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.

Wes Anderson has been living in Paris for the past several months, “just off the Champs Elysee” and somewhere in the vicinity of Roman Polanki’s place on Avenue Montaigne, according to Squid and the Whale director-writer Noah Baumbach. Baumbach visited Anderson there last winter-spring to work on their script for Anderson’s next film, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, an animated film based on the Roald Dahl book of the same name. (Pissed-off farmers wage war upon a sly fox and his family because he’s been eating their chickens.) Henry Selick, The guy who did the animated fish in The Life Aquatic, will do the foxes and the chickens this time. And that idea for a movie “taking place a train in India” may be Wes’s next human-being movie.

“The joy of this unassuming, generous film is that it never sells out its characters’ desires or ours,” N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dragis says of In Her Shoes. Of the two leads, “Toni Collette is so very good and goes so very deep inside her character — bringing us right alongside her — that she becomes the de facto center of the film as well as the beneficiary of our greatest emotional investment. You want Rose to lay down that ice cream container and poor-pitiful-me expression, to shuck her social conditioning and family dysfunction so she too can sashay in dangerous heels and kiss the boy (or two) in her life as a woman, not a contrivance.” Director Curtis Hanson “gives Ms. Collette the space to do just that.”

The baby that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are said to be expecting (according to a 10.5 piece in People magazine) is “fake…a Miracle Baby,” according to the suspicions of Defamer‘s Mark Lisanti. Mine too (kinda), but how do you fake a baby? The rumble is that Cruise isn’t the dad, etc., but if someone knows or has heard something factual (as opposed to the usual blather), please share.

This is a banner fall-winter season for Fox…In Her Shoes, The Family Stone, Walk the Line…three bulls-eyes. Well crafted, commercial, award-calibre, critic-friendly. Something tells me The Family Stone might be the big breadwinner, but who knows? And to a publicist I spoke to yesterday…no, I don’t care if other critics aren’t as supportive of In Her Shoes as I’ve been. In my heart I know I’m right. A friend who saw it at last Saturday’s sneak in Manhattan Beach says the audience clapped at the end, so…okay?

Who the hell is Thomas Bezucha? Until this evening I didn’t have a clue, but he’s the former fashion executive (ten years as creative services vp for Polo/Ralph Lauren) who’s come out of dead friggin’ nowhere to write and direct one of the best-written, most emotionally on-target and true-to-life family Christmas movies (okay, with a tidy commercial attitude…fine) ever made. It’s called The Family Stone (20th Century Fox, 11.11) and there’s no question it’s a hit. Don’t count on a rave from Armond White, but I’m telling you it’s going to go over big with educated blue-state Average Joes, at the very least. I’m not so sure about the family- values folks in Bubbaland…some of them might have qualms about a family that embraces a child-adopting gay-male couple, etc., but this movie is so relaxed and well-jiggered and human- tragedy funny…so half-dramatic and half-sitcom likable that you don’t even want to think about the red staters…screw ’em. The story’s about a large New England liberal family…all grown-up kids (Luke Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Dermot Mulroney, Tyrone Giordano, Elizabeth Reaser) and mom-and-popped by Diane Keaton and Craig T. Nelson..assembling for a snowy Christmas with an oddball apple floating in the punch. Her name is Meredith (Sara Jessica Parker), Mulroney’s uptight bring-home-date and (who knows?) possible fiance whom everyone hates because she’s so emotionally conservative and screwed down tight. Stunned by the disapproving vibe she incurs from this semi-mellow brood, Meredith pressures her sister Julie (Claire Danes) into joining her to provide emotional support, and this in turn lays the stage for all kinds of upheavals and complications. There’s a big plot point I’m not going to reveal that also throws everyone off-balance. Is The Family Stone an Ingmar Bergman dramedy-farce about a cultivated, semi-neurotic family coping with the emotional land mines that always seem to go off when families get together in late December? Yes…if you drop the “Ingmar Bergman.” This is a commercial movie, which isn’t always a punishable crime. It does this kind of thing as well as you can expect a smart commercial movie to do this kind of thing. That’s not meant as a diss. In its own realm of confection, Bezucha and his cast do a bang-up job. It’s a studio souflee that feels more prickly and chaotically realistic than any home-for-the-holidays movie I can think of right now. It’s not gnarly or snarly enough to compete with a certain 1942 wintertime movie called The Man Who Came to Dinner, but it’s almost as tonally assured and smartly written as that classic….really. Everyone says Keaton will be a Best Supporting Actress nomineee and okay, maybe…but Parker is the one who lays it out and goes whacko and takes the big character journey. Nelson is fantastic, and Wilson is the best he’s ever been since Bottle Rocket. There’s a SAG ensemble acting award, right? Settled…these guys own it. How do you pronounce Bezucha’s name, by the way? Like bazooka bubble gum?

