Tuesday Wrap: Syriana Sued, Seattle Begins, X-Files 2 Still Alive, and More
5/30/2006 4:00:00 PM
- That Syriana plagiarization case, brought by a French screenwriter who claims Stephen Gaghan took chunks of his story from her script Oversight, was finally heard in a Paris court. I’m not sure about how French justice works, but this seems to be the crucial point: “In October 2004, when Ms Vergniault deposed the copyright for Oversight, ‘the Syriana script was completely written and filming nearly completed,’ said Natasha Levine. ‘In June 2004, the storyboard was ready. In October, the movie was in the eleventh week of filming.’” Whoops.
- Japanese master, Shohei Imamura, director of the classic Vengeance is Mine and himself a two-time winner of Cannes’s top prize, has passed away.
- It doesn’t have the cache of Cannes, but the Seattle Film Festival, one of North America’s biggest and most prestigious fests, has begun. There will be plenty of press coverage, but I prefer to follow it through the ridiculously thorough and prolific musings of film-buff and filmmaker Ken Rudolph. Ken also happens to be a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences -- so his opinions matter in all sorts of ways.
- The Guardian’s got a pretty great profile of the once-ubiquitous Matthew Modine, who has refashioned himself into a cinematic eco-warrior of sorts, with a new documentary, 1,000 Suns.
- Could it be that X-Files 2 is still a possibility?
- Valerio Zurlini was one of the world’s greatest filmmakers (his Desert of the Tartars is on my all-time Top 10), but nobody talks about him anymore. Maybe this will start to change things.
- Another cut of Blade Runner? You think they’d get it right one of these days.
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The Cannes Factor
5/30/2006 11:30:00 AM
There’s a bit more to say about the Cannes winners. Amid all the talk about Volver being a lock to win and Almodovar being “due,” we all conveniently forgot that this was Ken Loach’s 13th Cannes fest and his 8th time competing for the Palme d’Or. The Wind that Shakes the Barley, which was the big winner on Sunday, also had the advantage of being a political film in an environment when political films are hot. (Another charged film from the UK, Andrea Arnold’s Red Road, won the Jury Prize, making it a good year for the struggling Brit film industry.)
There’s a lot of hoo-aah out there about the Palme not meaning much for a US release. I suppose that tends to be true – sort of. Previous Palme winners have included major hits and award-winners such as The Pianist, Pulp Fiction, and Fahrenheit 911. Then again, we have the counter-examples of such financial under-performers as L’Enfant (currently in theaters – go see it) and Emir Kusturica’s Underground (it’s on DVD, and it’s one of the greatest films ever made – go rent it). (For a pretty excellent and insightful accounting of the intricate relationship between major international film festivals and the directors they love, read this.)
 | | Jesus, you'd think I could find a better photo online of Tarantino accepting the Palme for Pulp Fiction. |
To say that Tarantino wouldn’t have happened without the Palme would be silly, of course. But it would be equally silly to argue that Pulp Fiction’s explosive debut at Cannes, capped off with its Palme win, did nothing for its stateside prospects. (At the very least, it got him the attention of the highbrow press like nobody’s business.) On the other hand, when The Pianist won the Palme, there was a lot of head-scratching; this film from an aging master, one whose best years were considered to be behind him, had been reasonably well-received, but it wasn’t considered one of the favorite titles that year. Many predicted that the film wouldn’t make much of a dent when it got its eventual stateside release. After all, did we really care about a period piece set during a long-ago war, even if it did star a hot young actor? Wait -- is this starting to sound familiar? Granted, The Pianist was a Holocaust drama, and those tend to do better come Oscar-season than IRA dramas such as The Wind that Shakes the Bartley. And no, I am not predicting that Cillian “Cheekbones” Murphy is due for a Best Actor Oscar anytime soon, either.
