The Worst of All Possible Outcomes

Well, it happened... Grindhouse flopped.

The film's poor showing really wouldn't be all that disconcerting if it wasn't for the fact that the two films directly above it, Are We Done Yet? and Meet the Robinsons, are such utterly brainless confections as to not even warrant discussion. So with that, I'll leave them aside to address the real point at hand here: this was, for all intents and purposes, the worst of all possible outcomes for Grindhouse the film, for the Weinsteins, for Quentin Tarantino and, indeed, for all those who love movies.

Make no mistake here, what Tarantino and company tried to do, and what the Weinsteins surprisingly signed off on, was a long shot. It wasn't like there were audiences out there clamoring for a grindhouse theater revival. Certainly, there were folks, niche markets and fanbases who were excited by the idea. The sheer amount of attention that the media and blogosphere showed the film indicates that, at least at some level, Grindhouse sparked immaginations and curiosities.

But (and this is a pretty big but), it looks as though folks just weren't ready for this type of experiment, weren't interested in making Tarantino part of their Easter weekend, and perhaps worst of all, weren't really interested in engaging what amounted to a challenging film in a lot of regards.
A lot of outlets have spent a lot of time discussing how surprising this latest Weinstein failure has been. In all honesty though, the deck was stacked against success in this case. Grindhouse was long. And, despite the surreal amount of media attention over the final week or so, I still have the sense that not many regular people knew what this movie was actually about. (I use regular folks here to refer to those that don't have film releases written on their calendar six months in advance.) I had a number of friends and relations say things like, "Isn't that the movie that's like, two movies?" or just simply "I don't get it." Either way, too much of the publicity probably assumed too much knowledge about what constituted grindhouse cinema to actually be effective and not confusing.

So now the talk turns to releasing Planet Terror and Death Proof into two films, something that I think will probably increase the box office potential of the whole project even while it demeans its cultural significance. At its core, Grindhouse was about recreating a film going experience that really doesn't exist outside niche offerings at art house theaters. Every part of the 3+ hour experience played to that end, from the schlock-y editing and digitally manipulated film stock to the over-the-top trailers and goofy age guidelines. All that will be lost when the films are split.

Instead, we'll be left with two very interesting genre offerings. Rodriguez's film, a real zombie gore-fest, plays pastiche for generic criticism. This has become a staple of modern horror cinema, with virtually every competent director nodding at favorite films or scenes from the past. But few do it as ham-fistedly or for as many laughs as Rodriguez does in Planet Terror. Tarantino on the other hand has offered up what, if Kill Bill hadn't been released so recently, I might call the ultimate Tarantino film. Unlike in Kill Bill however, Tarantino showed almost no restraint for flexing his cinephile muscles. Drawing heavily on little known genre films (embarrassingly, even to me), he subjected viewers to a film that dragged at times when Tarantino's script clearly got bogged down in his own twisted intellect. That being said, Grindhouse's final half hour was among the most intense and exciting I've seen in quite a long time.

Which brings us back to the real losers in this whole mess: movie goers. As I said, Grindhouse was a bet, a pretty big one it turns out. And Hollywood hates losing bets. What Hollywood loves are Will Ferrell comedies, animated family movies and Ice-Cube shit shows that loosely resemble films. (Disclaimer: I haven't seen any of these movies, and therefore can only operate under the assumption that they are pretty worthless. Let's just say I feel safe with this assumption.) If not for rolling the dice with the combined release, the Weinsteins might have had two decently successful genre films. Instead, they are stradled with a ton of bad press and a poorly performing film at roughly 3000 theaters across the country. Unfortunately, this failure will only deter further risk and will lead to more "safe bets" and rehashes of already known entities. Is that the end of the world? Of course not. But it will make for some pretty boring weekend afternoons.

An Epically Crappy Weekend and Roeper Returns!

I wish I could say that I have a great reason for the lack of posting over the last week, but the reality is that I'm simply still trying to recover from a weekend in which Norbit (staring Eddie Murphy, Eddie Murphy! and Eddie Murphy!!!) not only took home the top spot, but brought in $34 million. I would say that everyone who attended a screening of the film should be ashamed of themselves, but clearly, they have no shame.

Going into the February 2nd weekend I joked that we might be looking at a new all time low for combined Rotten Tomatoes scores among the weekend's top five films, the previous all time low having been set the weekend before at 23.8%. Well guess what, I was right. Headlined by The Messengers, my predicted number one, that weekend had a combined 18.8% on RT. Pretty good right?

