Monday, 17 July 2000

WEEKEND REVIEW

It was a good weekend for the good guys.

Welcome to Chapter Three of Screwed Expectations. In Chapter One, we had the mis-estimated showdown between The Patriot and The Perfect Storm. In Chapter Two, Scary Movie, which was tracking well, blew out every expectation with a $42.3 million weekend. And now, we have the estimated $57.5 million start for X-Men, which more than doubled the numbers coming out of the National Research Group's tracking. (It also became the fourth biggest three-day weekend in history, behind The Phantom Menace, The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Mission: Impossible 2 and just $100,000 or so ahead of #5, Austin Powers 2: The Spy Who Shagged Me. It could well fall behind AP2 when the final numbers come out, but still.)

"Nobody knows anything" has rarely been more true. After one of the lamest early summers in memory, if not so much at the box office as in our hearts, a huge wave of the unexpected has taken America's moviegoers on a ride that none of the pros saw coming. It happened last year with The Sixth Sense, but that was a one-movie phenomenon. This year, if What Lies Beneath opens big next weekend, we will have gone a month in which every weekend there was a movie that was once questioned by the industry guessers, and which blew out expectations. And don't be surprised if The Hollow Man, which I now expect has a real shot at being Columbia's biggest movie of the summer, continues the trend of surprise to a fifth straight week.

No doubt, you will see a flood of "What Went Right?" stories in the next weeks. But here is the question that some of my colleagues seem to miss when it comes time to analyze this to death: Who really gives a crap about tracking anyway? The question may seem facetious, but it isn't. Tracking matters to the studio marketing and distribution departments. Why? Because it helps them decide how hard to push (read: how much to spend on) a movie. In fact, the whole rise of the National Research Group is a reflection of the buck passing of Hollywood. If the tracking tells you that you can't sell a movie, you will see either an increased or a decreased effort on the part of the studio. usually the latter. This isn't to say that the studio pros stop trying. But it is human nature to be less enthusiastic about what seems to be a loser. And the dollars spent on marketing tend to fall off as well. On the flip side, if tracking says you have a hit, studios will lose their minds trying to sell the movie. Of course, these films need it less and the tough ones need it more, but who said that life was fair or even smart.

If tracking starts to be perceived as less reliable, human instincts may actually come back into vogue in this town. What a concept! And Hallelujah! But don't count on it. Crutches are on sale 24 hours a day in Hollywood and they can't ever keep enough of them in stock.

And remembering the earlier chapters in the Big Book of Surprise, Miramax reported just a 38 percent drop for Scary Movie, which is quite good for a film that opened as well as that one did and which isn't for everyone. Even if that number rises into the 40s, it's still impressive. The film should hit $100 million by next Friday. And The Perfect Storm continues to rage along, off an estimated 35 percent as it cruises toward the $130 million mark. (My estimate for a final domestic tally is now at about $180 million, falling behind M: I-2 and possibly X-Men in the final tally.)

Meanwhile, The Patriot looks like it will crawl past the $100 million mark and Gone in 60 Seconds has mysteriously slowed its drops to a crawl (est. 29 percent this weekend) as Disney hopes the film will sneak across the wire. Chicken Run also has $100 million within beak range and Scary Movie and X-Men are sure to join M: I-2, Gladiator, Dinosaur, The Perfect Storm and Big Momma's House in this summer's $100 Million Club. Add Erin Brockovich and you have eleven $100 million releases so far this year. Last year, there were also eleven as of this date, with Runaway Bride, Blair Witch and The Sixth Sense still to come and seven fall/holiday $100 million releases on the way. Oddly enough, this summer has one more than last, as of this date, as two of last summer's eleven were spring releases (The Matrix, Analyze This) while this year there was only Brockovich. On the side of inequity, last year's top two films, The Phantom Menace and The Sixth Sense were both over $290 million domestic. This year, M: I-2, which will likely top out around $210 - $215 million, may well be the top grosser of the year, grossing about 50 percent of what Star Wars: Episode One did.

