With Halloween less than a month away, it’s time to start thinking about what to go as. That is, if you haven’t already. A good costume-loving cinephile typically knows well in advance what he or she will dress up as for Halloween (and Comic-Con, too). But if you’re one to wait until the last minute, and also one who likes to be a lot more contemporary than, say, dressing up as a Ghostbuster or Edward Scissorhands, I’ve got some suggestions for you for costumes based on recent films.
Earning $14.3 million in its third weekend, Tropic Thunderretained its top placement on the box office chart over the holiday, yet it’s total gross still hasn’t reached the movie’s reported $90 million budget. Meanwhile, five new wide releases (Babylon A.D., Traitor, Disaster Movie, College and Hamlet 2, which expanded this week) performed badly enough to place this year’s Labor Day total at 17% below last year’s. In the end, the slow four-day weekend may have contributed to Summer 2008’s inability to top the box office of Summer 2007, despite The Dark Knight’s now more than $500 mill. take.
The most interesting box office news from the weekend is Mamma Mia!’s 34% increase over its previous weekend take — despite having lost more than 350 screens — due to Universal’s releasing a special sing-a-long version of the musical to 299 locations. I’d say something about the film being on its way to Rocky Horror-likecult hit status, but at $132.9 million and climbing, it’s already earned more than Rocky Horror has in 35 years and should anyway be considered an actual hit.
As for limited releases, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter failed to mention that Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Djangoearned $13,106 on a single screen in NYC this past weekend. Meanwhile, one of my favorite films of the year, Jirí Menzel’s I Served the King of England, earned a terrific per-screen average of $8,488 to gross almost $68,000.
I’ve always thought Nastassja Kinski was one of the most boring actresses in the world, but at least she would have given Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastardsthat usual casting from the ’70s cred. Unfortunately, Diane Kruger, who’s just plain boring, has instead been cast in the part originally offered to Kinski.
Originally, today’s clip was to be of Tom Cruise’s dance from Tropic Thunder. But, because the internet is not the utopia we like to think it is, the leaked footage has been removed from all formats that I’m aware of.* So, instead, let’s have a retro moment and remember what it was like when Tom Cruise had enjoyable dance sequences. When he wasn’t trying too hard to be funny and failing miserably in the process.
Of course, as I’ve seen with some recent comments to an old post about Cruise’s supposed scene stealing role in Tropic Thunder, there are people enjoying his new dance moves, too. But I have to agree with the guys at Vulture who stated right away that he’s just not that funny in the movie. And not only that, but I’ve now seen Tropic Thunder twice, and Cruise’s over the top swearing and dancing only gets worse the more times you see it (fortunately Robert Downey Jr. gets funnier each time). Not only am I shocked that anybody would let him do an encore of the dancing, I’m amazed that it’s the last thing we get from the otherwise decent movie — if ever there was a missed opportunity for a post-credits sequence, this was it.
Sing it with me: Still like that old time Tom Cruise dance. That kind of scene in which he wears no pants. I reminisce about the days of “Joel.” With that “Old Time Rock and Roll.”
*UPDATE: Oh, wait, I found another copy for the curious. Check it out after the jump (spoiler alert).
The past two weekends have seen the release of two big, R-rated comedies, first Pineapple Express and then Tropic Thunder. Both featured stars who have, at least occasionally, dipped their toes into family friendly film waters and who have developed big followings across all age groups.
Both movies marketing campaigns also featured red-band trailers. Others and I have discussed the role of the red-band trailer in the campaigns for R-rated movies. They are great components for selling the movies to their adult audiences since, as I’ve said before, they are able to more accurately portray the movie as a whole. If a movie’s comedy or drama depends on the use of coarse language or violence then it’s better for the movie to be able to present those elements to the target audience in order to appear attractive.
Red-band trailers have come back into fashion in the last four or five years largely because of the rise of high-speed video online. On the Internet, studios can put into place safeguards, usually in the form of forms that require the inputting of name, birth-date and zip code, that are meant to keep those under 18 from seeing the trailer or other content. Invariably, though, these trailers wind up on YouTube or some other video sharing site – or directly on blogs – where there is no safeguard. This makes what’s supposed to be restricted content available to everywhere regardless of age. This is an obvious flaw in the process.
