With Comic-Con beginning tomorrow, there’s so much movie stuff being talked about today that I almost didn’t know what the biggest topic was/is. And really, the most discussed film-related news of the day was the Sam Raimi/World of Warcraft movie announcement. But WOW fans have apparently gone back to playing the game and aren’t hanging out on the web so much anymore, so it appears the teaser trailer for Alice in Wonderland has taken over as the most exciting thing for movie geeks to drool over right now. Even more than the hot photos of Freddy Krueger, Jeff Bridges on the set of Tron 2.0 and the Megan Fox Fangoria cover.

All I can say is that if you told me 15 years ago that I’d ever be this disinterested in something involving either Tim Burton or Lewis Carroll, let alone both, I would have called you a liar and then beat you with my Edward Scissorhands DVD (see, the joke is that I was such a big fan back then that I had the DVD before it ever existed). It doesn’t look as bad as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I guess, but it looks a whole lot duller than I expected. Maybe this is just too perfect and obvious a pairing that there’s no need for it, in the same way we don’t really need a Terry Gilliam-directed Good Omens or a Chris Columbus-directed Percy Jackson (doh!). I guess that’s the main reason I have no desire to see this movie, but the fact that it somehow looks both murky and meretricious has me turned off completely.

Let’s see what the rest of the film blogosphere thinks of the teaser, after the jump:

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• At Cinematical, Erik Davis notes that although some bloggers fretted that Sony Pictures Classics would allow The Wackness to “disappear in limited release … and be eaten by a Cabbage Patch Kid, or whatever,” the film actual opening weekend “numbers [were] pretty frickin’ awesome.” And yet, are said fretting bloggers “congratulating SPC on a job well done? Nope. Not at all.”
• Nick Schwartz is unemployed. “Or, ‘between things,’ as I’ve been told to say,” he writes at ShortEnd Magazine. This leaves him lots of time to watch movies from the Brooklyn Public Library, read James Agee, and contemplate conflict avoidance: “I’m not some kind of idealistic idiot. ‘Shut The Fuck Up!’ might be some kind of bizarre, fanciful, Lumet-inspired concept of how New Yorkers are supposed to handle conflict.”
• Who would make a final color-corrected master of their movie so that 70% of the theatrical audience wouldn’t be able to see the colors properly?” asks David S. Cohen at Thompson on Hollywood. “Apparently, the Wachowski Brothers.”
• At Bright Lights After Dark, C. Jerry Kutner sends a Happy Birthday message to Janet Leigh, via appraisal of her little-seen, dancing-in-the-Manhattan-streets musical triumph, the Bob Fosse-choreographed My Sister Eileen. See a related clip above.
  

• Reason number #379 to kick myself for not seeing Speed Racer in a theater: Daniel Kasman’s latest entry at The Auteurs. It begins like this: “Upon return from Cannes, I saw two movies in rapid succession. The films probably should not be combined into any sort of synthetic criticism, but it is too tempting to at least collide their names in the same piece: Jean-Luc Godard’s 1968 film with the Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil (1968), and Andy and Larry Wachowski’s Speed Racer (2008) adaptation. The arena we are dealing with is dimensionality.”
• “The Happening is not just bad. It is more than awful.” At Hammer to Nail, Michael Tully finds the dark side of Avante Retarde. “The painful truth is that I had a blast while watching the film–again, not in the intended manner–but when it ended, and especially when I woke up the next morning, my delight at the preposterousness of it all was gone and all that remained was frustration and anger.”
• Blatant self-promotion: Your Blogger and Glenn Kenny joined the House Next Door boys for an epic, booze-soaked podcast. This is just the first part; stay tuned for parts two and three, where I accidentally slap my wife while she’s winning an Oscar and then walk into the sea in order to allow her career to continue its ascent without the anchor of my humiliations.

