Hang A Lantern On It

Weekend Box Office

2012-01-31T12:21:00.001-08:00

Props to Boxofficemojo.com for the figures!

Weekend Box Office Report

2012-01-24T12:24:00.001-08:00

Thanks to BoxOfficeMojo.com for the numbers!

2011 Oscar Noms: And Then There Were Nine

2012-01-24T10:38:00.000-08:00

The cabal of statuette distributors at AMPAS, two years after doubling the Best Picture field from five to ten, have made another adjustment, paring it down to Nine contestant films. Why nine? Odd number magic? Cloud 9? Nine Levels of Hell?

Walter Hill once explained in the DVD extras section of The Warriors (1979) that nine was key number for a "Collective Hero" movie, the right number of members for a small group of adventurers to embody a full range of personalities and traits. Perhaps the nine nominees are this collective persona, showing all facets of the human condition, set out against a wilderness of adversity and indifferent Academy voters. Or maybe I'm thinking about this a bit too much.

Of course if they had stuck with ten films, the Academy could have considered including Drive, Young Adult or Bridesmaids. Sheesh. Speaking of which, Kristin Wiig got a writing nod for Bridesmaids but not an acting nomination-- but Melissa McCarthy snagged a Supporting nod (this year's Marisa Tomei?). And Terrence Malick got a Best Director nod for The Tree of Life, but not for screenplay-- because there wasn't one.

Okay, here are the nominees, coupled with even more overheated insight.

The Artist - Technically a foreign film, nonetheless this black and white silent is 100% Hollywood to the core. I think this is a litmus test for Academy voting sensibilities: If The Artist takes the top prize, I think it indicates the industry folks in the voting body have given up caring about the outside world.

The Descendants - Didn't see it. Looked like an Oscar movie right out of the gate, akin to Up In The Air (2009), complete with George Clooney. Still: go get 'em Alexander Payne!

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close - Really? I've read four major-paper reviews on it, and they each hated it. Is this the "Remember 9/11: it was really, really bad" nominee?

The Help - A studio mainstream summer-release film in the Best Picture category? What's this doing here? Actually, it is a fine film, a look at race and discrimination told from a simplified YA-style perspective.

Hugo - Like The Artist, This is another Hollywood self-referential nod, though it reaches back a little further than Golden Age Hollywood for it's source material.

Midnight in Paris - Hey, it's another film set in Paris featuring cameos by historical characters! Two in a year, what are the chances. Nice to see Woody Allen in the running again, how long has it been?

Moneyball - Just saw this one. Love to see it win, as it was a mature, complex film featuring recognizably grown-up characters.

The Tree of Life - My personal favorite film this year. It probably doesn't stand a chance of winning, as it didn't have a story per se. But it did have dinosaurs, Barton Springs Pool and Brad Pitt, and that's a powerful combination. The official line from AMPAS says the nominees for this film are "to be determined." Terrence Malick must be looking through piles of receipts to see who paid for everything.

War Horse - Quite a few reviewers intoned on the Old Hollywood Epic quality of War Horse, pointing out reverently that this movie was actually shot on film. I mentioned earlier that the last film camera was manufactured in 2009-- which makes the 'novelty' of a film actually shot on film yet another milestone in the triumph of digital filmmaking (and further evidence that Kodak's bankruptcy is sadly well-justified).

All in all, it's a typical year for Oscar-- a lot of artfully made, not particularly successful movies vying for prestige and an early 2012 re-release bump.

Weekend Box Office

2012-01-17T12:04:00.000-08:00

No video this week. My computer is suffering from some iTunes related illness and it crashes if I try anything fancy.

3 new movies on the chart this week, here in the dead center of January. At #1 it's Contraband, Mark Wahlberg's annual action thriller. It made $25 mil. 2nd place goes to the 3D re-release of Beauty and The Beast, which pulled down 18 million. Not bad for a 20 year old title that has already paid for itself! In 4th place, Dolly Parton/Queen Latifah romantic comedy Joyful Noise, which brought in $12 million.

As I predicted, last week's #1 title The Devil Inside plummeted like a stone, dropping 76% from its opening week. Get thee behind me!

Weekend Box Office -- For LAST weekend

2012-01-10T12:16:00.002-08:00

Figures courtesy boxofficemojo.com, which you can resolve to check more frequently in the coming year.

Weekend Box Office

2012-01-10T12:16:00.001-08:00

numbers courtesy boxofficemojo.com

Don't Laugh, This Is Replacing TV in 5 Years

2011-12-21T16:13:00.001-08:00

It's the Best Viral Videos from this year! Enjoy, or rather "enjoy".

Weekend Box Office

2011-12-21T00:25:00.001-08:00

Numbers Courtesy boxofficemojo.com

Walk, Don't Run

2011-12-15T09:09:00.001-08:00

And maybe consider which direction to walk.

Weekend Box Office

2011-12-13T12:28:00.001-08:00

Numbers courtesy boxofficemojo.com

The Orgin of a Gag on Facebook

2011-12-12T13:13:00.000-08:00

I had the good fortune this weekend to be cast in a short independent film. Actually, I had the good forture to be cast in it last year, but it took a while to get the shoot together. It's a few scenes from a proposed full length feature about a college student struggling with brain disorder, and I play his callous guidance counselor who is trying to convince him to go on medication. Presumably if the short cuts together good enough to entice investors, I'm cast in the feature as well. Either way, I'm thrilled that they stuck with me this long.

Can't say the name of the feature. Frankly, it would get a few people in trouble. For example, we were shooting in the conference room of a condo in a Beverly Hills-adjacent area, and we were delayed for half an hour while we waited for the producer to let us in. He couldn't open the door until his wife left, because she wasn't supposed to know we were there. This kind of thing is common with independents - I took a producing course at Hollywood Film School where they specifically said don't bother with permits, just be ready to stall when the cops ask you what you're doing. Tell them the permit is back at the office and you'll send someone to get it. How long will it take? A little longer than it takes to get the shot.

So the Facebook gag: this conference room is in the lobby of the condo, and was doubling as a guidance counselor's office. Looked a little ritzy to me but I dunno, maybe the kid's going to a private school where the staff has french doors and marble flooring. Anyway, one of the cameramen kept getting forced farther his left as they were framing a shot, until he was half standing in a potted fern in the corner of the room. "It's like I'm shooting in Vietnam here!" he quipped. Hence my gag:

Independent film production is like Vietnam: you start out with the best intentions but pretty soon you've lost half your crew and you can't remember why you started in the first place.

Anti-Christmas Movies

2011-12-07T11:40:00.000-08:00

(Full disclosure: This is another re-edited TPN rescue. Well, about 75% of it, at least.)

The holidays have hit big time, and I'm tellin' ya the TV Yuletide assault in already in high gear. Just in the last week, I've seen bits and pieces of “Christmas Carol” adaptations featuring Reginald Owen, Alistair Sim, George C. Scott, Kelsey Grammer, Bill Murray (Scrooged: awful, awful) and Patrick Stewart. (no sign of the Muppets, The Flintstones, Mickey Mouse, Blackadder or Mr. Magoo as of yet.)


Ignorance and Want, from Richard Williams' Christmas Carol

The 2009 George Zemekis CG version voiced by Jim Carrey is in heavy rotation on the premium channels (a fine interpretation, IMO) but the 1971 half-hour adaptation made by animator Richard (Roger Rabbit) Williams hasn't surfaced yet. This is a real gem among Christmas Carol adaptations-- It's a bit truncated story-wise, but it was painstakingly animated in the style of a 19^th century engraving. It's also quite scary. Dickens' original story is quite scary in and of itself, but most production tend to pull punches so as not to frighten the kiddies. Not this one. A fuzzy upload can be seen online here.

As long as we're parsing Holiday entertainment, Slate has an article listing the five worst Christmas movies of all time. Two of the usual suspects are in the list: Santa Claus Conquers The Martians and the truly weird Mexican Santa-vs-Satan Santa Claus.

All well and good to list bad movies, but I'm here to list my three favorite Anti-Christmas movies.

The anti-Christmas movie does not just point up the absurdities of the Holiday season, it actively tries to deconstruct the reasons and traditions of Christmas. Most of the time this is done in a spirit of irony, pointing out the sillier parts of what is undeniably an over-the-top holiday. I for one will argue that sappy, formulaic star vehicles like Jingle All the Way or Deck the Halls or Christmas with the Kranks or The Santa Clause trilogy in their own way do more damage to the spirit of Christmas than films that actively make sport of it. Fake sincerity is generally more pernicious and damaging than active mockery, a form of complicit betrayal, a treason of the season, if you will.

The Hebrew Hammer (d. Jonathan Kesselman, 2003) The titular character, the defender of Jews everywhere, is a superhero in the Mystery Men genre, thoroughly mortal and played with a streetwise flair by Adam Goldberg . The heavy of the piece is Damien Claus (Andy Dick), the evil son of Santa Claus, who kills his father and sets out to make Christmas the only December holiday. Central to his plan: making all Jewish children watch It's a Wonderful Life. The Hammer eventually defeats Damien and saves Hanukkah by-- and I'm quoting both Wikipedia and the film here-- “using Judaism's ultimate weapon (complaining and guilt).” This is a fun little film with a good heart and a message of tolerance, even as it rips on every ethnic stereotype you can imagine non-stop.

Santa's Slay (d. David Steiman, 2005). The opening scene was so stunning I had to see it all the way through. The Masons, a typical bickering middle-class family, are sitting down to Christmas dinner. Santa enters the house and proceeds to gruesomely slaughter everyone. Leading the cameo appearances as the Masons are James Caan, Fran Drescher and Chris Kattan. Santa is played by WWE wrestler Bill Goldberg. See a pattern here?

The premise of this film is that Santa is actually a demon who lost a bet with an angel and had to do 1000 years of community service as a good guy giving out presents. Now the bet is off and every Christmas he goes on a killing rampage. He's basically a thinly veiled lift of Robot Santa from “Futurama:” according to the film, before Santa lost the bet and had to be nice people spent Christmas hiding from him.

As weird and inspired as the opening sequence was, the film quickly goes downhill from there and becomes a holiday-themed gore-fest. Like The Hebrew Hammer this movie has a strange sort of Jewish bent to it, but unlike that film Santa's Slay is not well-written enough to convey any sort of message, which makes it fairly worthless entertainment.

Bad Santa (d. Terry Zwigoff, 2005). A holiday movie with 170 occurrences of the F-word, its protagonist is Willy, a perverted, foul-mouthed, alcoholic safecracker who badly impersonates Santa in department stores so he and his elf-sized partner can rob it after hours. Billy Bob Thornton does an impressive job of portraying a worthless, shiftless bastard with absolutely no redeeming qualities and lots of repellent ones. I'll venture an opinion about Mr. Thornton as Willy: he does a good job, but I never thought he was quite right for the role. He's too rangy and skinny, even though I can't imagine anyone else doing a better job on the voiceovers. Apparently, Jack Nicholson was interested in playing Willy, but ultimately had other commitments and had to back out. A shame: he would have been just perfect.

Wonderfully, Bad Santa never even gets close to a cheery holiday-themed message: in the end, there is redemption for Willy, but without spoiling the ending let's say it involves the Christmas sentiment of others, not the principal characters. It's the perfect antidote to the holidays.

Weekend Box Office

2011-12-06T12:15:00.001-08:00

Check out boxofficemojo.com for more figures!

Matango: The Brady Bunch Connection

2011-12-02T10:31:00.000-08:00

The sexy, sexy Italian one-sheet for Matango.

This is the other old TPN post worthy of rescue (and re-editing).

In this article we're going to discover why "The Brady Bunch" owes so much to Godzilla.

I had the pleasure of watching a Netflix DVD loaned to me by Chris, my business partner: Matango (1963). It was known in the US as Attack of the Mushroom People. It scared the living crap out me when I was a wee lad watching "Chiller Diller Matinee" on Channel 44. Remarkable to see this film fresh and uncut, in 2.35:1 TohoScope, bright Fujicolor and subtitled Japanese. The channel 44 version was the one we ALL saw as kids: A heavily edited, clumsily dubbed, 16mm pan-and-scan print, run through a (no doubt) crummy film chain-- it was so washed out my recollections if it are in black and white.

This film was directed by Ishiro Honda, The Kaiji Eiga (Giant Monster Movie) master who directed Godzilla, Rodan and countless others. Matango is an unusual Honda film, an atmospheric horror movie with people-sized monsters.

Well, of course there's a range of Japanese action figures
available for Matango! The monsters depicted here
are much cuter than in the film.

The things that scared the piss out of me as a kid are still there: the ghastly, faceless mushroom people, the distorted laughter on the soundtrack, the air of gloom and slow death. Justifiably a cult classic.

A have heard all effective horror films play on primal phobias: violence, heights, enclosed spaces. (Daniel's brother Ed once surmised that if someone could realize a fortune if they make a horror film exploiting the number one fear in America: Public Speaking.) Matango works as a horror flick on several levels:

• The scary, lumbering mushroom folk, they're pretty scary in a monster-movie sort of way.

• The fact these fungal folks were once people and the characters are going to turn into them unless they can escape plays into fears of loss of humanity and Self.

• Matango plays on fears of germs and filth and disease. The island the principals are marooned on is lush and tropical: the abandoned ship they take up residence in is covered with mold, dry rot and fungus. They manage to clean it, but the mold soon returns. For the fastidiously clean Japanese audience the film was designed for, the creeping corruption and rot must have been harder to take than the prospect of turning into an ambulatory shiitake.

This film was based on "The Voice in the Night," a short story published in 1907 by pioneering English sci-fi author William Hope Hodgson. Conversely, it has long been rumored that Matango was an inspiration for "Gilligan's Island," that iconic, unlikely comedy series from the 1960s.

Exhibit A: Cast of Matango. Left to right: "Writer," Bombshell,
Chaste Young Girl, Skipper, Rich Guy, First Mate and Professor.
Note the First Mate has a red shirt, as did Gilligan.

After a careful comparison of the two works, allow me to lay such rumors to rest: It was. TV Producer Sherwood Schwartz (who also created "The Brady Bunch") had a motive, opportunity and even tacit permission to swipe the basic premise of Honda's film.

The basic story common to both movie and TV show involves seven people from various walks of life on a short pleasure cruise. They get caught in a storm, marooning them on a deserted tropical island. Schwartz basically took this first half-hour of Matango and pitched it to the network, adding "and then hilarity ensues!" He left off the rising themes of violence, greed, lust, starvation, and death that drives the latter hour of Matango, replacing these with coconut shortwave radios and funny guest stars.

Exhibit B: flashback scene. The dialog in subtitles is that
of the "writer," explaining why his manuscript (on
the table) seems so derivative.

But the cast of "Gilligan's Island" is almost entirely present in Matango: Skipper, First Mate, Professor, Chaste Young Girl, Glamorous Bombshell, Rich Guy. He made one cast change, and a very telling one: Instead of Mrs. Rich Guy ("Lovey" Howell), the seventh castaway in Matango is a writer. He's the first character to, when things begin to get desperate, steal food from the others, and the first to eat the fateful mushrooms. He's a morally weak character who, in a flashback scene, plainly admits to plagiarism.

Puzzling evidence.

.

Weekend Box Office

2011-11-29T13:03:00.001-08:00

Numbers courtesty BoxOfficeMojo.com

Some Muppet Semiotics

2011-11-27T01:48:00.000-08:00

Went to see the new Disney film The Muppets with my sister's family, at a kid-heavy Saturday afternoon matinee, no less. Sort of a mixed reaction: Adults loved it, and some of a certain age got teary-eyed at the end. Most of the older kids loved it, but some of the younger tots (like my youngest niece and the seat-kicking little squealer sitting right behind me) got bored at the one-third point and started a noisy rebellion. I thought it was very clever and entertaining (all I ask for in a movie, really)-- but there was a weirdness about the whole affair that lingered after the tag-less credits.

The Muppets is a bildungsroman with two main characters: Gary (Jason Segel) and his brother Walter, who is a muppet. We see their relationship develop in a series of childhood flashbacks, Gary growing to adult size while Walter remains about 2' tall. We never see their parents fully onscreen-- but we see enough of them to know they are both human. So the movie's context is set up: sentient beings made of stuffing and felt are treated as fully normal, fellow people.

This context is expanded as Gary and Walter discover what has become of the famous muppets as the years have passed since their show faded from our collective memory (and even syndication): The principals have all moved on with their lives. Kermit lives alone in a moldering Bel Air mansion among mementos of his former fame, attended to by a hilariously antiquated 80s-era robot (my favorite new character, as I'm a bit of an 80s robot myself). Miss Piggy runs a magazine, Gonzo has become a manufacturing magnate, and Fozzie is barely hanging on fronting a muppet cover band in Reno. In other words, this elaboration shows that muppets have exact same aspirations, failings and material needs as any nominal human being.

