Tonys In The Morning

The Tony Nominations will be announced tomorrow morning. I have been enjoying the Broadway season without foisting it on the blog. There was always whining about pieces

BYOB Monday

Congrats to editorial cartoonist RJ Matson on the birth of his new son, Milo.
Anything else going on out there?

The Last Words On Clinton?

The New York Times’ Jo Becker and Christopher Drew put together a very well researched piece on Obama, that offers both his strengths and weaknesses quite fairly, I think. Unlike many of the hurredly thrown together pieces about the South Side politics of Chicago, this reads like it was written by reporters who got themselves familiar with what it is really like in Hyde Park.
The piece offers some strong proof of Obama as politician, not religious figure. But it also makes the argument that Obama understands the value of finding solutions instead of wallowing in dogmatism, even at the cost of some support. If I were just pushing Obama, I don’t think I’d be thrilled. But I believe that editorial non-partisanship is a dying form and that this piece really offers it in spades.
On the flip side… and probably for the last time…
Two guys named James Andomian& Dan Strange wrote and assembled the video below, using the great film, Downfall, as a basis. It is brutally funny…

… but it’s not nearly as brutal as SNL’s slaughter of Clinton this week… which was so unsympathetic that it felt a bit like piling on and ass covering, especially after there was so much Clinton sympathy in recent months. It’s interesting to me, how when a comedy show gets it wrong for a while, really taking sides, and then shifts so dramatically to the other side when the other side wins. Did they really just figure out who Ms. Clinton is?

Weekend Estimates by Klady – May 11

Friday Estimates by Klady

What’s fascinating from the start is that Box Office Mojo has both What Happens In Vegas and Speed Racer at least $300k or about 5% lower… and has Iron Man a whopping $2.8 million higher than Klady.
Meanwhile, Brad Grey’s #3 Girl has Iron Man at $15m – avoiding the 65% drop that Klady estimates – and was actually $500k higher on the Friday estimate for Speed last night… and lower on Vegas last night than this morning. (Of course, some people can’t do math either. A $15 million Friday is a 57% drop, not 62%.)
What does all this mean?
It means that box office obsession and confusion are now in charge and that people who don’t actually know much about box office, but who are being “sourced” by people with vested interests, are going to make Saturdays interesting all summer long.
Meanwhile, Iron Man dropping anything less than 55% for the weekend after that opening is a very strong showing. And anything more, a pretty average showing. We’ll see.
Speed Racer and What Happens In Vegas, not so much.
We really don’t know the future of either film yet. The slot is more promising for legs for Vegas than for Speed with Narnia coming up next weekend. But the question of who Speed Racer is playing to is really the issue at hand.
Both films are in line with Monster-in-Law, which opened in this slot 2 summers ago. Thing is, for Fox, that is comforting. M-i-L got to $83 million and it’s hard to imagine that Fox was expecting more from their comedy. This is not comforting to WB, where they are well behind Daddy Day Care, a movie that got slaughtered by the critics from the same summer slot, but still managed to crack $100 million with family audiences. But again… the question is whether the under 12s are going to see this film or if their parents are going to push them off and make them wait for DVD, since the adults don’t want to go.
Even a strong Saturday rebound and great word-of-mouth has $100m for Speed Racer quite unlikely. As I have said forever, it’s not the movie on opening weekend… it’s the marketing. And in trying to sell this thing to older teens instead of just getting to the kids core – the strongest single demo in summer, period – they seem to have missed both. They are not the first and they won’t be the last. But the fact that they find themselves in the same position as Poseidon was – a undisputably horrible film – is tragic and sick-making. Once they blinked and moved off of Memorial Day, they would have been much better off on August 8 than May 9… maybe even July 18 as a light alternative to The Dark Knight. But kids, kids, kids was the answer to the question WB marketing never answered.

