“In a sense, the Internet has turned the entire world into one big test screening audience. Scraps, rumors, planted AICN items and more are fomented to determine which way the hoi polloi
compass is pointing. And if you think it’s crazy now, just wait until
the studios can point, via secure and super-fast broadband download,
specifically requested movies to specific individual citizen critics — customized to their articulated likes and dislikes, this transom will
constitute the final dagger in the heart of professional film criticism.”
I’ve written about this before, because it’s already going on to a certain extent in the manner in which some studios are playing coy, and keep-away, with genre product, crafting selective invite lists apparently based solely on whom they feel will be most receptive to (read: non-critical of) their movies. But Horgan is right — once the ability and technology of targeted download is upon us, print publications will be mortally wounded as far as arts coverage. The bigger point here, though, is that most Hollywood studio PR machines regard the Internet as inherently more corruptible, susceptible to back-slapping and favor-trading.
This grim, quick-cut trailer, while somewhat effective in its own
punch-to-the-face fashion, doesn’t do justice to the slow-paced,
much more legitimately unnerving trailer for The Strangers (Rogue, May 30) currently playing in theaters. The movie, seemingly a Vacancy-type killer-thriller, is about a pair of isolated young lovers (Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler) who find themselves under siege from a group (family?) of psychopaths who are perhaps taking a page from the original poster of Michael Haneke’s 1997 version of Funny Games with their choice of headwear. Yeah, the stalk-and-slash quotient of the final product is probably way up there, but the theatrical trailer reminded me a bit of In Cold Blood, actually, and the tense, long hold of a shot with a menacing figure standing silently in the background is virtually unprecedented in current trailer film vocabulary, especially for a genre piece like this. It freaked me out the first time I saw it, precisely because it’s so unexpected.
In celebration of March Madness — and more specifically, at least I like to think, this dunk — top-shelf DVD distributor Criterion is offering up a special 30% rate cut on Steve James’ superb documentary Hoop Dreams, as well as their collected Eclipse titles.
The discount ends April 7 at midnight; to take advantage of the offer, click here, and enter the code “NCAA.” Or tell them “Earl” sent you. That’ll confuse them…
In 1998, well-reviewed cardsharp flick Rounders, starring Ed Norton and Matt Damon, grossed under $23 million its entire run. Director Robert Luketic’s 21, on the other hand, outperformed that in only three days.
The film made a big splash this past weekend, refusing to hold in the high-teens, and instead rushing all the way to a $24.1 million opening at roughly 2,650 theaters, easily outgrossing spoof flick Superhero Movie, despite that film playing on more than 300 more screens. The rise in blackjack and poker as both a recreational pastime and somewhat unlikely spectator sport (more on this in a moment) has something to do with 21‘s better-than-expected success, since distributor Sony reported over half the film’s audience was comprised of those 25 and under, mostly males. But clearly this movie — about a motley group of can-do M.I.T. kids and their roguish professor taking Las Vegas casinos for a spin with a complex card-counting-and-probability scheme — also tapped into a hearty aspirant vein. That it’s based on real events, too, only likely increased fall enrollment in statistical variance classes in colleges across the country.
The story centers on Ben Campbell (Jim Sturgess, above left, of Across the Universe), a brilliant but decidedly middle-class student and son of single working mother who, needing money for medical school, finds himself recruited to join an extracurricular group that most definitely isn’t listed in the student directory. Fronted and relentlessly drilled by unorthodox math professor and stats genius Micky Rosa (Kevin Spacey), a quintet of the school’s most gifted students — including the sexy Jill Taylor (Kate Bosworth) — head to Vegas every weekend, armed with fake IDs and an intricate system of signals that tilt the odds of blackjack in their collective favor.
At first Ben only wants to set himself up for debt-free doctoral studies, should a much-needed scholarship not come through. Seduced by the money and upgrade in lifestyle in affords, him, though, Ben begins to push the limits. When he reneges on the agreed-upon protocol and costs Micky some money, his former mentor harshly turns on Ben. This leaves him and his peers in a difficult position, trying to quickly earn back the lump-sum nut they’d built up. The challenge becomes not only keeping the numbers straight, but staying one step ahead of the casinos’ menacing, old-school enforcer, Cole Williams (Laurence Fishburne).
Chalk it up to a need for fraternal diversion in the midst of a cruel world, or perhaps just the proliferation of cable sports channels desperate for new programming, but over the past five to seven years poker (celebrity, professional and otherwise) has experienced a surge in popularity. It’s become a staple of both the college relaxation circuit, and a surprisingly durable form of spectator entertainment in its own right. Las Vegas and Atlantic City have benefited (tourism is up 17 and 11 percent, respectively in the last half-decade), but so have any number of ancillary market players, from videogame manufacturers to how-to authors.
Still, despite the spike in popularity, recent cardsharp and gambling movies haven’t always made a killing at the box office. Sports bookie flick Two for the Money did under $23 million in the fall of 2005, despite the presence of Matthew McConaughey and Al Pacino. Drew Barrymore and Eric Bana’s Lucky You, meanwhile, wasn’t so lucky, grossing a meager $5.7 million last spring after being traded around from release date to release date like a low-value chip by distributor Warner Bros.
Sturgess, for those that didn’t see Across the Universe, reaffirms himself as a sympathetic, highly likable screen presence — perhaps even more so than in that film because here he’s front and center, without any outlandishly colorful production design and musical numbers to overwhelm him. But what helps give 21 a leg up is its story as much as its execution.
Legally Blonde helmer Luketic delivers a slick, engaging and well cast movie. Based on Ben Mezrich’s nonfiction tome Bringing Down the House, and adapted for the screen by Allan Loeb (Things We Lost in the Fire) and Peter Steinfeld, 21 artfully condenses all the necessary math-and-code bits one needs to know to decipher the art of the M.I.T. gang’s con. Then it just lets you go along for the ride. Of all the turns that the movie takes — including Spacey changing from rakish to menacing back to somewhere in between — 21 never stops surfing along on a surplus of cool. For for those that like games of chance, it persuasively pitches a winning rap — that big-play success, and all the fortune and accouterments that come with it, is right there for the taking, in the next hand. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here. (Sony, PG-13, 122 minutes)
I should’ve gotten around earlier to posting and/or commenting on the trailer for the fourth Indiana Jones film, releasing May 22 from Paramount. But I was probably busy watching a not-very-good movie on DVD. The truth about the trailer is that the fedora and shadow-play introduction stuff is cool, the quick Roswell-stencil cutaway is appetite-whetting intriguing, and the action beats are all dutifully hit. This is a movie made by pros, and it thus far shows. But one of my good friends is right, Indy’s quip when crashing through a truck windshield (“Damn, I thought that was closer…”) is egregiously misplaced; it should come after the punches he throws. A hit-then-quip order abets the aged-Indy leap of faith the film requires; if they consistently do it vice versa, the movie will suffer mightily for it.
The old media hits just keep coming. A couple days after the Newspaper Association of America reported that print newspaper advertising revenue was down 10 percent from last year, the worst drop in half a century, comes word, per Anne Thompson, Radar‘s online site and others, that Newsweek‘s David Ansen is the latest veteran film critic to soon find himself without a home, accepting an effective-at-year’s-end buyout along with more than 100 other staffers.
“Obviously the climate at newsmagazines is not great — more cost-cutting, more trimming,” both cited pieces above quoted Ansen as saying. Ansen looks forward to writing
books, teaching and “not going out to screenings every night. I want to watch DVDs of movies I might actually like, and read a
book or two. Face it, a lot of movies are not that interesting to write
about these days.”
