This is definitely a slow news week, wherein most stories are apparently marking time and stalling in the hopes of becoming the Big Blockbuster Story of the Summer. “Deep Throat” peaked early, but we still have “The Insurgency,” “Nuclear NoKo,” and “Judging Saddam” as big box office contenders. Let’s look at some of the hopefuls.
- “The Insurgency” Apparently, making too big a deal about dozens of innocents being slaughtered daily in Iraq is still in poor taste. The public’s not ready for a graphic downer like this. Expect “The Insurgency” to play in small art-houses and win a few Golden Globes, but it’s not going to earn back its $80 billion budget.
- “Tom” This has potential. Tom Cruise seems to be moving towards a new level of Celebrity Crazy, though it remains to be seen whether that’s “Marlon Brando Crazy,” “Michael Jackson Crazy,” or even “Robert Blake Crazy.” He might not actually kill anyone this time out, but audiences love this kind of thing.
- “Judging Saddam” Unlike “The Insurgency,” “Judging Saddam” has some built-in popular appeal. A taut courtroom drama, danger, and a guaranteed feel-good ending. If it opens before Labor Day, this could run away with the summer’s biggest take.
- “Nuclear NoKo” Kim Jong Il is popular, playful, and unpredictable - the Jim Carrey of global politics. But can he make the jump to a more serious role in this tense action thriller? Some fans say he’s got the talent, but others caution that “Nuclear NoKo” will just be another in a long line of features filled with silly, sophomoric stunts.
- “Finding Zarqawi” Forget this one. Unless there’s a surprise ending, it’s going to go the same way as its prequels, “Chasing Osama” (2001), “Target: Osama” (2002), and “Osama Who?” (2003). This one might end up going straight-to-video.
- “White and Gone” The smart money this summer has got to be on this tense tale of an attractive white woman who disappears and either gets murdered, murders someone else, or just needs a break. Even though this one hasn’t been cast yet, it’s looking like a megahit.
- “Whistleblower” Times have changed since the era when “Watergate” could captivate crowds. So don’t expect any scorching tales of misdeeds at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to raise any eyebrows, whether they concern military misdeeds or electoral tampering. It’s doomed to failure, maybe even before it hits the theaters - my sources tell me the project’s been canceled.
Fanny Roborat
29 comments
Johnnyko
June 7, 2005 at 3:25 pm
1I live in Katie Holmes’ home town and work inone of her favorite restaraunts — I’m definitely worried about an influx of Scientologists due to her new beau.
Harold
June 7, 2005 at 5:59 pm
2The one thing “Whistleblower” needs to have a hope of even showing up on the radar screens is for a little violence to be thrown in - something like “Silkwood”, but not so final. Maybe have the whistleblower get beaten to a pulp outside of a bar or something.
Auros
June 7, 2005 at 6:29 pm
3Am the only one grossed out by the Cruise/Holmes thing. He’s what, 40-something? And she’s younger than I am.
David
June 7, 2005 at 6:35 pm
4Harold,
That just happened to a whistleblower at one of our nuke labs. But whistleblowers are so retro. They belong to an era when people actually gave a shit about such things. If it ain’t kiss and tell or the the travails of the hottest celeb, save your money and cease production.
Now if Paris and Nicole will join forces with Katie and go find the missing white girl, you’ve got the all-important movie-choosing male demographic and a potential blockbuster, especially if you can work in chase scenes with tricked out compacts and bad guy black Hummers.
Or not.
Actually, it’s sad how little the actual personal agony of that girl’s family matters, except as it can be bite-captured in a way that ups viewer share and sells sponsor products.
David
June 7, 2005 at 6:36 pm
5And it just hit me that Harold was referring to that incident. Shit.
tess
June 7, 2005 at 6:50 pm
6I’m betting “Tom” will capture the essense of what it means to be American, and so anything else on the list’ll be sold as a pack of lies meant to soil the Bush Administration, and “Tom” will rise to the top like the cream that it is. Or like frothy algae on the top of a manure lagoon. Er, same difference.
It’s the one thing that’s really inconcsequantial, so of course we have to focus all our time on it! We’re Americans, goddamn it!
Pete IVDL
June 7, 2005 at 8:07 pm
7Er, shouldn’t “Finding Zarqawi” be politically corrected and rereleased as “Missing You (By A Hair In The Prophet’s Beard)”?. The background music should be Benny Hill’s signature tune, and the video footage sped up slightly to make it funny. Then you’d have a MONSTER hit on your hands. Even with the lousy ending…
Pete IVDL
June 7, 2005 at 8:11 pm
8BTW, I didn’t mean to poke fun at Mohammed, may blessings be upon him and peace! Just his arch-nemesis, Big Al (The Cockroach under the Prophet’s Shoes) Zee.
