Two trailers hit today for highly anticipated new films by hip auteurs. The first, for the Coen Bros.’ A Serious Man, is one of the most successful spots I’ve seen in a long time. Here’s a movie that has none of the Coens’ usual players and yet it’s unmistakably theirs (and not just because it looks like a repeat of another of theirs). Then there’s the trailer for Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, a stop-motion animated kids’ movie based on a Roald Dahl book, which features a few of the director’s usual actors and some of his signature camera style, but which, to me at least, bears little resemblance to his previous work (and not just because it’s an animation). Honestly, this may be the first of his films I don’t have interest in seeing.
I’m going to focus on the latter trailer primarily because it’s dividing bloggers, whereas everyone pretty much agrees that the Coens’ latest looks awesome. I’ve never been a big fan of stop-motion (though I do enjoy Nick Park’s films, go figure), because it usually creeps me out. Also, I’m typically against huge stars being employed for voice work in animated films, and I honestly can’t get past picturing George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Willem Dafoe and Jason Schwartzman while hearing their voices, and so I had trouble paying attention to the animals onscreen that are supposed to be the ones speaking.
I’m not alone in having no interest in this thing after seeing the trailer, but it seems some are still excited. Check out the rest of the film blogoshere’s reactions after the jump: …Read more
Just as we’d prefer for Hollywood to remake bad films rather than beloved classics, we’d also like to see more TV adaptations of obscure and failed series — as long as there’s going to be such a giant void of creativity anyway, why not go for the forgotten titles and at least make it seem like you’ve got fresh ideas?
Unfortunately, Hollywood continues to ignore our logic and is instead adapting the popular 80s cop show T.J. Hooker for the big screen. It may not be the most familiar or beloved series of all time, but it has enough name recognition to make it a success, a la the S.W.A.T. and Starsky & Hutch movies before it.
We have no interest in yet another veteran/rookie team-up, though, especially a blatantly recycled one. So we decided to mine deeper into our TV Guide issues from the 80s and pick out some lesser-known high-concept shows that would make awesome movies if only they had more of a built-in, nostalgic audience to justify a green light.
Check out our pitches after the jump, and thank us when Hollywood gets wise to the ideas. …Read more
Criterion, who had already shown the Wes Anderson love with their Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic discs, announced back in 2007 that they were going to be putting out an edition of Bottle Rocket. This was met with much joy, especially because the previously released version, which came out back in 1996, was about as bare bones as you could get. The only real special feature it could claim was widescreen on one side of the disc, and full screen on the other. Big whoop.
The new version, which just came out in late 2008 has a ton of features, and is available in both standard and Blu-ray editions. But it also contains one of the single most sour notes ever hit in an Anderson DVD. It’s so extremely painful that it makes the package almost worth avoiding.
Tyler Perry’s Meet The Browns made $20 million this weekend, which wasn’t enough to beat Horton Hears a Who at the box office. Drillbit Taylor opened with just $10 million; Variety vaguely says it’s “the second lowest” opening for Owen Wilson after The Big Bounce, but that statistic must exclude every Wes Anderson film and anything else that’s opened in platform release. Speaking of platform releases, The Weinstein Company has finally has a successful one to speak of: Under the Same Moon broke the record for the biggest opening of a Spanish-language film in the U.S. this weekend with $2.6 million on 266 screens.
James Gandolfini will play the mayor of New York City in thatremake of The Taking of Pelham 123. The film hasn’t been shot yet, and it’ll still probably hit theaters before what was suppossed to Gandolfini’s first post-Sopranos project, Where the Wild Things Are.
Regal Cinemas is looking to double its number of IMAX screens over the next two years, via a deal where the theater chain and the giant screen guys share both the cost of the expansion, and the resulting profits.
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.
There’s an LA Times story this morning about how Paramount has promoted Apatow-com Drillbit Taylor around the fact that star Owen Wilson has done no interviews, in fear of having to answer questions about last summer’s suicide attempt. Instead of talking to reporters, Wilson taped “Drillbit-themed introductions to Fox’s Sunday-night prime-time lineup.” If there are three steps to managing a celebrity scandal––denial, confirmation, confession––the Wilson camp has chosen to remain mired in Step 1 for going on seven months, a stunning and curious feat in the era of confession as commodity.
