The BCNVIU Blog

EXCLUSIVE: The stoner comedy has a long and illustrious tradition, starting with the oeuvre of Cheech & Chong and continuing right through "Pineapple Express" and the antics of Harold & Kumar.

We may soon be able to add another to the genre: "We're the Millers," a long-developed film that's now getting some new momentum. In the film, which is being developed by New Line, slackers aren't sitting around taking puffs and dreaming big. In fact the main character in this one, a veteran pot dealer, is actually pretty ambitious — so ambitious that he decides to create a fake family (the eponymous Millers) to move a large shipment of marijuana across the U.S. border from Mexico.

New Line and producers are narrowing down their director search on the film. Sources say that Burr Steers, coming off his "Charlie St. Cloud" this summer, is a finalist to land the director's chair, as is the duo of Sean Anders and John Morris (the pair wrote "Hot Tub Time Machine" and directed the road-trip bawdiness that was "Sex Drive").

"Millers" comes with a strong comedic pedigree: Dan Fybel and Rich Rinaldi, who've written scripts for TV series such as "The Sarah Silverman Program" and "The Hard Life of R.J. Berger" have written the latest draft of the script. (Steve Faber and Bob Fisher, best known for "Wedding Crashers," wrote the original draft.) Steve Buscemi was attached to star a few years ago, back when "Millers" was first coming together, but producers probably will be re-casting.

With medical marijuana getting an increasing amount of attention in California, it's time we suppose, for another stoner comedy. Or high time.

–Steven Zeitchik

http://twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

Photo: Up in Smoke. Credit: Paramount

Few actors inspire swooning devotion the way George Clooney does. It's not just "I'm going to check out something he does because I find him interesting" but also full-on, follow-every-last-detail-in-his-life obsession. Even though — or maybe because — the actor's personal life is shrouded in such mystery, these fans take a fervent interest in all that Clooney does. A friend who is one such Clooneyist demands, upon our return from a film festival, that we share with her even the smallest Clooney tidbit. (This applies even when neither Clooney nor one of his films are at the festival.)

Clooney's box-office problem, we've been told over the years, is that there simply are not enough of these devotees. Which is why so many of his starring vehicles have wound up performing modestly. Those who turn out to see them do so with gusto. But box-office totals aren't measured by desire, and so the movies take in only middling amounts.

That explanation is fine, as far it goes, and in a way was proven again this weekend when Clooney's latest, the dark spy film "The American," opened to $13.1 million over the standard three-day weekend, $16.4 million if you toss in Labor Day. Those numbers are in line with his last few wide openings, whose three-day totals clocked in at $12.7 million ("The Men Who Stare at Goats"), $12.7 million again ("Leatherheads") and $12.5 million ("Intolerable Cruelty.") (Ensemble films, such as "Burn After Reading" and the "Ocean's Eleven" pictures, have opened stronger, though those are buoyed, of course, by the presence of many other stars. And limited releases, such as "Up in the Air" and "Good Night and Good Luck," are different animals entirely.)

What continues to baffle, however, is something that goes beyond the dollar totals. It turns out that the hard-core cadre of Clooney fans who reliably turn out to these films on opening weekend don't especially like what they see. Their love of the man may draw them to theaters, but once they get there, they're not particularly happy they came.

That trend was brutally on display with "The American," which drew a pitiful CinemaScore of D-, one of the lowest of the year for any wide opener not named "Splice." (Actually, that's not true either — "Splice" at least pulled a D.) And the grade for "The American" is hardly an anomaly: Over the last few years, Clooney's wide openers — the best test for a megastar — have routinely been handed poor marks by audiences. Clooney's screwball football comedy "Leatherheads" managed just a C from CinemaScore voters. In 2002, Clooney's "Solaris" remake earned a rare CinemaScore distinction, the kind you don't want: an F. And it's not just those surveyed by the research firm: Last year's military spoof "The Men Who Stare at Goats" drew just a C+ from Box Office Mojo readers.