(There is a very brief but philosophically jarring shot in the film where the camera pans over the picture-covered walls of Kermit's abandoned studio office. Among all the publicity stills of long-past "Muppet Show" guest stars is a 8x10 glossy of Kermit and Jim Henson. This is what I'd call a "meta-meta-moment:" even in the self-referential world of this film, it is an image of a concept that cannot be parsed.)

Walter, though raised in human society, is fascinated by the muppets, and it is made obvious as the story unfolds that he will eventually fully accept his muppet-ness and be folded into the troupe. Really, the main plot arc hinges on his acceptance a a "real" muppet: His brother Gary cannot fully become a man and consummate his relationship with his long, long, long-standing girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams, about a radiant as she was in Enchanted) until Walter has moved on and no longer needs his protection and companionship.

But what is a muppet?

In intrinsic reality, we all know what they are: puppets, animated and voiced by human performers. Bur this definition is unavailable in The Muppets, so we have to move on to the movie's in-universe definition: A muppet is a special sort of sentient being, an analog of a flesh-and-blood being (frog, pig, chicken, etc.) or an abstract "monster" (Animal, Gonzo, etc.).

But how are they "special?" This can be uncovered by flipping over the definition again. Substitute "celebrated entertainer" for "muppet" in the subtext and it all makes sense. The muppets, once-celebrated entertainers who have fallen into obscurity or non-showbiz professions, are shown to be incomplete unless they are entertainers and being celebrated for doing so.

The major story arc for all these characters is their collective effort to put on one last show to save their old, abandoned studio from development. But if you think about it, this effort makes no sense. In the first act we see that ALL the muppets have moved on-- they have abandoned their old studio themselves, as their audience vanished over time. The only way this can be made logical is as they re-discover that their only definition is as entertainers, and cannot fully exist any other way.

This definition applies to novice-muppet Walter as well. He cannot really become a member of the muppet troupe until he finds his unique talent-- which he eventually, and surprisingly, does. The point is hammered home again: it's not enough to be made of felt and have little stick arms. Walter has to have a solid, show-stopping act. He becomes a celebrated entertainer.

The Muppet franchise has not always been part of the Disney universe: They were acquired in 2004 and The Muppets Studio LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary. A lot of Disney's offerings (especially at cable-TV level) have a strange self-referential obsession with showbiz (High School Musical, "Hannah Montana," etc.). The original 1970s "Muppet Show" has always been a show about a show, but the franchise's new run through the Disney echo filter has transformed it into a perfect ouroboros: A movie about a movie about a show about a show, featuring muppet performers who yearn to be muppet performers.

Weekend Box Office

2011-11-22T12:44:00.001-08:00

Numbers courtesy boxofficemojo.com

More First Movies Ever

2011-11-21T12:04:00.000-08:00

Here are a few more first movies, culled from the Facebook responses to that last post about first movies:

David (California): Where's Poppa? I was five. Nightmares.

--Where's Poppa? (also titled Going Ape, D. Carl Reiner, 1970) is one of the films I remember (along with Slap Shot, Mother, Jugs and Speed and Blue Collar) playing over and over and over on Home Box Office back in the early converter-box days. And young David was driven to bad dreams by the edited, "happy ending" version of this film-- the original version (which is intact on the DVD) has the darkest, most twisted ending of any comedy since Dr. Strangelove.

Toby (California): Yellow Submarine. At age five I thought the Blue Meanies were super cool.

Chris (Washington State): The Apple Dumpling Gang.

Caroline (California): I have a terrible memory of a Western where a stagecoach with a set of four white horses went over a cliff. It drove me screaming and crying from the theater. But the first full-length one I really remember was Help! at the drive-in. Wore my footie PJs.

Lynn (California): Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was the first movie I saw at a drive-in (with my parents). Not sure if that was the first one ever although it might be.

Marianne (California): I was the youngest of four... who the hell knows? As the youngest, my family fed me memories just to shut me up. Half of my memories actually happened to another sibling, not me. As an example, I was told that I had nightmares after seeing Darby O'Gill and the Little People. But it turns out that was Rebecca. 

-- Which is quite an insight. Memory is a mercurial, hit-or-miss thing before age 5. They can be constructed out of disparate experiences or influenced by hearsay. Makes sense that a lot of what we "remember" are actually things told to us by older relatives from which we have stitched together into real-seeming, but fake, memories.

Which is why that first remembered film is important-- it establishes a time when you can coherently remember anything. It has been remarked on over and over by smarter folks than me that movies are a shared dream, and the conventions of cinema's image-based storytelling has evolved over the decades to ever better fit into the deeper parts of perception, to seem more and more like a dream or a set of real memories. Where do we leave off and movie-based memories begin? How much of our personality is borrowed wholesale from the media we consume? What you talkin' 'bout, Willis?

The developed ability in childhood to stitch together a received narrative into something you replay half a lifetime later says quite a lot about the power of cinema and remarkable qualities of the human mind.

And finally, the antidote to the charm of the "first movie ever" memory:

Cova Lee (California) Fantasia… It's still on my all-time most hated list! That would a hatred stemming from the psychological torture of being forced to sit through the most boring movie ever made more times than I can count! The last time being my 12th birthday with a bunch of my friends… so not cool because Grease was playing in the theatre next door and of course my father caught us trying to sneak into that instead!

Abby's First Movie Redux

2011-11-18T01:58:00.000-08:00

(This is a re-edited posting from the Box Office Weekly Podcast site from around March 2008. I just recovered an old hard drive with a bunch of these articles-- the online versions are gone, down some Australian memory hole. I'm republishing this one, and one other that I think is totally worth revisiting. --S)

Last weekend my niece Abigail reached a milestone in her young life-- she was taken to her first movie.

This event is a sort of maturity marker for parents-- To take a very young child to a theatres makes some basic assumptions: Will he or she sit still for two hours? Will he or she understand, or at least uncomprehendingly enjoy, the movie? Does he or she know that you have to use your quiet, whisper voice? Well, these SHOULD be the criteria for taking small children to movies: Anyone who has attended a popular film lately must believe, as I do, that there must be some sort of terrible babysitter shortage.

According to her mommy Abigail, who is two years and nine months old, passed with flying colors, enjoying Horton Hears a Who! (d. Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino, 2008) in a matinee screening.

I had an opportunity to drop by Abigail's place, where she consented to a brief interview about her cinematic experience. She is just as cute as a bug's ear, my niece.

UNCLE SKOT: Abigail?
ABIGAIL: What, unka?
US: Did you see a movie?
A: Uh huh.
US: What did you see?
A: Um. Horton.
US: What's Horton?
A: Elephant.
ABIGAIL'S MOMMY: What do the Whos say, Abigail? (note: They say "We are here!")
A: Help! Help!
US: Do you want to go to the movies again?
A: I want to go to Africa.
(Abigail begins a new conversation with her imaginary friend Michelle, effectively ending the interview.)

It brought back something of a special event for everyone: That first movie. Really, you were taken you your first film before the age of four you don't really remember it. Long-lasting memories are tied into brain developments that occur about age four or so, so even if you have scraps of vivid memories your brain didn't have a good filing system in place. Still, that first movie one can remember seeing was special.

I dropped a few emails into the ether, asking people the first film they and got a surprising variety of answers. Actually, most of the first movie experiences were Disney movies, which is not surprising at all: In the pre-home video days they constantly re-released their features, two a year by average.

GLEN (California--where he was as a kid): Mary Poppins. I'd just turned four years old. The film was released in August of that '64, but I'm sure it was tough for mom to get the trip all organized, so we made it to the theater near the end of the film's first run. Mom and Grandma took my two sisters and I. I'm pretty sure we saw it in Burbank, but maybe San Fernando. The house must've been packed, because I remember we were in the front row. The theater seemed really fancy, wherever it was.

JOHN (California): I believe it was Snow White. I have the vaguest of memories of sitting in the theater watching it.

SUE (Great Britain): Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

Other recollections are eclectic to say the least:

DANNY (Louisiana): Well, I definitely remember seeing The Poseidon Adventure in the theater. When the ship rolled over, so did my soda! The Jungle Book was also a big early one. Not sure if that predates Poseidon.

SCOTT (California): It’s interesting that you would ask this question today. On this morning’s show [Scott hosts a weekly radio show] we talked about the passing of Arthur C. Clarke, and I mentioned seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey in the theater when I was 4, and that’s the reason I’m so messed up now.

CHRIS (California): Dr. Doolittle.

DAEV (Arizona): Hmm… I have a vivid recollection of seeing 2001 at a drive-in, but I think Cat Ballou or Oklahoma! was the first I saw in an indoor theater, probably at a matinee.

CAMERON (Australia): I can't remember exactly but it was either Enter The Dragon (my dad taking me to the drive-in) or Star Wars!

BILL (California): I have a memory of seeing a very boring film about Bigfoot at the Capitola theater. Searching IMDb, it may have been Bigfoot: Man or Beast? I guess I was about six.

This last one is great-- Bigfoot was released by American National, a bottom-dwelling roadshow exhibitor like Sunn Classic Pictures used to be. They specialized in exploitation films: Chariots of the Gods, In Search of Historic Jesus, stuff like that. They released their terrible, non-factual documentaries "four-wall:" Rent movie screens (all 'four walls") in a particular TV demographic region, then blitz the local channels with lurid, overheated ads. Fast money made, they would move on to the next demographic area.

Still, it's all part of the film experience we all fell in love with. There you are, tiny in your chair, in a big dark room. The images on the screen are titanic, the colors intense, the sound loud. There is something about the act an ritual of moviegoing that makes us all kids, looking up at a world that is larger than life, larger than us.

--Skot C.

p.s. What, MY first movie? I'll never forget it: The Sand Pebbles (d. Robert Wise, 1966). What on earth was my dad thinking, dragging a four-year-old to a bloody, violent, morally ambiguous, patently adult three-hour-long film? Well, he was a former Marine, and he probably was very interested in the story of a headstrong, anti-authoritarian sailor (Steve McQueen) caught up in the turmoil of American gunboat diplomacy in 1920s China? He probably thought I'd, in the parlance of the times, "learn something." Dad would later drag me along to enjoy such family-friendly movies as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Cool Hand Luke (1967) and The Wild Bunch (1969).

I did learn something: I learned how beautiful and exotic the world looked when it was shot in Panavision and projected on an 80' screen. The photography for The Sand Pebbles was (and still is!) stunning, washes of blues and oranges, Chinese alleys and streets disappearing into mist. The final showdown in the Mission was a perfectly choreographed sequence (rendered in dark blues and grays by DP Joseph MacDonald), just Steve McQueen and his Browning Automatic Rifle valiantly defying his fate. On the way home, dad told me that was the kind of gun he used in the Marines (they gave the tall guys in the squad the heavy machine gun).

So I gained two things at my first movie: the beginning of an abiding passion for cinema, and a rudimentary working knowledge of mid-20th-century American military firearms. --s

Some Thoughts On 3D Glasses

2011-11-16T12:11:00.001-08:00

Weekend Box Office

2011-11-15T12:58:00.001-08:00

Numbers courtesy BoxOfficeMojo.com.

Weekend Box Office

2011-11-08T12:25:00.001-08:00

Where does he get those numbers from, anyway?

Weekend Box Office

2011-11-01T12:24:00.000-07:00

The numbers come from here.

The 2011 Austin Film Festival Day-to-Day

2011-11-01T11:52:00.000-07:00

Thursday October 20th - Flew in non-stop from San Jose, got a lift to David Miller's house from David himself.

The last time I was here in 2009, when John and I were finalists, I spent all my time in the AFF bubble, the four-block area centered on the Driskill and Stephen F. Austin hotels in the heart of downtown. This time I was lodging in South Austin, 6 miles from the action, and I had a car to use (and, unfortunately, pay to park). This situation, and the fact I had nothing in competition this year, gave me a somewhat more realistic take on things.

Didn't do much more that day than get my laminates and meet up with some nice folks for some drinks at the Driskill Bar, seated right next to where Joh, our wives and I celebrated our win two years ago. Left, had Tex-Mex with David and got too hammered make the first AFF late-night party.

Friday October 20th - Made several panels. One, called "A Shot of Inspiration" with Shane (Lethal Weapon) Black and Jim (Fight Club) Uhls, was quite excellent and inspirational as advertised. Another, with some dev girl from Pixar, bombed out and went to questions after only 15 minutes. After excellent BBQ at the French Legation, waited in an immense line for the AFF screening of The Rum Diary.

Bruce Robinson (L) and Johnny Depp (R)

The film itself was fairly good, though there was something definitely wrong with it. Protagonist problems, perhaps. In the Q&A afterwards Johnny Depp is nothing short of charming and clever, but writer-director Bruce Robinson (Withnail and I) was reeling, sloppy, incoherently drunk. (All part of his bio, apparently). This threw off moderator Elvis Mitchell, who was snippy throughout the session. It didn't help that pinwheel-eyed Depp fans were asking questions like "I'm making a short film and I'm wondering, Johnny Depp, if you'd want to play God?" His response: "That sounds great, but… the research…" This debacle was the talk of the AFF for the rest of the weekend.

Attended a late-night party at Ruth's Chris Steak House. This was just as it was last year: A bunch of writers jammed into a room with free Dos Equis and 100dB conversational levels. Met a slick-haired fellow from Florida who made a film about an 18-year-old virgin stripper and, minutes later, a big-eyed young lady from Michigan who had a rather touching family story as a short in competition. Both these folks shot their films on Red One cameras in 2.35:1. See? Anybody can do it these days. Chatted up Lawrence Kasdan and met Thomas Jane.

Saturday, October 21st - My favorite moment came early in the morning at the Silver Valley Donut Shop on William Cannon Drive. The place was full of locals, Good Ol' Boys. As one fellow made for the door, his friend said "Have a good'un, Earl. Stay out of trouble."

Without breaking stride, Earl replied, "You can't tell me what to do! I might be fixin' to start something."

Typical Panel, Driskill Hotel Ballrooom

More panels at the AFF. John Lassiter gave a good talk about the Pixar writing process, which is diametrically opposed to the standard Hollywood process, where most producers are lawyers or agents-- which makes them spectacularly unqualified to give notes on writing, but do anyway. Takeaway quote: "Imagine taking a 747 from here to Tokyo-- and the pilot is a lawyer who 'always wanted to fly a plane.'"

Another Panel featured Rodrigo García, the son of Gabriel García Márquez. His talk was supposed to be about constructing complex characters but ended up being mostly about himself-- excluding the part about how his being a famous person's kid got him into the business in the first place.

After some fine BBQ at Stubb's with John and his Seattle posse, crashed for a few, then came back downtown that night for the Pitch Fest at the Speakeasy and late night party #2. This one was not quite as loud. Went back to South Austin and collapsed on the couch. David came back from a gig in San Saba at 2:30 a.m. and we stayed up 'til 5 talking old trucks (he has a '55 Panel, I have a '56 Panel) and finishing a bottle of Jack's.

Sunday October 22nd - Slept right through the "Hair of the Dog Brunch," the final party of the AFF weekend. After grabbing some migas at Casa Garcia (yum!) I made the afternoon panel-- "Endings: Good, Bad and Insanely Great," given by Michael Arndt. This guy wrote Little Miss Sunshine in 3 days, revised it 100+ times, and it won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar in 2006, a first for a first-time scripter. He also wrote Toy Story 3, which was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2010. Arndt obviously had had a lot to teach us-- and he did. By far, the best panel of the entire weekend, almost worth the steep cost of the badge.

Driving around rural Texas in a pickup
truck in the middle of the night.

After tearing up some Texas freeways in David's 1995 Chevy pickup afterwards (so I can cross 'drive a pickup in Texas' off my list of things to do) got a ride to the airport from the finest steel guitar player in all of Austin.

Overall, and excellent weekend in the finest city in Texas. Three summary observations on The 2011 Austin Film Festival:

1. It's definitely a bubble. in the Badge Zone of the AFF, you get to meet, chat up and even pitch ideas to people high up in the industry. Just remember that when you're back in the real world, you'll never get within 2 miles of these people.

2. Much easier to see said bubble when you spend a lot of time outside it. Got to visit the Broken Spoke Honky Tonk, Barton Creek Mall (for souvenirs), The Alamo Drafthouse South and got drive-thru at R. Terry's on Lamar. Out there, where the real Texas is.

