MCN Columnists
David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

WEEKEND REVIEW

Ouch! I know you can’t see it in my photos, but I am bleeding profusely from the nose after getting tagged hard by Boogie Nights’ number four opening with just $5.1 million! I guess Middle America wasn’t ready for a film about porn that didn’t include porn. And I wish I could blame it on New Line being a small studio, but their magnificent Money Talks opened with $10.65 million just weeks ago! Argh! The one salvation here is that the picture should end up doing so little business (my guess: under $30 million total domestic) that if New Line plays its cards right, it could become the Oscars’ “Little Movie That Could” for 1997.
Meanwhile, the unstoppable slasher films continue to do big box office. I Know What You Did Last Summer camped out at number one for the third week, dropping just 20 percent to $10 million. Devil’s Advocate, where Al Pacino slashes the scenery with his tongue before chewing it up real good, dropped a modest 25 percent to summon another $7.6 million for third place. And Kiss The Girls slashed-n-smooched its way to fifth place with another $3.6 million, dropping just 30 percent in week five.
Another surprise, though not as unpleasant, was the success of Red Corner. I guess the China visit worked for the film — which got roundly panned by the critics — rather than against it. Pretty Man Richard Gere got a liberal $8.3 million to take second place. Also, Switchback, Paramount’s quiet entry into the All Hallows Eve thriller market, stayed quieter than I thought it might, pulling in just $3 million for seventh place.
The rest of the Top Ten is made up of holdovers, all of which I came pretty close to predicting. Big deal! I’m already bleeding. Anyway, Brad was glad that Seven Years in Tibet took in another $3.4 million in its fourth week for sixth place. Fairy Tale: A Forgotten Release, grabbed another $2.9 million while the grabbing was good for eighth. Gattaca ran out of puns — $2.7 million for ninth. And In & Out took tenth with $1.8 million.
Check out what my predictions were on Friday. Email is your way of showing me you feel my pain. Or maybe you just want to rub it in.

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One Response to “WEEKEND REVIEW”

  1. Dobry wpis, będę tutaj zaglądał częściej.

Pride

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon