Tropic Thunder was not only the number one film of the weekend, but it dethroned The Dark Knight, which is now the second highest grossing film of all time. So why is Ben Stiller brooding? No, he’s not recycling his Bono impression––according to Variety, its $26 million 3-day weekend (it made $37 million from Wednesday through Sunday) is no cause for celebration. The film made about $4 million less than Pineapple Express in its opening run, but cost four times more than that film to produce.
They spent $13 million on last year’s broadcast alone, but due to “plunging sales, recession fears and spiking gasoline prices”, GM can no longer afford to sponsor the Oscars.
The Voltron movie, which has been in development since before the first Transformers movie was completed, has been put into turnaround.
Tropic Thunder is taking heavy fire, not for Robert Downey Jr.’s blackface performance, but rather for Ben Stiller’s spoof movie-within-a-movie, Simple Jack. Is this a case of political correctness gone too far? Or does Hollywood have serious flaws in how it portrays people with disabilities? The latter may have been Stiller’s point all along…
Our friend Kevin Kelly shares the tale of his journey to the fabled Skywalker Ranch to see Clone Wars and meet the elusive George Lucas. The film, essentially a two hour trailer for the upcoming animated series, gets into some pretty wonky territory when it asks the question we’ve all wondered: What would Truman Capote be like as a Hutt?
I wish I had smuggled the Polaroid snapshot of Nolte from my former employer, a men’s homeless shelter. Nolte wasn’t his real name, but I’ll be damned if the scruffy, gin-blossomed, gravel-voiced Vietnam veteran wasn’t a ringer for Nick Nolte playing a Nam burnout. He wore mirror shades and ratty field jacket festooned with medals and POW/MIA buttons. He complained that the thunder erupting from the building’s boiler at night gave him jungle flashbacks. There are cliches and there are cliches. Beyond the impossibility of his extreme Nolte-ness and 1,000 yard silences, the man was really suffering. One time he lifted his shades to show me.
Yesterday I was shocked to see Nolte again, up on the big screen in Tropic Thunder. This was my Nolte. A Nam vet whose acclaimed book of war stories inspires a cash-in film adaptation, the character played by Real Nolte emerges on the troubled set like Quint in Jaws, leading our comic heroes not out to sea but into the heart of darkness. In a shot mournfully photographed by John Toll, Nolte stares out at the jungle mists from a mountain perch and answers a query about a weapon with, “I don’t know what it’s called, but I know the sound that it makes when it takes a man’s life.” It’s like, out of nowhere, ten seconds of Malick or Herzog. Later on, Nolte’s heart-of-darkness act and its function in American mythology get deconstructed (or demolished) like Warren Beatty’s frontier pimp in McCabe and Mrs. Miller.
Variety saysTropic Thunder “has a good shot at staying number one through the weekend,” knocking The Dark Knight out of first place. It should “at least match the overall five-day take of last week’s Pineapple Expressat $41.3 million,” but on a $90 million budget, it’ll take a lot longer for the Ben Stiller comedy to eke its way towards profitability.
This story on Lionsgate’s revival of the Conan franchise makes no mention of Robert Rodriguez, who told a crowd at Comic-Con last month that he was personally shepherding the project and planned to direct the film. Curious..
Willem DaFoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg will star in Antichrist, a “psychological thriller that evolves into a horror film” in the works from Lars Von Trier.
Hillary Swank, who seems like an unrealistic candidate for a role that would require her to pretend to be French or to know something about getting fat, will produce and star in a film based on the diet book, French Women Don’t Get Fat.
This new bit of internet marketing for the forthcoming Tropic Thunder claims to be a trailer for a fake documentary about the making of the fictional movie that Tropic Thunder is also about the making of. Wait, what? On the one hand, I love the piling on of ridiculously self-referential layers, but on the other hand, isn’t this a bit confusing? Let me try this again, Tropic Thunder is a fictional film about a film production where the director decides to put his (fake) actors in real (fake) danger. And Rain of Madness is a fake mocumentary about the fake movie, or about the real movie about a fake movie?
Well, whatever the case may be, the above clip proves two things: One, Tropic Thunder would probably be better as a mockumentary, rather than a fiction film about a fiction film. And two, Danny McBride is hilarious: “I just beat nature today.”
