The Hot Blog Archive for March, 2006
Choppy Water On Bermudian Sea & On Fairmont Pool
More Bermudian Images
The Town Crier & The Town Squier
What
Spoilers
It has been suggested to be that spoilers be a specific topic about one particular hack out there… but I don’t want to single anyone out and I do think it is a bigger question.
What do you do when a critic you like endlessly spoils movies?
Do you avoid some outlets because you expect spoilers?
Are spoiler warnings effective anymore… and how best can we in the media do them?
Who are the worst offenders?
And do the studios spoil more with ads than critics do with reviews?
Klady's Friday Estimates – 3/18/05
The V for Vendetta launch is a bit smaller than expected. Many will use the
66 Comments »Broken Dreamz
And I thought that Poseidon was going to be the first disaster movie of the year!
The Bermuda International Film Festival opened with Paul Weitz
Late Arriving Photos From SXSW
The Best Burger In Austin?
The Hardest Working Man In indieWIRE Business
Celeb On The Web
The Alamo Drafthouse
Scott Wilson Enjoys The Introduction
Leslie Vernon Wants You To Have A Heart
Team Behind Behind The Mask… Dad, Heavenly, Bro, Director
But Who Will Buy The Film???
D For Duh
Answering his own question, Mirror critic David Edwards, linked on the front of Drudge in a classic bit of unintended adverising, seems capable of understanding what is happening in V For Vendetta… but still doesn’t seem to want to get it.
“But what are badly needed are tension and much more of an insight into what a horrific place England has become to ramp up the threatening atmosphere. Instead, the totalitarian state doesn
Good Morning From Bermuda
Hello all –
See what happens when I leave town for a minute? Hirings at Universal, DreamWorks’ dramatically overpriced library announces that it has moved closer to a sale, George Clooney gives up his Oscar goodie bag… dear GOD!!!!
The battle of V has begun. The most fascinating thing continues to be how angry the film seems to make some critics. It’s not “I don’t get the mask.” It’s “THIS IS SHIT!!!” I count that as a win for the film, by the way. And I think about how much so many hated The Matrix when it first arrived… and for that matter, almost every Kubrick film. Thing is, V is not built to have the kind of resonance of either Matrix or Kubrick. There is the limitation of that mask. But I still think that kids who don’t go to movies to think will end up thinking about some big issues when they walk out of the film… and ironically, considering that blowing shit up is at the heart of the film, the biggest issue is that violence has a place, but that it must be considered and be purposeful.
V is not a comic book hero. He is all of us. And I love that this makes so many people so uncomfortable. Like sticking your fingers in Palmolive, if you feel it when you stick your fingers in it, it’s working!
Meanwhile, on a lighter note, I keep wonder what the hell they are talking about when they keep saying that distributing the DreamWorks library is a money win for Paramount. You mean the $3 million they might get in rentals to revival houses? I mean, really… I don’t get it. There isn’t a title in the library that isn’t played out. I guess I just don’t understand t he genius of the deal (except that they are getting a lot for the library… though that deal will demand scrutiny to see whether the $900 million is real money or “Weinstein money.”)
And as for George’s goodie bag… good for him… so why do we know about it and why should we care? Maybe I can get him to write a blog entry for The Hot Blog, written just for us and not just a misattributed amalgamation of quotes pieced together and sold as proprietary by a the world’s finesrt media slut since Paris Hilton jumped the shark (or is that “fucked the shark” in her case?).
More on Universal later today…
Yes, Virginia… The FCC Intends To Censor Even The Suggestive
Janet Jackson’s breast aside, the news that the FCC is fining CBS $3.6 million for an episode of the 10pm show Without A Trace for a scene in which they feel a child could get the idea that sex was taking place outside of the eye of the camera is more than a little shocking.
You can read the complete FCC Document for yourself, but here is an excerpt.
10. The Programming. The Commission received numerous complaints alleging that certain affiliates of CBS and CBS owned-and-operated stations (listed in Attachment A) broadcast indecent material during the Our Sons and Daughters episode of the CBS program
Want Movies?
I’m not feeling so great about the mockery (here’s Mark Caro’s) of Dan Glickman’s suggestion yesterday that the movie exhibitors and studios get together to promote the joys of the theatrical experience. It is one of the great forms of denial that somehow movies are not sold like pork chops. This is the same naivety that argues that
11 Comments »Travolta – Third Act or Car Crash?
News that John Travolta will follow his drag act in Hairspray with what is sure to be a satirical take on JR Ewing in Dallas: The Motion Picture (where rumors of Kevin Costner being up for the role make no sense since he is a natural
31 Comments »SXSW Finds A Non-Doc Hit
Midnight at SXSW is about half new stuff and half films with distributors and/or veteran filmmaking names attached. One of the two World Premieres at Midnight here premiered Sunday night and I am writing about it at 4:24am Austin time because I want to start the conversation before it sells… distributors are circling.
First time director Scott Glosserman was here with his entire family for the premiere of Behind The Mask: The Rise Of Leslie Vernon. Title sucks. Poster looks like a conventionally crappy cheapo horror film. The only two acting names you
Confusing Opinion For Fact Again?
I’m not sure exactly when Jeff Giles took over David Ansen’s role as critic at Newsweek, but he proclaims this week about V For Vendetta,
“In point of fact, though, “Vendetta” is not good.”
Fact?
I guess it’s going to be an interesting ride, this one. V For Vendetta joins Munich and Paradise Now in the land of examinations of moral ambiguity being confused for radicalism. It would be interesting to see how the media reacted to a film that leaned right and was ambiguous, but I know of none lately.
We live in a country that is gathered in the middle. And we have a media that obsessively demands that people take sides. Now, that is a fact. A really ugly and dangerous fact.
We will have a Democratic president when we have a nominee who is as inflexible as Bush is. But I wish it wasn’t so. I wish we could elect leadership that understands that choices are complex, that there are winners and losers in all choices, and that we must be gracious whether we are winning or losing. Now, that is an opinion.
In my opinon, V for Vendetta no more confuses terrorism for revolution than it accurately reflects either the Blair or Bush governments. The explosions are not the message. The call to waking up, previously offered quite literally on film by Spike Lee, also by The Wachowskis, David Fincher/Chuck P, Alan Ball/Sam Mendes, etc, etc.
V blows things up because the government in the film has such complete control of the country that there is no other way to break through. Most of the terrorism involving Palestine and Israel right now is being generated by people who want to stop the peace process. There is no target defined. Likewise, al Quaida. Not only don’t they have a single country, but their target is cultural, embodied first by the U.S., but it is not a traditional military targetting, except, at times, in execution.
Taking V for Vendetta as literal is as stupid as reading Hamlet as a history lesson.
But that’s just my opinion.
(P.S. Note who is pushing the anti-V agenda… Matt Drudge. Right?)
Sunday Estimates by Klady
A huge congratulations is due Gerry Rich and the team at Paramount Pictures for turning a movie that was having some serious problems with interest among its core audience into a strong opener with a new campaign run over just a couple of weeks.
The big questions about the success of Failure To Launch are going to be about the value of Matthew McConaughey and Sarah Jessica Parker, who is in her second theatrical hit in three months. Fox focused on Parker first and foremost throughout the campaign for The Family Stone. Here, Paramount ended up going away from Parker to focus on the parents in order to explain the horrible title. But one could argue that they laid the groundwork for her (and McConaghey
