A few weeks ago we learned that the folks at Focus Features would be re-editing Richard Curtis’s “The Boat That Rocked” for U.S. shores in an effort to whip the project, which didn’t fare well with critics across the pond, into more profitable shape. Now I’m hearing the title is also getting a change, to the more fetching (if you’re asking me, though I know no one is) “Pirate Radio.”
Thoughts?
Variety’s Pamela McClintock and Ali Jafaar are reporting tonight that Focus Features will distribute Richard Curtis’s “The Boat That Rocked,” rather than parent Universal, and instead of the originally planned August 28 release date, the studio has pushed it to November, right in the middle of the Oscar season.
The article notes the fact that Focus is “more adept at marketing less commercial fare” as reason behind the move, but it also notes “Focus prexy James Schamus said his team is working with Curtis to trim about 20 minutes from the film, which originally ran 129 minutes. A chief complaint from critics was the film’s length.”
You’ll recall, the film took a pretty big critical shellacking upon release in the UK in the spring. It also failed to light up the international box office, pulling in, as McClintock and Jafaar note, a mere $25.1 million against a $50 million budget. But while everything is certainly a business maneuver in this industry, one can’t help but wonder whether Focus is thinking, with a thin Oscar slate going into the fall (though animated feature “Coraline” is sure to pop up in the animated field), “Boat” could be whipped into an awards contender.
It’s somewhat surprising that our year-in-advance Oscar coverage is only three months old. That now ancient list of predictions seems so long ago, and yet, even with Cannes behind us and this or that indication of a few of the contenders, I have no idea how to offer an educated update beyond general housekeeping. The season, it seems, will remain elusive for just a little while longer.
Here’s what we know: Critics didn’t respond to Universal’s “The Boat That Rocked” across the pond. But the Brits hardly have a soft spot for Richard Curtis. Along similar lines, Stephen Frears’s “Chéri” hasn’t exactly inspired either. But both films, from awards savvy studios, could find a second wind when they eventually open Stateside.
The biggest Oscar hopeful to emerge from this year’s Cannes fest is, in my opinion, Jane Campion’s “Bright Star.” Heralded in some quarters as a return to form for the director, and snatched up by the intrepid Bob Berney (formerly of Picturehouse and now closing in on a name for his distribution company with partner Bill Polhad), the film could be a nominations hog, anywhere from six to 10 possibilities. You’ll note all of my ponderings in that regard in the latest chart update below.
I mentioned last week that I had reservations about Richard Curtis’s new comedy “The Boat That Rocked,” which opens here in the UK on Friday. Every inch of the film’s marketing thus far (and there’s been a lot of it) gives me the impression of a talented team trying aggressively hard to have fun, but it all looks too calculated for my liking.
And the tepid trade reviews the film is getting seem to suggest I had reason to be suspicious. Screen International strikes with the sharpest claws, going so far as to describe it as Curtis’s “personal Titanic.” (And they aren’t referring to the 1997 blockbuster, either.) Fionnula Halligan writes:
There’s no sign of anyone in charge of this bloated Working Title vessel, which lurches and leaks its way through a series of flimsy setpieces before gracelessly coming to a watery grave … Problematic 134-minute running time turns what should have been a breezy comedy about radio broadcasters on a pirate ship into a draining experience and notices/word-of-mouth are unlikely to be forgiving.
What transpires on Curtis’s Radio Rock feels historically bogus (would a DJ in 1966 really say “this will make you moist”?), if visually accurate. But what is most striking is the wasted opportunity here: surely life on the real Radio Caroline must have thrown up far more dramatic and comedic potential than Curtis is able to take on board here.
I have a complicated relationship with Richard Curtis. (Well, with his work, at least.)
On the one hand, I’m keen to defend the man: it’s become fashionable here to direct aggressive vitriol his way for daring to stick to an upbeat formula that, while hardly pushing the envelope artistically, has proved both popular and crowdpleasing. While more considered than most, this critique by Tim Adams in yesterday’s Observer is typical of the scepticism with which local critics regard him:
This desire to be a one-man band, and not just a writer of scripts, appears to be born of an unlikely immodesty. There was a likable kind of humility about the scale of Four Weddings … but as the budgets have grown, so, apparently, has Curtis’s sense of what he is capable of. Somewhat like Blair, he seems to feel he is a pretty straight guy, but also a lone positive voice.
He seems to want his films to evangelise the idea that the world is nowhere near as grim as most film-makers like to think … It is admirable, that faith, but when translated wholesale to movies it borders on sanctimoniousness.
Like I said, I want to go against that elitist grain, but the truth is that Curtis’ maddeningly inconsistent oeuvre doesn’t entirely justify such loyalty. Yes, “Four Weddings and a Funeral” still stands as an exemplary, structurally inventive rom-com, even if it occasionally misjudges the audience’s affection for its characters. (Andie MacDowell over Kristin Scott Thomas? Really?)
Ahh. The dust is settling. And on the horizon, just visible through the mist and waiting to drive us all up the wall once again: the 2009 Oscar season.
I’ve been writing this year-in-advance column for probably six years now, and I always look forward to gazing ahead. No one dives in so pathetically deep this far out as yours truly, but in exchange for not having a life for the past few months, I get to unload this burden the day after our annual season’s peak and forget about little gold men entirely for a few months.
It’s quite liberating.
The most interesting thing about the season to come, from my vantage point, is the lack of a dreaded “frontrunner status” for any of the contenders. Some might say Clint Eastwood’s Nelson Mandela project (which is not called “The Human Factor,” mind you — the director says the film is currently untitled and is based on John Carlin’s book “Playing the Enemy”).
Others might say Rob Marshall’s “Nine” (coming from a money-tight company hoping to avoid echoes of “Memoirs of a Geisha”). But I don’t see a “Geisha” from here, or a “Charlie Wilson’s War,” expected heavies waiting to miss the mark. The field is curiously flat, and as a result, excitingly broad.
Let’s get to it, shall we?