Bangkok Dangerous opened with only $7.8 million over the weekend, but on the upside it still topped the box office chart and it was still better than Nic Cage’s last non-National Treasure movie, Next. Far more embarrassing is Babylon A.D.’s 58% drop and College’s 55% drop in their second week, as well as Hamlet 2’s 52% drop in its second week in an already disappointing attempt at wide release.
Perhaps the Bard will have better luck with Paramount’s announced adaptation of the young-adult novel Spanking Shakespeare, which actually has even less to do with the playwright than Hamlet 2 does.
The obvious pitch: Braveheart in Egypt. Will Smith is playing Taharqa, a pharaoh who led battles against the eventually successful Assyrian invaders, in The Last Pharaoh. Randall Wallace is currently writing a new draft of the project, and hopefully Smith is hard at work on the “Walk Like an Egyptian”-sampling plot song.
Just as the latest Coen brothers film is about to open, the previous is back in the news. Unfortunately, it’s because Tommy Lee Jones is suing Paramount for more than $10 million, which he claims he’s owed for No Country for Old Men.
Benten Film’s latest release, the award-winning The Free Will(otherwise known as “that 3-hour German rape movie”), is available today. I’ll be posting a longish piece on the film when I get back to New York next week, but in the meantime, check out comments from Cinematical, The ScreenGrab, and Hammer to Nail.
Fleshbot notes that the editor of Showgirls/director of last year’s Dane Cook/Jessica Alba bomb Good Luck Chuck is also a published photographer of art porn. The Approval Matrix may need to be redrawn to reflect such achievements in middlebrow sleaze.
Speaking of dubious filmmakers: is Madonna turning into Mae West? Michael Musto is all for it, as long as we all agree to “pass a law that in 30 years she must start covering shit up.”
New Magnet release Shrooms leads Craig Keller at Cinemasparagus to ask an immortal question: “If, in a film, a character has to have his penis bitten off within the first 35 minutes, wouldn’t it be more interesting to let him live until the story’s end?”
Actually, though Alba may be trying to challenge the male gaze and also negate my claim that she’s the perfect poster child for feminist film theory, this picture further supports my argument. Anyone who’s read Mary Ann Doane’s “Film and the Masquerade” knows that Alba is taking on the masculine clothing in order to conceal her femininity and transsexually identify with the male spectator. Duh.
It’s barely 9am, and I’ve already read a story that made me choke on a bagel and therefore fear for my life: Audrina Partidge, brunette scenery on The Hills, has become the first member of the reality drama’s cast to land a film acting role. She’ll play “a no-nonsense, beautiful beach babe whose boyfriend caters to her every command” in a sequel to Into the Blue, a Jessica Alba film that flopped at the box office but made gobs of money on DVD.
Iron Man dropped almost 50% in its second weekend, which was still good enough for $50.5 million at the box office––more than the weekend’s two big openers, Speed Racer and What Happens in Vegas were able to scrounge up combined. We’ll have more on Speed’s crash later today.
Steven Spielberg will put his long-in-the-works Borat-as-Abbie Hoffman movie on hold temporarily to tackle his long-in-the-works Liam Neeson-as-Abraham Lincoln movie. Personally, I’d like to see the two movies combined.
If there’s one actress working today who best reinforces the theories of Lauren Mulvey, it’s Jessica Alba. And she encourages the male gaze by maintaining a career centered on playing eye candy, whether she’s having her skirt ripped off to expose her underwear (Good Luck Chuck), spending the majority of a film wearing a bikini (Into the Blue), playing a stripper (Sin City), being used to invoke jealousy (Meet Bill) or invoking erectile gags out of Mike Myers (The Love Guru). Perhaps someone should write a lengthy article on the myriad ways in which Alba relates to feminist film theory. I think her role as Invisible Woman in the Fantastic Fourmovies and her blind character from The Eye (who identifies herself with the dead woman whose eyes she acquires) can each inspire a few interesting theses.
Obviously Alba is aware of the male gaze and may in fact be controlling it. It’s possible even that her participation in the online staring contest at ibeatyou.com is a matter of ironic reflexivity. Watch the clip of her first-place-winning stare and you’ll understand what I mean. It’s like she’s welcoming our lustful eye and then seemingly returning the gaze, hypnotizing us into thinking she desires us, too. Certainly there are a number of men out there becoming simultaneously turned on and disturbed by this video. And hopefully there are some feminist critics taking notes on it as well.
Jessica Alba may be appearing in a lot of movies these days, but I wouldn’t exactly say she’s been keeping busy. It can’t be too much work to play the role of “Eye Candy” again and again and again. This time she plays a girl who is used in exploited for a vengeful ploy by a husband (Aaron Eckhart) to invoke jealousy in his cheating wife (Elizabeth Banks). The character could have been played by any pretty face (in fact Alba replaced Lindsay Lohan in the role), but Alba seems to be the most appropriately cast, because she’s one of the hottest actresses right now and yet she seems to be easily accessible to any filmmaker who wants to employ her. Last week we looked at another movie starring Alba, The Love Guru. In that she seems to have a more disposable role — she’s not really introduced until halfway through the trailer, and even then it’s unclear what purpose her character serves other than to invoke erectile gags from Mike Myers.
Meet Billpremiered last fall at the Toronto Film Festival, where it was merely titled Bill. Apparently it wasn’t met with much excitement, despite the obvious appeal of watching Eckhart as a sad-sack (unlike Alba, he’s cast against type) in a comedy that looks part classic screwball and part Rushmore (with roles switched all about). The odd thing about this trailer is that with Alba playing the part of “Eye Candy”, she ought to be featured wearing lingerie for marketing purposes (see trailers for Good Luck Chuck)rather than Banks. Sure, Banks is also gorgeous, but Alba is the one that Americans obviously prefer to be objectified.
Informal strike talks are still slogging on––Robert Iger from Disney and Peter Chernin of News Corp will rep the AMPTP today––but without a set deadline for “officially” going back to the table, there are fears that the WGA will drag this out until June, when SAG’s contract expires, so that they can basically shut down Hollywood together until some time in the fall.
The tech world is freaking out over Microsoft’s offer to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion in cash and stock, which kind of takes the thunder from another Yahoo story from several hours before that story broke: former Warner Brothers chief Terry Semel announced he was leaving his position on the board at Yahoo. Earlier this week, Nikki Finke spread a rumor that Semel would soon leave Yahoo and possibly take over as head of New Line.
Disney is releasing the 3D concert film Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour theatrically for one week only beginning today. The tween sensation is expected to beat the box office competition, which includes the Jessica Alba horror film The Eye, which was withheld from film critics.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
filmcouch-114
Benten Film’s latest release, the award-winning The Free Will (otherwise known as “that 3-hour German rape movie”), is available today. I’ll be posting a longish piece on the film when I get back to New York next week, but in the meantime, check out comments from Cinematical, The ScreenGrab, and Hammer to Nail.
It’s barely 9am, and I’ve already read a story that made me choke on a bagel and therefore fear for my life: Audrina Partidge, brunette scenery on 
Informal strike talks are 