When Hypocrisy Met Stupidity

I just read the NYT story on “the Internet knives” out for Indiana Jones. (I’d link, but I’m on the iPhone.)
Wow.
Does it get any stupider than this?
I hardly know where to start counting the layers of idiocy. But I will try.
1) The big paper gets to be top of the heap. By makng a NYT story out of 2 anonymous “reviews” of this movie, The Paper of Wreckord took a blip that would have been seen by a few hundred thousand people, at most, who are going to this movie no matter and made it into national news that will now be picked up by every paper in the country in one form or another. Congratu-fucking-lations. How proud Bill Keller must be!
But beyond my disgust, let’s ask the basic question (unlike the editors did yesterday). What is the news value?
We get a “because the reviewer didn’t want reprisals from the studio or their employer” excuse for not reporting the real name of the inbred fool who wrote the “review.” But does the NYT really know who this schmuck is? And as all things point to, “No,” how responsible is it of the most major newspaper to run, essentially, an anonymous “review” as news? Does the paper even know for sure that this putz saw the movie? And did they think for a second about the ramifications of legitimizing it?
Furthermore, didn’t the crack research staff recall that there was a major incident that was quite similar regarding Fox where they got a kid protectionist fired for this same kind of douchebaggery? Did it occur to them that this self-proclaimed “exhibition exec” might be another kid not wanting to get fired for breaking the rules… that it was, actually much more likely than a grown-up with a job who doesnt’ need the ego stroke jerk off of anonymous reviewing?
Thinking caps!!!
2) AICN. Still running this pathetic shell game after “the boys” are all growns up.
We’ve had this argument 1000 times. I won’t waste my thumbs on it now.
But what is the good part of this… Besides being “cool”?
There is no movie advocate argument that holds water here. You can only harm, not help. So really… do you care about anyone but yourselves?
3) Paramount and all the studios in open or shady business with AICN and others who run this shite.
I guess this is the same cynical calculation you use so often. Milk the geek sites as best you can and hope the occasional rapes don’t hurt too much. Meanwhile, threaten and manipulate real journalists who are just trying to, say, make Alt-weekly deadlines.
You’ve been aggrieved here, but it is hard to rev up too much sympathy when the guy trying to manipulate the fire gets burned.
(edited on a real computer, 12:02a)

Lunch With… Surfwise

The most raucous Lunch With… ever, with 6 members of the First Family of Surfing, The Paskowitzes, and director Doug Pray, who made Surfwise, a bio-doc that is not only about the family, but about an extreme philosophy of life.
The “interview”

BYOB Friday

Have you lost your bearings?
Welcome to the first idiotic campaign scam of McCain v Obama.
Does anyone really think that in the first interview of Obama’s presumed run in the general election, he tried to craft a backdoor way of saying, “McCain is old?” Or was it just a reasonable response to a guy saying that he was going to be above the fray inferring that Obama was soft on Hamas?
Funny… the Obama camapign didn’t come out complaining that McCain was secretly trying to tie him to Osama and other scary A-rabs.
Meanwhile, the Hillary story becomes clear, as Slate explains that she has only until the Dem Convention to pay herself back her campaign loans… and that the Obama campaign really can’t directy give her campaign more than a quarter million dollars to that end or any other. So the game is clear… as long as she can raise more than she is spending in the campaign, she will stay in. If her support dries up so that the million dollar a week machine starts building debt again, she will likely get out.
Okay… a quiet, non-political weekend to come.
Yay.

Box Office Hell on Speed

Interesting weekend.
By any previous metric, other than the first Spider-Man, Iron Man will be at $40m or lower, but none of the predictors are near that number and one has the film dropping just 40%, which would be a Spider-Man-like triumph of a second weekend.
On the flip side, tracking has Speed Racer in the low 30’s, but tracking is notorious for missing kids. The question on the film is whether parents will let little kids see the film or if they are scared of the Wachowski of it all. The reviews, screaming hyperactivity, will not inspire many parents to want to spend the time with their kids in the theater, even if it seems clear that the kids will love the film. Will they hold them off and take them to Narnia next weekend, even if they are begging?

Thank Blu God!

From The Criterion Site…
May 8, 2008
We

Let's Not Overdo The Tears

You know… the three things I mostly do in this work are the criticizing of films, the analysis of the industry, and the seeking of insight into the people who make up this industry.
When Picturehouse and Warner Indie shut down, a part of my job is to see what happened with clear eyes. But I also know and have worked with and have drunk with a bunch of people at both companies. I am also quite conscious that the “victims” of these kinds of shutdowns are not the people whose names everyone who reads Variety or clicks on MCN thrice daily, but the people who float through this business, trying to find their place, doing good work, putting their best feet forward.
Still, when I read the word “tragedy” used in the first sentence of indieWIRE’s analysis of the day, it trips my gag reflex. And when Nikki Finke feels compelled to rewrite her blase’ I-didn

