The Hot Blog Archive for July, 2006
Is That A Snake On Your Stage…
…. or are you just glad to see the ComicCon presentation for Snakes On A Plane?
Sorry 'bout that…
It seems that the MCN blogs were down for an hour or two this afternoon… maybe it had something to do with the frickin’ heat….
7 Comments »Lunch With David 2
I haven’t even seen this… streaming on my satellite uplink card sucks…. but you can let me know what I said, I guess…
Here it is.
Down At The Con
Two highlights at the Fox presentation…
1) The naked BORAT clip. Borat & his producer wrestled naked through a busy hotel.
2) Jim G, co-head of the studio, getting bounced out of his front row seat by security… and taking it with a smile and silence. (Even as the security guard figured out what he had done and pleaded for forgiveness and Jim was all “don’t worry about it”.)
Box Office Hell Returns…
For some reason, there have been a lot of requests for the return of “Road To Box Office Hell?” this week at MCN… so… why not?
(For me, I finally decided that I didn’t like the game of it all and didn’t want to add to the insanity about numbers anymore than we already do. But let’s see how it goes..)
I haven’t figure out how to post a chart on here, so you have to go to the MCN homepage to see where we are. As some of you may know, we have the Weekend Warrior as a regular around here. So feel free to bug him. And me. And as soon as Mojo and EW offer their opinions, they will be added.
Screen Bleed
Who is paying the price for four new films hitting the mulltiplexes wide (2000 screens minimum) this weekend, according to Box Office Mojo?
Title (Distributor) / Theater Count (Change) / Week #
The Lake House (Warner Bros.) / 603 (-1107) / 6
Nacho Libre (Paramount) / 505 (-996) / 6
Click (Sony / Revolution) / 2,312 (-984) / 5
Superman Returns (Warner Bros.) / 2,826 (-939) / 4
The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (Universal) / 397 (-743) / 6
Cars (Buena Vista) / 2,410 (-593) / 7
The Devil Wears Prada (Fox) / 2,248 (-562) / 4
Waist Deep (Rogue Pictures) / 175 (-464) / 5
20 Weeks… Trilogy Of Terrible
The latest disaster is My Super Ex-Girlfriend, which just plain fails on every level. Personally, I think it qualifies as an epic of misogyny, made all the more irritating by pretending to have girl power at its core.
The first great offense – in movie chronology, but not in movie order – is the creation of “G Girl” (a name so remarkably unremarkable that you wonder how anyone let it pass), which consists, upon touching a meteor, of her breasts growing a few cup sizes and her lovely brown hair turning blonde. Great message for those teen girls, huh?
The whole column
By The Box Office Way
Even though Day 12 for Star Wars: Episode Three
20 Comments »Critics Get Punched In The Is
There is a Sunday Variety story… “Local arties buoyed after Israel nixes crix… Journos asked to hold reviews until a week after pic’s opening,” that shows that distributors not screening for critics is not just for America anymore.
“As if Israeli film journos didn’t have enough problems with the escalating political crisis in the country, they now have another obstacle to overcome: film distributors have barred them from preview screenings.
The decision to block film critics came after months of negotiations with Israel’s leading association of film distributors broke down. The distribs had been calling on the film journos to hold their reviews of upcoming pics until after the opening weekend, a demand which many critics found unacceptable.
“We didn’t want to accept these terms. I don’t think the big American studios even know about this,” commented Goel Pinto, film critic for Israeli daily Haaretz.
While online sites have been largely unaffected by the boycott — journos attend opening screenings on Thursday and file the same day — print journalists have been forced to wait to the following Monday to see their reviews published given that Saturday is a public holiday in accordance with the Sabbath.
One unlikely benefactor is the country’s art house distributors. Many have refused to observe the preview ban and are happy to see reviews of their pics in the papers unopposed by their bigger budget rivals.”
More specifically and more disturbingly, a critic in Israel writes me, “The two major film distributors in Israel have decided not to invite film critics to press screenings. The reason: they feel bad reviews hurt the film’s financial potential. “Cars” and “Pirates of the Caribbean 2″‘ for example were not shown to critics. Needless to say, most critics have rejected the distributors’ offer to be re-invited to screenings if we only push back the publication date of our reviews, and give their movie, their massive-mega-million-dollar blockbuster, “one weekend of grace”.
The companies are: G.G, releasing UIP (Universal. Paramount. Dreamworks) and WB. And Forum Film, representing Disney, Miramax, New Line and Sony. It’s been speculated here that this reactionary move was done without the permission of the Hollywood management and that upon running that item in Variety, the shit – it seems – has hit the fan.
“One weekend of grace…” Interesting.
Meanwhile, there is this free link from India to the story, “Film criticism in media today governed by commercial interests.”
Amongst the comments: “Most of the space in the mainstream newspapers is filled by gossip about the lives of the film stars. There is no proper attempt to provide information to the public about films,”film writer and editor of the Asian Age Kaushik Mitter said.”
Kevin Smith Will Be 36 Years Old In Twelve Days
At first, I found his recent behavior irritating. Now I am finding it sad. And he has pushed into a level of mean-spiritedness that I never expected from him.
For me, this started with being disinvited from a Clerks II screening a couple of weeks ago. I had already told the studio that I was aware of Kevin’s sensitivity and that if I disliked the film, my plan was to simply not write about it. It isn’t worth the drama. And really, I have always wanted to turn the corner with Smith, who makes me laugh and still has moments of brilliance that suggest he may hit a truly important vein of humor one of these days.
But still… can’t see the movie. Why? I have always assumed that it was because I once wrote a review of Dogma that said, in part:
Kevin Smith is not a good director. He is a strong writer and an even stronger creator of ideas. But the ideas that Smith had on this one were sabotaged in one part, by his inability to effectively bring to life much of what he put on the page and in the second part, by his lack of perspective as the man pruning his own garden.
