I’m really not ready for Weekend Guesstimates quite yet…

There are four major releases this weekend – Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, Trapped, The Banger Sisters and The Four Feathers.  Normally, I would expect Trapped to be the likely commercial winner.  Charlize Theron can draw some box office.  Kevin Bacon is a great bad guy.  And the film has got the clear drive to draw in the Ashley Judd woman-in-danger audience.  But will Columbia’s self-restraint cost them too much?  Hard to say.  Gitesh Pandaya thinks that The Banger Sisters might manage $14 million, but I don’t see the film coming close.  That leaves Ballistic at the top of the charts, it would seem.  Neither Antonio Banderas or Lucy Liu is much of an opener.  But action will out.

Just for the sake of you HSXers, Ballistic $12 million, Trapped $9 million, The Four Feathers, $8 million and The Banger Sisters $7.2 million.  But remember, I’ve been off the field for a few weeks.

There are some really interesting openings this weekend on a smaller scale.  Disney is starting Spirited Away out slowly and it is a wonderful experience, well worth having.  You know whether you like anime’ or not and you sure know whether you like Apollo 13 or not.  If you do, you are guaranteed to enjoy the Apollo 13 IMAX experience.  IMAX has reformatted the film and it looks great.  But perhaps my most curious response was feeling how normal the experience felt.  I intend to do an extensive look at the new format sometime soon, particularly on the box office potential of the program.

Also journeying to another planet is Secretary, the S&M romantic comedy starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader.  If you read my Toronto coverage, you know how I feel about the film.  One thing continues to occur to me… Ms. Gyllenhaal is the girl that Dominique Swain was meant to become.  Swain is more clearly the beauty.  But Gyllenhaal has an unavoidable charm and sensuality that feels more advanced than her years.  No matter how she tries, Ms. Swain remains a young girl. 

Finally, the dark and brilliant French film How I Killed My Father, which I saw at Toronto 2001, is playing on a few screens around the country.  Images and moments from the film continue to haunt me to this day.  Perhaps you have to have lost your father or thought about that loss in some depth to be hit by the fill emotional weight of this drama.  But for me, it was a thought-provoking, powerful experience, while the filmmaking was both subtle and sublime.

For those of you who link to the column and never go to the front page, go to the front page and buy some damned DVDs.  But  more to the point, don’t miss THB’s new Friday feature, Pride Unprejudiced, from the brilliant and arch Ray Pride.  Roughcut readers will remember and appreciate Ray’s sense of film and humor.  I am honored to have him on board.  Look for him every Friday.  And read him today right here.  Today, he writes about The Four Feathers, Quitting, Igby Goes Down and WTC Uncut.

TORONTO CLEAN UP:  A couple more Toronto notes… First, Denzel Washington’s Antwone Fisher has one remarkable performance in his film that could be the greatest silent performance since Giulietta Massina in La Strada.  The actress giving the performance is Viola Davis, who also turned up in the Toronto buzz hit, Far From Heaven and is due in Soderbergh’s Solaris.  It was Davis who I was thinking of when I complained that Clint Eastwood no longer had the drive to find the best new actors in America, as evidenced by Blood Work.  She has less than three minutes of screen-time and only that kept me from putting her on my Supporting Actress Dark Horse list.  She will have her time.

Also, I wanted to point out in my defense of the press screening problems in Toronto, that the festival is not about us.  It is uniquely about the people of its home city.  That’s no excuse for beating up on Roger.  But whenever people ask me about the world’s festivals, the defining comment about Toronto is always that TIFF is the major festival that is most about the locals.  They sell about 350,000 tickets to the locals every year.  As far as I know, no one else comes close.  San Francisco and Seattle are big festivals that are also very much about the locals.  But Toronto and the Cinematheque that goes on all year there, are extraordinary and a tribute to the men and women who created that festival and who keep it going year in and year out.

SPIDER-MIKE:  Looks like there is a little more discomfort in the land of superheroes.  After happily going ahead with the Alfred Gough and Miles Millar and David Koepp on the Spider-Man sequel, Columbia brought in a new writer, novelist Michael Chabon, less than four months before production is scheduled to start.  And the Variety story by Cathy Dunkley and Dana Harris suggests that Chabon is starting from scratch, not punching up either the script by Gough & Millar or Koepp. 

