The Hot Blog Archive for May, 2006

Cannes Winners At The Box Office

Here is a chart the NY Times probably should have done with their John Anderson piece, “Cannes Gold Tarnishes in U.S..”
The analysis kind of does itself for you. If it

17 Comments »

Some Publicity SoaP Doesnt Need

This, of course, might get some of the people who LOVE Snakes On A Plane web hype excited instead of disgusted, but this sceeenshot from Dateline NBC’s most recent to “Catch a Predator” series about catching older men who are searching the web for underage girls they can have sex with is not likely the kind of promotion that will make New Line or Time-Warner execs very pleased…
snakesonagirl500.jpg
Next up on Dateline, screen names “TheDaVinciLoad” and “PenisOfTheCaribbean”

1 Comment »

Friday Estimates by Klady

Not an exception hold for Mission:Impossible 3, but not a nightmare either. Is there some backlash by real people against the media showing itself to be worse hos than Mr. Cruise, now making the movie one that has to be seen so it can be talked about?
Poseidon at $18 million – $22 million is not a slot disaster. Nor is it a success. It

33 Comments »

A Brief Look At The Problem With The Dependents

This really is a full column, but for the moment, I want to offer some reason for my derision of Anne Thompson

15 Comments »

It Was M:I 3 Night On Leno Thursday Night

One has to give Tom Cruise and Paramount points for going down fighting.
Second weekend talk show appearances by stars like Cruise are a great rarity in this business. Yet, there he was. Thursday night is the key night for network advertising and promotion and there he was. And he brought Kanye West with him to sing a song from the movie… that is in the movie, I guess, over credits. (It’s only available for purchase on iTunes.)
Cruise was game. There was no talk about the box office. There were two clips, an EPK clip of Cruise doing a stunt himself and of the causeway stunt from the film.
It

40 Comments »

I Kinda Half Watched Dirty Dancing Havana Nights On Satellite…

No wonder it bombed!
The first film was a fantasy for regualr girls. Jennifer Grey was the perfect cute, sex, but imperfect lead with Swayze as the macho female fantasy. What do people always quote from the film? Not sex, but “No one puts baby in the corner.” It’s emotion.
Tihs film, however attractive Diego Luna is, is a male fanatasy. Giant blonde girl with oodles of money with well place boobs falls for plain looking, poor, ethnic midget.
I’m sure the target marget of men under 5′ 7″ who want to climb 6′ tall blondes LOVED the film.
What were they thinking?

17 Comments »

20 Weeks Of Summer – Reasonable Expectations

After a well chewed over start with M:I3, I thought it might be a good idea to lay out some landmarks for the season before we see the films or their marketing campaigns.
The column

25 Comments »

I Think They Forgot, "See This Movie!"

inconvenient.jpg
(The one-sheet is after the jump… this is a promotional handout at theaters)

Read the full article »

32 Comments »

Will It Float?

What’s wrong with Poseidon?

57 Comments »

Sit Back, Relax, & Enjoy Mocking Tom Cruise Before The Show

A reader of The Hot Button sent in a note today about his experience at the Alamo Drafthouse this weekend where he went to see Mission:Impossible 3.
To give you a litle background, the Alamo Drafthouse is a growing chain out of Austin , TX that shows movies in a theater that has rows of seats that have small tables in front of each seat. You can order food before, during and after the movie, which is served discretely.
The tone is loose and fun. There is a lot of movie love in the space and a lot of smarts as well.
So the Drafthouse, as it expands, is showing more and run first-run movies. The Lake Creek location is showing M:I3 as well as five other first run movies. And is in the Drafthouse spirit that they ran a pre-show trailer for the film that features, according to the site reader,

16 Comments »

The Trouble With Rage

I had an odd feeling over deja vu when I read this piece by the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen.
His story is about the rage and accusations that came in when he took the position that Stephen Colbert wasn’t funny at the Washington Correspondent’s dinner. Mine includes, but is certainly not limited to, Brokeback Mountain. The best run, to me, was in 2004, when I went from being a liberal Christian hater when I complained about the divisive way Mel Gibson was pushing The Passion of The Christ and then, just a few months later, was a closet right wing Bush lover because I had pretty much the same problems with how The Weinsteins and Michael Moore were selling Fahrenheit 9/11.
Of course, what I know now is that there is an upside. In time, the rage subsides, waiting for the oxygen of another cause. And if you

22 Comments »

Just For Debate

Mission: Impossible 3, Day 4
M:I3’s Monday Continues To Match The Opening Weekend’s Relative Pace Vs Previous Summer Openers With A $3.5m Monday… Same Day For Kingdom Of Heaven ($1.7m), Van Helsing ($4m), X2 ($6.5m), & Spider-Man ($11m)

17 Comments »

Mission: Semantics

For some reason, this turn of phrase by Anne Thompson this morning in her Risky Blog
“Fact: The weekend numbers for Mission: Impossible: III were not what they should be.”
This is probably a good test of how well you know how I think if you can figure out what word hit me funny…
“should”
We’re going to be reading endless speculation about “what went wrong” for the next few days. And the answer will always be, as it has to be, opinion… gut reactions with some educated guessing. The pre-release tracking suggested women had fallen off the Cruise bandwagon, Paramount reacted with new ads (the ultimate confirmation), and fortunately for my blood pressure and Sony’s Da Vinci push, Mr. Cruise is the whipping boy of the moment (let the media build you up and be prepared to be shredded as soon as you show vulnerability) and the only “slump” spin is coming from the ever-reliable New York Times, where Sharon Waxman, coincidentally, did her first box office story since King Kong was perceived as not opening as it should have.
But,

68 Comments »

Weekend Ouch-stimates – May 7

There are all kinds of stats to play with and even an anonymous e-mail on a gossipy website claiming that Scientologists bought hundreds of tickets in bulk at The Arclight here in L.A., suggesting more sold elsewhere as a plot to raise the Mission: Impossible 3 gross. (There actually is a sane explanation, if the sighting is true

68 Comments »

Friday Estimates – May 6

So

44 Comments »

The Hot Blog

Quote Unquotesee all »

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