It would be one thing if Clooney's movies were grossing $50 million or $60 million over their opening weekends and landing these bad grades; that would mean they're catching a lot of non-Clooney fans in their nets, and so mediocre marks would be understandable. But these movies are attracting not the masses but the the small group that loves him. So why do so many of them dislike what they see?

Clooney and his reps might argue that these tough marks are a function of the actor's adventurous choices. Do what Adam Sandler does, and you'll never disappoint your fan base, because you're never really challenging them.  But take some chances, and fans, at least a certain percentage of them, will be confounded. They want the light, charming Clooney of late-night talk shows, not the dark antiheroes of "The American" or "Michael Clayton" (the latter of which garnered a decent but not overwheming B grade from Box Office Mojo readers). When they don't get it, they give a movie a weak grade. (Of course, the simpler explanation is that the choices are not so much adventurous as wobbly; a number of these films received poor-to-middling critical responses too.)

But there may be something subtler at work here. The CinemaScore system is a strange beast. Even in the overall grade, it asks respondents to grade what they just watched, sure. But since many filmgoers are coming to a movie because of a given actor, it also implicitly asks them to determine whether their motivation was valid. And it's here that Clooney runs into trouble.The actor may inspire devotion — too much devotion — so that the Clooney on the screen never matches up to the Clooney in filmgoers' minds. Audiences urgently want to know more about the man, but his film roles never give it to them. He is a victim, essentially, of his own high Q Score.

What's remarkable is that even though audiences don't as a rule like Clooney's films, they continue to love him. You'd think that after being disappointed by one of his movies too many times, they'd turn on the actor. But he continues to score high in popularity tests, coming in close behind the beloved Tom Hanks and running neck and neck with much bigger box-office performers such as Sandler and Will Smith, even as his movies generate much less appeal. Which we suppose is liberating for Clooney, even if the studios who collaborate with him may feel less enthused.

– Steven Zeitchik
twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

Photo: George Clooney in "The American." Credit: Focus Features

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As a young English child with a terrible stammer, David Seidler would listen to radio broadcasts of King George VI, who also had an almost incapacitating speech impediment. The king’s World War II addresses reminded Seidler that if the monarch could overcome stuttering, so could he: The king was his elocutionary inspiration.

Seidler grew up to become a screenwriter, writing “Tucker: The Man and his Dream” and numerous television programs, but he never forgot what he heard over the wireless so many decades earlier. He eventually adapted the story of the king and his relationship with his unconventional speech therapist, Lionel Logue, into a play, and the play has now become the movie “The King’s Speech,” which had its world premiere at Labor Day weekend's Telluride Film Festival.

Even though the movie directed by Tom Hooper ("The Damned United") is about the royal family and unfolds around Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey, “The King’s Speech” follows surprisingly common themes of friendship, perseverance and trust.

Logue (Geoffrey Rush) was indeed a talented language pathologist (the film was shaped by a trove of his unpublished papers, records and diary entries), but his true gift was companionship. Like any good shrink or comrade, the therapist was able to reveal and manage some of the things — an oppressive childhood, chiefly — that twisted the king’s tongue in knots. The film ends with the king (Colin Firth) addressing the nation just as the war with Germany is set to begin. 

“What I felt the film was really about was that he was saved by friendship,” Hooper says. “Yes, it’s about a man with a stammer. But we all face blocks to becoming our better selves.”

The film is stuffed with period detail (“I’m obsessive about historical accuracy,” says Hooper, who also directed the miniseries “John Adams”).

One of the film’s most memorable lines comes not from biography, but from something Hooper’s father told the director. Educated in a heartless boarding school, the filmmaker’s dad suffered some of the same confidence-killing treatment as did King George VI.

So when Hooper told his father he was stuck on one scene, his father told him some the best advice he ever heard: “You don’t need to be afraid of the things you were afraid of when you were 5.”

It’s Logue’s line to the king now, and it’s part of what makes “The King’s Speech” so affecting.

– John Horn in Telluride, Colo.

Photo: Colin Firth in "The King's Speech." Credit: The Weinstein Co.

