Does everyone understand what happened last weekend to poor George Romero? On its second weekend Romero’s Land of the Dead nose-dived 73.4% and ended up with a $16,209,660 cume. This doesn’t just mean that younger audiences didn’t care for Romero’s film, but also that his zombie visions are out-of-synch with the times. The old-fogey, slow-shuffling zombies who made their legendary debut in Romero’s Night of the Living Dead 37 years ago are done for — the fast-sprinting zombies in Danny Doyle’s 28 Days Later and the ones in Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake obviously have struck more of a chord. Romero himself has been retired by Land‘s financial failure. All the middle-aged hip journalists love and respect the guy but this was his big comeback shot and it didn’t happen, and now he’s more or less fucked as far as the financial tough guys are concerned.
I’ve gotta jump into this reporters-going-to-jail thing for a second. It’s too bad that special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald is being a total prick and urging that Time reporter Matthew Cooper and the New York Times reporter Judith Miller be sent to the slammer for refusing to cooperate with a grand jury investigating the outing of Valerie Plame as a covert C.I.A. operative. It’s a little bit wimpy for Cooper and Miller to ask to be sent to a couple of summer-camp prisons, but it’s still incredibly shitty of Fitzgerald to say no, fuck you, do your time with hard-core cons in a jail somewhere around D.C. Today’s New York Times story reports that a Judge Hogan held the reporters in civil contempt last October and sentenced them to up to 18 months in jail. These sentences were suspended while the reporters appealed, however, and it now looks like the maximum time the reporters will face is 120 days, as the term of the grand jury will expire in October. That’s it? Jimmy Cagney or George Raft could do four months standing on their heads in Sing Sing or San Quentin. On the other hand, Fitzgerald has suggested in a recent filing that criminal prosecution is also a possibility. “The court should advise Miller that if she persists in defying the court’s order that she will be committing a crime,” he wrote in a 21-page briefing about Miller’s position. “Miller and The New York Times appear to have confused Miller’s ability to commit contempt with a legal right to do so.”
A survey of moviegoer response to War of the Worlds done last week (or weekend) is coming up “fair,” which is roughly equivalent to a CinemaScore rating of about 70. This means it’s going to see a fairly steep drop in business next weekend — not catastrophic but precipitous.
In Sharon Waxman’s latest box-office-slump story in the N.Y. Times, she reports that Paramount executives are seeing no evidence of any War of the Worlds revenue slippage due to Tom Cruise’s eccentric behavior on the promo circuit. “[Cruise’s] audience came out in greater numbers than ever before” for this film, Paramount vice-chairman Rob Friedman tells Waxman. “I think the world separates the star and celebrity from a movie actor and the performance on screen, and this shows that completely.” I’m hearing this is precisely what Par execs are not discerning in the tea leaves. I’m told there’s been some muttering in the hallways that War could have made closer to $140 or $150 million over the first six days if Cruise hadn’t acted like a wackjobber on the talk shows. The fact that Waxman quotes notoriously obsequious industry cheerleader Paul Dergarabedian as supporting the Cruise-linkage theory speaks volumes. “Those who had in mind that they wanted to see the movie, [the Cruise shenanigans] didn’t have any effect,” he said. “But if you’re a person who has a strong feeling about what Tom Cruise said, you might say, ‘I don’t want to support that movie.'”
“Like the rivets popping off the wing of an airliner”….good one! The Tom Wolfe-ian wordsmith is D.J. LaChapelle, webmaster for TomCruiseIsNuts.com. The quote was given to Daily News “Lowdown” columnist Lloyd Grove: “What really inspired us was Tom’s appearance on the Today show. His body language, the way he got in Matt Lauer’s face — it was all pretty amazing. Watching one of America’s best actors coming unglued — like the rivets popping off the wing of an airliner — there’s a kind of fascination.”
That $113.3 million that War of the Worlds earned over the last six days since opening last Wednesday (6.29) may sound good in the trade stories, but believe me, Paramount distribution execs are disappointed. “They’re crying about this,” a marketing veteran is telling me, because “they didn’t make the $150 million they were hoping for over the first six days.” And now they’re probably looking at only $200 million or a bit more domestically. (They’ll have $150 or $160 million by the end of next weekend, and then the fall-off will kick in more severely.) Add in video and foreign and they’re looking at a break-even finale for a feature that cost at least $135 million (Roger Friedman reported $182 million), not counting the $50 or $60 million in marketing costs. (Par co-financed Worlds with DreamWorks.) At least part of the grief and the groaning is over the Scientology-proselytizing by WoTW star Tom Cruise. Some observers believe he shaved the first-six-day gross by $40 million by doing his Scientology nutso stump speech on various interview shows (like that Today appearance with Matt Lauer) and ranting against Shields’ use of medication to ward off post-partum depression, etc. “They knew they had a problem picture on their hands,” the observer says about the Paramount team, “but they thought they could get $150 million for the opening week…but they didn’t get it because of that lunatic. I know people who are saying they won’t go to another picture of his. He’s become another Mel Gibson. Movie stars are like royalty…once they fall of the throne, they can’t it back again.”
