Friday, 7 July 2000

WEEKEND PREVIEW

Welcome to the "so what" after the storm.

To be completely fair, I have to admit that I have seen only one of the four wide openers this weekend, But I'm A Cheerleader. I saw it at Toronto. It's campy and silly and I enjoyed it. It surely is no act of unmitigated genius, but if you are willing to be amused by broad, gay, hetero-anguished comedy, you'll likely enjoy it. I was on the set of It's The Rage, but I could barely get myself to read the entire screenplay that I was given as prep for the set visit. Andre Braugher is one of my acting gods, but converting plays to movies is no simple task. And from all I've heard, this film doesn't crack the code.

Disney's The Kid is apparently quite commercial. Where does it the live on the line between charming kid stuff and dreck? Can't say until I've seen it.

And Scary Movie is probably the most interesting entry in this weekend's derby. It got slammed at ShoWest by distributors, but distributors tend to be older men who are more interested in Carmen Electra as a feat of engineering than they are in engineering their way to rubbing her feet. Tracking says (oh no!) that the film is going to do pretty well. Apparently, Miramax is getting the message out to their narrow-target audience, teenage boys and girls willing to go to the movies with them. And there certainly isn't anything new this weekend to compete for those teen dollars.

Also opening in some markets is the "Director's Cut" of Blood Simple, the first Coen Brothers movie. If you've never seen it, see it. If you've seen it on TV, see it on a big screen. If you haven't seen it in 15 years, go again. This is the simplest and cleanest of the Coen Brothers' work. Go see it anyway. If it opened as a new film tomorrow, with a major star and no artsy-fartsy Coen stigma (Quality is now a stigma…go figure!), it could well be a near-$100 million movie.

I'm going to skip Box Office Extra this week because I'm travelling and the week isn't that interesting. I'll tell you now that The Kid and Scary Movie will both open in between 2000 and 2800 venues. And here are my weekend guesstimates.

1. The Perfect Storm - $23 million
2. The Kid - $16 million
3. Scary Movie - $14.7 million
4. The Patriot - $13 million
5. Chicken Run - $10 million
6. Me, Myself & Irene - $8 million
7. The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle - $5 million
8. Big Momma's House - $4.5 million
9. Shaft - $4 million
10. Mission: Impossible 2 - $3 million

THE GOOD: If you want to read a really great conversation about the future of the Web and entertainment content sites, you have to read the Business 2.0 report from their first salon, in which internet media critic Michael Wolff and Inside.com co-founder Kurt Andersen go toe-to-toe. The issue of content is a bit different for Venture Capital-chasing sites like Inside.com and sponsored places like roughcut.com. We here are in the extremely advantageous position of being a sponsored adjunct of a massive company. On the other hand, if we bite the hand that feeds us in some unthought of way, we could be erased in a moment. The issue, so brilliantly framed in this transcript, for the bigger I.P.O. companies is that the business of what we do simply doesn't have a strong enough profit model to be appropriate for hungry investors. Building media outlets is a long-term game. Magazines like Entertainment Weekly took more than 5 years of struggle and red ink to reach any real stride. Venture capitalists want to be paid next year…that is unless you are going to be a cash cow, which no print/Web media venture is likely to ever be. At least, not enough so to make up for the wait. Anyway, check it out if this interests you. And thanks to Medianews.org's Jim Romanesko for pointing me in its direction.

THE BAD: Richard Mosk has resigned as co-chairman of CARA, the MPAA rating board. Hallelujah! The question is, will his exit make any difference? Sadly, probably not. Joan Graves has taken over and she fights filmmakers with the worst of them. Jack Valenti told The Hollywood Reporter, "The transition is seamless. Joan steps up, and things move on." No censor is an island.

