Friday, 2 February 2001

WEEKEND PREVIEW

It's raunchy time at the box office.

The big question surrounding Me, Myself & Irene is how this kind of movie will deal with a big dollar start. There's Something About Mary, which will be mentioned in every piece of coverage about Irene, started with $13.7 million and then went untraditional, running at no less than $1 million a week for 15 weeks. To give you an idea of how odd that is, The Phantom Menace, which brought in $431 million domestically, had one fewer $1 million-plus weekend than Mary. That's the trajectory of movies these days. Open big, slide. Some slide a little faster, others a little slower. And given that Irene is being anticipated with a much larger core of must-sees than The Farrellys had (and deserved) before Mary, the word of mouth will come in one big wave. The next high anticipation comedy is more than a month away (The Klumps), so Irene should have open seas for a while. This will be one of the truest week 2 reads ever, since this will probably be uncharted water for the Farrellys.

For all my box office guesstimates and the venue counts, check out Box Office Extra after noon, e.s.t.

THE GOOD: Nancy Marchand was more than good. She really was great. She was never a typical leading lady, but she held the screen in a remarkable way. And she had a real talent for ringing the bell in a big way every 20 years or so. Her movie career started in 1957 with The Bachelor Party, from a script by Paddy Chayefsky. In 1977, she became a TV icon as Margaret Pynchon on "Lou Grant." And starting in 1999, she became the character whose name seems certain to be etched next to hers for eternity, Livia Soprano. She will be missed.

THE BAD: It's funny. It's bad. It's Chris White's Top 5 List of difference between the old Shaft and the new Shaft, culled from White's merry band of contributing pranksters. (I've culled it further. For the full list, check out the site.)

9. To find out what the word is on the street, the new Shaft simply logs onto www.wordonthestreet.com.

8. 1971: He's a complicated man, and no one understands him but his woman. 2000: He's a misunderstood survivor of work place discrimination with authority issues, aggravated by an undiagnosed Attention Deficit Disorder and a lousy HMO plan, and no one understands him but his life-partner and his anger management therapy group.

7. This year's Shaft is suspended from the NYPD for failing to use excessive force.

6. "Who's the black private dick who's a sex machine with all the chicks? Well, originally we got the green light with Will Smith, but we couldn't shoot around his commitment to the Ali biopic and still make a summer release, and Ving Rhames and Larry Fishburne were possibilities, but finally we were able to come to an agreement with ICM on Sam Jackson's back-end points... Daaammmmn right!!"

5. Isaac Hayes' confusing update of the theme song: "Who is the cafeteria worker who's a sex machine to all the chicks? Chef!"

4. As part of his effort to clean up NYC, Mayor Giuliani makes Shaft change his name to Sheldon.

3. "Is that your final answer, homeboy?" makes for one VERY cool pre-gunfire catch phrase.

2. Old Shaft: Wants to get into his woman's pants NOW! New Shaft: Is a member of NOW.

1. With Harvey Keitel in the cast, the only di** we see is neither black nor private.

THE UGLY: Film Threat's "Deconstructing Harry" took an odd turn in its second segment this week. The first piece, "Ain't It Unethical?" was a fairly dry, factual accounting of the sometimes questionable history of Ain't It Cool. The writer, Ron Wells, took a few potshots at Knowles and his primary contributors, but the piece was pretty much unassailable for content. Part two, "The Geeks Strike Back" went up late Wednesday and I have to say, I found it a little disturbing. Unlike the first piece, this was pretty much a rant, taking a long phone interview Harry did with Ron Wells subsequent to the first piece and aggressively spinning it against Knowles. Especially brutal was the tactic of naming Moriarty and showing his photo, which was already up in the Web somewhere else, over and over and over again. It's a weird place to be in when one feels like Ain't It Cool had it coming to them on some level, but when one also feels that the bludgeoning has gone outside the bounds of the standard that the media outlet had already set for itself.

