Friday, 6 November 1998

WEEKEND PREVIEW

On Wednesday, I teased that one of the best movies of 1998 would be showing up today. I didn't get many guesses, but the answer wasn't The Siege, but The Waterboy. No, it's not in the class of some of the great dramas this year, but it's the first comedy to come close to There's Something About Mary for sheer laughs-per-minute. But enough glowing commentary (more below). My box office estimate? The Wedding Singer opened on a four-day weekend, but the three-day total was about $17.7 million. That was in the period of complete Titanic domination. (Titanic did a little more than $25 million in that three-day.) In fact, Sandler and Barrymore had the biggest opening against Titanic in 1998 until Lost in Space finally beat the boat in April. Last year at this time, Starship Troopers opened with $22 million. I hope The Waterboy can beat that and register a $23 million weekend. I suspect that $19 million is more realistic. But either way, I'm betting that Sandler will have his biggest success and potentially his first $100 million hit. I suspect that the general disinterest in The Siege won't keep the film from opening, but will keep it around the $11 million mark.

The rest of the ride is all repeats without much variation on the themes of weeks gone by. The only change in order that I see is Bride of Chucky falling behind Rush Hour to take the eighth spot with a 50 percent fall to $2 million. Here are the rest: John Carpenter's Vampires loses 40 percent of its blood to take third with $5.5 million. In fourth, it's Pleasantville, saying goodbye to another 30 percent of its innocence to take $4.8 million to near the $25 million mark. (FYI, L.A. Confidential did $4.7 million in its third weekend for an $18 million total. That analogy continues.) Practical Magic drops 40 percent to $3.2 million and fifth. (The initials for a Practical Magic sequel, were they to make one? P.M.S. Ooooh! Scary!) And in sixth, Antz picnics on $2.7 million, dropping 40 percent. Rush Hour will be 35 percent lighter, adding $2.5 million for a $125 million-and-change total. In at ninth, Beloved keeps falling below the Mason-Dixon line, losing 40 percent to add $1.4 million to its creaky total. And Soldier manages to stay in the game for a third big weekend. Fifty percent loss; $1.4 million weekend; $13.5 million domestic total. Why, this film could break the $15 million mark, getting closer than expected to matching Kurt Russell's salary! Congrats.

(DAVID ADD: I didn't see it coming when I wrote the rest of the column, but it looks like Belly will manage a $5 million, third place weekend based on its powerful $850,000 Wednesday opening on just 870 screens. Everyone else, move down a slot. Soldier, you've lost your Top 10 grip.)

THE GOOD: The Waterboy is this winter's There's Something About Mary. It's stupid. It's wacky. It's hysterically funny. OK, so it's not quite as wet-your-pants funny as some of Mary's best jokes, but I laughed from beginning to end. In fact, I worried that my tear wiping during the "dramatic" scenes would be seen by those around me as a sign of sentimentality. It wasn't. I was just clearing tears of laughter. Adam Sandler is at his lovable, hysterical best. Jim Carrey is no longer the direct descendant of Jerry Lewis. It's Sandler. He has that same gentleness. Not many guys can leer at and be afraid of a pair of breasts at the same time. Adam can. I would love to see him in remakes of some of Lewis' later work, especially The Family Jewels.

Also, seeing great dramatic actresses Kathy Bates and Fairuza Balk playing comedy was a joy in scene after scenery-chewing scene. Fonzie (Henry Winkler) was terrific as the coach, the music was very cool, and there is just something intrinsically, hysterically powerful about the sound and image of a hard football hit. Director Frank Coraci still isn't Orson Welles. (There were a couple of scenes that called for a small, sharp scalpel that Coraci apparently didn't have on his instrument tray.) But so what? This movie will make people laugh. And they'll go back two or three times to laugh some more. I'd go back and watch it again tomorrow. And I don't do much of that.

THE BAD: Saving Private Ryan is going under the knife in Malaysia. Well, maybe not. When the Malaysian censorship board wanted to cut out about five minutes of Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg said no, and the film was never released in that country. The cuts to Ryan are still being argued over and it will be interesting to see whether Spielberg bends on this slightly less personal film. Meanwhile, Malaysians are likely watching (enjoying seems too slight a word) the full version of Schindler's List, as Malaysia is one of the top video pirating nations on Earth. In other less serious Malaysian censorship news, Variety reports that the board cut 35 scenes from There's Something About Mary. There's no truth to the buzz that Fox is hiring the board to create the PG-13 version of Mary. (That, by the way, will never see the light of day. It was a fairly goofy idea and when Fox looked closely at the film, they realized that.)

THE UGLY: The Big Chill and The Wizard of Oz are both being re-released this week for one reason -- Columbia and Warner Bros. want to sell you some holiday videos. Sadly, the re-release has gone from a special event to a marketing gimmick. There was one great re-release this year -- the re-edited version of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil. Besides that, it was all video promo. And to your credit, you haven't bit too hard. Less than $13 million for Grease was hardly a rousing success. Gone with the Wind added about $6 million to its $199 million total.

THE CHAT: Apologies to those of you who came to visit this week. Yahoo! had some technical problems and we (and John Madden) were cancelled. Next Wednesday, Living Out Loud director Richard LaGravenese will be my guest. Come chat out loud. Wednesday, 9:00 p.m. ET/6:00 p.m. PT.