Meanwhile, the “preview” sites are loaded with conversation about Dr. Octavius (Doc Ock) and other characters already being worked on in pre-production.  I’ve come to believe that in the comic-book movie world, these sites would always get the scoop.  What has changed that now allows the trades and others to beat these sites to the punch on stories like the Superman trilogy and this re-think on Spider-Man?  It’s odd.

Chabon has been connected to comic books by way of his wonderful novel, The Adventures of Kavelier and Clay.  But it isn’t remotely a comic book.  It is about real men who toil in the world of comics.  But Chabon’s proposal to Fox for the first X-Men movie relieves any concerns.  He knows how to tell these stories.  Read about his proposal, in his own words, and the proposal itself by clicking here.

And for those of you who aren’t that interested, I have taken a hunk from Chabon’s website for your amusement.  Its final sentence certainly amused me:

“Postscript, Summer 2000: As everyone interested in the X-Men knows by now, the filmed versions of the Lee-Kirby-Claremont-Cockrum-Byrne-Wein mutants have, at long last, made their appearance in the Great Multiplex. I saw the movie; I liked it pretty well. It managed, I thought, to capture some of the loony angst and absurd grandeur of the comics that inspired it. I tip my hat to Mssrs. Singer et al. Too bad about Storm, though.”

CUT TO FIT! / LEAVE IT ALONE!:  After linking to one story about ClearPlay, Inc. and other companies that are cutting “offensive” sections out of completed movies and renting them to the public, I asked for your opinions and got a load of them.  After reading Thursday’s story about the situation in the Wall Street Journal, I decided that I would establish my own opinion first and then dig into your e-mails.  And so…

This situation points up the ever-present battle between art and commerce.  There are two “first” reactions.  Commercially, these companies seem to have exposed a significant market for studios to exploit in which they might be able to increase video/DVD sales by as much as 10 percent.  (That’s my number.)  Artistically, I am offended and disgusted by this imposition on the integrity of a completed work of art.

But this is the Film Business.  There are consequences to every effort that studios make to maximize profits, not always good and not always bad.  Likewise, filmmakers are spending tens of millions of dollars to create their visions and in the process make massive concessions.  They guarantee to deliver an R and not an NC-17.  They allow for airplane and television cuts.  They agree to allow their films to be shown in non-letterbox formats in video and DVD.  All of these choices are intended to maximize profits, not artistic freedom.  And, God knows, they have no control of how we watch their films in our homes… what section we fast-forward past or slow down for a closer look or simply pay no attention to as we knit or read the paper in front of the TV. 

I believe that the industry can probably shut down ClearPlay and others over copyright issues… but only if they offer to deliver this service to consumers who want it with the boundaries of copyright.  Assuming that ClearPlay and others are not illegally exploiting these changes to films in order to line their pockets without paying what regular video retailers/rental houses are paying, “fair use” is a legitimate argument. 

Remember the Jennifer Aniston topless photo case in which the judge asked Aniston to provide all nude or near-nude images that she has approved?  Any moral argument against manipulating completed films in order to satisfy a constituency is legally counter-intuitive.  The industry does it all the time.  And if there are no financial damages…

On the level, my gut reaction is that the industry is better served by the studios and directors themselves doing what these companies are doing and publishing “TV-safe” versions of their films to satisfy this market. 

But my critical heart is sick, because nothing good can come of this.  If the film industry embraces the idea that there is an audience for sanitized home releases, how long before Salt Lake City exhibitors start demanding sanitized theatrical versions of films?  And how long before Salt Lake City papers decided that they wouldn’t accept ads for any R-rated films?  Sounds absurd, but it could happen. 

But what do you do?

The history of the NC-17 is scary.  The rating was created to allegedly give filmmakers the freedom to make films for adults that were not “pornographic” and thus worthy of being rated.  The porn business had taken over the uncopyrighted “X” rating and with NC-17 under copyright, the MPAA could control it.  But they still hadn’t solved the central problem… any porn film could apply for an MPAA rating and get the same NC-17 as Showgirls or Henry & June.  Freedom didn’t last long. 

