Movies Daily by Zach Cannon

Due to a busy day, I’ll have to keep today’s update short. Here’s some quick bullets of today’s news.

To strike, or not to strike. That is the question. At 12:01 tomorrow morning (Tuesday at midnight), the SAG contract with AMPTP will expire. As of yet, no strike has been authorized. SAG’s president doesn’t want it, others do. Read all about it here and here.

After he’s done with Watchmen, director Zak Snyder already has an animated feature lined up, as well as an adventure/drama set in Afghanistan, but it looks like he could be sticking around in the Middle East after that and leading the Spartans against the Persians again in a sequel to 300. Frank Miller, the author of the original graphic novel, is writing a new one upon which the film sequel will be based.

Terminator 4 (I know I never refer to it by its real name, but that name is just too stupid to type out) has gotten itself a new actress. Helena Bonham Carter will join Christian Bale in a “small but pivotal” role.

Brett Ratner has tried to dispel the rumors online that Beverly Hills Cop 4 will be PG or PG-13 so that younger audiences can rediscover the franchise. He told Latino Review: “Dont believe everything you read on the internet. Believe me, this is going to be a hard core ‘R’ Beverly Hills Cop. I start shooting next year.”

And two interesting stories about trends in entertainment came from Variety today. The average TV viewer is getting older, probably in large part because of the growing number of baby boomers, and, despite the record summer last year, rising tickets, gas and popcorn prices, this year’s box office is doing 4% better than 2007’s.

As predicted, Wall-E dominated the box office this weekend. The Pixar animated wonder (really, it is phenomenal) grossed $62.5 million, besting many industry estimates. As far as Pixar movies go, it just about ties Monsters, Inc. for the third highest opening for a Pixar movie, behind The Incredible and Finding Nemo.

The big surprise this weekend was Wanted. Estimates had that movie making about $30-40 million and it actually took the number two spot with $51 million. Those numbers are already good enough, but they’re even bettered by the fact that the film only cost $75 million to make (compared to Wall-E’s $180 million). When you take into account the large international gross the film will probably get (Timur Bekmambetov, Wanted’s director, helmed the highest grossing Russian films ever; the star, James McAvoy is big in his native UK, so I can imagine the film having success in Europe), Wanted will likely be a worldwide hit.

Iron Man is finally out of the Top 10. Last week, it became the first film to reach $300 million this year. Indiana Jones, which was number seven this week, has grossed $299,936 million and will be the second film to cross that threshold before too long. That is, unless it slows down enough in the next two weeks and The Dark Knight is the enormous success everyone thinks it will be.
Here’s the complete list :

1. Wall-E: $62.5 million
2. Wanted: $51 million
3. Get Smart: $20 million
4. Kung Fu Panda: $11.7 million
5. The Incredible Hulk: $9 million
6. The Love Guru: $5.4 million
7. Indiana Jones… Skull: $5 million
8. The Happening: $3.8 million
9. Sex and the City: $3.7 million
10. You Don’t Mess with the Zohan: $3.2 million

We’ll start this Saturday with three non-trailers. First is an extremely well-edited fake trailer for a Batman movie in which the four iterations of Batman — Keaton, Clooney, Kilmer and Bale (that’s right, no love for Adam West) — battle over turf in Gotham City. You can catch it here.

In the upcoming Watchmen film, advertisements and commercials from various Veidt products will be visible in the background throughout the film on TV sets and as part of the scenery. (For the uninitiated, in the Watchmen universe Adrian Veidt is a retired superhero who reveals his secret identity and uses it to cash in.) Director Zak Snyder gave fans the opportunity to make the commercials for Veidt Enterprises and this week they picked the winners. You can find them here.

On Monday, the trailer for the new James Bond flick, Quantum of Solace, will debut on the ‘net. Until then, there’s a short preview of the preview here.

Now that Pixar guru John Lasseter is at Disney, the Mouse House is trying to get back into animation. The trailer for Bolt, their first feature-length cartoon since the Disney-Pixar merger is available here.

Shia LaBeouf (I’ve added his name to the spell check on my computer since I type it about once a week) reteamed with his Disturbia director D.J. Caruso in Eagle Eye. The trailer is available here and it looks like a huge, smash-bang thriller with equal shades of The Matrix and The Patriot Act.

Unfortunately, the makers of Epic/Date Movies and Meet the Spartans haven’t been kicked out of Hollywood yet, so they’ve made another spoof flick, Disaster Movie. It looks absolutely terrible. See for yourself here, but you’ve been warned.

Even though there are already a handful of trailers online for Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Apple debuted a new one this week. I was already sold on this movie — from the previews it looks like Del Toro has solved all the problems of the first one — and this trailer just gets me a little more excited for it. See it here .