HAPPY TRAILERS TO YOU: I ran into the trailer for The Faculty before seeing I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. (More on that one next week.) Looks to me like an iffy proposition. There was nothing from Robert Rodriguez, at least in this trailer, that appeared at all special. And the kids melted into one another like teens naturally tend to. The performances by the teachers look the most interesting, with Piper Laurie looking the most chilling. But Robert Patrick was a little too T2 for my comfort zone. We'll see. As I've written here before, Miramax is quite high on this film. I hope that it's better than the trailer.

BAD AD WATCH: Actually, I really like the style of the ads for Rugrats and A Bug's Life. The extreme close-ups of characters that are so interesting looking seems to say enough. And, as you probably have realized, they are a new variation on the "character with his/her name over their head" ads that Disney has been using over the last year or so. Where will they go after this? X-rays and a diagnosis?

READER OF THE DAY: Here's one of the stomach-acid creating letters created by the Oscar columns. I'll run it in its entirety: "You should resign from covering the film industry in any way, shape or form after this latest spate of ill-informed and downright ludicrous columns. I don't care about your 'industry cred.' I know a lot of people who are higher up in the Hollywood machine than you who know f---in' all about the business. If your insipid error of thinking New Line (one of your Website's parent company's subsidiaries, so there's no excuse) was opening American History X wide (sheesh, couldn't someone have fact-checked a bit) wasn't bad enough, your inexcusable inclusion of the films Very Bad Things and, for pete's sake, Ringmaster among your upcoming Oscar buzz releases is the straw that breaks the camel's back."

"I was willing to humor your clueless (and completely unfounded in the industry; none of my sources back up these silly picks, and I doubt any of your reliable connections do either) choices of Holly Hunter and Meg Ryan, as well as Sharon Stone for lead -- it shouldn't have taken reader emails to correct you on that score. And your personal choices, while betraying your hard-on material ("no-buzz" actresses Reese Witherspoon, Holly Hunter, Meg Ryan, Laura Linney -- a thing for pixie chicks, eh?) and your pseudo-hipness (Wild Things, like Starship Troopers, was a thinly-veiled satire of the genre it was exploiting -- trust me, we all got the joke, and if you want vintage McNaughton, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and Normal Life are the true choices. But then I think it was Denise Richards' amply displayed epidermis that kept you in the theater; not a bad reason to watch, but an abysmal one to tout it as one of the year's best movies) is really an indicator of your lack of taste, but again, there's no accounting for that.

"But picking Very Bad Things (Swingers meets Reservoir Dogs) as an Oscar-bait flick? Hell, it stars Christian Slater; that alone rules it out, pal. Unless this is another example of your Cameron Diaz jokes kicking in (no Oscar nom for Mary, get it?) No, sorry, you're wrong, and the industry is not hyping this film; just overgrown white boys looking to get their rocks off on another cold-as-ice, po-mo cynical black comedy. Ecch. Also, Ringmaster, the cheesy Jerry Springer biopic? Either you truly are on drugs (as many of my industry friends have opined upon reading your off-base musings) or you're joking -- for if you're serious, you should be booted from any entertainment journalism post. My guess is that you were too silly to look past the title and the distributor (Artisan) and assumed it was an arthouse pic -- what other explanation is there? Please enlighten me.

"Instead of those (and the putrid remake of Psycho, and the awful The Seige and Enemy of the State; have you seen these -- they stink to high heaven!), your list should have included (and these films do have your all-mighty industry buzz): Little Voice, Tea with Mussolini, Hilary and Jackie, Central Station, A Bug's Life, Hi-Lo Country and Affliction. And not mentioning mortal lock Sean Penn (Hurlyburly) -- the height of stupidity. And come on, name names, just don't give us those cop-out 'a soldier from Ryan or Line' bids. If anyone from those two films gets a supporting nom, it's Adrien Brody from Malick's film and Jeremy Davies or Tom Sizemore from Spielberg's. Remember those names, and also best-actress lock Fernanda Montenegro from Central Station (a film the industry is raving about, but one that I'm sure about which you have not a clue).

"Plus, why the big pushes for duds such as City of Angels and Living Out Loud (a silly trifle wasting its performers) and calling the as-yet-unreleased film You've Got Mail a hit (it's gonna flop, pal) unless your parent wants you to give quota hype to its Warner Bros. and New Line pix. Hell, then, just push Lost in Space and Why Do Fools Fall in Love and really make them cream... By the way, their names are spelled Ian McKellen and Tony Shalhoub. I'd prefer in the future if you insist on tackling this topic, just reprint some of the better letters you receive -- invariably they have more insight on and rationale about the Oscar race than you."

RESPONSE OF THE DAY: What can I say? Obviously, Ringmaster was a joke. And obviously, KC (the only name this reader gave) is completely rational about the Oscar race. The only point that I should tackle is my association with Time Warner. It's this simple: roughcut.com is owned and operated by TNT, a subsidiary of Time Warner. I have been crueler to Warner Bros. than to any other studio in the last year. Easily. They have deserved it. And now, as they turn around, they deserve to be acknowledged for that. New Line has had a pretty good year, but that didn't keep me from ripping them for problems with the Gone with the Wind re-release (a movie that is the crown jewel in my uber-uber-uber boss, Ted Turner's, empire. I'm pretty sure that he doesn't even know that I exist.) One thing that I'm now reminded about -- Oscar ranks right up there with sex and politics as dangerous conversations. Even amongst rational people.

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E ME: Go to town, gang. I'm too worn down to come up with a good prompt.