Friday, 25 June 1999

WEEKEND PREVIEW

Ask any mermaid you happen to see, what's this weekend's big dog, Adam Sandler's Big Daddy. (I love to sing my leads.) Yes, I don't expect My Son The Fanatic or The Dinner Game to really threaten the Top Twenty, so the question is which of the guys who pee outside will be the weekend winner. There are those who think that Sandler will make a run at the Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me opening. I'm not among them. AP:TSWSM had some serious video and cable mojo going for him. The idiocy of this weekend is that Big Daddy will be sneered at if it wins the weekend with a number under $40 million. Dumb. As is this movie, which manages to be quite amusing throughout in spite of that. It's director Dennis Dugan and Sandler's most ambitiously visual movie ever. But it's still all about Adam and the kid. And they are great together. Haven't seen a speech impediment work this well in quite a while. At least the occasionally rough-hewn humor of Sandler and his posse didn't make the kid say "rascally rabbit" repeatedly.

Look for strong continuing legs from Tarzan, Austin P., The General's Daughter, Star Wars: Episode One -- The Phantom Menace and Noting Hill. But what occurred to me as I was writing this is that none of these films will be the best remembered films of the summer. Eyes Wide Shut should knock The General's Daughter right out of our long-term memories. And The Iron Giant may well be better remembered than Tarzan, not because it is a better movie, but because it is likely to be the first $100 million animated feature that isn't Disney and has a real impact (sorry, Prince of Egypt, but I don't see kids anxious to buy that video tape). Star Wars is tainted, though it will certainly be the biggest grosser of the year and I do think it will look better in the rear view mirror. And Austin Powers & Big Daddy...well, AP2 will be remembered as a hit, as will Big Daddy, but the tandem of American Pie and Drop Dead Gorgeous are sure to be the best-remembered comedies of this summer. These are great comedies. And if we are really lucky, Dick will be a high quality sleeper too.

At the art houses, I highly recommend My Son The Fanatic, if you want to think and I hear that Francis Veber's The Dinner Game is one of his best. For a look at the wonderful Run Lola Run and Tea With Mussolini, as well as Arlington Road, take a look at Andrew Sarris, who is always worth the read. Click here for his New York Observer column.

Get all my Top Ten guesses and screen counts at Box Office Extra after noon e.s.t. today.

THE GOOD: There were two deal announcements in Variety this week that I really, really was happy to read. First, in a role far more suited to him than "the young" anyone in The Godfather (other than, perhaps Freddo), Leonardo DiCaprio has signed on at the infancy of the latest unnamed Howard Hughes project. But not only could Leo play Hughes brilliantly, he is teamed with Michael Mann, who may be the most underrated filmmaker in Hollywood today. I don't know how good "The Tobacco Project" (now titled Insider) will be, but Heat is still a film that reverberates throughout Hollywood as an overlooked classic. The headline "Leo Does Whatever" isn't all that exciting to me, but the combination with a director I hold in esteem does. And so it is with The Vertical Limit, a mountain climbing movie that not only has the greatly underutilized Scott Glenn and may mark the first real performance by Chris O'Donnell, but is being directed by Martin Campbell, a man who can really bring it when it comes to combining grandeur and storytelling. I'm sorry if you didn't like The Mask of Zorro. You should lighten up. And his Bond (GoldenEye) was the best put together since Roger Moore became a camp act. (He also directed the classic Three Men And Adena episode of "Homicide: Life On The Street.") The Vertical Limit starts shooting on August 2 and the Hughes picture is just being scripted. I'll keep my fingers crossed for both.

THE BAD: An interesting series of thoughts from Barry Sonnenfeld to Entertainment Weekly on Wild Wild West. First, he explains that the bad test screening that ended up as Web fodder was made worse by the fact that the recruiters had told people that they were going to see The Matrix a week before release. At that point, no doubt, the wanna-see was far greater on The Matrix than on Wild Wild West. (Still is, but that's an old Hot Button saw.) When the cards came in, he says, 20 percent said the thing they liked least about the film was that it wasn't The Matrix. Of course, though all this may be true, they did go out and shoot four new replacement scenes at a substantial (more than $10 million) cost, so it couldn't have gone that well, even in the minds of the studio people and Sonnenfeld. As I've said before, despite leaps of logic (there is still one gag in the movie which is 100 percent inexplicable), one of the "new" scenes is amongst the very best in the film. And I don't know when they did it, but reports that Robert Conrad was playing President Ulysses S. Grant are wrong, but probably because he couldn't be duplicated effectively. And to understand that, you'll have to see the film. Finally, Sonnenfeld went off on a rant that I will reproduce somewhat self-servingly. "The Internet, and the bad reporting based on the Internet, is ultimately going to hurt the quality of movies. Studios are freaked out, and now they don't want to have any more recruited audience screenings. But it's a tool directors use, and it's one I need really early. And now I can't have it. Now I don't know where the laughs are." That's a truthful perspective. It's not that the audiences really know one way or the other what Harry Knowles or other sites think, but the combination of other media picking it up (usually without credit to Knowles or others) and the inside the freeway paranoia that also makes execs think that what they overheard at Spago is somehow related to what any "real" person in America might think. Sonnenfeld also took on the legitimacy of the information that floats out there as well: "You can ruin a movie through anonymous reviews on the Internet, and don't for a minute think that studios themselves aren't anonymously writing good reviews for their own movies and bad reviews for other movies." It's like deja vu all over again. It's simple. Qualifying it with an "I don't know how legit this is" does not indemnify you from responsibility for printing anonymous mail or even your own spit-balling that's based on long range extrapolation. You go, Barry. Looking forward to your next movie.

"Dashed Dreams, Pushing Buttons In Your Ear And My Horse Gets Kicked"