3. As fun as the 2011 AFF was, it does not beat being there with a script in competition. Doesn't even come close. Still, here and there throughout the long weekend people remembered me for our 2009 win. And that felt pretty darn good. Who knows? I might be fixin' to start something.

Just Seen: In Time

2011-10-31T12:08:00.000-07:00

A nice little work of speculative fiction depicting an alternate universe that some may even find attractive: Everyone has been genetically engineered to stop aging at 25, and has to earn every minute of their lives after that, conveniently counted down on green clocks on their forearms. If you can't get the minutes, you'll die young, but you'll at least leave a good-looking corpse.

Writer-director Andrew Niccol seems to specialize in the Philip K. Dick idiom of sci-fi: high-concept, freighted in some bit of impossible future tech, with an undeniable touch of paranoia. Observations:

• As much as it resembles Niccol's other sci-fi films-- the genetics-is-destiny concept of Gattaca (1997) or the really, really artificial reality of The Truman Show (1998)-- In Time seems to be a logical expansion of Logan's Run (1976), Where everyone had a little glowing plastic flower on their palms which blinked out at 30, along with their lives. This film was based on a 1967 book by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, which had everyone time out at 21 (which has an undeniable 60s flavor to it). In Time adds the neat trick of turning an arbitrary execution date into a sort of financially-based expiration date.

• The easy-to-carry concept of In Time-- Money now literally equals time, carried on a clock on everyone's forearm: some have a minutes, others have centuries-- is quite timely, despite it's sort of abstract quality. The haves have so much time they seem to move slowly (because they literally have all the time in the world) and live far from the teeming have-nots, who scramble to get enough minutes to last out the day by a system that continually squeezes them by raising prices. This is a situation that, you have to admit, feels quite familiar.

• Even with it's nifty premise, In Time suffers from a familiar flaw in it's sci-fi universe: call it "Arbitrary Totalitarianism." The good-looking, well-dressed folks, rich and poor, go through their well-ordered lives without any contact with each other, with a yawning societal stratification which goes unaddressed by democratic discourse or media of any kind (aside from wanted posters). Authoritarian governments are so common in sci-fi that universes with suffrage or talk radio tend to stand out ("BSG" being a big one). I think this is because depicting a society without the messy debates of democracy plays much stronger on-screen and hangs a huge lantern on the central gimmick. It's not really writer laziness, rather a form of shorthand, like the movie trope of turning on a TV exactly when vital info is being broadcast (which happens several times in In Time).

• This must have been a easy script to pitch to a studio: an alternate reality where everyone is 25 and extremely attractive. Olivia Wilde plays Justin Timberlake's hot 50-year-old mom. The pursuing cop, the indefatigable Javert of the piece, is supposed to be over 70 and is played by smooth-faced Cillian Murphy. I'd read one review that said the movie looks like a 99-minute long credit card ad. Have to agree.

•Just a wee little bit overwritten. Practically all the characters are cutely named after timepieces: Salas, Weis [Weiss], Hamilton, Fortis, Citizen, Raymond [Raymond Weil], etc. Andrew Niccol had the restraint not to name anyone Timex, Swatch or Fossil, so there's that.

• Seen at the Daly City 20, a fine digital projection which showed the amazing photography of Roger Deakins to best effect. At the end, when the director credit came up, some fool in the back bellowed "HOR-RI-BLE!" That got a few chuckles. Since I was by myself and wouldn't embarrass anyone, I loudly intoned back into the dark, "--Then why did you sit through the whole thing?" That got a good laugh.

Weekend Box Office

2011-10-25T13:06:00.001-07:00

For the numbers, click here.

The Spirit of History

2011-10-24T12:12:00.000-07:00

In my continuing attempt to document my acting career and fill blog space, I'll tell you what I'm up to this month: I can be found next weekend at the Ghost Tour in Strathern Park.

Strathern House

Essentially it's a "haunted house" with a pro-social purpose. Strathearn Park is located in Simi Valley about three miles north of the Ronald Reagan presidential library, and it's stocked with hisotrical buildings. The one depicted above is the Strathearn house, but many of the other structures have been transplanted to the grounds so you can see what life was like before smartphones.

The Simi Valley Historical society hires actors to play the ghosts of famous Simi Vally figures. ("Famous" is a term of art; the only figure I'd ever heard of is Crash Corrigan, the silent movie cowboy who isn't even depicted this year) The actors perform 3 minute scenes which serve to explain their place in local history. As it happens, there were enough creepy folk in Simi Valley's past that Halloween is a perfectly appropriate time to mount this little dog and pony show.

Note, there is neither a dog nor a pony in the show.

Here is me and Veronica Scheyving as Finis and Mary Yoakum, who were founders of the Pisgah Grande Colony and mission at the turn of the last century. It was a health cult. As cult leaders go, Yoakum is among the more benign in the area's history. The least benign is probably Krishna Venta, whose space alien/religion/sex cult went so off the rails in the 1950's that his followers literally blew him up with dynamite.

The interesting thing for an actor in this gig is - well, are - a. they actually give you money to act and b. you get a lot of "stage time." True the scene is only three minutes, but over the course of any evening you will perform it to 13-15 groups of about 20 people each. It's only a three weekend run, but it's still more exposure than a 5 weekend run in a regular play. So it's worth being trapped outside for 4 hours.

If you're in the area next weekend and not interested in checking out a recreation of the Reagan-era Air Force One, swing by.

Headin' Back to Austin

2011-10-19T14:48:00.000-07:00

Flying out tomorrow at an ungodly time to Austin, Texas, to attend the 2011 Austin Film Festival and Screenwriting conference. I've got my Producer's Badge, which gets me into almost all the conferences and all the good parties.

I was there two years ago, under very different circumstances: John and I were finalists in the screenwriting competition. We eventually won our category, and to this day the Bronze Typewriter award sits on my mantlepiece (John said he had more than enough awards jamming up his office, and it's true).

After the win came a small avalanche of requests from producers and development shingles to read the winning manuscript, and a few days of pitch meetings in LA. But in the end all I can report has happened with The Sensitivity Program (the winning script) is several revisions and it's current option held by a Bay Area production company.

So as you can imagine, this time out it's not going to be the non-stop demi-celebrity experience we had in 2009 (Ron Howard congratulated us!). John's going to be there, but he's staying in a condo across from the Driskill Hotel (AFF's ground zero) with some buddies he met at The Film School in Seattle so he's sort of doing his own thing. I'm crashing at my bud David's place in South Austin, where I can admire the four Grammy awards on his piano and feel humble.

I was quite excited about the AFF when I got the badge-- last-minute thing that depended on some last-minute money coming in. But now I'm set to go, and I can't help think it's gonna be a big disappointment compared to 2009. When you think about it, how can it not be?

Still, some fun should be be had. I have access to a pick-up truck, which should open up the whole Austin experience considerably. Also, James Franco and Johnny Depp and Mike Judge and a bunch of famous screenwriters and inebriated not-so-famous screenwriters will be there, so how can it not be fun?

Weekend Box Office

2011-10-18T12:52:00.000-07:00

Where is he getting these numbers, anyway?

Just Seen: The Tingler

2011-10-18T11:12:00.000-07:00

Halloween is closing in again, and on cue the cable nets are loaded up with horror films. Actually, I'll say the spooky season was kicked off quite well by last Sunday's season 2 premiere of "The Walking Dead" on AMC. A very impressive, excruciatingly tense 90 minutes. The only thing that let the air out of a fine evening of zombie action was the increasing tempo of commercial breaks, which started hitting every ten minutes or so in the third half. I guess they had to capitalize on the buzz-- and were rewarded with the best ratings for any AMC show so far.

Up-dial a bit, I got a chance to catch The Tingler (1959) last night on TCM, in finely transferred HD. It was part of William Castle's most successful cycle of gimmick-driven horror films, along with House On Haunted Hill (1959) and 13 Ghosts (1960).

Quite a few years ago, I got to see The Tingler in a revival house in San Francisco in an auditorium wired for "Percepto," the sensory gimmick from the original release. And by gimmick, I mean several buzzers wired into selected seats. When the blackout part hit ("The tingler is loose the the theater! Scream as loud as you can!"), the buzzers were turned on (along with, for added terror, a Van Der Graff generator throwing out blue sparks under the screen) and all the hipsters in the house reliably screamed their heads off.

No Percepto last night (though I did watch it a little buzzed) so I got to dig into the film's plot. It was written (along with the other two) by Robb White-- and it's obvious the poor guy had William Castle hovering over his typewriter the whole time. a few super-weird plot motifs popped out in this screening:

• Strange family relationships. Vincent Price (in his skinny-moustached prime) plays Warren Chapin, a pathologist. As the story opens he is conducting an autopsy on an executed criminal. Ollie, the executed guy's next of kin, plays a pivotal role in the story that follows. Dr. Chapin is married to Isabel, a gold-lamé-wearing trollop. She's an heiress who refuses to share her wealth with her good-hearted younger sister Lucy, who also lives with them. Lucy is going steady with David, who is played by Darryl "Dobie Gillis" Hickman and who Dr. Chapin considers a son to him. Everything that happens not directly Tingler-related involves the baroque, complex and hateful dynamics of this family unit.

• Weird plot holes. Dr. Chapin's trollop wife Isabel, a fairly important character, vanishes from the film at about the two-thirds point-- no real reason given. Vincent Price greets this development with a shrug, and the film continues.

• Time wasters. Aside for the long scream-filled blackouts at three points in the film (which are cheap to shoot!) We're also treated to an extended sequence in the silent-film theater (before the Tingler gets loose in it) of Tol'able David (1921). This was a wheezy melodrama featuring Richard Bartholomess about a mistreated bumpkin who gets his big shot a manhood when he gets to deliver a mailbag. For the most part, films-within-films usually make some sort of thematic commentary to the overarching narrative. Not this time. It was probably a way William Castle could add four minutes or so of length to his movie (which was shot in two weeks) and he didn't give a damn if it informed the plot or killed it dead.

Even with it's manifold faults, The Tingler is a genuinely creepy film, with a clever bit of color in the scariest part. There is an almost Lynchian despair and strangeness to the thing, an effect that lingers well after the last 50's teenager screams. it doesn't hold up well, but it holds up.

The End of Film

2011-10-13T00:53:00.000-07:00

Sometime in 2009, the last professional 35mm motion picture camera was assembled.

The three major camera companies-- Panavision, Aaton and ARRI-- have since been devoted to designing and improving their digital cameras. The 35mm cameras that made them famous are still out there, and they still service them, but to quote Deborah Kaufman on Creative Cow, "someone, somewhere in the world, is now holding the last film camera ever to roll off the line."

Meanwhile, the number of movie theaters screens set up for digital projection surpassed fifty percent of all screens, and they're installing over seven hundred new projectors every month. This is a net gain, I think: the days of scratched prints and out-of-frame shows may be history. But with the exception of IMAX (a 65mm process that grows in popularity every year) film print delivery will eventually become rare, then a sort of historical curiosity. I can see a time not far off when you will have to visit a subsidized rep and revival theatre (a museum screening room, LA's Cinematheque, or the Packard-supported Guild in Palo Alto, for example) to see what a projected 35mm print looks like.

It should surprise nobody that film has been virtually dead in television production for years, but what's weird is how the tipping point came: during the near-shutdown of Hollywood due to the SAG labor dust-up in 2008. TV's move to AFTRA contract players, who had a deal with TV producers so long as the film were made digitally, made film use in TV production vanish overnight.

As far as movies go, we're living in strange times. Sure, the major films shot digitally look a lot like their 35mm predecessors. But the shallow focus and squeezed bokeh of Panavision, the red circles of film halation on point-source lights, the organic grain density of the photochemical process: these are 20th century artifacts, remnants of the analog world.

We're well into the 21st century now, and the precise, pure color of digital cinema is steadily becoming the norm. For filmmakers, this may well be a good thing: 35mm film stock is, and always has been, phenomenally expensive stuff. For the cost of 20 reels of color negative and processing for same, you can go out and buy a RED ONE 4K Digital Cinema camera and capture an unlimited amount of footage at the same resolution.

For film enthusiasts, this progress is sort of a mixed bag. In the days of film, the cost of stock set the lower bar for film production. Film production needed high-level financing, and financing requires return on investment, which requires things like actors, competent lighting, coherent scripts and decent post-production standards. A few years ago the opening up of film markets to zero-budget films spawned the "mumble-core" movement and The Room (D. Tommy Wiseau, 2003). There are thousands of kids out there, energized with all sorts of personal cinematic epiphanies, running their hands over their DSLRs, ready to roll-- and the image resolution at their command rivals any professional camera. Watch out.

On the other hand, It's important to remember that Hollywood is a system: It's stock in trade is slickly made, big-budget creations populated with familiar faces, available to be seen in a darkened auditorium or on a major network near you. This system was created because of the needs of film: To tell a story using the low-sensitivity nitrate stocks of the time, you needed a studio to shine a lot of lights on actors, sets on stages where scenes could be repeated reliably, and access to development labs for workprints. The film studios remain, though the film itself is gone.

Then again: if we can have cars without gas engines and computers without keyboards, we can have film studios without film.

Weekend Box Office

2011-10-11T12:36:00.000-07:00

Numbers from HERE.

Skippy The Bush Kangaroo As Embodiment Of National Character

2011-10-06T12:14:00.000-07:00

Skippy, The Bush Kangaroo (pictured center)

As I mentioned last week, one of the cultural artifacts my girlfriend Leanne brought back with her from Switzerland was a DVD of some episodes of Skippy, The Bush Kangaroo, enigmatically dubbed into French. To be more specific the episodes are from the 1991 revival series, The Adventures of Skippy. Still the situation is the same - unmarried Austrailian game warden and his two children, sharing adventure with the unusually smart and helpful titular Kangaroo. Pretty obviously male Kangaroo in this case. Don't ask me to give details.

Skippy has captured my imagination. Even though I don't speak enough French to understand the dialog, it's clear that the show is not dialog driven. It's an action show. Which is why I keep thinking that it must have been unbelievely frustrating for Australians to write it.

Skippy is the main character - you can kind of think of him as a superhero but his chief superpower is indication. "What is it Skippy? What are you pointing at? Oh no, it's a toxic waste spill! Who could have done that?" Skippy's function on the show is to notice the thing that sets the plot in motion, and then accompany the game warden or children as they investigate and solve the problem. If possible, Skippy will notice and indicate something else over the course of the episode. Perhaps he'll hop off and the little girl will follow him to discover a leaky pipe. But other than that, Skippy ain't nothin'.

Can you imagine the poor staff writers trying to crank out a script every week? "He can't speak, he can't drive a bloody car, he can't hold a gun - crikey, how the hell am I supposed to use this thing? He doesn't even have a bloody pouch." To make matters worse, the characters Skippy deals with most are children, who are similarly limited protagonists. Ultimately the real engine of the show is the game warden, who just does what Skippy and the kids tell him to.

Australians are famously simple men of action, and this show is the most passive/agressive situation imaginable.

Backhanded Compliment Of The Week

2011-10-06T07:39:00.000-07:00

"But Allen is a perfect fit for a multicamera sitcom, and despite the predictability of the jokes, he sells them well. As bad as Last Man is, it would be a trillion times worse without him."

- Hollywood Reporter's Tim Goodman, reviewing new Tim Allen sitcom Last Man Standing

Weekend Box Office

2011-10-04T12:02:00.000-07:00

The numbers show no matter what month it is, it's still September.

That's right, 4 new movies in the top then and they underperform old movies that weren't doing great to begin with. For starters, premiering at the #4 position, Courageous. It blazed into our consciousness with $9 million. Woo hoo. Next, 50/50, a comedy about a guy who has incurable cancer somehow managed to make that premise palatable and only made $8.6 million. Below that at #6, Dream House pulls in $8.1 million and finally, at #8, What's Your Number? Its number, it turns out, is $5.4 million.

Make of this what you will - a couple of months ago, a raging pro-Sarah Palin documentary called The Undefeated opened to a sad $65k. This weekend, raging anti-Palin documentary Sarah Palin: You Betcha opened to a far sadder 7K. In either event, it looks like people aren't jumping at the chance to watch movies about Sarah Palin.

Weekend Box Office

2011-09-27T12:01:00.000-07:00

Moneyball, numbers -- why do I even need a clever way to link?

New movies still no match for a 20-year old re-release of a cartoon animated through drawing pictures by human hands. That's all you need to know about this week's top ten. But if you want to know more, the 2nd biggest movie was Moneyball, based on a true story almost as uncinematic as The Social Network's. It did a respectable $19 mil, $20 if you insist on rounding up. Just below it, A Dolphin's Tale at $19 mil. At #4 we have Abduction, a thriller that almost cleared $11 million and finally the Sam Peckinpah remake train pulls in again with The Killer Elite, this time not starring James Caan but opening with $9 mil.

