Monday, 18 October 1999

WEEKEND REVIEW

It was an interesting weekend at the box office. The news coverage of it was also interesting -- too interesting -- but more of that in The Ugly.

The question of the weekend isn't just "Who won?" but also "Did anyone win?" I guess you can say that Double Jeopardy, even though it is likely to fall off its Number One perch by start of business Monday, won because the film is still holding beyond the point of sanity. Even if the movie weren't crap, but was just "good," four weeks of drops in the low 20s is a magnificent run. Maybe people are going back to it again thinking there was a gimmick like The Sixth Sense, saying to themselves, "That couldn't really have made that little sense...it must be a trick ending that I didn't get."

It's hard to say that a $10.4 million estimated opening for The Story of Us is a win because opening a Bruce Willis-Michelle Pfeiffer movie to just $10 million seems like a loser even if the critics around the country were almost all treating this film as though they had found it on the bottom of their shoe in the middle of a first date.

And that leaves Fight Club. Even if it turns out to be the weekend winner, which seems likely in the minds of almost every industry person I spoke to on Sunday, $10.3 million est. is not going to be, in my opinion, enough of an opening to get word-of-mouth really humming. It is now a media game. Fox didn't, couldn't or wouldn't sell this movie to women and the classic "boy movie" failure to increase the box office draw on Saturday by more than 10 percent seems to have been the result. Yet, women who brave the film, at least women outside of Los Angeles and New York, seem to be surprised by the movie and say it is not a "boy movie." In fact, the harsh negative reaction to this film seems to be centered almost exclusively in the major markets (more on that in The Good). In any case, Fight Club has a major uphill battle if it is to have a significant American box office life. I suspect it will be a $150 million grosser across the rest of the world. But if it is going to be resurrected here...and we're looking at two straight weeks to come of box office unfriendly product with the exception of The House on Haunted Hill...the media will have to get involved. If CNN and Nightline and others are not yammering about the issues of this movie during the next week, it will be forever lost to DVD/homevideo. And this is not a film that should be so easily dismissed. But it might happen.

There were only a couple other films of real numerical interest in the Top Ten this weekend. One was The Omega Code, which was passionately distributed by Christian organizations and found a surprisingly large audience, estimating a gross of $2.4 million in 305 venues. And American Beauty had its first real down weekend, estimating a 28 percent fall to $6.8 which is likely to fall a little further. Not exactly a drastic drop, but the first time the film has fallen at all, despite adding more than 120 venues. One note that shouldn't be a spoiler to any of you. The LA Times ran a piece this Sunday suggesting that the question of who shoots the gun at the end of this film is somehow a rampant one. Uh, I don't know anyone who didn't figure it out. It ain't exactly The Blair Witch Project. Did anyone who is smart enough to decipher this column every week be dumb enough to not know who was the shooter? Come on...fess up.

THE GOOD: The view of Fight Club in the big cities where the "media elite" roam turns out to be a falsely negative one. According to Variety's poll of critics in New York, L.A., Chicago and Washington D.C, the reviews was 19 positive, 11 negative and 16 mixed. But once you get out of the big towns, you'll be hard pressed to find a negative review of this film. The was one in San Diego, one in Denver and one in Detroit. Pretty big cities. But even more to the point, even in the media towns, it was the bigger papers with the more established critics who kicked the film. In L.A., it was the Times. Interestingly, both trades offered reviews from critics other than their primary ones with Variety being positive and The Hollywood Reporter being negative. In New York, the syndicated Jami Bernard of the New York Daily News gave the film only two stars and The Wall Street Journal's Joe Morgenstern (can you get any more establishment?) ripped it, though the exiting Janet Maslin of The New York Times and the newly hired Lou Lumenick of The New York Post both offered up positive reviews. Conservative outlets The Orange County Register and San Diego Union Tribune didn't surprise nor did The Washington Post & The Washington Times. Ultimately, the only real surprise reviews of this film came from Roger Ebert and from Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. Both are men who I expect wideband thinking from and they seem to have joined the parade of folks who decided to disregard the third act of the film, where the "moral" of our story is, and focus on the 10 or so fist fights that make up part of the brutal second act of this film. To me, kind of like focusing only on the "torture of Alex" and the rape sequences in A Clockwork Orange. I don't get it.

Also of positive note, Jami Bernard is the only woman critic I know of in the entire country who gave this film a negative review, though there were certainly a few that qualified as mixed. And though I hate to be an age-ist, especially when so many over-40 critics like this film, it does seem that I can't find a single negative review except for the remarkable un-insightful diatribe that can be found in L.A.'s New Times by Gregory Weinkauf, who opens with the impossibly smug, "David Fincher needs a hug, the poor bastard. Or possibly a diaper change," which seems worthy of a closed-fist heading mid-face were I not such a peaceable man. Indeed, most of the really negative reviews (not the mildly negative ones like Ebert's) were every bit as harsh as the harshest moments of the film.

Anyway, critics don't really matter, do we? Nor do Internet columnists. Except in how we influence the media players who read us. It is the Rosie O'Donnells and Oprahs and Jays and Daves and Ted Koppels and Time and Newsweek and Entertainment Weekly and on and on who really connect with the massive public out there. And I make only one suggestion to them and to those of you who can influence them...in the words of DreamWorks Marketing, look closer. Or look wider. Or look at all three acts. This is not a movie about violence or about consumerism or about insanity or anarchy. It's about all those things and more.

