Desperate times, desperate measures. Things should be fine if the industry pays attention to this handful of simple guidelines I’m about to lay down. In turn, if they choose to reimburse me for these ideas, I’LL be fine. Otherwise, I’ll never upgrade to Blu-Ray.

REALITY MOVIES. Reality shows are the go-to idea when you’re putting together a cheap TV network - why not do the same thing on the big screen? There is an air of non-event around the form though, so maybe we can rename the genre for the big screen - call it a document or incidents. No better yet, a “documentary.” I bet we can talk the Academy into putting aside a special award for ‘em or something.

WOODY ALLEN SEMINARS. Woody Allen is the most disciplined filmmaker on the planet. For years he’s churned out tiny movies on tiny budgets, using big stars who work for peanuts because are attracted by the prestige and the challenge of working with only three pages of the whole script while getting almost no direction. The reason all Woody’s titles look the same is because he gets a discount on that font. We need to get him out from behind the camera and in front of a master class, where he can teach other directors to make dialogue-heavy, often unwatchable 93-minute movies for peanuts.

MORE 3D. This is counter-intuitive because it costs more, but let’s face it - at the moment, you can’t pirate 3D.

LESS DIGITAL, MORE LIVE - In the old days they wouldn’t hire 30 geeks to fake an explosion on a server farm - they’d just blow stuff up and film it. Was it more convincing? Sometimes. I don’t care. The important thing is that it was more fun to read special-effects magazines. Just imagine how much better the extras session on that DVD will be when you see the struggle of a dozen special effects people to put a guy in a rubber dinosaur suit and build a convincing tiny city for the dinosaur to step on. Contrast that with the interview with a programming geek who created a new tiny-city algorithm just for this movie. See? Pays for itself.

MORE REMAKES OF THE WILD, WILD WEST. Sooner or later, this idea is bound to pay off.

TEEN VAMPIRES. For the next year, every movie must write in a teen vampire character. It’s a transparent ploy, but those often work the best.

BIGGER PRODUCT PLACEMENTS - I’m not talking about soft drinks or cars. Set the next Batman movie in Isreal, for the Isreal tourist board. For the next Cate Blanchette Queen Elizabeth drama, have her discover oil under Buckingham palace and lament that the technology doesn’t yet exist to benefit from it. Think big, people!

FORCE JIM CARREY TO MAKE THREE DOPEY COMEDIES FOR 5 MILLION DOLLARS APIECE. Yeah, it’s less than he’s asking, but since they keep canceling those projects anyway, he probably needs the walkin’ around money about now.

SHOOT EVERYTHING IN MEXICO. There’s all kinds of goodness in this idea. For one, the Unions can’t reach you there. For another, lax safety standards insures that you’re going to kill off at least one major star in the process. Look at Heath Ledger! That put the Dark Knight over the top baby! Plus catering doesn’t have to send out for Mexican food.

Finally - SHORT, UGLY LEADING MEN. Sounds crazy, but it worked during the early seventies.

-daniel k

I love the San Fernando Valley, don’t get me wrong; but every fall the Santa Ana winds kick up and with them, a couple of arsonists. The smoke has been so bad this weekend that today in my voice acting class, everybody got the same direction - better breath control, and don’t sound so much like Alec Baldwin. Listen to radio commercials about a month from now, and you’ll see what I mean.

What better way to pass the time then by staying indoors and watching a long-neglected cult film via Netflix? The film in this case is PRIVILEGE, Peter Watkins’ pseudo-documentary about a troubled pop star. It’s a little-known work, but people who have seen it tend to remember it. I for example, caught it once on TV over thirty years ago and haven’t been able to find it anywhere since, but I’ve wanted to. In fact, up until last year I couldn’t even have rented it if I wanted to. New Yorker Video got around to cleaning up five Peter Watkins movies and releasing them as a series.

Peter Watkins was a British television director in the late sixties who was quite ahead of his time. He made his reputation with THE WAR GAME, another faux documentary about London in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear blast. PRIVILEGE, shot in a similar fashion for theatrical release, covers some of the same territory. It takes place in 1970, which made it science-fiction in 1967. Teen idol Steven Shorter is as popular as all the Beatles rolled into one, and worshipped with a fervor that even the Beatles could only imagine. His ability to sell products based on an endorsement is so potent that there are Steven Shorter appliance stores. 