But there’s one thing I can’t help but notice. It’s a painfully obvious point, but English-language Palme winners tend to do a lot better here than foreign-language Palme winners. One notable and very recent exception is Elephant, which suggests that – duh -- at some point a film’s inherent accessibility or lack thereof becomes a factor. (Though I would like to note that the fact that Elephant actually made more than a million dollars at the US box office is something of a colossal achievement for that film.) Secrets & Lies was far from Mike Leigh’s best work, but it won the Palme and led to his first Oscar nomination, and made him something of a household name on the arthouse circuit. Granted, Leigh was certainly a major filmmaker before his Palme win, but since Secrets & Lies he has been a much-better known commodity (did I just call Mike Leigh a “commodity”?), the kind whose name pops up as a possibility on Oscar forecast lists and whatnot. A similar thing happened to Jane Campion with The Piano.
Here’s what it boils down to, I think. An English-language film that has won a Palme d’Or will simply have an easier time convincing its US distributor to pony up the money for a proper release, a proper marketing campaign, and a proper awards campaign. The win means slightly more flashbulbs will go off at its press conference. It sells out slightly more quickly at the New York Film Festival. It convinces reviewers to take a slightly longer look at it. It attracts the big-name critics instead of the second and third-stringers, which means its reviews get read and noticed by more people. All those things matter. They matter much more than we like to think they matter.
I could be wrong. It’s possible that The Wind that Shakes the Barley will just vanish, the way The Son’s Room did. But don’t be surprised if it becomes the first Ken Loach film your friends wind up seeing.
UPDATE: (5/31/06) Not sure it reveals all that much, but here's a great list of the box office grosses of previous Palme d'Or winners.
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Morning Deal Report: Box Office Bodaciousness, Cannes Wraps, Clerks Screens, and More
5/30/2006 9:30:00 AM
- Brett Ratner might be a hack and a half, but the man knows how to keep a franchise alive. Now that X-Men: The Last Stand has raked in some serious cash (like, $120 million) over the Holiday weekend, can we expect a revision of all those categorical statements that this was to be the final X-Men movie, like, ever? And if they are working on a spinoff, may we humbly suggest a starting point?
- And oh yeah, in case you stopped wondering, The Da Vinci Code is still minting up a storm overseas. In fact, it handily beat the new X-Men movie abroad.
- There’s more to box office reporting than just the box office. There is, of course, also the reporting on the box office reporting. And then the reporting on the reporting of the box office reporting. Dave Poland skewers certain media types’ race to get on right-wing tool Matt Drudge’s links list here.
- Neither rain nor sleet nor Hollywood superstition will stop Disney-Pixar’s Cars from connecting with its heartland audience. The film’s outdoor premiere at Lowe’s Speedway was lashed by a torrential downpour, delaying celebrity arrivals but doing little to affect the 30,000 that turned up for the event. As much as one might want to take this as a bad omen, be warned: Cars is getting staggeringly good advance word . A major Summer box-office contender that might actually be a great film to boot? The mind reels at the possibilities.
- Well, in case you missed it, Cannes is over. In a bit of a surprise, Ken Loach’s well-liked Irish war drama The Wind that Shakes the Barley won the Palme, the Grand Prix went to the not-much-beloved Flandres by Bruno Dumont, Best Director went to Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu for Babel, and widely favored Pedro Almodovar’s Volver got two awards for its troubles -- Best Screenplay and a Best Actress award to its entire ensemble of female performers. (Look for a slightly more in-depth ScreenGrab piece on Cannes awards later today.)
- Somewhat lost among the Cannes coverage was a reported eight-minute standing ovation for Kevin Smith’s long-awaited Clerks II. Granted, it was a midnight screening and therefore probably an audience composed of big Smith fans. But hey, color us excited: Smith assures us that, despite the MPAA’s decision to hand the film an R without asking for any cuts, “the ‘questionable’ content in Clerks II goes beyond anything we've ever presented in a film before.” Oh, goodie.
- In the wake of Cannes, Time.com has what appears to be an utterly random assemblage of smaller “film festivals for the rest of us”, a list that includes such unlikely bedfellows as the Cleveland International Film Festival, Screamfest LA, and Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival.
