Catherine Hardwicke hit one out of the park for female directors this past weekend, but she had a lot of help. Not only was she working with a pre-sold property, she also had a very manageable budget of $37 million. Quite different from the $2 million she had to work with on Thirteen a few years back. Of course, she had similar budgets on Lords of Dogtown ($25 million) and The Nativity Story ($35 million), and both were box office disappointments. Still, she’s going to keep on being trusted with more money — if Summit is smart they’ll keep her on for at least the first Twilight sequel, which will surely come with a higher price tag — and as long as she continues with genre films, she’s sure to remain a profitable director.

Not every talented filmmaker does well with more money. Danny Boyle, for instance, typically bombs with bigger budgets. And a lot of foreign auteurs strike out when handed costly studio-produced genre or franchise pics (Jeunet’s Alien Resurrection is a favorite example). But there’s the occasional filmmaker who, like Steven Soderbergh or Christopher Nolan, can make something worthwhile out of any budget they’re allotted. And then there are the many indie filmmakers who quickly find themselves at home with modestly priced broad comedies, such as the case with Seth Gordon easily transitioning from the Slamdance doc The King of Kong to the star-studded Hollywood holiday pic Four Christmases, out this week.

Who will be the next small-scale filmmaker to successfully rise up and prove him or herself worthy of bigger budgets? SpoutBlog has selected five directors we’d like to see given an economic boost, each because he or she would likely deliver something more interesting and popular than the usual Hollywood product.

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At Movie Marketing Madness, Chris Thilk points to a sample marketing presentation made by the ad agency Basement, based on this hypothesis: If all prints of Casablanca had been lost immediately after its initial premiere and had recently been found, how would you market the film today as a wide-release feature?

Chris says the pitch looks “very real,” and he would know better than me, but I have to admit: some of the slides made me laugh out loud. Like the one where Casablanca is pitched as the perfect gap bridger between Sex and the City and an “Iraq War film” (”Casablanca is a romantic option for women; while still having entertainment for men — a shared experience for Valentines day”). And also the “Valentine’s Day Romance Generator” feature on the hypothetical Casablanca website, which allegedly “takes a woman’s idea, and transforms it into a man’s idea.” And also the “contingency plan” of having a Warner Brothers-signed top R&B performer do a cover of “As Time Goes By.”

So…is this supposed to be funny, or practical? Both?

Two quotes just popped out of my feed reader and clubbed me over the head; when I came to, I recalled a couple of other soundbites from my week in LAFF that sort of seem related. First, from David Poland’s eye-roll at “Tom & Jerry On Crack cartoon” Wanted:

Wanted is more like the last of big budget porn, throwing around endless style along with massive fake boobs and enough smoke to choke a Scott. Guys still get off on it - guys can get off on anything that tells them it wants to get them off - but one simply has to wonder, “Doesn’t anyone just f*** anymore?”

We’ll get back to that. First, a digression…

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Last night, the trailer for Disaster Movie premiered on MySpace. You can watch it after the jump. But considering it’s completely lacking in disaster spoofage, I’ve instead reserved the top spot for Disaster! (aka Disaster the Movie!), a claymation feature from a few years back that appears to have done much better with the disaster genre parody. Plus, it co-stars Motley Crue (in clay form, that is).

What does this Disaster Movie have? Apparently parodies of all this summer’s blockbusters (maybe Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer should have titled this one “Summer 2008 Movie” instead?). There are jokes on Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk and Hancock (maybe Friedberg and Seltzer are upset that someone else made Superhero Movie?) as well as Sex and the City meets You Don’t Mess With the Zohan (via Juno). Oh and there are some lame Hannah Montana and Enchanted references thrown in, too. Where are the disaster movies? Who knows? Maybe the title actually refers to the fact that this movie is a disaster.

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• Kung Fu Panda made $60 million this weekend, 150% of the gross of the weekend’s number two film, You Don’t Mess With the Zohan. Sex and the City dropped 63% to fourth place; power blogger Peter Bart says its because the women of America spent the weekend atoning for the previous ten days of cosmo-steeped empowerment fantasies by bowing to the demands of their boyfriends and children. Which may not bode well for…
• Chickflicks, a new indie production company headed by Sara Risher and Stephanie Austin, which will produce two or three films per year with women in mind. Risher, hooking the project to the success of Sex and the City, said “the underserved market for intelligent, emotional films with relatable female characters has spoken emphatically.” For one week, at least.
• Meanwhile, Mongol, one of the very last films to come out under the Picturehouse banner, easily won the specialty race this weekend, with a per screen average of $26,627. Also: Bob Berney is apparently planning on going into business with unidentified pedestrians.

