Friday, 15 December 2000

WEEKEND PREVIEW

It’s the All-Boys Weekend at the box office!!!

Or is that an All-Girls Weekend? What is it when you have three big movies that are centered around powerful and/or good-looking men making asses of themselves?

First, you have The Emperor’s New Groove, which infamously started as a drama and is now a lightweight, speed-of-a-bullet comedy. Built for kids but quick enough to engage adults, the film works pretty well. But your major characters are a dumb, vain young king; a big, dumb townsman; a huge, dumb, evil sidekick who likes to cook; and one evil old bag who seems to have escaped from a natural history museum.

Next, for the teens, you have Dude, Where’s My Car?, which 20th Century Fox has conspicuously not screened for the media. Early anticipation, based on the script, seems to have dissipated. But basically, you have a movie about two young guys who party so hard that they lose their car and then have a day’s adventure trying to find it. The big gag? One always says, "Dude" and the other says, "Sweet."

And, as we get to the adult men, we have Mel Gibson in his movie-star-perfect turn in What Women Want, a film that hits commercial notes like a Steven Spielberg player piano. Yet, again, it is Mel’s oafishness and lack of insight or sensitivity that headlines the movie. The age-old question of whether leg waxing, or listening to a woman talk about leg waxing, is more painful is never to be answered here. This is a movie about why men suck as much as it’s about what women want.

So, will all three films be hits? It’s possible. Each has a distinct constituency. Each is being well marketed. And each will have attractions for both boys and girls and men and women.

As far as my specific box-office predictions, check out Box Office Extra, right here.

THE GOOD: There was an interesting piece on the New York Film Critics Circle in the New York Observer this week. The basic premise is that the New York Post’s new lead film critic was denied a seat at the circle’s table, taking one of the city’s major dailies out of the voting. The reason? That Lou Lumenick is not a "real" film critic and isn’t worthy of a slot. Or is it? Some suggest that Lumenick followed the path of Jonathan Foreman and former Post-er Thelma Adams (both now members) in being kept out at first because the group has a bias against the right-leaning New York Post. But what the Observer’s Gabriel Snyder missed was that Lumenick was not the only critic turned down this year. Mike D’Angelo, a well-respected web-based critic who became the lead critic of Time Out New York -- a definitely lefty publication -- was also denied membership. There was also an unusually large number of new applications this year, with two new New York Times critics (A. O. Scott and Elvis Mitchell), plus Jonathan Foreman finally being accepted. So, even though there may be some degree of contempt for Mr. Lumenick, it seems that this rejection was not quite as dramatic as Mr. Snyder suggests. (His story can be found here.)

THE BAD: Another NYFCC story came from the Daily News, where Jack Mathews and Jami Bernard suggest that there may have been an anti-Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon conspiracy. That too, seems to be a bit of an overstatement. The only critic in New York who is on record as being anti-Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is Amy Taubin of the Village Voice. The Voice has three members in the NYFCC, and they have been known in the past to vote as a bloc. So they may have been against CTHD. However, according to my sources, the group was even more interested in pushing for The House of Mirth than against Crouching Tiger. But they failed to get that film even one award.

The Daily News story also falsely suggests that the group was voting on Javier Bardem for Best Supporting Actor, as opposed to the more appropriate Best Actor, an award that ultimately went to Tom Hanks. And in fact, Benecio Del Toro was originally part of the Best Actor grouping with Bardem and Hanks when, mid-voting, some decided that he was really a supporting actor. Hanks then beat Del Toro for Best Actor by a slim margin, and Del Toro went on to win Best Supporting Actor in a runaway. Likewise, Marcia Gay Harden and Ellen Burstyn were both failed Best Actress candidates, whose supporters pushed them into the Supporting Actress slot after the Del Toro turnaround; the Supporting Actress award was ultimately given to Harden, who also beat Frances McDormand for the honor.

THE UGLY: In my final homage to New York criticism, there is the bloodbath, Cheshire vs. Lane. If you don’t know Godfrey Cheshire, he is one of the two movie critics for The New York Press, a New York alternative paper, like the New York Observer. He also spent some time with me in professional situations this year, as we shared the stages for movie discussions at Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival and at the Telluride Film Festival. There must be something in the water, because young Godfrey went to town, deconstructing and destroying the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane in an attack far more brutal than any of my recent Ken Turan smackdowns. And I couldn’t agree with Mr. Cheshire more. Lane has had it coming, and he gets it with an authority that pithiness can never overshadow or dismiss. Please read Cheshire’s demolition by copying the following URL into your browser. http://www.nypress.com/content.cfm?content_id=3260&now=12/14/2000&content_section=4
Normally we would link to it, but Mr. Cheshire has a freedom of expression that reaches beyond roughcut’s parent, TNT... so if you are shy about language, you may want to stay away. And if you laugh easily, don’t put any liquids in your mouth as you read or you will have to clean up after yourself.