Abner Cadaver
June 7, 2005 at 8:21 pm
9Well,this summer I’m going to be in front of the tube watching “The Laura Bush Comedy Hour”! Don’t miss it.
melina
June 7, 2005 at 8:25 pm
10just when i thought i’d be netflixing all summer long! thanks adam!
and, tom cruise has *so* brando’d…he was full-on crispin glover’ing (as on david letterman years ago) on oprah. katie holmes looks utterly lost in most of the recent pictures.
kinda like when you (read: i)decided to go to prom or homecoming with a guy you kinda had a crush on, but didn’t really *know*, and then he turns out to be totally overbearing and embarrassing, but you don’t know how to get out of the date…
dee
June 7, 2005 at 8:46 pm
11I don’t think any of them will top last year’s blockbuster Handover! I remember some of the reviews…
“After decades of brutal rule by a terror regime, the Iraqi people have their country back,” Bush said. The handover “begins a new phase in Iraq’s progress toward full democracy.” Bush also said the U.S. military “will stay as long as the stability of Iraq requires.”
British Prime Minister Tony Blair welcomed the early handover, saying it was an attempt to “seize the initiative” over insurgents, his spokesman said. “We obviously welcome it because it’s their decision and it’s them taking control. What’s important now is that the Iraqi people can see Iraqi leaders taking charge in Baghdad.”
Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari met Monday morning with coalition leaders gathered in Istanbul for the NATO summit. Zebari told reporters in Istanbul that the early transfer of sovereignty is “a sign we are ready for the job. We are ready to take up our responsibility even before June 30th,” he said.
Boffo stuff.
cooper
June 7, 2005 at 10:51 pm
12Don’t miss the soon to be released “As I Lay Dying”, the chilling memoir of the last Ivory Billed Woodpecker, lungs crushed in mid-flight by the fall of the last Redwood, chain sawed by Dick Cheney under a dark, moonless night, as he manically screams his now trademark “Fuck You”. Tracked by a trail of slime to his previously undisclosed location and grilled by the usual pack of yapping news hound as to why, the reporters quoted the VP as hilariously rejoining, “And Fuck you, too!”.
Bush rushed to Cheney’s defense by calling a news conference and stating that “any yahoo knows you can’t see the benefits of our Clear Skies legislation with all them damn trees in the way.” Smiling, with his characteristically boyish charm, he offered his benediction over the scene of carnage - “Mission Accomplished”. “Now if we could just get them oil rigs in place before them godless commie pinko fag enviro ‘mentalists’ start bellyaching…
hedera
June 7, 2005 at 11:32 pm
13Sorry, Cooper, you can’t have the last Ivory Billed Woodpecker crushed, in mid-flight or on the ground, by the fall of the last Redwood, even though we all know that Dick (Darth Vader) Cheney would happily chainsaw it. Redwoods and Ivory Billed Woodpeckers don’t live in the same biota. Find an endangered tree species from the Arkansas or Louisiana swamps to drop on the last bird.
Jody
June 8, 2005 at 12:55 am
14I think, in a way Cooper and hedera have hit on something. Maybe the problem with the Ivory Billed Woodpecker is it’s been trying to live in the wrong ecosystem. We could move that one bird to a redwood forest, maybe Muir Woods, cause it’s kinda small and won’t take up too much room as we develop everything around it. By the same token, we could move all the caribou down to Arizona - it’s much warmer and they wouldn’t have to struggle so much to survive - then ANWR would be available for drilling, right? I’m just trying to use the logic of the Bush Adminstration - just an extension of “clear skies” and “healthy forests”.
cooper
June 8, 2005 at 6:19 am
15Hedera, this I know, but we’re talking Hollywood here, right? Besides, most Americans don’t know their Acer from a holly in the ground.
Harold
June 8, 2005 at 6:58 am
16I think we might witness the death of the last Ivory-Billed Woodpecker in the upcoming short “Dick and Antonin in ‘A-Hunting We Will Go’”.
Murray
June 8, 2005 at 9:03 am
17Adam, there may be other options.
Marijuana, pain control vs. fundamentalist who know that some of these dying people, in constant pain, are just looking for a quick high, and it’s their job to stop that too.
Sending biology teachers to the gulag errr.. reeducation camp on that large Caribbean tropical island south of Key West.
Mary
June 8, 2005 at 9:04 am
18My money is on the sleeper “Quess Who’s Getting Your Pension?” A tense drama in which the indebted Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. struggles under the added weight of Northwest, Delta, GM, Ford, Chrysler, the Petnagon….
This one will keep you on edge for years to come.