• “If Iron Man was about America’s power overseas — specifically in Afghanistan, where much of the movie takes place — then the Incredible Hulk is about what happens to our soldiers when they come home,” writes Charlie Jane Anders in a long review at io9. It’s about the impossibility of transforming young men into “super-soldiers” and then expecting them to blend back in.” Related: Anders takes a look at superheroes who can’t have sex, including “Poor Rogue from the X-men. She’s got the cool Susan Sontag hair, and the leather jumpsuit, and the hot boyfriend… but she can never touch anyone.”
• Anders isn’t exactly ga-ga over New Hulk, but she calls Ang Lee’s version “disastrous.” At Bright Lights After Dark, Erich Kuersten vehemently disagrees. “Man, it’s a sad day on our bitterly defended-from-Galactacus earth when an Ang Lee Hulk film is just dismissed outright, and here it is a super and vastly underrated picture. Granted the CGI was a bit cartoony in the previews (I know I laughed at the time) but looked much better in real big screen life.”
• David Poland bottom lines it: “The truth is, for all its flaws, there is not a single frame of The Incredible Hulk that contains a fragment of the artistry that Ang Lee brought to Hulk. Of course, the film was too long and the psychodrama too thick for most people. But there was true aesthetic beauty. I hate to even pull this one out of the backpack, but Speed Racer? Genius in comparison. Every frame.”

• It’s been all-but-confirmed for awhile, but thisVariety story nails it: Magnolia will self-distribute What Just Happened?, Barry Levinson’s Hollywood satire which the studio produced through 2929 Entertainment but were hoping to unload at either Sundance or Cannes. “There were offers,” Eamonn Bowles told Anne Thompson, “But we can make more money doing it ourselves.” They’re planning a platform to medium-wide release for October.
• Brazillian novelist Paulo Coelho is a MySpace addict! But at least the one-hour-a-day user has found a way to funnel his obsession into something productive: he’s planning to “‘curate’ a Web-generated film based on The Witch of Portobello from MySpace video and music submissions.”
• Warner Brothers says Speed Racer wasn’t *that* much of a disaster after all––toy sales have apparently been “comparable to the last Batman.”

Maybe this really is the year of “product suggestion”, a term coined recently by Risky Biz blogger Steven Zeitchik after noticing the subtle hint of a McDonalds logo on the driver’s helmet and race car in Speed Racer.

Following that, we now have Pixar suggesting iPods and other Apple products through its new animated film Wall-E. If you take a good look at the sleek robot character Eve, you might be reminded of the typical Apple product design, and apparently it’s not so coincidental. Wall-E director Andrew Stanton told Fortune magazine of Eve’s development and the benefit of having Steve Jobs as your umbrella:

“I wanted Eve to be high-end technology - no expense spared - and I wanted it to be seamless and for the technology to be sort of hidden and subcutaneous,” Andrew Stanton, Wall-E’s director, told Fortune. “The more I started describing it, the more I realized I was pretty much describing the Apple playbook for design.” It is, of course, not the first time a product has inspired a film character - think of the murderous HAL 9000 robot in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” based loosely on big IBM mainframes of the day.

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It may seem like a waste of space to beat this dead horse too heavily, but since we did devote time to analyzing why the bombing of Speed Racer is likely to have a detrimental effect on the future of the blockbuster, it’s relevant. Turns out, the film made even less money than Warner Brothers estimated––about 8% less, dropping its 3-day gross from $20.2 million to $18.6 million, and dropping the film from second place for the weekend, behind the unbeatable Iron Man, to third behind the flash-in-the-pan What Happened in Vegas.

What’s to account for the discrepancy? Apparently, when WB released their numbers on Sunday morning, they were estimating Sunday’s final take based on a typical weekend’s metrics, without accounting for the fact that this past Sunday was Mothers Day––ie: the single day of the year when parents are least likely to pander to their kids’ whines about going to see a hyper-active live-action cartoon. The other studios called bullshit, and by late Monday the real numbers came to light.

The real question is: why didn’t Warners foresee that Mothers Day was going to be a black hole for a film that apparently only appeals to eight year olds and contrarian aesthetes?