The Telluride Film Festival movie “Incendies” opens with the last wishes of a single mother who has instructed her twin children to find a father and brother they never have met. The request is unusual, but what the young woman and man discover as they begin their quest is extraordinary.

Even though Canadian writer-director Denis Villeneuve’s film is mostly set in the modern day and adapted from a recent play by Wajdi Mouawad, it owes its narrative DNA to Sophocles: The film’s title, translated from French, means “Scorched,” and the movie’s psychic and physical fires burn hot and deadly.

“It’s a very modern way to tell Greek tragedy,” Villeneuve says. “A very ancient and mythological story with modern warfare.”

Twins Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon Marwan (Maxim Gaudette) don’t agree about whether they should honor their mother’s instructions. But Jeanne, a mathematician, looks at the instructions as if they were an equation to be solved.

She leaves Montreal and heads to the Middle East, trying to piece together a complex family history from scratch. Jeanne may have few clues and records to help her, but as the film cuts between the present and the past, the audiences sees the twins’ mother, Nawal (Lubna Azabal), being transformed and nearly destroyed by the civil war in Lebanon in the 1970s.

The ethnic violence between Christians and Palestinians is beyond imagining, and Villeneuve shows in sometimes explicit detail how the seemingly random brutality not only affects Nawal but also plays a critical role in the twins’ birth. Yet the film is ultimately a parable about reconciliation.

“In order to be an adult, you have to be free of your angers,” says Villeneuve, who took several years off in the middle of his filmmaking career (his credits include “Polytechnique,” “Next Floor,” “Maelstrom” and “August 32nd on Earth”) to try to become a better screenwriter.

The film’s bravest performance is delivered by the Belgian actress Azabal, who both witnesses and is subjected to horrific brutality — and speaks very little throughout the movie. “It was tough all the time for her,” Villeneuve says. “There was never any relief.”

This weekend’s festival is not known as (and is not designed to be) a sales market, as most films showing in the Colorado mountain town already have domestic distributors. But every now and then, a few films come to Telluride looking for a buyer (as was the case with last year’s “The Last Station”), and “Incendies” is among the festival’s new works that does not yet have a theatrical home.

Following its screenings here (after the film played to a standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival), “Incendies” may soon find a deserving home.

– John Horn in Telluride, Colo.

 
Many tears were shed at the world premiere screening of “127 Hours” at the Telluride Film Festival on Saturday afternoon. But few in the audience of some 500 cried harder than Aron Ralston, the hiker who famously cut off his right forearm and is the subject of director Danny Boyle’s new movie.
Boyle has described the film, which Fox Searchlight is releasing on Nov. 5, as an action movie in which the hero doesn’t move—a reference to how Ralston (played in the film by James Franco) was pinned by a falling boulder in an isolated canyon and was forced to amputate one of his limbs in order to survive.
But as Boyle has proved throughout his filmmaking career—his last film, “Slumdog Millionaire,” which premiered in Telluride two years ago, not only won the Oscar for best picture but also for directing, cinematography and editing—he can take a scene that at first glance looks unfeasible to film and make it both visually kinetic and emotionally moving. Christian Colson, who produced “Slumdog Millionaire” and “127 Hours,” said Ralston’s tale “was a story that on paper felt impossible to tell as a movie.”
Boyle appears to have taken that as a challenge.
In “127 Hours,” Boyle’s cameras (he used two cinematographers, Anthony Dod Mantle and Enrique Chediak) never stop moving. They soar over the desolate Utah canyons where Ralston was stuck for all those hours. They swim through the water bottle as he drinks his last drink. They penetrate his arm, as Ralston’s knife stops when it hits bone. They enter a duffle bag that Ralston has put over his head to stay warm in the 44-degree chill, the bag’s nylon shell becoming a miniature movie screen in which Ralston briefly revisits the world he has left behind and might never see again.
Most directors would have cut away from Ralston to focus on the building rescue effort, but Boyle doesn’t. Franco is in virtually every second of the movie. As he becomes increasingly dehydrated, he starts to hallucinate, and it is after one such hallucinations—in which Ralston thinks he might be seeing a son who is not yet born—that Ralston decides to take dramatic action and cut himself out.
In making the movie, Boyle knew that if the audience averted its eyes when Ralston ultimately breaks the bones in his arm and severs a tangled mass of tendons, muscle and nerves with a dull knife, “127 Hours” would have failed. While one member of the Telluride audience apparently passed out during the graphic sequence, very few looked away. Ralston, who was attending the screening with his wife, was visibly moved throughout the film, but the tears really started flowing when he watched the reenactment of his primitive surgical procedure. The relief in the theater was palpable—if there’s such a thing as quiet cheering, there it was.
“It’s like we all just went through what I did,” Ralston told the audience after the screening’s conclusion. Even though “127 Hours” takes some dramatic liberties (a flash flood scene, in particular), the movie was “all very accurate and real,” Ralston says
“This is insane,” are the first words Ralston speaks as soon as he is trapped by the large falling rock. His situation was doubtlessly that, yet even crazier is that Boyle has made Ralston’s tale spellbinding—truly an action movie in which the hero doesn’t move.
–John Horn, in Telluride, Colo.

