Monday, 19 March 2001

WEEKEND REVIEW

The good news is that Enemy at the Gates opened with an estimated $13.6 million despite the lack of a major box office name and in spite of being a serious film.  I’m not the film’s biggest fan (see below), but as I always explain, opening weekend is almost never about the quality of the film, but about the ability of studio marketers to find and entice the audience that will shell out before word of mouth begins.  Next weekend, Paramount will expand the venue count by about 30 percent and then we will know.  In the meanwhile, the studio is already spouting off to the press that their investment in the film is only $10 million, compared to Mandalay’s $60 million towards the rest of the world.  All these split rights deals are beginning to show their skirts a little too publicly.

Exit Wounds opened a bit better than I expected.  If you want to know why, my guess would consist of three letters, D-M-X.  The black audience in America is incredibly loyal and they show up on opening weekend.  The real test of this film will come next weekend.  Last year at this time, Romeo Must Die opened to $18 million over the weekend and $24.6 million over 5 days (it opened on Wednesday, as most black-audience-targeted films do).  It went on to gross $56 million domestically.  If Exit Wounds follows the same pattern… and the films that focus centrally on the black market most often do… look for a total domestic gross of around $57 million.  Or, this could be a real surprise and you could be looking at an $80 million domestic gross.

In the Oscar race, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Traffic and Chocolat all remained in the Top Ten, retaining their order of finish from weeks past.  Tiger reported a 5 percent drop, though we need to keep in mind that it actually added about 105 screens this weekend.   On the other hand, the film reported a $1.4 million Sunday, which is very unlikely to be real.  If Sony Classics didn’t cough up the oversized number for Sunday, they would have ended the weekend without breaking the $100 million mark, separating it politically from Traffic, which passed the $100 million mark on Saturday, and leading to a series of stories about Traffic passing $100 million and Crouching Tiger soon to get there…. doesn’t sound as good, does it?  Traffic a 13 percent drop and Chocolat a fall of 11 percent. 

THE GOOD:  I pretty much stayed away from this story last week because I thought the logic was so clear that there was no need… then I got a couple of e-mail requests for my position.  So here we go. 

The case of Byers vs. Warner Bros. and Oliver Stone should have been thrown out before it ever got to discovery.   It took two years of discovery before it got thrown out, but it’s dead now and that is good.  I believe that the suit was wrongheaded both legally and morally.  I believe in the First Amendment and on this, I am an absolutist.  If someone breaks the law as part of expressing speech, I believe that those acts should be treated as if unrelated to the speech.  Inciting speech, which is one of the two clear exceptions currently held by the courts, falls under law breaking, in my belief, when it comes to something like shouting “fire” in a crowded theater.  That is a deliberate act with no possible intention other than to create harm to others.  On the other hand, incitement to riot as in speech that fires up numbers of people has no place in U.S. law. 

Obscenity, the second exception, also should be removed as law, as far as I’m concerned.   Though speech affects people in all kinds of ways, in a society that believes in the freedom of expression quantifying obscenity is near impossible.  I have no personal interest in some of the extreme sexual acts that have become standard in modern pornography, but I think the mainstreaming of some of this stuff makes clear that the bar is always moving.  Do I think that men are harmed by the viewing of this stuff?  Yes.  Anything that makes the opposite seem less human is nothing if not horrifying.  But should it be banned?  No.  Can’t do it.  This is America.

Forget the extremes for a minute and look at safer speech.  The Los Angeles Lakers use Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.” as a theme when the team wins a game at home.  The song is a mockery of Los Angeles.  Newman mentions all the least attractive streets in L.A. and clearly is not creating an ad for the city.  But that doesn’t stop us from taking it that way.   People sing along to The Supremes’ “Love Child,” rarely thinking about the lyric about a woman and her child, abandoned.  Charlie’s Angels is held up as a feminist statement.  And Natural Born Killers, like Fight Club, has become a lightening rod for anti-violence groups, when the movie is clearly about the danger of glamorizing violence in this society.  They kill the reporter, for God’s sakes!  Yes, he makes them famous… but even the most evil people know that he is perpetrating a great evil upon his audience. 

There is no question that people respond to the media they witness.  Children get more violent after watching violence.   Men objectify women more after viewing pornography.  Women buy stuff on Home Shopping Network.  (Sorry… so do men, but balance isn’t always accurate.)  But when we start deciding what gets banned, who gets the final decision?  And will we agree with them? 

Most of Hollywood agrees that the MPAA rating system has got major problems, especially on the level of censorship.  But how do we fix it?  I have some ideas, but no system will ever be perfect. 

And no system should be enforced by the government.  I believe that speech, unlike guns, is not inherently dangerous.  And I believe that without the freedom of speech, America will cease to exist as a powerful nation.  Freedom of speech is a dangerous thing.  But without that danger, we would forever be in danger of losing all our freedoms.

THE BAD: I really wanted to love Enemy At The Gates.  Or at least I was looking forward to being able to say it was one of the year’s best films to date, along with Memento.  But no such luck.  From beginning to end, it seemed to me as though Jean Jacques Arnaud was taking what was a very intimate, simple story and blowing it up beyond recognition.  

Enemy tells the story of a sharpshooter who becomes the center of the Russian propaganda campaign designed to inspire the nation’s troops.  But it starts with this man in the midst of a journey to a besieged Stalingrad that is clearly meant to measure up to or reach past what Steven Spielberg did in Saving Private Ryan.  But it is one of the poorest imitations I have seen so far.  The first 10 minutes of this film are like a textbook intended to give the viewer an appreciation of just how brilliant Spielberg is.  For one thing, we make the journey with Tom Hanks, with whom we have a relationship, even before entering the theater.  As Jude Law makes his trip, we have no idea who he is – except that we are keeping an eye on him – and how we should feel about anything that is happening.  Of course, once he says, “I need a gun,” the outcome is inevitable… but not in a good way.  Similarly, we get a glimpse at Rachel Weisz in the first minutes, only to have her disappear for an extended period.   Why?  Is there a payoff?  None that I saw.  And what role does the Joseph Fiennes character really play in all of this?  Is his character anything more than a functionary blown up to fill the role of being a third arm in an inevitable triangle?

But back to the massive size of Stalingrad… not only isn’t it necessary, it never really comes home to the viewer.  There are moments, like a sequence with men running across a landscape, using the head of a giant Stalin statue as cover.  But for the most part, the CG is not very good and the movie looks like a rip-off of Full Metal Jacket’s second half combined with Private Ryan. 

Ed Harris is terrific.  That’s the one thing that really worked for me in this film.  He is cold and tough and driven towards his end.  And he never becomes a caricature.  Law and Weisz are as good as ever and Fiennes’ role is so thankless that I have nothing but compassion for him as an actor.  But the movie is a mess, trying to be epic when, in fact, it is about men who are snipers.  Snipers are the most intimate of  warriors.  There were things wrong with it, but 1993’s Sniper, a pretty low budget, low profile affair, got it so much more right than this film, it is amazing. 

So, it’s too bad.  This isn’t one of the worst films of the year.  But it surely is not one of the best.

PAGE TWO:  Ugliness In The Times & Trailers