After enumerating a number of projects fatally wounded by the unsavory off-hours activity of their stars, LAT writers John Horn and Gina Piccalo note in the last paragraph that Nine Months, the Hugh Grant film that was released just two weeks after the star was caught with a prostitute, grossed $70 million––according to this chart, more than Dumb and Dumber, Bad Boys or Babe, all of which spawned sequels. The Hugh Grant scandal seems to represent a turning point in spin: by appearing on any show that would have him the day before his movie’s premiere and talking about the hooker incident directly and self-mockingly, Grant was able to completely deflate the issue, successfully turning confession into commercial.
Bob Iger says Disney’s Hong Kong thene park had a rough second year because his researchers drastically under-estimated how long it takes to eat lunch. “There were longer lines to eat than to ride Space Mountain.” Oh, and iTunes makes money.
Warner Brothers is trying to coax New Line’s Toby Emmerich to take a newly-created position as head of the pared-down, independent studio. WB wants to refashion New Line into a boutique producing half a dozen films a year at no more than than $50 million each. Variety says this could throw a wrench into a few proposed New Line projects, including (obviously) The Hobitt, and (not so obviously) a sequel to Wedding Crashers. Adjust that 2005 film’s budget for inflation and you’re up to just over $43 million; are we to assume that the remaining seven million is to spent on keeping both Fred Claus and Drillbit Taylor on retainer?
The Hollywood Film Festival is adding the Hollywood Trailer Awards to their October slate of festivities. Yeah, I know–I spend a week in Texas, and this is all I can come up with on my return? Blame the cold I picked up somewhere on the journey home. Or, hell––just blame Variety.
Oscar producers are worried that the alleged inaccessibility of this year’s major nominees will have a negative impact on the telecast’s ratings. But how could that be, when the Best Picture nominees are so full of memorable catchprases? “I drink your milkshake!” “Homeskillet doodle blog!” “I am putting my scruples aside in order to blackmail you in the name of the greater good,” or whatever George Clooney says at the end of Michael Clayton!
Speaking of bad means and good ends, the Juno phenomena is spilling over to benefit an actual indie film. Bruce McDonald’s The Tracey Fragments, which played the Berlin, Toronto and Denver film festivals last year, and which stars Ellen Page, has secured U.S. theatrical distribution via ThinkFilm. Page’s current hotness notwithstanding, the pick-up is something of a surprise, considering that it’s coming three months after McDonald posted raw footage of the film online as part of a contest for its DVD release.
Owen Wilson will start shooting his first film since his recent breakdown on March 10. Marley and Me, co-starring Jennifer Aniston, is an apparent science fiction film set in an alternate universe in which 40 year-old women can procreate on demand, but chose to purchase dogs instead.
Oh, what a difference a weekend makes. News broke on Friday that Wes Anderson was video taping an interview with Owen Wilson for MySpace, to promote The Darjeeling Limited. It was to be Wilson’s first interview since his apparent suicide attempt this summer. The clip wasn’t scheduled to debut until midnight that night, so there was plenty of time to speculate as to what it all meant, and especially whether or not the two old friends would broach the topic of Wilson’s health and sobriety. Jumping the gun just a tad, Nikki Finke ran with the headline, “Hey, Barbara & Diane: You’re Obsolete. Owen Tells All Post-Meltdown To MySpace.” In the post, she pointed to what she described as “a really angry article about this on ABC News,” in which the network that owns Barbara Walters, who in turn owns the patent on teary celebrity confession, kvetches about changing paradigms. We’ll have to take Nikki’s word on that — the story no longer exists at the link in her story.
To skip straight to images and audio from the NYFF press conference for The Darjeeling Limited, click the “Read More” link at the bottom of the page.
The plot of Wes Anderson’s fifth feature concerns the misadventures of Jack, Francis and Peter, three 30-something brothers who gather on a train in India. It’s been twelve months since they last met, at their father’s funeral. They’ve been brought together by Francis (Owen Wilson), who, in the intervening year, almost killed himself in a motorcycle accident; he arrives on the train with his head bandaged like he’s had a lobotomy. Jack (Jason Schwartzman) is fresh off a self-destructive tryst in a Paris hotel room with an ex-girlfriend; he’s grown a George Harrison mustache but walks around barefoot, like Paul McCartney on the cover of Abbey Road. Peter is about to be a dad for the first time; he insists on wearing his late father’s prescription sunglasses, even though they give him tension headaches.
