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Gas Prices Are a Hollywood Conspiracy! Trade Roughage 07/11/08

By Karina Longworth posted 1 year ago

Hollywood loves the energy crisis! Not only is there evidence that “higher gas prices boost boxoffice by prompting consumers to opt for the local multiplex over longer trips,” but foreign oil investors, prompted by a desire to avoid taxes on windfall profits, “look more favorably on the film biz — any film, really — because it means that even if a movie loses, say, 20% or 30% of its money, investors still come out on top because those losses pale compared with what a government might have taken.”
“There’s a superhero summit under way at Warner Bros,” says David S. Cohen at Variety, as the studio and subsidiary DC Comics meet to work out a “master plan” for shilling superheroes going forward.
The Chinese censorship board is demanding that cuts be made to the third Mummy movie––which shot for three months in China, and incorporates a replica of the Great Wall––but they’re not publicly specifying what it’ll take to let the film be shown in the country. Is anyone else starting to suspect that the Chinese censors just have really good taste?
The AMPTP won’t accept any of SAG’s counter-offers, and SAG won’t settle for the AMPTP’s “final” deal. So what now? No one knows for sure, but with SAG members continuing to work with no contract, it’s possible that the studios will “declare an impasse and impose the terms and conditions of the new offer.”

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There Will Be Blood: Trailer of the Week

By Karina Longworth posted 2 years ago

A baby looks up at the camera. Cue audio of Daniel Day Lewis, in confessional-style voiceover: “There are times when I look at people and see nothing worth liking.” The baby starts to cry.

That pretty much sums up the teaser trailer for There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson’s long-gestating interpretation of the 1927 Upton Sinclair novel, Oil!, which appeared on YouTube over the weekend. In his version, Sinclair, a high-profile advocate for Socialism, used the Harding oil scandals as an excuse to tell the story of a father and son battling over political ideology. Judging from the trailer, Anderson seems to have taken politics out of the equation in order to focus on greed, misanthropy, and resentment. The baby grows up. Day-Lewis moves through a crowd of apparent well-wishers as if they were snakes and says, “I can’t keep doing this on my own with these … people.” There may very well be blood, but as always, Anderson is less interested in the red stuff than in the fear and emotional violence lurking within the average American family.

A new P.T. Anderson film is a big deal, so over the past three days virtually every blogger with even the slightest interest in film has weighed in. The general consensus seems to be, “I don’t know what that was all about, but it’s probably brilliant.” In terms of the style of the trailer itself, Nathaniel R. at the Film Experience Blog had an interesting take:

Maybe this is a teaser version of the singular characters poster trend that is so prevalent now ? If it is perhaps Paul Dano as Eli Sunday will have his own teaser soon and more characters from There Will Be Blood will also emerge.

This movie is now at the top of my Spout list of Fall ‘07 Films That Are Making Me Drool. Surely you have your own list of fall films that you can’t wait to see; clue me in with a comment.

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