No Movie For Old Men

It’s a terrible stereotype… but it is quite fascinating to me that the negative reviews of Speed Racer all seem to sound the same.
“It’s too loud!”
“It’s too fast!”
“It’s too long!”
“Too many colors!”
I am sympathetic to complaints about the visual intensity of this film. Seeing the film in IMAX last night was a bit of sensory overload. Very intense. And exhausting. (And in many ways glorious.)
But it sounds, over and over, like “Those kids and their texting!” or “Those kids and their crazy rap music!” or “Those kids and their special effects movies!”
But I’m sure that’s just me… I’m sure that the target for this movie was always people over 40 who prefer their action movies slow and plodding and looking simiilar to their idea of themselves.
Watching the original cartoon on DVD the other day, I was reminded how much imagination we, as an audience, had to bring to that cheap animation… and I wondered whether any of us could muster it again, 30+ years and many thousands of movies later. Maybe not.

The Last Couple (Funny) YouTube Shots At HRC

I know… piling on… but these will soon be nothing but history…


And this last one has a rather different feel about now…

#29 – Glenn Kenny

Another one bites the dust.
He self-obits.

Killing WIP & Picturehouse

Time-Warner pulled the plugs today.
It is a minor surprise, as there was a sense that there was strong support for Polly Cohen in the WB hierarchy. My guess is that T-W asked Robinov to give a financial upside to keeping WIP going… and Robinov couldn’t.
There really isn’t much room left for any more Dependent blood to be shed in the industry.
Searchlight is, obviously, safe… though Atomic could disappear completely in time.
Focus is safe at U, though Rogue is iffy.
Par Vantage is doing better than the main studio.
Miramax is doing great.
Sony Classics is more than solid.
The downside of 2 more Dependents going down is that these five have more leverage than ever. That could be good too. But the studios have made their “indie” arms so broadly commercial, even when doing great work, that they all want their Junos and Little Miss Sunshines every year. It’s not a shock that two of last year’s Oscar nominees were co-funded by two Dependents (Blood and No Country). These movies are costing more than we think of as indie prices now. In fact, Juno was the only one of the four American-made indies that qualified for Indie Spirit Awards… even with a $22 million budget top.
The hope is that two fewer Dependents mean that a few more arthouse screens will open up for true indies, as screens have been harder and harder to get against the big push of the Dependents.
But don’t count on it.
The prayer is that these Dependents – other than the more acquisition-minded and conservative Sony Classics – make movies only over $20 million, leaving the under-$20m quality business some room, leading to a few big hits, leading to a better business future for true indies. But it is, in reality, a prayer.
My condolences to the WIP and Picturehouse teams. The biggest question is where Laura Kim will land next.
I’d be willing to bet on Vantage, where the movies are good, Megan Colligan is strong enough to have another respected voice on board without being intimidated, and Lesher luvs a high profile hire.
She would probably be happiest at Miramax, where the chief is a gentle one and this hire would allow him to bring more of the publicity effort in-house.
The Searchlight and Focus machines are pretty much set. And Sony Classics has a pretty settled-in structure of independent publicists on both coasts, so consistent as to feel in-house.
I would expect Bob Berney to land with an already-funded aspiring indie, as launching his own right now is not financially viable. He would be a great asset to any of them and make funders happy by dint of his name alone.
Welcome back to the bosom of WB, Ms. Cohen.
BTW (add 11:58a) – The evolution of this from a Picturehouse takeover to a shared-power arrangement to a double firing is pretty much exactly how things went with New Line.
Shaye and Lynne thought they were okay… then it was a 70% staff cut… then they were killed… then they cut another 15% of the staff.
There is a story in there somewhere. It feels as though Robinov has an idea, Horn adjusts it to something more realistic, then the T-W people look at it and go, “Are you guys kidding? Why can’t you just cut the f-ing cord?”
And one final note… I fully expect New Line to be the WB bastard son for the next couple of years, as Toby rides herd over the last few projects and can’t get much money from Daddy. But as things turn in this business, don’t be surprised if after a couple of years of flailing around, they reinvigorate the label with whoever is running the strongest true indie at the time and earnestly take a shot at the Dimension business, which is not great right now, but will cycle around as it always does.