5 January 2000

RANTING & RAVING continued...

As for those who have placed Jawbreaker on their Bottom Ten list. Hey, it's not a great movie. But geez, have you seen a movie that came as close to deserving a review in Hustler while no one took their clothes all the way off? I mean, they try to objectify Jennifer Love Hewitt as best they can in her movies, but when it came to Maxim, she looked pretty clunky trying to heat things up. Running into this early '99 dud on cable recently, it finally occurred to me that Rose McGowan is hitting the same buttons that the young Susan Sarandon did. Unusual, slightly bulging eyes and a fabulous chest. Let's hope for Ms. McGowan's sake that her acting fills out as well as Ms. Sarandon's did. Sexy and seriously talented is a powerful combination. Rose has got her bad girl schtick down like no other, but she'll need more to make it out of her early 30s. Rebecca Gayheart, recently single, so I hear, is always sweet and sexy. Julie Benz is the classic smart blonde playing the dumb tight-skirted blonde. And Judy Greer, who goes from plain-squared Fern to Vylette was sexy enough to end up bouncing in George Clooney's lap at the very top of Three Kings. I guess simplistic ogling of young women -- all well over 21 in real life, I should point out -- isn't really much of a movie review. But Jawbreaker's generosity in that area alone kept it well off of my Worst of '99 list.

Yeah, baby!

And finally, this e-mail came in and I had to respond. "I could be wrong but I believe in Canada, their academy gives an award to the highest grossing film. Why can't we do that here?" We have that award here. It's called the Hummer & Humvee Award, given to the richest producers, directors and stars in town by a number of well-endowed actresses and the auto manufacturer.

Okay...I think I'm almost back in the groove. Tomorrow may actually be like a good old-fashioned '99 Hot Button column, the way Dave used to write them. Until then, here are some ROTDs...

READER OF THE DAY: When you get an e-mail from someone with a name like Strength and it's subject line is "marketing, marketing, marketing," you wonder why your junk mail catcher didn't catch what must be an unwanted solicitation. Instead, it was a letter that spoke to Galaxy Quest clearly and my personal example, not just my rantings. So even though he essentially confirms what I've been saying, hereÍs a letter from The Strong Man: "Saw Galaxy Quest, it's been one of my more enjoyable movies this holiday...took my wife who doesn't really like sci-fi, I convinced her it would be a fun, light movie to take our 8-yr-old daughter to, as we've seen "TS2" and Stuart Little a couple of times now...anyway my wife loved it, wants to see it again, she says she didn't know what to expect originally and might enjoy it more going in with a "less-biased attitude"...my daughter also really liked it, I thought she might get restless (seems like a long running time and "Phantom Menace" bored her to tears) I'm sure she didn't get everything, but what she DID get, she liked)...

I've mentioned the movie to a few of my friends, I know they would really like the movie but they almost always have a negative attitude about it... typical comments are: "Don't you have to be a Star Trek fan to get it?" or "Isn't it a kid's movie?"... just expressing they don't really know what it's about... It just goes to show that quality commercial films can suffer the same fate as lesser known gems...solid movies from Fight Club to The Iron Giant can fade, like this one most surely will just because of poor marketing (by the way I'm not quite putting Galaxy Quest in this caliber of films, just making a point)..."

And on the subject of the Hot Button coverage of art and commerce, three reader P.O.V.s. I think the fair thing is to give the "anti" position the last word. So first, a defender of sorts, The Big B: "The day film stops depending on commerce is the day you can put away your box office reports and commentary. Film is an art, but it's the most business-dependent of any art form I know. What do you need to be the next Michaelangelo? Talent and paint. What do you need to be the next Shakespeare? Talent and a pen. What do you need to be the next Mozart? Talent and a piano. What do you need to be the next Spielberg? Talent and $100 million worth of people and stuff.

With costs so high, money influences (or infects, depending on your point of view) every aspect of filmmaking. Would The Thin Red Line have been made if Fox hadn't counted on starpower to turn a profit? And since it didn't, will we see its like again? The fact is, the way movies make money has a huge impact on the way movies get made and seen, and which movies get made. This column has always had a solid perspective on the roles of art and commerce in film, and it would be a shame to lose that perspective. Thanks for what you do (not that you do it for free -- art and commerce, baby)."

And lodged somewhere in the middle is Dan: "I too would love for the emphasis on box office dollars in entertainment reporting disappear completely; I think such a disappearance would shift the attention from the big loud summer movies towards the movies that truly need the attention like small art house pictures. The box office take has such a great effect on areas of filmmaking nowadays that it has become like the 800-pound gorilla.

Having said the above, you can not completely ignore box office dollars. The results are EVERYWHERE and you wouldn't be a good columnist if you didn't at least mentioned them from time to time because it is a big part of the movie business. A lot of decisions, especially nowadays, seem to be based on the bottom line. So perhaps you can find ways to counteract this emphasis of the race for the number one at the box office each week. Something like seat count just so readers have more information on which to interpret the results."

And last but not least, Diamond Lil writes: "I almost wrote you about it before: if you disagree with the numbers game, do not play it. You are too good critiquing to employ so much time and space in that nonsense. I am not saying completely ignore it -- now we are all caught up in this -- but to a much lesser degree.

And it seems to me that your blood pressure goes up a tad much when you are on the numbers subject. We want you around for a long time, David. De-stress your life."

E ME: Just so y'all know, the reason I do Box Office Extra on Fridays instead of including it in the column is that I know that some of you don't want to read it. So, it's just an extra piece that you can easily avoid. On Mondays, box office is always the news of the day, though I have tried to write less comprehensively about the numbers, focusing only what I see as news. The battle of art vs. commerce continues to rage, here as everywhere. All life is balance. Right?