- For his part, Ebert wraps up his last Cannes column with a description of something I’ve been dying to see, the restored three-hour cut of Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria. Pastrone’s film was a direct inspiration for D.W. Griffith’s legendary Intolerance. And, speaking of overlooked movies, the story of that inspiration was later fictionalized into the awesome-but-unseen Good Morning Babylon by the Taviani Brothers.
- Should we be worried about this?
- R.I.P. Principal Vernon.
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Friday Wrap: A Transformers Title, a Peyton Reed Kehrfuffle, and More
5/26/2006 6:00:00 PM
- Michael Bay’s Transformers movie has a real title. Transformers: Prime Directive. And there was much…head-scratching.
- The storied film critic (and New York Times DVD columnist) Dave Kehr posted on his blog earlier this week about the strange discrepancy of middle-aged film critics having to write about teen-oriented movies and the like. (This was a follow-up to the feedback for an earlier post about the dismissal of Jami Bernard from the New York Daily News. I hadn’t checked the blog for a few days, so imagine my surprise at finding out that the “Comments” section had degenerated into a discussion of Le Cinema du Peyton Reed.
- Morgan Freeman is joining the cast of Ben Affleck’s directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone. I don’t understand why this is news. Isn’t there a law in Hollywood stipulating that your movie can’t go into production until Morgan Freeman joins your cast (or, at least, narrates)?
- Andrea Arnold’s well-liked Cannes title Red Road has been picked up by Tartan USA.
- Al Gore’s been on a publicity tear this week for An Inconvenient Truth (which you should all run out to see, btw). LA Weekly’s Judith Lewis has one of the better profiles that have appeared.
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Sofia, Marie, and the Myth of the French Boos
5/26/2006 3:58:58 PM
Some more words about Marie-Antoinette’s boos. Everybody’s been propagating this silliness about the French booing Sofia Coppola’s film. (Dave Poland seems to be the only one who is admirably skeptical.) I noted briefly earlier that the idea of the French becoming suddenly enraged by this film didn’t make sense, since a number of French critics had already seen the film before Cannes, and registered their admiration.
Let’s explore this a bit more closely. First, take a look at Mike’s posted averages of the Screen Daily and Le Film Francais critics’ ratings. Notice anything interesting? Marie-Antoinette is not too far from the top. And as of this writing, on the Film Francais poll, it’s virtually neck and neck with widely-acknowledged fest fave Volver for the top spot among competition films. Sacre bleu! But I sought zose cwazy Fwench hated theez feelm!
Let’s also look at the box office numbers. Marie-Antoinette has already opened in France, where it premiered this week. (That’s why the French critics saw it early.) Needless to say, it was beaten by X-Men: The Last Stand, which was to be expected. But it’s still doing brisk business, right up there with a juggernaut like The Da Vinci Code.
Unfortunately, the media loves to latch onto a story, and when it does, it just will not let go. The idea of the French wanting to guillotine the Goddaughter and Mary Jane Watson is just a lot more compelling (and simple-minded) than the fact that Marie-Antoinette might actually be a successful, if flawed, film that people are genuinely interested in seeing.
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Reviewing the Reviewers
5/26/2006 1:15:00 PM
Wherein we turn the tables once a week and give some of our more notable film critics a taste of their own medicine...