Jason
June 8, 2005 at 9:33 am
19“Nuclear NoKo”, “Finding Zarqawi” and “Whistleblower” all seem like good movies. But why do I get the feeling that the only movie shown in a theater near me will end up being “White and Gone”?
neocleo
June 8, 2005 at 2:40 pm
20Brilliant! Thank you.
Auros
June 8, 2005 at 6:08 pm
21A young white woman has obligingly gone missing, providing our first summer blockbuster story.
David
June 8, 2005 at 8:57 pm
22A bald cypress - drop a bald cypress on the damned bird (reckon, like the spotted owl, they taste like chicken?) Hell, send the bird to Central Florida and Cheney can drop the 2,400 year old “Senator” on it - a hat trick.
[The Senator, for all you left-coasters, is a bald cypress that escaped the clear cutters of those glorious days of yore that included Eberhard-Faber clearing Cedar Key of the trees for which it was named.]
Landis
June 9, 2005 at 10:55 am
23Auros is right: “White and Gone” opened a couple days ago in Aruba. It doesn’t get much better than opening in an exotic locale with plenty of locals for “color”. We just fall over ourselves when a white teen disappears and we can get photos of black guys in handcuffs.
What always strikes me odd is how absolutely safe the citizens of this country must be that we only hear about one person’s disappearance a year. I’d think that there were maybe a couple more murders, or kidnappings, or runaways - but apparently not. That’s a good thing, right?
hedera
June 9, 2005 at 11:43 pm
24This is on an entirely different subject, and I can’t think of a name for the summer blockbuster, but it was in the paper today and I have to share it. The general summary is all too common: small bedroom community (Tracy, CA) has one gay high school kid with real smarts, reactivates moribund Gay-Straight Alliance, encourages discussion of gay rights issues, gets people talking.
OK, now to the local high school graduation come a busload of “members of the virulently anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church of Kansas”, come to yell “God hates fags!” at the Tracy students. The Gay-Straight Alliance plans a counter-protest; the Tracy P.D. is putting out extra officers to keep things calm, etc. Before they go home, the Kansans intend to picket some local churches who have spoken out in favor of the kids.
The blockbuster here is buried way down in the story, and I’ll quote it in full:
“Strip away their titles, and those churches are all talking about the same big lie,” Phelps-Roper said, “that God loves anyone.”
This is such pure Calvinist theology that the faint sound you hear may be John Calvin himself, cheering from whatever ramparts he now inhabits. Maybe this blockbuster should be called, “He’s baaaaaack…”
Any other suggestions for a title? And did anyone else think the Christian church taught that “Jesus loves you”?? What about “Do unto others as ye would that they do unto you”?
Murray
June 10, 2005 at 9:13 am
25Hedera
As a recovering Calvinist myself, I’m familiar with the idea that someone else is having fun and it’s our duty to stop it. But Baptists aren’t Calvinists. Calvinists are Presbyterians (and in my case Christian Reformed (the Dutch version)). I realize it’s a subtle difference, but none of the Calvinist churches I know are virulently anti-gay. You have to leave that to the Baptists, they are a lot more into the emotional side of religion.
Harold
June 10, 2005 at 2:55 pm
26There’s also a small, not-very-well-publicized movie coming out called “The Forgiven”. It’s a sequel to the big-budget blockbuster “Show Trial!” So far the confirmed cast includes Arthur Andersen and Big Tobacco, but the industry buzz has it that Kenneth Lay and the folks from Halliburton are also likely to appear.
Jim
June 10, 2005 at 3:53 pm
27Hedera,
A good movie title might be:
“La Methodes aux Folles”
The English title would be:
“The padded cage.”
If it were a T.V. series, I suggest “Intolerant Eye for the Queer Guy.”
Pete IVDL
June 10, 2005 at 4:30 pm
28You *know* that the members of the Westboro Baptist church must all lie awake nights, horribly sure that someone, somewhere, is having fun.
(That’s one of the things that turned me off most (but not quite all) religious denominations - that disgusting flexibility to say “The Lobster loves both of us, but I choose not to love _you_”).
Perhaps a fitting title could be “Hate, Actually”
hedera
June 11, 2005 at 1:54 am
29Murray, Lobster knows I’m not an expert on religious sects, but when people start talking about only the Elect being capable of believing in Jesus Christ’s message and therefore being saved (I went to their web site - it’s quite amazing), then we’re practically in Calvin’s lap, whatever the name over the church door. I was raised Baptist myself, and they were pretty intolerant, but these folks reach extremes I don’t remember even from my former fellow churchgoers. These people go waaaaay beyond any minor worries that someone somewhere is having fun, believe me.