The Hot Blog Archive for March, 2006

what will your movie weekend look like?

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Too Soon? Too Much?

Some people have said that some of the materials involving Universal

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Horror Porn Is… A Response To 9/11!!!

Dallas/Ft Worh Star-telegram’s Christopher Kelly makes the argument for Horror Porn here… you see, the adults just don’t get it!
It would be laughable if it wasn’t so tragically deluded.
Teenagers have been consuming massive amounts of crap forever… and adults have always winced.
Comparing Wolf Creek to Hitchcock… or Eli Roth to someone who can direct?!?!? Come on!!!
Horror films, like most of cinema, is cyclical. Scream marked the end of slasher horror in 1996. In a few years, someone will come up with an all-out satire of Saw and the others. And horror will be dead. And five or six years later, it will come back again. And so on and so on and so on.
The current trend is similar to tattoos… faster pussycat, kill, kill. How can you rebel against a generation that grew up smoking pot and getting laid? Tattoos, random oral sex, and more realistic movies about killing people.
For me, Roger Ebert has been the front man for “the adults,” which is to say, if its the emotionless cartoon violence of Tarantino and Rodriguez, great…if it is really disturbing, piss on it and set it on fire.
Me? I am okay with the cartoon stuff or with the realistic stuff. It’s about how the experience connects with me. There has to be a reason why some people connect so well with Eli Roth. To me, he is an aesthetic con artist who is not as clever, funny, or dark as he and his followers claim. Hostel was not crap because it was too tough… but because it wasn’t tough at all.
And throwing 9/11 into it? The horror of 9/11 is how short our memories are in this country, not how it is manifesting in our culture. New Yorkers do still live with that experience. For the rest of the country, it has already been reduced to jingoism. We are affected by the roll-off. Airports aren

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Topics On The Cyber Table

Things are quiet on the Westside front… so here are three odd stories that might be worth discussing…
Harrison For “hates the internet”.. but if you really read this story, he is saying that he hates not being able to control his image and private life because of the 24/7 hunger of the web for info. Does he have a point?
Waldenbooks and Borders will not put a magazine on its shelves because it contains the cartoons of Muhammad that sparked riots overseas. Censorship or safety?
As a potential ticket buyer for Mission: Impossible 3, will it bother or distract you that a guy who got burns on 60% of his body on the set in an accident – though any fire on set is extremely specific in its calibrations – is not getting a few million thrown at him by Paramount to compensate or even, legally, overcompensate.

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Boy Is It Quiet Out There

There is a lot of gossip floating around, but bottom line… we are in the pre-summer lull in a big way.
Anyone awake out there?
(Return Of The Blair Witch? The Leprchaun in Mobile, AL)

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Why Doesn

It

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Not Thrilled With This One…

If you go to the front page of imdb in hopes of entering a name in the search engine, you have to wait a few seconds for King Kong to shake up the search slot.
There is no advertiser who has ever been benefited with me by interrupting the course of me trying to do my basic online functions.
Kong hanging out on the search slot? Cute. Slowing me down? If there was a way to punish imdb and Universal for it, I would.

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Why Snakes On A Plane Changing Dates Makes No Sense

So. there is now this hum out there… “If I had Snakes On A Plane getting all this online buzz, I’d jump on it and put it out right away!”
The most obvious reason not to leap as though choices were free, specific to New Line, is called The Real Cancun. New Line got excited about the film after some strong early screenings. They rushed it into theaters, trying to catch a wave, and got slaughtered for their effort… more because they had to overspend on ads because there was no time for a proper publicity campaign. You can say, “But that film sucked” all you like. But for one thing, you have no idea of Snakes is any good. And second, test screening audiences really liked Cancun.
This is the arrogance of the media, on and off the web. If it’s on our radar, it must be on everyone’s radar. Well, it isn’t. As I have always said, the internet geek audience is worth $5 million – $8 million. If you want more than that, you have to reach the rest of the audience. And the trend in youth oriented movies is great success with looooooong lead campaigns and not quick hits.
To go into the summer, May-July, would be idiotic on every level. It’s incredibly expensive to get attention and if people are into Snakes On A Plane, they might also be the audience for, say…. I’m just guessing here… M:I3PoseidonX3NachoLibreClickSupermanPirates2. Those are 7 sure-fire MUST SEES in 10 weeks… all grounded in the same Snakes demographic… most reaching far beyond.
And besides the fact that New Line already is selling an April movie and has a May release on their schedule, ramping up a full campaign while still making changes in post is like throwing money into the garbage and then pulling the can into your living room, next to the drapes, before setting it on fire.
And where is the obvious argument for an August release of Snakes? A $16 million opening and a $58 million domestic gross for Red Eye. If New Line is lucky and good, they can improve on that opening. If they are good at selling and the movie is actually entertaining and they can find a way to get someone with a vagina in the door, they could take that better start and reach a similar 4x multiple.
But most importantly of all… and this speaks to much of what I feel about the media’s rush to push this industry into fulfilling our whims with their hundreds of millions of dollars… the excitement of the film is not going away because some journalists just figured it out. Snakes will be a great media story in July, when the hard push starts. And it will be the change of pace movie after a steady diet of very expensive big action films (which incidentally, is also the strategy on Miami Vice).
When did very smart, very experienced people turn into hyperactive puppies licking the glass as soon as they get a whiff of dinner? As Samuel L. Jackson once said, by way of QT, “Come on, Yolanda! What’s Fonzie like?” “Cool..” What? “Cool.” “Correctamundo! And that’s what we’re gonna be – We’re gonna be cool.”

