Hot Button Archive for January, 1998
Super Sunday Line Up
The movie line-ups are set. For Super Sunday. Studios are paying $1.3 million for 30 seconds of Super Bowl advertising hoping to become the next ID4 or Men In Black. Is it worth the money? Probably not. If you don’t blow up the White House or offer something no one’s seen before, the time probably costs more than it’s worth. This year’s 30-second stars will be Sphere (opening in a few weeks), Lost In Space (opening in a few months) and The Mark of Zorro (opening this summer). MIB studio, Sony, apparently got the idea that laying out $1.3 million for Godzilla to go Super was unnecessary given the already huge wave of anticipation, thus the Zorro ad instead. But who knows? Maybe the lizard will make a surprise appearance. Going the full monty is Disney’s Armageddon, which will get the meteor rolling with a full $2.6 million minute. Trying to establish itself as the surefire runner up (or better) for summer, Disney is hoping that size does matter.
After turning the Bond series a little upside down as a woman who could whoop butt with the best of `em in Tomorrow Never Dies, Michelle Yeoh is hot, hot, hot. Even before signing Yeoh to a deal, United Artists has signed Mitch Markowitz, screenwriter of Good Morning, Vietnam, to write a kind of inverse, comedic The Bodyguard to star Yeoh and a male comic. Proceeding in the script development process without a star isn’t that unusual, but Yeoh will be pretty much irreplaceable, having created her own category of studio starlet.
Speaking of spec purchases, Hollywood Pictures has forked over $600,000 for the English-language remake rights to Kiler, a Polish action comedy, with hopes that it will become a Barry Sonnenfeld comedy in the future. Kiler, which translates astonishingly to Hitman, is the story of a taxi driver mistaken as a hitman who then decides that maybe the job isn’t such a bad idea. The film is the highest-grossing film ever in Poland, which sounds like the set-up for a joke, but isn’t.
Weekend Review
Titanic continues to post unbelievable
numbers, reporting another $29.2 million,
dropping just 9 percent, even less than
last weekend despite losing the
advantage of work-free holiday
audiences for the early Friday and late
Sunday shows. Meanwhile, the weekday
numbers have dropped by about 60
percent. But Friday would have to be off
by less than 20 percent for these numbers
to be accurate. Something smells worse
than an 84-year-old sketch to me. I just
don’t get it.
Good Will Hunting proved to be a
strong newcomer as it expanded into Top
Ten Land, taking second place with
$10.3 million. As Good As It Gets
dropped a very reasonable 24 percent in
its third week. And the Hoffman/DeNiro
combo grabbed a slightly disappointing
$8.2 million for Wag the Dog’s first
wide weekend. And Bond suffered a 45
percent loss, but did pass the $100
million mark.
In the bottom of the order, Mouse Hunt
dropped a decent 41 percent, but still
became the DreamWorks box office
champ. Firestorm opened in sixth with
$4 million, probably in its first and last
appearance in the Top Ten. Jackie
Brown takes eighth with $3.8 million to
quietly pass the $30 million mark.
Scream 2 was the biggest dropper,
losing 50 percent to take ninth place with
$3.7 million. And Amistad rode into
tenth with just $2.7 million and may be
riding out of Oscar contention barring an
awfully big push coming from
somewhere. To date, DreamWorks has
proven incapable of that kind of push.
Sequels & More
Laurence Fishburne will turn actor/producer when he plays Detective Pharoah Love, the black, gay detective hero of A Queer Kind of Death. With all those titles with which to address the actor nicknamed Fish, only one will get him really riled. Don’t ever call him Larry.
P.J. Hogan, who directed last summer’s smash hit, My Best Friend’s Wedding, is about to sign on the dotted line to do a biopic on one of the most important figures in American history. Chuck Barris. Yes, that Chuck Barris, producer/creator of “The Dating Game,” “The Newlywed Game” and “The Gong Show” (which he hosted). Barris already directed and starred in The Gong Show Movie, a pseudo-biographical mockumentary in 1980, but that one didn’t cover Barris’ supposed career as a CIA assassin who knocked off Soviet agents while traveling on Dating Game trips with the winners. His method must have been to make KGB agents watch his shows for hours until they begged for death.
