Monday, 8 January 2001

WEEKEND REVIEW

With only one major expansion -- Traffic’s successful jump to 1,510 venues -- the holdovers had a very good weekend. Cast Away should pass the $150 million mark by end of business Wednesday and seems like a lock to become the number two grosser to open in 2000, surpassing Mission: Impossible 2. If the film has the success with Oscar voters that some now expect, it could actually press the fast-falling, post-Christmas The Grinch for the top spot, though it will probably fall short, even with an Oscar run, by $10 million or more. But the idea that Cast Away might well be the second-highest domestic grosser of the careers of both Bob Zemeckis (Back to the Future, $208 million) and Tom Hanks (Saving Private Ryan, $216 million) (it won’t be passing their shared Forrest Gump domestic gross of $330 million) is noting short of stunning. Blame ticket prices all you like, but stunning, I say.

Cast Away estimates a drop of 22 percent. Also taking advantage was What Women Want, estimating a 25 percent fall, Miss Congeniality, with a 5 percent estimated drop, and The Family Man, with 28 percent. But the big stories were smaller. Traffic finally went wide and delivered an estimated $14.9 million. And Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon added just a handful of screens (11), but put an estimated $500,000 into its coffers, kicking its way to a third straight weekend with a per-screen average of more than $20,000. Awesome! Do I need to say it yet again? SONY CLASSICS, PLEASE ADD MORE SCREENS NOW!!!

Of course, the biggest surprise might be further down the list. Dude, Where’s My Car? passed the $40 million mark. Still haven’t seen it. But even from a distance... OY!

THE GOOD: The National Society of Film Critics named Yi Yi its Best Picture of 2000. You know the National Society of Film Critics... the one that people mistake for the National Board of Review every year when the NBR awards hit first? The other Mandarin-language film of note, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, was shut out of any wins, taking third place for Best Cinematography and Best Director. Ironically, the group gave no Best Foreign Language Film award.

Also picking up awards were Laura Linney and screenwriter (and unawarded director) Kenneth Lonergan for You Can Count on Me; Benicio Del Toro and Steven Soderbergh for Traffic; Javier Bardem as Best Actor for Before Night Falls; and Elaine May for her supporting turn in Small Time Crooks.

THE BAD A**: I saw my first great film from Sundance 2001 on Friday. It’s called Series 7, and it is a dead on, unflinching satire of reality programming that left me laughing and thinking from beginning to end... okay, maybe it wore me out a little bit between the hour-one and the hour-fifteen mark. But that’s not surprising. That’s when I would usually stop watching TV to get a drink or something.

Series 7 is the seventh series of a fictional program called The Contenders. (No, Rod Lurie is not involved.) The show’s premise is simple. Five people, picked at random in a national lottery, are chosen to compete. They are each given a semi-automatic handgun, and their task is to survive while the other four contestants die... kill or be killed. Our contestants in this series are a woman who is into her eighth month of pregnancy ("It’s for the baby!"), a 50-something, dowdy emergency room nurse, a beer guzzling "regular guy," an 18-year-old all-American girl, and a young guy dying of testicular cancer. Sounds fun already, huh?

Writer/director Daniel Minahan hits a home run here, getting every note, visual and verbal, just right. Even the music has the precise feel of these drama/docs that have become so popular. Except now, all that vacuous self-indulgence has real consequences. If you are "sent off the island," you’re going in a body bag.

There’s no point in exploring all the details of the storytelling, because why ruin anyone else’s fun. Suffice it to say that if USA Network, the TV arm of USA Films, which is releasing the film just after its Sundance premiere, doesn’t make a version of The Contenders for TV, they are nuts. I would advise Showtime to call Minahan and offer him a fortune to get the show -- complete with the violence and language that only really lives on pay cable -- on by this summer, while these shows are still hot. This could be the hit that they’ve been dying for. The Contenders can be to reality TV what The Simpsons is to animation... the new voice, the true voice, the next generation. And the ingenious part is that The Contenders is as ripe as anything I’ve seen to have all the drama of a soap opera. Characters live and die and then you build out new characters. It’s always fresh. It’ll get old after about 100 episodes, but oh the fun we can have until then. Series 7 opens at Sundance at the Eccles Theater on Friday, January 19, at 9:30 pm, and also plays at noon on Saturday and in Salt Lake City on Sunday night.

THE UGLY: I was wrong when I wrote on Friday (for the weekend) that there was no news. There was huge news. Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich are now former employees of Columbia Pictures. There will be no renewal of their Centropolis deal. Ironically, it was not the beast (Godzilla) that killed the boys, but the beauty (The Patriot). Despite scathing criticism, Godzilla managed $379 million worldwide, which was disappointing but not disastrous. But $215 worldwide for The Patriot, which cost about the same amount as the effects-heavy Godzilla, was a small disaster. Ironically, the guys couldn’t comment because they are in Arizona prepping a $30 million-budget flick, which they are producing, called Arac Attack. It’s not for Sony, a company that could use a low-priced hit, but for Warner Bros. (Please see my New Year’s resolutions for my suggestion that Fox revive the idea of an ID4 sequel, since a personality conflict with the old Fox regime was one of the big problems with that project going forward. The time is nigh.)

PAGE TWO: Radio, Wondering & ROTD