Little time but some big news today in the geekier realms of moviedom (which is pretty much all of big moviedom these days, or so it seems at times).
* The dynamic duo of Finke and Fleming have broken the news that “Dark Knight” helmer Christopher Nolan will be leading — though probably not directing — a new Superman reboot that will definitely not follow on the (in my view) somewhat underrated Bryan Singer/Brandon Routh semi-sequel to the Richard Donner/Richard Lester films of the seventies. I’m sure me and half of everyone reading could probably write a novel length essay about this. From my end, at least, that’ll have to wait.
* The apocalyptic battle over the rights to “The Terminator” winds on. Last night, Nikki Finke claimed the exclusive that something called Pacifore had purchased the rights for $29.5 million. Today, since Pacificore is a Santa Barbara-based hedge fund with presumably no knowledge of how to make a blockbuster franchise film, they are today reportedly in negotiations with the former bidding adversaries, Sony and Lionsgate as to actually making new Terminator films. Ben Fritz of the L.A. Times Company Town blog has the details. Apparently, if the negotiations don’t go well, legal action may be in the cards. Gotta love show business.
* And a fun casting story to top everything off. Did I ever tell you people I actually know people who’ve actually been on UCLA stages with Tim Robbins back in the day? It’s really true. Well, I just got a few degrees of separation closer to the “Green Lantern” movie since the very talented writer-director-actor-dramaturg and Sarandon-ex (<sigh>) has joined the cast of “Green Lantern” where he’ll be playing the Peter Saarsgard’s dad. Heat Vision has the scoop.
I was tempted to go with one of two songs for tonight’s episode. The runner-up to the Nirvana lyric above was Garbage’s “Stupid Girl,” in reference to the subplot where Starbuck lets her hilljack ex-con lover and his troglodyte friend loose in an evidence warehouse…but it didn’t seem emphatic enough. No, for that to be the lead, I needed a song with a title along the lines of “You Are the Dumbest Motherfuckers in the History of Dumb Motherfuckers,” and a quick check of my iTunes library reveals nothing that has both ‘dumb’ and ‘motherfucker’ in it. I am clearly listening to the wrong bands.
Slumdog President is fast becoming my second-favorite character on the show this season (though he’s admittedly a distant, distant second to Renee Walker). He was smoove like Wilt Chamberlain – take that any way you like – when the peace accord was about to be signed, but Jason Schwartzman’s betrayal has evidently shaken him to the core…or has it? That’s the beauty, if you want to call it that, of this show; we only know what we’ve seen, so we have no way of determining Slumdog’s next move, since we don’t know really know him at all. On the surface, the sudden paranoia and ruthlessness is in stark contrast to his affability in the first two hours. But who knows, maybe the reason he’s so shaken is because he thought he and Jason Schwartzman were on the same page, only to discover that little brother was much more hardcore than he ever knew.
Speaking of Jason Schwartzman and hardcore, he has now been screwing those two hookers for three hours. Good on ya, mate.
If you take a step back, you have to wonder how Vladimir Guerrero didn’t see that he had been set up for failure six years ago when Jackie first entered his life. She’s suddenly back, and she has this “German” partner who speaks perfect English, and would you look at that, he wants to buy uranium rods, something totally out of Vladimir’s league. Could you make some calls, for old time’s sake? Even funnier that he thought that any of these Russian godfathers would actually tell him over a cell phone, “Why yes, I do have some enriched uranium rods. Why do you ask?” I’m no small-time gangster, but if I were, I would not be making awkward phone calls late at night to guys who could erase my entire family tree in 24 hours. Just sayin’, it would be bad for business.
“What’s my sign? ‘Out of order.'”
Ah, but Crazy Jackie has Vladimir’s number, and when that happens, you can throw all logic out the window. (Trust me on this, I speak from experience.) And if you didn’t already know that the producers of “24” are expecting their audience to suspend a certain amount of disbelief, you sure as hell did after tonight’s episode, where Jackie, having just filleted Vladimir with a bread knife (knew that was making a callback), accidentally stabs Jack in the stomach during her fit of rage. Jack falls to the ground, but still has his wits and faculties enough to throw the bread knife at Vladimir’s suspicious right-hand man…and stab him perfectly in the neck, killing him instantly. Gales of laughter came from the “24” blog headquarters when that happened. “Thank you, Senor MacGyver. You saved our village.” “Don’t thank me. Thank the moon’s gravitational pull.” Both are equally as likely to actually happen.