I’m hearing “no,” “forget it,” “terrible,” etc. on Fantastic Four (20th Century Fox, 7.8), which I never wanted to see anyway, and a friend of a close relation is saying Walter Salles’ Dark Water (Disney, 7.8) doesn’t make it. (How could that be? The hand of Walter Salles has been nothing if not assured in his past films.) I’d normally wait and make my own calls in the proper time frame, but there haven’t been any Manhattan screening invites in my inbox. The downbeat Dark Water word will probably translate into a weak box-office showing, but Fantastic Four is expected to debut hugely.
That concern I expressed about Cameron Crowe possibly allowing for a Walter Parkes-styled pruning of Elizabethtown (Paramount, 10.14) is, I’m told, not a concern. The panic spasms began with Crowe telling Benjamin Wagner of MTV News that “the movie’s still a little long” and that test screeners are asking what parts can be cut out, etc. (See 7.2 Word item about the “long and important” version.) But just after that Word item ran I heard Crowe recently threw together “an experimental short cut” for his team to consider, and that after this screening it “[they] all looked at each other and said, ‘Restore it all.'” Crowe is now in the editing room fine-tuning the “long and important” cut and resultantly there “will be no ‘untitled’ version of Elizabethtown on DVD…this time it’s going into the theatres.”
Yesterday’s Sunday New York Times piece by Jake Tapper about the continuing pattern of degradation for the National Lampoon “brand” had, of course, a familiar ring. The dumbing down of Lampoon-provided humor began 27 years ago with the success of National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) and, at the command of thick-fingered-vulgarian publisher Matty Simmons, changing the long-since-disappeared magazine’s orientation from something to be savored by witty hipsters to one that was basically about hormones and getting laid. Tapper’s article starts by mentioning one of those celebrate-the-inner-gorilla recreational events for spring-breakers on South Padre Island, Texas, called the National Lampoon Greek Games. “Greek Games are part of what the new owners of National Lampoon Inc. are calling a resuscitation of an American comedic treasure,” Tapper writes. “But veterans of the original National Lampoon and others who were greatly influenced by it are horrified by the wet T-shirt contests and worse. The new efforts may, in some sense, revive National Lampoon, but in another sense, they show how one of the most ambitious and influential experiments in comedy — which began with a group of young geniuses sending up J. R. R. Tolkien (1969’s “Bored of the Rings”) — is ending with beer-soaked soft-core porn.” I wrote more or less the same piece in August ’03 when the 25th anniversary DVD of National Lampoon’s Animal House had just been released. That John Landis film “has long been celebrated for bringing a new fuck-all mood — ’60s juvenilia mixed with a kind of loutish, upfront randy-ness– to the Hollywood formula comedy, and for singlehandedly spawning the dim-bulb, horny-guy, getting-laid genre,” I wrote. “National Lampoon humor had once signified a very bright, wittily subversive kind of humor. After the movie it meant Bluto and beaver shots and a kind of stiff-banana attitude. I’m not saying the National Lampoon magazine was anything like Collier’s or The Atlantic. One of my all-time favorite pieces of fiction in that magazine was Chris Miller’s ‘First Blow Job.’ But it WAS Collier’s, in a way, compared to what the magazine became in the post-Animal House late ’70s, after Simmons decided to emphasize the oafish stuff that made the film so popular.” Here’s an excellent website about those early-to-mid ’70s National Lampoon issues called mark’sverylarge…extremely thorough, all the covers, etc.
All day yesterday I was chipping away at a lead piece about Jacques Audiard’s The Beat That My Heart Skipped but it never quie got there. One of the hang-ups was trying to explain in plain terms the half-feral, curiously charismatic quality that Romain Duris brings to his lead role. I guess I’ll post next Wednesday (7.6), but in the meantime know that this reimagining of James Toback’s Fingers is truly one of the year’s best. (Along with Hustle & Flow, Cinderella Man, Grizzly Man, Mad Hot Ballroom Crash, Cronicas, The Beautiful Country and …I’m a little surprised I’m including this…Last Days.) In her 7.1 review,
New York Times critic Manohla Dargis called it a film with “beautiful images, strong emotions and the joy found watching a movie aimed straight at the heart and head. Summertime is meant to be the season of the adult moviegoer’s discontent, one reason The Beat That My Heart Skipped is more than just a well-timed gift — it’s essential viewing.” While you’re reading her piece click and listen to “Monkey 23” by The Kills (off their Keep on Your Mean Side album)….which is heard twice during Audiard’s film. It’s purchasable for 10 cents at www.allofmp3.com, or you can just buy the CD, which I highly recommend by the way.
In an interview with MTV News’ Benjamin Wagner, Elzabethtown director-writer Cameron Crowe says “the movie’s still a little long.” Wagner goes “no!” and Crowe says, “The guy who runs the focus group asks, ‘What would you cut out?’ And the group immediately starts arguing. One person says, ‘Well you can cut this’ and someone else says, ‘Are you crazy? You can’t cut that!’ Then this girl says, ‘Well, you know, it’s really hard to know where to cut ’cause it’s long and important.’ So we’ve been joking about that. We called the cut ‘long and important.’ But it can’t be that long, or that important. We’re gonna cut it down.” Oh, no! When I read this, I quickly wrote Crowe and said, “Please…puhleeeze don’t honor the legacy of Walter Parkes in any way, shape or form with the editing of this film. I want to see…no, thousands of us want to see the long and important version of Elizabethtown, and not the Brad Grey or Robbie Friedman version. C’mon, man.”
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