Cinematical

We hadn't heard from child star extraordinaire Haley Joel Osment for a while -- at least not in any productive way. His last film (not counting the unreleased Home of the Giants) was the mediocre 2003 coming-of-ager Secondhand Lions; since then, news about him has mostly involved car accidents and drunk driving. But thankfully, things seem to be turning around. The actor, now 20 years old, will star in this fall's Broadway revival of David Mamet's challenging American Buffalo, alongside John Leguizamo and Cedric the Entertainer. I'm assuming that he'll be taking on the role of teenaged Bobby, played by Sean Nelson in the 1996 film. Not a huge part, but being one of a cast of three on Broadway certainly isn't trivial.

So few child stars make a successful transition into adult careers, but an actor of Osment's caliber deserves one. (The Sixth Sense is all well and good, but A.I.'s "David" was a masterpiece.) Now that he's no longer an adorable moppet, he should probably aim for "character actor" rather than "star." If that's the goal, then American Buffalo seems like a step in the right direction; there are few things like a little Mamet to establish some thespian street cred.

The play starts previews on October 31st and opens in November.

I think this'll be my last Outlander post for a while; you're probably sick of hearing about it by now. But I think I owe you this one as a matter of follow-through. You see, the buzz on the internets is that, as feared, the Weinstein Company is sending the nearly $50 million dollar Vikings-fight-aliens adventure film to direct-to-DVD oblivion.

The source of this semi-substantiated rumor is that a couple of online DVD retailers, such as Movies Unlimited and Amazon have listed a November 18th, 2008 release date for the movie, with Movies Unlimited now accepting pre-orders. No theatrical release date was ever announced, and needless to say, if the DVD release date is accurate, it rules out any sort of theatrical appearance.

I guess I'm a little surprised at the dump, simply because the movie's so darn expensive. But it's the Weinsteins, theatrical releases themselves cost a lot of money, and this was more of a cult item from the start anyway. In any case, November is certainly sooner than I expected to be able to see the thing.

Important to note that there's no official confirmation from the distributor on the DVD release, so this could all be one big mistake. But it doesn't look good.

[via SlashFilm]

Fans of the Riddick franchise -- all six of us -- thought for sure that, despite occasional rumblings to the contrary, the series was dead. The expansive, expensive Chronicles of Riddick was trashed upon release, after all, and flopped at the box office (at least domestically). Another sequel seemed foolhardy, sure to be met with gales of laughter from the same peanut gallery that so readily dismissed Chronicles.

I still think that's probably true, but I won't tell Vin Diesel, who is determined to make two more sequels happen. In an interview with MTV, he said that writer-director David Twohy is currently working on the scripts, and that the "only question" is whether they will be shot together, LoTR-style, or as two separate productions. Why did it take so long? No money problems, Diesel insists -- they just want to get it right. This was, after all, envisioned as a trilogy, with Pitch Black acting as a stand-alone companion film.

I've wasted a lot of breath defending The Chronicles of Riddick to naysayers, and have pretty much accepted that the film will never meet with much popularity. (My hopes that it would become a cult hit on DVD despite its initial chilly reception have been cruelly dashed, though the spin-off video game proved popular.) I continue to think that it's an ambitious, genuinely interesting piece of science-fiction and world-building. So I'll gladly get excited for sequels from the same creative team, even as I harbor doubts that they'll actually get made.

Now, I know Wayne Wang isn't in most cinephiles' good graces these days.* He's spent most of the decade making bland and unremarkable middle-brow flicks like Maid in Manhattan, Because of Winn-Dixie and Last Holiday. But the director behind The Joy Luck Club and Chinese Box still has a fair bit of cachet, and when he does something like make his new film available in its entirety online and for free, people pay attention.

So, pay attention: Wang's The Princess of Nebraska, an indie he premiered at last year's Toronto International Film Festival (where it got a positive review from Cinematical's Kim Voynar), will be offered for free on the internet in September. The filmmaker partnered with ex-SXSW chief Matt Dentler and his Cinetic Rights Management to make this happen, as a means of releasing Princess simultaneously with its companion film, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, which will come to theaters courtesy of Magnolia Pictures. The exact plans of the release (i.e. where, how) haven't been announced, but I'll keep an eye on it. Take a look at this IndieWire story for more.