So much for Peter Bart’s pet dead horse about the untraversable gap between ticket buyers and film reviewers––Iron Man, so far the year’s best reviewed film, is also thus far 2008’s fastest moneymaker. The critic/audience sync continued this past weekend with Speed Racer. It takes a rare film to unite critics with as disparate a sensibility as Anthony Lane and Armond White in common vitriol; it’s almost unthinkable that the same critically-despised film would fail to appeal to the masses.

“Speed Racer kills cinema,” went White’s fuming, unusable pullquote. But does it? It would be wishful thinking to assume that the average ticket buyer actually cares about “cinema”, never mind the death thereof, but it seems clear to me that the audience’s failure to care about this particular movie could have lasting repercussions for those of us who do take cinema seriously. After jump, you’ll find five reasons why, love the movie or hate it, this bombing could potentially be Bad For Movies on the whole––and one reason why it might be kind of good. As usual, feel free to tell me why I’m a moron in the comments.

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• 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.

Computer generated super machines run by conflicted heroes tethered to ladies who just can’t quit them–summer has arrived. And we’re loving it. Iron Man won the democratic primaries this week by staying away from controversy. The Marvel Universe will change how business gets done in Hollywood and Speed Racer is… different. Like Warhol making out with Walt Disney.

 

 FilmCouch #69 [32:05m]: Play Now | Download

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filmcouch-69

Iron Man, Speed Racer

The first official press screenings for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull aren’t for another ten days, but as long as Aint It Cool News exists, you can count on early reactions from the amateur critics. One such person, going by the alias “ShogunMaster,” has a spoiler-filled review that is unfortunately quite negative. Claiming it lacks tension, employs extremely fake-looking props and sets, and features a “horrible” performance from Shia “LaBeef”, the reviewer at least puts some of it into perspective:

Anyway, I don’t want to rant on forever, as it doesn’t matter what I say, you will see this movie regardless. And even though it’s not as bad as Allan Quartermane, it’s definitely not a good Indy Movie. But for those of you that feel that the new Star Wars Movies robbed your childhood, expect some molestations from Uncles’ George and Steven…

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• At the Risky Biz blog, Steven Zeitchik accuses the Wachowskis of “insidious” product placement in Speed Racer, altering the design of Speed’s helmet and the Mach 5 to subliminally invoke corporate partner McDonalds. “It may not be brand placement. It’s something much newer and trickier: brand suggestion.”
• FILMMAKER Magazine’s website has published the essay by David Gordon Green from the liner notes of the recently-released Benten DVD of Todd Rohal’s The Guatemalan Handshake. His first impression of that film? “I had a queer anxiety in my stomach that in fact the movie was “too good,” or should I say “special,” like a retarded kid who is enchanting and liberating in his or her world view, destined for a conflict with the traditional culture.”
• Movie viral marketing or fan fic? It’s too early to tell, but two G.I. Joe characters have started Twittering. GeneralHawk’s latest update: “Having a late lunch at Bennigan’s with Snake-Eyes & Alpine. Alpine says The Roots newalbum is, quote, ‘Dope.’” [Tipped by Kevin]

People are starting to say smart things about Speed Racer, sight unseen. The film has been screened for journalists who attended junkets, but those journalists have so far stuck to stuck to the studio’s review embargo––all of the really interesting stuff is being written by bloggers who are basing their critiques solely on promo materials like stills, trailers, and now clips.

It’s these seven new clips posted by Colider.com that prompted iO9’s Annalee Newitz to start spouting sci-fi philosophy. “In this scene, where Speed and his pals race through a geometrically-impossible “ice mountain,” it’s clear we’re inside an artificial world where humans and machines have become interchangeable,” she writes. “Watching Speed and his car is like seeing the movie Tron from the point of view of one of the programs.” Tron references are always sexy.

You can watch the clips at either Colider or iO9, but they don’t seem to be easily embeddable. Colider’s are crisp and HD sparkly; it looks like Newitz’ crack Gawker Media tech team scraped the clips in order to re-post them on their own site, but I kind of prefer the lower resolution. Especially with that ice cave clip, the pixelation causes the image to blur into a wild four-dimensional abstract expressionist canvas. It made my eyes cross, but in a good way.