BYOB 11011

American Masters Does The Dude

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DGA

It’s been one of those crazed, computerless days.

I’m not shocked by the nominations. No, it’s not good for True Grit‘s Best Picture winning odds. You have to go back to 2001 and 1999 to find DGA Achievement In Motion Pictures winners whose films didn’t win Best Picture (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Saving Private Ryan)… and in both cases, the Best Picture winner was one of the other nominees.

I would say that Fincher is a stone lock to win this award.

Jim Carrey Is Black Swan (SNL)

It’s from the “shoulda been funnier” department, but Carrey is funny.

Looks Like Them Thar HFPA Foreigners Got It!

The Tourist passed $100 million internationally this weekend. Seven markets with #1 openings (Portugal, Ukraine, Hong Kong, Norway, South Africa, Israel, Philippines) and three holdover #1s (Spain, Singapore, Vietnam).

In Russia, it was the 18th biggest opening EVAH!

In Russia, Portugal, Ukraine, Norway, South Africa, and Israel it opened bigger than Wanted or Salt!

The road to Oscar goes through Norway, baby!

Weekend Estimates by Klady

The Giffords Discourse

My primary computer went in for repairs yesterday and I have, not unintentionally, stayed offline.

I think that 85% of the conversation in the last thread was completely worth having.

Here is my thought… the rhetoric from both sides of the aisle, particularly from the party without the presidency in hand, gets extreme and stupid. George W. Bush was not The Devil and his relative position amongst presidents is an issue to be better considered from a distance.

But the level and tone of the rhetoric from the right in the last few years, starting at the McCain/Palin rallies and onwards, has a very strong undercurrent of violence, the suggestion of violent overthrow, and a constant heartbeat of “them vs us.” Even on the most extreme tips of the left, represented by Kos and occasionally Michael Moore, may hit some of this harshness, but it never (in recent history) has been mainstreamed into the politics of the party the way it has been by the right.

So this shooter may just be another 20something who lost his shit in a profound way trying to transition into grown up life and killed a bunch of people. He may even lean left. He may have nothing to do with Sarah Palin, tea partiers, or whatever else.

To blame this on anyone specifically on the right in a “blood on their hands” way would be too specific. But to dismiss the culture of rage that has been encouraged on the right, including the gun culture – have we heard what kind of weapon this guy shot 15 people with before being tackled – is equally foolhardy.

Leadership has become invisible. It is time for the right to stop putting elections ahead of morality and to stop catering to, even encouraging, the worst nature of people. Fox News wants to spin all day? I say, “Fine.” Just don’t make stuff up and continue to indulge extremists, like The Birthers, with a wink. You want to make the argument that we would be better off with smaller government? Great! But when you call the other side “socialists” for voting for most of the same packages that support Americans through hard times and old age, you are not arguing what you believe (or claim to believe), you are just trying to put a target – sometimes literally – on the back of another politician.

The sad truth is, the difference between Republican and Democrat, politically, in this country, is marginal. It may seem extreme when Republicans openly say they’ll shut down the government over a 3% tax break for the top 10% of wealthy Americans, but think about how marginal that issue really is.

So we have come down to branding. Hope and Change and the smart guy who has visions of a better world and articulates them beautifully and Grizzly Moms and Tea Partiers and Guns and Anti-Immigration and the ABT (Anything But Them) platform. At least that is the current incarnation.

And each side defends its brand as befits the brand, scared to let it go for even a minute, lest the audience fail to see the differentiation or to doubt the validity of the rhetoric… each scared to be Tylenol with Cyanide in it in one store in Chicago. Republicans breathed a sigh of relief when those YouTube videos turned up yesterday, not because they wouldn’t feel personally responsible or because anyone was less dead or shot, but because it kept the brand safe.

So the lies pile on top of the lies and eventually the only way anyone can see it is as “Us vs Them.”

Would this guy have been any saner if he was a rabid Palin fan? Besides the ha-ha answer, the obvious answer is “no.” But that doesn’t leave her off the hook… or any of us.

Why do people hate the health care package that was passed? Because they have been told they should hate it. Because they have been told it will end up being unfair to them because they work hard and people who don’t will reap the benefits. They have been lied to. And now, more lies are piling up as the Republicans are pretending that they would like to replace the package with another one that satisfies everyone. This is who we have become. Lobbyists’ monkeys pretending to be freedom fighters. And yes, it happens on both sides.

Perhaps it is time for the oath of office to include, “First, Do No Harm.”

Remind Us Again How The Violent Rhetoric Doesn’t Matter

Source: Sarah Palin’s TAKE BACK THE 20 website.

Essential Killing, director Jerzy Skolimowski

Friday Estimates by Deja Vu Klady

Opening a horror/thriller in this slot – first weekend after the holiday – has become a bit of a tradition. Daybreakers last year… The Unborn the year before… One Missed Call… and so on. Season of the Witch will deliver, it seems, about 60% of the least impressive opening of this group.