Not, probably, the start of a new Hollywood trend, given that The Princess of Nebraska -- a no-budget drama about a pregnant Chinese teenager's struggles in the United States -- probably wouldn't have done much business anyhow. But if Dentler and his colleagues can figure out a way to get people to watch the thing, who knows. Indie filmmakers could always use a new channel.

*The exception is our own Eric D. Snider, who informs me: "I love Wang films!"

There were no big surprises at the box office this weekend. To officially ring in the fall, it was the first weekend since April when no film debuted to more than $20 million. The best opener was the tolerably-reviewed Anna Faris vehicle The House Bunny, with $15.1 million. Interchangeable Jason Statham Movie, a.k.a. Death Race, followed with an estimated $12.3 million -- among Statham's weakest showings and the worst ever for director Paul W.S. Anderson (not counting the indie Shopping, which played on one screen).

Neither The House Bunny nor Death Race could dethrone Tropic Thunder, which held up fairly well to stay on top with a $16.1 million second weekend. It looks to have better legs than Pineapple Express, and should pass that film before all is said and done. In other holdover developments: The Dark Knight fell to fourth, but should reach $500 million by next weekend; Star Wars: The Clone Wars fell an unsurprising 60%+, and will top out around $35 million -- still not bad for a cartoon, I think.

Two more wide release debuts fared poorly. The Longshots -- the Ice Cube/Keke Palmer football drama directed by Fred Durst -- made a predictably tepid $4.3 million bow. But boy was I ever wrong about The Rocker, which was heavily advertised and promo-screened, but landed out of the top 10 with $2.8 million and an under-$1000 per-screen average. Color me surprised -- it's a decent flick, too. I guess Rainn Wilson not only can't open a movie, but affirmatively turns people off.

Hamlet 2 opened on 100 screens before going wide next weekend. Its $435,000 gross -- around $4,200 per screen -- isn't terrible, but doesn't inspire confidence for the expansion.

The full estimates after the jump.

Movie studios are big on protecting their intellectual property, which is certainly understandable -- but sometimes they come down too hard. Take this new case. Warner Bros. is suing to stop the Indian release of a domestic film called Hari Puttar: A Comedy of Terrors. Why? Because Hari Puttar is close to Harry Potter, obviously, and Warners damn well owns the film rights to Harry Potter.

Sounds fair enough -- except that the movie has nothing to do with Harry Potter, and doesn't even appear to be an attempt to capitalize on the Potter brand name. As best I can determine, "Hari Puttar" is the endearing nickname of a 10 year-old character named Hari Prasad Dhoonda. The movie itself appears to be an action-adventure fantasy, about a resourceful kid who saves his dad's top secret computer chip from some burglars -- sort of like a modern, Indian Home Alone. The title references Harry Potter, but there's no theft here; the closest parallel is Son of Rambow, which managed to avoid a lawsuit (reportedly by adding the "w" to the end of "Rambo").

Warners, of course, has to fight this battle in Indian courts, so it's hard to predict what's going to happen. But Harry Potter is such a prominent part of the zeitgeist all over the world, that the company may have a lot of battles on its hands if it chooses to go after every incident such as this.

Sometimes cinemaniacs get rewarded for stepping outside the theater. Scott Weinberg, his tongue possibly in cheek, thinks a viral 4-minute internet video is the best movie of the year. I am convinced that the year's best fiction-on-film (so far -- though I have trouble imagining anything topping it) is currently airing on HBO. That would be Generation Kill, the seven-part, eight-hour Iraq War miniseries from David Simon and Ed Burns (The Wire). I know, I know: this is Cinematical, not TV Squad. But Generation Kill is something no movie lover should ignore.

