The Doctor in the Hallway News Report 12.13.06
Posted by Ben Moser on 12.13.2006
Awards season kicks off, Borat scores a win, Jason Lee rocks out and more. Only 20 shopping days left until SNAKES ON A PLANE!!!
Hello there, children. Allow me to welcome you to another smashing entry into the archives of The Doctor in the Hallway News Report.
The DVR may be the greatest invention of the past 10 years, but it also comes with a curse. My cable box up and died during Scrubs, failing to record a chunk of it and the last half of 30 Rock. Needless to say, I am dismayed. Mostly because I don't want to watch the first half of the 30 Rock with Conan O'Brien on it without seeing the second half. When it didn't look like we'd be able to get the end of Scrubs(it was really touch-and-go for a while there), my fiancee thought about looking at NBC's online "two-minute recap" to see how they handled the abortion issue. So I started thinking.
I've decided that it's downright foolish for NBC to announce immediately following a 30-minute or - even worse - an hour-long broadcast that what you just took the time to watch can be summed up in two minutes worth of clips. I understand that it's more-or-less true. I understand that it can be done with virtually every show on television, regardless of the network it lives on. That doesn't mean it's a good idea for those networks to announce it. Poor planning NBC. If you wanted to compete with YouTube, then you needed to do more little online features like you did with The Office: The Accountants.
Let's rock some news:
Duck Season, Wabbit Season, Awards Season
The AFI released its top 10 films of the year. Here they are, in alphabetical order:
Babel Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation Of Kazakhstan The Devil Wears Prada Dreamgirls Half Nelson Happy Feet Inside Man Letters From Iwo Jima Little Miss Sunshine United 93
Disrespect for four of my top five 2006 choices(Snakes on a Plane, Thank You for Smoking, and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, and V for Vendetta if you were wondering) aside, I think a lot of this list shows that 2006 wasn't a great year for movies. Inside Man was pretty unimpressive, United 93 was just blatant pandering, and Happy Feet was a cartoon about talking animals no matter how much buzz it gets. Plus that list is missing highly acclaimed movies I haven't seen in The Departed and Flags of our Fathers.
So then we get to move along to this:
After a four-round tie breaking vote, "United 93" managed to just pull ahead of "The Queen" to win the Best Picture of the year award at the New York Film Critics Circle on Monday. Here is a complete list of the winners:
New York Film Critics Circle
Best Picture: United 93
Best Actor: Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland)
Best Actress : Helen Mirren (The Queen)
Best Supp. Actor: Jackie Earle Haley (Little Children)
Best Supp. Actress: Jennifer Hudson (Dreamgirls)
Best Director: Martin Scorsese (The Departed)
Best Screenplay: Peter Morgan (The Queen)
Best Animated Feature: Happy Feet
Best Foreign Film: Deliver Us From Evil
Best Documentary: An Inconvenient Truth
Best Cinematography: Guillermo Navarro (Pan's Labyrinth)
Best First Film: Half Nelson
Some of these are the oft-sung about "things that make you go 'hmm'" while others are well-deserved but unheralded.
The good news is that all of this could potentially make the award season the most interesting in years. No only is there no clear front-runner for film of the year, but all of the acting categories are wide open. This means that when they announce a winner at the Oscars, there won't be a split screen of one winner and three or four losers who knew they didn't stand a chance, but a seriously surprised winner and four equally surprised losers. These could be remembered as the "honest reaction Oscars," and I can't wait.
Also, if all of the critical darlings cannibalize each other, the door is wide open for SNAKES ON A PLANE to win big.
Borat defeats the Greeks
Borat has scored a legal victory. On Monday a judge denied the request of two college fraternity brothers to have a scene in Borat, in which they are shown drunk and making racist remarks, cut from the film. The men claim the footage has damaged their reputations. Last month they sued 20th Century Fox and the film's producers, maintaining that they were intoxicated when they agreed to participate in the film and were falsely told that it would never be shown in the U.S. A judge earlier denied their request to have the scene cut from the theatrical version of Borat, but last week the plaintiffs were given another opportunity to request that the scene be cut from the Borat DVD.
Verdicts are still pending in other Borat-related lawsuits. Two residents of a Romanian village filed a $30 million suit alleging that they agreed to participate in Borat because they were told it was a documentary about poverty in Romania. And Los Angeles attorney Gloria Allred is seeking an investigation on behalf of client Cindy Streit, owner of an etiquette training service in Alabama who claims she was similarly misled into taking part in the film.
I'm going to try to make this as clear as I possibly can. If you don't want people to know you're a racist, you might want to try to not say racist things. I do feel a little bit bad that things these guys said when they were drunk could possibly damage their futures, but then remember that they probably didn't need to have their arms twisted to drink and spit out the bile they spewed in Borat, as images like these feature Confederate Flag T-shirts on display and beer in hand. Yep, I have a hard time buying that guy as a drunken racist...NOOOT!!! See what I did there?