When “Taxi” star Andy Kaufman died in 1984 at the age of 33, people were pretty sure it was an elaborate joke. It wasn’t. Now, the men who brought The People vs. Larry Flynt, Ed Wood and That Darn Cat to life on screen, writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, have the green light to make the Andy Kaufman movie, Man In The Moon, with Milos Forman as director. Danny DeVito will produce and co-star as Kaufman’s manager. Reports of potential leads include superstars Carrey, Cage, Hanks and Cusack, but my bet is on Edward Norton, who would fit into the role and not over it. And what is it with the 33rd year of a great comic’s life? Belushi, Kaufman and now Farley all died at 33. I’m 33. Good thing I’m not that funny.
United Artists is following the rest of Hollywood by going back to the well — probably too many times. The 1998-99 slate includes a sequel to Basic Instinct, starring Sharon “Damn, I Need A Hit” Stone without Michael Douglas or screenwriter Joe Eszterhas. Also, a follow-up to The Birdcage is in the works, with a screenplay by Bruce Villanch, one of Hollywood’s best joke writers (he’s an Academy Awards writer every year). Robin Williams and Nathan Lane aren’t even in discussions yet and look for the studio to find a director much easier to deal with than Mike Nichols this time around. Unless Williams demands him.
Non-Holiday Box Office
The first non-holiday weekend of the new year and not much to go on.The only new wide release is Fox’s forest fire actioner, Firestorm,starring the hugely popular (snicker, snicker) Howie Long. Last year,three pictures debuted in this slot. The Relic opened OK, followed by a weak Jackie Chan‘s First Strike and a disastrousTurbulence. My guess is that Firestorm will do a Liotta-like $4.5million for seventh place. The unsinkable Titanic will certainly maintain first place. The weekday numbers are off, with the holiday over, by about 60 percent, but I expect that the Fri-Sat cume should drop only about 15 percent because kids are back in school and another 7.5 percent or so because of reduced attendance on Friday and late Sunday. That means about $25.8 million.
As Good As It Gets seems to be in the passing lane, rushing past a remote-controlled Tomorrow Never Dies for second place with a 30 percent drop to about $8.6 million. Bond drops 40 percent to third with $8.3 million to pass the $100 million mark domestically. Mouse Hunt will take theDream Works box office crown, dipping about 35 percent to add $5.5 million cheese balls for fourth. Scream 2 should battle Jackie Brown for thefifth spot. Both look like 34 percent droppers, but will the long-term wear onS2 be worse than the ennui that seems to surround T3 (that’s Tarantino3). Both should hang out around $47.7 million. Firestorm will follow.Amistad should drop one spot to eighth with about $3.1 million. And Mr.Magoo should be tangling with Flubber for ninth and tenth with about$2.6 million each. The third of the Disney idiot trilogy, An AmericanWerewolf In CGI, should drop below the Mendoza line.
Reader Timothy Kooney sent us this over the holidays, responding to my Worst of 1997 list. It’s edited for space.
“Lost World should have ranked worst of the worst with a Surgeon General’s warning. This movie had it all: hack writing, bad acting, half-dimensional characters,B-movie suspense, inconsistent science, fractured plot,lead-pipe-to-the-head “humor”/irony and more. The dinosaurs were the most life-like creatures on the screen.”
TK adds about Jeff Goldblum:
“After Lost World, I think even the Prince of Darkness will be ready to get this babbling idiot off the screen. I don’t remember my Dante, is there a circle of hell for bad acting?”
Hollywood's Hottest Director?
Who’s the hottest new director in Hollywood? It could well be Jay Roach, who debuted with Austin Powers, and who has now been given Disney’s burgeoning non-animated summer “event film” slot for the year2000 with a long-anticipated adaptation of Douglas Adams’ TheHitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Roach will shoot the film early nextyear after he finishes Disney’s David E. Kelley-written hockey movie and presumably, Austin Powers II in the fall. For Disney, the Hitchhiker greenlight suggests that Disney will permanently move out ofthe pre-Memorial Day weekend slot that had produced $100 million hitsthe last two summers with The Rock and Con Air, and into the July 4th weekend slot which has the potential for even bigger revenues. This year, Armageddon takes the slot. Disney may back off the slot for ayear though with Sony’s Men In Black 2 and WB’s Superman Lives bothlikely to be gunning for the “Second Massive Summer Hit” position afterthe new Star Wars in 1999.
