Another Loss…

Arthur C. Clarke passed away at the grand old age of 90 in his beloved Sri Lanka, where he lived for the last 52 years of his life.
For movie fans, Clarke is “The 2001 Guy” and little else.
David Fincher has been planning a film based on another Clarke book. We’ll see if it happens.
For me, he has settled into my consciousness as a friend of Roger Ebert’s. The teo apparently had a lively e-mail relationship over the years. The relationship really began in the late 50s when as a member of the Urbana High School Science Fiction Club, Roger went to see Clarke speak at U of Illinois: Champaign-Urbana
In 2003, I was in the attendance when Clarke made a rare appearance – by telephone – at Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival, along with Keir Dullea and Jan Harlan after a screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In one piece, Roger wrote – “At Cyberfest 1997, a birthday celebration for HAL 9000, who reveals in the film that he was born in 1997 at the university’s computer lab. (There was a panel discussion featuring Arthur C. Clarke, live from Sri Lanka, on a huge screen over the stage; told by a panelist that HAL “sounded gay,” Sir Arthur said, “I think you’ll have to ask HAL about that.”)”
In a Movie Answer Man, he offered Clarke’s response to a 2001 question.
I am almost more sad that Roger is not able, for the moment, to give tribute to this man who meant so much to him, as I am by the loss of a 90 year old who lived a full life, most of it on his own terms.
Then again, there are few with that kind of vision.

Truly, Madly, Minghella

It’s a very sad morning.
Anthony Minghella’s first film, Truly, Madly, Deeply landed when he was 36. Just five features later, he is gone. Half of them were serious Oscar bait, generating 24 Oscar nominations and 10 wins, including Best Picture and Best Director for The English Patient.
But more importantly, Minghella was a good man with profoundly honorable intentions. As a producer, in concert with Sydney Pollack and Mirage Enterprises, they supported tough-to-make films from Noyce, Tykwer, Eyre, Lonergan, and most recently, Tony Gilroy’s debut, Michael Clayton.
And to tread delicately, Minghella’s partner, Pollack, has been quite ill for months, fighting through illness and rumors. Minghella, who has had health issues along the way, going first is a bit of a shock. And the idea of losing Mirage altogether in a hurry is very sad… the company didn’t always deliver perfect films, but they were always getting behind ambition and ideas and has always been about more than business.
Hearing that he died from a hemmorage after a surgery to remove “a growth” on his neck, it is a reminder of how lucky we are to still have Roger Ebert amongst us, as he has spent the last 20 months or so recovering from a similar injury, caused not by his cancer, but by the weakening of his neck and vascular system in the process of the operation to remove it. (Roger is, fortunately, still moving towards a signficiant recovery after having spent the last year working in spite of it.) And in a similar turn earlier this year, we lost Dusty Cohl, a very close friend of The Eberts, while we were all more focused on Roger’s recovery. It can give you whiplash.
Minghella’s last film, The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, has been sold off to Brit TV – premiering next week, I believe, while the Weinstein Co owned film has been shelved for the US in favor of being retooled as a HBO series.

I genuinely liked and admired this man. Damned shame to lose him.

Do I Hear…

Another Profiles In History auction is coming. Some odd stuff is on the block, including the first Thalberg Award ever given (to Daryl F Zanuck), Heston’s sandals from Ben Hur, Halle Berry’s leather battlesuit from X2, an immortal mask from 300, and so much more, including…

This very creepy model from AI. Ewwww…

BYO Civility

Feel free to use this space for whatever conversations come up.
But please… I have noticed a few people who seem to be spoiling for a fight and taking some otherwise valuable conversations someplace personal and petty.
Let’s please vent our anger into our opinions and not get into the measuring of body parts.
Your turn…

More Critics Blood Spilt

SVA got his first exclusive for Defamer… more Tribune critics getting fired. Fun.
The scary part is not just good people getting fired, but that a company the size of The Tribune Co apparently having no real game plan for the future of this part of the franchise.
This, as best as I can tell, is the entire list of full-time Tribune Company film critics now, servicing 11 newspapers, 7 of which are legitimate full-out dailies:
Carina Chocano | The Los Angeles Times
Roger Moore | The Orlando Sentinel
Michael Phillips | The Chicago Tribune
Michael Sragow | Baltimore Sun
Kenneth Turan | The Los Angeles Times
Someone asked, “Who’s next,” regarding who would next be killed. And I can only imagine – sadly – that it would be Sragow, working in a non-movie market. If you look across the company’s papers, the one who is most widely syndicated is Roger Moore, which probably makes him the safest. Firing the guy at the flagship – at least as long as Roger Ebert is working at the rival paper – is unlikely. And it is all too easy to imagine both Chocano and Turan being bumped, but replaced with someone more revered than Carina, but younger than Ken.
Soon, Tribune Co could have fewer full-time film critics than the much-questioned New Times empire, which includes the Village Voice, LA Weekly, and 15 other local alt weeklies.