But those poor films hadn't reckoned on the sheer awfulness of Norbit. Like a slow motion car-wreck, involving a fat-suit of course, Norbit led an even classier group of five films that captured audiences' attention with a combined 18.6% score at Rotten Tomatoes. Let me be the first to congratulate Norbit, Hannibal Rising, Because I Said So, The Messengers and Night at the Museum. You accomplished something terrifically crappy this past weekend, and now no one can take that away from you. (Sidenote: Night at the Museum somewhat artificially inflated each of the past two weeks scores with its 45% rating. Otherwise, the top four from both weeks would have come in at a staggering 12.3 and 12 respectively.)

It's also been some time since we visited with our good friend Richard Roeper. Now, it almost seems hard to believe, but Rotten Tomatoes has only uploaded five new Roeper reviews in the past month. What is this man doing all day? I mean, I understand he's a big time columnist and all, but doesn't he realize there's a nation of movie-goers who count on his sterling words of wisdom and insight? Even more upsetting is the fact that he wasn't sent to watch any of the real pieces of shit everyone seems so intent on paying money to see. No Epic Movie, no Because I Said So, no Norbit, not even any Messengers. Utterly unbelievable. But without further ado, here's a somewhat tardy version of This Week in Roeper:

• Alpha Dog - "Justin Timberlake has what it takes to be a genuine movie star."


• Arthur and the Invisibles - "Strange and kind of meandering."


• Alone With Her - "Alone With Her plays like an extended voyeur video with nothing new to say about hidden cameras or stalkers or anything."


• Catch And Release - "I was pleasantly surprised."


• Seraphim Falls - "Though the chase threatens to go on too long, the suspense remains high because we don’t know which man is the real villain, or if there’s a villain at all."

Hope You Weren't Planning on Hitting the Megaplex

Good sweet Jesus is this going to be an off week at theaters around the country. I certainly don't mean that in terms of box, although it might be that too, but it's shaping up to be a rare weekend in regards to the overall quality of movies that will be available to most of the country.

According to our old friend Rotten Tomatoes, not a single movie in last week's top five Box Office winners scored above a 45% (it takes 60% to be considered "fresh"). For the mathematically inclined readers, last week's top 5 averaged a pretty paltry 23.8%, led of course by last week's winner, Epic Movie, which clocked in at 3%. Yeah I know, I was shocked that 3% of reviewers liked it too. But, as I've said, I'm not one to quibble with audiences' viewing choices.

The real bad news for the discerning film going community is that it looks like things are going to get worse before they get better. This week we have two releases, both of which have received a nauseating amount of advertising run-up. As of this writing only one of the films has received any RT love, and let's just say, you might want to stay home this weekend. I don't know if anyone keeps stats on these things, but we might be looking at an all-time box office top ten shit show when it comes to RT scores. 23.8 is the number to beat, but I think these films are up to it.
The first of these cinematic gems is Because I Said So, which might be the most laugh-out-loud bad title this side of porn. Everything I know about this film I've garnered from watching the preview, but my guess is it doesn't get a whole lot deeper. Apparently Diane Keaton (why, oh why?) plays an overbearing mother to Mandy Moore's rambuncious 20-something. There's some tension, and, gasp, BOYS! And mom and daughter probably butt heads a lot only to realize that they really love each other at the end of the day. Critics seem to be referring to this as a "chick-flick," the generic implications of which I won't even begin to address at this juncture, but I'd dare anyone to find me five so-called "chicks" who are interested in seeing this film. I goddamn dare you. Oh yeah, and just so we're clear, Because I Said So is currently clocking in at an Epic-Movie-like 8% right now over at RT. Good times.
The back end of this weekend's shows some potential. The Messengers is a horror film, which obviously curries favor with this writer, but it's also a Ghost House film (Sam Raimi's production house), so there's hope that it won't be a total waste of time. John Hodgman actually discussed The Messengers a fair amount in his NYT Magazine story "The Haunting", (sorry NYT Select members only it looks like) which looked at the current state of horror in the US. Actually a really nice article if you can get your hands on a full copy somewhere. But I digress. There's one glaring problem here, and it's probably the first thing that jumps out to any fan of the horror genre: a PG-13 rating.