Fans of The Wire already know of Simon and Burns's uncanny, unparalleled ability to weave together hyper-realism, trenchant commentary and riveting drama, but even they may be stunned, as I was, by what this smaller-scale project has to offer. It is, quite simply, the deepest and most sympathetic portrayal of the military -- any military -- I have ever seen. It may also be the first "Hollywood" take on the Iraq War that is genuinely thoughtful and de-politicized. Rather than offering a polemic, the series (adapted from a book by Evan Wright, a reporter who rode with the 1st Recon Marine Unit) just observes -- and, by all accounts, gets close to the truth.

One of the more interesting comic book projects in the pipeline is an adaptation of Mark Millar's Kick-Ass (title likely to be changed?), directed by Matthew Vaughn. We previously covered the action comedy -- about a high school dork who decides to become a superhero despite not possessing any of the gifts normally associated with superherodom -- here and here.

Perhaps hinting at the tone of the eventual film, the first bit of casting was Superbad's Christopher Mintz-Plasse. Though he may seem like the perfect choice to play a dweeb with delusions of grandeur, Mintz-Plasse was cast in a supporting role. A week later, they've cast the lead: it'll be 18 year-old Aaron Johnson, whom you may remember as little Ed Norton in The Illusionist. Joining him will be Nicolas Cage and TV vet Lyndsy Fonseca. Fonseca will play the love interest, while Cage will play the father of Elizabeth Rappe's future daughter, "a vicious, foul-mouthed 11-year-old who chops down criminals with a katana." Apparently he's trained her to do that as part of his quest to take down a druglord.

Mark Millar, by the way, is the dude behind Wanted, a comic that was about 250 times crazier than this summer's movie adaptation. I'd like to see Shoot 'Em Up's Michael Davis get a crack at a Millar project, but I'll settle for the ultra-talented Vaughn, who can do both over-the-top violence (see Layer Cake) and elegant movie versions of difficult source material (see Stardust).

Here's a movie that's getting stranger and stranger the more details we get -- and I'm loving it. First, Mike Judge's Extract was simply a movie that "explores what it's like to be the boss when everything seems to be shifting around you." Then it became about a guy who owns an industrial flower-extract plant and has to deal with workplace issues and a cheating wife. Now, it turns out that one of the "workplace issues" is an employee who loses a body part in a freak accident, and that the wife is cheating on the protagonist with a gigolo. Awesome.

Jason Bateman plays the factory owner -- that, we already knew. We also knew that the amazing Kristen Wiig is playing the wife, and Mila Kunis another employee. The new info is that Clifton Collins, Jr. has joined the cast as the maiming victim, and Ben Affleck as an ambulance-chasing lawyer who, I'd imagine, wants to milk Bateman's character for all he's worth. No word on who's playing the gigolo.

I got pelted with poop for praising Mike Judge's last movie, the largely direct-to-DVD Idiocracy, the first time I wrote about this project, but I stand by comments. It would have been easy for Judge to do Office Space 2, but it's been gratifying to watch him go in some even more offbeat directions instead.

Maybe it's because this was my first summer writing for Cinematical, but it's felt like an exceptionally intense movie season: the event movies just kept coming, and many of them wound up having real traction. There was a lot to watch and a lot to talk about. It's barely ended, and in just a couple of weeks, Telluride and Toronto officially kick off the fall -- and "Oscar season". I'll sleep when I'm dead, I guess.

One of awards season's most formidable contenders -- already slated for the familiar December platform release -- is Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon, based on the acclaimed West End and Broadway play about journalist David Frost's famous televised interviews of post-resignation Richard Nixon; the ones where Nixon delivered the infamous line about how "if the President does it, it's not illegal." There's a well-crafted trailer for it over here, (trailer link removed at request of studio) and yep: we're in Oscar mode.

I saw the play with Frank Langella as Nixon and Michael Sheen as Frost, both of whom reprise their roles in the film. The show was great but very much a stage show, deriving a lot of its power from the foreboding set and the hugeness of Langella's Nixon impression which, from the looks of the trailer, remains very much intact. It worked great in the theater, but I'm worried it might overwhelm the film. I liked Anthony Hopkins' take on Nixon in the Oliver Stone film, where he basically said to hell with the impersonation and did his own thing.