Travel, Broadening The Mind

2011-09-26T12:28:00.000-07:00

My girlfriend just got back from a biking tour of Switzerland. No, she's not the kind of girl who does that all the time, but I can say she's done it one more time than I have! Anyway, aside from an appreciation of dairy-based cuisine and a higher metabolism, she also brought back a stack of French DVDs, because she knows how much I love the obscure.

Some of the titles were less obscure than she had hoped - for example, she didn't recognize a two-episode arc from CSI directed by Quentin Tarentino, dubbed into French; a few episodes of Skippy the Bush Kangaroo dubbed into French from the original Australian. But at least one item was a brilliant thing I'd never heard of: an Italian horror movie from 1960 called Le Moulin des supplices, or Mill Of The Stone Women.

Neither one of us knew anything about it; she was attracted by the lurid cover, pictured here. We watched it in English with French subtitles, and it's fascinating from the get go - just trying to figure out where and when it takes place for one thing. People are dressed in period garb but you can't quite put your finger on what period. The road signs and so on aren't in English, but they're not in Italian either. In fact, they're in Flemish.

The movie has a gorgeous technicolor gloss to it, like a Hammer picture from the same period - but the Hammer chaps were going for shocks. These guys had one thing on their mind, creepiness. Who is that woman who looks so much like Gina Lolabrigida, peeking from behind the curtain? Why does she have a tiny greyhound on a leash? Why is the old Flemish lighthouse filled with statues of agonized historical figures? Is the lead character really in a mausoleum at the base of the windmill or is he just dreaming?

The great thing about the movie is that the answers to these questions is even weirder than you thought, though also largely improbable and insane. Like any effective horror movie, the dream logic is a lot stronger than the normal kind.

Still it's probably that lack of plausibility coupled with the awful title that kept the movie out of sight for all these years. And they tried a lot of other titles over the years: The Horrible Mill Women, Drops of Blood, Icon or my favorite, Doktor Skräck och de förstenade kvinnorna. It's Swedish and funny because there is no Doctor Skrack in the movie.

Anyway it was worth the effort to watch, and considering it's copy protected AND encoded in PAL instead of NTSC that's saying something.

Weekend Box Office

2011-09-20T12:08:00.000-07:00

Can you feel the numbers tonight?

This is the first time I can remember that I got out over the weekend to SEE the #1 movie, and I fell in love with it all over again. The Lion King, this time in 3D through judicious saving of files on Disney's part, is just about the perfect movie. Everybody involved was at the top of their game, the storytelling is epic and economical at the same time, the songs are hummable and they took a few crazy chances, such as visually referencing Leni Riefenstahl in the "Be Prepared" number. So I'm happy to report that the re-release took the #1 spot with $30 million. I bet it's still in theaters when the Blu-ray comes out!

A handful of new movies opened this weekend too: action drama Drive came in @ #3 with $11 million; the long-awaited remake (?) of Straw Dogs took #5 with $5 million, and I Don't Know How She Does It doesn't quite do it, coming in at #6 with only $4 mil.

Hollywood's Immune System

2011-09-15T15:55:00.000-07:00

In order to see Contagion comfortably, I chose a late, late showtime: 10:55, the last showtime at the Tanforan 20. From what I'd read about the effectiveness of Steven Soderbergh's new thriller, I wanted at least a few rows of seats between me and the next moviegoer. There were only 8 or so in the auditorium, and nobody was coughing. (but there was, as there always seems to be in late-night movie screenings these days, a couple dragging their toddler-aged kid along.)

Contagion is a very good, very scary film. Soderbergh calls it a horror film, evading the "thriller" tag, and he has a good point. Good horror plays on primal fears-- remember that grotty dude hacking away without covering his mouth at Starbucks last week? Sure you do. That, coupled with the always-unsettling glimpse of the thin veneer of society peeling away at the epidemic's later stages, creates feelings of rising unease as the film progresses. And as it uses Soderburgh's signature multiple-storyline style, you're never quite sure which of the Oscar-caliber ensemble is going to bite the dust next.

Later in the film there are plenty of scenes of National Guard troops in digital camouflage and Hum-Vees keeping roadblocks. This aspect calls back to the discussion about Torchwood: Miracle Day, which covers remarkably similar ground concerning profound social disruption. But here's the thing: the high-concept sci-fi idea of everyone on earth inexplicably granted life everlasting is sort of fun to think about, but the hard-science idea of an unstoppable virus wiping out millions is not only depressing and scary to ponder, less than 100 years ago something very similar actually happened.

Aside from the micron-sized and therefore un-telegenic virus, there's a human villain in this piece: Alan Krumweide (Jude Law), a crummy, weedy fellow who sows fear and misinformation and false hope in alternative medicine cures through his blog. In a film that focuses on the selfless efforts of government scientist to save lives (a la Outbreak and The Andromeda Strain) he represents the conspiracy nuts, the anti-vaccine moms-- the whole, weird anti-science know-nothing movement that seems to depressingly be steadily gaining traction in larger society.

But I think there's something more subtle going on here. This is at least the second major feature film which paints a harsh picture of the internet in general and social networking specifically. Recall the tone of The Social Network, a film that exposes Facebook's roots as a crude sexist college diversion and it's founders as litigious snobs or prickly sociopaths. And in Contagion, it's made clear that everything would be going so much better for humanity in general if it were not for some nutty blogger from San Francisco (surprise: Hollywood yet again portrays the Bay Area as a scenic loony bin).

And why shouldn't establishment Hollywood view the Internet in the worst possible light? As far as the studios are concerned, it's a disease.

I think such negative depictions of internet culture in major movies are a sign of Hollywood's immune system going into overdrive. Even now, there is little the internet and social networking can do to help studios sell tickets: viral hits like Paranormal Activity and The Blair Witch Project are so rare they've become cautionary tales (as in: never mention either of them when you're pitching a script). In realpolitik, internet film marketing is just another money-suck for which studios are obliged to staff buildings full of web designers and marketers to create feckless web presences for their movies.

The internet has come to represent nothing less than a full attack on Hollywood, a galloping infection that attacks both control of product and the bottom line. The studio buys a script, and they have to make sure it doesn't get uploaded somewhere. Greenlight, and there are even more potential leaks. Outright piracy begins generally at the first pre-screenings right through general release, eating away box-office as effectively as a blood-borne parasite eats red blood cells. As whole films fall into bit-torrent oblivion, snippets of their films get cut out and put on YouTube or Daily Motion and there's little to be done about that either. Finally, even the home video market and it's tidy widget-style sales model is being sapped by streaming services, offering the same film for a fraction of the cost of a DVD or BluRay version.

As falling revenues draws the industry into existential crisis, we're seeing it's immune system deploy T-cells and leukocytes, out to destroy the malignancy. Expect to see more.

Once upon a time, internet culture as depicted by Hollywood was a rich source of pseudo-high-tech, blatantly unbelievable tropes: "I'll have to hack their IP with a custom-written worm to access their triple-encrypted password. And… there it is!" Remember Hackers (1995) with Angeline Jolie as "Acid Burn" and Jonny Lee Miller as "Crash Override?" Hoo-boy. But that was then: the era of that sort of fun-loving naivete is over.

Endorsement: Sherlock (2010)

2011-09-15T12:36:00.000-07:00

The thing that makes Sherlock Holmes a great character is this: He'll open with an unlikely conclusion, and then dazzle you with the insane amount of detail he observed to reach it. And no matter how implausible the conclusion is, you see that there can be no other. It's with this in mind that I tell you this:

BBC's recent 3 episode series of Sherlock, set in the present day and starring an actor named Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes is brilliant.

Actually the 1st and 3rd episodes are brilliant, the 2nd is merely very good. Here's my favorite line from the 1st episode, a curt response to one of Inspector Lestrade's team:

Against all odds this Sherlock is bouyant, depsite there being absolutely no need for a modernized Sherlock Holmes. Let's face it, he's already all over televsion in the person of Hugh Laurie's Dr. House, any given episode of CSI: Wherever, Castle -- 50% of all primetime TV is Holmes nowadays, and another 35% is reality TV. What does that leave? Two and a Half Men. And that's just America.

What works with the new Holmes is, as far as I can see, pure serendipity. You have the right show runners (Mark Gattis and Steven Moffat, who also are steering the Dr. Who franchise nowadays -- there's another Holmes for ya) the right actors (Cumberbatch, who Moffat claims is the only actor to play the character who has a stupider name than Sherlock Holmes) and Martin Freeman, late of The Office and Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy)) and the right format (90 minutes! Who the hell makes 90 minute TV shows? But it's just right for the complexity of these stories) and maybe most important, Holmes kinda belongs in the 21st century.

I don't want to give anything away because this stuff is available on streaming Netflix and places, but I will say that for starters, HOLMES LOVES TEXTING. And Google. If there's an internet outage in some upcoming episode, the poor detective will likely go insane.

Anyway, check it out, especially if you were disappointed with Robert Downey Jr's Holmes recently. Because this one works.

Weekend Box Office

2011-09-13T11:43:00.000-07:00

Numbers fever -- catch it!

Not bad for early September! A virus thriller with an all-star cast called Contagion takes the top spot, with $22 million. This week's other new movie, Warrior, barely fights its way to #3 with $5 mil.

Last week's lowest ranking release The Conspiritor is still holding on, and things are looking up! This weekend it made $32! You know what that means... 3 people saw it, 1 more than last time. Why do I get the feeling that Robert Redford owns a piece of that theatre?

Torchwood: Miracle Day - The Debate 4

2011-09-12T22:33:00.000-07:00

So strangely, Dan and I seem to agree: Russell T Davies seems to have knitted together a TV show that is much greater than the sum of it's prior parts. Furthermore it is quite apparent that he'd be quite happy to move the series past it's small-form BBC Cymru roots to a grander vision with international locations and big guest stars (Bill Pullman! The former Mrs. Clint Eastwood!). After all, he jettisoned all the previous cast except for the two leads, and these characters spent a lot of time distracted and off the procedural trail. I won't be too surprised if the leads next year are Mekhi Phifer's Rex Matheson (quite the sly, TV-sci-fi tip of the hat, that character name) and either Jack Harness or Gwen Cooper.

And yes, I'll agree that John Barrowman is not an especially compelling actor. I was gonna chalk it up to my mistaken idea that he was an English actor being held back by having to do an American accent, but he's basically American-- Scots-born, grew up outside Chicago, he was in an extra in The Untouchables (1987). My wife is terribly perturbed by his hair, which changes drastically from shot to shot.

Honestly, if the premise of the next season is anything like the compelling one of Miracle Day, the whole Torchwood/Doctor Who backstory can be dispensed with.

Torchwood: Miracle Day -- The Debate 3

2011-09-12T16:11:00.000-07:00

Ah, that would change one's perspective. Miracle Day does get a lot of charge from being set in the States. It seems like Davies got a bigger budget than usual and plowed it all into a wish list of character actors - the Starz series is peppered with faces that you haven't seen in years, gobbling up scenery like some kind of existential maw at the center of the world. And I'll add that it's great to see Wayne Knight again, fat and sweaty like he's meant to be.

Lauren Ambrose comes from the world of musical comedy, and somehow manages to tap into that energy on the small screen without going big and fake. She's quite a find and they'd be crazy to not make her the engine of the next season. That woman is all charisma.

Also with every succeeding series of Torchwood, Davies jettisons more of the premise of the original series and I like to think he's as fed up with those characters as I am. Especially Captain Jack. My high school drama teacher is right, Jack Barrowman is a terrible actor. Now and then he turns out an authentic moment, but then so do animals and children if you put them in the right context. The thing that ruined Torchwood: Miracle Day for me, more than anything else, was Torchwood.

Still let me be unpleasant with the following spoiler.

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At the end, the two CIA agents are seemingly killed - one survives and one doesn't. The twist is, the guy who's been running around with a gaping chest wound throughout the show survives, because as it turns out, he's been transfused with Jack's blood. Then he's shot at the funeral for the other agent, but he heals up again. Everyone is surprised.

WHY? Didn't they notice his failure to die when the blessing reset itself? It's sloppy.

Torchwood: Miracle Day - The Debate 2

2011-09-12T15:21:00.000-07:00

I have never watched a scrap of the first three seasons of Torchwood. I have also never seen more than a dozen of so minutes of the sixty-odd seasons of Doctor Who. First impressions are made early, and I remember trying to watch the show when I was just a kid-- it was in black & white and consisted of endless scenes of a fusty old Brit climbing around an abandoned brickworks or whatever.

So I took in Torchwood: Miracle Day as a complete newbie, having to fill in the gaps as I went along as to who the supercilious gay guy with the wartime coat and the resentful Taff with the freckles were.

Oddly, I think this perspective put me in a position to really appreciate what a remarkable series it was. Russell T Davies and company (notably former Buffy and BSG showrunner Jane Espenson) cooked up a series that is centered an a hard science-fiction concept so simple, so profound and so rich I can't figure out why nobody had done it before.

And moreover, this simple concept (one fine day, for no apparent reason, people stop dying everywhere) is explored thoroughly and realistically. Yes, Miracle Day would seem like just that for most people-- until you start thinking about the consequences of getting injured or incapacitated or shot full of holes or crushed in a car compactor. Play these things out and you get economic collapse, moral panic, and the eventual re-classification of those incapacitated but undying into a category to be disposed of. Immortal life, which is something we mere mortals can only hope and pray for, becomes the stuff of unending pain and horror. That's good, well-thought-out speculative fiction.

Death is a inextricable part of the human condition-- one which everyone would very much love to banish. But take it away-- and watch the chaos spread. It's such a powerful idea to explore somebody wrote a New York Times Op-Ed about it.

I've lost track of how many TV shows that have introduced a world altering concept and were either too lazy or hidebound to thoroughly explore the ideas they are promulgating. The late reboot of V on ABC was a prime example of this-- after a while, it felt like the the Visitors were nothing more than annoying new neighbors everybody had to just put up with.

So I came away impressed by this show. Sure, it was a bit talky here and there-- and the season finale, though it wrapped things up well, was just plain bad. Without spoiling, in the last two acts the baddies, though they are in an unquestionable power position, stand around like a bunch of potted plants while the intrepid Torchwood team undoes all their grand plans basically right in front of them. And of course, they wouldn't be bad guys if they didn't get in some epic monologing beforehand. (And I'm with Dan, we want more Lauren Ambrose. And John DeLancie had the best parting line ever.)

I'd venture to say that the Miracle Day effect was so rich an idea, it made the precedent Torchwood adventures irrelevant. I feel no need to review past episodes. In fact, since it was a BBC Wales show before the infusion of US cash from Starz/Encore for Miracle Day, I'm sure they're just endless scenes of fusty Brits (and a resentful Taff) climbing around an abandoned brickworks or whatever.

Torchwood: Miracle Day - The Debate

2011-09-12T12:34:00.000-07:00

Russel T. Davies' Torchwood series is kind of a gauge of your geek cred. I proudly claim to have seen every episode and for the most part, hated all of them.

The premise of show, a spinoff from Davies' reboot of Doctor Who (attention anagram enthusiasts!) is that the UK government has a top-secret intelligence agency devoted to tracking down and neutralizing extraterrestrial threats, headed by Captain Jack Harkness, an immortal humanoid alien with a penchant for WWII fashion and an unmistakable American accent. And he's bisexual, though lately only interested in men.

In the last two series, Torchwood has been dismantled (aggressively dismantled) and instead of saving the Earth on behalf of the government, it has been saving the Earth because Captain Jack and Gwen Cooper, the only two original team members not assassinated, simply refuse to leave the Earth to its own devices. The latest series, Miracle Day, has just completed its 10-episode run on Starz. It was epic in scope and, as usual, frustrating.

The series, first of all, seemed about 5 episodes too long. The plot engine in Miracle Day is that suddenly, one day, nobody dies. All around the world, at exactly the same time, everybody is immortal, except Captain Jack. Sounds great at first, but of course the devil's in the details. Overpopulation becomes a problem inside of a week, along with the disturbing proviso that mortal wounds never heal. You're just kind of alive, stuck with this oozing gunshot wound or flesh-eating virus or what have you. Good premise but the longer you have to think about the implications, the more holes you're going to find. And there are a lot of them holes. For example the phenomenon seems linked to Harkness, but when he takes a bullet, he just heals. Hell, they blew him up last year! He was encased in concrete for the better part of century once, and it's no biggie. So why not the new crop of immortals?