One of the entities putting that charisma to use is the “British Provisional Government”. By 1970 apparently the two party-system in England has given way to something a little more… efficient. So our popstar’s job is to channel the destructive energy of youth away from, say protest and politics. And Steven Shorter, increasingly, is realizing this and he doesn’t like it.

The style of PRIVILEGE is a lot like DON’T LOOK BACK, the long-unseen documentary about Bob Dylan. However, Watkins is said to have modeled the film on a more unlikely source: LONELY BOY, a half-hour Canadian documentary about Paul Anka. Steven Shorter IS Paul Anka, in a way. Beloved by pimply hormonal teenage girls; polite, clean-cut, good-looking enough to be an effective tabula rasa. And besides who would you rather have as the fresh face of fascism? Bob Dylan was so subversive he’d have spoiled the joke. 

The movie does overreach, but it’s noble overreaching. We see Shorter selling appliances, then next they call him in to do a commercial for apples because there is an apple glut, and then BANG! he’s called upon to simultaneously encourage christianity and blind conformity to an omnipresent government. It goes too far too quickly. Perhaps there just isn’t a slow enough pace to make that twist work, but it’d be great to see the movie remade as a mini-series. 

I hate to say it, but it would also be nice to see someone else as Steven Shorter. He’s played by Paul Jones, a non-actor who was the lead singer of Manfred Mann’s Earth Band. Jones has two notes as an actor - nervous tension and thinly veiled agony. I can’t help but think there needed to also be some sense that he loves his job so much that he can’t stop performing, even when he knows what an awful agenda he’s helping. But he does really nail the two big numbers, which are masterful satires of the excesses of pop. It’s only once he’s not singing that you start to question how the public would be devoted to such a dour guy. Part of the Beatles’ appeal was how much fun they seemed to be having at their press conferences after all. Being famous can be fun.

Whatever. PRIVILEGE is a rare gem, and flaws only serve to make gems even more fascinating. Be glad that you live in an age where you can rent it. That is, as soon as I return my copy, because I bet that’s the only one they have in stock.

-daniel k.

“The Bond movies belong to the world,” Sony domestic distribution president Rory Bruer said. “They’re popular around the world, so getting the dates right — whether domestic or elsewhere — was particularly important.”

Initially, “Solace” was to bow Nov. 7 in the U.S. and Canada, with only the U.K. and a handful of markets getting the film first. But when Warner Bros. bounced “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” from November to July, executives at Sony and MGM decided to hold back the Bond film one week domestically to open “Solace” closer to the lucrative Thanksgiving period.

Bruer said the film’s established international success should help boost must-see interest among domestic moviegoers.

“I certainly believe the buzz is out there, with regard to what it’s doing throughout the world,” he said. “The world is a much smaller place, and that resonates back to the U.S. as well.”

“Solace” has yet to unspool in several overseas markets and won’t travel to Japan until January. But its early bow in China and other piracy-prone territories has helped keep unauthorized copies of “Solace” from circulating on the Internet or elsewhere, Bruer said.

It’s unusual for movies to make the bulk of their money overseas before hitting the US, especially a bulk like that. Mother of Mercy, is this the end of the US as a global superpower? Will it mean more American Bond Villains? Can I bittorrent the movie now? So many questions, so few answers.

-daniel k.

13TH CHILD

Cast
Christopher Atkins, Robert Guillaume, Cliff Robertson, Lesley-Anne Down, Michael Maryk
Production Status
Completed
Synopsis
Every Halloween, the LEGEND OF THE JERSEY DEVIL emerges from the darkness to bring terror to those living along the Pine Barrens Wilderness of Southern New Jersey. Homicides, linked to a creature that can shape shift from demon to human, have haunted the locals since the 1800’s. With Halloween approaching once again, will anyone be safe?

THE PLEASURE OF BEING ROBBED

Cast
Eleonore Hendricks, Josh Safdie
Synopsis
A curious and lost Eleonore looks for something everywhere, even in the bags of strangers who find themselves sadly smiling only well after she’s left their lives. They owe her their thanks.