Guy Richie’s latest, RocknRolla, looks to be a return to what he’s good at: Smart, quick and dark comedies set in London’s underground. See the trailer here.

Last year I got to see a clip from Bruce Campbell’s My Name is Bruce at an event. It was hilarious, but there hasn’t been much news about it’s release anywhere. This week, it was reported that the studio liked the film, poured some more money into it and allowed for a second round of shoot. The trailer is online here.

Since George Clooney already has enough gravitas, he decided to loan some to both SAG and AFTRA . In a two-page letter, the grey-haired actor declared neutrality in the AFTRA-SAG spat and laid down some “fundamental facts,” which include the importance of supporting other actors and following the models set by other unions. Read the article and letter here.

Because we want more remakes in our movie theaters, the Greek gods are coming from Mount Olympus and clashing in the cineplexes. Not so much the gods, but Perseus will be battling Medusa again in a Clash of the Titans remake helmed by Louis Leterrier. And if that weren’t enough, USA Today released this article today (try to pronounce the author’s name, I don’t even know where to start) announcing Robert Rodriguez’s next project — Red Sonja. Rose McGowan will step into Brigitte Nelson’s shoes.

A little while back, Regal announced they’d be adding a large number of 3-D screens and now Dolby Labs has set up another 350 screens in Europe, Asia and the Americas. The first movie to really have to tackle the 3-D hurdle will be Journey to the Center of the Earth. To me, it looks nostalgic but incapable of competing with other family films, like Wall-E, or the abundant comic/adventure films of the summer. On that note, Variety has an interesting article dissecting the possible success of Journey and the future of 3-D.

When Jay Leno steps down next year as host of The Tonight Show Conan O’Brien will fill his chair, but no one quite knows what Leno will do. He could move to another network and still do late night, or move to cable, or maybe do stand-up, or just retire to his famous garage and work on cars until his twilight. Check out all his possible options here .

Industry estimates put WALL-E on top of the box office this weekend, making around $50-$60 million. That would put it’s gross Ratatouille, but below most other recent Pixar films. The obvious runner-up for this weekend will be Wanted, which is expected to take in around $30 million. That would make them both relatively successful and not just commercially. Both are getting positive reviews (97% Rotten Tomatoes rating for WALL-E and 74% for Wanted); I guess that makes them critical successes as well

Could Oscar come early this year? Heath Ledger’s turn as The Joker has generated Academy Award buzz when the first trailers hit earlier this year. That movie doesn’t come out for three weeks, but Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers already put up his review — the first professional review of the film — here . In short: It’s the stuff dreams are made of.

The Hollywood Reporter has an article claiming Wall-E (for which there plenty of positive reviews online) the start of Oscar season. In the past, Brad Bird has tried unsuccessfully to lobby for his film to be a nominated for Best Picture rather than Best Animated Feature. Could Andrew Stanton and Wall-E be the first of the PIXAR films to break that barrier?

Now that she has Sex and the City behind her, Sarah Jessica Parker is going to play a single woman living in New York in The Ivy Chronicles. It’s not SATC 2.0, but a flick about a divorce who loses her job, downgrades apartments, and starts her own business.

Everyone’s favorite deportee — OK, deportee isn’t exactly fair, but I couldn’t think of what you call someone who isn’t allowed into a country for fear of being arrested for a crime committed decades ago. Anyways, Roman Polanksi has cast Nicolas Cage, Tilda Swinton and Pierce Brosnan in The Ghost, a remake of the Patrick Swayze classic. That’s a lie, it’s actually an adaptation of Robert Harris’ novel about a ghostwriter who finds his life in danger after filling in for a dead writer who was writing the memoirs of a former British Prime Minister

The future of To Catch a Predator is in the air after NBC settled a $105 million law suit with a woman who claimed the producers pushed police to arrest her brother after he didn’t show up for one of the show’s trademark sting operations and he killed himself. The settlement comes months after a judge said a jury could say NBC “crossed the line from responsible journalism to irresponsible and reckless intrusion into law enforcement.”

Tired of product placement on your favorite TV shows? Well it’s not going anywhere, if anything it’ll probably going to get worse thanks to TiVo, but the Writers Guild of America West recently talked with the FCC about the problems with product placement and how it should change. You can read a short, interesting article about it here.

The SAG-AFTRA debacle continues. A few days ago, Tom Hanks and Kevin Spacey spoke up and backed the AMPTP-AFTRA tentative agreement and now Jack Nicholson, Ben Stiller, Sandra Oh, Martin Sheen and 64 others openly protested it. Aside from ruining movies and polite conversation at dinner parties, the impending strike could change the face of San Diego Comic-Con. It turns out no actors could be there to promote their movies.

