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  • SUNDAY CENTS: ‘Funny’ money

    Funny People*All historical figures are adjusted to today’s dollars.

    It was no laughing matter at the box office this weekend as Judd Apatow’s “Funny People” opened at the top spot with a disappointing $23.4 million. Not only is that lower than both “The 40 Year Old Virgin” and “Knocked Up,” but it’s also the lowest figure to top this particular summer weekend since “A Time to Kill” in 1996. Don’t forget that “Virgin” and “Knocked” cost $26 million and $30 million, respectively, while “Funny People” carries a price tag of $70 million.

    Bottom line: this film didn’t perform like an Adam Sandler summer comedy at all. This is a guy who has opened six low-brow comedies in the summer months and had an average debut of $46.0 million. “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” opened with $38.5 million, for Pete’s sake. Even his notorious misfire “Little Nicky” opened to $21.4 million. So no matter how Universal wants to spin this, it’s not pretty. It dropped from Friday to Saturday, indicating that fanboy rush and word of mouth is not going to be great enough to keep it in theaters much longer than Labor Day.

    I think a $65 million finish is the best-case scenario and Apatow has officially lost his “cancer subplot” and “two-hour-plus running time” privileges. And you can kiss those Best Original Screenplay chances goodbye.

    “G-Force” fell 46% to third place and $17.1 million. The guinea pigs already have $66.5 million in the bank so go ahead and mark your calendars for “G-Force 2” in July 2011. And just to reiterate, no matter how bad or good you think “Funny People” is, it’s a filmmaker with a distinct voice trying something a little different and people soundly rejected it in favor of films like this.

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  • Winner of one Oscar nomination, including Best Picture

    Henry Fonda in The Ox-Bow IncidentThe Academy’s recent controversial decision to bump the Best Picture category up to 10 nominees has been mulled over, digested, regurgitated and mulled over again at this point.  There’s nothing really new that can be added to the conversation/debate/speculation, but as I was going through my updated Oscar predictions for Monday’s column, I suddenly realized I had a film in the predicted 10 that didn’t pop up in the predicted five in any other category.

    My immediate reaction was, “Well that’s silly, Kris, take it out of there.  Or find a feasible place for it elsewhere, too.”  After all, while three and four nominations aren’t necessarily unheard of for select Best Picture nominees throughout the years…a lone Best Picture nominee?  Really?

    But why not?  The dynamic shifts so much with this new paradigm that it’s quite feasible for a film, which might not have valiant champions for its various parts, to be one of the most passionately supported efforts for the sum of those parts.  Over the 10 years the Academy tried this experiment between 1932 and 1943, we saw nine films receive single nominations for Best Picture: “She Done Him Wrong” (1932), “Smilin’ Through” (1932), “Here Comes the Navy” (1934), “The House of Rothschild” (1934), “Ruggles of Red Gap” (1935), “Libeled Lady” (1938), “Grand Illusion” (1938), “One Foot in Heaven” (1941) and “The Ox-Bow Incident” (1943).

    You’ll find out the mystery film (which sits at #10 on the chart, mind you) on Monday, though perhaps it’s not so hard to guess.  I discovered more and more with this update that I’m anticipating this to be a “time capsule” year for the Academy more than ever.

  • Rob Marshall and ‘Pirates’ … why not?

    Rob Marshall It seems I’m one of the few people who isn’t particularly bothered by the admittedly surprising prospect of Rob Marshall directing the fourth go-round of “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

    Variety first floated the news yesterday that the Oscar-nominated choreographer-turned-filmmaker is in talks to take the reins of Disney’s megabucks franchise from Gore Verbinski, prompting a stream of “what is he thinking” remarks around the web.

    While sideswiping Marshall’s upcoming “Nine” as a “problem movie,” David Poland rather melodramatically suggests that it might be “the single worst idea in history.”

    Jeff Wells, meanwhile, foresees this damaging Marshall’s Oscar prospects for “Nine.” (Not that the stench of the “Da Vinci Code” franchise turned the Academy off Ron Howard. And I doubt Marshall will be a contender for the win anyway, but that’s another discussion.)

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  • Bad things come to those who wait

    It’s so often these days that we see poorly cut trailers for otherwise high-pedigree films that we tend to brush them aside. “Well, it has to be better than that,” we say.