And my biggest beef with the series is definitely on display this time around: it violates the prime law of procedurals. Okay, it's my law, but it seems to hold: if you do a show about people with a job, they must be really really good at that job. If it's about bus drivers the plots must be how they solve bus driver problems that would flummox ordinary bus drivers. And they have to care about the bus so much that it takes precedence over their personal lives. A bus driver who is neglecting his kids because he's putting in so much extra time to keeping the bus running is a hero in a procedural.

In Torchwood, it's always been a conceit that the team members are people! With needs! So when Captain Jack literally takes an evening off from saving the world so he can pick up a bartender, it sticks in my craw. A good dozen of the plots in the first two series revolved around Earth-threatening conflicts caused by the Torchwood staff. If I were the British government, I'd have taken those guys out around episode 5.

Just Seen: Mozart's Idomeneo

2011-09-12T10:42:00.000-07:00

First-nighting a live performance is always a thrill, and it's something I haven't done in quite a while. On Saturday, we had the honor and pleasure of attending the opening night of Opera San Jose's 2011-2012 season at the California Theater. Our attendance of this performance was all due to an incredibly generous gesture by Amanda, a very talented opera singer and member of Opera San Jose's chorus.

For those not from the Bay Area, one would get the impression that Opera San Jose is a sort of small-town affair. It's not: San Jose is a larger city by population than San Francisco or Oakland, and still-flowing Silicon Valley money allows for upper-crust activities such as supporting opera. The problem is one of comparison: 40 miles north of the California Theater sits the War Memorial Opera House, home of the San Francisco Opera-- second only to New York's Met in size. There was nothing second-rate about Saturday's performance: it was a $3 million plus production, backed by Packard family money.

The opera was Mozart's Idomeneo, an Italian-language opera first performed in 1781. Structurally, it's a classic 18th century Opera Seria, full of rich emotional performances and virtuosic singing. And like all good operas, this one was not short on spectacle: Excellent lighting, wonderful costumes and some awe-inspiring sets-- the temple set in act III is three stories tall, eliciting gasps from the audience (I have no idea how they moved it in and out). Archaeologists were consulted on costume and set design, which strongly evoked Mycenian-era Crete.

And the lush orchestral score: Mozart, 'nuff said.

If you're gonna attend a season-opening performance that lasts for nearly three hours and forty-five minutes, you're gonna come out with quite a range of impressions:

• I've always maintained that opera is the ancestor of the motion picture, and Idomeneo was no exception, full of dramatic scenery, emotional exposition, and extras. What I didn't expect is a story that reminded me of a modern romantic comedy. It's based on some of the characters from Homer's Iliad (which makes the story about 3000 years old, well into public domain). In brief, Idomeneo, King of Crete, his son Idamante, his Trojan prisoner/ son's love interest Ilia, and the jealous princess Electra all carry big important secrets. At one point all four characters sing out on how these secrets are making all of them terribly unhappy-- but it does not occur to anybody to disclose these secrets. It's not at all different from a contemporary rom-com where the main character has constructed some elaborate fantasy to woo the girl, and everything would be solved by a short conversation. Then again, I'll wager 230 years ago such hoary plot contrivances were at least fresh.

• Another story element has changed quite a bit from then to now: I'd call it the Homeric element. The prime mover of the story-- the character who basically makes everything happen-- is the god Neptune, a supernatural being. He causes the initial crisis for King Idomeneo at the start, extends it in act II with the introduction of a ravaging monster, then wraps things up nicely in act III. (Neptune shows up with the wordless appearance of a buff actor with a big white beard and a crown: his disembodied voice resolves all the conflicts at the end.) In other words, Deus Ex Machina is not just used to wrap up the plot: it IS the plot. But if you are at all familiar with the Iliad it's pretty clear that Homer had no problem telling a story driven by divine intervention-- or it's evidence of bicameral mentality 3000 years ago.

• Our friend Amanda was not hard to spot in the chorus: Attractive and quite tall, she managed to gain some impressively central stage positions during the arias, standing out in a large chorus. It helped that we had excellent seats in the orchestra. So thanks again.

• In general, it was a delightfully civilized evening of culture. One of the things I really like about these venues is enjoying a sophisticated adult beverage during the intermission. To save time, the bar lets you pre-order your drinks before the first curtain, and you pick them up according to number later. It was perhaps a rude reminder of the moral decline in modern society that when we went to collect our Manhattans at the first interval that we discovered someone had stolen them. The folks at the bar were nice enough re-pour us new ones-- a kind act of non-divine intervention.

At Least They're Consistant

2011-09-09T12:30:00.000-07:00

I love bad movies. In fact I once appeared on a game show (when you live in LA it's a matter if IF, not WHEN) and Dick Clark asked me why I like them so much. "They make me feel good about myself," I replied to the delight of a tiny studio audience.

Anyway, it gets harder to find bad movies every year as digital production technique classes up even the cheapest product. Even a cheap monster movie can get a creepy patina added to it in post and suddenly it's not bad, just mediocre. With all the tools at one's disposal nowadays, to make a bad movie you practically have to be aiming for it.

Which is why I was so thrilled the other day when I watched Titanic 2 on streaming Netflix. It's deliciously awful. The acting matches the writing; the writing is crazy stupid. It takes place on the 100th anniversary of the launch of the other Titanic, and the conceit is they have the good sense to avoid icebergs on the route, but global warming causes a glacier at the North Pole to calve so massively that it causes a tsunami that PROPELS THE ICEBERG INTO THE SIDE OF THE SHIP. They shot on the Queen Mary, a ship that has been docked in Long Beach for over fifty years and I have no doubt that had they wanted to, they would have rewritten it so the iceberg would have fallen from space onto the deck.

Somehow they even managed to do what everyone else in Hollywood has avoided - they make the CGI look unconvincing, as is their SFX department is running off a handful of Commodore Amigas. "We need to save this shot! Bring more floppies!"

Full disclosure - I auditioned for a part in this movie last year. I don't blame them for not using me - I was unprepared and got there late to boot. Anyway, I like the guy they did use for first mate, so it's all good.

Anyway, keep an eye out for this movie and any product from The Asylum. I've seen two other movies by these guys and they're always just the right level of bad. I didn't get a chance to catch MegaShark Vs. Giant Octopus yet, but again, it's not IF.

Weekend Box Office

2011-09-07T11:51:00.000-07:00

Labor over these numbers!

Labor Day is the only 3 day weekend that reliably delivers NOTHING to the studios. Here's why: September is an enormous dead spot as people focus on going back to school or stocking up on supplies to make it through the harsh winter. They don't go to movies in September. Thus, anything you released this weekend had three days to make its money, and then it's gonna drop like a stone. If you had any confidence you'd have put it out a month ago or you're holding it until October.

So coming in at #2 is Focus Pictures' The Debt, making only $10 million. Then at #3, goofy SF concept Apollo 18, making almost $9 million; at #4 is Shark Night 3D (about Tuesdays at the bar down the street, I think) which only made $8 million. And those are the highlights. Yeah, and The Help came in on top again with $14 million. Some people at Buena Vista are keeping their jobs through the fall!

Worth looking: Robert Redford's The Conspiritor is claiming $24.00 one one screen. That's one couple, or two very, very lonely people.

Apple Comes Out Swinging: Hits Below Belt

2011-09-02T12:10:00.000-07:00

One of the biggest changes in the film industry right now is happening outside the general scrutiny of the public. Several months ago, Apple rolled out the highly anticipated new version of Final Cut Studio, thier well-used, well-loved professional-level editing suite. Skipping right over versions 8 and 9 to a cool Roman 10, the new product rolled out as FCPX.

It was a resounding failure.

The new program has a completely different user interface, key shortcuts and throughput capabilities. It won't export edit decision lists, capture video from tape sources, and it's not backwards-compatible-- if you have a legacy project in Final Cut 7 and want to port it upwards, you're outta luck. It bears a strong resemblance to iMovie, the free, consumer-level editing software that comes with your laptop, so much so that post-industry wags dubbed FCPX "iMovie Pro."

At some point, I understand what Apple was trying to do: make a clean break with a system that utilizes a more powerful core engine. The core engine is the video processor system that drives all the renders and makes things like FCP work. From Final Cut 1 to Final Cut 7, they've all been driven by the QuickTime engine, which was state of the art about a decade ago. FCPX utilizes an engine based on AVC and AVCHD, which is state-of-the-art (and is used by most prosumer camcorders these days) and blazingly fast.

The problem here is the calculation Apple made that professional users of FCP, a billion-dollar market, would blindly follow on the brand name alone. These professional users have deadlines, large libraries of legacy projects, and mortgages to pay-- and can't spare the time to dick around with a product that, fast as it may be, is "unsuitable for professional workflow."

People seem to have a fixation on Apple as a cutting-edge, market-making company with unique ideas, and they're right. But innovation is risk-taking, and that means Apple is less a cautious computer hardware company and more based on a movie studio model (As Steve Jobs was a founder of Pixar, this isn't a surprise, I hope.) Invest in a far-out idea, market the hell out of it, shove it out there and hope for a blockbuster. This worked for the iPod, iPhone, iPad and a lot of other stuff. It DIDN'T work for the Apple Lisa, AppleTV, and the Cube. And now it didn't work for FCPX.

If you need an example of a traditional computer hardware company's approach to marketing, consider the Toshiba laptop. They're completely reliable machines, tough and robust-- and they barely change from model to model. a 2011 Satellite looks like a 2001 Satellite. Toshiba bases their business model on market share, not market making.

But innovation becomes something of an ethical issue if you have thousands of users dependent on you for their livelihood. If that's the case, innovation becomes self-serving: killing legacy compatibility and altering features beyond usefulness makes the upgrade risky for most. And there is a definite show-biz angle to this story: A lot of people, from movie studios to indie-film hacks, cut their movies on the Final Cut Pro platform. There is a good chance that TV show you just watched, the movie you just saw, or the DVD you just got from Netflix, came to you through the FCP workflow. (Not your Blu-ray, though: more below.)

And yes, this has affected my business in a big way. I make DVDs for a living, and the suite of programs in FCPX does NOT include DVD Studio Pro. (this is somewhat understandable, as DVDs haven't changed all that much in the last 6 years or so, so upgrading the authoring software is sorta redundant.) Fortunately, the fine folks at Adobe have a wonderful suite of recently hotrodded editing and authoring solutions-- the Creative Suite. They saw Apple stumble badly with FCPX and are sweeping up market share with half-off offers for switching to Premiere 5.5-- and have subtly altered the look and feel of it to something approximating classic Final Cut Pro. I'm already using Premiere and Adobe Encore to author BluRay-- a format Apple still refuses to support! So I'm gonna persevere with FCP7 and DVD Studio pro until they rot off my hard drives (or a new Mac OS refuses to open them anymore) then head across the street to Adobe.

Apple has a right to do whatever they want with their products, of course. But as the legal aphorism goes, your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose. And there are quite a few video pros out there with bloody noses looking to hang out with a less pugilistic company.

Weekend Box Office

2011-08-30T11:55:00.000-07:00

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the numbers.

And sad numbers they are this week, pushed down by Hurricane Irene which basically closed most of the East. So, meh. The number one movie was The Help again, but we're all about novelty here so the top grossing new picture came in at #2. It is Columbiana and it made $10 million; you can imagine what the rest of the chart is like.

Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark came in at #4 with under $9 million, which still isn't bad for a remake of a TV movie from the seventies. At #5 was Our Idiot Brother with 7 million.

Okay, go back into your homes now where it's safe.

Summer 2011: Seen, Unseen or Just Observed

2011-08-25T11:11:00.000-07:00

Summer 2011 is almost one for the books, so here is a summary of random observations. I'll kick it off by a short list of movies I paid good money to see this summer.

BTW: Did anyone else notice that the movie at the bottom of this week's Box Office Mojo, as noted by Dan, was called The Worst Movie EVER? It made $11, one admission. Anyway, on to that list:

• Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Fine entertainment, just stuffed with little hidden call-outs to the original series. I saw this in San Bruno, which is coincidentally the home of the fictitious San Bruno Simian Center, where the ape revolution begins.

• Bridesmaids: Excellent. See if you can spot the sequence Judd Apatow added to make it more, um, palatable to male moviegoers.

• The Tree of Life. Okay, it's not perfect, but it's one of the most challenging, beautiful and moving films I've seen in quite a while. Not a few reviewers tried to take Terrence Malick to task for adding stuff like the Big Bang and dinosaurs to his story, but for me it seemed like he was just being thorough, like writing a novel that has the family trees of all the characters in it. I tried to get as many people to go see this with me as I could, and failed.

• Stuff I didn't see: Cowboys & Aliens (strongly warned away by friends) Hangover II, Transformers III, Cars 2 (couldn't muster the interest) The last Harry Potter, X-Men First Class (couldn't find the time).

• What I'm following on TV these days: An excellent new season of "Futurama," "Breaking Bad" and "Wipeout" on ABC (Basically "Castle Attack" with LA wanna-be actors getting slammed by foam rubber apparati while the hosts crack wise). I'm following "True Blood" too-- but as my wife put it, several of the plotlines on this show need to be sentenced to the True Death.

• What I'm looking forward to on TV this fall: The return of "Mad Men," "Boardwalk Empire" and "The Walking Dead." The "Mad Men" inspired series kicking off this fall: "Pan Am" and "The Playboy Club." It seems Hollywood has finally responded to "Mad Men," and that response is: bring us more Joan Holloway and complicated undergarments! Speaking of mid-century retro shows, the 1956-set "The Hour" on BBC looks pretty good too, but I'm going to get that from streaming sources rather than BBC America (who hack 20 minutes out of each episode).

• Strange Pattern-Seeking Observation #1: Is it just me, or are the character dynamics of "Breaking Bad" basically the same as in Back to the Future? Obsessive scientist, dopey trouble-making kid sidekick, involved in reality-bending adventures?

• Strange Pattern-Seeking Observation #2: There is a trailer cycling on TV for Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star, yet another urbane, sophisticated Adam Sandler comedy offering. The titular character, played by Nick Swardson, is a rural idiot man-child with a blond pageboy haircut and big joke-shop front teeth. At one time Mr. Sandler specialized in this sort of pathetically delineated doofus, but considering the sourness of his late characters (Funny People, Just Go With It) he obviously makes too much money to mug anymore (though his upcoming Jack and Jill will likely prove me wrong). Anyway, the observation: The first thing that struck me about Bucky Larson is his strong resemblance to Simple Jack, Tugg Speedman's "serious" character from Tropic Thunder. You know, "Never go 'full retard?'" Is Bucky Larson just another half-assed Adam Sandler attempt at comedy, or is it something more sublime-- the first example of art imitating art imitating art imitating life?

But Does HAL Have an Intel Inside?

2011-08-24T10:26:00.000-07:00

Thought it was high time I start contributing to this thing again!

What brought me out this time: Local high-tech jurisprudence. Good ol' Apple, that beloved corporate juggernaut, is trying to block sales of Android-powered Samsung tablet computers in some countries, claiming copyright infringement against the iPad. Same old story, really-- but Samsung's lawyers have sprung back with a remarkable defense. They pointed out that Apple itself swiped an idea over 40 years old. There were devices nearly identical to iPads in use in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Quoting Samsung's filing:

Attached hereto as Exhibit D is a true and correct copy of a still image taken from Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film "2001: A Space Odyssey." In a clip from that film lasting about one minute, two astronauts are eating and at the same time using personal tablet computers. As with the design claimed by the D’889 Patent, the tablet disclosed in the clip has an overall rectangular shape with a dominant display screen, narrow borders, a predominately flat front surface, a flat back surface (which is evident because the tablets are lying flat on the table's surface), and a thin form factor.

I did not notice this until now-- and it's amazing how right they got it-- all the way back in 1968! (the image here is an amusingly photoshopped deal I found online: in the film, the pads are made by IBM.) I'll bet if you can get a hold of some tech-savvy kid and make him or her watch 2001 (at 143 minutes, a tall order), and ask them what Bowman and Poole are watching BBC 12 on, they would be more interested in what brand of tablet they were using to do so.

Kubrick hired a lot of scientists, futurists and engineers to design the look and feel of his film. No doubt one of these guys (and back then, it had to be a guy) thought the future of TV would look like a clipboard with a video screen. They didn't totally nail future technology, though: The often-seen square-format computer displays in the film are more akin to data readouts, rather than GUIs (graphical user interfaces). In one scene an astronaut is seen scribbling data down on a yellow legal pad, and HAL dispenses hard data on a punchcard (this scene got some scattered laughter at the last screening I attended). And though today's solid-state SATA swappable hard drives bear a striking resemblance to HAL's logic core modules, I'm afraid nobody has yet figured out how to make them transparent.