Pixar already announced the short that will appear before Wall-E this weekend a while back and now they’ve announced that a Wall-E-related short will appear on the DVD, a la Jack Jack Attack on The Incredibles DVD, called Burn-E, about a robot of the same name.

Steven Spielberg has been involved in video games before , but never quite like he will be with his new project, The 39 Clues. Spielberg’s production house DreamWorks acquired the screen rights for the title, which is billed as a “multiplatform adventure series.” It will include 10 books, collectible cards, an online game, and, of course, a movie.

Finally, in an interesting move, for the first time MTV will air political ads . The network says they’ve decided to change their policy on ads because it would “be a good fit for our audience and would compliment this year’s Choose or Lose campaign.” Considering John McCain isn’t exactly hip with the MTV crowd like Barrack Obama is (I can’t imagine McCain doing fist bumps or revealing whether he wears boxers or briefs on the network like Clinton did to compete with the Obama’s “cool” aura), it seems like, for the first time, MTV may actually have backed a candidate in a back-ended sort of way.

I’m not suggesting that they’ll only accept ads from Obama or give McCain unfair treatment, but MTV has to know how popular Obama is with its demographic and how a) more viewers will pay attention to Obama’s adds on MTV than McCain’s and b) how Obama will continue to capture that demographic and McCain will continue to rely more on the working class, middle-America non-MTV-watching old-people demographic. MTV could have done this any other election year, but it’s the year that Obama runs that they free up their restrictions. Of course, both of the candidates (or all three, if Ralph Nader is feeling crazy again) have equal opportunity to advertize on MTV, but the fact that MTV decided to allow political ads when an extremely popular candidate who would benefit more than any before from ads geared towards the youth audience runs, while the rest of Hollywood gets behind him, seems a little obvious, if you ask me.

Actors are the talk of Tinsel Town, and will continue to be until next Tuesday. This is a strange case of history repeating itself — two Hollywood guilds striking within months — made stranger by the potential strike by a third guild that already said it wouldn’t strike. Sound weird? Here’s the Cliff Notes on what’s happening.

The Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) are rival guilds that represent actors in Hollywood. Like the Writers Guild before them, the current deal that both guilds have with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television producers is about to expire and both are negotiating new terms with the AMPTP. AFTRA and the AMPTP have negotiated a tentative agreement, which could be signed in the near future. SAG, on the other hand, will strike next Tuesday if they don’t find an acceptable middle ground with the AMPTP and is now calling for AFTRA members to reject the deal that union negotiated with the AMPTP.

It sounds like something out of a bad sitcom, but it’s true and a strike more devastating than the WGA stoppage could be a reality a week from today. You can read more detail about the strike and SAG and AFTRA here and here.

Two actors look to be getting work outside of Hollywood though. Seems Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger will finally team up on screen, but rather than being in a Hollywood blockbuster, it’ll be in Bollywood’s most expensive film ever.

While we’re on the subject of actors, NPR’s Fresh Air ran a series of interesting interviews last week with actors from movies that appear on the AFI’s new Top 100/ 10 Top 10 List. Faye Dunaway, Eva Marie Saint, Kirk Douglass, Tony Curtiss, Peter O’Toole and Robert Towne are all featured.

If you were intrigued by Nick Fury’s appearance at the end of Iron Man and Tony Stark’s cameo at the end of The Incredible Hulk, you can find out who all of the Avengers will be, from gods to ants, in 2010 here.

Finally, Tom Brokow will fill the moderator chair on Meet the Press, at least until the November elections.

Every year since I was in high school, my mother has bought me a page-a-day calendar. They’ve ranged from sports trivia to recommended reading, but most often, they’ve been An Orgy of George. They were a collection of 300-or-so (Saturdays and Sundays are put together on one page) mostly random musings from the brain of George Carlin.

Sometimes they were dark: ALL SUICIDE ALL THE TIME: I’m convinced in this depraved culture that so devalues human life and dignity, and where reality television has convinced everyone they belong on national TV, I’m convinced that if you added in the excitement of a brand-new All-Suicide Channel debuting with maximum publicity, you could get five hundred of these hopeless people to hold hands and jump into the Grand Canyon.

Other times, random, as in this example, in which he expounds on language, one of Carlin’s favorite subjects: There is a tendency these days to complicate speech by adding unnecessary words. The following phrases all contain at least one word too many.
belief system
seating area
facial area
daily basis

No matter how wide the range of Carlin’s comedy, it was always pointed, critical, most often true, and above all hilarious.