From the “So Few Oscars, So Many Movies” file: The Academy reports that275 films qualified for Academy consideration this year, the highest number in 25 years. Have you seen them all? Ballots go out next weekendand nominations will be announced on February 10. The Awards are onMarch 23. Let the partying begin!
Castle Rock, the once white-hot indie, has suffered since beingpurchased by Turner (Rough Cut’s parent company, and then later being folded into the massiveTime-Warner family. Since the success of The Shawshank Redemption, thestudio has released 13 financial misses and only one moderate hit — theSundance pick-up, The Spitfire Grill. The missed list includes such doozies as Striptease, Dracula: Dead and Loving It and Alaska, the ads for which made everyone think it was an IMAX travelogue. And company co-founder Rob Reiner hasn’t helped, contributing only the well-intentioned misses,The American President and Ghosts of Mississippi. But now, Warner Bros.and Polygram will split the costs for Castle Rock to make five movies a year for the next three years. First up, Tom Hanks does Stephen King in The Green Mile, a Hugh Grant thriller called Mickey Blue Eyes, the new Whit Stillman comedy of manners, The Last Days of Disco and “Seinfeld”co-creator Larry David‘s feature debut, Sour Grapes.
Sonny, Mykelti & Titanic News
Waking up to the news each morning continues to offer unpleasantsurprises these days. Yesterday, it was two hard-working, decent men suffering at their own hands. Sonny Bono may have been ahippie-turned-Republican. He may not have sung as well as Cher andcertainly needed plastic surgery more than she did. But he did whatfew men in show business could. He recreated himself, moving fromon-air buffoon to legitimate Congressman with the kind of hard work and perserverance that has made John Travolta more than just another moviestar. I guess that going on the slopes at 62 isn’t the worst fate, but it’s sad nonetheless.
Meanwhile, actor Mykelti Williamson has been arrested on charges of stalking and assault. We all should reserve judgment on the stalking chargewith so little information available to us. But, we do know thatWilliamson allegedly stabbed another man with a butcher knife,forever marginalizing himself as “that guy who stalked his wifeand stabbed that guy.” Tragic. After what would normally be a star-making turn as Bubba in Forrest Gump, Williamson found himself stuck in secondary roles in movies like Heat, Con Air and TNT’s Buffalo Soldiers.
In less tragic news, there are reports that NBC has bought the TV rights to Titanic and it looks like they got a real bargain. Rumors place the deal at $30 million for six showings. No doubt, the network will be going wall-to-wall from 7 P.M. to 11 P.M. some Sunday night in the year 2000.Figure that TV ad rates for top programming will be well over $1,000,000per minute by then and that the net will pull at least 32 minutes of adtime from the four-hour extravaganza. Can you smell the profit?
Show Biz News
It’s been a weak week for show biz news. Things should start heating up again as Hollywood returns to its collective desk. The table you’ve been grabbing at The Ivy isn’t yours any more, Mr. Wannabe. While we were sleeping, Jada Pinkett and Will Smith got married, creating the most excitement in Baltimore since Barry Levinson started working at home. The great and glorious Helen Mirren tied the knot with director Taylor Hackford, making them the cerebral version of Geena Davis and Renny Harlin. And one proposal was turned down flat. Chris Rock won’t be teaming up with Samuel L. Jackson in a movie version of “Sanford and Son.” To quote young Rock, “I was like, ‘Are you on crack?'”
Also over the holidays, yet another award for L.A. Confidential, this time Best Film and Best Writer and Best Director from the National Society of Film Critics. Julie Christie secured a likely Oscar nomination for Afterglow with her third major award. And Boogie Nights‘ Burt Reynolds and Julianne Moore both added more brass to the mantle. Robert Duvall grabbed Best Actor for The Apostle, beating out Hoffman, Pacino, Fonda and Ian Holm. If these guys end up being the Academy nominees, people all over town will be double-checking the decade on their calendars. Sadly, the two competitors for best documentary, Thin Blue Line director Errol Morris’ Fast Cheap and Out of Control and Spike Lee‘s Four Little Girls have gone all but unseen by movie audiences, even in Los Angeles.
