Cinematical

I will say this for Old Dogs: It is exactly as funny as you'd expect a movie to be that stars John Travolta and Robin Williams as two bachelors who must suddenly take care of precocious 7-year-old twins, and that was directed by the man who made Wild Hogs. Which is to say, it is not the least bit funny, not once, not even for a minute. Imagine a season's worth of plot devices from TV's most generic sitcom crammed into 88 excruciating minutes.

Here are the thoughts of Williams' character in this frantic, contrived mess: I had a one-night stand seven years ago, and it turns out I'm the father of twins! And now I have to babysit them for two weeks! But I'm working on the Big Account at my job, and I don't have time! Oh no, they don't allow children in my condos -- apparently not even temporarily, to visit -- so we have to stay with my best friend at his un-child-proofed apartment! Oh no, if I screw up this golf game with the client, it'll blow everything -- and I accidentally took my friend's medication this morning that gives me hallucinations! Oh no, my friend and I are going to breakfast with the kids, and everyone thinks we're their grandparents! And now the staff is singing a "welcome to the grandparents' club" song, which surely does not exist in real life anywhere! How embarrassing! And now we're on a camping trip with the kids, and the scout leader thinks my friend and I are gay, except we're too stupid to realize he thinks that, because somehow it's "funnier" if we don't know! Doh! We're on a collision course with wackiness!!

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences documentary committee has watched the 89 eligible docs that were submitted and whittled the field down to 15 finalists, from which the five Oscar nominees will be chosen. But before we even get there we gotta talk about the snubs.

Notably absent from the shortlist are Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story and the highly praised Anvil! The Story of Anvil, which last month earned the distinction of being the first "for your consideration" screener sent to Academy members this year. Last year's best-reviewed documentary, Man on Wire, went on to win the Oscar; Anvil! holds that title this year (98% at Rotten Tomatoes), but it's not even going to be nominated.

Other noteworthy titles not among the top 15: Tyson (about the boxer, not the chicken company) and The September Issue (about Anna Wintour and Vogue magazine). Michael Jackson's This Is It and Chris Rock's Good Hair didn't hit theaters until October, qualifying them for next year's documentary category -- for docs, the eligibility period is September-August, not January-December. (This Is It might not be eligible anyway, since Academy rules forbid films that are "essentially unfiltered records of performances," which could apply here.) The highest-grossing documentary of the year, Earth, isn't eligible because it was mostly repackaged material that had already aired on TV.

The complete shortlist is after the jump.

[Note: Scott Weinberg has the pro side of this argument -- why Roger Corman does deserve an Oscar -- in an article that you can read right here.]

In a post yesterday about the honorary Academy Awards given out over the weekend, I said this about one of the recipients, Roger Corman: "Corman, who has directed more than 50 films and produced nearly 400 (!), has never been nominated for an Oscar, probably because all of his movies are terrible. But apparently the Academy is rewarding quantity now, too. So don't give up, Uwe Boll! Just make another 300 movies!" These remarks were met with much disapproval by many readers, and so I would like to elaborate -- assuming any of the people who swore they'd never read Cinematical again are in fact still reading Cinematical (which they are).

First, a correction. I shouldn't have said "all of his movies are terrible." I should have said something like "his movies are generally terrible." "All" suggests that I've seen all 400 of them, which of course I haven't. I ought to have used more general language. That was my bad, as the kids say.

I stand by the point I was making, though. If the Academy is giving out Oscars based on the production of quality work -- which, last time I checked, was the basic idea behind the Oscars -- then Roger Corman does not qualify. The vast majority of his output is mediocre at best. Some of it is downright awful. A few films are good enough on their own, but not to where any of them would deserve Oscars individually. Even as a body, those moderately good Corman movies don't outweigh the dozens -- literally dozens and DOZENS -- of cheap, forgettable clunkers.

Producing a huge quantity of work whose overall entertainment or artistic value averages out to be somewhere between "mediocre" and "mediocre-plus" isn't worthy of Academy Award consideration. That's neat and everything, producing 400 movies over the course of 50 years. Very ambitious of you! But the Academy should be rewarding quality, not quantity.