    Refreshingly, however, this trailer for Richard Eyre’s romantic thriller “The Other Man,” due for a late-September release after gathering dust since last year’s rocky Toronto debut, does a fine job of suggesting just how abysmal the film really is. (Not particularly accurately, mind you: it’s cute that in the wake of “Taken,” they’re trying to sell this as another “Neeson kicks ass” effort, but I can assure you that the chess match is about as physical as things get here.)

    You may recall that I gave the film a rather generous 1.5 stars last October (I figured the presence of Laura Linney alone merits an extra half-star, even if she has nothing to do), and went on to name it the year’s worst. But hey, at least it gave “The Reader” the chance to slap “Only the second-dreariest Bernhard Schlink adaptation of 2008!” on its DVD cover. Always a silver lining.

  • WEEKLY WRAP: Festivals, foxes and funny people

    Adam Sandler in Funny People• In the week’s most dramatic news, Universal rather cleared its awards slate by bumping both “The Wolf Man” and Paul Greengrass’s “Green Zone” to 2010.

    • Against expectations, we were won over by Meryl Streep’s latest bid for that elusive third Oscar, “Julie & Julia.”

    • The Venice Film Festival unveiled a typically well-planned lineup, with “The Road” and Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story” leading the American charge.

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  • Tell us what you thought of ‘Funny People’

    (from left) Eminem and Adam Sandler in Funny People

    I’m briefly on the record with some thoughts on Judd Apatow’s “Funny People,” but I’m really looking forward to hearing what everyone else thinks of this film.  Viewers ought to be trickling out of matinees by now, so cut loose with your reactions in the comments section below.

  • Thompson shifts to indieWIRE this weekend

    Anne ThompsonA couple of weeks ago the news dropped that Anne Thompson would be pulling up the stakes on her Thompson on Hollywood Variety blog and shifting it over to indieWIRE.

    My immediate reaction was that the fit was better.  Thompson always seemed like an outsider at Variety, an awkward figment of a newer, fresher approach to journalism than that outlet has been willing to fully embrace.

    I’ve known Anne a couple of years now and have come to consider her a good friend in a business more full of “business associates” than actual confidants.  I wished her the best when the news fell and again today, as Eugene Hernandez announces the “new” Thompson on Hollywood and Anne herself writes up her final post under the Variety masthead, I’d like to do so again.

    It’s an exciting get for indieWIRE, a good bunch of guys who understand the business the way Anne does.

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  • Remembering ‘Raging Bull’

    Robert De Niro in Raging BullThe first time I saw “Raging Bull” was in 1980, the second day the film was in theater after release. I was an acting student at the time, heading to the theater with my friend Kevin McDonald, who went on to fame as one of the “Kids in the Hall” stars and film roles in “Galaxy Quest,” denim guy on “Seinfeld” and loads of voice work.

    Like me, Kevin was a film junkie, and we both had been looking forward to the new Scorsese film. Our paths went very different ways, but I know for a fact he recalls this evening with much fondness as what we saw changed our lives forever.  Two and a half hours later we left the theater exhausted, drained and stunned by the event.  We talked incessantly about the film on the subway as we headed back home and convinced our classmates to see it with us the next night, if I recall correctly.

    There was little doubt Robert De Niro would win not only the Academy Award for Best Actor but every other acting award n the planet as well, but I remember being shocked when Scorsese himself did not follow suit. When the Oscar nominations were announced, Scorsese and his film were up for eight, but the writing was on the wall: Robert Redford‘s “Ordinary People” was going to win the lion’s share, no doubt about it.

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  • Back East with the ladies of ‘Julie & Julia’

    Meryl Streep in Julie & JuliaEarlier in the week I offered up my (surprisingly) positive assessment of Nora Ephron’s “Julie & Julia,” a shrewdly adapted narrative that features two of my favorite performances of the year from Meryl Streep (as famed chef Julia Child) and Stanley Tucci (as her loving husband, Paul).

    Today in the pages of USA Today, Susan Wloszczyna has caught up with Ephron, Streep and co-star Amy Adams for a frothy little interview from New York.  She even sets the quaint mood early on with a lead describing “a picture-perfect summer’s day at the Blue Hill restaurant at Stone Barns, a bucolic foodie mecca about an hour’s drive from Manhattan in Westchester County.”  She then proceeds to structure the piece like a recipe (but of course), including the proper asides from the conversation here and there.