Bitch vs Black on SNL

By the way, this is why the studios fought YouTube on copyright… so they could use the clips to both generate ad revenue and to sell other shows and products.
And for a twist in revolutionary thought… the corporations pushing this stuff off of the “democratic” YouTube also means that the WGA members who struck over the issue of web replays can get paid for the use of these clips… which they could not when they ran on YouTube. So… corporations good or corporations bad? Democracy freeing or democracy exploiting the worker?

Weekend Estimates by Klady

Not much more to add to this story.
A couple of small things struck me.
1) There are only seven movies in wide release right now with as many as 100 people a day buying tickets in each theater… not per show… per day.
2) Juno isn’t going to hit $150 million, which seemed like where it was going back in the Oscar heat. Likewise, The Bucket List, which was at $75 million and still doing $5 million a weekend, will also land just over $90 million total. I would imagine that both are victims of the DVD window.

Killing Blu-ray

As you have read, I am excited by Blu-ray and I don’t think it is overhyped. I do think that Sony underestimates how HD delivery of movies on cable and satellite, in an era of larger, cheaper hard drives, will be a market-inhibiting competitor.
That said, I just caught up with the NYT’s reporting on Stan Glasgow, the president of Sony Electronics, and his recent NY media meetings (3/5). And I am in more than a little shock.
As I wrote when HD died, Sony must seize the opportunity to make this format fly. People will pay a $5 premium for the discs in return for the clear quality step up. But what is still a major factor in the way of the growth of the market into double-digit penetration is the cost of the players. (What makes PS3 the go-to player is the wireless updating of firmware, even more so than the gaming application.)
And here, Glasgow is not only crowing about controlling the market – bad press choice – but making clear that the cost of a Blu-ray player will not drop to $299 until this next Christmas!!! And that’s still too high!!!
$199 by 2009! Still too high!!!
Until they deliver a $149 player, the market will continue to limp along, even with increased and singular visibility at retailers. Discs are already being discounted on Amazon and elsewhere, both to keep up with HD discounts and to deal with the price disparity with the ever dropping retail price for regular DVDs.
And really, however threatened Sony might feel about the Chinese knock-off artists, resting on their laurels is no answer. Sony NEEDS to come up with a $150 solution – or a $250 package that comes with 10 Sony Blu-ray DVDs – by the end of THIS summer.
They don’t seem to understand the lesson of Apple and the iPod. Yes, it’s great to control the market. But Apple controlled the digital music market by creating; 1. a superior product, 2. ease of use unlike anyone had previously experienced, 3. a sense of real value, both in the somewhat pricey product and with iTunes as a lower cost alternative to overpriced CDs, 4. a range of products within 18 months of the initial release of the product so more people could join the “revolution”, and 5. access to the full value of the iTunes platform, even if your new iPod couldn’t fit everything you owned.
Sony seems committed to forcing Blu-ray on quality improvement alone. They haven’t even adapted the very clever duel format that allowed many HDs to play on regular DVD players as well, so buyers wouldn’t feel they were buying something they could only use in one machine on one TV in their homes.
What is Sony’s iPod here? The $150 single use machine that also has wifi updatability.
You have to make the product accessible enough that people who are ready to make the leap because of a movie

Vamps?

Interesting NY Observer story on the heat around vampires in the teen chick lit business.
The only movie to take advantage of it so far is Twilight, which was made by Summit and which, for now, they will try to self-distribute, starring Kirsten Stewart and directed by Catherine Hardwicke.
Seems to me that The Lost Boys and Interview WIth The Vampire were more gay bait than girl bait. Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula was more an action film with a touch of romance than a grrrl fantasy. And Buffy, The Vampire Slayer, whether on film or on TV, was never really much about vampires so much as menstruation.
We are in a small lull in the teen girl horror/action market. But will vampires who romance-not-roofie young women show up relentlessly in 2009 until we get sick to death of them?

