The Day The Earth Stood Still managed to pull in $30 million dollars this past weekend, which you can mostly attribute to clever marketing, but it’s not a promising number for the much-loathed movie, which is sitting at 21% on Rotten Tomatoes right now. Beyond the wooden acting and the eviscerating of a beloved sci fi classic that most people are talking about, there are some moments in this movie that just make my teeth clench. Moments that are so poorly written, thought out, filmed, and constructed that I just can’t keep myself from venting. Read on to see all five, and just in case it’s not clear enough from the header: there are spoilers below.

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It’s always hard to hold back the expletives when reading Cindy Adams, but this time, I just can’t hold back anymore: what the fuck is she talking about? An excerpt from today’s offending column:

You’ve maybe heard about W., Oliver Stone’s tough feature film about Bush…First-ever movie about a sitting president, shooting in Shreveport, La., is so hush-hush secret that all scripts are embargoed… So do not ask - do not - how one is now in my own sticky fingers.

She acknowledges that we’ve “maybe heard” about this movie, but neglects to mention that the reason why we’ve heard about it is because she’s like the tenth person to get her “sticky fingers” on some version of the script. That “hush-hush” line is completely laughable. Is there *any* film in recent memory that has been reported on so extensively by the mainstream news, gossip and entertainment media before it even starts shooting? And all without a single spoiler alert!

Anyway. Most of the “hush-hush” details that Adams passes along are familiar from other W script stories: the fights between George Bush Sr and Jr; W’s bumbling efforts to fly a plane; the marginalization of Colin Powell; the crack about Wolfowitz’s hairy ears. At this point, by the time the movie’s actually in theaters (just five months away!), we’ll all be able to shout the biggest zingers back to the screen. Hell, maybe that’s the point––maybe Oliver Stone is making the Rocky Horror Picture Show of political satire. Carry on then!

Go to LittleBostonNews.com and you’ll find an outtake from Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. “Here’s a good scene that we didn’t need,” reads the copy on the site. “It won’t spoil anything.” I suppose that’s technically true, although the scene does pretty much sum up the main conflict of the film, so beware, I guess. I’ve been going around town basically doing a frame-by-frame reenactment of The Napkin Scene, so obviously I’m not working too hard to protect anyone from spoilers.

[Via Filmdrunk]

At his blog, Glenn Kenny has a great fleshing out of a theory I’ve heard but haven’t, up to this point, given much thought to: the idea that Anton Chigurh, the killer played by Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men, could be a ghost, or some other kind of supernatural embodiment of absolute evil.

Kenny’s got some good points, and as far as wildly speculative theories go (always dangerous when it comes to the Coens), his take certainly does offer an easy read on some of the more troubling details of the film’s final act. But I still don’t think I buy it. The film spends too much time on the procedural details of Chigurh’s spree, up to and including a long scene in which Chigurh treats his own wounds, which seems to have been put in there chiefly to tell us that he’s human. But what do I know. If you’ve seen the film and/or are prepared to be spoiled, check out Kenny’s analysis and let us know what you think.

Man, Nathan Lee is ON FIRE. My new critical hero, who previously wowed with his gaga reviews of I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry and Black Snake Moan (sample quote: “[Christina Ricci's] the white-hot focal point of Brewer’s loud, brash, encompassing vision of the soul’s dark night survived, peering into the dawn. That’s right, haters, I said ‘vision.’) hit another home run this weekend, with this New York Times op-ed on spoilers. It’s so good that it’s hard to pick just one section to blockquote, so here’s an attempt to condense some of the best stuff:

I wouldn’t dare unmask the secrets in the movie A History of Violence out of respect for the artistry of David Cronenberg and the integrity of his booby-trapped plot, but there isn’t a single frame of The Number 23 I wouldn’t mock in great, guiltless detail for the simple reason that I find it extremely silly. A spoiler requires something to spoil and someone to take offense at the spoiling, and I’m confident that my readership does not include humorless scholars of the Joel Schumacher oeuvre.