THE UGLY: I couldn't get the whole thing on the Web and I am not anywhere where a current newsstand edition of The Hollywood Reporter can be bought. So, here is all I have of Spike Lee's rant about The Patriot. You judge whether it is he or the movie that is "The Ugly:" "This past Fourth of July weekend, my wife and I, along with millions of other Americans, went to see The Patriot. We both came out of the theater fuming. For three hours, The Patriot dodged around, skirted about or completely ignored slavery. How convenient was it for screenwriter Robert Rodat to have Mel Gibson's character not be a slaveholder? Let's not forget that two of 'the framers,' founding fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, owned numerous slaves. The Patriot is pure, blatant American Hollywood propaganda. A complete whitewashing of history, revisionist history. While holding myself back from shouting at the screen, I kept wondering where are the slaves? Who's picking the cotton? Did Rodat, a 1981 history graduate of Colgate University, get his dates mixed up? The Emancipation Proclamation was 100 years away. Where were the Native Americans? Did the two Johns -- Ford and Wayne -- wipe them out already? Why have the film critics completely ignored this in their reviews?"

David here again. I'm pretty sure that I (and others) have mentioned the unreality of the slave situation in this movie. However, I didn't focus on it quite this aggressively. What do you draw the line? Is Spike overly sensitive? Can one be overly sensitive about slavery being softballed in an American Revolution era drama? Is it "just a movie?" What do you think?

RADIO RADIO: It will be Pennacchio, Home Alone, this Saturday on KABC-790 L.A. and kabc.com, Saturday starting at 11am pst.

NY TIMES QUOTE OF THE WEEK: This cartoon is a little more cynical than smart in my eyes. However, it's worth looking at and laughing with. As usual, since it's a New York Times link, you need to have a free registration to see it. If you do, just click here.

BAD AD WATCH: I am happy to say that I haven't seen a movie ad, good, bad or indifferent, since leaving L.A. on Monday. A week of Zen.

READER OF THE DAY: CW & The Cixie Cancekings writes: "Big weekend for movies, and I managed three of them (plus the DVDs I rented). Tops was Chicken Run, which I thought was just wonderful and smart, and despite that, the kids in the audience seemed to really enjoy it. But then, Aardman was always good at slapstick, and who doesn't like that? I ran into a friend on the way out and told him and his family to make sure to stay for the credits, because the running gag continues right up to the very end. (You should recommend readers do the same.)

Second place was Rocky & Bullwinkle. I'm with you on this one. I've seen only savage reviews, and I don't understand it. Now, I'm not the biggest R&B fan in the world, but I think the humor was pretty much what the show was all about. Sure, Russo and Alexander were underused and not particularly funny (R&B got all the good lines), but the bad puns had me laughing from start to finish. And some of the cameos were great. Loved Billy Crystal as the travelling mattress salesman.

Last (but not a bad movie) was The Perfect Storm. There was just something unfulfilling about this, and it had nothing at all to do with the ending (which I knew going into it). My problem was the disparate coverage given to the other characters. We're introduced to the fishermen and their families, but then halfway through the film, we cut to this little sailboat with Karen Allen, and we're supposed to care? Who are all these other people and why are we wasting all this time on them? Either introduce them in the beginning with the fishermen like traditional disaster movies, or cut them out completely (or at least don't waste so much time on them, as we don't have any emotional investment in them).

Honestly, I have no interest in The Patriot. Guess I'm waiting for X-Men now..."

And this from the Baysider: "Damn, what's up Lonesome Dove's ass?

The interesting thing about Perfect Storm for me was the action was ultimately all about saving lives. That's it. No crooked politicians, no terrorists, no bombs going off, no saving the girl, none of that. Just people helping people against the elements. It missed a few moments: the way the music swelled as the boat pulled out missed the point that these are ordinary guys going on an ordinary job, it kinda played it a little too movie-like. There was no sappy score swelling up when these guys left in real life, the danger they faced was sudden and unpredictable, not foreshadowed so obviously. But that was just one minor complaint.

I thought the pre-storm scenes were a little forced, not bad, but not as good as they could have been. But once the storm starts, it's done all it needed to do. And the way it throws in new characters, new plots, with no development or preview is really quite interesting. It's as if the storm itself has willed entire subplots into being. I thought it was quite a good flick. Maybe it could've been better, but frankly this has been such a disappointing summer--Gladiator just didn't have it for me, M: I-2 was just overdone and not very interesting, Chicken Run was good but I expected greatness, Irene had enough funny moments to recommend it but not to really like it, I liked Titan A.E. but I was one of the few and the proud on that one--that I'll take The Perfect Storm as it is. Furthermore, the effects were completely intoxicating."

E ME: Tell me all about it.