Blu-ray Getting Stronger

I was on Amazon.com, where they are pushing both hi-def and regular DVDs heavily these days, and noticed that No Country For Old Men was on their best seller list both in DVD and Blu-ray formats. Wow.
I always caution to be suspect of Top Ten lists at Amazon and iTunes, since volume is not noted, but still… for both formats to be on the list suggests some positive movement for Blu-ray, no? And then, when I went back to do this entry, the pre-sale Blu-ray of I Am Legend -and not the regular DVD – topped the chart.
Of course, those of us who have gone Blu are the most intense consumers of the films films that fit our demo. And I still think Blu is likely to be a short-window technology. But this suggests a step forward.
(it is only fair to note than in the Top 7 shown below, only 101 Dalmatians is NOT available in Blu. So while BSG and Stargate are very geek and Enchanted is big with the kids, they aren’t breaking through in Blu the same way the two slightly older, slightly more make skewing titles are.)
Just a couple of days ago, a title that I am greatly anticipating on its 20th anniversary showed up from the studio… and it was the regular DVD. I’m thrilled to have it a few weeks early… and I was ready to rip the disc out of its contained and throw it in the machine right that minute… untill I saw it wasn’t Blu-ray. And now, it sits unopened, as I wait for the Blu-ray. I want to see it in the best way possible and I am willing to wait a few more weeks to experience it that way, even if upscaling would look pretty good. That doesn’t mean that I won’t watch The Graduate upscaled, which I bought yesterday to watch, anxious to look at it again after reading Mark Harris’ book. But I’m waiting on Bonnie & Clyde too.
Every time I put a Blu-ray in, I get that same thrill I got when I first got a DVD player and was buying gray market discs in New York, thrilled to hear Charlie Parker or Aretha Franklin or Mozart so cleanly with just a set of earbuds. And I already find myself prioritizing the pay-TV offerings, prefering the ones in HD (about 20% of the channels).
Of course, give me a movie theater experience any/every day…

Friday Estimates by Klady

Horton Hears A Who will push to get to Ice Age‘s opening number of $46.3 million, but will come up short. Still, it will be the best non-summer, non-holiday animation opening other than the Ice Age movies. It will also repesent Fox’s fourth entry onto the list of 20 best CG animation openings, still the only studio to crack the Disney/Pixar-DreamWorks stranglehold.
The trouble with this film is that the film skews a little too young to have a bigger opening weekend audience, no matter how hard Fox shoves it down our throats. Fox could have pushed the quirkiness of the film to teens, but in doing so, might have turned off the parents of the little kids. Look for a touch more psychodelia in the second weekend ads to come.
10,000 BC may break even. But the film, picked up by WB for the 300 slot after being passed on by Fox and Sony, is relying on what will eventually happen in Japan and France to make a buck (and DVD, obviously).
The movie may be okay in the end, but the cautionary tale is there… cool CG imagery is not enough… it has to be the right CG imagery to capture the imagination of potential audiences. Conversely, the ads for the DVD of I Am Legend look better than the ads for the movie, even focusing on the CG images that were a problem for some… TV vs theatrical. Expect the film to be even bigger in DVD than its considerable success in theaters.
Never Back Down is the latest “urban” effort to undertrack. No real surprise there.
Universal’s Doomsday reminded us yet again that not every studio can market every movie. The Neil Marshall movie would have been opened to double the number at Screen Gems. They just know how to sell the crap out of the female-led action movie. And Universal handing the film to Rogue to market wouldn’t neccessarily have been better either, as they haven’t had success in that genre. But isn’t that the idea? Why rev up the machinery of the big studio to sell the non-Tomb Raider?
On the flip side, a movie like The Bank Job would have been well served by a big studio release… even though Lionsgate is great at selling small window films. Hitman did $40 million domestic… with a less known star than Bank Job.
And Jumper, ready to fall out of the Top Ten next weekend, reminds us that Doug Liman is still a very interesting (and often undisciplined) filmmaker – Jumper: The Series could be a big hit – but that he really needs stars to be put into the middle of his madness to give the marketers something to give to audiences to hang onto when they sell the wild ride.

The Return Of Box Office Hell

Funny Hate

I can’t say that I am a big fan of Michael Haneke’s near shot-by-shot English-language remake of his own Funny Games. But the anger so many critics seem to be feeling about it? I don’t understand.
Much to my surprise and in spite of enough hyperbole at the top of the review to scare people away from getting to its strong ideas, Anthony Lane speaks to why remaking this 10 year old film offers a completely different series of subtexts that do not work in Haneke’s favor when delivering a nearly identical film.
But as for others… when a film is meant to make you uncomfortable, and you are, has it not done its job… or at least enough of it not to deserve a beat down?