Does a PG-13 rating preclude a film from being scary? No, of course not. But what it does mean is that a large number of the conventions of the genre will be absent or woefully nuetered. Gore, sex, extreme violence? Sorry, go see The Hitcher again. Obviously, films have done pretty well for themselves without all those goodies--Poltergeist and The Ring are just the two that come most readily to mind, Jaws somehow got a fucking PG--but it's an uphill battle. And those exceptions had one thing in common for the most part: decent direction by Speilberg, Hooper and Verbinski. The Messengers is being helmed by two Hong Kong stars, the twin Pang brothers, but what kind of work they'll turn out stateside remains to be seen.

What The Messengers will do is get those pesky teens to the theater. You know, the not-quite-ready-for-Rob-Zombie crowd who still likes a good spook and enjoys a night away from mom and pop? They'll be out in numbers I'd expect. Probably even enough to put Messengers into number one. No guarantees of course, but it'd be nice to see because it would get some good traction going for Ghost House, who will be dropping two more horror ditties on us later this year.

An Odd and an End from the Weekend

Two unrelated topics I wanted to touch on from this weekend, neither really worthy of a full post, so instead I'm just cramming them together, no matter how awkward the fit.
First and foremost, now we all know what happens when you don't read the Sunday Times on Sunday: you miss sweet ass articles like this one from Whitney Joiner. In her piece, Joiner gives readers the low down on Rodriguez and Tarantino's Grindhouse. For folks familiar with the film and its production history to date, there probably wasn't anything in the piece to knock your socks off. But what's important here is that A) it was in the New York freaking Times. They don't talk about any movie to come down the pipe. B) It's fucking Grindhouse for god's sake! I mean, this is going to be one of the messiest, bloodiest, most beautiful pictures of the year. And C) Joiner deploys a strong sense of the generic implications of the two films that make up this beast of a movie experience.

The set piece that kicks the whole story off is Rose McGowan's infamous prosthetic leg/automatic weapon. Joiner talked to both Rodriguez and Tarantino for the piece, and the former make a somewhat surprising statement about how he crafted the film:

“I thought, ‘Nobody’s ever thought of that [put an automatic weapon where a leg should be] before,’ ” Mr. Rodriguez said of his high-caliber epiphany during an interview at his Troublemaker Studios here last month. “Your mind just goes to the craziest idea to lure people into the theater, and then you write your script around those elements.”

This sounds a little reckless, but Rodriguez's feel for genre seems strong enough to make this kind of writing philosophy work. A little later in the piece, he mentions John Carpenter an awful lot, which sets a pretty damn high bar, but could mean great things come release date. A couple other points from the piece are worth mentioning:

1. Weinstin Company is preparing their largest promotional push since their founding upon Harvey and Bob's acrimonious split with Disney.
2. The directors, in their effort to create that true grindhouse movie going experience, will be randomly dropping reels from the films.
3. Tarantino on developing his contribution: “Part of my fun in doing genre cinema, since everyone knows the rules well, whether unconsciously or not, is leading you down a road and giving you all the information that you’ve gotten in other movies, and then using your own information against you,” he said.
4. The possibility of a sequel is put firmly into play by Rodriguez, but sort of brushed off by Tarantino.

We'll see what he says after the box office numbers start rolling in.

Speaking of box office numbers, my second point from this weekend has to do with Epic Movie's mildly surprising victory in its opening week. When your only real competition is Smokin' Aces, you probably shouldn't go around getting a big head when you open at $18.6 million. Now, that being said, this is the second time in less than a year that one of these spoof films has opened at number one at the box (Scary Movie 4 went number one in April). Epic Movie's draw was also almost identical to Date Movie's last February.

Certainly no one is going to argue that any of these three films is anything substantial. While I haven't seen any of this line since Scary Movie 2, it would seem that the team behind these films has the process down to something of a science, which isn't surprising seeing as that they are, at the end of the day, genre films, and the most derivitive type of genre films to boot.

The strength of each of these films' box office openings, however, speak to audiences desire to laugh through so many of the generic conventions that have succeeded in films that are usually still fresh in their minds. Especially in the case of the Scary and now Epic series, there really is no telling how far these films can go, since they can simply rely on the previous year's crop of films when pulling material together. Then, simply play the exact same set pieces that earlier filmmakers leveraged for drama or scares, only for laughs this time around. I'm not saying you need to like it, but it'd be silly not to respect the racket that this group of writers and producers has set up.