The Hot Blog Archive for December, 2006

Top 20 Of Top 10s

Thought you might want to discuss how things are going so far… another 86 lists to be added
Rank

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Klady's Friday Estimates

This is one of those weird Fridays where analysis is somewhat defied. What we are really doing is analyzing the season, since the day-to-day is so different than any other time. It

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I Guess It Really Can't Be Avoided

Over at Hollywood-El-Swear, a grown up director- George Hickenlooper – went apeshit on our very own JWEgo aka Spam Dooley after Dooley posted in response to George’s buttboy’s 8.5 star rave:
“why picture George when you know he did not direct this movie? did he sell you some white stuff?”
Lame. But it pissed GH off and the highlights of his response were:
Hey asshole, I am in the process of tracking you down. When I find out who you are, and I will, I am going to file a nice fat defamation of character lawsuit against you. I have spoken to my attorneys and Bloom Hergott and your sinister, unrelenting proclamations of my alleged drug abuse and my having been removed from the picture, both blatantly false, malicious, and cruel, is grounds for a big fat, juicy lawsuit. You have seriously exposed yourself legally and you only better hope you don’t have any assets, prick-face, because when my attorneys get through with you, you’ll be pushing a mop at the La Brea Burger King.
Prick face. Nice.
” warn you JWEgo as I finish the final mix of Factory Girl… when I find out who you are, you will here from my lawyers. In fact as an incentive, I am offering anyone who provides me with the identity of JWEgo by this weekend, I will pay a reward of $1,500.00. Thank you. GH”
JWEgo then folded like a $3 deck chair:
“No need to find me Mr. Hickenlooper. I repeated a comment that I was told by someone who seemed to know. I apologize if I was wrong. I hereby state that I have no idea what I am talking about and IN NO WAY intended to upset you.”
Not enough for George…
“JWEgo: You still have not told me who you are. And tell me who told you this? I am not going to drop this matter. I have already had two separate people identify you for me. You do not have a lot of fans apparently. This is disappointing to me because if you are who these people say you are, I thought we were friends. I admire your work and we even discussed working together. So if it is you, why would you post these viscious, false and puerile diatribes. You better come forward with me on this, because I will pursue this unrelentingly, not so much because it has hurt me, but because it has hurt my five-year-old.”
Well… if Mr. Hickenlooper’s 5 year old is on the internet reading Wells and other internet pornography, I am afraid a visit form Child Protective Services is appropriate. But I am guessing that it was just hyperbole.
Spammy has, so far, backed off every time anyone – I was the other one, I guess – got close to finding out for sure who he is. It’s no secret that most people think he is Don Murphy… even if he dissed Transformers on this blog a few weeks back. (Give ’em the ol’ razzle dazzle…)
The only really interesting thing here is a grown up actually putting a bounty on an anonymous commenter’s head and losing his shit in a public forum.
Oh… and the movie pretty much sucks. Hickenlooper

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What

Sorry, but this is not going to be an argument against Dreamgirls. I will probably write that in February sometime, but not today
The reason I am writing this is that I am finding myself deeply amused by this week

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The Worst 10 Of 2006

Of course, as I point out in the column… and want to point out again… I managed to avoid the Bloodraynes, Beerfests, and The Marines. Still, the list goes on…
Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus
Y ou can live with bad and you can live with pretentious, but the combination is deadly. Steven Shainberg had the good taste to hire Robert Downey, Jr. to play The Man Upstairs in this film. But pretty much every other decision involved was a misstep. Doing a Diane Arbus film that isn’t really about Diane Arbus

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From Inside My Coma

I just don’t want to do much besides drink coffee and tell stories this week… it’s kinda brutal, really.
I don’t even want to go see James Brown’s body. (You have to give it to we Jews… close the frickin’ casket… please!)
Anyway… y’all know the drill… play nice… no eye-gouging, please. I’m sure I will find inspiration sometime today…

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Broadway, Where Is Thy Sting?