• 10 90s Indie Hits That Should Be Franchised
• Albert Maysles on Showman, and commerce vs. humanity.
• Marnie as bondage fantasy.
• We have new columnists!
• “The porno version of Cloverfield.”
• If an Iraq metaphor comes this easily, it should probably go through a second pass.
• “Leave Britney Alone”? Jonas Mekas invented the concept.
• The Universal Studios fire and its impact on classic film preservation/distribution.
• Your YouTube spoof doesn’t need a working Flux Capacitor.
• Black women weigh in on Sex and the City , which may actually make sex better after all, even if it enforces archaic gender stereotypes. Regardless: Karina’s “final thoughts.”
• War Inc forces Vanity Fair to come up with own convenient definition of “viral marketing”
• Something which will not make anything better: The new The Women.
• Female genres and their male equivalents.
• Kate Beckinsale is not Anna Karina.
• Karate Dog: The Movie!
• Internet week @IFC
• The ethics of paying tribute to Heath Ledger.
• On FilmCouch: Roman Polanski and The Promotion.
• Kevin Smith and the MPAA’s quest to control web content.
• Where’s Waldo: The Movie!
• My Fair Sandler?
• There Will be Blood meets It’s a Wonderful Life
• Baghead opens in Austin
• Whit Stillman may or may not be making movies, but he has been reading books.

The most idiotic comment I’ve heard in reference to Sex and the City is, “Who wants to watch a bunch of old ladies having sex? Yuck.” (uttered by a 23 year old co-worker who looked like Wally Cleaver). The second most idiotic comment I’ve heard in reference to Sex and the City is, “That show’s just for rich white chicks.” What rot! There are armies of black women who adore the show and were doing cartwheels in anticipation of the movie. But there is some ambivalence, some trouble among the ranks…

Susan Lyerly (comedian, 36)
I’m very protective of the show because I was one of the first to really get into it. Most people got in on the second season. Back then, everybody was going for Ally McBeal. That was the hit at the time.

The show completely changed the way I dress. Best I’ve ever looked in my life. Rich white people knew about stuff like Manolo Blahniks but I didn’t know about it ’til Sex and the City. Inside I feel like that hot, skinny blonde chick. Inside I’m Carrie, but the world doesn’t see that.

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The Sex and the City tour now apparently includes a stop at the Manhattan sex shop The Pleasure Chest, where tourists are invited to check out a selection of Sex and the City sex toys, including The Miranda, which bears the tagline, “suitable for any power-loving woman.” Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York has pictures of “consumer orgy” (tee hee) and thoughts. This, for me, is the key takeaway:

I love hating SATC too much to stop hating it, but there might be one good thing to come from it if, in the tightly wrapped heart of the American heartland, more Christian women are having orgasms and more Christian men are discovering their own assholes.

Much like the only other piece of SATC promo/synergy that seems capable of turning anyone on, I have a hard time finding a problem with that.

Via Gawker.

Oh good! The long-gestating remake of George Cukor’s bitchy masterpiece The Women has a trailer––and just in time to catch all those lady filmgoers in the afterglow of their weekend orgy! Some thoughts:

__Cukor’s original, released in 1939 and based on Clare Boothe Luce’s hit play, was basically a melodrama cranked up to the tempo of screwball; the performances today play as camp, but even the comedy is underlined with some kind of emotional truth. This new trailer plays broad, broad, broad throughout. The whole idea of the text is that it offers a glimpse into the way women behave when together in uncomfortably intimate spaces; going too big with the punchlines and the delivery seems like a tonal mistake.

–Where the original film had an ultimately cynical view of female friendships, depicting them as nuanced and unstable and constantly flipping between fingers-crossed faux sympathy, outright hostility and tentative trust, thisThe Women seems to be surrounding Meg Ryan’s Mary with a Sex and the City-like cadre of demographically varied Bestest Friends. The Annette Benning character, who I think is a stand-in for Rosalind Russell in the original film, seems annoying, but hardly the busy-body back-stabber that Russell made classic.