Legal victories are almost as good as the sexytime
And the Krater will rock
Jason Lee will star in and produce Krater, a comedy project that Warner Bros. Pictures has pre-emptively picked up from writer J.D. Ryznar. Scott M. Martin also is producing. Set in the late 1970s and early '80s, the story follows the leader (Lee) of a rock band known as Krater who struggles with massive success after hiring a new lead singer with hidden Broadway ambitions. The project is based on an idea that Lee and Martin brought to the writer.
I love the idea of a rock star that secretly wants to be prancing around the stage as "guy with AIDS #3" in Rent. Not to knock Broadway, or even Rent...it's just a concept that works for me. As a matter of fact, Rent might even be a bad example of just how good this idea is. If only Cats were still on Broadway...now there's a hidden passion that you don't ever want to see from your rockstars for any reason whatsoever...
So it's a funny concept, but I will admit to being skeptical about its chances of working for the length of a feature. Then again, a lot of the minds here produced Almost Famous and I do enjoy Jason Lee in just about everything he's in. So benefit of the doubt has been granted, Krater.
Tom Boy Movie Alert!
Sandra Bullock is attached to star in comedy One of the Guys, which she's producing with Todd Garner for 20th Century Fox. The project is based on a pitch by brothers Tom and Tim Mullen about a woman who throws her all-male circle of friends into chaos when she embraces her feminine side.
Gee, another movie about a boyish girl who gets all girlish much to the initial dismay of her guy-friends. Good money says that she ends up hooking up with one of them while another get jealous. In the end, I'll be they all learn valuable life lessons about friendship and love. Nothing about this movie, including the casting(Bullock was one of the guys turned hottie in Miss Congeniality), is even the slightest bit original. Computer animated movies about talking animals is a less-worn field than this is. Even the title of this one feels painfully familiar.
Woo-ing Distribution
John Woo and producer partner Terence Chang are near completing financing and distribution for the $50 million Asian period actioner Battle of Red Cliff. Chow Yun-Fat, Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Taiwanese supermodel Lin Chiling all star in the film based on part of the huge and rambling Han dynasty novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The Red Cliff screenplay is by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon co-scripter Wang Hui-ling.
I do love these types of movie...once. I find second viewings of flicks like Crouching Tiger and Hero to be tedious, though. Fans of the genre more knowledgeable than myself have told me that most of what I object to are attempts to "westernize" the movies. I keep promising to watch one that isn't meant to screen in suburban Durham, North Carolina. I haven't yet. Since Variety's description of the novel is "huge and rambling," I doubt the movie is going to hold my attention span any better.
I was, however, curious about the phrase "Taiwanese supermodel." Lin Chiling has been off of my radar, so I did some quick interweb research to determine if Taiwanese supermodels were as underfed as normal ones.
I'm so adorable you could just eat me up...but I'd prefer you took the ice cream
As it turns out, they like Haggen-dazs. Also, they're cute. There's something about this picture in particular that almost made me forget my celebrity crush on Sarah Chalke. Almost.
"Sharon Stone's Fantasyland" would have sounded great in 1992, but now it just means she's crazy.
Sharon Stone has angered the people of Norway after breaking with royal protocol and upstaging the country's King and Queen at a banquet. Stone may have wanted to make a grand entrance at Sunday's dinner honoring the Nobel Peace Prize winners in Oslo, but ended up making a royal faux pas by arriving late. Royal protocol in Europe dictates that when a King and Queen attend an event, everyone is required to be in their seats when the royal couple make their entrance, making them the last to arrive. Stone offended the Norwegian royal couple by waltzing into the room 10 minutes after the couple, which has been interpreted by Norwegians as the actress declaring herself more important than the King. This year's event was especially significant because it marked the first time that Norway's King Harald V and Queen Sonja were invited to the annual Nobel Banquet at Oslo's Grand Hotel. Stone's late arrival offended several guests, with former palace official Carl-Erik Grimstad calling it a "violation" of international custom.
Is Sharon Stone really so out there that she considers herself to be above royalty? It's not so hard to believe. She's the one who thought there might be a demand for a Basic Instinct 2 and possibly even a Basic Instinct 3. One thing that is clear, is that Sharon Stone hasn't read some of Shakespeare's finer tragedies. If she had, Stone would know that you don't &@#* with Norway. Just ask Scotland and Denmark.
This week's SNAKES ON A PLANE DVD hype!
So just how big did SNAKES ON A PLANE get? Well, it didn't become the highest grossing movie of all time, as I predicted. Those who viewed it on opening night weren't taken up by the Samuel L. Rapture immediately following the movie, as I predicted. But it did pick up 44 entries(and counting) in the urban dictionary. You have to weed through some tired and repetitive entries to get to the good ones, but they're there. An excerpt:
Quite possibly the best movie of all time.
George Bush: Did you hear Snakes on a Plane won 10 Oscars?
Samuel L. Jackson: Yes I mother-fucking did!
That'll do it for this week...
The Bears seem to have righted the ship, and Rex once again means King. Not in the dominant ruler way, but in the servicable figurehead sort of way. If Hester is going to keep running back kicks, I may end up shuffling come Super Bowl time after all.
Thursday night boasts an hour-long episode of The Office, so there's my pick of the week for you.
See you next week. Until then, don't do anything I wouldn't do.
(This week's sources: Variety, IMDB, The Hollywood Reporter)