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More Trouble For Traditional Media

It’s just a small thing, but i is illuminating.
This morning, on my return to Los Angeles, the LA Times ran a TV spot touting a 125th Anniversary edition. And what were they selling? 125 years of images of great moments in sports.
What’s wrong with this?
While I am sure the LAT package will be excellent, these are the kinds of events that used to be unique to Traditional Media. How else could the average person get access to decades and decades of cool images and memories?
But now, this kind of thing is endlessly available via the web. Moreover, there is the sense that the LAT is, in this ad, attaching themselves to these events as though the insititution naturally has something to do with them. What the LAT does own… what they are empowered by… are the words of their writers who analyzed those moments.
The notion that Traditional Media still owns the news is over. The new model is choice. Too much choice perhaps. But choice. And that choice is driven, as ever, by the offer of materials better or different than the rest of what has become everybody’s bottomless slush pile.

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Klady's Friday Estimates – 3/25/06

Okay… get this… the Friday estimate for Spike Lee

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Ring? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Ring!

gollumblog.jpg
No, It

Randy Quaid: Futurist Or Fuck Up?

So word hit the street, via a website that Variety, of course, does not credit, that Randy Quaid is suing Focus Features for “tricking him” into taking what is likely scale to do Brokeback Mountain by representing the film as a low-budget indie.
Though the media sucker… uh, reporters reported on the “indies at the Oscars” over and over and over and over and over and over, anyone thinking straight always realized that $15 million – $20 million movies are not indies, no matter what division of a massive conglomerate is releasing them. Now that The Weisnteins are in bed with MPAA signatory MGM, Lionsgate is the only true indie still in this sbudget range. Fox’s The Family Stone cost less than Brokeback… is it more, less or equally indie?
So with the line utterly blurred and the studios long using the “indie arms,” their Dependents, as a negotiating tactic to get names to work for less than their normal price, is Randy Quaid striking a blow for actors’ rights or is he just a guy past his money making prime trying to cash in and shooting himself in the foot while hoping to get a multi-million payday just to go away?
(Maybe someone needs to send him a BBM postcard. And maybe agents or SAG will soon be negotiating a price for this form of now-standard talent exploitation.)

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New Look Michael Douglas In Newsweek

And you can vote for the new look

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The First Gay Superhero Movie?

Larry Gross writes in MCN
What do you think?

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Bits & Pieces

Just some things that may or may not be of interest…
*Warner Indy is waiting to find out from the production team that made March of the Penguins whether there will be a sequel. Apparently, they are going back to the same area where the original was spawned to try to shoot the part of the story where the female penguins leave the male penguins behind with the egg to thoroughly understand what happens then. If there is footage to get, it will be a sequel within 2 years. In the meanwhile, the National Georgraphic kinda-sequel, about a Polar Bear, a Walrus and some other such ice lovers, The White Planet, may not get into the summer action this year after John Lesher took over the project hatched by Vitale & Dinerstein.
*Roger Durling was just extended for another year running the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.
*One of the interesting aspects of the Shmuger/Linde hire at Universal is that it marks a directional shift for the studio towards the international, where both men have experience. Yes, they also have a lot of experience on the marketing side and there is an absolute acknowledgement that the marketing minds is a big part of how the movie business works now. But the vision at the studio (where as far as I know, neither man will work in Black Rock as reported in some TradMedia paper last week) is much more Mechanic or Giannopoulos than Dawn Steel.
*Don’t know if you saw Criticker on MCN… I’m not sure I would be willing to spend enough time to give the thing enough info to make it work well, but it is interesting…
*Roger “Make Me Do Right Or Make Me Do Wrong, I’m Your Puppet” Friedman “reported” on Monday that “friends in Memphis” told him that Isaac Hayes didn’t quit South Park and hinted that it was some sort of conspiracy. Does anyone buy that exretia?

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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