Blockbuster Video, shopping mall owners and some newspapers banned the NC-17 and unrated films, the same as they had the “X” rating.  And suddenly, the rating system was a censorship system, strong as ever, with ratings given the force of law… at least, economic law.   So now, all NC-17 and some R-rated films are edited for Blockbuster release, mall-based multiplexes often cannot show unrated or NC-17 films and some newspapers won’t accept advertising for these films. 

Slippery slope… slippery slope… slippery slope.

The irony is that the current “savior” of the film business is DVD, where “director’s cuts,” outtakes, extra material and other convolutions are hailed as wonderful values.  But only in the rarest of cases are these “values” actually about any director’s vision.  These are simply marketing tools. 

The infinitely superior director’s cut of Almost Famous (aka Untitled) is one of my favorite DVD experiences.  But the theatrical cut is also in the same box.  How horrible would it be is they included a PG version of the movie (is that possible?) as well? 

My greatest fear is that some outlets might decide that they would only sell that PG version.  That is, in my opinion, de facto censorship. 

So, I believe that people who don’t want to see “uncomfortable” images have a right to watch edited entertainment.  But I also believe that the urge to censor is a very dangerous thing to indulge, a step on the road to self-censorship, which I consider even more dangerous, as it is silent and impossible to fight.  (Try getting the studio to put back in the sex scene that was never shot!)  On the other hand, it doesn’t seem to be in the public interest to force people who want to see “clean” entertainment to wait until a network premiere or to hide under a rock.

This thing is a bear.  Because the law and morality are not often compatible.  This is the same problem as the MPAA ratings system, which does have a value, but which can also be myopic and work against the good of the work and the public.  

It is one of the joys of going to film festivals, where there are no ratings – and almost no children, for that matter.   We all just assume that we are all adults and that we can make adult judgments.  Crazy, huh?

But wide releases and film festivals live on opposite ends of the spectrum, even if they co-exist for the sake of marketing sometimes. 

And then there is the impending end of copyright on a massive number of films in this young industry.  Someone joked somewhere about a re-edited version of Attack of the Clones.  Well, as many of you know, an edited-for-improvement version of The Phantom Menace has been floating around on video and the web for years now.  Just wait until you see Bob Guccione’s remake of Birth of a Nation!

Of course, on the radio we hear bastardizations and improvements on classic songs, sanitarily tagged “sampling,” all agreed to by the artists and record companies thanks not to an agreement on artistic oversight, but to an exchange of cash.   Is that the inevitable next step for the film business?  Is there any clarity left to a moral line other than the ever-changing immoral line that is Standard Operating Procedure.

Ya know… I haven’t come up with a single clear answer yet, have I? 

It’s simple.  I am of two minds.  Legally, edited movies are going to happen and I’d rather have the people who actually own the copyrights do the work.  Emotionally, I’d love to see filmmakers stand by their films and tilt against those windmills until the end… which also means that every cable network and DVD gets letterboxed, Spielberg and Lucas make Indiana Jones Does Dallas and use their hundreds of millions to get Jack Valenti & Co to create an adult rating that will work, and distributors start sending movie marshals out around the country to make sure that the sound level is right, bulbs are as bright as they should be and that 14-year-olds are not alone in R-rated films.  Also… lose the damned commercials in the theaters.  Okay… I’ll get to that another day.  My point is, if we are going to the moral high ground, let’s get serious about climbing the whole mountain, not just this week’s cause.

READER OF THE  DAY:  When I finally read the reader mail, I was surprised to find that there were many sentiments against Clean Flicks, but no one really waving the flag of artistic rights.

MS NOT NBC writes:  “(Clean Flicks) is just so wrong on so many levels.

1) Filmmakers such as Spielberg and Cameron have contractually-mandated final cut. Arguably, the studios could be found liable if an unapproved version becomes available, even if they had nothing to do with it. (It's not unlike holding gun manufacturers responsible for a shooting death.)

2) Theoretically, an edited version becomes a "new" version and thus, if not copyrighted, would be considered public domain, and anybody could legally sell it.

3) Where do some guys in Utah come off thinking they can tell Spielberg and Scorsese how to edit their movies? It's one thing to write a column and post it on the Internet; it's quite another to take someone else's column and re-edit it to suit yourself. This is no different. If these guys are unhappy with Hollywood's output, let 'em make their own friggin' films.

Here's a possible solution: the studios have to re-edit the things for network TV, anyway. Why not just release these "approved" edits along with the official versions? That way, everybody's happy and nobody gets cheated out of hard-earned dough.”