I have to side with David Poland’s “stop, George, stop” plea about George Clooney’s plans to remake Sidney Lumet and Paddy Chayefsky’s Network for television. It was a cutting and wonderfully nervy film in ’76 because it was forecasting trends — reality TV, infotainment, cult-of-the-personality news anchors — that were starting to take shape but hadn’t quite happened. And of course, the fact that Network turned out to be prophetic has added to its reputation. But Clooney himself nailed the problem of a remake when he told the Associated Press that he was “briefly mystified when he screened it for a group of young people and none of them saw it as a dark satire. ‘I couldn’t understand it, (then) I realized that everything Chayefsky wrote about happened. And so, suddenly, the idea that the anchor is more important that the news story, and that you’d be doing sort of reality-based shows with heads of gangs and Sybil the Soothsayer all happened. And when you have that great speech with Ned Beatty sitting there going ‘There is no U.S.A. and Soviet Union, there is only Xerox and IBM,’ you realize all of those things were true, or came true.” Exactly, and the point of re-making a film that’s no longer forecasting but echoing today’s reality is….? Note: Scratch that thing I wrote about the Black Panthers and updating the terrorist gang element. I read the article too quickly and I’m always racing around, etc.

Two for the Money (Universal, 10.7) is about this hunky ex-college football player (Matthew McConaughey) with some kind of supernatural psychic ability to pick the winners of football games. Or who knows teams and their quirks and tendencies so well it seems like he’s got a crystal-ball thing going on. And he gets hired to work for a kind of high-end betting consultancy firm, run by this larger-than-life blowhard named Walter Abrams (Al Pacino), that sells information about which teams to bet on and…I can’t do this. I don’t mind gambling as long as it’s not my money on the table, and I dearly loved California Split, one of the hippest and sexiest loose-shoe gambling movies ever made. But this thing has no groove or heat. It plays loud and abrasive, and feels boorish and forced. It was directed by D.J. Caruso (Taking Lives, Salton Sea), but, being a Morgan Creek film, was almost certainly influenced in a hundred hair-on-the-back- of-your-neck ways by M.G. honcho James G. Robinson, who is known by anyone who’s worked in this town as the biggest bad-vibe producer around. Somehow, through force of will or obstinacy or what-have-you, just about every film Robinson has made has seemed a little bit icky or underwhelming or crude or less-than-cool. All I know is, Morgan Creek = caveat emptor. And I figure Robinson is probably at least partly to blame for the sand-draining-out-of-the-hourglass feeling that runs all through Two For the Money. It doesn’t figure that Caruso could have screwed up this badly. His last two films were second-tier but they were at least stylistically intriguing and had some good moves here and there, so something happened this time. Consider the following: when last night’s all-media screening at the Mann’s Chinese ended, a certain big-name critic came up to a colleague and expressed his feelings about Two for the Money by forming an imaginary pistol with his thumb and right forefinger, holding it to his head and then pulling the trigger. This was more entertaining than anything that had transpired on the screen. Plus it was enormously comforting to feel a sense of kinship.