What’s up with Brendan Fraser? Besides turning up uncredited in two Pauly Shore movies as Link, his character from Encino Man, he put on the loincloth yet again as George of the Jungle, which also reflected his brain-damaged turns in Airheads and The Scout. When he hasn’t been stupid and semi-nude, he’s been a big brain at top institutes of learning, as in School Ties and With Honors. And now, just as Gods and Monsters, the biographical film in which Fraser stars as Frankenstein director James Whaley, is about to hit Sundance, Fraser takes on a remake of The Mummy, another one of Universal’s classic monster movies. I guess he’s a practicing actor. He just keeps practicing the same role until he gets it right.
WEEKEND REVIEW
Ah, a fresh look at a weekend’s box office. Seems like ages since I got to gorge on grosses. In the top slot, Titanic steams ahead with numbers that are still unbelievable. Titanic reported its biggest single day to date with $12.7 million this Saturday. Accomplished in its third week with no increase in screens. Titanic reported a total of another $32.2million (down just 9 percent from last week) for a grand total of $156.4million in its first 17 days of release. Paramount’s numbers on this picture continue to defy all recent box office points of reference and have to be seen as an even more shocking display than The Lost World’s$90 million opening weekend.
Lost in the wake of the Big Boat is the new Bond, Tomorrow Never Dies,which, after a $14.1 million weekend, should pass the $100 million mark late in the week. As Good As It Gets is holding steady, dropping just two percent to add $12.3 million to its total. In fourth place is Mouse Hunt,which, since its soft $6 million opening, has picked up ($8.7 millionthis weekend) with good word of mouth and has blown past Amistad ($27million to date) to become DreamWorks’ first real hit, passing the $40million mark this weekend and soon to put The Peacemaker‘s $41 milliontotal in its rearview mirror. My belated apologies to Alex for buying into negative pre-release buzz. This is a very dark, very funny movie.Too bad DreamWorks mismarketed it so badly. DreamWorks sold it as akids film and discounted the adults who grew up loving “Tom and Jerry.”They’ll find it on cable.
Of the rest of the Top Ten, there’s Scream 2 in fifth place with $8million, heading toward final numbers a little better than theoriginal. More importantly (at least for Miramax), if the sequel canhit $120 million, it should match the original’s enormousprofitability. J<strong>ackie Brown remains slow, adding another $7.7 millionfor sixth. The film’s $14 million budget assures profitability andmaybe the quiet results will allow Tarantino to work without thepressure of being the culture-maker that Pulp Fiction made him. Disney owned slots eight to 10 with a total of $14.5 million for An American Werewolf In Paris, Mr. Magoo and Flubber. Hey, it’s better than The Postman!
THE TEN WORST MOVIES OF 1997
These are limited to major films by indies or major studios. But don’t look for that 3 a.m. soft porn karate on Showtime to show up. Nor should you look for Gummo, Masterminds, Mr. Magoo, T<strong>he Pest, Playing God or The Postman. I suspect that they are all candidates for this dishonor, but I didn’t see them, so they escape my wrath.
Dishonorable Mentions go to (in alphabetical order): Fire Down Below, Gone Fishin’, Incognito, Out to Sea, A Smile Like Yours and That Old Feeling.
And in the Career Enders category (in alphabetical order): Speed 2: Cruise Control (Jason Patric), Double Team (Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dennis Rodman), Steel (Shaq’s a hack) and Leave It to Beaver (Janine Turner).
10.Mad City, with John Travolta and Dustin Hoffman both trying to “fix” previous failures. Travolta as white trash in White Man’s Burden and Hoffman in Hero, a movie about false patriotism directed by a Brit.
9. The Devil’s Own. Brad Pitt was right when he trashed this one before it hit theaters. Great actors and a very fine director still ended up with mush when the script went soft.