NOT THE AUSSIE FILMMAKER writes:  “I live in the ultra conservative city of Mesa, Arizona where one of the largest distributors of edited films (Clean-Flicks) is headquartered. I run into these super sensitive people all the time.

My initial sentiments are with the Director's Guild. If movies are really art, than the "sanitizers" are doing the equivalent of adding a fig leaf to Michaelangelo's David. Cutting 10 minutes from the D-Day invasion scene in Saving Private Ryan ruins the whole anti-war theme of that film. Then there is the offensive use of "Oh My God!" in Harry Potter that got trimmed.

The Director's guild may have better legal grounds as well. If films can be independently edited for offensive content then rented out, then what is to stop me from editing better versions of mediocre films and renting those out? Anyone want to see a good version of Attack of the Clones?

On the other hand, Hollywood does this kind of stuff all the time. How different is this sanitizing to the ratings manipulation that goes on everyday?

I recently caught The Rookie on video. Even though this film is rated "G", it is not really a kids movie. Adults are likely to get more out of this film than kids will. The only reason it got a "G" rating is because it is a "G" rated story. Could anything have been added to make the movie PG that would have improved the film? NO.

Unfortunately, The Rookie is an exception. XXX would have been a much better film with an "R" rating, instead it got edited to "PG-13" in order to get a bigger audience. Meanwhile, a completely unnecessary "shit" was added to Spy Kids 2 to get the PG rating they wanted.

Then you have the studios themselves creating "edited for content" versions for TV broadcasts, even going to the expense of shooting alternate versions of scenes and having actors loop alternate lines of dialog. Does the Director's Guild approve of this?

Since there is obviously an audience for "sanitized" versions of films, why don't the studios themselves cash in on it? They could sell or rent edited for TV versions of their films over the internet, and they would be much better versions than these independent "sanitized" edits.”

JOHNNY UTAH writes:  “First of all, the branch of Clean Flicks that is suing the DGA is out of Colorado, not Utah.  I mention that because I've gone to message boards on this subject, and many who post in those places who are against Clean Flicks tend to add something like "I hope those f**king Mormons die!" in their opinion.

I am Mormon.  I've never used Clean Flicks.  I like seeing movies the way the artists intended.  i don't like seeing them with choppy edits or commercial interruption.

Clean Flicks is not cutting stuff out of your movie.  They're not cutting it out of mine.  They're only cutting it out for people who WANT it to be cut out.  It's a freedom issue.  And it's a money issue.

My parents and sister and several friends and neighbors of mine will not see R-rated movies and most PG-13's.  They don't want to hear the cuss words, see the nudie shots, sit through the gore, etc.

What Clean Flicks does is provide a service many people would do themselves if they knew how.  In fact, I have a friend whose girlfriend would give him a small list of movies that were now available on video that she'd ask him to edit for her.  She no longer needed him to do this once Clean Flicks opened near by.  And she's not hunting down a clean version of Todd Solondz's Happiness when she goes.

To me, it's an invasion of privacy that others are trying to demand that if my mom wants to see The Patriot, she has to see it with every bloody shot intact or she's violating copyright laws.  Bullfeathers.  I suppose Microsoft is going to sue me if add a macro to my copy of Microsoft Excel?  Same thing.

I've read all kinds of different arguments against Clean Flicks but if the studios were really concerned, they'd stop selling their movies to Clean Flicks.  But they don't.  Because Clean Flicks gets their movies sold or rented to thousands of customers who otherwise would not have given their product a shot.

I think the studios should work with Clean Flicks in approved edits, like they already do for airlines and TV.  But for people who say "If you don't want to hear the F-word, don't watch it" who are you to tell me what to do with my life?  It's Big Brotherish of these people to say even after I've bought one copy of a movie that's available in millions of other copies and I want to cut five minutes of it, I can't.  It's invasion of privacy and crimping on freedom.

Another argument I've heard is that it's like putting a mustache on the Mona Lisa.  No, there's only one Mona Lisa.  It's more like drawing a mustache on a downloaded jpeg of a Mona Lisa.  Movies are cheap cheap cheap.

