Miley Cyrus: Eyebrows, Overbite and Ambition

I have reported before that Miley Cyrus, the perfectly nice kid who starred in the Disney monster hit "Hannah Montana," is a remarkably flat-footed actress, so much so the showrunners brought in Emily Osment to prop her up in most scenes. Now she has her first non-Hannah Montana movie out, The Last Song, based on a Nicholas Sparks weepie. Of course she's taken the years on Disney's soundstages to hone her craft, and the proof is in the reviews. Let's start with Rob Nelson at the usually boosterish Variety:

Cyrus, alas, hasn't yet learned not to act with her eyebrows and overbite.

Mick LaSalle, SFGate:

[T]he bottom line here is that Cyrus is ghastly in "The Last Song," bad not just in one or two ways, but in all kinds of ways. It was a disservice to the audience, to the material and to Cyrus herself that she was put in this position. [...] Cyrus plays one note - rage - in scene after scene. There's no motivating anguish underneath the anger. It's all surface snarling and sneering, and within minutes, she alienates the audience. She makes herself repellent and doesn't seem to know it.

A. O. Scott, New York Times:

Another big problem is Ms. Cyrus. [A]cting, for the moment at least, seems almost entirely beyond her. In “The Last Song” she pouts, slouches, storms in and out of rooms and occasionally cracks a snaggle-toothed smile, but most of the time she seems to be mugging for the camera, play-acting rather than exploring the motives and feelings of her character.

The hilarious, celeb-ripping part: according to wire reports, Miley wants nothing more than to go thespian.

[T]he star wants to leave the music industry for good and become a fully fledged Hollywood actress. On the red carpet for her new film The Last Song, Cyrus told reporters, "I've got a record coming out in June and then I'm done. I just want to work in movies. That's what I like and that's what I want to be doing."

I don't know if this is painfully naive or just straight from the heart. Probably the latter. And why not? Purportedly, Miley, hand-picked by her dad for the Disney show, had this property hand-picked for herself, inspired by the success of the 2002 Sparks romantic weepie A Walk to Remember. She met her boyfriend Liam Hemsworth on the set. And unlike the pressure-cooker of episodic TV production, on a movie set she only has to knock out ten-odd scenes a day, allowing her to spend most of her time in the trailer, where people bring lattes and muffins.

I would add another perk for her, that she doesn't have to memorize anything longer than a page anymore, but having watched a few episodes of her old show it was readily apparent she read much of Hanna Montana's dialog off cards. But ya know what? Who cares. If The Last Song makes money, good for everybody. Acting-wise, up-and-coming ingenues can't all be Dakota Fanning.

Weekend Box Office

Heartache by the numbers.

Well, looks like that crazy 3D fad has run its course - Alice In Wonderland knocked out of the top spot by a digital cartoon! Let's see: How To Train Your Dragon takes #1 with $43 million dollars and... it's in 3D. OK, don't switch to monocles yet.

At #3 the other new entry, Hot Tub Time Machine. Only $14 million! Sometimes making the internet the basis of your marketing strategy works, others... well, I bet it does good cult business.

Allllll the way down at #105, Murder In Fashion. $177. A look at this description will confuse you. It reads like a documentary, but the genre is listed as "horror", or on Variety's chart, "crime". Might be worth sneaking in to if you live near the one theatre it's playing at. If you know anything about it, comment for us won't you?

The Terrorists Win

After eight seasons, Fox’s “24” is coming to an end.

The groundbreaking action drama will air its final real-time episode in May, the victim of a confluence of circumstances: a swelling budget, declining ratings and creative fatigue.

Yet for fans of Jack Bauer, there remains hope. Studio 20th TV is developing a theatrical film that takes Bauer to Europe, and showrunner and executive producer Howard Gordon says other possibilities are being explored as well.

On the plus side, Bauer can finally get some sleep.

Weekend Box Office

Hey hey we're the numbers.

Alice lives here for the moment: At #1 Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, pulling down $34 million in the weekend and $265 million so far. You'd think they could afford to let you keep the glasses!

