The Hot Blog Archive for May, 2007

A Proud Moment In Indie Film History

ALIEN ROBOTS TO STORM WESTWOOD VILLAGE

37 Comments »

20 Weeks: The Sequel

The point of this column is not to shovel dirt on the past, but to look to the quite immediate future. There is an entire summer ahead of us that looks a lot like one of the strongest summers ever without The Big Three being any more than The Big One.
Last summer, it was Pirates 2 followed by Cars in #2 slot with $244 million domestic. In 2005, it was Star Wars 6/III followed by $234 million domestic for War of the Worlds. In 2004, it was Shrek 2 and Spider-Man 2 in the ether and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban with $250 million domestic in third.
The closest thing to this summer was 2002, with Finding Nemo and The Matrix Reloaded huge in May and Pirates of the Caribbean huge in July with Bruce Almighty at $243 million for #4 and X2 with $215 million domestic at #5. But that was so very different also. Nemo opened to “just” $70 million and did almost 5 times that opening. Bruce Almighty was a surprise with a $68 million opening and about 3.5 times that total domestic.

The rest…

6 Comments »

And Some Open Space…

As always, when I am on the run, I try to leave some space for y’all to work it out.
Try to be nice to one another… or at least civil…

32 Comments »

Seattle Day II

It’s so beautiful in Seattle that no one seems to be able to talk much about anything else.
That is, except for Anthony Hopkins, who we chatted with tonight for almost 2 hours before a screening of Remains of The Day as part of his tribute here. He couldn’t have been a more gracious or forthcoming guest. And where else will you get a world-class James Ivory imitation, Ismail Merchant to boot, and acting insights from Hepburn to Gielgud to Alec Baldwin, who shut down production on The Edge in order to get Hopkins to the hospital as Hopkins tried to soldier on. Sir Tony even has the distinction of having developed a relationship with Bart The Bear over two films. (He tells a great story about one take when Bart didn’t get his treat after doing his bit… and how he could see Bart’s face turn from domesticated animal to wild bear in a flash.)
Because of the Hopkins schedule, I have only had a chance to see his Slipstream at a theater last night and a number of films on DVD. Unfortunately, a couple of the docs I’ve seen have been minor versions of previous docs, like Rock School and King of Kong (which is here) and Darkon. I also viewed a rather wacky, but not-sticky-enough-for-me (not literally) Korean teen sex comedy called Dasepo Naughty Girls that was almost a grrrlpower episode of The Monkees… but not quite that good… at least for me…
The first film I watched was The Life of Reilly, which was a videoed version of Charles Nelson Reilly’s one-man touring show. Obviously, losing him this last week made the urge to watch all the greater. And he was funny and tough and insightful and even understated. I wish the filmmakers had been a little less concerned with trying to make it look like more than it was, shooting a great deal of the film from the backstage, which meant seeing too much of the back of a man whose expressive face was all an audience might ask for. But when he underplays moments, like being told by the head of casting at NBC in the 50s that “They don’t put queers on TV,” and somehow not being disturbed by that verbal aggression, there is enormous power.
The new wave of documentary… what really is being changed by the availability of cheap, good quality cameras… is about cataloging every little thing. And some day, the way we surf the web now, we will surf video history. If you want to learn about actors, you will catch a little of The Life of Reilly and a little of Special Thanks To Roy London, and so on.
And after a couple of hours of great stories tonight, I would feel it was really a shame if we didn’t get Sir Anthony Hopkins to sit down for 4 or 5 hours just to tell his stories. He tells them with love and with humor and self-deprecation. But mostly, he carries in his mind a big part of the history of film. He’s worked with so many of the great directors. He’s been on top and he’s been slogging along. But how many people can give you a first hand opinion about the work of Coppola and Spielberg and Cimino and Stone and Lynch and Attenborough and Ivory and Parker and R. Scott and Demme and Lester and Wise and Schlesinger and Zemeckis, whose Beowulf he is in this fall. And that’s just scratching the surface.
And come tomorrow… I’ll be able to just go to the movies and enjoy the spirit (and sun) of Seattle. Yay.

2 Comments »

In Seattle…

It’s Day Six of the 33rd Annual Seattle Film Festival, which opened last Wednesday night with a movie I kinda love, Son of Rambow.
I arrived today just in time to attend a dinner for Anthony Hopkins and a screening with Q&A of his film, Slipstream. Tomorrow night, he gets an award from the festival and I’ll be chatting with him before the presentation. He was pretty feisty tonight, which hopefully portends another intense public outing tomorrow night.
Meanwhile, I’m settling in with some DVDs, as Seattle is one of the few major festivals left that makes a wide selection of their program available for the press to check out on DVD. I expect that I will see at least three films by the time of the first screening public tomorrow… great.