As you've probably already heard, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is shaking things up at this year's Oscars by having 10 Best Picture nominees instead of five, and by moving the honorary awards (read: the boring part of the show) to a special ceremony of their own. That ceremony will be held in November, and-- holy crap, it was this weekend! The almost-Oscars were on Saturday!

They're called the Governors Awards, and while they won't be televised, the AMPAS website has some photos and background info. Honorary Oscars went to actress Lauren Bacall (pictured), cinematographer Gordon Willis (the Godfather trilogy, Manhattan, All the President's Men), and director/producer Roger Corman (numerous MST3K films). Astonishingly, the legendary Bacall has only received one Oscar nomination in her 65-year career, for The Mirror Has Two Faces. Willis was nominated for The Godfather: Part III and Zelig. Corman, who has directed more than 50 films and produced nearly 400 (!), has never been nominated for an Oscar, probably because all of his movies are terrible. But apparently the Academy is rewarding quantity now, too. So don't give up, Uwe Boll! Just make another 300 movies!

The other award at the special ceremony was the Irving G. Thalberg Award, given to John Calley, who produced The Remains of the Day and Closer and oversaw worldwide production for Warner Bros. throughout the 1970s.

The Governors Awards were also a chance for Oscar telecast producers Adam Shankman and Bill Mechanic to drop a few hints about what the big show will be like on March 7. Mechanic said they're not going to repeat the thing the 2009 show did where a coven of five past Oscar winners introduced the acting nominees.

Yep, Faizon Love and Kali Hawk are missing from the poster used in the U.K. As reported by London's Daily Mail, Universal Pictures says they just wanted to "simplify" the poster for foreign release, to focus on "actors who are most recognizable in international markets." Nonetheless, after getting complaints about racism from British viewers, the studio has apologized and scrapped plans to use the revised poster in other countries.

I feel a little sympathy for Universal here. It's certainly true that Love and Hawk are less famous in other countries than they are in the United States. (Heck, they're not that famous here, either.) Their characters are fourth in importance in the story; even in the American poster, they're all the way in the back. If you had to remove a couple from the poster, they'd be the logical choice.

Ah, but there's the problem -- why did Universal think they had to remove a couple? The poster with all eight characters did fine in America. Why change it? Do international audiences reject movies that appear to have too many characters? Is "clutter" a big complaint among British poster aficionados? If nothing else, someone at Universal should have realized that removing the black couple -- even if race had nothing to do with it -- would at least look sketchy. You'd think that as bad as the movie is, they'd be extra careful not to turn off any potential viewers with their marketing. Live and learn!

[Via Huffington Post.]

One of the most iconic movie images of the 1980s is that of Tom Cruise, clad only in socks, underwear, dress shirt, and sunglasses, dancing to the strains of Bob Seger's "Old Time Rock 'n' Roll" in Risky Business. Guitar Hero recreated the scene for a series of commercials last year, which apparently put it into the heads of quite a few young people that they should do the same thing in their own homes. As the video evidence shows, this was approximately as bad an idea as it sounds like it would be.

We've chosen five of the worst ones and posted them after the jump. The first is courtesy of BuzzFeed, and it's the best reminder that the film was called Risky Business for a reason. I love that even though the girl seems to be legitimately injured, they still posted it on YouTube. Why let a simple thing like a concussion keep you from Internet fame?

That one, and four other bad ones, after the jump.

Many of Michael Jackson's fans have paid tribute to the deceased pop icon by seeing This Is It, the ghoulishly titled assemblage of rehearsal footage and outtakes that was rushed into theaters last month, just in time for Halloween (or, as Jackson used to call it, "every day"). But some of the beloved nutjob's greatest admirers have gone a step further and contacted him beyond the grave in a seance, which is about as believable as The Fourth Kind.

Derek Acorah, an English medium of some renown on that side of the pond, conducted the spirit-contacting and aired it on the U.K.'s Sky 1 channel. We have a YouTube clip after the jump. Acorah is the older, silver-haired gentleman in the video. The host asks him if people can ask Michael Jackson questions through him, and Acorah says yes, absolutely, the King of Pop would love that. Then Acorah opens his eyes and looks a little stunned. Apparently this is when he starts "channeling" Jackson. Michael Jackson is inside this man's body!

