I honestly don’t mean to keep devoting time and blog space to Uwe Boll, but when the guy manages to say something hilarious or interesting every other day, what else am I to do? Write about serious issues like the future of film criticism? Karina’s got that covered quite sufficiently and efficiently, so I might as well stick to the fluff.
Of course, I can still relate the fluff to film theory, as in the case of Boll’s latest peer slamming, located at MTV Movies Blog. After criticizing the uneven work of Tom Tykwer (sorry, Uwe, but Perfume is a far better film than Run Lola Run), Gus Van Sant and Michael Haneke, he goes off again on his favorite nemesis, Michael Bay:
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Bryan Appleyard takes a look at the artists who died in 2007 for The Times, and says a few infuriating things about the state of comtemporary filmmaking in the process. The thrust of the piece is a bit of Summer 2007 nostalgia: “The deaths of Antonioni and Bergman drew painful attention to the lack of great European auteurs.” Post-colonial angst is SO exhausting, but let’s engage with it anyway, shall we?
In assessing the year’s disappointments, Appleyard lumps Quentin Tarantino in with Francis Ford Coppola and Philip Roth as artists “who did not die but, somehow, faded.” He dismisses Tarantino on the grounds that Kill Bill was “dismal” (although, both critically and commercially, it was undeniably successful, at least in the States). Death Proof also gets an unrealistic drubbing. In calling Tarantino’s half of Grindhouse “not so much a film as an act of pathological self-indulgence [which] convinced even some of his most devoted fans that the game was up,” Appleyard ignores the fact that Death Proof, which beat out films like Sweeney Todd, The Lives of Others and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead in indieWIRE’s comprehensive 2007 critics poll, is widely considered to be the chunk of Grindhouse that could actually stand on its own.
When Appleyard moves on to consider candidates for The New Film Auteur (with a straight face, as if there’s going to be an election, or maybe a competition show on Bravo), his logic betrays even more personal bias.
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In preparation for this week’s episode of FilmCouch (which, as always, will premiere Friday morning here on SpoutBlog), I gave myself a bit of re-education on the life and career of Peter Bogdanovich. In the podcast, I reference a number of interviews. Because I can’t (yet) insert hyperlinks directly into the podcast, below the jump I’ve put together a basic glossary of the stuff I read in preparation for the segment. Past episodes of FilmCouch can be found at our Podcasts page.
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The Bourne Ultimatum, the third installment in the series starring Matt Damon, broke a slew of records this weekend with its $70 million+ opening. It’s not only the best Bourne opening yet — it’s the best August opening weekend of all time. But even a hands-down victory is susceptible to multiple spins.
At some point, someone positioned the Bourne franchise as a direct competitor to the James Bond franchise. And so, Variety’s weekend post mortem opens by noting the new spy’s dominance: “[F]ilmmaker Paul Greengrass’ The Bourne Ultimatum nabbed the best August opening on record, outperforming the debut of any James Bond pic as well as the previous two installments in Universal’s Jason Bourne spy.” The Greengrass shout-out is, I think, also significant: when was the last time a Bond film was associated with its director? The implication is that the Bourne franchise–which was handed to Greengrass after the studio determined Bourne Identity director Doug Liman (who secured the rights to the Robert Ludlum novels, wrote the Identity script and actually operated the camera for a portion of the first film) was too difficult to work with — is succeeding in part because of the auteur vision behind it.
Ever bottom-line minded, Brandon Gray at Box Office Mojo notes that this third Bourne *needed* to open huge. “The Bourne Ultimatum’s production budget bulked up to well over $100 million, compared to $75 million for Supremacy and $60 million for Identity.” Blockbusters generally need to gross twice their acknowledged production budgets, in order to cover marketing and distribution costs before turning a profit. Nikki Finke thinks it may face tough competition from Rush Hour 3 next week (yes, seriously), but BOM’s outlook on that score is pro-Bourne. Gray notes that exit polls on Ultimatum had viewers rating the pic extremely high, which suggests that it’s got strong holdover potential in the weeks to come.
Last weekend’s winners showed a market lack of that holdover potential in this frame. The Simpsons Movie dropped an astounding 74 percent from Friday-to-Friday, and 65 percent for the weekend as a whole; it still ended up in second place, but only because the competition was equally weak. The Andy Samberg misfire Hot Rod opened in ninth place, with about $5 million on 2,600 screens; the BRATZ movie couldn’t even manage that. The biggest indie showing of the week came from El Cantante, which debuted in 12th place with $3.2 million on about 540 screens; indie holdovers such as Rescue Dawn and Sicko are falling fast, with the latter about to drop out of the Top 20.
Previous Spins:
Sandler Gay-OK
Maybe Paul Dergarabedian Would Like A Milkshake?
If Transformers is Just Boffo, What The Hell is Whammo?
Insert Your Favorite Cooking Metaphor … HERE