But the larger question about the advertising of R-rated films is: What advertising is appropriate?
Meanwhile, everyonethinks she’s got the Best Supporting Actress Oscar race locked up for her work in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Even Lawrence Levi, who writes the film itself off as “as blinkered and lazy as the ‘90s films I got sick of,” admits that Cruz and Javier Bardem are “staggeringly funny and sexy” in it.
Speaking of “too soon!” Oscar predictions: Can Robert Downey Jr win a nomination by acting in a movie about actors who are whores for Oscar nominations?
Tropic Thunder was not only the number one film of the weekend, but it dethroned The Dark Knight, which is now the second highest grossing film of all time. So why is Ben Stiller brooding? No, he’s not recycling his Bono impression––according to Variety, its $26 million 3-day weekend (it made $37 million from Wednesday through Sunday) is no cause for celebration. The film made about $4 million less than Pineapple Express in its opening run, but cost four times more than that film to produce.
They spent $13 million on last year’s broadcast alone, but due to “plunging sales, recession fears and spiking gasoline prices”, GM can no longer afford to sponsor the Oscars.
The Voltron movie, which has been in development since before the first Transformers movie was completed, has been put into turnaround.
Tropic Thunder is taking heavy fire, not for Robert Downey Jr.’s blackface performance, but rather for Ben Stiller’s spoof movie-within-a-movie, Simple Jack. Is this a case of political correctness gone too far? Or does Hollywood have serious flaws in how it portrays people with disabilities? The latter may have been Stiller’s point all along…
Our friend Kevin Kelly shares the tale of his journey to the fabled Skywalker Ranch to see Clone Wars and meet the elusive George Lucas. The film, essentially a two hour trailer for the upcoming animated series, gets into some pretty wonky territory when it asks the question we’ve all wondered: What would Truman Capote be like as a Hutt?
I wish I had smuggled the Polaroid snapshot of Nolte from my former employer, a men’s homeless shelter. Nolte wasn’t his real name, but I’ll be damned if the scruffy, gin-blossomed, gravel-voiced Vietnam veteran wasn’t a ringer for Nick Nolte playing a Nam burnout. He wore mirror shades and ratty field jacket festooned with medals and POW/MIA buttons. He complained that the thunder erupting from the building’s boiler at night gave him jungle flashbacks. There are cliches and there are cliches. Beyond the impossibility of his extreme Nolte-ness and 1,000 yard silences, the man was really suffering. One time he lifted his shades to show me.
Yesterday I was shocked to see Nolte again, up on the big screen in Tropic Thunder. This was my Nolte. A Nam vet whose acclaimed book of war stories inspires a cash-in film adaptation, the character played by Real Nolte emerges on the troubled set like Quint in Jaws, leading our comic heroes not out to sea but into the heart of darkness. In a shot mournfully photographed by John Toll, Nolte stares out at the jungle mists from a mountain perch and answers a query about a weapon with, “I don’t know what it’s called, but I know the sound that it makes when it takes a man’s life.” It’s like, out of nowhere, ten seconds of Malick or Herzog. Later on, Nolte’s heart-of-darkness act and its function in American mythology get deconstructed (or demolished) like Warren Beatty’s frontier pimp in McCabe and Mrs. Miller.
Variety saysTropic Thunder “has a good shot at staying number one through the weekend,” knocking The Dark Knight out of first place. It should “at least match the overall five-day take of last week’s Pineapple Expressat $41.3 million,” but on a $90 million budget, it’ll take a lot longer for the Ben Stiller comedy to eke its way towards profitability.
This story on Lionsgate’s revival of the Conan franchise makes no mention of Robert Rodriguez, who told a crowd at Comic-Con last month that he was personally shepherding the project and planned to direct the film. Curious..
Willem DaFoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg will star in Antichrist, a “psychological thriller that evolves into a horror film” in the works from Lars Von Trier.
Hillary Swank, who seems like an unrealistic candidate for a role that would require her to pretend to be French or to know something about getting fat, will produce and star in a film based on the diet book, French Women Don’t Get Fat.
In what is probably the only case on record of an oft-voted Sexiest Woman Alive replacing a defensively heterosexual male megastar in a Hollywood thriller, espionage film Edwin A. Salt is being rewritten to star Angelina Jolie instead of Tom Cruise.
