WEEKEND PREVIEW

I’m back in the saddle again, but I’m not 100% sure that I want to go back to the traditional Hot Button format, particularly on Monday and Friday.  I do understand the idea of not fixing what’s not broken, but I am a different man than I was when I left for Miami and I hope that the next weeks will bring some of that growth to The Hot Button. 

(P.S. I expect to do the column 5 days a week, posting sometime between 3 a.m. and noon p.s.t on most days… she who posts the column does it, as she has done it, on a voluntary basis, so please offer her, as I do, your thanks and patience.) 

The general response from y’all about the weekend of movies was that it was like a traditional movie weekend… it sucks.  I wish I could disagree.  But I can’t really agree either.  I’ve seen only one of the three major releases.  Warner Bros. hasn’t quite figured out that I’m home and ready to cause trouble, so I haven’t seen Showtime.  And I think I’m still on Blaise Noto probation at Sony… waiting for Terry Curtin to get there… she knows that I don’t actually have horns and a pointy tail.  Bur wait… she’s going to work for Revolution, not Sony… tee-hee, titter titter, har har.

(Actually, that reminds me that I should use this forum to thank a lot of studio folks for their help with the Miami festival, including Terry, the folks at Fox Searchlight, who gave us our Audience Award Winner Kissing Jessica Stein, the dynamic Sony Classics duo of Barker & Bernard, who gave us four films and whom we failed by not getting them proper promotion, IFC and Beth English, who gave us the great Y Tu Mama Tambien, Overseas Film Group, who got us a print of My Kingdom at the last minute, the classics division folks at Paramount, Warner Bros. and Universal, who made our Coppola retrospective possible and of course, Zoetrope, which allowed us the honor of presenting an outdoor showing of the grossly underrated One From The Heart on opening night.  There are a lot more people to thank and films to discuss… more in time.)

I would like to say something nicer about Ice Age, but if you mixed Dinosaur and Antz, you still wouldn’t have much of a movie.  (Heck, Fox may think “It’s like a mixture of Dinosaur and Antz” is a pull quite in the making.)  Chris Wedge is wonderfully talented and the film looks terrific, but… it just isn’t very interesting.  As Dinosaur proved, slow-moving animals trying to get to safe land is a yawner, no matter who voices the animals.  And while Dinosaur was timid on every level, Ice Age sets you up for some of the wildness that made Shrek such a hit.  And then, it plays it safe.  Where were the Fox-housed Farrelly Bros. to tell them to get some giant woolly mammoth crap jokes in there?  It may not be high humor, but it would have gotten me to shake the cobwebs off of my Diet Coke.

Ice Age didn’t even have the cajones to allow natural selection to take place… too bust trying for a happy ending.  Death is a part of life.  Shouldn’t that be what our kids are getting from these films?  It doesn’t have to be high Lion King drama.  Laugh a little at death… it won’t be so scary. 

The most irritating thing about Ice Age, even though it is a very different style of animation, is that the humans look exactly like the humans in Monsters, Inc.   What’s up with that?

I will probably spend cash money to see Showtime this weekend.  With DeNiro and Murphy, it would have to be a pretty rough piece of business not to be worthy of my $9… or my $14 at the new theaters at The Grove, just a few blocks away from my home.

In case you are wondering, the photo on the front page is one I took yesterday at the still-not-officially-open site.  (I just walked in.  People are afraid to ask.)  I spent a couple of hours walking around, watching the workmen do the massive last minute work before opening night.  And as I was leaving, I saw these images of the past and the reflection of this new monstrosity and took the only really good shots of the day.

Oh yeah… Resident Evil… I’ll be waiting for the DVD.

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