6 Comments »

Stupidest Headline Of The Summer

Early Summer Movies Underperform At Box Office
It is completely appropriate for Dean Goodman or anyone else to point out that the record setting openings of three films this May, as well as a record setting month of May, has to be put in perspective by reportage of the cost of the films and the failure of each (and no doubt, Pirates 3 will follow domestically) to match the second films in their respective franchise series.
But “underperform?”
This is the insanity of a media that sets up films as targets by exaggerating their potential then starts tearing them down as “underperforming,” when in reality, they are performing remarkably well.
Spider-Man 3, much as I hated it, will likely be the 18th highest grossing film of all time, pushed out of 17th by Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, the final gross of which is quite uncertain at this point.
This is the same idiotic mentality that led to Slump Chat in 2005… you know, when theatrical box office was finished because The New York Times and others refused to acknowledge that Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11 warped the whole box office year in the record-setting 2004 and that if you removed those two freaks, the year was off by very little in reality. And they still sell this shit in every article where they deign to mention two straight up years at the theatrical box office, much less the ever more surging international box office. They weren’t wrong… it just… well… there was a real problem… it just changed… because prices went down… no… because large screen TVs got more expensive… no… because the DVD market made less product available… no…
Of course, there is also the goofy Mark Harris article in EW this week that once again has a man in his 40s telling America what they REALLY want… because he knows… because more people in this country alone went to see each of the three massive openers on opening weekend than read EW in a year.
Mark… I love that you have taste… I love that you want better movies… I love that you don’t feel serviced by the studios summer slate… but in your journalistic ivory tower, it is easy to forget that the reason why the studios are now funding that crazy fall slate of movies that they make very little on but which become so important during the Academy Award race you wanted to extend (Sweet Jesus!) in another myopic article last year, is that they make money on Spider-Man 3. Or did you really believe that Sony bought the James Grey movie at Cannes that Universal dumped unceremoniously (that includes arty Focus) was because they know that adults really want more Russian mob dramas?

33 Comments »

Sunday Estimates by Klady

memdaybo.jpg

21 Comments »

Anyone Else…

… hate the outdoor campaign for what appears to be in the ads Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots: The Motion Picture (aka Transformers)?
transformers.jpg
(This is a screen capture from the website. I have seen one billboard with pretty much this image… the vast majority just have the two robots and don’t include the humans in the middle and that is the one I really hate. The funny thing is, I like it a lot more on the screen here than on a billboard, where the color is not as intense.)

28 Comments »

Counting Down From 100 Movies To 1


(thanks to Lota for the find)

14 Comments »

Fill In The Blahs

Looking through The Village Voice in search of Cannes coverage – and they are doing what The Tribune Co can’t seem to get… using all of their assets in one place… albeit at the cost of the jobs of some very good writers – and I ran into Nathan Lee’s “review” of Pirates 3.
And what struck me, even more than the predictability of it, was the feeling that it really could have been written months ago… a year ago… with some Ad-Libs-like spaced for specific details.
Thing is, I don’t really care whether he liked the film or not. I don’t even care that his distaste was so arrogantly dismissive and predictable. But I am not sure this is really a review. It qualifies more as a review of the idea of franchise movies. The very few facts he discusses are either wrong (Davy Jones’ Locker is clearly noted as a purgatory, not death), PC snooty (“Aunt Jemima” and the use of an Asian man to empower a white woman), or rather disingenuous given his distaste for the whole exercise (“Of all movies, this is the last you

15 Comments »

The Weekend Slogs On…

“You never count your money when you’re sittin’ at the table.
There’ll be time enough for countin’ when the dealin’s done.”

Box Office Mojo is estimating $31 million for P3 for Sunday, which is a similar Sunday drop to X3, which was the biggest dropper last Memorial Day Sunday… which could be right or $5 million or so wrong.
Sony (via C. Nikki Finke) is estimating at $35 million Sunday… which could be right or $5 million or so wrong.
Keep in mind that Sony’s Thursday estimate was about $3 million high… and other studios were in other places… estimates are estimates… not that there is anything wrong or unexpected about that… unless you are selling absolute accuracy.
What is apparent is that Monday will be in the mid-20s, which would put the 4.5 day cume in the 150s, which will not be a record. (4-day record is $161m… 5-day is $173m) Regardless, we will still have had three of the four biggest movie openings in history in this dainty month of May 2007.
That said, as the freaky numbers have shown us this summer, P3 looks like it will pass SM3’s first week gross of $182 million by the time Thursday grosses roll around. But then it gets interesting again…
Next weekend, Pirates 3 will face its first traditional 3-day weekend. Last year’s Memorial Day opener, X3, which also did Thursday night screenings, still fell 66%, even though logic would suggest a relatively small drop would make sense, as the 4-day weekend spreads the gross. Nope. P3 will face at least as much new firepower as X3 did in The Break-Up, with Knocked Up and Mr. Brooks combined. Drops were a lot smaller in earlier years, with Shrek 2 as a for instance.
Still, a strong week and a 50% drop for the 3-day only next weekend, would make for about a $245 million 10-day (or 11…or 10.5, depending on how you want to account for Thursday), which would put P3 behind only P2 after the second weekend. Still, a 55% drop and it’s back behind Spider-Man 3 as well.
(For the sake of clarity, SM3 fell permanently behind SM2 day count-for-day count on Day 11. Using the “first weekend/second weekend / third, etc” scale, SM3 fell behind SM2 on the first Monday for both films, pulling back ahead with a stronger second weekend, then falling permanently behind on the second Monday. SM3 fell permanently behind the first SM on the third Sunday.)
In other news, 2007 is now officially the biggest May in history, finally passing 2002 with Friday’s grosses.

12 Comments »

Klady's Friday Estimates

friday2.jpg
For reference, the chart had been typo’d and is now accurate.

7 Comments »

Happy 30th Birthday

sw.jpg
I was 13… The Surf Theater on Miami Beach… my dad walked out on the film… I went back a few times… how about you?

39 Comments »

The Plundering Has Begun

Sorry

42 Comments »

Pirates Spoiler Review

It feels a bit like I am whistling in the dark.
The film industry left town for the weekend yesterday and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End is open and making money hand over pirate fist.
I did a bit of broad commentary on the film in yesterday’s 20 Weeks column on MCN. Here now, some SPOILERS in review.

The rest…

23 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