| Critic | Review | Quote | Analysis | This Week's Verdict | | Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly | X-Men: The Last Stand | "Exemplifies what can happen when movies are confused with sandwich shops as franchise opportunities: More items on the menu — or in this case, an even greater variety of superheroes with specialty-act powers — is not the same thing as originality of recipe." | Not particularly distinguished, especially given the generally uniform nature of X-Men reviews this week (begrudging acceptance of its professionalism, mixed with laments for the newfound soullessness of what was once Hollywood's most poignant superhero franchise). | | | Carina Chocano, Los Angeles Times | X-Men: The Last Stand | "'Mutant' is the champagne of teen insults, and X-Men holds a special place as the paragon of teen misfit angst dramas." And: "With this trio [Rogue, Phoenix, and Mystique], X3 enters new-ish territory, diving headfirst into the mythos of the femme fatale. Together, they're the Furies for the Hollywood Age. | Has the balls to make a case for a Brett Ratner movie. The best of this week's bunch. | | | Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly | An Inconvenient Truth | Misstating the obvious: "Global warming has its roots in '60s environmentalism — or, as it was known then, ecology." And: "Be warned, for I am about to write seven of the scariest words ever to confront moviegoers: This is a documentary starring Al Gore." Zzzz. | Phones this one in. What happened to all the cute compound Owen-isms and the adverbs stacked so delicately atop one another? | | | Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times | Army of Shadows | "[Jean-Pierre] Melville, who was himself a member of the Resistance, is not interested in making an action film. Action releases tension and makes it external. His film is about the war within the minds of Resistance members, who must live with constant fear, persist in the face of futility, accept the deaths of their comrades and expect no reward, except the knowledge that they are doing the right thing." | It's like he's been taken over by his younger self. Reviewing a throwback has brought out Ebert's inner film buff once again, reminding us of the days when he was one of the more insightful critics in the country. | | | Armond White, New York Press | X-Men: The Last Stand | "Ratner's clichéd exposition (like Ron Howard's) suggests visual slang; doggerel people mistake for exposition. That's why they can't grasp the progressive syntax of Chen Kaige's The Promise." And, speaking of Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart: "They're two kinds of ham: chops and hindquarters." | Gets in his patented digs at other movies while reviewing this one, but is that creeping sense of exasperation the result of a reduced word count? Also, attacking the audience even before the movie has been released is so damn tacky. | |
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Coming Soon to License-Plate Slogans Near You
5/26/2006 12:00:00 PM
The Independent names the city of Los Angeles “film noir’s most enduring star,” offering up a timeline that runs from 1940’s Double Indemnity, via Chinatown and Reservoir Dogs, to this year’s Brick. The article, however, neglects to mention the other cities that inspired their own genres.
Examples:
Paris: The “quirky gamine finding love” genre (Charade, Beauty and the Beast, Amelie)
Chicago: The “running from the law in a creative manner” genre (Some Like it Hot, The Blues Brothers, Risky Business, The Fugitive)
Philadelphia: The “creepy things are lurking everywhere” genre (The Blob, 12 Monkeys, The Sixth Sense)
Dallas: The “trampled-down hero” genre (Bonnie and Clyde, Silkwood, Born on the 4th of July, Boys Don’t Cry)
Detroit: The “fix your relationship by shooting things” genre (Grosse Point Blank, True Romance, Out of Sight)
Got a contribution to the list? Leave it in Feedback. — Gwynne Watkins
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Morning Deal Report: Cannes Winds Down, the MPAA Busted (Again), and Spidey 3 Rolls Into NYC
5/26/2006 10:00:00 AM
- Cannes is slowing down, sez everyone, without any real breakouts in sight. (They say this every fucking year, btw.) Then, practically in the same breath, they mention the frontrunners: Almodovar’s Volver is the clear favorite, followed closely by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Babel, and then maybe Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Climates, (probably too low-key to be a real Palme contender) and Nanni Moretti’s Le Caiman (probably too topical and slightly dated, also Moretti’s won before). And good word seems to be circulating about Pan’s Labyrinth as well. I wouldn’t count out Sofia for an award either, actually: Jury prez Wong Kar Wai has heavily influenced her work, and those notoriously divisive Cannes movies have been known to snag a prize or two in the past.
- The MPAA, in its pursuit of hackers, has been accused of hacking. This is, of course, typical MPAA behavior. Who can forget the hilarious news item earlier this year when they were caught pirating a copy of Kirby Dick’s excellent MPAA-skewering documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated. Next up: The MPAA attempts to reduce America’s obesity problem by hogging all the jelly donuts.