THE GOOD: Pop Quiz! Which one of these is true?

A. Robert Zemeckis is a genius.
B. Not every trailer that you think tells you everything, tells you everything.
C. Michelle Pfeiffer can still carry a movie on her supple shoulders.
D. A return to the classically slower speed of the movies of the '30s-'50s can turn out to be far more liberating than it is irritating.
E. All of the above.

Of course, if you answered "E," you are correct. I saw What Lies Beneath on Friday night and watched a movie that I never saw coming. If you fear spoilers, you can read my comments, don't worry. But I would worry about reading almost anyone else's. Almost anything other than seeing the trailer is likely to be loaded with spoilers. Why? Because this is not the movie you think it is. It also IS the movie you think it is. But it is so much more.

Bob Zemeckis is perhaps Hollywood's greatest living director in the game of taking genre filmmaking and turning it up a notch. While Spielberg, who was an early supporter of Zemeckis and then-partner Bob Gale, is off exploring his dark side, Zemeckis is balancing entertainment and weightier matters with a touch worthy of the masters. Used Cars is still one of the few movies of my generation to come close to putting a glove on Preston Sturges. Romancing the Stone was his mixture of the romantic comedy and the Hollywood backlot action film. Back to the Future bent the family comedy. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? made us look a second time at cartoons and, I think, has influenced straight animation to this day. Death Becomes Her could easily have starred Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Cary Grant and been co-directed by Howard Hawks and Billy Wilder. Forrest Gump was post-Vietnam Capra. And Contact, which suffered from Matthew McConaughey's miscasting, was still the most cerebral space movie since 2001: A Space Odyssey.

What Lies Beneath is Zemeckis' Hitchcock movie. Even beyond certain shots that pay direct homage, there is Alan Silvestri's score, which Bernard Hermann could have written himself. But it is not a straight rip-off. Don't get me wrong. Zemeckis has brought more to the party. He's brought decades worth of tools to the party that Hitch never had. The movie takes its time to get going. The pace throughout the first act is languorous to say the least. But as the Big Bad Wolf once said, "The better to eat you with, my dear." By the time you get to the third act of this film, Zemeckis has taken his film and turned it inside out and upside down and made something magical. So much so, that in 20 minutes of an interview, we didn't begin to get down to the nitty gritty of the film. (It's no coincidence that James Remar and Miranda Otto are slightly off reflections of Mr. Ford and Ms. Pfeiffer, is it? I didn't get an answer to that, among many very specific questions.)

And in the third act, there are some magical shots that I don't think we've really seen before. Really stunning stuff. I don't know if the average moviegoer will see or appreciate them, but they come fast and furiously and are just breathtaking. Cinematographer Don Burgess, who's on his fourth movie with Zemeckis, including Castaway, deserves high marks. So does Clark Gregg, the actor (The Adventures of Sebastian Cole) and now screenwriter for a subtle script in an unsubtle genre. Production designers Rick Carter and Jim Teagarden also deserve great praise. And effects master Rob Legato, who is finally earthbound after Apollo 13, Armageddon and Titanic, does some CG work in this film that should help set a standard for how CG can add to a story and not overwhelm it.

This movie seems to have grown on me in every hour since I first saw it and I can't wait to see it again. Audiences are going to have to be willing to change their movie watching pace for this one. But based on the hum of conversation at the Friday screening, I think that they will find this film, even if it doesn't open huge.

I'll write more tomorrow from the junket interviews, including Harrison Ford's candid response to why he really didn't do Steven Soderbergh's Traffic and what is up with Indy 4 and The Sum of All Fears. In the meantime, watch yourself. The secrets of What Lies Beneath are best served warm and moist and in a theater near you, not on an Internet site.

"Bad to the Hot Tub & Mechanic's Last Laugh"