Photo of James Franco as Aron Ralston in "127 Hours": Fox Searchlight/Chuck Zlotnick

The production company filming “Transformers 3” scrapped plans to film its final scenes in Chicago after a bank teller working as an extra was critically injured this week, a city official said Friday.

Filming of the action movie was scheduled to be completed Thursday, with final scenes being shot at Millennium Park, the city said. Those plans were canceled after 24-year-old Gabriela Cedillo was struck in the head Wednesday night during filming in Hammond, Ind.

“ ‘Transformers’ has completed their filming in Chicago,” said Richard Moskal, director of the Chicago Film Office in the Mayor’s Office of Special Events. “The filming that was canceled [Thursday] was not rescheduled.”

Cedillo remained unconscious Friday, in critical but stable condition at Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, relatives said. The family was gathered at the hospital, but Cedillo had not regained consciousness, the relatives said.

“We haven’t talked to her,” said her mother, Rosa Cedillo, adding that there were no immediate plans for surgery.

The production company released a statement saying, “Our thoughts and prayers are with Gabriela, her family and loved ones. We are looking into what caused the accident.”

Meanwhile, the Indiana Occupational Safety and Health Administration has begun an investigation into the incident, according to spokesman Marc Lotter. He said OSHA must first determine whether Cedillo, as a paid extra, was hired as an independent contractor or as an employee. If she was hired as an employee, OSHA would have jurisdiction.

“We're looking into the general circumstances that led to the accident and the employment status of the victim,” Lotter said. “Once we determine the circumstances, we will look into if there were safety violations or training issues.”

Cedillo was injured as the movie crew filmed a scene in Hammond that involved drivers moving along a busy highway as explosions went off in the opposite lane. A metal object smashed through the windshield of her car and struck her in the head. Her car continued moving, skidding along the inner median concrete barrier for about a mile before coming to a stop, Indiana state police said.

"Transformers 3" stars Shia LaBeouf and is being directed by Michael Bay.

–Dahleen Glanton, Chicago Tribune

Photo: Optimus Prime in an earlier "Transformers." Credit: Paramount Pictures

We awoke Thursday morning to the news that T.I., the rapper/actor currently starring in heist film “Takers,” had been arrested hours before in West Hollywood on drug possession charges. He and his wife, Tameka “Tiny Cottle,” were pulled over by sheriff’s deputies who say they “smelled marijuana coming from their vehicle during a traffic stop,” according to L.A. Now. After searching the car, the cops found a controlled substance -– “pills resembling Ecstasy” -– and arrested the couple.

As we heard this, we flashed back to our own ride with the Atlanta resident in Los Angeles just weeks before. We had been scheduled to interview T.I. for his new film at the posh hotel he was staying at, the Montage in Beverly Hills. But no sooner had we arrived than T.I. called his team to let them know there’d been a change in plans: He had just left a meeting with producer Brian Grazer, and had now been invited to meet with Brett Ratner at the director’s Benedict Canyon mansion. Would we mind tagging along?