Of course, I have been through this myself over Ain't It Cool. When I have run negative stuff about the site, I have gotten loads of e-mail questioning my motives and my ancestry. There has been the standard, "We don't take Harry seriously" arguments and the "He never said he was a journalist" arguments. And like Film Threat, I agree with Spider-Man, "With power comes responsibility." That is true for Harry. That is especially true for the studios and producers who play footsie with Harry and that is true of those of us who choose to point out the failings of others in out profession.

So when Wells writes, "As it turns out, we at Film Threat are the only ones who would step up to the plate," you have to wonder why he went to a tactic that Ain't It Cool is often accused of, excessive self-aggrandizement. You have to wonder about reducing the beating on "Moriarty" to making fun of his real name, making fun of his only produced screenplay and making fun of the fact that the guy can be hypersensitive. You have to wonder why the coy, "We've actually accumulated quite a list of spy identities, but there's no need to reveal them all right now." Why not? The premise of the piece is that no one deserves the anonymity of these nicknames. Why pick and choose for the reader in an exposé?

Again, I agree with much of what Ron Wells published. But I would be far more interested in reading a transcript of Ron's interview with Harry than I am in Ron's obviously strongly biased selectivity about what Harry had to say, even if I don't disagree with the points Wells makes. If Harry sounds like a naughty 14-year-old, fine. But let it play out all the way.

And for the record, I should point out that Wells has the Oscar® thing wrong as far as Harry and Roger Ebert goes. I can’t speak for Roger's feelings, but I can tell you that Disney had decided to kill off any guest hosts other than the three currently showing up a few weeks before the Oscars happened.

I'm glad Film Threat stood up and wrote something authoritative about Harry and the questions about his site. I'm sorry that Part Two turned into a bit of name-calling rather than pure, if stylized, reporting.

RADIO RADIO: Saturday. 11a-1p, pst. KABC-790 L.A. kabc.com. The Movie Show.

BAD AD WATCH: Nothing really bad today, though I do think it's funny that Helen Raptis has the quote on Dinosaur ads. Do you think she's related to the species?

READER OF THE DAY: RKW writes: "Just because no one said anything (about the blinky pull-quotes, etc.) doesn't mean no one noticed. There are only so many times one can be curmudgeonly about stuff like technical snags, be they in a piece on the net, on TV or in a print-mag. Am I gonna mule & puke because my pic of Russell Crowe got printed all blotched-up in EW? Or when someone misspells 'exhilarating' in a review, which then gets REPRINTED in a trailer used in both theatres and on home-video (for 13th Warrior, btw)? No...I'll just mumble to myself.

If someone misspells 'whiny,' or uses 'they' for 'him or her' or writes 'affect' for 'effect' YET AGAIN, it hurts my snobby sensibilities as an English professor/editor, but I also know when I'm fruitlessly bucking the voice of the semiliterate masses (even the ones with college degrees).

All too soon, 'him' and 'her,' 'she' and 'he,' will be as archaic as 'thee' and 'thou.' We'll also be stuck with a compounded 'is-it-singular-or-is-it-plural?' problem that we will have to live with for eternity, or until the total death of the English language, whichever comes first....

If I sound like some distaff Mr. Chips, carping about the 'Kickeronian' pronunciation of 'vicissum' as 'we kiss 'em,' it's for the same reason--tradition. No one wants to be old-fashioned, but no one wants to be rendered obsolete, either.

I'm not going to complain when you overextend an analogy (sometimes! 8) as you did w/ the roundball column, since, as you say, it is a column, but it might've been more effective if you had simply said, 'Hey, today, I'm gonna write about basketball instead of movies, just for kicks and giggles,' instead of trying to make it relate. After all, a column about the schmoozing and the food amongst the stars at Sundance is as peripheral to the movies those guys make as is which ones like to go to basketball or hockey games and where they sit and what kind of special passes they have, no?"

E ME: Why can't we all just get along?