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  • 7/31 Web Round-up

    Rose Byrne• Rose Byrne, leading lady at last. [Daily Telegraph]

    • More on the story that won’t go away as the “Moneyball” drama spills into the pages of Vanity Fair. [Hollywood Elsewhere]

    • Stephanie Zacharek wonders whether the “Judd Apatow moment” might be over. [Salon]

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  • Lennon biopic ‘Nowhere Boy’ to close London fest

    Aaron Johnson as John Lennon in Nowhere Boy

    UPDATE: “Nowhere Boy” producer, Kevin Loader, addresses Jeff Wells’s concerns about the film’s non-appearance at earlier autumn festivals quite reasonably. He explains that the post-production schedule means the film simply won’t be complete in time for Venice or Toronto. I thought as much.

    This is an interesting development. Lately, the London Film Festival has chosen to wrap up with big-name films, many of them already powered by previous festival hype — “Slumdog Millionaire,” “Babel” and “Good Night, and Good Luck” have all been given the closing night slot in recent years.

    By comparison, the news of this year’s closing film, Sam Taylor-Wood’s debut feature “Nowhere Boy,” comes slightly out of left field. I’ve been eagerly anticipating Taylor-Wood’s portrait of the young John Lennon, which is being shepherded by The Weinstein Company, for a while now. For many others, however, I suspect it hasn’t really been on the radar.

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  • Diablo Cody star-struck by Stan Lee at Comic-Con

    (via Awards Daily)

  • ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ trailer

    Gee, they weren’t kidding when they said this is a Wes Anderson film in every respect apart from the lack of human beings. As for Anderson’s recent claim that this is “a British film … set in the UK” … well, perhaps it’s just set in the tourist district, but it looks American as apple pie to me. (By the way, surely Roald Dahl is enough of a legend to be advertised by name, rather than as “the author of ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.’”)

    On a more serious note, something about the visuals on display here doesn’t gel for me … am I the only one who thinks the stop-motion looks a tad rushed and plasticky? I want to be excited for this — not least because I’ll be about for its world premiere at the London fest — but I find myself, to put it gently, concerned.

  • ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ featurette

    It originally appeared at Apple and I’m just getting around to posting it.  A nice discussion with author Maurice Sendak with added commentary from Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers:

  • TECH SUPPORT: Best Costume Design — Volume I

    (from left) Ben Wishaw and Abbie Cornish in Bright StarMovie stars are often given much attention for the fashion that they sport off-screen. Seldom does the on-screen attire garner as much publicity.

    Nevertheless, the Academy Award for Best Costume Design recognizes those talented men and women who design the threads actors wear on screen. Not only does this work add to the elegance and authenticity of the film, but it can also express the character and the period, mood and setting of the piece.

    For the last three years, this category has chosen films which have highlighted the extravagant attire of the upper class from centuries ago. Period films almost always triumph in this field and, in fact, garner the vast majority of nominations, though a spot or two is usually reserved every year for a fantasy effort.

    This is also a category which tends to reward designers who have been around a long time, with most nominees every year having been in the race before, although a spot or two is almost always reserved for a newcomer as well. And unlike many other crafts categories, the costume branch does not seem averse to nominating a film which scores in few if any other places.

    The most likely nominee this year, if not the most likely winner (sight unseen, of course), might be Janet Patterson for “Bright Star.” This Jane Campion effort was very well received at Cannes in May and the crafts look exquisite. Patterson, who landed two of her three previous nominations for Campion collaborations (“The Piano” and “Portrait of a Lady”), looks likely to return to the race after 12 years. I’d be surprised if she failed to be nominated.

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  • UK ‘Informant!’ poster

    The Informant!

    (Courtesy: Empire)

  • Check out the full Daft Punk ‘Tron Legacy’ theme song

    (Courtesy: Latino Review)

  • 7/30 Web Round-up

    Vincent Cassel• Jeremy Piven would like to see an “Entourage” film.  Who wouldn’t? [CNN]

    • Vincent Cassel refuses to court Hollywood.  Who needs it when you’ve got Monica Bellucci at home? [Daily Telegraph]

    • Robert Levin sits down with “In the Loop” director Armando Iannucci. [Film School Rejects]

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