Oh, and apparently Jackie’s stabbing of Jack was just a flesh wound. Whew. (*slaps forehead*)
Finally, let’s get to Starbuck and her dumb, dumb, super-fucking dumbass plan to send Kevin on his way by giving him access to an warehouse filled with evidence lockers. Oh noes! Kevin’s even dumber buddy – don’t be surprised if they reveal that he’s illiterate – is going to mess everything up by poking around in the cell to look for more bling, and when we revisit them, he’s trashed the place like a toddler in a toy store…and the supposedly street-smart Kevin allowed it to happen. In the name of “South Park” character Jimmy, “C-C-C’mon, fellas.” For those of you who have been reading these rants since the season premiere, you know that I’ve been begging Starbuck to come clean for weeks now. She had everything in her favor then. Now, not so much, especially since Shoeless Joe beat down a cop with a baseball bat. Ugh, Dumb, mother, fuckers.
If there was a positive note to tonight’s episode, it was that Wolfhausen’s minions brought Jack through sewer tunnels as a means of evading government surveillance. That was a nice callback to when Jack called the Russians a dirty people in the previous hour. I guess they showed him.
All right, let’s get to the tune. I think it’s incredible what Dave Grohl has done in the wake of Kurt Cobain’s death, but damn, man, what I would give for one more Nirvana album.
* Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” tested as the most memorable film commercial during last night’s hugely rated Superbowl and understandably so, it’s genuinely beautiful stuff. Past versions of the classic, however, have been somewhat hampered by the episodic — you might even say pre-Pythonesque — structure of Lewis Carrol/Charles Dodgson’s freewheeling children’s literary classic. (The first work of art to ever really blow my mind, I think.) The idea this time is to get around that problem by turning the film into something like a sequel to the original as concocted by writer Linda Woolverton. Storylines, or the lack thereof, have been Burton’s Achilles heel in the past, so this should be interesting.
* I’ve always loved Robert Wise’s great film of “The Andromeda Strain” and there are few movies I’ve detested more than Wolfgang Peterson’s “Outbreak.” (A virus is threatening all of humanity and I’m supposed to be distracted by an adorable monkey on loan from an overrated sitcom and helicopter chases???) I’m sure Steve Soderbergh’s “Contagion” will at least try to be closer to the Wise approach. Soderbergh may be uneven because he’s so unafraid to take huge chances, but when he pulls a movie together, few are better.
* Yet another item from Deadline|Hollywood’s ace, non-venomous reporter, reporter, Mike Fleming. Ami Canaan Mann, daughter of Michael Mann, is directing her first big feature (but not her first feature). It’s an intriguing sounding fact-inspired thriller about a series of unsolved Texas murders tied with the drug trade.
Yes, so for those who read Friday’s post, The Hollywood Reporter‘s Carl DiOrio was wrong and Nikki Finke was more right than even she knew on her first, non-updated, version of her weekend box office post. The Nicholas Sparks adaptation starring Amanda Seyfried and Channing Tatum, “Dear John,” seriously exceeded even the most optimistic expectations this Superbowl weekend and took down, at last, the seven-weekend long domestic box office “Avatar” juggernaut. The make-up of the audience that generated $32.4 million for Sony and Relativity Media according to Box Office Mojo was not surprising. As per Finke:
Females made up 84% of the opening weekend audience, while 64% of the moviegoers were under age 21.
Still, I should add that this was definitely a case of “Dear John” winning, not so much “Avatar” losing. James Cameron‘s science fiction spectacle from Fox is still holding remarkably well, dropping less than 25% this week and netting some $23.6 million. The distinctly shorter length of “Dear John” is another obvious advantage.
On the other hand, Pierre Morel’s all-out action picture, “From Paris with Love,” starring John Travolta and Jonathan Rhys Meyers is shorter still, but it’s possible this was just the wrong weekend to release that kind of a movie with male fans of balls-out action distracted by the year’s #1 sports event. The film came in a very poor third with only a bit over $8.12 million for Lionsgate. C’est la vie. And here’s one more plug for the Bullz-Eye feature on Parisian-based films of all genres, “We’ll Always Have Paris,” which I say completely without bias or pride of co-authorship.
In other news, “Crazy Heart,” the country music drama featuring a nearly certain Oscar-winning performance from Jeff Bridges, was not a tale of Americana-style heartbreak. It nailed a very respectable $3.65 million in 819 theaters, which got it into this week’s #8 position. The week’s biggest per-screen was for a movie that is technically a television miniseries. The “Red Riding” Trilogy, which originally aired on English television, nailed a per screen average of $15,500 thousand. Of course, that’s in exactly one theater. Still, not bad considering it’s actually three films.
On the other hand, Pierre Morel’s all-out action picture, “