8. The eruptive duo of Volcano and Dante’s Peak. Two bad movies. One took itself too seriously, the other, not seriously enough. Which do you prefer, tires that drive through lava or a character who disappears when the city is about to blow up his new multi-million dollar condo?
7. Jurassic Park: The Lost World, the first Spielberg movie without a heart. It looked good, but it was about as artful as a Fox TV special called When Dinosaurs Attack.
6. The double dip of Excess Baggage and A Life Less Ordinary. They were the same central story except one used Alicia Silverstone’s production company to move it along, the other, angels. Holly Hunter did Less Ordinary instead of As Good As It Gets. A tragedy.
5. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. When the cheesy effects opened the movie, I thought it was style. It was just cheese. The film was a better representation of the video game and no representation of a movie at all.
4. Kull the Conqueror. Universal tries to make Kevin Sorbo a movie star. Oops.
3. Fathers’ Day, the movie that even Robin Williams and Billy Crystal couldn’t save. A source at the WB says that they re-shot major parts of the film four times. It still wasn’t funny.
2. The product reel of The Bubble Factory, the production company that the Sheinbergs got for leaving the executive suites at Universal. The 1997 line-up was The Pest, A Simple Wish and McHale’s Navy.
1. The Worst Movie of 1997 is Batman and Robin. Maybe not the worst in purely clinical terms, but a true disaster on every single level. Bad acting. Bad writing. Bad effects. And expensive. Though it’s hard to imagine, this film was an even bigger disaster for Warner Bros. than the media made it out to be. Warner Bros. will deny it, but WB sources tell me that the film beat Titanic to the $200 million mark in production costs by months. My goodness, that’s bad!
THE 10 MOVIES I DIDN'T GET IN 1997
These are the successful films that I just couldn’t find a reason to love. I tried. I swear. But no luck. Listed in reverse order of financial success.
10. Parker Posey movies: She was the toast of Sundance with The House of Yes, Clockwatchers and SubUrbia. None of them sold tickets. She’s cute. She can act. But I can take her or leave her and apparently, so can you.
9. The Ice Storm: I could see how well-crafted this portrait of the sexual revolution in suburbia was, but I didn’t really care. Maybe too many of these characters were direct reflections of my school friends’ divorced parents.
8. Chasing Amy: Blonde hair, nice tush, squeaky voice and a lesbian to boot. Cool. I didn’t buy it for a minute. I think maybe everyone in the movie was a little too nice for me to care about.
7. Mimic: Guillermo del Toro is a very talented guy, but like the brilliant Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who came from France to make Alien: Resurrection, his ability to offer a straightforward narrative is as limited as his visual style is overwhelming. Great bugs though.
6. Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion: Sorry to be doubling up on Mira, but what was up with this lump of gold-plated turd? Two terrific and engaging actresses and a really funny premise. Did they have to invert Rocky and make the stars losers even though they won?
5. Picture Perfect: There are people who enjoyed this movie. I enjoy watching Jennifer Aniston in mini-dresses, but I could have just taped “Friends” for that. A good idea gone disastrously wrong.
4. Cop Land: I wanted to care about Stallone. I wanted DeNiro to do more than sleepwalk through a cameo. I wanted to hate Keitel. But who could care about these mooks? I’d love to see the movie about the women in the lives of these people. They have a story to tell. And about seven minutes total screentime in this flick. Janeane Garofalo‘s cameo ties Winona Ryder’s Alien 4 turn as 1997’s biggest waste of a great talent.
3. Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery: Just rent In Like Flint, baby! How many times is “you wanna shag?” funny? For me, once. They even took the very clever “fruit covering genitals” gag and did it twice, ensuring that it would be run into the ground.
2. I Know What You Did Last Summer: Teens, tank tops, terror. I’m not saying I hated this movie. I didn’t. Heck, I might have even liked it. But it dominated the fall in a way that seemed to suggest that it was a movie worthy of repeat viewings. It was a lot fresher than another Freddie Kruger romp, but it was the kind of movie that its screenwriter, Kevin Williamson, mocked in the far better Scream.