All three are heavily medicated, trading black market Indian opiates at the dinner table before soup is served. Francis first tells Peter and Jack that they’re in India to reestablish their brotherly bonds by visiting a number of “spiritual places,” an itinerary which has Jack planning to jet off to Italy at the first snag. Francis then reveals that they’re actually on their way to find their mother, who is living in a convent in the Himalayas and who, for reasons unknown, failed to show up at their father’s funeral.
The Rock will play “a Las Vegas cab driver who picks up a pair of siblings with magical powers” in Witch Mountain, which is set to “advance the storyline” of the Disney’s 70s movies about mystical orphans.
Owen Wilson has dropped out ofTropic Thunder, an ensemble comedy currently being directed by Ben Stiller in Hawaii, for obvious reasons.
John Goodman will lend his voice to the role of Paul Bunyan in the CG animated Bunyan & Babe.
Rob Zombie has signed a two-picture deal with Dimension, which would suggest that Bob Weinstein has faith that Zombie’s Halloween remake is going to do well this weekend.
Turner Classic Movies is turning their evening programming blocks over to guest programmers for the entire month of November. The guests will include a contest winner, a fictional character (Kermit the Frog), and Rose McGowan, whose “unpredictable” choices include A Place in the Sun and A Touch of Mink.
Dreamworks and Paramount have decided to open Tim Burton’s Sweeney Toddwide on Christmas weekend. The original plan was to open on a couple of screens December 21 and then go wide three weeks later, but the studios, apparently convinced that Johnny Depp’s demon barber could have the appeal of a singing, cannibalistic Captain Jack, think Burton’s Sondheim adaptation has holiday weekend written all over it.
“Owen Wilson’s emergency hospitalization and recovery are throwing a major monkeywrench into production of two movies and causing marketing headaches for two more,” writes Variety’s Tatiana Siegel. It seems like a fair thing to speculate, but the only studio rep who would go on the record dismisses the line of inquiry as “totally inappropriate at this time.”
As part of a campaign to promote their film’s upcoming DVD release, the producers of the Michael Moore attack doc Manufacturing Dissent have struck a deal to stream 40 minutes of the movie on AOL’s TrueStories documentary site. According to Variety, AOL’s Stephanie Sharis said they’ll monetize the event “by splicing adds into the video;” they’re hoping to get some free publicity from “plenty of blogs.”
SuperBad held onto the top slot at the box office for the second weekend in a row, making it just the third film this summer to show such staying power. Meanwhile, the Weinstein Company’s losing streak continued with a sixth-place open for The Nanny Diaries.
The New York Film Festival has announced three sidebars: “Views from the Avant-Garde”, an annual program featuring films by Ernie Gehr and Ken Jacobs; “Tropical Analysis: The Films of Joaquim Pedro de Andrade,” through which NYFF will screen 13 films by the Brazilian director; and “Chinese Modern: A Tribute to Cathay Studio,” featuring Hong Kong cinema of the 1950s.
The Pasadena Playhouse will host the world premiere of a stage musical based on Peter Bogdanovich’s 1985 film, Mask. Despite the fact that the score will be written by the songwriting team who brought us “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling,” it seems unlikely that Cher will reprise her role. The Playhouse will also host the premiere of Orson’s Shadow, a play based on a real-life encounter between Lawrence Olivier and Orson Welles.
Judging by the opening shots of the newly-released trailer for The Darjeeling Limited (via Anne Thompson), Wes Anderson’s latest is about noses. There are three of them, each lovingly framed in Anderson’s signature wide-angle close-ups: Jason Schwartzman’s fake nose, Owen Wilson’s bandaged nose, Adrien Brody’s…pure, unadulterated Brod-nose. On closer examination, it seems to be a remake of Bottle Rocket, transplanted to India. Instead of two guys, there are three. Instead of a road trip, it’s a train journey. One of them falls in love with an exotic Indian woman instead of an exotic maid. You’ve seen it before, but this time, it’s painted sandy gold, the music is borrowed from Satyajit Ray, and there are camels.
Watch it here, and if you see it pop up on YouTube, let me know and I’ll embed it above.
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.
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Tyler Perry’s Meet The Browns
Zoolander
There’s an 
Bob Iger says
Oscar producers are worried
Dreamworks and Paramount have decided to open Tim Burton’s 
As part of a campaign to promote their film’s upcoming DVD release, the producers of the Michael Moore attack doc 
