The Hot Button by David Poland

Friday, 21 August 1998

WEEKEND PREVIEW

Most weekends the weekend preview starts with the top films or the new films. Not this week. Because this week's configuration of numbers is more interesting at the bottom of the list. (At least to me.) There should be five holdover films (Snake Eyes, Halloween: H20, The Avengers, Ever After and The Parent Trap) that gross between $4 and $4.8 million this weekend, with drops of as little as 25 percent for Ever After to as large as 55 percent for The Avengers. There's also a distinct chance that Dance with Me, Dead Man on Campus and Wrongfully Accused (in alphabetical order) will also be in that range.
I am a bit uncomfortable predicting box office train wrecks from major studios. Sony has been excellent, in the last couple of years, at getting the word out, despite a somewhat unexplainable misstep with The Mask of Zorro this summer. Paramount is using MTV to its greatest synergistic advantage to try and get DMOC opened. And Warner Bros., is, well, uh, Warner Bros. is having another one of those months.
But this is a weird time of year. Every once in a while, you get a movie like The Fugitive that dominates an August (It opened on August 6.), but look at what the new product has to face -- a boatload of established holdover films in a universe (which readers of this column probably skew badly) that actually pays for three or four films a summer. Exhaustion from months of onslaught advertising, leaving us all worn out and pretty well innoculated from reacting to promotion of any kind. (To quote Lily Von Shtupp, "I'm pooped.") And there is, in a growingly sophisticated world of moviergoers, a tacit understanding that we are now, and for the next few weeks, in the dumping zone. So, what's a new film to do?
Saving Private Ryan will continue to just roll along. New competition remains irrelevant. The film should do about $9.9 million on 25 percent less weekend business. Will Blade break the $10 million barrier? Hmmm. Really hard to tell. I like a lot of things about the film. It was a pleasantly refreshing surprise. But then again, I felt the same way about Dark City and Spawn (though I like Dark City more and prefer the hard-core animated Spawn), and one flopped and the other got serious backlash from the Knowlesians. I'll say $12 million and hold on for dear life.
Third place should go to There's Something About Mary, with an ongoingly astounding 10 percent or less drop per week, adding another $7.9 million. (Some might wonder why I don't suspect book cooking on this film as I have on Armageddon. Well, that's because the film started small and, while the drops are unusually small, the grosses are realistically small. And I have met very few people who didn't really enjoy the film, even if they wanted to hate it. AND because there's no subtle agenda in the box office figures. No magic occurrences like hitting records every step along the way. That's why.) Right behind Mary (maybe just ahead), in fourth should be How Stella Got Her Groove Back, which I'm estimating to fall 30 percent to $7.9 million. I put Mary ahead of Stella on the basis of the tens-of-thousands figure and because Mary hasn't fallen by a full 10 percent in weeks. But the two ladies should be tight. And that's the Top 10 for the weekend. Buyer beware.
TWO MOVIES EQUAL: Dance With Me + How Stella Got Her Groove Back = How Beautiful Black Actresses Got More Screen Time. Angela Bassett and Vanessa L. Williams fight for screen time with Whitney Houston, Lela Rochon, Vanessa Williams (you know, the V.W. who got her SAG card first), N'Bushe Wright (of Blade), Jada Pinkett Smith, Vivica A. Fox, Nia Long, Lisa Nicole Carson and a host of other talented actresses who don't work enough. Finally, a feminist film that will make grown men cry. Co-starring Whoopi Goldberg as the funny friend and Oprah Winfrey as the maternal influence.
JUST WONDERING: How come so many of you were able to recognize Good Will Hunting in Wednesday's column (THB 08/19)? And how come no one recognized any of the other films?
