Gilmore Goes Tribeca

I am not 100% sure what to make of Geoffrey Gilmore exiting Sundance after 19 years to go to the never-quite-stabilized Tribeca Film Festival.
As a fan of the Miami Dolphins, I am amused to see him becoming “Chief Creative Officer,” which like Bill Parcells seems to mean that he will be hiring staff in his image, as opposed to doing all of the heavy lifting himself. The big difference is, to get to the pros, professional athletes have already achieved a certain standard and can be coached to work better together as a team, even without the best talent. At a film festival, the movies are what they are and will not get better with coaching from festival programmers.
Since Tribeca was launched, initially on the claim that it would help Tribeca recover from 9/11, then turning itself into a for-profit enterprise, then expanding well beyond Tribeca itself, they have faced the same basic problem that any film festival with Top Tier fest ambitions faces… they are not needed. Sundance in January, Cannes in May, Toronto in September. In addition, Berlin in February and Venice in August. Plus, non/soft-market fests SXSW in March, San Francisco (America’s oldest and the one Tribeca most poaches from) in April/May, Seattle in May/June, LAFF in late June, New York in October, and AFI LA in November.
Where does Tribeca want to fit in?
A great local festival is a beautiful thing. But Tribeca isn

The Final Gurus Charts

The charts are just going up and to no one’s surprise, the two tight “big” races are Actor and Supporting Actress.
What’s different about this week’s charts is that we are ranking our best guess at who will win, but then doing a 1- 10 that explains how strongly we feel. So the top candidate in that regard is Heath Ledger with an average 9.27 rank, followed by Slumdog for Best Picture with 9.2. Least sure are the 2 Sound categories with ranks in the 5s with the tightest top category being Actor with 5.87 and 8 votes for Penn and 5.28 and 7 votes for Rourke.
Here are the most tight votes amonsgt top contenders, by the Gurus’ estimate.


And here is the link to the who chart, Page 1 and Page 2.

Watchmen Review Battle Royale

And so it begins…
Oh the excitement!
A geek loves Watchmen and decides that even though he is employed by Time Magazine, owned by the parent company of Warner Bros, he isn’t a journalist, so he can say whatever he wants. Meanwhile, others are forced to wait to offer any opinion.
Sigh…
The funny thing to me is, I have had this same reaction to “early” reviews. But unlike this guy – who is smart enough to exec produce The Simpsons, but who is not smart enough to understand the concept of an embargo…. or the studio isn’t smart enough to explain it to him – I have always been told by the studio when I can go early and am completely transparent about that being the case. That is likely the case here… even more likely that he is a friend of the director’s. But the kind of flip, “I’m not really a journalist” crap… well, we all know where we have heard that before.
Personally, I will be shocked if they can get to Friday without reviews running, in various disguises, all over the place. And I don’t much care… since I really have no stake in the reviews of this movie.
What I heard from one person with an ear to the tracking is that he thinks the movie is heading to a $75 million opening… which would be the second best non-summer, non-Thanksgiving/Christmas opening ever, after The Passion of The Christ. 300 was just under $71m. I don’t see that kind of passion out there, but who knows? There are many reasons why 300 was more accessible than Watchmen, but stranger things have happened.
And as for the embargo break… as usual… positive breaks don’t get punished. I don’t expect to see any either… at least not before the week of release.

Oscar Bump Redux

Thanks to Patrick Goldstein for waiting two full weeks before rewriting my piece on the extreme lack of an Oscar bump this year. Looks like he read the blog on Saturday for even more detail about what films have done what so far.
Unfortunately, he didn’t read carefully enough and decided, in his wisdom, to completely overlook the details and to keep selling the load of crap he loves about the marketplace instead of putting the responsibility in the places it so obviously is.
Specifically… you can’t get an Oscar bump unless you market your movie when you expand… and oh yeah, you have to expand.
Patrick is busy selling his “One big factor in the evaporation of the Oscar bounce has less to do with the Oscars and more to do with the commercial marketplace” theory.
And what is profoundly flawed about this – and it is not just about this, but it stands as the biggest misunderstanding of journalists covering this industry, year in and year out – is this notion that the movie business operates on some sort of continuum that is general and not deadly specific.
Of COURSE it was the actual movies – and their studios’ unwillingness to chase an Oscar bump – that didn’t make more money. There is no way to explain this away. People, whether we think they are brilliant or idiots, make choices. They are not automatons. They are no without will. They are, in the end, just like you and me, the dumbest and the smartest among us

Klady's 4 Day Estimates… P-Daydy

More Slumavation

ACE Awards…
BEST EDITED FEATURE FILM (DRAMATIC):
SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE
Chris Dickens
BEST EDITED FEATURE FILM (COMEDY OR MUSICAL):
WALL-E
Stephen Schaffer
BEST EDITED DOCUMENTARY:
Man on Wire
Jinx Godfrey
STUDENT EDITING COMPETITION
Junna Xiao

Question Of The Day: What Best Picture Winners In The Last 20 Years Are "Worthy" And Why?

