The Hot Blog Archive for December, 2006

Box Office Hell 12/22 (4 days)

Box Office Mojo Friday Numbers
1 | Night At The Museum | $12,250,000 | 3,685 | $12,250,000 / 1
2 | The Pursuit Of Happyness | $5,300,000 | 2,863 | $43,587,000 / 8
3 | Rocky Balboa | $5,000,000 | 3,017 | $14,693,000 / 3
4 | The Good Shepherd | $3,500,000 | 2,215 | $3,500,000 / 1
5 | Charlotte’s Web (2006) | $3,150,000 | 3,728 | $21,959,000 / 8
6 | Eragon | $2,750,000 | 3,030 | $33,246,000 / 8
7 | We Are Marshall | $2,700,000 | 2,606 | $2,700,000 / 1
8 | The Holiday | $1,825,000 | 2,635 | $31,918,000 / 15
9 | Happy Feet | $1,800,000 | 2,565 | $155,756,000 / 36
10 | The Nativity Story | $1,550,000 | 1,824 | $28,235,000 / 22
bohell1222.jpg

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The Brilliantly Barren Children Of Men

It took a while to figure out, but I finally got a handle on what I think is right and what I think is wrong with Alfonso Cuaron, Chivo Lubezki, and Kirkland & Clay’s Children of Men.
My problem has been that I was expecting too much. I don’t feel too bad about this, since the reason I was expecting so much is that the movie kept telling me to expect more. But the film is essentially a new-era Hitchcock thriller or, more specifically, a man-caught-up-in-something-he-didn’t-see-coming-who-gives-himself-over-to-a-cause-that-he-barely-understands-because-it-seems-right-and-he-needs-redemption movie.
Basic.

The rest…

37 Comments »

Lunch With Chanukah Claus

lwd1222.jpg
The Clip

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Loving Armond White

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20 Weeks – The Great Settling

The only titles that are not readily available on screeners are The Good German, The Good Shepherd, Monster House, and The Weinstein Company’s double dip of Factory Girl and Miss Potter. And if you are a screener recipient and are at all adventurous, there are opportunities like Sweet Land and Sherrybaby and A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints and Who Killed The Electric Car and others that might surprise and delight.
But that’s the screener rub. Getting voters to watch your movies when you don’t have Variety to beat them over the head with each day means you have to already have enticed them before they got on the plane to AspenMauiParisLondonMarrakeshBaliMilwaukee.
Ironically, any voter with young kids or grandkids are more likely to get an education on Cars vs Happy Feet vs Over The Hedge vs Flushed Away vs Charlotte’s Web than any single adult title. And if you don’t think that there won’t be notice taken of which one the kids watch for the fifth time, you would be wrong.

The rest & the charts…
(EDIT, 2:16p, Thur – It is the extremely rare occasion when I make a post-publication change on my charts, but thanks to Spammy, I spoke to Fox and indeed, they have changed their plan and decided to send Borat out to Academy members, shipping today. On the downside, they have a Peter Bart moderated Q&A with SBC on Jan 3, and if anyone can wrench the humor completely out of this film, it is Bart. Still, they have made one good decision and I hope that they can get things rolling for SBC in time for it to mean something.)

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The Wisdom Of GdT

“The sign of a true friendship is when you forgive success.”

11 Comments »

Welcome To Oscarwood

After an afternoon of being yelled at by Oscar consultants, Marcel Giacusa and Tim Webber spent the morning being yelled at by studio executives, member directors and others and

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Slow Enough For Ya?

So…. how are you feeling about sequels?
Is the Transformers trailer playing this room?
Is the Women Film Critic’s Circle a drag?
Does an angry Chris Gardner make you want to see Pursuit of Happyness more or less?

26 Comments »

Who Let The Screeners Out?

On Friday, the Directors Guild of America decided to allow screeners to be sent to their 13,400 members for the first time in its history. The previous rule had been that studio could send screeners to the DGA and that if members couldn

20 Comments »

Why Rocky Balboa Kinda Sucks

I wish I could join a few others who have suggested that Rocky Balboa is a quality addition to the five other Rocky movies. But I can

72 Comments »

Awards Time: Blog Shmoozes, His Ego Loses

Reprinted From VANITY
This is Trade Advertising Season in Hollywood — that frenzied time when back-to-back cocktails and dinners are hurriedly mobilized in order to get studios to buy as many obscenely expensive ads as possible and we can run as many special issues as humanly possible in the hopes of staving off obsolescence. Once the buyers have been fleeced, we also get invited to parties, when all sorts of people, from stars to studio chiefs, suddenly become your best friend.
What accounts for this outburst of conviviality? No, it’s not about Christmas. This is kudo time in Hollywood — the magic moment when Golden Globes, Oscars, critics’ awards and endless heavy covered editions of Variety rain down on the entertainment community.
The rules of the game for artists and other contenders are clear: If you’re idealistic or egomaniacal enough to believe that you can win without benefit of campaigning and hand-shaking, then stay home. If you have any street smarts, however, you’ll be out there on the campaign trail and buying lots and lots of trade covers. And if you are really smart, you will pay particular attention to the tuchus of the editor of the most important trade paper

1 Comment »

The Feignted Veil

Fortunately, The Painted Veil is not as bad a movie as Looking For Comedy In The Muslim World, the last time we saw the media jump happily into the Victimization Marketing game, ironically also involving Warner Indie.
Of course, Albert Brooks got into his finger-pointing public battle (final gross: $889k domestic) after a remarkable career, having authored a few films that will forever live in the pantheon of comedy. The whole thing turned out to be a bit like Mel Brooks getting bitter over the handling of Robin Hood: Men In Tights or Eastwood sweating True Crime.
The bottom line here for John Curran, who showed great promise as a director of powerful, passionate, raw character studies with his first American exposure, 1998

36 Comments »

A Story Only The Media Cares About

Does anyone on the planet give a flying fig about whether Judith Regan – one of the most successful merchants of utter crap in literary history – is working for Rupert Murdoch or writing unread blog entries for The Huffington Post?
Yes, we discuss many irrelevant things here on The Hot Blog and even on MCN… but geez… this one feels so much to me like worrying about the political fights in the French Club in our high school. It matters a lot to those 20 people, but beyond that…

25 Comments »

Sunday Estimates by Klady

The Theatrical Box Office Is Dead! Long Live The Dead Theatrical Box Office!!!
As Father Oyl said endlessly in Popeye, someone owes me – and more importantly, the industry – an apology.
I will explore this further in tomorrow

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Klady's Friday Estimates

Okay

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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