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Even before Annaliese Griffin at the Vulture blog detailed why Sex and the City is the female equivalent of superhero movies, a genre mostly appealing to men, a female friend of mine noted the same. It’s apparently an obvious parallel, despite the fact that earlier this summer the supposed gender battle between Iron Man and Made of Honor resulted in the awareness that many women are in fact fond of some superheroes.

Nevertheless, Griffin’s post made me think of the conversation in Sleepless in Seattle in which real-wife married couple Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson discover the connection between An Affair to Remember and The Dirty Dozen. Of course, Hanks’ character was probably joking about crying at the end of the latter film, but he still had a point. There are certain equivalents between specifically female film genres and specifically male film genres, as you can see from the following list:

1. Melodrama (female) = War Film (male) - Already touched on with the aforementioned Sleepless in Seattle scene, there is a correspondence between tearjerking melodramas and gutwrenching war films. Maybe it’s because of the similar focus on death and/or other crippling tragedy. Maybe it’s because the female spectator weeps for her ego ideal, who is often the terminally ill or wronged woman character, and the male character weeps for his ego ideal, who is often the hero that lives yet suffers the experience of viewing the demise of his brothers in arms.
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Wow, I’m tired of talking about Sex and the City. How about you? I’m happy that millions of women found something on a movie screen that appealed to them, even if it’s not something that appeals to me, and I feel like that should be the end of the story. It won’t be, but personally I just want to put the period on this sentence and move on to the next manufactured hysteria. But first, two final thoughts:

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You know how I know you’re gay? You saw the Sex and the City movie.

The above clip was made a few weeks prior to the opening of SATC, which has cemented itself into film history as perhaps the most chicky chick flick ever made. But I find it even more interesting (and more pointed than actually funny) after seeing the box office figures. I wish there had been some kind of tracking done over the weekend of how much of that money came, respectively, from women, from gay men and from - God forbid - straight men.

Whether or not a heterosexual man has seen SATC is now officially a gauge of his manhood. Up there with liking beer, fighting, trucks, guns, chopping wood, etc. OR, in my honest opinion, up there with being comfortable with wearing a dress, putting on eye makeup, crying, giving another man a hug, etc. I have no reason to see SATC because I never watched the TV show, but I almost feel I should sit through it to PROVE my manhood. No need for push ups and skeet shooting, as the dude in the video thinks. Those activities are actually tools of repression for men who aren’t comfortable enough with their sexuality.

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• Sex and the City made almost $56 million over the weekend––almost twice what tracking would have indicated as late as Friday morning. Pamela McClintock says the debut “mystified Hollywood and shattered the decades-old thinking that females — particularly older ones –can’t fuel the sort of big opening often enjoyed by a male-driven event pic or family movie.” I’m mystified that Hollywood––or anyone––could believe that they could spend that much money promoting that beloved a brand and not see results.
• Transformers won the big award of the night at last night’s Attempt to Remind Children Who Mike Myers Is Three Weeks Before The Release of His New Movie MTV Movie Awards.
• Bryce Dallas Howard is in talks to replace Charlotte Gainsbourg in that new Terminator movie. Yes, Charlotte Gainsbourg was apparently going to play John Connor’s wife in that new Terminator movie. Good thing the daughters of men who were famous in the 70s are interchangable!

• Cannes: complete coverage, plus Karina’s 5 favorites.
• Sex and the City: Saving boyfriends, 5 Easy Ways To Dismiss It, is it Why They Hate Us
• Also possibly about sex: War, Inc’s big opening weekend.
• On FilmCouch: Bigger, Stronger, Faster (reviewed here), and gossip from Cannes.
• Sydney Pollack died.
• The Worst Film Ever Made is being remade.
• Manhattan already has been…with Muppets.
• Jean Claude Van Damme: unlikely target of respect.
• Is Tyson accurate?
• Mommie Dearest author tries to protect her lock on the market.
• John Woo returns to China.
• An accidental visit to the set of Brooklyn’s Finest.
• Italian Spider-man
• The Wackness on public access.
• Bill Murray’s divorce ripped from unproduced Lost in Translation 2 script
• 5 favorite graduates.
• Jordan Gray won our Presidential Zombie Contest.
• Fred Astaire brought sexy back 70 years before “SexyBack.”
• Brad Pitt had a funny hairstyle 17 years before Burn After Reading.
• A new movie about The Doors?
• Sharon Stone made China angry.