BAD AD WATCH: Paramount is bribing people to go see Dead Man on Campus, topping their print ads with an uncredited "The Drop Dead Funniest Movie Of The Decade" claim followed by "Spot MTV's 'Dead Man' at selected theaters and you could WIN $10,000." Other films this weekend might have chosen similar tactics, with Sony offering a peek at Vanessa L. Williams' or Chayanne's cleavage (your choice) if you actually go to see Dance with Me, Warner Bros. offering Leslie Nielsen to make a fart joke at your expense if you go to Wrongfully Accused or New Line allowing Wesley Snipes to kill you with a sword after seeing Blade. But none of them showed the fortitude in proceeding with a really tacky idea like Paramount. Bravo!
THE BAD, THE UGLY & THE READER OF THE DAY: From Jeff Wells, whom you are likely to remember from the Affleck episode. Jeff has got a brand new rag: "Very intriguing, Dave. Spider-Man and Cameron and MGM and the weasels at 21st Century and yaddah-yaddah-yaddah (sic). Just one question: Who gives a rat's ass? Has it occurred to anyone how totally lame and old-shoe and one-dimensional ALL movies based on comic-book characters have been in recent years? They are the single worst obsession to come out of the under-35s who are writing, directing and pushing for green-lights these days. This is strictly a Gen-X thing here and it's like a pestilence. God save us from another Mike DeLuca brainstorm along these lines. This is because they are (a) repetitive, (b) about infantile masturbatory boy-fantasies and (c) terminally '80s. Costumed heroes-vs.-villains is the same old story every friggin' time. The submerged alter-ego of a conflicted personality stands up to and ultimately triumphs over evil. And that's...IT! How many times are audiences expected to sift through the same dog-eared baseball cards? Spider-Man is a bit more young-guy juvenile and hung-up than the others. Well, whoop-dee-doo for knocking our socks off!
"I cringe at the thought of Cameron regressing from the growth spurt of Titanic to do this thing. I lament that Bryan Singer is doing X-Men. I hated Spawn. I was intrigued by The Crow but not to any great extent. Batman & Robin was one of the most repulsive extravaganzas in Hollywood history. I refuse to see a free screening of Blade because I just can't take this s--t anymore. Some have said the Superman films have aged well, but they were never more than marginally diverting, in my view. The basic problem with comic book hero movies right now isn't so much that movies about titanic good-vs-evil confrontations and phantasmagoria and intensely rendered mirror-image visions of urban horror (have you noticed that ALL these movies take place in the essentially the same expressionistic city, i.e., Noir Town?) tend to bring out in screenwriters and directors the same self-referential, self-mocking, heh-heh, we've-been-here-before-but-THIS-time-we're-going-to-be-MUCH-more-clever-than -the-last-flick-about-an-anguished-all-too-human-superhero.
"The problem, now, is that these production-design-for-their-own-sake-because-the-plot-and-character- points-have-been-done-to-death-37-times-before movies are OVER. They're deader than dead. Raw, minimalist realism is the new thing, as the breathtaking opening 25 minutes of Saving Private Ryan gave us a taste of. That movie wasn't the end-all and be-all, but it sure as hell made the proponents of stylized violence and stylized storytelling seem like yesterday's pasta. I never, EVER want to see again a stylishly decked-out, over-coiffed super-villain cackling and smirking and double-entendre-ing his or her way through a cynical, over-preening, self-absorbed perf in a super hero movie, once again delighted at his or her unregenerate evil (born of Nicholson's Jack Torrance in The Shining 18 years ago, and amped up by Jack with his Joker perf in Batman years later). Pleeeease, enough is enough is enough! Pared-to-the-bone realism with real-death and real-consequences endured by real-people-with-a-semblance-of-gray-matter-between-their-ears is where it's at for any director or producer with the slightest interest in wanting to play it cutting edge."

E ME: Well! I know that these thoughts will find strong disagreement amongst many of you. Let's hear it. And keep in mind when you write, this is Jeff Wells opinion. He is the ROTD. I am not. I'm not in total agreement with him or in total disagreement, but this is his letter and your response will be yours. I am but a weary (and amused) conduit.