THE BAD: The media coverage of the weekend's box office results was the kind of embarrassment to our profession that makes me want to scream. Every story about the weekend noted that the race was, in reality, too close to call. But there was Reuters with the first headline of "Double Jeopardy wins box office race for fourth weekend," which is exactly the headline that Paramount was looking for by claiming to win a record-for-fall fourth weekend in a row when the early consensus is that they did not. Later, Reuters made the headline a little more subtle: "'Double Jeopardy' Wins Box Office Race Again." However, reporter Dean Goodman led with this sentence: "In the battle for box office supremacy between the street brawlers of Fight Club and the warring couple in The Story of Us, North American moviegoers apparently opted for neither." Does that give you an accurate picture of the fight for the top slot this weekend? I don't think so. In paragraph 4, Goodman finally gets to: "The rankings could change when final data are released Monday, especially since Universal and Fox were each claiming that their movies were No. 1. Not surprisingly, older females dominated audiences for Story, while young males grabbed the ringside seats for Seven director David Fincher's Fight Club." If box office news has become marketing, why would a Reuters reporter indulge the fact by giving such a gift to Paramount.

AP was better, headlining: "3 Films Battle for Box Office Title," however business writer David Germain loses me in the body of the story by not only using Robert Bucksbaum of Reel Source as a source, but by twisting reality by saying that Bucksbaum's Reel Source "does its own projections based on surveys of theater chains." Simply put, that is a lie. At least in the context of weekend box office estimates which it was used in. Reel Source does minimal surveying, primarily on its Internet site, to guess at how films will open. Bucksbaum is still the only person I know of who claims to be a professional numbers person who wants anyone to think that he can really estimate not only openings, but final domestic numbers BEFORE films even open. He estimated Fight Club to do $18 million this weekend and $75 million overall. I wish it would. What made him think that Fight Club would do about 4 times its opening weekend? He was guessing, just like the rest of us. Only he takes money for it and pretends to have some facts to back it up. Pisses me off.

And by the way, The Hollywood Reporter, accused of bias against Fight Club by this column in recent days, did the story exactly right. The headline: "Championship bout at b.o. is too close to call." That is the story. That is the right headline. And in the body of the piece, the word "claiming" for Paramount, the phrase "studio-estimated" for Universal and the word "conservative" for Fox. That is an unbiased and accurate call. I hope this particular hatchet is now buried and buried somewhere other than in my head.

THE UGLY: The weekend Hot Button was missing all weekend. In some places, that might not be such a big deal. In some places, it might be cause for celebration. But after two years of doing this column without missing a day, this weekend was not my first. Technical problems and no one in town to fix them. You can read the weekend column. Or you can pass. The mouse is in your court.

GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY: I had a chance to ask Russell Crowe directly about Wolverine this Sunday as I was talking to him about the upcoming Michael Mann film, The Insider. Yes, he did meet with Bryan Singer, who shares a talent agency with Crowe. No, he never seriously considered it. One, he was never a fan of the comic book. He still doesn't seem to even know who or what Wolverine is. Second, he does respect Bryan Singer and would love to work with him, but as he said, "Gladiator is kind of my Wolverine."

JUST WONDERING: What the hell is Warner Bros. doing, moving The Green Mile to December 10 from December 17? The only logical answer is that director Frank Darabont is just not near ready with the movie yet because the December 10 date seems like easy pickings with just Stuart Little and the perhaps-wonderful, but certainly esoteric Cradle Will Rock in the way while the 17th offers up the joy of fighting off Robin Williams in Bicentennial Man and Jodie Foster in Anna and the King.

BAD AD WATCH: The Story of Us has a few special tricks in it. The best is the headline quote from Jacqueline Sonderling of KCAL, who is not only not a critic, but she's not even an on-air personality. She is the segment producer for non-critic Cary Berglund. Of course, it also has the unholy pentagram of Wolf, Brewington, Churchill, WISH and The Dish Network. And six more non-critics to boot.

READER OF THE DAY: I've been getting a lot of mail that reads much like this from first-time contributor Doug: " So, after watching this, am I the only person wondering where the wall-to-wall horrendous violence decried by so many was? Certainly, there's some, and I wouldn't recommend it to the weak of heart -- but there's nothing that gets me the way some of the scenes in Raging Bull do (not to mention Seven, or Reservoir Dogs, or Summer of Sam, or even Three Kings, or any number of other movies).

And as for social responsibility -- personally, I think the Home Alone movies are more socially irresponsible than anything in Fight Club. I'm dead serious here. Disguised as polite entertainment, the Home Alone movies show young kids how to create all sorts of fun traps - but don't worry, the bad guys will be fine! Anyone old enough to see Fight Club in the theater should be able to process the ideas in the movie at an adult level. And if people cheer the comment about blowing up credit card buildings (which is hardly delivered in a charismatic manner in the movie), does that mean that David Fincher and Chuck Palahniuk and everyone else involved are inciting a riot, or that they're just giving a voice to the thoughts on everyone's mind? The question, obviously, is rhetorical; I'll just add that Chuck Palahniuk, who should be given credit for virtually all of the ideas of the movie, recently stated in an in-store reading that 99% of what he did was write down things that he heard other people say, and just try to cohere all the thoughts he heard stated by the people around him."

E ME: You gotta fight for the right to Fight Club. Or not. So far, only two negative e-mails about this film. And I'm pretty sure that one of the writers hadn't seen the film. If you are already wearing thin on this subject, I apologize. The fight can only go on so long. But as long as I've got the gloves out...what do you think?