As is so often the case, people who want to complain find a way to complain.
But let’s flip the lid on this one… what films that have won the Best Picture Oscar in the last 20 years really should have won, in your opinion, and why?
And if you are really daring, answer me this… do your reasons as to why become backdoor qualifiers for other pictures you DON’T think were worthy?
In the end, are the ones that “deserve” it deserving because of some strong, clear criteria or because YOU liked them more than the others?

BYOB – President's Day

If you are waiting for your mail today…
If you really need to get quarters at the bank…
If you are overestimating the day for Friday the 13th’s Monday…
YOU MIGHT BE A BYOBer!

Slumdog Wins Another Award… Shocker, Huh?

Los Angeles 14 February 2009

Weekend Estimates by Klady

While Friday The 13th will not be anywhere close to being the biggest 4-day R-rated opening ever, it will easily be the best start in the series. (Freddy v Jason did $40.1 million in its first 4 days.) There is an outside chance that it will break Ghost Rider‘s President’s Day record $52 million 4-day start of 2 years ago… but it’s unlikely. Based on Sunday estimates, the film is running about $3 million behind that record.
If Friday manages to get to $100 million, that will break the tie between WB and the deceased Shaye/Lynne New Line for $100 million movies in the last 12 months, with NL taking the lead with 4… which, obviously, WB will match in a few weeks with Watchmen. But Old NL is batting .500 (4 of 8 with Friday) while WB rolled out 14 to get their 3 so far… and the sticker price comparison… well…
The big difference between this year

Friday Estimates by Saint Valentine of Klady

Five and a half years without The Mask seems to have built up a lot of wanna see… thank God they didn’t put Jamie Kennedy in this one.
I thought it was particularly interesting that three different pay-tv networks were runing Jason content last night, often for hour after hour after hour.
The last Jason film (v. Freddy) opened to $36 million. This opening should beat that handily. It will also beat the opening of Marcus Nispel’s first remake of a classic, Texas Chainsaw Massacre by a significant margin. Nispel’s first in this form also did an unusually good near-3x opening domestically. If that holds here, we may be looking at the first $100 million Jason film… which one should note, has never been achieved by any of the Saw films. We also havenm’t seen any horror remake of any kind do $100 million since The Grudge in 2004. Of course, it has to get there first…
The news for the other two new films was not as happy. Shopaholic came in behind the second Friday of HJNTIY and The International, perhaps the worst title for a studio movie in years, couldn’t beat the third Friday of Taken, a movie that will shockingly be in a close fight with Paul Blart: Mall Cop for the title of Most Proftable Film Of First Quarter 2009.
And Blart hitting $100 million is important for Sony, where the dissapointment of Pink Panther 2 (which is also brutally painful for an in-trouble MGM) and The WinterSleeperNational (which was, at least, hedged with German tax credits) is sharp. The studio has a long wait now until Angels & Demons – just a couple of Screen Gems films in between – and the pressure on that one to come close to the numbers on the first of the franchise will be intense. And that’s the only real franchise film of the year for the studio, so like I said… intense.
The hold for Coraline is encouraging.
And Slumdog remains the only Oscar nominee in the Top 10.

BYOB Friday The 13th

Official Rejection

I saw a smart little documentary last night called Official Rejection, a doc about the experience of one group of filmmakers who got rejected from Sundance, Slamdance, and a parade of other festivals before they start making the journey into the third tier of U.S. festivals, which brought its own ups and downs.

The filmmakers, writer/director Paul Osborne and film’s subject/director of the rejected film that Osborne wrote, Ten ’til Noon, Scott Storm, go through this journey with humor and a willingness to expose their limitations, especially in personal relationships. They did a good job of getting a strong line-up of interviewees – Kevin Smith, Tracey Lords, Chris Gore, and Lloyd Kaufman among them – and did a nice with those interviews.
The weakness of the film is that it is too long, it loses its narrative flow a bit in the third act, and for me, there were not enough independent voices about the fest circuit (guys who would actually do interviews, like Jeff Dowd, Mickey Cottrell, Mark Lipsky, Ted Hope, etc.).
I also wondered about the timing of this “first screening.” It’s months after Sundance/Slamdance, so while I am sure they wouldn’t bother even trying for Sundance with this film that’s tough on that fest, you would have thought it would have been a lock for Slamdance. It was not. On the website (and not in the film, which should have it in there), they acknowledge that this film, following in the 2-time rejection of Ten ’til Noon by Slamdance, was also rejected by this year’s fest..
Really, I don’t get that.
One of the really interesting sectons is the self-shredding by Chicago IndieFest, an apparent disaster zone also reported on by the Chicago Reader back then.
Anyway, watch for the film on the fest circuit. Like many docs these days, there is a lack of high-level filmmaking skill on display. But it does the job of telling the story. And if you have spent any time on the fest circuit, you will recognize and identify with much of the movie. And if not, you will get some insight into what everything but the biggest 10 (or so) fests in the United States are like.

DP/30 – Fernando Meirelles, Blindness

This was taped back in Toronto in September, before the film opened here in the U.S. The film is now out on DVD.
The video interview, in QT, is after the jump…

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