Also opening is Country Strong… which is… who knows? This All About Crazy Heart Eve is opening on more screens than Crazy Heart saw at any time of its run last year and this will, in turn, be a bigger weekend than Crazy Heart ever had last year. But logically, this film is headed, at best, to a similar neighborhood as its predecessor… or less. It’s still only 1425 screens. And there is no way of knowing whether the Bible Belt will make this movie as leggy as its star. Meanwhile, the less happy comparison is Youth In Revolt, which had a similar opening day and just $15m total domestic.

The movies that are suffering most from the transition from a holiday Friday to a non-holiday Friday are the kids movies. Yogi and Narnia have 66%+ drops and Potter has fallen out of the 10. I would expect somewhat of a comeback for those titles over the rest of the weekend. Not huge, but more in the 50s than the 60s.

We’re still dealing with a lack of the kinds of massive December holdovers that we’ve had in the past. So, while Avatar and Sherlock Holmes outgrossed everything on the chart on this relative date, the smaller scale hits are doing okay heading into 2011. True Grit sits on top of the chart, as it has in 6 of the last 8 days. By the time I write this, it’s passed $100 million and will look for a boost when Oscar nods hit, by then likely to be in the $2m or $3m weekend range.

Little Fockers remains the shining example of why making the third in a series is often a bad idea, though it looks like it will find its way to black ink someday, if you believe the price tag the studio has put on it. I don’t. I have no direct insight or evidence. But reports about the process suggest that the $100 million figure may be as much as 25% low. Either way, the gross is a significant disappointment, with the film scraping to get to 50% of the last film in the series’ gross, both on the domestic and international side. For comparison, the disappointing Sex & the City sequel did about 70% of the prior film’s gross.

Tron: Legacy could find its way to $300 million worldwide… but just by the hair of its chinny chin chin.

Black Swan, The Fighter, and The King’s Speech are back-to-back-to-back on today’s chart, in that order. Swan is looking like a comeback kid this Friday, up 24% from last Friday, but part of that is the odd drop it suffered last Friday, about which I still haven’t been able to get a satisfying explanation. This is the 6th day in a row that Swan has been in front of Fighter. Meanwhile, King’s Speech is doing the least business of the trio, but with the best per-screen average. All three are poised to be in the 60s or 70s, depending on awards reaction.

And here’s an awards note that should be taken with a little salt… but not too much. Last year, the first year of 10, the lowest pre-nom grosser was at $8.8m when it was nominated. I don’t think that Academy members are looking at the box office before casting their nominating ballots, so I wouldn’t count out Winter’s Bone ($6.2m) or Another Year, which has really just done a qualifying run so far. But it’s an uphill fight. A big part of that is that grossers are somewhat of an indicator of how many potential Academy voters have seen the film. In the case of Bone and Year, their studios have been screening the heck out of them for month… and are still screening. (Tomorrow night, Winter’s Bone with John Hawkes at Harmony Gold… get out those Guild cards!)

And again, this would be one of my arguments for The Ten, an idea I pooh-poohed when I had a passionate discussion about it before it went to the Academy board 20 months ago. Like others, I feared that it would put junk into the race. Instead, we are seeing a relaxing of prejudices about “success: of some films and it is the Winter’s Bones and the The Kids Are All Rights that get to play in the big sandbox because of the larger group of nominees. And I am good with The Pixar Slot too, though it would be nice to see it just be The Animation Slot in future… Pixar just keeps doing such great stuff. (I suspect that next year, we will not be assuming that Cars 2 is in… so the door is open to some other animated film.)

If this were a 5 horse race, i would bet on it being True Grit, The Social Network, The King’s Speech, Black Swan, and The Fighter. Would we really like that better?

CURRENT DOMESTIC GROSSES OF CONTENDERS GROSSING AT LEAST $8.8 MILLION
Toy Story 3 – $415m
Inception – $293m
True Grit – $114.4
The Social Network – $93.4m
The Town – $92.1m
Black Swan -$55.5
The Fighter -$52.9
The King’s Speech – $28.2
The Kids Are All Right – $20.8m
127 Hours – $10.6m
Get Low – $9.1m

BYOB Weekend

When We Leave, writer/director Feo Aladag

When We Leave is the German candidate for the Oscar for Foreign Language for 2010.

Welcome To The Future

I am thrilled to see that Fox Searchlight and FFE are moving into the future, to sanity, by making their movies digitally available to the biggest of the guilds, SAG, and their 100,000 awards voting members.

I was stunned by all the whining, back when January was floated for 2012, about how digital was not viable. It is completely viable. And devices that go to your television set with HD versions of these films should become the norm in 2011/12. It’s better for everyone.

Digital delivery can make the awards themselves better, as the excuses about not allowing documentaries and foreign language films to be voted on like the rest of the films can finally be overcome. Screeners want to be free!!! (ha ha) But seriously, there can be more films available to voters in higher quality in more quantity and when the voting period ends, the movies go away. (On screeners this year, there are a lot of unrealistic prompts about destroying screeners when the season ends.)

Now if I can only get on that list with Searchlight to download these movies!!!!

8 Weeks To Oscar: It’s Getting Serious

The column

Star Wars Goes Godfather

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