And 3 new movies nipping at Alice's heels: Diary of a Wimpy Kid at #2 with a respectable $22 million, The Bounty Hunter at #3 with $21 million and Repo Men at #4 makes only $6 million. I confess that I know nothing about the Wimpy Kid. Wherever they were advertising that thing, I wasn't. The other two, more power to 'em.

Interesting rerelease this week: hitting the chart at #95, Kurosawa's Rashoman pulls down $331 at one location. Of course that's the distributor reporting. The theatre remembers it as having only made $150, the projectionist insists that it made $500.

Maurice La Marche Explains International Talk Like William Shatner Day

Let's make it even bigger this year - don't sabbotage it!

Great Screenplay, Clumsy Movie: Heat (1986)

I just treated myself to a DVD viewing of Heat, the 1986 Burt Reynolds vehicle. Burt Reynolds doesn't interest me - by 1986 he didn't interest most people. However, Heat is the brainchild of William Goldman, a screenwriter who is of perpetual interest.

By 1986 Goldman's star was pretty tarnished as well. In the seventies he had become pricey talent because of his work on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President's Men, Marathon Man and The Stepford Wives, brilliantly crafted hits. But a man can't top himself forever. He cemented his rep by writing Adventures in the Screen Trade, the best book ever about Hollywood, but when the decade turned the industry was content to leave him to his comfortable laurels and seemed a little annoyed that he kept writing anyway. Goldman came back the next year with The Princess Bride, which is significant in discussing Heat.

It's a kind of action movie/character study about Nick "Mex" Escalante, a freelance bodyguard (he lists in the yellow pages as a chaperone) in Las Vegas who never carries a gun but is brilliant in the use of improvised edged weapons. For example, a thrown ashtray. Nick is semi-famous due to some exposure in Soldier of Fortune magazine. One night a friend of his, a prostitute named Holly, asks for his help in locating the creepy pretty-boy john who beat her up and abused her. Nick discovers he's the son of a gangster kingpin but roughs him up anyway. Complications ensue.

The great joy of Heat is watching Goldman work the audience. He introduces Escalante as a guy harassing a nice girl in a bar who winds up taking a beating from her much smaller, less macho boyfriend. Goldman knows what you expect and takes delight in twisting it up. His dialog is tough and sounds less like people talking than it sounds like DIALOG. Characters are killed but it turns out they're not, gangsters do unexpected things.

It would all be textbook screenwriting, but Goldman at that stage in his career couldn't just phone it in. Heat, like The Princess Bride, is a parody of itself. It's the work of a great screenwriter working hard to keep himself interested, so he pushes everything just a liiiiiiiiitle too far, to see if he can pull it off.

One of the things to love about this movie is that Goldman basically stops the action dead in the second act for a half hour, to pursue other things. It's a breathtaking tactical mistake, and coming from a rookie it would have gotten him fired. But it give the movie its most interesting moments, separating it from the routine action fare (say Malone for example) available at the time.

So, great screenplay. Sadly the movie doesn't quite work - maybe it never could. Maybe it only works as a novel (Goldman wrote that too, and it's a better read than The Da Vinci Code) but it can't translate to the screen. It would be interesting to see this remade, with the exact same script. It doesn't date at all. Even downtown Vegas looks the same. Benicio Del Toro would make a pretty good Nick Escalante.

Now This Lawsuit Is Getting Interesting

Because content owners large and small use YouTube in so many different ways, determining a particular copyright holder’s preference or a particular uploader’s authority over a given video on YouTube is difficult at best. And in this case, it was made even harder by Viacom’s own practices.

For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt "very strongly" that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.

Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.

Given Viacom’s own actions, there is no way YouTube could ever have known which Viacom content was and was not authorized to be on the site. But Viacom thinks YouTube should somehow have figured it out. The legal rule that Viacom seeks would require YouTube -- and every Web platform -- to investigate and police all content users upload, and would subject those web sites to crushing liability if they get it wrong.

Viacom’s brief misconstrues isolated lines from a handful of emails produced in this case to try to show that YouTube was founded with bad intentions, and asks the judge to believe that, even though Viacom tried repeatedly to buy YouTube, YouTube is like Napster or Grokster.

Oh man, I can't wait to see what happens next with this one.