So we jumped in a car with T.I., his publicist, security personnel and driver to head over to Ratner’s house. (It wasn't the pricey Maybach that T.I. was arrested in late Wednesday, but rather a big black SUV. And there certainly wasn't any odor of marijuana or anything else untoward.)

We had asked T.I. how he viewed his role in "Takers" — he plays Ghost, a thief recently released from prison who's trying to get back in good with his former posse of bank robbers. — and he said he found it difficult to relate to the character. “I’m a nice guy by nature, you know what I’m sayin’?” he told us. “I’m accommodating. I’m a nurturer. Protector. Provider. You know, so, I mean, I just — certain things, I just can’t see myself doing.”

Wednesday’s arrest is not good news for the Grammy-winning rapper. He has been on probation since December, when he was released from a federal prison in Arkansas after spending about seven months there for charges related to purchasing machine guns and silencers.  The new charges may also prove to be negative for Screen Gems, the studio behind “Takers,” which is entering its second weekend at the box office. In its opening weekend, the film narrowly beat out “The Last Exorcism” for the No. 1 spot, with a $20.5-million tally. Then again, it is keeping the star of the Screen Gem movie in the news.

–Amy Kaufman

Twitter.com/AmyKinLA

Photo: T.I. poses at the Montage Hotel on Aug. 23. Credit: Kirk McKoy/Los Angeles Times.

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It's not easy for an art-house film to get moviegoers polarized, certainly not on aesthetic grounds. But before it has really even started to roll out on the festival circuit, Darren Aronofsky's "Black Swan" has begun to do just that.

The reaction last month to the trailer for the ballet world-set supernatural character drama — which plays up the horror elements a bit more than perhaps the film does — already generated reaction of "this looks amazing" to "this looks extremely bizarre" and gave you the immediate sense this was not a movie that would pass quietly. At the Venice Film Festival, where "Black Swan" just premiered as the opening-night film, the critics are already divided– against themselves.

Just check out Hollywood Reporter critic Kirk Honeycutt's review of the Natalie Portman-Mila Kunis film, which jumps all over the place like a ballerina on a New York stage. "Trying to coax a horror-thriller out of the world of ballet doesn't begin to work for Darren Aronofsky" goes the summary at the top of the review. But two paragraphs in, his skepticism dissolves, and he seems to enjoy the very thing he had just decried. " 'Swan' is an instant guilty pleasure, a gorgeously shot, visually complex film whose badness is what's so good about it." That is, until he finishes his assessment with a who-needs-all-this dismissal. "[T]he horror-movie nonsense drags everything down the rabbit hole of preposterousness," he concludes. Was the same person responsible for all three sentences?

Then again, it's fitting and understandable that a filmgoer would war with himself about a movie that's about doppelgangers and one's own worst enemy, as Portman duels with — or invents — a rival character who is her diametrical opposite. No critic so far disagrees on the ambition  of what may well turn out to be the most captivatingly watchable film of the fall. But they are divided on which of the movies contained within the genre-bender — the art-house dance film, the Freudian character study, the  supernatural suspense picture — work, and how they should or shouldn't go together.

The commercial question, of course, is what the schizophrenic response will mean for the film (which, incidentally, Universal put in turnaround as too difficult/ambitious before Fox Searchlight picked up the gauntlet, coming on to co-finance and distribute the passion project from Aronofsky and his Protozoa Pictures). Jagged reactions are good for those of us in the media, but they don't necessarily mean the same thing for filmgoers, who, particularly during awards season, like to wait for the wind to steadily begin blowing in a certain direction before turning out in droves.

Then again, radically different reactions to  "Inception" only helped that film; polarize people in the right way and everyone wants to see what the fuss is about.

Whatever audiences wind up concluding about "Black Swan," is there anything more enjoyable than a movie, in this day of rigid genre distinctions, that tries to eradicate so many arbitrary lines? About that it's hard to be divided.