Defamed

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix…”
Perhaps using Ginsberg is overstating the case. But when Stu Van Airsdale heads out of his own business into yet another situation where he is truly a round peg in a square hole – Stu blogging Oscars? Stu doing Hollywood gossip? Are you f-ing kidding me?!?! – you have to realize that the hopeful lie of blogging for money is narrowing to the pinhole of reality it always was.
It’s not so much of a shock. I have been seeing this ugliness coming for about 9 months… really, ever since Nick Denton was forced back to work at Gawker and soon after started interviewing any monkey who had put together a clever insult for the Defamer slot. (I love Stu’s brain and I wish he were still working with MCN. I am willing to bet that we’d be paying him more than Gawker Media to do the kind of work he really should be doing instead of trying to pelt Hollywood from an ivory tower that will distinguish him from his down & dirty predecessor. But that’s more water under the bridge.)
But it’s hardly just Gawker. I have seen it on site after site, waiting for their payday. I have seen it as many known journalists are thrust into the cold world of joblessness, hopeful for a moment that blogging is an answer until they realize that $20,000 a year for working endlessly is no great shakes. I saw it during the Oscar season when studios were happy to pay MCN well for ad space, but showed little interest in smaller sites, even ones that were getting lots of attention from The Bagger and others. Others pretended to have paid ads when they did not. Others begged and cajoled to little success. Frankly, MCN is lucky to have the industry base we have and a flag set on the Oscar season for years now… or we too might be wondering what to do.
Stu’s launch of his own niche version of MCN, more heavy on original content, was brave and passionate and smart… and too late. And by niche-ing NY, he limited his potential ad base to true indies, most of whom are struggling to survive right now. Even $500 for an ad is a lot for many of these companies and their movies.
And while I hate to bring up La Finke, please note how few site-specific ads have turned up on her page… after all those WGA writers in love… after all that publicity… after more positive mentions in mainstream media in the last six months than MCN has been afforded in over 5 years… and all she is running are the same ads from the LA Weekly. In her case, it is studios being afraid or unwilling to be associated with her ranting rage… even the 3 or 4 studios that feed her info on a daily basis.
And then we can start looking at the Traditional Media sites that muscled up for awards season and found out that not only was it hard to find a consistent audience, but that studios were not willing to pay premium prices to reach Oscar obsessives when what they were looking for was Oscar voters. How many TM sites have gone out buying bloggers only to find out that the content was better than the page views (or, in many cases, not)?
Let’s keep in mind that MediaBistro.com, the big sale of last year, had established a brick-n-mortar business generating $5 million a year in revenues with the web as the doorway, but their classes as the cash machine that made a buy of 5 times yearly earnings make sense to someone. If someone was out there with $25 million for Gawker Media, they would now own Gawker Media.
It’s hard out there for a pimp. My biggest concern these days is how many established writers I can hire for a price and what to do with all the content we could create. Is the cost – even the low cost – going to add value to the page… not just financial, but will people take the time in an oversaturated media culture to read smart, thoughtful writing on film? I have no interest in being in the Lindsay Lohan’s tits business or claiming exclusives on every third story we bump into or making noise just to make noise.
Maybe we should take a cue from Karina Longworth, who reacted when it was suggested she could be better used by a more aggressive outlet by saying, “Not really… thanks.”
I know that Stu and others have to do what they can to get where they are going. But much as I love him – and you can love someone without agreeing with all of their ideas – I am just blown away that he is now embarking on a further lowering of his standards in a job that he really isn’t qualified for anyway (Stu knows about as much about pop culture as I know about being hip in Brooklyn).
I pray for the day when Stu grows into the role he was born… an arts commentator at the NY Times or Village Voice (may it live on) or Vanity Fair or Details or anywhere they want to get a movie-loving Andrew Sullivan for the future. He will surely kick me in the balls when he has a chance, if I am still offering my balls up for kicking. But that would be a pleasure, in its way. I don’t mind fighting battles with angry young men (who look like mild mannered reporters). What I mind is watching so many kids prove themselves and then ending up starting out again at the Obits desk because they have to pay rent.
But so it goes…

Bring Your Own Friday Blog

The weekend is coming… does anyone old enough to spell care about Horton Hears A Who?
Does anyone really care about Garry Shandling’s ugly divorce from T-Pel?
Wouldn’t it be nice to skip to May?
Is there a reason why we have to be treated to an idiotic survey that states the obvious every single frickin’ spring??? (The wider the audience interest – which things like profanity, nufdity, and the use of your brain limits – the higher the gross. F-in’ DUH already!!!!)