Steve Jobs is just a few years older than me, and grew up in Mountain View, California. He was 13 years old when 2001 came out-- and it's even quite likely he saw it at the Century 21 on Winchester, same as I did. It likely made just as deep an impression on him as it did me, though I have to admit his inspiration was quite a bit more profitable than mine.

ADDENDA: About three hours after posting this, Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple. No need to take this blog personally, Stevie...

Weekend Box Office

2011-08-23T11:53:00.000-07:00

Nobody knows anything, unless they look at the numbers.

William Goldman is one of the most brilliant and successful screenwriters who ever lived, but even more remarkable than that is he boiled down to three words the reason why executives pour money into projects that fail and little independents become blockbusters: NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING. This weekend served as an illustration of that axiom.

Spy Kids: All The Time In The World opened at #3 with $11 million. This you could have actually seen coming. #4 was a 3D remake of Conan The Barbarian, which brought in $10 million but reportedly cost 3 times what Spy Kids did. Fright Night, another remake (where have you gone, William Ragsdale?) made about $8 million at #6 and a little independent from Focus called One Day came in at #9 with $5 mil.

So what about the top slots? #2 was last week's #1, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a 3D science fiction epic. What could possibly do better? Last week's #2 movie, a civil-rights era weepie based on a best-selling novel even though everybody knows that people don't read nowadays.

Here's to you, William Goldman.

Weekend Box Office

2011-08-16T12:07:00.000-07:00

Interesting but lackluster weekend! I punctuated that with an exclaimation point though obviously a period would have been just as appropriate.

Holdover Rise of the Planet of the Apes took the #1 spot again, but period chick-flick The Help came in a close 2nd with $26 million. Final Destination 5 (I did everything I did to avoid a sequel, but it came around anyway) took #3 with $18 million. At #5, suspense-comedy 30 Minutes or Less made $13 million. Call it less.

Glee: The 3D Concert Film took as little imagination to conceive as it did to market, and undershot the top ten by one slot, pulling in only $6 million. The TV show makes much more. Personally, I'm still waiting for the 3D Nip/Tuck feature.

Or if you're looking for 3D, try this: at #108, Sex and Zen 3D: Extreme Ecstasy.

Let's put a viewing party together!

Weekend Box Office

2011-08-09T11:54:00.000-07:00

Click here to get the numbers flung at you.

Another surprise weekend, with Rise of the Planet of the Apes outperforming expectations. We all thought it would come in at #1 but it brought in $55 million! That's a lotta monkey business. Attention Variety headline writers! Hire me now!

At #4 The Change Up debuts with $13 million. Meh.

This week Smurfs beat Cowboys and Aliens by about $5 mil, and has already beat it in cumulative ticket sales. I'll miss ya, Harrison Ford! You had a good run.

Weekend Box Office

2011-08-02T16:32:00.000-07:00

Whew, THAT WAS CLOSE. Look at the numbers!

I blogged about this yesterday - according to estimates, The Smurfs so outperformed estimates that the Hollywood Reporter was emailing breathless updates Sunday morning on its progress. Our tiny blue friends almost beat out Cowboys and Aliens for the number 1 spot. However, when all was tallied, C&A took the top with $36.4 million, and Smurfs made 2nd with $35.6 million. As a guy who has no understanding of the Smurfs phenomenon, this is a little too close for my liking.

Also doing respectably at #5 was Crazy Stupid Love, which manged to romance $19 million out of ticket buyers with post-adolescent tastes.

Smurf a Smurf On It

2011-08-01T12:12:00.000-07:00

I'm a little ahead of the game this morning with box office figures, but the news for the past 24 hours is that Cowboys and Aliens was losing the number one spot this weekend to The Smurfs. This was distressing to me because by rights, C&A was said to be a solid bit of genre filmmaking while Smurfs looked like another dreary post-modern "updating" of the property by having characters remark on how stupid the premise has always been.

Ridiculing the tropes of this property is really low-hanging fruit.

But you know what they're doing there? They're HANGING A LANTERN on the Smurfs. Maybe our little blue friends can no longer survive in our sophisticated media landscape without addressing the glaring weirdnesses of the premise.

So this movie is, in fact, an epic lantern-hanging. It's like maybe the movie is all lanterns. It's lit up like a Christmas tree! I'm almost inclined to see it on that basis!

But of course, you'd still have to drug me to get me into an auditorium with those teutonic Schlumpfen. I mean come on. Research is one thing, but I can't waste two hours on a load of smurf.

Weekend Box Office

2011-07-26T20:42:00.000-07:00

Numbers. In case you think I'm making it up.

I'm in a hurry: Captain America -- huge! #1 with $65 million. Friends With Benefits -- less so! $16 million, debut at #3. Okay, done.

Adventures in the Forsaken Zone

2011-07-20T18:42:00.000-07:00

You will disagree with me, but I think the true miracle of the internet is that is makes available things that should, by rights, have been long forgotten. So in the case of your job search that means pictures of you shotgunning a keg in college; in the case of politicians it's footage of them endorsing the policy they're trashing THIS month; and in the case of Columbia Pictures it's Starhunter: Adventures In The Forbidden Zone. When I opened up Crackle on my new Roku player, it's the thing that caught my eye.

Like a lot of my guilty pleasures, this 3D gem was running in theaters that I worked in as a youth so I used to watch it for free often and wonder what the hell they were thinking. You don't usually see a movie so bad put together by such good people. Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters) produced, experienced journeyman Lamont Johnson directed, and it stars Peter Strauss, Molly Ringwald, Andrea Marcovicci and Ernie Hudson. The point is, there are a lot of people involved with the movies who should have made a solid, uninspired hour and a half of sci-fi eye candy.

Instead, there is this fascinating series of wrong decisions, starting with the throwaway killing in the first act of the most interesting character. It's not just surprising, it's arbitrary. It doesn't make life particularly difficult for the lead. (Spoilers! As if you're going to watch it) Then Molly Ringwald, as a teenager who speaks some kind of extraterrestrial valley-girl slang appears and annoys Peter Strauss for the rest of the movie. Strauss, and you.

From then on its a series of Logan-Run-Like vignettes to kill time until the equally time-killing finale. And none of those vignettes is especially revealing of character - not of the lead, not of the world in which they occur. It's like they came up with a dozen ideas, threw them in a hat, and picked 5 at random.

At some point they decide it's time to start wrapping it up, so they drag in Michael Ironside as some kind of mechanized Nosferatu. He usually makes a splendid villain but here he might as well have been played by hand puppets.

Visually the design borrows mostly from The Road Warrior. It's like The Road Warrior, only in 3D! And without a story or point of any kind! And it appears really cheaply made, only once in a while you realize they must have spent a ton of money to make it look that way. Even the 3D effects are arbitrary. It's like a science fiction 3D epic made by people who hate Sci-Fi, hate 3D, hate Molly Ringwald and hate the movie business.

So in other words, good fun to watch. Honestly, I couldn't tear my eyes away. This is the movie, I think, that killed 3D for the rest of the eighties. Watch it, and compare it to whatever's going to kill it this time.

Weekend Box Office

2011-07-19T14:43:00.000-07:00

Muggles love numbers!

Well, it seems like just a year ago I was writing how predictable this would be - the final installment of the Harry Potter Saga, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, did well at the box office. Specifically it opened at #1 and made $169 million in 3 days. On the plus side, the long reign of terror is over! No more books! JK Rowling insists she doesn't need to write any more of them and she has all the money she wants. And you know what that means.

More Percy Jackson and the Olympians movies!

Also on the top ten, if you squint, is Winnie the Pooh, a slow and gentle re-imagining of the A.A. Milne stories. It opened at #6 and almost made $8 million. In your FACE, slow and gentle!

The Undefeated, a documentary about once-interesting Tea Party icon Sarah Palin, picked a bad weekend to open! It came it at #40 and made $65000 on 10 screens. That's not even a high per-screen average, though it beats Winnie the Pooh by about 3k.

Oooh Roku: An Introduction

2011-07-18T17:48:00.000-07:00

I'm taking a week off work but only to allow myself the opportunity to sleep in after the very late rehearsals I'll be having for the next musical at the Simi Valley Cultural Center. Opens Saturday, locals! Anyway, you may recall that I'm too cheap to pay for cable because I'm never home to watch TV, except once in a while. THIS WEEK, for example.

So I went online and found myself a used Roku player.

The little black box, which is about the size of a CD box set of Johnny Cash rarities, outputs to your TV and gets content from the internet, either wired or wireless. There's all kinds of services supplying to Roku, and the price ranges from free (Crackle, for example) to $12 bucks a month (Hulu Plus) to video on demand movie rentals (Amazon). The sheer volume of official channels is staggering. Unofficial ones, even more so, because it is apparently not too difficult to draw up a Roku aggregator.

It is, of course, much cheaper than cable otherwise I wouldn't be writing about it. I'm paying $9.00 for streaming Netflix and $12.00 for Hulu Plus, though I will probably drop one of those two in the next few weeks. The thing that Netflix has on Hulu is they don't run commercials in their movies, but Hulu has a content deal with Criterion, which means I can finally see Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman. As I say, I'm still deciding.

Also interesting is Crackle, which works just like Hulu but is free. They're making money on the ads alone. The Crackle library is all Columbia Studios product. I think that means it will be exclusive but what the hell, like I say it's free.

Is there porn? Of course there's porn. No official channels, but lots of home baked ones.

Basically almost any video that's available on your computer, the Roku box is glad to serve up to your TV. The one exception is YouTube, which is a real peculiar exception. I understand that arrangement broke down earlier this year.

The picture quality varies like crazy, as befits a wild-west cable buster. There is one channel which showcases only 1080p footage, for example. (Don't try it with wireless!) Then on the other end of the scale, some of the stuff for Archive.org's channel was digitized at 320x240 and looks caaaaarrrrappy on the big screen. Hulu and Crackle both offer acceptable bigscreen viewing, Netflix as well.

From what I've seen if you like HBO and Showtime, you still gotta pay for cable. My advice, stop liking them. Look, ultimately any media service lives and dies on whether they carry what you want to see, but this crazy little box carries so much that there's gonna be something in there for you.

Next time: Spacehunter - Adventures in the Forbidden Zone

Weekend Box Office

2011-07-06T15:52:00.000-07:00

Truth through the night that the numbers were still there.

Hope you had a nice holiday weekend, Americans! I'll tell you who did - Michael Bay! As long as he didn't read any reviews anyway. His Transformers: Dark Of The Moon predictably took the number 1 spot with an expectedly massive $98 million.

And like an army of giant robots with no respect for property values, Transformers decimated the rest of the chart. Tom Hanks' Larry Crowne only managed to make #4 with $13 million. Something called Monte Carlo from Fox came in at #6 with $7 million.

Weekend Box Office

2011-06-29T13:59:00.000-07:00

Why doncha take the numbers out for a little spin?

Let me take a moment to whine about how difficult it is to write about summer box office. It's predictable. Clever doesn't make any difference to this stuff, and therefore it's no fun. For example, you know what was number one? A CGI 3D sequel to a movie that was a huge hit a few years back. Cars 2, if you're still reading, and it pulled down $66 million. What about that last sentence was interesting? NOTHING. See what I'm sayin'?

Of nominal interest is the #2 entry, Bad Teacher, which managed $32 million. I had written off Cameron Diaz, frankly. Turns out I was wrong! That's a great number for a movie that doesn't have animals or machines as stars.

Speaking of machines as stars, here's the headline under the Hollywood Reporter's review of Transformers: Dark Of the Moon which opens today.

Michael Bay delivers a techno spectacle that is spectacularly empty.

For this news I pay $200 a year?

Weekend Box Office

2011-06-21T14:00:00.000-07:00

All I can say is, I need another Jim Carey movie like I need a movie about penguins.

Oh, look at them numbers, there at #3 is Mr. Popper's Penguins, garnering only $18 million. Might not be bad for the studio, depending on what they paid Carey. The penguins, of course, work for virtual herring.

At #1, the similarly disappointing Green Lantern. It only made $53 million, which is not enough for a Marvel Superhero movie. So that's one thing that damn ring can't do.

Weekend Box Office

2011-06-14T13:54:00.000-07:00

Number one movie has a number in it, as you learn when you look at the numbers.

Understand that Super 8 is not a sequel to Paul Anderson's Hard Eight. No, it's a JJ Abrams-directed homage to Spielberg, produced by the homagee, and it came in at #1 with $35 million. Only other new movie is Judy Moody and the NOT Bummer Summer, a title clearly meant to appeal to the underage set. If only they'd gone 3D CGI they'd have pulled down more than 7th place and $6 million! Some executive is going to have a very bummer summer indeed.

Weekend Box Office

2011-06-07T12:24:00.000-07:00

Sometimes in algebra, they use an X as a substitute for numbers.

Number one movie last week, X-Men: First Class. $55 million.

A record-breaking May, I hear! Money, not attendance. Kudos to the people who raised ticket prices at the right time!

Weekend Box Office

2011-06-01T12:19:00.000-07:00

Memorial Day - remember our fallen numbers.

Stupid intro aside, the numbers are anything but fallen. The holiday weekend was good to Warner Brothers, Paramount/Dreamworks and Buena Vista. At #1 was The Hangover Part II, which some are calling Bridesmaids for men! Anyway, it made $86 million. Then at #2 another sequel, Kung Fu Panda II. The 3D CGI extravaganza kicked up $48 million.

That Pirates of the Caribbean movie brought in $40 million for it's 2nd weekend, which tallies up to $153 million. Way to generate easy money boys!

Weekend Box Office

2011-05-24T11:57:00.000-07:00

There be numbers here!

You might think that all interest in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise had been drained away during the lackluster final chapter. Somewhere in those 5 hours of Part 3, you had probably said "enough already with the pirates" and vowed to never come back. You broke that vow this weekend.

On Stranger Tides, the fourth film in the trilogy, came in at #1 with $90 million dollars.

Also notable under an onslaught like that, Bridesmaids had a pretty good second week, dropping only 20% to $20 million. Doesn't seem like much in comparison, but remember that Kristin Wiig doesn't cost as much as Johnny Depp. Everything else in the top ten sank like a frigate in the thrall of a Kraken.

American Politics Isn't So Bad

2011-05-20T14:04:00.000-07:00

"Vice speaker of the Ukrainian parliament, Adam Martynyuk, on the right, throttles deputy Oleg Lyashko during a session in the chamber of the Ukrainian parliament in Kiev on Wednesday, May 18, 2011. According to reports, Lyashko had just asked Martynyuk to let him make a speech, which Martinyuk refused to do on procedural grounds. Lyashko then apparently called his interlocutor a Pharisee, at which point it was on."

- h/t bOING bOING

RIP Randy Savage

2011-05-20T12:22:00.001-07:00

Weekend Box Office

2011-05-17T12:07:00.000-07:00

These numbers are nice, but I'm not married to 'em.

God of Thunder/Superhero Thor holds on to the top spot (what is wrong with you people!) but coming in a strong second place is Bridesmaids, the Kristin Wiig-penned comedy about chicks being as bad a dudes man. $26 million! Me, I still haven't seen The Hangover but I don't get out enough. At #4 is Priest, another comic-book-based property but not presold enough - it only made $14 million.

I think I'll award worst title honors to Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives which debuted last week at #116 but now languishes at #119. I can't imagine how this would have been more appealing in Thai, but in any event here it needs work. Hello Strand Releasing! "Uncle Bobby" is all you need! Then you can sell the remake rights to George Clooney! Say.... "Uncle Clooney." There, I saved you a step.

Lantern Quote Of The Day

2011-05-13T15:31:00.000-07:00

"They gave me an expandable sarong... Army ingenuity! "

Glenn Manning, The Amazing Colossal Man

Shrinking Wasteland

2011-05-13T12:41:00.000-07:00

I have been worrying for years (worrying about/reveling in) about the decline in broadcast network ratings. My assumption has always been that viewers have been siphoned off by the Golf Network and VH1 and whatever other narrowcast concerns are out there. But today I just had my attention called to this.

For the first time in 20 years, the number of homes in the United States with television sets has dropped.

The Nielsen Company, which takes TV set ownership into account when it produces ratings, will tell television networks and advertisers on Tuesday that 96.7 percent of American households now own sets, down from 98.9 percent previously.

There are two reasons for the decline, according to Nielsen. One is poverty: some low-income households no longer own TV sets, most likely because they cannot afford new digital sets and antennas.

The other is technological wizardry: young people who have grown up with laptops in their hands instead of remote controls are opting not to buy TV sets when they graduate from college or enter the work force, at least not at first. Instead, they are subsisting on a diet of television shows and movies from the Internet.

That second reason is prompting Nielsen to think about a redefinition of the term “television household” to include Internet video viewers.