Then there is a fellow who looks a bit like Michael Ian Black who was apparently one of Jackson's friends and, by the looks of things, the inheritor of some of his wardrobe. He is very emotional about the chance to speak with his dead friend, especially when the dead friend, through Acorah, tells him that love and sensitivity "oozes" from him. Finally the friend asks, "Do you realize how much I love you, Michael?" Really? That's your question? Not "What's the afterlife like?" or "Have you had any awkward encounters with the Elephant Man?" but "Did you know I love you?" LAME.

The clip, after the jump.

The final numbers are in, and the estimated $1.8 million earned by Precious in its limited-release opening weekend wasn't an exaggeration. In fact, it was a little short: The Sundance-prize-winning, Oprah-endorsed indie drama actually made $1,872,458 between Friday and Sunday. (Numbers courtesy of Box Office Mojo.) The reason that's so impressive is that it was only playing in 18 theaters, for an average of $104,025 per theater. For comparison's sake, A Christmas Carol made $8,159 per theater.

So let's put on our nerd hats and break down those Precious numbers. While it's only in 18 theaters, it played on 35 screens, because most cineplexes, anticipating the demand, booked two prints. (The per-screen average, therefore, was $53,499.) I looked at each theater's listings and added up how many showings the movie had over the weekend. That number was 507.

Then the math: It made $1,872,458 in 507 showings, for an average of $3,693 per showing. The average ticket price at the theaters in question is $11 (disregarding things like senior discounts and slightly cheaper prices for Friday matinees). That means each screening sold an average of about 335 tickets, which is surely the capacity for a lot of those theaters. That means a sell-out crowd for almost every screening. I guess I could have found out how many people each theater seats and determined exactly how many sell-outs there were, but that would be silly.

Box Office Mojo says the $104,025 per-theater average is the 12th highest ever -- but the 11 films ahead of it were all playing in no more than six locations. Precious played in 18 and still had a huge per-theater average. Any way you slice it, the delightful feel-good romp of the year opened with a splash.

We're told at the beginning of The Men Who Stare at Goats that "more of this is true than you would believe." But the story of the U.S. Army's attempts to harness psychic powers to create super-soldiers is so bizarre it almost HAS to be true, in accordance with the "how could anyone make this up?" principle. In fact, I believe more of this admittedly fictionalized story than I do of The Fourth Kind, which claims to be 100 percent true. Surely there's a lesson in there.

Based on Jon Ronson's nonfiction book, The Men Who Stare at Goats stars Ewan McGregor as Bob Wilton, a journalist covering the Iraq War in 2003. Bob meets a man named Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a private contractor with an unusual past: He claims to have worked for the government as a psychic spy. Bob once met a man, back home in Michigan (played by Stephen Root), who made the same claims, and who named Lyn Cassady as one of his colleagues.

You can see why the military would be interested in psychic spying. Surveillance is a lot less dangerous when you can do it entirely with your mind, rather than having to actually sneak up and eavesdrop on people. And if we could harness things like telekinesis, well, forget about it! We'd beat the Russkies for sure!

The fear many of us had when it was announced Jim Carrey would play Ebenezer Scrooge and other parts in Robert Zemeckis' adaptation of A Christmas Carol was that Carrey's clowning would turn the story into a goofy farce. This fear turns out to have been unfounded. If anything, the opposite is true: The film has no personality at all, not Carrey's or anyone else's.

Charles Dickens' holiday classic has already been adapted for movies and TV dozens of times, but Zemeckis noticed something peculiar: Somehow, none of the previous incarnations had managed to be in 3-D! He sought to rectify this oversight with that newfangled motion-capture technology he's been so excited about the last several years, where actors' movements are translated into animation. The Polar Express and Beowulf demonstrated that for as neat-o as the technology is for action scenes, characters' faces -- especially their eyes -- look dead and soulless. Some improvement has been made in that respect, but most of the people in A Christmas Carol still look like creepy robots.