weekend is Disney’s Step Up, a teen dance-romancer that got a failing grade on Metacritic (50%) and a much worse number on Rotten Tomatoes (19%). But it was the #1 movie yesterday, doing $8,499,000 and beating out the #2 Talladega Nights and #3 World Trade Center . The final weekend tally for Will Ferrell’s NASCAR flick is expected to nudge it into first place, although Step Up is expected to finish with a higher-than-projected $21,240,000.

Step Up‘s Channing Tatum

The Step Up surprise was mainly about ace-in-the-hole Channing Tatum, the 26 year-old hunky male lead from Alabama who’s very hot now with teenage girls. (His previous punch-throughs happened in Coach Carter and She’s The Man — he had an uncredited bit part in War of the Worlds.) My son Jett, 18, said “the girls in the audience were gasping” whenever Tatum was on-screen during a She’s The Man show he went to last March in Boston.
I can smell piece-of-shit teen flicks like this a mile off, which is why I didn’t catch the press screening. But magnetism that works is always worth checking out, which is why I’ll probably pay $11 bucks plus parking , popcorn and a coke to sit through this thing (well, part of it) sometime later today or tonight. $20 bucks to watch Channing Tatum! Maybe I’ll learn something.
My favorite review blurb is from Chicago Reader‘s J.R. Jones, who wrote that “this teen chick flick is so perfectly calculated I wouldn’t be surprised if every i in the screenplay were dotted with a little heart. Any guy who sits through this date movie deserves to get to third base at least.”
If you go by MCN’s predictions chart, everybody was way, way off on this one. Coming Soon foresaw Step Up earning $11.1 million this weekend, Box-Office Guru said $8 million, Hollywood Reporter $13, Poland predicted $9, EW $11 and Box Office Mojo said $10.5. Thursday’s tracking indicated a late surge and a figure between $12 and $15 million, but that was still a short call. Nobody saw this one coming. Those tracking-survey guys had better figure some way to get to younger types on their cell phones and not just depend on land-line surveys.

“My girlfriend went crazy during this movie and was actually the one who wanted me to send in a review because she wants everybody to see it. I would rate this 10 out of 10 and is probably the best movie I’ve seen in a couple of years. We couldn’t believe how much we got into this movie and the music. Everybody was tapping their feet and laughing and cheering.

“At the end of the movie the whole crowd was applauding for a long time and they had this part when the credits were on where they had clips from all the different actors, and everybody clapped like crazy for each actor and then screamed nonstop when Jennifer Hudson came on.” — A guy named “Nightmare” who caught Bill Condon‘s Dreamgirls at a theatre in San Diego’s Gaslamp district a couple of days ago and wrote a review for AICN. I’m into the idea of this film as much as the next guy, but “Nightmare” sounds like an easy lay.