Landed in Burbank’s Bob Hope Airport last night around 8:10 pm, and the first movie image to catch my eye — at a bus stop on Hollywood Way — was the chick-flicky one-sheet for Superman Returns. This is the best poster image WB marketers have come up with for this film yet. If I were gay or female I could see being really intrigued, but it has a cross-gender pull. It should have been the teaser poster way back when. The first Superman Returns junket screenings begin later this week, so there’s no reading how well the chick-flick angle plays but there would be irony, surely, if it winds up connecting with more females than Warner Bros.’s The Lake House (6.16), which is clearly more of an overt appeal to the XX quadrant. I’m wondering because of the rumble over this one, but let’s hold off on that for now.
For Jennifer Aniston, “The Break-Up follows a terrible professional run. In the last year she has appeared in two high-profile movies — the disappointing thriller Derailed and the stink-bomb comedy Rumor Has It — and the smaller Friends With Money, in which she was the least convincing member of an ensemble. The characters in these films are wildly different, but Ms. Aniston’s performance isn’t. She projects the same high-maintenance Jennifer Aniston style — the trademark sleek hair, the natural-looking makeup, the body so toned you wonder how many hours a day a person can spend with a trainer. [Plus] she exudes coolness and self-possession even when the part calls for warmth or vulnerability. She did warm and vulnerable winningly in the cult movie Office Space (1999). But lately all her characters uncomfortably resemble the one who made her rich and famous, the feather-brained Rachel on Friends, who thought being pretty was her full-time job. It’s as if she has substituted a movie-star pose for acting.” — Caryn James on Aniston’s career slump in the 6.5.05 N.Y. Times.
Sofia Coppola‘s Marie-Antoinette “may also be [her] most personal film to date, not because she is herself the scion of a royal Hollywood family, but rather because she came of age during her father’s lean years, when the palace of Zoetrope was set upon by angry creditors and King Francis was forced into working as a director-for-hire just to pay the bills. This is a movie made by someone who knows firsthand what it means to watch a once-glorious empire crumble .” — L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas in his sum-up piece on the Cannes Film Festival.
(a) Straight up Crosby, facing north — Monday, 6.4.06, 11:52 am; (b) Spring Street facing east — Monday, 6.4.06, 11:55 am; (c) This Starbucks (Spring & Crosby) has an especially friendly, unforced, study-hall vibe, on tyop of the wi-fi and that Wild Orange tea.
I’m sitting at a small round table at a Starbucks at the corner of Crosby and Spring Streets, and I feel icky and look like hell but I don’t care because I’m not feeling quite as sick and submerged as I have since Saturday night, which was when a Paris virus invaded my blood. Constant fatigue, nausea, fever, aching muscles, weakness, sweat-sleeping …awful.
After a second night of ache and torment at my brother’s place last night (i.e., Sunday), the damn virus seems to be losing steam. I tried plugging in this morning at 4 ayem (I’m on Paris time, naturally) but the new AC adapter I bought in Paris suddenly wasn’t working, so I shlepped back to Manhattan on the 7:23 out of Norwalk and found an electronics store on Fifth Ave. and 39th. A pale-faced, yarmulke-wearing salesman took a look at my Paris-bought adapter (which cost me 80 Euros) and determined that only half of it wasn’t working, and he sold me a plug-in that fixed everything for only $10. On a plane back to LA at 4:45 today…
Okay, now I really have to go…plane’s leaving…back online Stateside sometime this evening, at which time…well, who knows?
Aaahhh…the beautiful, most sensuous, immaculately studied “nothingness” in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, especially in his early ’60s period. The Italian master’s career will be on view in a three-week retrospective at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Rose Cinemas starting Wednesday, 6.7.
In the Delta/Air France terminal, 35 minutes before taking off — Sunday, 6.4.06, 11:22 am.
Sunday is travelling day…back to NYC and Brookline, where my son Jett is ceremoniously graduating from high school, so no posts until late tomorrow, at best. And maybe none at all…we’ll see. It’s 9:48 pm in Paris and still only dusky so far…good night and good luck.
Okay, I’m eating my words about the goddam Break-Up tracking (i.e., what I wrote about it being toast) during the Cannes Film Festival. I was wrong and intemperate and rash, and I made an effing mistake, and I hope I’ve learned a lesson from all this. It’ll sink big-time next weekend, of course (50% or 60%), but from today’s perspective this is a very impressive, based-on-an-almost-total-bullshit-ad-campaign opening (the Tonya Harding joke notwithstanding)….
The Break-Up is a bigger hit than expected, so let’s hear it for Universal’s Big Con marketing! The Vince Vaughn-Jennifer Aniston drama-with-laughs is projected to do about $37 million this weekend, having done about $13.7 million last night. It’ll be off about 50% to 60% next week once the word gets out that it’s not hah-hah funny, but that was the plan all along. X-Men 3 is off radically. Last night’s take was down 77% from the Friday before…a huge drop. The experts are projecting $34.9 million for the weekend, which will amount to roughly a 60% to 65% drop from last weekend’s haul. (People may have liked it okay but weren’t through the roof about it.) Over The Edge is looking at an $18 million dollar weekend, off about 32% from last weekend. The DaVinci Code is looking at roughly $15 million, down about 53% from last weekend. Mission: Impossible III will take in about $4.3 million, off 40%. Its expected to eek out $125 to 130 million total. It’s basically dead at this stage and a fairly big disappointment. Poseidon will take in about $3 million, off 45%…a disaster with an expected cume in the low 50s.
“Although Pauline Kael knew comparatively little about how movies got made, she was unbeatable at taking off from what she had seen. But beyond that, she would take off from what she had written, and there was a new theory every two weeks. A lot of her theories had to do with loves and hates. She thought Robert Altman was a genius. He can certainly make a movie, but if it hasn’t got a script, then he makes Pret-a-Porter . That’s one of the most salutary lessons of this book: what makes the movie isn’t just who directed it, or who’s in it, it’s how it relates to the real world. That principle really starts to matter when it comes to movies that profess to understand history, and thus to affect the future. Several quite good critics in various parts of the world knew there was something seriously wrong with Steven Spielberg’s Munich, but they didn’t know how to take it down. If they could have put the lessons of this book together, they would have found out how. Munich might have survived being directed by someone who knows about nothing except movies. But it was also written by people who don’t know half enough about politics.” — Clive James reviewing “AMERICAN MOVIE CRITICS: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now” — edited by Phillip Lopate (Library of America) in Sunday’s N.Y. Times.