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December 27, 2005
The next three days will bring the end of the year parade of pieces. Movies You Should Have Seen, But Didn't leads off, though the list is looking a little thin in the non-documentary categories this year. Then, there is The Ten Worst and The Ten Best.
In the meanwhile, I need a column for today and, while I am finally feeling mostly healthy again, I am sick to death of Munich, Brokeback, the box office for Kong and Narnia, and who's getting fired next. So what to do?
First, I came up with a research project while catching up on Tivoed episodes of House and hearing the phrases "And Ebert & Roeper give it Two Thumbs Up!" over and over and over again. Just how many of the movies in this year's Oscar race failed to get two thumbs up?
I decided to start with the Gurus o' Gold chart…
Brokeback Mountain… Walk The Line… Good Night, And Good Luck… Munich… A History Of Violence… King Kong… Capote… Match Point… The Constant Gardener…
All double thumbs.
But finally! Memoirs of A Geisha split. (Yay!) Roeper up, Ebert down.
And from there, it gets a little dicier. They actually split on both Pride & Prejudice and Crash.
(Late Edit: turns out Crash has two thumbs up as well. When researching on the duo's website, I seem to have found the Cronenberg Crash, to which Siskel gave a thumb down.)
But there are another 14 awards season films they agree on in a positive way - Jarhead, Harry Potter & The Goblet of Fire, Syriana, Paradise Now, Rent, The Chronicles of Narnia, Transamerica, The Family Stone, Mrs. Henderson Presents, The Producers, The New World, Rumor Has It, The White Countess, In Her Shoes, and of course, the comeback kid, Cinderella Man.
Of course, the Dynamic Duo is less generous this year than the magical Peter Travers, who has only one negative (less than 3 stars) review among those 26 titles… for The Producers. There are four titles for which I cannot find Travers reviews (Rent, The Chronicles of Narnia, Rumor Has It, and The White Countess).
Now… wasn't that fun?
Okay… not that fun.
There is a report from a major brokerage firm that suggests that there would be a major increase in overall revenues if the industry went to day-and-date DVD release, which they theorize would cut theatrical in half. But the report is deeply flawed and before I really get into it, I want to really get into it and to talk to the analyst who wrote it. That said, it is a great example of why some people are skipping down the primrose path on the concept of refocusing the delivery systems of the industry. (And of course, 2929 and Soderbergh's Bubble have NOTHING to do with movies that are made with an eye to anything close to nine-figure revenue totals.)
Remarkably, two movies I saw this weekend will end up on my Top Ten for the year…but that is for later this week.
Not ready for a serious Sundance conversation yet…
Okay… give up… it's okay, no one is reading anyway…
See you tomorrow.