This has been a prodigious growth curve, and for it to reverse is serious. For an increasing number the question will no longer be "what do you want to watch tonight" but rather "what do you want to do tonight?" The idea that Americans might actually choose to participate in activities is a crazy notion that will take some getting used to.

When I first got divorced and moved into my own hovel across town, I quickly determined that I could do without cable AND television until I was back on my feet again. If I wanted to watch something, I had the iMac. Eventually I broke down and bought a flat-screen digital but the only difference was it was twice the screen size and it didn't crash when I was fetching email. And indeed, once in a while I use the TV as a second monitor.

You can live without a TV. But can the TV industry? As more and more channels try to carve up a shrinking market, you'll see cheaper shows and more reruns. TV is going to look a lot different in 5 years my friend, and you probably won't notice because you're doing something else.

Weekend Box Office

2011-05-10T15:23:00.000-07:00

The hammer of the Gods helps you crunch the numbers.

Let me say right now that I was mistaken. I said nobody's going to turn out for the opening weekend of a big-budget movie based on the Thor comic books because Thor is silly. I was half wrong. Thor IS silly, but the movie debuted at #1 and made $66 million. Can't wait to see how much of that it holds on to next weekend. If it's solid, I may even see the thing myself!

At #3 Tri-Star release Jumping the Broom makes $15 million. Urban romantic comedy, thanks for asking. Right behind it with almost $14 million, Something Borrowed. I'd be interested in finding out why two studios would think this is the weekend to release wedding competing wedding comedies. Mother's Day? Really? Doesn't make sense to me.

Keep an eye open for Rutger Hauer vehicle Hobo With A Shotgun, which made $12 thousand bucks and has gotten more press than a movie this size normally does. You'll probably be streaming this on Netflix before you know it.

Weekend Box Office

2011-05-03T12:13:00.000-07:00

Box Office Mojo is down; I had to go to a different source for my numbers!

Producers should probably be grateful that certain big news items didn't really emerge until late Sunday, after the box office weekend was more or less over. Surely they would have hurt the grosses of Fast Five, which had a similar target audience. This 5th sequel to The Fast and The Furious boasted both Vin Diesel AND Dwayne "I'm Not The Rock anymore!" Johnson, two guys who could use a hit. They got it! FF premiered at #1 with $86 million.

Meanwhile at #5 is Prom, a movie the Boston Globe calls "deeply unthreatening". And indeed, it only made $5 million, a sign that they only bought ads on the Disney channel. Crawling in at #6 is Hoodwinked 2: Hood Vs. Evil, a sequel that nobody apparently wanted. It made $4 million, despite being both CGI and 3D.

Weekend Box Office

2011-04-26T12:09:00.000-07:00

The Egg, Numbers, and I.

Happy Easter everyone! I thought I saw Moby when I was shopping for groceries, but it was just an egg. *dreamy sampled rimshot* Meanwhile, at the boxoffice, pretty good weekend! The number one movie was Rio, a holdover from last week. Coming in just behind it, Tyler Perry's Madea's Big Happy Family. Can't we all agree that "Madea's" is the only possessive that title needs? Anyway, maybe Tyler and Madea can split the $25 million that it brought in.

At #3, Water For Elephants with $16 million. I don't know anything about this movie past the fact that there were weird, weird casting notices for months about it last year. I'm convinced that if I had been carney folk, I'd have gotten work. If you don't like elephants, you might have seen African Cats instead, a Disney nature docudrama narrated by Samuel L. Jackson. $6 million only, but the cats don't ask for a piece of the backend.

Speaking of Disney, their Bollywood entry Zokkomon came in at #90 with a $117 per screen average. Critics like it! I hope it does well in whatever heather country it's aimed at.

The End of the Monarchy

2011-04-20T17:25:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to give a shout-out and spread the news - my old acquaintance Richard Cheese and his band will be playing at the Royal Wedding reception. This will, I suspect, bring down Western Civilization. And it's about time!

Weekend Box Office

2011-04-19T12:02:00.000-07:00

Oh, numbers, flying down to numbers, flying down to numbers where's there's rhythm and rhyme.

I fear there is no way to make this interesting. Two new movies opening in the top ten this week. At #1, generic 3D CGI spectacular Rio takes $39 million. At #2, generic pre-sold horror property Scream 4 pulls down a respectable $19 million. There's still a Dimension Pictures? Who knew?

Just off the chart at #11, Robert Redford's The Conspiritor makes $3.5 million. Oddly, it was all in $5 bills.
And pennies! Because Lincoln, you see.

What, too soon?

Jesus Christ, Warhorse

2011-04-15T12:24:00.000-07:00

I'm giving up a couple of hours sleep a night for "hell week", that final 6 days of rehearsal before a big musical. In this case it's the Simi Valley Cultural Arts Center Performance of Jesus Christ Superstar. I have a few small parts in the show, but there are no small parts, just small priests and small apostles. And little old men who are certain they've seen Peter somewhere.

This ain't library art - it's our real Jesus.

It's odd. The show was quite radical for its time. In addition to telling the story of Christ's last days through the scandalous medium of ROCK MUSIC, it also questions His divinity and dares to cast Judas in a sympathetic light. It's a hit single that became a concept album that became a hit Broadway show in the space of a few years (add another couple of years and you have a movie) and in every incarnation JCS infuriated a pretty large segment of the religious community. I suspect that the only reason that there weren't riots over this show is by the late sixties, we were all a little rioted out. If the whole ball of wax was conceived today, perhaps as a hip-hop version starring Usher as Jesus, there would be blood in the streets.

And yet now, it's going to be a community theatre production, playing 2:00 Sunday matinees to what we actors privately call "The Walker Brigade", that predominantly 55-70 year old crowd that holds season tickets. A bit surreal, frankly. And they're going to be grooving along with the music, because some of them were in college when this thing first hit the scene. This show is familiar to them. Probably they'll leave humming the tunes.

Incidentally from what I've been seeing, the show still has the capacity to shock. I have been sneaking into the back of the house during scenes when I'm not onstage. Believe me, it's quite a story when you look at it closely. The bible really knocks the rough edges off the whole Jesus/God/Judas thing, and JCS delights in forcing you to re-examine what people in that extraordinary situation must feel like.

So in the end the show promises to be a balancing act - the old and the new, the comfortable and the shocking, the cross and the switchblade. I wish I could see it myself but I'm busy for the whole run. Let me know how it is.

Weekend Box Office

2011-04-12T11:55:00.000-07:00

Might as well face it, you're addicted to numbers.

4 new majors premiering this week, all disappointing. Maybe the studios were counting on that pre-Easter boost but it failed to materialize, because there never was such a thing. In any event the top movie was a holdover from last week, Hop. Following that, at #2, Hanna with a slim $12 million.

At #3 the apparently un-awaited Russell Brand remake of Arthur which also made $12 million; #4 brought us Soul Surfer, the story of a surfer who gets trapped under her board and has to cut off her own arm to survive. James Franco plays the girl, and -- oh wait, Franco is in something else, and Surfer made $11 million.

At #6 with only $9 million is Your Highness, a noble attempt to tap into the medieval stoner comedy market. It also features Natalie Portman in a thong. I'd pay to see that! If I hadn't already seen it in the trailer.

Weekend Box Office

2011-04-05T11:59:00.000-07:00

Hop over to the numbers for more info!

At least, a movie to exploit Easter! Hop, the CGI extravaganza, pulls down $38 million and takes the number 1 spot. Behind it, Source Code, a confusing thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaall despite the fact that no one really wants to see him in a movie. It only made $15 million. And at #3 it's Insidious, which made $13 million. Which is not so good.

Debuting at #13, interestingly enough is The King's Speech with a little over 1 million. It appears that the gimmick is this is the PG-13 rated version, with all the b-b-b-bad language taken out. Oh Weinstein, you card! Well, I hope the post-production turns a profit.

Playing First String

2011-04-03T21:40:00.000-07:00

As soon as you can, get a hold of an episode of Secret Service. I wish I could trust you to simply go out and do it based on what I'm telling you, because the pleasure of this show is in the discovery. But sadly, you need more.

Secret Service was the last Gerry and Sylvia Anderson "Supermarionation" production. Like Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlett, the characters are all played by puppets. In this one, they tried an interesting but insanely wrongheaded strategy - sometimes it will be a puppet in a miniature set, but for some long shots, they used human body doubles for the puppets in full-size sets. It was a way of saving a little money on miniature sets, and now and then you'd have to show a character running, and it's simply easier to make a real person do that than a puppet.

Still, puppets are lousy actors and using them for closeups is just loony.

And that's not even considering the premise of the show, which would have been insane under any circumstance. It's the adventures of Father Stanley Unwin, who works for B.I.S.H.O.P (British Intelligence Secret Headquarters, Operation Priest) as an undercover spy. Unwin is voiced by Stanley Unwin, who also plays his full-size doppleganger, but only in long shots. Unwin works with his parish groundskeeper Matthew, another agent, and here's where it gets weird. Unwin has a device which can shrink people to a fifth of their size. For missions Matthew is reduced and Unwin carries him in a specially designed suitcase to various situations where he can observe or sabotage enemy actions.

This notion that this thing made it out of a pitch meeting is proof A: of miracles and B: that the late sixties was the golden age of hallucinogens.

As it happens, the size Matthew shrinks to is about the height of a Gerry Anderson show puppet. Though sometimes, they have to put him in scenes with other puppets so they use camera tricks. All right, I just can't go on without giving myself a headache. They only made 12 half-hour episodes, so it's pretty breezy watching if you don't go nuts. If you're a fan of special effects or dubious narrative strategies, rush out and watch this one.

Weekend Box Office

2011-03-29T11:53:00.000-07:00

Here's proof of what I say: the numbers!

Talk about a sucker punch! The golden age of Zach Snyer may be over. His Sucker Punch, a $75 million epic based on yet another graphic novel, premiered at #2 with $19 million. Depressingly, it was beaten by a presold property, a sequel to Diary of A Wimpy Kid (subtitled Rodrick Rules!) that took the weekend with $24 million. It reportedly cost $18 million to make. I don't want to think about what this means.

This weekend I took in Of Gods and Men, a contemplative true story of French monks in Algeria, coming to terms with terrorism in their community. I have no idea what it cost, but considering the subject matter, the fact that it made $333,000 is the stuff of prayer. It's pretty good by the way, a combination essay/thriller. Worth seeing, if you can find it.

Showtime Scuttles Netflix Deal

2011-03-23T15:06:00.000-07:00

Wow, it's like having to choose betwen your divorcing parents - last week Netflix announced its intention to produce an original series like the cable networks do, and today Showtime announced it won't stream some of its content on Netflix any more.

Showtime said Tuesday that its newly negotiated deal with Netflix, which takes effect this summer, no longer includes online streaming rights to its currently airing first-run series, such as "Dexter" and "Californication."

When the new agreement kicks in, episodes of those shows will disappear from Netflix and will be offered exclusively on Showtime's online service.

"A number of Showtime original series will continue to be available and stream on Netflix including 'The Tudors' and 'Sleeper Cell,' among others," Showtime said in a statement, referring to programs that have gone off the air.

This is a significant departure from Showtime's current arrangement with Netflix, which expires this summer. Under that pact, the cable channel provided several seasons of "Dexter" and "Californication" to Netflix in an effort to introduce its signature shows to a wider audience.

Daddy, mommy, don't fight!

Well if I have to choose, streaming Netflix is 8 bucks a month, Showtime is something like $80 (you have to get it on top of a cable package) and the economy sucks. You do the math.

A True Story About Elizabeth Taylor

2011-03-23T12:01:00.000-07:00

It's not much, but it's mine: in the late 80's I was running a movie theatre in Westwood. We had an exclusive run of Moonstruck that winter and it was a surprise hit, so we were selling out every night. And Westwood is Beverly Hills adjacent, so it was the closest theatre to that little hamlet.

Anyway one night I was making the rounds outside the building, checking the line for the next show, which was going to be standing out in the cold for at least an hour. There, about 60 people down from the door, was Elizabeth Taylor and Roddy McDowell. My policy with celebrities at the time was to never treat them differently. Earlier that week Martin Short had begged me to let him into a sold out show ("Hello, I'm Martin Short" he had said redundantly) and I turned him down, on the grounds that there are fire laws.

But Short would have approved of my breaking the rules for Liz Taylor, because she was royalty. "Listen", I murmured so the rest of the line wouldn't hear, "if you guys would like to wait in the lobby it's not a problem."

Taylor glanced at McDowall and said, "We'll be fine here, thank you."

And so I left them in the chilly SoCal winter, exposed to the elements and boredom and fans.

My limited experience with celebrities is that the bigger they are, the more they prefer the normal things. Tom Cruise, at the height of his fame, used to always stand in the popcorn line, even though he was buying for an entourage that included his own personal assistants.

Like I said, not much of a story. Better than none though!

Weekend Box Office

2011-03-22T11:50:00.000-07:00

One thing limits everything: numbers.

The film industry shrugs this week - three weak movies opening! At the top of heap that looks like a speed bump, Limitless. The Bradley Cooper vehicle drew down $19 million, which hopefully constituted profitability. 4th and 5th place run a virtual tie - both earning around $13 mil. It's The Lincoln Lawyer and Paul. Meh. All pretty good Netflix material but I'm not too energized to drive out to the mall for this stuff.

Battle: Los Angeles dropped 60% from its opening week. I saw it on Tuesday. I was a little disappointed that for the most part it should be called Battle: Santa Monica. And for the most part, all the real destruction takes place off screen. Let's face it, from a movie with that title you want to see landmarks blown up. Captiol Records building - GONE! Hollywood sign - GONE! From the way it's shot, it might as well be Battle: Afghanistan.

Not THAT Bad

2011-03-21T12:16:00.000-07:00

Don't get me wrong, this is an awful little song. It's just not as bad as the gold standard of bad, My Humps.

Still, it's bad enough to have had this result:

Rebecca Black's pop video has been viewed on YouTube 29 million times American schoolgirl singer Rebecca Black has said that negative online comments about her music made her cry.

The 13-year-old's Friday video is currently a major internet hit with 29 million views so far on YouTube.

But the track has been heavily criticised online - with some newspapers and commentators dubbing it "the worst song of all time."

"When I first saw all these nasty comments I thought this is all my fault," she told US TV network ABC.

"[I thought] this was all because of me," she added, speaking on the Good Morning America show.

Rebecca said the worst post was someone who'd written "I hope you cut yourself and I hope you get an eating disorder so you look pretty. I hope you cut and die."

The video for Friday has has been trending continuously on Twitter and is notching up views at a rapid rate.

I'm on the fence - on one hand, I could shell out a buck, buy the single on iTunes and cheer the poor kid up. On the other hand, that would just encourage Ark Music Factory to release more stuff like this, humiliating more 14-year-olds who aren't prepared for notoriety. It's a moral quandry, this song.

A History Lesson with Betty White

2011-03-18T11:01:00.000-07:00

The lesson here: I had no idea that they were broadcasting in color in 1959.

The other lesson: Betty White was always hot.

March Oddments

2011-03-18T02:04:00.000-07:00

••• It's strange to be witness to another entry in the "biggest flop of all time" contest. Of course, we're talking about Mars Needs Moms. Sometimes Hollywood just sneaks 'em out: yet another bouncy, kid-friendly computer-animated 3D flick, with some mild laughs in and cool-looking stuff in the trailer. Then it premieres, and the opening weekend comes and goes, and it racks up a few million in ticket sales. At this point, it shares a surface commonality with the majority of films on Dan's Weekly Box Office Report: It opened wide, a few people saw it, big deal. But then the news breaks wide in the trades (and the New York Times: read it before the whole news site vanishes behind the paywall!) that the damned thing cost the studio $150 million and two years to make.

What? $150 Million? Didn't somebody once say that CG movies would eventually be cheaper than live-action films? Do you mean to tell us that Mars Needs Moms, which is based on a children's picture book by Berkeley "Bloom County" Breathed, cost as much to make as Lord of The Rings: The Return of the King? Really? I once wrote an article praising Dax Shepard that pointed out that his cute little film Employee of the Month (2005) cost $10 million to produce and it eventually collected $30 million in first-release BO: a modest profit, but a profit nonetheless. Did anyone at Disney (who rarely step in the horse exhaust as badly as this, might I add) realize they could have used that motion-capture and compositing money, made fifteen Employee of the Month movies (covering five seasons worth of employees) and raked in nearly half a billion dollars?