Zoolander, Ben Stiller’s 2000 fashion world spoof, has been doing consistently well on iTunes’ movie download-to-own chart. NewTeeVee’s Chris Albrecht wonders why. “Wait, what? An eight-year-old comedy is more popular than Ratatouille, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, and High School Musical (parts 1 and 2)?”
Apple hasn’t released demographic information, but let’s try to imagine, for a second, who might be willing to spend $10 on a legal––but DRM-heavy––movie download at this stage of the game. First of all, it’s gotta be someone who uses Mac products exclusively: students, artists, upper-middle-class nerds, aging hipsters, style-conscious parents, the curious rich, celebrities. Albrecht has screen caps of several recent iTunes top sales charts, and it’s clear from a glance that adventurous cinephilies don’t seem to be yet represented––but then, with the exception of a handful of classic titles, iTunes’ movie catalog doesn’t seem to be going for adventure. So let’s assume that the cool hunter Apple user is getting their movies elsewhere, and concentrate on the more middle-of-the-road aspects of the Apple demographic.
I don’t know what is more upsetting, that I’m actually excited about a movie starring Ben Stiller and Jack Black (remember Envy?) or that it’s actually Robert Downey Jr. in blackface that’s provoking all this excitement. Fortunately — or maybe unfortunately — I’m not the only one that’s going ga ga over Downey’s racial transformation for Tropic Thunder. It began a couple weeks ago when this still, featuring Stiller, Black and a colorized Downey, made the rounds through the blogosphere. It turned out the actor’s appearance is part of a brilliant joke on method actors. Downey plays Kirk Lazarus, a multiple Oscar-winner who goes through a special skin-darkening procedure in order to play an African American sergeant during the Vietnam War. It’s mostly funny because you could almost imagine someone like Sean Penn doing this for real.
But is there danger of the joke becoming a bit too much during the whole movie? After all, it began as a mere sight gag with the still photo, then continued with the website, where Downey actually looks eerily identical to Blaxploitation star Fred Williamson. However, now it’s also an audio gag, complete with what must be referred to as blackvoice. Yay, racism is funny! Not that I’m knocking it; I do actually think Downey is absolutely hilarious here. And having Brandon T. Jackson there as an actual African American actor, acknowledging how ridiculously racist Lazarus is, makes it the potentially the best use of racism as comedy since Blazing Saddles (sorry Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay).
I wonder, though, if the joke, the blackface and Downey’s performance will all completely overshadow the rest of the actors. I guess, considering my lack of favor for either Stiller or Black, I should be more hopeful of that being the case than worried.
Tropic Thunder, written by actor Justin Theroux (Inland Empire) and Etan Cohen (Idiocracy) and directed by Stiller, arrives in theaters August 15.
Paramount Vantage has delayed the worldwide release of The Kite Runner until mid-December, so that they can transport the film’s young, Afghani stars, who believe they may be in danger if they stay in their home country while the film is being released, to the US. 12-year-old actor Ahmad Khan says he was not aware that he was to play the victim of a rape in the film until the day the scene was shot, and though the finished scene is not graphic, Khan and his family are concerned about cultural repercussions.
In more release date shuffling, Leatherheads, George Clooney’s latest directorial effort, has been pushed back from December to April. The official line is that Clooney, can’t juggle finishing the film with his duties shooting the next Coen Brothers film and promoting Michael Clayton, all the while recovering from a broken rib. Elsewhere, there are whispers of re-casting and reshoots.
***Music video icon Mark Romanek (see his infamous clip for Fiona Apple’s “Criminal” above) is set to direct Ben Stiller in a comedy called In Deep. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Dreamworks is resurrecting the project, which crashed and burned in the late 80s (!) when the prodution company behind it went bankrupt. Steve Conrad has been hired to do a “Page One rewrite/reconceive” on the ancient script, which has something to do with unpaid parking tickets.
***In another high-profile partnership, Frank Miller is turning Raymond Chandler’s noir Trouble is My Business into a star vehicle for Clive Owen. Miller and Owen are apparently BFF since Sin City, and with Trouble Miller will be taking cues from that project, shaping the script around narration to be delivered by Owen.
***Michael Apted, the mastermind behind the 7 Up documentary series, will direct the next Narnia pic.
***The Los Angeles Film Festival will screen a program of celebrity-directed shorts this Sunday to celebrate Live Earth Day, including clips helmed by Casey Affleck and Madonna.
Variety says
Zoolander