The first time I saw Carlin was on one of his 14 HBO stand-up specials when I was in middle school. I didn’t know his history, the Seven Dirty Words, other than that I wasn’t supposed to say them, or his influence on pop culture. I caught every one of his comedy specials since then, and Carlin has influenced me both politically and personally. His constant diatribes on euphemisms, redundancies and political correctness fueled my own affinity for language and the way society shapes it rather than the way it shapes society. Seeing this old guy on TV speak so passionately about the idiotic idiosyncrasies of American culture during my formative years taught me to question and challenge much of what I saw around me (especially since I forcibly attended Catholic Sunday School once a week), but to always do it intelligently with a sharp tongue and quick wit, not loud and brash like Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh.

I don’t want to pepper this too much with my own memories of Carlin; I have no real connection to him other than being part of his massive fandom, so making this about me would rather than him would be a bit narcissistic. In reality, his influence is far spread and incalculable. When I look over all the obituaries of Carlin in various publications, I can’t even begin to fathom how much Carlin changed U.S. culture. Of course, he inadvertently created “family hour” on TV and the much-maligned FCC indecency rules. He’s inspired countless comics and, along with other counter-culture comedians like Lenny Bruce, forever changed stand-up comedy.

I feel like Carlin would probably have (or did have) something hilariously critical about the way people and publications flock to celebrity deaths and report on it as much as they can to “pay respects” to the person, but actually profit off his or her death as quickly as possible. With that in mind, I’ll stop here, but leave you with a few articles about and interviews with him.

An article from Time, explaining the importance of George Carlin.

An interview and remembrance of Carlin from NPR.

A photo slide show of Carlin from Variey.

The Kennedy Center, which recently announced it would give Carlin the Mark Twain Prize, will still give him that award posthumously.

The comedy battle this weekend between Maxwell Smart and The Love Guru ended in defeat for Michael Myers. The comedian’s return to the big screen grossed just $14 million to Get Smart’s $39 million. Of course, people will question whether Myers can still be a box office pull like he was in the days of Austin Powers, but really, The Love Guru was so poorly received and marketed, it’s performance is less a sign of whether he can make money as it as a sign that he might not be able to make a good movie. We’ll see when/if Austin Powers 4 comes out.

Audiences were kinder to Steve Carell. This was his biggest opening weekend to date. Get Smart probably won’t have the legs that something like The 40-Year-Old Virgin or Little Miss Sunshine, but it’s proof enough that Carell is comedy star, not just in television, but it in box office as well.

Here’s the full list:

1. Get Smart: $39.15 million
2. Kung Fu Panda: $21.7 million
3. The Incredible Hulk: $21.5 million
4. The Love Guru: $14 million
5. The Happening: $10 million
6. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: $8.4 million
7. You Don’t Mess with the Zohan: $7.2 million
8. Sex and the City: $6.5 million
9. Iron Man: $4 million
10. The Strangers: $1.95 million

This week brought a slew of new trailers to the Web. I posted earlier this week that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button trailer was finally available in high quality on Apple (available here ). If you’re jonesing for some more Brad Pitt after that and you dug the first Burn After Reading trailer, there’s a fun international trailer available here on MSN. It focuses less on the story, but gives you more of an idea of the tone of the movie.

There’s already been a handful of X-Files: I Want to Believe trailers online and in the theaters, but Apple debuted an “Online Exclusive Trailer.” It doesn’t show much new footage and it’s not all that different from earlier stuff, but here ’s the link anyways.

In the new movie Taken (unrelated to the Steven Spielberg mini-series), Liam Neeson plays the father of a kidnapped daughter who is on the phone with her when she’s nabbed from her apartment. When her captors pick up the phone, he just stops short of giving them his resume, revealing he’s some bad-ass CIA type who vows to get his daughter back and give her captors hell. The trailer’s tone and its editing are reminiscent of the Bourne films and it looks like it could be a genuinely exciting ride. You can catch it here.

Matthew Broderick became famous for playing Ferris Beuller and then made a career out of playing characters very unlike Ferris Beuller. In the trailer for Diminished Capacity, he looks to be continuing the trend of playing stuck up, stuffy characters. This time, he visits his uncle (Alan Alda), who reveals he owns a priceless baseball card. Together they set out to sell it, fall in love, learn important life lessons, blah blah blah. It’s in the vein of Sideways and the trailer puts it in the same quirky/indie world that Little Miss Sunshine was in. You can find the trailer here .

Now, this is what Red Band trailers were made for. Often, there’s the kind of movie you can’t fairly advertize because of its subject matter, so, naturally, a period comedy about a teenage drug dealer and the old guy (Ben Kingsley) he works for probably needs a red bander so you can get a true sense of what the film is like. Take a hit of The Wackness here.

While the teaser for Terminator 4 won’t debut until The Dark Knight hits theaters, AICN has a pretty detailed description as to what the trailer will be like. Check it out here.