1. George of the Jungle: I loved the original cartoon on which this one was based. Loved it! This just didn’t do it for me. It was OK, but not $105 million worth of OK. Oddly enough, it was less layered commercially than the cartoon. And I don’t remember Ursula being as dumb as George in the cartoon. Most jokes could have been funnier.
THE 10 BEST MOVIES OF 1997
This is my list. My opinions. I’ll be happy to hear your opinions, whether they’re about your own choices or about mine. (E-mail is fun!) Twenty-one movies made my “possibles” list.
Before the actual Top 10, the films that came close and the movies that I expected not to like, but really, really enjoyed.
The Honorable Mentions (in alphabetical order): The last 20 minutes of The Devil’s Advocate, In & Out, Liar Liar, love jones, Rhyme & Reason and Titanic. The Best Surprises (in alphabetical order): The Assignment, Breakdown, Eve’s Bayou, The Fifth Element and Soul Food.
MY LIST
1. Kundun: My hands-down winner. A hard film to love, but worth the effort. Relax and let it wash over you. It’s Scorcese as Monet. And the subject is love. Love of all mankind. (Here’s hoping that Disney will avoid the tag line, “You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll shave your head and chant gutturally.”)
2. Wag the Dog: As cynical as Kundun is spiritual. Great script. Great acting. Great story. You’ll laugh out loud and if you think about it, you may cry, because there’s no real reason it couldn’t really happen. It may already have happened.
3. Boogie Nights: An epic from 27-year old Paul Thomas Anderson. How could it be about anything but pornography (or television)? It’s a ride so harrowing that it makes the deck of the Titanic look like a safe place to be, but that doesn’t keep it from being funny and a little sexy too. Middle America didn’t want to look. Their loss.
4. Good Will Hunting: I really wanted to hate Matt Damon. All the hype always triggers my B.S. alarm. But then he co-wrote and co-starred in this movie and I had to jump on the bandwagon. It’s a movie for anyone who’s paid the price for being special in any way. It’s the movie Oliver Stone would have made instead of Platoon if he stayed in the Ivy League instead of going to Vietnam.
5. L.A. Confidential: The beloved. Dolls, dames and guns. Glad to have you back. It’s no Chinatown, but what is? Laughs, thrills and great suits make it the cop flick of the year, if not the decade.
6. My Best Friend’s Wedding: I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I loved seeing this movie. I was charmed from the silly girl group opening to the gay-friend-saves-frustrated-babe’s-bacon ending. It not only brought back Julia Roberts, but re-launched Rupert Everett and Cameron Diaz with great movie star turns.
7. Grosse Pointe Blank: John Cusack is a smart actor. And this is a smart movie. From the underrated director George Armitage (Miami Blues), this movie kills. And the soundtrack is one of the year’s very best.
8. Contact: When I left the theater I expected to receive an “I Survived Matthew McConaughey‘s Performance” T-shirt, but outside of that, I loved this movie. It wasn’t at all what I expected and that was a problem for audiences, but movies about something other than pyrotechnics are worth the trouble. Sadly, I’m betting that Contact will be seriously diminished by shrinking to video. It’s a movie that needs its space.
9. Face/Off: Bang bang, you’re dead. Or not. Let’s try that again. This time with a thousand bullets and a missile. Still not dead? Cool. Blow some more stuff up, please. Woo is the best and with Face/Off, he was at his best. Both violent and tender, disgusting and compelling. And Cage/Travolta and Travolta/Cage were at their movie star best.
10. Deconstructing Harry: Woody Allen‘s best serious comedy since the brilliant Crimes and Misdemeanors. Woody finally lets us in on what he really thinks of the women in his life and it’s not pretty. But it’s funny as hell. Literally.
10.5 Afterglow: I saw the movie after press time, but I had to squeeze it in. I’m not an Alan Rudolph fan, but critics’ awards for Julie Christie drew me in. Turns out that she was only one of four lead actors doing the very best work of their careers. Plus, the screenplay is so solid, simple and beautiful that even the gimmicks that usually drive me nuts in Rudolph’s work somehow charmed me instead.
E-mail me your picks. And check out the Top Movie Stories of 1997. Tommorow, the movies I didn’t get. And the weekender offers up the Worst 10 of 1997.