Our obsession with spoilers has a diminishing effect, reducing popular criticism to a kind of glorified consumer reporting and the audience to babies. People outraged by spoilers should avoid all reviews before going to the movies or reading the book they’ve waited so long for, because the fact is all criticism spoils, no matter how scrupulous.

My stance on spoilers is similar to Lee’s, but that’s been documented sufficiently. So let’s do something else. Everyone’s talking about Lee’s op-ed, up to and including Brian Lehrer, my local NPR morning talk host, who invited Slate’s Dana Stevens on the show this morning to chew over Lee’s piece (Lee, apparently, didn’t return Lehrer’s calls). At one point on this morning’s segment, Lehrer asked Stevens if critics in ye olden days had taken care not to spoil major plot twists, such as those within Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Stevens said she didn’t know. I then spent 45 minutes on the internet attempting to answer that question.

I could only find three reviews of the original Psycho on the internet, but I think they represent a decent cross-section of methods, opinions and outlets. Of note: two out of the three reviews note that critics have been asked not to reveal the film’s ending. One of these the reveals the kinds of plot details that could get a contemporary critic scalped. The third review, by Bosley Crowthers of the New York Times, is at once the most respectful of the film’s secrets (he reveals the identity of the killer as Norman’s mother, but refrains from revealing the identity of the mother, and the least impressed (”his denouement falls quite flat for us,” sniffs the master of the royal first-person plural.)

Variety and the San Francisco Chronicle were less careful. A review attributed to Paine Knickerbocker spends several paragraphs detailing plot points (Marion meets with her lover, Marion steals the money, Marion buys a used car) before exercising restraint: “No more of the action may be disclosed here. But violence follows, and then a skillfully paced interrogation by Martin Balsam as an affable but determined private eye.” Is it less of a crime to tick off each menial plot pint than to reveal the really good stuff?

Finally, Variety. A review attributed only to “Variety Staff” pledges not to expose spoilers, and then totally does anyway:

Hitchcock uses the old plea that nobody give out the ending — “It’s the only one we have.” This will be abided by here, but it must be said that the central force throughout the feature is a mother who is a homicidal maniac. This is unusual because she happens to be physically defunct, has been for some years. But she lives on in the person of her son.

I’ve always hated spoiler alerts with a passion. But jesus christ — to say you’re *not* going to reveal a plot secret, and then immediately reveal the plot secret? That’s just dirty play.

I’m usually notoriously hard on spoiler Nazis. I know I’m in the minority on this–I recently found myself embroiled in a pseudo-hostile Twitter fight between John Brownlee and Joel Johnson because of it– but my theory is that if you care enough whatever is being spoiled, your investment should be able to withstand the revelation of a simple plot point.

Still, I think what Pete Vonder Haar is doing sounds intriguing. The FilmThreat writer has been intentionally avoiding reading set reports and watching trailers for new films, in order to preserve a sense of excitement for the film’s eventual release. Now, Vonder Haar is specifically attempting to avoid acquiring any pre-release information on the fourth Indiana Jones film, which is currently shooting in New Haven for a May 2008 release. “Call me a crazy insane crazy person,” Vonder Haar writes, “But I’d like to not know how the movie is going to end (or every major plot twist, or the big action sequences, or the climactic one-liner) before I actually go see it.”

In a great post at Movie Marketing Madness, Chris Thilk explains how Vonder Haar’s information abstinence stands in direct defiance of what the typical studio marketing campaign tries to achieve.

[S]ince ’surprise’ is in some people’s minds synonymous with ‘displeasure’ … the campaign creators, then, want the movie to feel familiar and safe so as not to scare anyone off. That’s why these casting announcements for the major flicks are broadcast far and wide, and it’s why studios on some level like Web sites that post spoilers. Those plot points reduce the odds of the movie being seen as an unknown quantity by the audience, upping the comfort factor as well as, hopefully, the subsequent desire to see the film.

So the studios are actually engineering a world in which the concept of spoilers–and the conflicting drives to either pursue or avoid them–becomes virtually meaningless. This makes Vonder Haar’s mission of interest on two levels: not only is it an effort on the part of a professional critic to recapture the enthusiasm of fandom, but it’s also a subtle form of protest.