But alas, no. It turns out that Kevin is still angry about a passing comment in a September 2000 review of a movie he produced, Vulgar, in which he appeared:
(P.S. I never noticed that Kevin Smith, who produced the film and cameos, has calves the size of a small Shetland Sheep Dog. I felt like I was watching an Incredible Hulk episode with David Banner’s calves caught mid-change.)
And so, I am banished from seeing screenings of Kevin Smith movies.
I decided to shut up and keep it private. But then, I heard from Scott Foundas, who had no idea about my screening disinvitation, and told me about his temporary screening disinvitation. (He tells the story in his positive LA Weekly review of the film, which he eventually saw.)
And then, I read Mark Caro’s story about Kevin drama queening him in Chicago.
And then, Page Six leads today with Joel Siegel’s walkout of the Clerks II screening he was allowed to attend and Kevin’s raging, mean-spirited response.
Still, I was noting it on the front page of MCN, but keeping my part of this quiet.
And then, someone sent me a link to the Opie & Anthony show this morning on which Joel appeared, apologizing from the start. The apology was met with derision and Kevin whining about how Joel disrupted the screening – and offered him more publicity that the film has gotten so far – by harrumphing loudly for 2 seconds on the way out of the room. Kevin threw the Cannes standing ovation at him (preserved in living virtual ink by Weinstein suction machine Roger Friedman). And then, Smith did all he could to degrade Siegel as a man. (Of course, the link is on Kevin’s site… can’t let a thing like this be anything but self-promotion.)
And my reaction is, Fuck Kevin Smith.
I have always thought of him as the guy I would most like to shoot the shit with and who could cut my crap to the core with humor and insight. But for this moment, I have to say, it feels like I was buying the hype. Kevin has become the kind of whinny, thin-skinned bitch (used in the truly non-gender way) that he makes fun of in his films. He has become thoughtless and mean about people who do not kiss his ass like the deity he has built himself into on his sites. (Yes, I see the irony of me writing that… but I don’t think I am quite in Kevin’s class) He has become a hypocrite, who complains about the traits of critics after employing Jeff Wells for 3 years, who is guilty of all the things Smith now claims to hold dear (you don’t attack a person’s physicality… a critic can’t review a movie that he hasn’t sat through… don’t disrupt and distract from others watching the movie). And Smith attacks others in ways that would send him through the roof with rage.
I can only attribute all of this to Smith fearing that a weak response to Clerks II really will mark the end of his ride. The years that Jersey Girl sucked up – I still haven’t seen it… don’t need the grief of ever mentioning it in passing if I felt the way most people seemed to about the film – appears to have weighed heavily on him. And then man who writes about every nerve ending sensation that amuses him is suddenly The Director In The Plastic Bubble.
I hope this will pass. And part of me still hopes that I will someday repair my
Lady In The Water
How does one critique Lady in the Water?
The movie is so steeped in so much stuff that has nothing to do with whether a movie is good, bad, or indifferent. There are, obviously, the other movies M. Night Shyamalan has made. And there is the book that tells the saga of the birth and production of the film, written by Michael Bamberger, but clearly loaded with Night’s voice, that tells its readers more than anyone needs to know about the making of the film before the film is seen.
Thing is, I liked Lady in the Water more than I liked The Village. And to me, it was another variation on Signs
Someone Had To Do It…
… And who better than CNF?
In her piece, “And Then There Will Be None…,” Darling Nikki Finke spins the Nina Jacobson firing that she keeps insisting took all Hollywood by surprise (and where is the sisterly support of acknowledging that she “was told” about the maternity ward phone firing by reading Claudia Eller’s LAT piece ?) into a feminist issue.
(Note – Wed 10:10a – I am told…a cetain someone who wishes to remain anonymous would like it known that she failed to credit Anne Thompson and Sheigh Crabtree, who she allegedly took the information from, not Claudia Eller. Mystery Looney also now thinks that she is driving traffic to Drudge. And after hocking me to link to her on the MCN front page, she is now complaining… that I linked to her from the front page. If anyone sees a woman with binoculars hanging out around my apartment, please let me know. That is all. Sorry I can’t tell you who it is. Big secret. All of Holywood would be shocked.)
“Not since Dawn Steel learned she was ousted as president of production while on maternity leave from Paramount has a top woman movie executive found out this brutally she’d been axed in Hollywood. Even years later, when I sat down to interview her, Dawn still acknowledged…”
(But plenty of male execs have found out more brutally in the interim. Try reading about it in the paper, sis.)
“Which leads me to another thought: did these women have a better win-loss box office record than the men? Nearly all have greenlighted embarrassments as well as failures. Some were testosterone-heavy violence-fests. Others were chick flicks that not even gals wanted to see. A few were big fat blockbusters. Actually, their record seems no worse than their male counterparts. And that’s the point: Hollywood, like most industries, sets the bar higher for its woman executives: they can’t just be equal to men, they have to be better. So that may be why this woman’s world era is coming to an end. There’s no doubt the women were good. They just weren’t good enough to suit the men still in charge of them.”
Sherry Lansing’s last few years at Paramount were as bad as any man who ever lost that job (and she was replaced by a woman, whose job is threatened by another woman)… the films at DreamWorks that led to its sale can’t be much defended (and a woman – and not her husband – in charge of production at the continuing company, plus Laurie & Walter still under contract)… did Nikki forget Fox 2000 president Elizabeth Gabler… and isn
The Long Tail Of Paramount Passes
The power of people who didn
About As Shocking As A Shot Of Lindsay Lohan On Defamer
Uh, does this really shock anyone?
Nina Jacobson
