The Hot Blog Archive for September, 2006

Klady's Friday Estimates & BO Hell – 9/30

(Note: A typo in friday’s numbers put Jackass: Number Two at $6.2 million. The correct number was $4.2 million)
Title | Distributor | Gross * | Theaters | % Change | Cume
Open Season | Sony | 6.2 | 3833 | | 6.2
The Guardian | BV | 5.8 | 3241 | | 5.8
Jackass: Number Two | Par | 4.2 | 3063 | -63% | 41.9
School for Scoundrels | MGM | 2.7 | 3004 | | 2.7
Fearless | Focus | 1.4 | 1810 | -61% | 14.5
Gridiron Gang | Sony | 1.3 | 3033 | -56% | 30
The Illusionist | FS/YF/Odeon | 0.8 | 1319 | -21% | 29.4
Flyboys | MGM | 0.7 | 2033 | -64% | 8.3
The Black Dahlia | Uni | 0.6 | 2009 | -55% | 19.2
Little Miss Sunshine | Searchlight | 0.6 | 1065 | -31% | 51.7
All the King’s Men | Sony | 0.5 | 1520 | -63% | 5.1
Also Debuting
Facing the Giants | IDP | 0.4 | 441
The Last King of Scotland | Searchlight | 41,000 | 4
A Guide to Recognizing Saints | First Look | 28,000 | 8
Journals of Knud Rasmussen | Odeon | 12,000 | 43
Broken Sky | Strand | 1,500 | 1
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21 Comments »

Clarity On Gurus

I don

56 Comments »

Rinko Kikuchi

She’s one of the two little-known “it” girls of Babel and she landed in Los Angeles ever so briefly..
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A quick QT look…

15 Comments »

Good Sheet/Bad Sheet?

AND NOW – The Trailer
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A great poster or a terrible poster? I’m really not sure myself…

36 Comments »

Gurus Of Gray – Post-Toronto Wrangling

Penelope Cruz is getting the media committment that might shove her into an actual nomination… George Clooney gets thrown into the ring sight unseen… Love for The Departed starts turning up in earnest… and Dreamgirls, Mirren & Whitaker are your early leaders…
The new charts

57 Comments »

Lunch With David – Atonement Day Is Coming!

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Here It Is

22 Comments »

Von Triers Does Art Porno

Just when you thought the bad sex movie posing as art was killed off by the suprisingly superior Shortbus, Lars Von Trier invests in a dirty movie that looks like a 70s skin flick. But he got distribution in the U.S… on DVD… by porn distributor Wicked Pictures. Oy.
The film is called All About Anna and it even has its own MySpace page.
The nice thing is that there is both a very earnest explanation of the film and a Dogma 95 Manifesto specifically for films like this, called “The Puzzy Power Manifesto“. It includes such tidbits as: “It is not enough for four unknown actors to enter stage right, drop their pants and simply get down” and “The films must be based on woman

20 Comments »

Sometimes A Blackberry…

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When two e-mail subject lines are funnier than one… or maybe not.

6 Comments »

Why We Don't Link To Caryn James Much

A reader sent in a note asking:
“I was reading the NY Times article on All the King’s Men and was wondering about their referral of Toronto as a “nonexclusive” festival. My knowledge seems to contrast their reference, or am I taking their comment out of context? Are they referring to strictly Oscar races that Toronto would not aide?”
I wasn’t really sure what this person was talking about because I bailed out of the Caryn James piece when it was clear that she was doing her usual “I told you so” after the fact schtick, loaded with assumptions she really knows nothing about. When she is right about something like this, it is by mistake.
But looking for the specific reference the e-mailer was calling out, I found:
“Oscar-ready films that have opened in September, like

54 Comments »

Departed Discussions

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Leonardo DiCaprio
Matt Damon
Vera Farmiga

19 Comments »

Harvey's New Scam

With Bobby resting uncomfortably on life support, Harvey needs a brand new bag.
And that bag is… Sienna Miller.
The sad part of the Harvey ramp-up is that it has become so ham fisted that this kind of laughable nonsense now leaks out of the same handful of walking orifices every time. That group now includes Tom O’Neill, Jeffrey Wells, and the late charging (in this case) Roger Friedman, who should be doing a story on Sienna as an Oscar frontrunner about…. now.
Have you noticed that Harvey’s other game of the year – the record breaking standing ovation – is now happening at every festival where American journalists don’t seem to be in attendance at the screening. Clerks II at Cannes

51 Comments »

Holy One Sheet!

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Looks like it’s either going to be so audacious as to be a major event or so audacious that it loses 85% of the audience… we soon shall see…

26 Comments »

Why Studio 60 Sucks

I hated the pilot… but the pilot made the second episode look like genius.
The truth of the matter seems to be that Aaron Sorkin is making a show about making an hour long drama and not really about live TV or SNL or anything else. Not surprisingly, Sorkin doesn

64 Comments »

THB – And so, another circle jerk begins.

After it screened for a selected audience guaranteed to love it and for an Ain’t It Cool News crowd in Austin that was guaranteed to love it, the jungle drums are beating over Apocalypto.
So let me take a moment now to engage with reality.
This is exactly the strategy he used on The Passion of the Christ, though its screenings were further from the release date and, because of the material, it was inherently more divisive. There is nothing surprising in any filmmaker repeating the steps that led to a big success on their last film.
Mel Gibson knows how to make an action film with intense emotional peaks. Always has, drunk, sober, crazy, sane, anti-Semitic or in love with Barbra Streisand. There was never any question that Apocalypto was going to be interesting, likely visually compelling, and that language was not going to be an issue, anymore than it was for The Passion of The Christ – which, like it or not, was a strong, extremely brutal action film.

The rest…

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Sunday Estimates by Klady

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39 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