WARWOLVES

Cast
John Saxon, Tim Thomerson, Michael Worth, Adrienne Barbeau
Synopsis
Jack Ford leads a special forces unit back to the United States to hunt down Jake Gabriel, a soldier who has been infected with the werewolf virus that turns man into wolf. Little does Jack know that three of the female soldiers serving in his unit have also been infected and have already transformed into she-wolves. The she-wolves’ forces of evil and Ford’s special op forces of good, are pitted against each other in the race to save mankind from turning into wolves.

END CALL

Cast
Tasuku Nagaoka, Yuria Haga
Production Status
Completed
Synopsis
A group of high school girls call the Devil to be granted a wish but cannot end the call until they are dead.

JACKIE A.

Cast
Grant Barker, Siri Baruc, Kevin Sorbo,
Synopsis
In this heartwarming comedic tale, a young boy learns about determination and triumph with the help of a very opinionated talking mule.

SUNDAY SCHOOL MUSICAL

Cast
Candise Lakota, Chris Chatman
Director(s)
Rachel Lee Goldenberg
Synopsis
Two competing groups of high school students must rally together and enter a song and dance competition in order to save their church from closing.

BILLY OWENS AND THE SECRET OF THE RUNES

Cast
Dalton Mugridge, Ciara O’Hanlon, Christopher Fazio, Mikayla Ottonello
Synopsis
Billy, along with his two fellow students in magic, must find a way to free their teachers soul from an enchanted amulet before he is trapped forever.

ACCURACY OF DEATH

Cast
Takeshi Kaneshiro, Manami Konishi, Sumiko Fuji
Synopsis
Chiba (Takeshi Kaneshiro) is a god of death who loves music. His job is to determine whether the human being chosen by the world of Death is ready to die or not, after examining the person’s life for 7 days in the human world. He appears in human forms and always wears white gloves. He spends time and listens to music in CD shops whenever he is free. When he works in the human world, somehow, it always rains. Thus, he has never seen the blue sky

HAROLD

Cast
Nikki Blonsky, Spencer Breslin, Cuba Gooding Jr.
Synopsis
A teenager with an early onset of male-pattern baldness befriends his high school’s janitor.

-daniel k.

Except.

Except in the movies. Oliver Stone’s take on the 43rd President, “W”, opened a couple of weekends ago to mediocre box office and it dropped almost 50 percent this weekend. A few weeks earlier saw the arrival of both David Zucker’s AN AMERICAN CAROL and Bill Mahr’s RELIGULOUS. One is a comedy ridiculing left wing politics and the other is a comic documentary ridiculing religion, but in this country religion and politics are often the same thing. Anyway, they both opened at the bottom of the top ten - AMERICAN CAROL made more money overall but RELIGULOUS had a higher per-screen average, and the takeaway is that nobody was awfully excited to see either one. In fact, the lions share of the ticket sales went to BEVERLY HILLS CHIHUAHUA that weekend.

You may also recall SWING VOTE, a Kevin Costner movie from the summer, though it’s just as likely that you won’t recall it at all. 

Well, something’s going on here and my guess is it has to do with the phrase “current events.” There are things that TV just does better than movies, and one of those is immediacy. If Joe Biden says something stupid at 3:00pm on Thursday, you don’t want to wait a year to see the comment about it. You want it NOW mister! I kinda liked W but I have to admit that as a political junkie, it all seemed pretty worked over to me. There was nothing in there that I hadn’t heard years ago, except the suggestion that Bush is a more sympathetic character than he seems. 

Movies just can’t maneuver with the agility that politics requires. TV is like a speedboat; movies is like a battleship. It is huge and majestic, but it takes a whole day to change course. In that time, the speedboat can zig zag circles around it 400 times. 

There are exceptions of course. MR SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON, which focused on the struggle of one man against the backdrop of politics, is a mighty good movie. Even then, classic though it is, I don’t believe it made a lot of money. THE CANDIDATE, which starred Robert Redford at the peak of his career, wasn’t huge. ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN is probably better looked at as a crime thriller than a political movie. 

So if you’re investing in movies…. hah hah, just kidding. Never mind. But if you had money to invest, and you were considering putting it into movies, keep away from the ones about politics. They’ll just break your heart.

-daniel k.