A long and very thoughtful comment by wongjongat on Weekend Box Office (near the bottom) got me thinking about why musicals have had it so rough lately. What started as a comment became the following:
Personally, I think the death of movie musicals can be most accurately be laid at the feet of Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and revivals.
There are many good shows from the last 20 years, but not a whole lot that scream for a screen version. And with multiple touring companies becoming a norm under Cameron Mackintosh’s Really Useless Co., the theater experience is far more available all over the country within a year of a show getting hot on Broadway.
Sondheim and Lloyd Webber have been dominant figures. Lloyd Webber makes operettas. Sondheim makes more esoteric shows that don

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Ho Ho Ho

clintclaus.jpg

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The Palette Of The Modern Movie Critic

When I watch Gordon Ramsey or Top Chef or some similar show on TV, it often occurs to me that as much as I enjoy cooking, my palette is just too simple for me to ever become a great chef. I can make really tasty things inside of my palette.
Filmmakers often struggle when they have expended the breadth and width of their palette and still want to work. A guy like Robert Zemeckis has a taste for endless variety and keeps using his long-honed skills in a variety of genres. Oliver Stone is still struggling to get out of the Vietnam era. He knows how to direct, but what does he have left to say?
Critics cannot reasonably afford themselves the luxury of a narrow palette. Yet, someone like Pauline Kael is remembered for the details of his palette and her inflexibility. Anthony Lane is revered for being acid-tongued and generally uninterested in films themselves aside from the platform they afford him for his witty craft. And Armond White has become nearly legendary for his gift for narrowing a film down to a strong political position that often has nothing to do with the film itself.
Like Political Correctness, Cinematic Correctness is both heroic and villainous. Hurting films, like hurting words, must somehow be both protected and destroyed by the keepers of the flame.

The rest…

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Going To The Movies?

It seems to me that a lot of you must be going to the movies this week. So what do you think? What is there to talk about other than Dreamgirls grosses and Good Shepherd thrombosis?

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Weekend Box Office

Klady will be here shortly, but here are a few sneak peeks at the small openers…
1. As previously reported, Dreamgirls was massive on 852 screens on Monday, with $8.7 million, about $100,000 of which came from added midnight shows around he country. It is the #3 Christmas Day opening ever, the #10 Christmas Day gross overall, and the single best day for any musical ever (Moulin Rouge had the previous best day ever with $5.68m on 2279 screens – Chicago

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What Is A Good Number For Dreamgirls?

Every once in a while, it seems like time to make an offering of what would be a number that is “good” or “great” or disappointing for a highly anticipated opening. Dreamgirls

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This Space For Rent

I just thought I’d make some space for y’all to talk about whatever if you happen to be wanting to chat during the holiday…

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Merry Christmas To All

And to all a sad loss.
The Godfather of Soul is dead… long live James Brown.
About 18 years ago, I took my then-girlfriend to a Jame Brown concert at The Beacon in New York. Her eyes widened as she realized we were in a tiny ethnic minority in the room. I don’t think she had experienced anything like that before. But The Godfather made her feel good, like I knew he would.
A few weeks later, I shot a segment for a show I was working on in NY for “The James Brown Auto Alarm.” Someone would touch the car and it would start…. “Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh heh” as only JB could scream. It was one of the coldest days in NY that year when we shot it and I ended up having to act in it because someone didn’t show up. The line was, “Thank you, James Brown,” but it was so cold I couldn’t get my mouth to annunciate. I tried to improve on

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The Box Office To Come

For any movies now open, studios can, within about 15%, figure out with about 95% certainty what the rest of 2006 is going to look like for them. Black Christmas and Dreamgirls are really the only box office stories left to present themselves.
As it went last year, the Friday before X-Mas pretty much lays out a number that a film will perform close to on every day except the two down days of X-Mas Eve and X-Mas, and the unusually up day of the day after X-Mas. 2004 was unusual because that Friday was X-Mas Eve, but the Day before that, the Thursday, pretty much offered the same rule.
The extra day is a big advantage for films this year over last, since the day after the New Year

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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