RADIO RADIO: This weekend on KABC-790 and kabc.com -- as of this moment -- it looks like both Laura Linney and Alfred Molina may be with us. Check it out... 11 am PST on Saturday.

JUST WONDERING: Is anyone else discovering that they are reading less of Inside.com, now that the new design has turned what was once an easy task into a form of mid-1980s torture?

BAD AD WATCH: Sony continues to throw Finding Forrester into the waste can for no good reason, using quotes from Peter Travers, Bill Zwecker, Lou Lumenick, Omar Linares, Jill Lances, and Ted Goldenberg, while obsessively holding the review date on the film until next Monday... it is a rare thing to see a movie this good treated so shabbily by its studio.

READER OF THE DAY: This comes from McC.L.T. -- "A thought on the trailer of Cast Away. In his plays, Bertolt Brecht would often start each of his scenes with what is essentially a title card announcing the outcome of the scene, in purely expositional terms: ‘Little boy run over by horse cart,’ or something along those lines. What this does is immerse the viewer purely in the present of the scene, in the now of the moment. Since the viewer knows what is going to happen in the end of the scene, he can let go of that nagging thought in the back of his head that’s wondering how it is going to end, and concentrate on what is happening now, and how the end result of scene is reached. The viewer is not thinking ahead -- he is experiencing the moment only in the present, with the character.

"While I would be surprised if Robert Zemeckis was thinking of Brecht when he designed his trailer, I wouldn’t be too surprised, for I think the trailer does the same thing. People are complaining that Zemeckis has tipped his hand by letting people know that Tom Hanks gets off the island. Now, I haven’t seen the film, but I think it’s a brilliant move. Instead of the audience skipping ahead in their minds the entire time Hanks is on the island, wondering how it will all play out, they know he makes it off. Now viewers can relax a bit, and give all their emotional attention to experiencing the island solitude with Hanks, to existing purely in the now of the stranded FedEx exec.

"I think it is also a bit of a safe Hollywood play on the part of Zemeckis. People know coming in that this is something different -- but I think Zemeckis also puts a lot of middle America at ease by saying that ‘Hey, it’s okay -- he makes it off the island, he survives that.’ And now people at least know that they aren’t in for a total downer of a movie -- that it doesn’t end with him dying alone on the island, failing to escape.

"Now what I am looking forward to seeing is what happens to him once he gets back: how does a man reclaim life when everyone else thinks he’s dead? And Zemeckis tells you how none of that is going to play out, and for me, that is the most interesting part of the movie. (Though, yeah, I want to see how Broyles and Zemeckis pull off the 45 minutes of no music and dialogue that I keep hearing about.)"

And this one is from... well, he’ll explain: "Today’s [THB 12/14] ROTD is a raving impostor. I am the real ‘Pizza Man,’ and I have come to rightfully reclaim my pseudonymous crown. Although the treacherous implications of this charlatan baffle me, I am exceedingly confident of my own title’s legitimacy. As far back as May 26 and as recently as September 25, I was granted the enviable legacy of ‘The Pizza Man.’

"The person who wrote today’s letter is not me. Never on my immortal soul would I intentionally utilize the phrases ridiculously pathetic or horrifyingly scary while composing a sentence in a remotely sober state. A high-caliber weapon of some variety would need to rest against my temple before I would spell ‘Renee Zellweger’ with any sort of pompous accenting. And finally, it would require a payoff of at least a kilo of uncut heroin and a silver spoon before I would ever allow Requiem for a Dream to pop up on my top five movie list for the year.

"For the sake of all that is good and pure (and non-nude) on the Internet, I demand... Nay, I plead like a common beggar to be returned full rights and duties to ‘The Pizza Man’ moniker. Call that humbug ‘The Pizza Boy’ or ‘The Calzone Man’ or some other such appropriate nonsense."

E ME: Where are they wackier? New York or Florida?