–Steven Zeitchik

Twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

Photo: Natalie Portman in "Black Swan." Credit: Fox Searchlight

Fight that sinking September sensation that summer's truly over with the heat and beauty of "Cairo Time," a delicious escape that should be experienced before it's pushed out by the coming wave of fall films.

A small, intimate tale of not-so-young lovers portrayed by Patricia Clarkson and Alexander Siddig, the film luxuriates in the considerable talent of these very fine actors. As Juliette and Tareq, a pair brought together by happenstance, they make great use of all the breathing room and minimal dialogue they've been given to create an exquisite mood piece.

"Cairo Time" is also a postcard to a city that Canadian writer-director Ruba Nadda clearly adores — the grime, poverty and sheer density momentarily swept under cinema's magic carpet. The filmmaker has become something of a specialist in telling grown-up love stories well (her 2000 short, "I Would Suffer Cold Hands for You," comes with one of the best titles for a romance ever). This film suggests a growing confidence. There's a smart restraint to the storytelling, and she brings an exceptional eye that creates an evocative landscape for her would-be couple to meander through.

Here the characters are bought together by Juliette's unexpectedly absent husband; an affair couldn't be further from their minds. But that friendship born of necessity — the husband asks Tareq to watch over her until he returns — moves to a languid flirtation as they wander the ancient city, their differences sparking both friction and flame. There is an authenticity to it all, with their haltingly uncomfortable first conversation setting the tone for the tentative way their relationship will find its footing. These are not fools rushing in.

Still, it doesn't take long before they begin to fall under the spell of the city and each other, with Siddig and Clarkson using their interplay to construct classic opposites-attract moments in ways that feel fresh. The heat, their heat, rises slowly off the desert sands.

This is a quiet film with a gentle pull, but if you let it, "Cairo Time" will cast its spell on you too.

-– Betsy Sharkey

Photo: Alexander Siddig and Patricia Clarkson in "Cairo Time." Credit: Colm Hogan/IFC Films

No sooner did we write that the release of the special edition of "Avatar" this past weekend was a disappointment than we received a slew of comments and e-mails asking why we thought it a failure (politely, of course).

So let's take a closer look.

The movie grossed about $4 million on 812 screens here in the U.S. Several readers pointed out that the per-screen number this averages out to — just about $5,000 — was among the strongest of the weekend. And that number is indeed not terrible for a new opener — except for the fact that "Avatar" wasn't a new opener; it had the benefit of eight months of marketing and buzz behind it. This is hardly some unknown character drama that has to fight for every ticket.

Throw in the fact that the film had the benefit of premium ticket prices, and was going up against some pretty weak competition, and $5,000 doesn't look quite so solid. If you're scribbling on the back of an envelope — assuming conservatively about a dozen shows per screen over the three days and $15 for a premium 3-D ticket — that's an average of about 28 people at each showing. If you saw that many people in a theater you were in, you'd think that was OK, but wonder if the film is getting much beyond the hard-core or the really late adopters.

In the per-screen pecking order, the "Avatar" re-release was better than the second weekend of "The Switch" and "Lottery Ticket," but not as good as the first weekend of "Takers" and "The Last Exorcism." Which is … Fine? Mediocre? Not an overwhelming success?

Others pointed out that this was a weak time to release a big movie, so you have to take the numbers in context. Well, it was Fox's decision to release it this past weekend, and clearly they thought it would be a propitious time for the film. And they had reason to. In fact, outside of "The Expendables," the new "Avatar"  had the benefit of being the only action spectacle playing in any kind of wide release this past weekend. Clog the weekend up with a few more wide releases and it's likely the movie's numbers dip.

None of this is really a knock on the new "Avatar." It was a tall order to come on the heels of a DVD release and assume a few minutes of extra footage would restart the phenomenon. And much of this is found money for Fox. So it's not even the worst gambit in the world. It's just not exactly a major event either.

–Steven Zeitchik

Twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

Photo: "Avatar": Credit: 20th Century Fox