••• I think I have a little crush on a cartoon character (again): Cheryl (or Carol) from "Archer," a TV-MA animated Cold War spy-spoof on FX. Strong recommendation for this show: It's slick-looking, flash-style animation, with handsome, realistic character renderings (it looks a bit like a Saturday Morning version of "Mad Men") and some of the sharpest , funniest writing of any current series, period. It shares a heritage between creator Adam Reed's heady earlier series, particularly "Sealab 2021", and, of all things, "Arrested Development" (Jessica Walter, Jeffrey Tambor and Judy Greer do voices on it).

Anyway, Cheryl (or Carol, voiced by Greer) is the secretary for Malory Archer, the head of ISIS, the spy agency at the center of the story. She is amazingly, mind-bendingly stupid. That's her, drinking rubber cement. She has displayed her near-total lack of intelligence at various times-- to quote her Wikipedia bio-- by "trying to turn on her computer by typing O-N on the keyboard, wondering aloud who brings Jewish people their Christmas presents and thinking that a website can tell her whether she's pregnant." She defies a trio of armed police officers trying to arrest her by yelling "You're not my supervisor!" At the end of an episode that deals with cancer non-stop (it's very funny, I assure you) she leans over to another character and asks "what's cancer?"

It's always a kick to see a character who is set up to be an ignoramus, because if it's written and performed well, you're both amused and a little bit stunned. Cheryl (or Carol) as a character reminds me a bit of Larry, Darryl and Darryl from "Newhart" (1982-1990), who had the ability to throw down absolutely amazing non-sequiteurs. But Cheryl (or Carol) is better because she's smoking hot as well. No Uncanny Valley in "Archer," no sir. Full episodes are available on IMDb.

••• The awful events unfolding in Japan make a mockery of any comparison to fictional disaster or fictional anything, really. Having said that, I should point out that I'm not the first person to draw the most obvious comparison, or at least one that is culturally appropriate: Godzilla. A raging force of nature that destroys indiscriminately and lays waste with a plume of radioactive fire. It's so terribly apt that one could almost see it as science-fiction time loop, a 50s monster inspired by events that occur in devastating cadence half a century later.

But there is another icon from Japanese culture that truly gives me hope for the beleaguered people of Japan: Domo. He's NHK's mascot (and mine too, kinda): a squared-off, stubby-legged monster with beady eyes and a huge, toothy square mouth. Check him out: he's cute enough with the napped fur and outreaching arms, but he's got teeth. Big sharp pointy ones. There's an unlikely mix of winsomeness and determination to him. He always shows his mouthful of shark-like teeth to the world, almost like a challenge. Any culture that can produce a little character that embodies such a dichotomy of cute and tough can internalize these qualities, and they can do anything-- And that is something we at Hang A Lantern On It definitely believe.

Oh Yeah, Netflix Is Going There

2011-03-16T11:59:00.000-07:00

You like cable TV but wish you could subscribe to ONLY HBO or ONLY the Golf Channel? Well you can't. You have to pay for at least 50 other channels and while at least one of them is possibly the Golf Channel, the other 49 are for some niche you have almost no interest in.

That annoying stalemate may be changing.

Netflix has allegedly outbid a number of major cable networks for a new drama series produced by and starring Kevin Spacey called House of Cards, and may be about to close a deal at more than $100 million, according to a report on Deadline.com.

The deal has yet to be finalized, but Deadline's unnamed source claims that Netflix has made a commitment to two seasons of House of Cards, which the media site described as "staggering" and "pretty unheard of these days."

See the point is, streaming Netflix provides on-demand movies and TV shows, it's less than 10 dollars a month and with the amount of TV I watch, I don't even need cable. In fact, I barely need Netflix. But if they get a couple of must-see series the way HBO does, voila! Your entertainment bill is down to a quarter of what it was. Sure you'll miss some programming but wouldn't you rather have the money? Plus Netflix buys up most programming a year later anyway. They're all over Showtime offerings.

Weekend Box Office

2011-03-15T11:57:00.001-07:00

Mars needs numbers!

Three movies opened in the top ten this week. No news: Red Riding Hood debuted at #3 with $14 million. Vampires are more popular than wolves. Big news: Battle: Los Angeles takes #1 with $35 million. That's good money.

But the biggest news is about failure: Mars Needs Moms, a 3D CGI extravaganza from producer Bob Zemeckis, pulled down only $7 million. It reportedly cost $150 million to make, so this is bad news. So bad that Disney has pulled out of the Zemeckis-helmed remake of Yellow Submarine, which was to use the same uncanny-valley prone CGI company. As of today the project is being shopped around to other studios.

An Angle On The Sheen Story I'm Comfortable With

2011-03-10T12:21:00.000-08:00

I didn't want to go near this story when it was about an actor's meltdown. It's like someone asked me today, "did you see that video where Charlie Sheen...(whatever he did THIS time) and I said no, I don't watch Charlie Sheen videos. I let other people tell me about them. It's quicker. If I thought Charlie Sheen was actually melting down, I'd just ignore him. But here's what I think Charlie Sheen IS doing.

In the first move of what could be a long legal battle, Charlie Sheen has sued Warner Bros. and "Two and a Half Men" co-creator Chuck Lorre for $100 million plus punitive damages over his termination on the hit television show.

Mr. Sheen's lawyer, Hollywood firebrand Marty Singer, filed the lawsuit on Thursday in Los Angeles Superior Court.

A spokesman for Warner Bros., a unit of Time Warner Inc., declined to comment.

In the suit, Mr. Sheen alleges that Mr. Lorre decided to fire the actor because he wanted to work on other television shows and before Mr. Sheen's public antics.

Citing his recent behavior, Warner Bros. on Monday terminated Mr. Sheen's contract, which according to people familiar with the matter pays him about $2 million an episode, including his share of "back-end" profit like syndication. But in the suit, Mr. Sheen also alleges that the studio's firing of the actor, even for those circumstances, would be in violation of California law.

The suit also states that Mr. Sheen is pursuing claims "for the benefit of the entire cast and crew to get paid for the balance of the season's 24 episodes."

Yes I know, suing a company for $100 million is entirely constistant with the insane behavior that Sheen has been exhibiting. But go with me on this. Say you're making a huge amount of money on a show, and you want out because you're tired of it, but the last time you tried to leave they just offered you a little more money? Why not burn your bridges this time and get a huge windfall besides?

I'm not saying Sheen isn't on drugs. Of course he is. But this whole public breakdown has the look of strategy in it to me. This is why I whenever I see Sheen (or have his antics described to me) I hear that Alec Baldwin line in my head. To recap, it's from Malice, in which Baldwin plays a surgeon on trial for malpractice and on the witness stand he says "You say I have a God complex? Let me tell you something. I am God." In the movie, the malpractice suit is part of a long con.

Same thing people! And duh - winning!

A Harbinger Of Things To Come

2011-03-09T19:49:00.000-08:00

Red Riding Hood is in the vanguard of what appears to be an onslaught of live-action fairy tale-derived studio features over the next year or so. What triggered this trend remains unclear, but one can only hope that the level of cleverness and invention improves, as things hardly get off to an inspired start here.

- Hollywood Reporter review of RED RIDING HOOD

Weekend Box Office

2011-03-08T11:55:00.000-08:00

This town ain't big enough for the both of us. Either I go, or the numbers do.

Emerging from a really lackluster February (they say it's a 15-year low) March comes in like a lion. Leading the pride is Rango, which grabbed $38 million with its little green gekko feet. That's twice the opening of The Tourist, which featured a live action Johnny Depp. Makes you go "hmmmm" doesn't it?

At #2 The Adjustment Bureau, which made $21 million. You may wish it had made more but that's how much it was supposed to make. Opening at #3 was Beastly, with almost $10 million. I hadn't heard of it before just now, but I think it's aimed at the tweens. Let them have their fun.

Also a notable opening this week: Under the Boardwalk: The Monopoly Story. I think it's a documentary about Monopoly. This is what happens when people greenlight based on academy awards. "Listen, that Inside Job was about monopolies. Who do we know in the business world? We don't? Well, figure something out."

Charlie Harper Is a Real Live Boy

2011-03-02T00:16:00.000-08:00

Okay, I watched the 20/20 interview of Charlie Sheen, and have followed the breathless hysteria/moral panic outrage over his recent behavior. I have read articles about his outbursts and the subsequent production halt on "Two and a Half Men." He is being compared on ABC's "Nightline" to Lindsay Lohan and Christina Aguilera, and even Qaddafi.

I haven't the slightest idea what everybody is so worked up about. Charlie Sheen honestly advertises his values and lifestyle every single week on his sitcom (and several times a day in syndication). Nobody who watches this show should be surprised in the least by these "shocking" new revelations.

I am never, ever going to get on a high horse and judge the guy. He's living a lifestyle the rest of us can only envy. In his ABC interview most of what had was say was quite reasonable, given his unusual life perspective. About the only thing I can say about his recent behavior is that it resulted in shuttering his show, and any sort of personal outburst that interferes with profits is bad business. But come on: whose fault was that? Sheen's, for having a chip on his shoulder and an oversized ego, or Chuck Lorre for being thin-skinned and also having an oversized ego? Name a person at a level high enough to directly profit from the #1 sitcom on American television who wouldn't have an oversized ego?

If we're going to go ahead and compare spasms of media celebrity outrage, Charlie Sheen would best be compared to Woody Allen. In 1992, Allen's relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, 34 years his junior and his sort-of stepdaughter with Mia Farrow, became public. The hue and cry was most extreme. But Woody Allen had telegraphed his preledictions for, um, younger women in his film Manhattan. Why was everyone so surprised when it turned out to be true?

Hey, as long as nobody gets hurt and nobody's livelihood is threatened, Charlie Sheen can be Charlie Harper all the livelong day. In fact, that's what I love about the guy.

The Razzies: More Geeky Than Usual

2011-03-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

The night before the Oscars is the penultimate moment for the award season, with two final award shows before the big one: The IFC Spirit Awards, usually held in Santa Monica, and The Razzies, held in Hollywood at the Barnsdall Gallery Theatre ("a low-priced rental house for live theatre, dance, music, spoken word, lecture, film and special event presentations." - official website)

Out in the West Side, IFC gave their best picture award to Black Swan: They also considered The King's Speech a foreign film, and it won that award as such. Back in H'wood, awards at the Razzies were mostly shared by two films: The Last Airbender, which took 5 awards (worst picture, director, screenplay, mis-use of 3D, and worst supporting actor) and Sex and the City 2, which received three (worst actress combined, ensemble and worst sequel).

According to the breathless copy on the Razzies' pop-up-infested homepage, The "winner" of worst picture is "Repeat Offender M. Night Shyamalan’s 're-imagining' of the faux-animé TV series The Last Airbender into a jumbled, jump-cut mess of a movie that fans of the TV show hated even more than critics did (if that’s even possible!)."

I've read more than my fair share of savage reviews in 2010, and there were quite a few for Airbender. But the worst most people could say about it is that it was confusing and boring. No, the best, the most elaborately written, the most snarling and vicious reviews were almost universally reserved for Sex and the City 2. It inspired such review quotes as:

...An enervated, crass and gruesomely caricatured trip to nowhere -- seems conceived primarily to find new and more cynical ways to abuse the loyalty of its audience. (Slate)

It's an accidental candid snapshot of the sick, dying heart of America, a film so pleased with its vacuous, trashy, art-free extravagance that its poster should be taped to the dingy walls of terrorist sleeper agents worldwide. (IFC)

SATC2 takes everything that I hold dear as a woman and as a human—working hard, contributing to society, not being an entitled c*** like it's my job—and rapes it to death with a stiletto that costs more than my car. (The Stranger)

I mean, from major newspapers to online critics, everyone who was paid to write a write a review of this film went out of their way to throttle SATC2. The Last Airbender? Aside from some soaring put-downs of Mr. Shyamalan (who most believe will be moving on to directing wedding videos) most reviewers thought it was just a poorly executed film, not the end of western civilization as we know it.

It would seem that the Razzie folks are in the corner of disappointed "faux-anime" fans than part of the larger chorus of outrage over the awful, clueless, tone-deaf abomination of SATC2.

Then again, this isn't really a surprise: I've found it interesting that the closer you get to the fringes of Hollywood culture, the prevailing culture becomes increasingly male and fanboy-like. So I believe SATC2 didn't take full [dis]honors because ultimately the Razzie boys couldn't quite parse the negative reactions to it-- and it was so far outside their demographic they would never actually see it.

It's not an exact analogy, but I'm reminded of the segment of the Academy Awards ceremony where they hand out the technical Oscars. This event is held far in time and space from the big show, and it is usually MC'd by a recipient of a "real" Oscar-- This year, it was Marisa Tomei. The last shot of the segment was the group photo: Cute little Marisa standing on a stage surrounded by tuxedoes. Away from the bright center of Hollywood, it's apparently a real sausage fest.

More Academy Award Fun, In Tweet Form

2011-02-28T11:58:00.000-08:00

Here's a "best of" collection of my tweets from last night. It's this level of comic sophistication that got me the following email just now: "Woodland Hills Pawn (@LApawnshop) is now following your tweets (@piker62) on Twitter. " I couldn't be prouder.

#coreyhaim, it's as if the Academy refused to admit you were gone.

With all the new attention I bet the producers of The Kings Speech are kicking themselves for not shooting in 3-D .

Oh great! This is what happens when a movie about a speech wins

Congrats Natalie! This must take the sting out of your boyfriend becoming a dark lord of Sith.

Ladies and gentleman, the ghost of Bob Hope!

Sorkin not delivering accepting speech while walking fast down a hall.

83rd Academy Awards: High Tech Traditionalism

2011-02-28T10:14:00.000-08:00

The 83rd Academy Awards is in the books, an impressively long broadcast which tried hard to skew young and relevant-- only to end up as traditional as any Oscar ceremony I've seen in a long time.

Some random viewing notes:

• When the nominations were announced a few weeks ago, I called almost all of them. the only acting award I missed was Melissa Leo rather than Amy Adams for Supporting Actress, but I still get half-credit because both were for The Fighter. This isn't clairvoyance, it's just the application of brute sociology. For instance, the Best Picture win was easy to predict: The popularity and the award push for The Social Network peaked in fall, while The King's Speech was gaining momentum in January. It's a sad conceit, but it's been long observed that Academy voters have the memories of goldfish, and here's the proof.

The nature of the stories told in the above two films may have been a factor as well: A story of friendship bridging a social chasm versus a story about a bunch of privileged Ivy League types suing each other. This was excellently observed in a column I read in the San Jose Mercury about The Social Network, a sort of tech geek take on things. The takeaway quote: "The Social Network is a film about social networking made by people who hate social networking."

• Melissa Leo's rambling, sort of skeevy acceptance speech is what would happen if your favorite neighborhood bartender was awarded an Oscar. From this perspective, her F-bomb was actually obligatory. Are we sure she wasn't one of the Lowell, Mass. folks hired as local color for The Fighter?

• The co-hosts James Franco and Anne Hathaway were a pair of pretty clouds that drifted further and further apart as the evening progressed. It became apparent that Franco had mentally checked out of anything but the most mechanical aspects of hosting by mid-point (web speculation was that he was rockin' the ganga a little), which left poor Anne having to shuffle and dance and try to pick up the slack.

• I actually got a big kick out of the ending: the stage of the Kodak was stormed by the PS 22 chorus (from Staten Island) who sang "Over the Rainbow." They were joined at the very end by the Oscar winners, waving their gold statuettes. A nice little note to end on.

As fun as this was, it made me finally notice an ongoing problem with the way the Oscars are structured: Winners are shooed backstage, never to return to their seats (this year, they were kept backstage to provide additional web-only content, apparently). This means that as the telecast progresses, the orchestra seats are eventually filled with-- and there's no better way to put this-- losers (and seat fillers). This is probably the reason why the energy level peaks so early. Why not let the winners sit back down with their peers? They could pass their Oscars around, shout encouragement and imprecations from the audience, and generally keep things lively. I'm sure Melissa Leo would have livened things up.

• Ricky Gervais was nowhere to be found.

Liveblogging The Oscars

2011-02-27T20:24:00.000-08:00

Damn! I meant to blog the Oscars, and wound up tweeting instead. Next year for sure.

Sent from my iPhone

Weekend Box Office

2011-02-22T11:56:00.000-08:00

"I Am Number One" say the numbers.

Kinda meh this week, openings-wise. At the top of the list, Liam Neeson vehicle Unknown pulls down $22 mil though it can't remember how. Probable non-franchise I Am Number Four belies its title by opening at #2, but it only makes $19 mil. At #5 (ouch!) Martin Lawrence takes time off from his mall galleries to star in Big Mammas: Like Father Like Son. Like $16 mil. He'd be better off buying the rights to one of Tracey Jordan's fake 30 Rock titles.