There is no big-screen theater in America that I know of that shows edited movies, and the big-screen is the format these are intended for.  It's at the video stage, where the art part's over and now it's about squeezing a few dollars out for those want to watch it on their TV.  If they wait three months after the video's out, they can wait until it's on Pay-Per-View, record it then and edit it themselves.  Editing is going to happen.  The artists need to understand that and deal with it.

Another argument I read is that edited movies are a form of lazy parenting (usually put forth by people who have no kids).  Bullcrap!  Lazy parenting is letting your kid watch porn, then letting him run loose without ever asking him where he's going or who he's with.  There are shows we won't let our children watch.  There are movies we won't rent for them.  We exercise parental discretion.  i haven't used it, but I know other people who've rented Clean Flicks movies for their kids, stuff like Men in Black, a great kids movie where Will Smith has a potty mouth.

Bottom line: if the courts rule for Clean Flicks, fine with me.  I don't got there but I know there are thousands who do and are happy for the service.  if the courts rule against them, then the movie studios had better work a compromise with them or they've just lost thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of customers.  And when one movie like Pluto Nash can lose $100 million by itself, studios need all the customers they can get.”

And some readers found their own ways of reconceptualizing Clean Flicks…

Tighty Whitey writ-eys:  “I would like to anti-sanitize movies. I would like to take beloved chick flicks like Pretty Woman, Ever After, Dirty Dancing, Love Story, what have you, and insert scenes of hardcore sex. At story-appropriate moments, of course -- you know, where the camera swings away from the action, or where the lovers fall into each others arms and the screen fades to black?  At those points, I want to get actor look-alikes for the principals (or maybe it'll all be shot in gynecological close-up so resemblance is less of an issue), shoot some new footage and splice 'er in. And then sell the finished product.

It seems to me that legal permission for CleanFlicks to do what it does would also extend to me to do what I want to do. Alan Horn says as much in Rick Lyman's piece. And, facetiousness aside, I don't really have a problem with someone doing what I described except for that last step: selling. I'm a fair use guy, and a fan of the remix and the sample. And I think someone that creatively messes with another's work to draw out new meanings, from "Grandmaster Flash and the Wheels of Steel" to the Phantom Editor, deserves any recognition and notoriety they deserve for their efforts. But they don't deserve, and can't ask for, cash money. They didn't pay for the sampling rights, and so they can't make money off of them. (It's also worth mentioning that they shouldn't try to market/distribute their version as a free alternative to the official. Unless we're talking about guerilla protest art whose effect is based on the viewer expecting one thing and getting another, but things like that -- i.e. replacing Blockbuster's Pretty Woman VHS with my porn dub -- will always be illegal, so it's not a case worth mentioning.)

Of course, if CleanFlicks' service was free, CleanFlicks couldn't afford to stay in business. And that's what keeps unauthorized dubbing and sampling as a fringe art that should stay beneath the media corporation's radar.

That said, Hollywood -- as an industry interested in pocket-fattening, not as a collection of artists – is so dumb for letting MovieMask get their product to the market first. (And I think hardware solutions to the problem are totally legit, so long as it's bleeping, blurring or cutting and not digital corsets or product placements. The studios have a right to protect the product as sold and rented/distributed, but they should have no say on the hardware on which it's watched.) DVDs, with their separate audio tracks and seamless branching, make it very easy to include multiple versions of movies on their DVDs, and the only directors who really have the right to balk from studios offering this bowlderizing option are those who've never seen any money from network and airline

screenings. And if they'd done it first, they would have retained control over it -- i.e., cutting before Winslet's topless shot in Titanic rather than giving her an FX brassiere.”

And this from NOT THE BOURBON:  “So, does this mean that with MovieMask software, I can watch The Godfather Part III with Robert Duvall rightfully replacing George Hamilton, and Sofia "Jar Jar" Coppola removed from the film?  SOLD!!!

When the Matrix sequels come out, can I superimpose the old Tank over the new Tank?  I'll buy ten!

And can I remove clothes from actresses as well as cover them up?  Bring It On and Blue Crush will never be the same!  Sex And The City and Friends will finally be a worthwhile DVD purchase!

Dave, in the name of all things holy, I defy you to argue against this product.”

E ME:  Me?  I just want it to put some clothes on Harvey Keitel.  What do the rest of you think of this issue?  And what about this weekend’s movies?  Anything worth watching?