- Quite possibly the lamest article I’ve ever read on book-to-film adaptations.
- Today is the day Spider-Man 3 starts shooting in New York City, apparently filming in spots like Central Park and Times Square. Oh good. More traffic problems.
- This just in: Mike D’Angelo isn’t the only guy who regularly walks out on Cannes movies.
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Thursday Wrap: The Southland Shuffle, X-Men's Bewildered Reviews, and More
5/25/2006 7:10:56 PM
- Jeff Wells reports that the makers of Southland Tales had to rush to finish the film on time for the Cannes date, and are probably going to go back into the editing room. I have sympathy for them, and this may well turn out to be a case similar to Brown Bunny, which lost a good chunk of footage and suddenly became critically-acclaimed. At the same time, rushing to finish in time for the festival isn’t exactly an excuse, guys. I mean, this is different from what almost every other filmmaker goes through how? Let’s not forget that back in the day Francis Ford Coppola won the Palme d’Or with a rough-cut of Apocalypse Now.
- A.O. Scott takes on the politically-themed movies at Cannes this year. The title suggests the article will be about political films from America, but read the article and see if you agree.
- Let me be frank. Given that Brett (Rush Hour) Ratner has now taken over the franchise, I am somewhat amazed that the new X-Men movie evidently does not suck. And even the reviews seem to be expressing that same puzzlement: “Eventually gets the job done,” says Variety. Brett Ratner “isn't as competent behind the camera as Mr. Singer, but such niceties can be irrelevant when it comes to industrial products like these,” says Manohla. “Diminished,” but “not without its wow-inducing, SFX-driven moments,” says the Reporter. It’s like they’re all vaguely annoyed that it’s not a complete stinkbomb.
- Scott Foundas hearts what he’s seen of Dreamgirls.
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Sssomebody ssstopped them!
5/25/2006 2:00:00 PM
The big news story that everyone’s been linking to today is a pretty fascinating piece in The New York Times by Sharon Waxman, about Fox’s pulling the plug on the Jim Carrey-Ben Stiller sci-fi comedy Used Guys, which was set to go into production next month, under the direction of Austin Powers and Meet the Parents maestro Jay Roach. Apparently, the budget was around $112 million, and the studio began to get cold feet. Roach appears to be quite heartbroken over it: “How could this happen? I keep asking myself that every second,” he’s quoted as saying. Waxman’s sources argue that the film’s main talent had so much financial participation that the film would have had to have been a truly gargantuan hit for the studio to even begin seeing money on it. And believe it or not, not all Jim Carrey and Ben Stiller movies wind up being gargantuan hits.
David Poland over at The Hot Blog has a good set of “footnotes” to this story that are worth repeating. First is that Waxman’s story makes no mention of the previous Stiller-Carrey collaboration The Cable Guy, which was also a genuine financial disaster. (I happen to think it’s a pretty good movie, btw.) Granted, it was before Stiller became a huge draw (and he didn’t star in it -- he directed and had a cameo). He also notes that only tangential mention is made of Ben Stiller’s other in-production Fox comedy A Night in the Museum. It’s safe to assume that if the Fox suits were jumping for joy over what they were seeing coming out of that production, then they would have been a lot more hesitant to pull the plug on Used Guys. Also, there’s that small matter of sci-fi comedies not really doing all that well to begin with. It just doesn’t seem to be a genre people are gonna hop in their SUVs to drive miles and miles to see. (I am personally hoping that all changes with this.)
One other thing I’d like to note: While $112 million is a lot of money for a comedy, it’s not that above and beyond what was originally budgeted for this film: $90 million or $102 million, depending on your source. In other words, while this project was over budget even before shooting, it doesn’t appear to have been a runaway production. Which suggests that part of the story here might be that the execs have at long last decided to really take a long hard look at the numbers they’re working with on these films. George Lucas recently predicted that by 2025, movie costs will plummet down to the mid-teens. Either way, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a major (and way overdue) correction sometime soon.
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