Daily Archives: December 27, 2007

Jessica Simpson’s New Flick Bombs

Amusements, Musings

After first allegedly putting the jinx on Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo, the state of Texas returned the favor on Jessica Simpson this past weekend, when her latest film opened in eight theaters to a total of $1,322. No, not Major Movie Star, the Private Benjamin rip-off that audiences will still have a chance to reject and deride in 2008, but Blonde Ambition, in which a young professional woman (Simpson) unwittingly becomes the pawn of
two business executives in their bid to oust the head of a
mega-conglomerate.

Since, in addition to Simpson, the film costars fellow Texan Luke Wilson (and Andy Dick too, who’s… big in the Lone Star state?), Millennium Films executives decided to give the movie a limited, down-home Christmas run, trying to bait more interest from other cinema chains
across the country for a wider January release. That worked out smashingly. Averaged out, Blonde Ambition‘s gross comes to around $165 per theater, and if you figure an average ticket price of around $8, that’s less than 20 people per screen, per day. Awesome… a line-in-the-sand stand by home-staters will certainly help inflict another serious if not yet mortal wound on Simpson’s would-be big screen career.

Let’s Get Lost at the Nuart

Screenings

Photographer and filmmaker Bruce Weber’s Academy Award-nominated documentary Let’s Get Lost, focusing on elusive trumpeter
and jazz legend Chet Baker, opens for an exclusive one-week engagement at the Nuart in Los Angeles on
January 11. Using excerpts from Italian B movies, rare
performance footage and candid interviews with Baker, peer-group musicians, friends,
ex-wives and children, Weber (no, not the oh-so-inspirational Illinois basketball coach) weaves together a fascinating and evocative portrait of Baker — a naturally gifted musician whose beautiful work helped introduced jazz to a whole new generation, even as his personal demons and troubles earned him the nickname of “the James Dean of jazz.” For more information, click here, or visit Bruce Weber’s eponymous site by clicking here.

On Untraceable’s Trailer, Poster

Posterized!, Trailer Watch

I’m not really fully digging the short hair look on Diane Lane, for whom I would otherwise happily spend an afternoon washing her car (seriously, no creepy subtext… I’d just wash her car for her), but it’s not merely that which weighs down the trailer for Untraceable, a techno-thriller January 25 release from Sony Screen Gems.

The keyboard-tapping and killer-stalking-his-stalker moves all seem a bit familiar, and the boilerplate dialogue doesn’t really get one’s heart racing. Still, the film gets a bit of a benefit-of-the-doubt pass because of the involvement of director Gregory Hoblit (Primal Fear), who can tease slickly efficient genre thrills out of recognizable set-ups, as he most recently did in Fracture, which was anchored by (yet another) superlative performance from Ryan Gosling. In short, my belief in Hoblit’s deftness of touch outweighs the nasty taste of Pulse and other stupid Internet thrillers still in my mouth that this trailer tangentially summons forth. The unfussy poster, meanwhile, I kind of dig: graphically simple and to the point, it sells the movie’s concept in direct fashion, and that’s refreshing. Not sure if they went with a kitschy mirror in theaters though, as I haven’t seen one there.