Does anyone else sort of wonder if this whole Tropic Thunder“retard” protest is actually just an “alternative” marketing thing, paid for by Dreamworks to make the film’s satire look “dangerous”? Although I have to admit, canceling the premiere after party would be going a little far for a campaign…
Helen Mirren’s husband will direct a film about Tennessee Williams’ dysfunctional childhood. The Cloverfield guy will produce a movie about an earthquake. The Japanese girl from Babelwill star as an undercover hit woman in the next film from Isabel Coixet.
Lists of movies within movies are fairly common on the internet, enough that I now realize I need to finally see Bowfinger simply because I’ve counted about a million list makers in love with something titled “Chubby Rain.” And the lists are likely to keep on coming thanks to this week’s hot release, Tropic Thunder, which actually features two movies within (the Vietnam War film “Tropic Thunder” and the festival-winning making-of documentary “Rain of Madness”), as well as the upcoming How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, which has spawned a popular fake movie trailer for an NC-17 film titled “Mother Theresa: The Making of a Saint” (previewed above). Yet until someone makes a Wikipedia page for “List of Fictional Films,” these blogged and forumed lists are necessary to keep us movie fans remembering those non-existent movies we wish existed.
Narrowing down to ten seemed to be difficult — fictional films have been at least nominally been created for tons of films about filmmaking, otherwise reflexive films, sketch comedies, spoofs, etc. — until I realized that a lot of these films within films are appropriately nominal or trailer- or clip-sized gags and would in reality be terrible (imagine actually watching the entirety of“Asses of Fire” from South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut). Even “Je Vous Présente Paméla” (”Meet Pamela”) from Day for Night and the sci-fi film being made in 8½would probably be major disappointments in actuality if you expected from them the work of Truffaut and Fellini, respectively.
So, I went mostly with fictional films that would probably be bad, but would at least be amusingly bad — though I purposefully avoided fictional porns, including those from Boogie Nightsand The Big Lebowski, of which there are literally thousands:
Yesterday’s list dealt with Tom Cruise’s performance in Tropic Thunder. Today, a response to Robert Downey Jr.’s role in the same film as a white actor portraying a black soldier in a war movie (seen in the above clip). Doesn’t it seem such an original and shocking idea? I guess not if you see it as an update on blackface. Fortunately, it’s different when it’s an actor playing a character who makes himself up to look black. It’s funny. But isn’t it typically more acceptable when the make-up isn’t quite as authentic-looking as Downey’s? He actually looks black. Specifically, he looks like Fred Williamson.
I’ve seen plenty of lists detailing the worst instances of one race or nationality playing characters of another race/nationality (John Wayne and Susan Hayward in The Conquerorcomes to mind as #1), but I can’t recall any lists involving actors playing characters disguised as or playing another race. So here’s one:
We’re less than a week away from the release of Tropic Thunder, and as the reviews and puff pieces make their way onto the web, there’s one thing clearly uniting the media’s coverage: talk of Tom Cruise’s appearance in a small role as a Hollywood studio boss. Everyone seems to agree that he steals the show and that his performance — or the joke surrounding it — is one of the comedy’s major highlights, if not the actual best part.
Of course, we can expect a good cameo from Cruise every now and then. He showed up for a bit part in Young Gunsand played himself as playing “Austin Powers” in Austin Powers in Goldmember. But from what it sounds like, his role in Tropic Thunder is featured for longer than might qualify as a cameo. Some are regardless referring to the performance as an “extended cameo”, and in theory it certainly fits in with the huge crop of so-called “ironic cameos” that have become popular in movies and TV in the last ten years.
Still, despite my not having yet seen the movie, I’m thinking that Tom Cruise’s involvement in Tropic Thunder is more like the following list, which consists of merely small roles filled by big stars. You might consider some of them to be technically cameos, especially the ones that aren’t integral to the plot and/or call attention to themselves. But with each of the roles I’ve included, I consider them to be either the best part of their respective movies or at least a major highlight, which is how Cruise’s appearance is being touted. Anyway, forgive me for trying to come up with something different than simply a best cameo list, even if the focus here seems less than clear.
Penelope Cruz will be honored at this year’s Gotham Awards. Details 
Variety says
We’re less than a week away from the release of 
