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Hollywood Treats Labor Day Moviegoers to Festive Abundance Of Crap

STV — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:05:00 EDT

Welcome to a special Labor Day edition of Defamer Attractions, your regular guide to what's new, noteworthy and potentially nausea-inducing this week at the movies. We're as shocked as anyone to see another bottleneck for wide releases, with five films vying for scarce holiday dollars before studios roll out their fall collections. Alas, there they are — only one dumpee can finish on top, and our overeducated guess follows below. We've also got a hunch over who stands to lose big, our regular underdog pick for your consideration, and the best of the best new DVD releases for you three-day-weekend homebodies. As always, our choices are our own but positively elegant in their accuracy. You're welcome!

WHAT'S NEW: For the second consecutive week, what isn't new? But more to the point, what's new that you actually want to see? The Summer of the R-rated Comedy tapers off with College, which will battle Disaster Movie in the lowest-common-denominator category. Hamlet 2 expands to 1,500 screens, hoping to find some traction in the mudslide that was its lackluster limited opening last Friday. Among smaller films, look for Brian Cox to avenge his murdered dog in the haunting Red, while Czech Oscar-winner Jiri Menzel returns after 20 years with I Served the King of England and the '90s art-scene aftermath gets a once-over in the doc Beautiful Losers. Finally — and somewhat amazingly — a franchise is born with Another Gay Sequel: Gays Gone Wild!.

THE BIG LOSER: Babylon A.D. may yet outmaneuver Tropic Thunder for the week's top box-office spot; it should tip $15 million for the four-day frame, probably just sneaking by Ben Stiller's comedy by less than $1 million. That's the "good news" — if underperforming by about 20% is still considered good. The failures don't stop there, however; to the extent it's remembered at all, Babylon A.D. will always have the distinction of being the film that ended loose-lipped Matthieu Kassovitz's directing career in America, sucker-punched Vin Diesel back into franchise submission and jammed a red-ink exclamation point on Fox's underachieving (if not disastrous) summer. Still, they'll always have the silver lining of ambition — this kind of implosion requires a rare chemistry you shouldn't take for granted. Just wear sunglasses and stand way, waaayyyy back.

THE UNDERDOG: The Don Cheadle/Guy Pearce political thriller Traitor got an early jump with a midweek release, decent reviews, a funny Kimmel tie-in and smart, aggressive marketing throughout the Olympics and Democratic National Convention. The upstart gang at Overture Films, which previously scored this spring with the ultimate underdog (and unlikely Oscar candidate) The Visitor, is having a nifty run we hope continues through all the ferocious scythe-swinging taking off the heads of its indie contemporaries around town.

FOR SHUT-INS: Too cheap/agoraphobic to leave the house this weekend? We're sorry to hear that; new DVDs are less than encouraging. There's always the "Extended Jackpot Edition" of What Happens in Vegas, which we hear spits quarters from your TV if you endure all 167 minutes. Uwe Boll's folly Postal appears in rated and unrated versions for the schlock completist in you, and Morgan Spurlock's here-and-gone doc Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? settles into Weinstein video oblivion. And for the mega-bored among you, full-season sets of Heroes, Entourage, Everybody Hates Chris and One Tree Hill will get you through holiday bedrest like a charm.

So seriously — is there anything here you'd spend money on this weekend? Did we miss some gem that compels a closer look? Call your shots, or better yet, call your friends — you're not really planning to hide in the dark during the last weekend of summer are you? Oh. OK, us too. Have a good one!

Steve Coogan or Rainn Wilson: Who Had the Worse Weekend?

STV — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 13:00:00 EDT

It's probably asking a lot for a Monday, but pretend for just a second that you're Focus Features, Universal's mini-major offshoot and the folks who last January made the single biggest buy in the history of the Sundance Film Festival: Hamlet 2, which sneaked into Park City at the last minute and left 10 days later with lukewarm (at best) reviews and a check for $11 million. So imagine your signature was on that check, and imagine how much weight you'll lose this week as your appetite plunges with Hamlet 2's box-office prospects: $435,000 on 103 screens, averaging $4,223 per for one of the most profound festival flops of the decade — not to mention the film that bumps Steve Coogan back to ensemble/supporting-class in American movies.

To be fair, the film goes wider later this week, and Focus always has the UK release this fall and whatever slight cult audience accrues for video. So it could be worse — now imagine you're Rainn Wilson.

As we anticipated last Friday, TV viewers' Wilson goodwill isn't exactly multiplex-ready. The Rocker's marketing misfires, non-existent word-of-mouth and release-date follies yielded a $2.8 million, 12th-place opening. We're not in the short-sighted camp that thinks Fox is having the Summer From Hell — not with The Happening and What Happens in Vegas finding very respectable profits overseas — but there really is no positive way to spin this one, at least not for his toplining future. Until further notice, Wilson is Dwight Schrute and the clever bit-parter who has a way with pregnancy-test pitches and other Oscar-winning patois — maybe not in that order, but at least in that zone. Maybe a few scenes in Inglorious Bastards? Our Mondays are too fragile as it is to go through this again.

Weeken Box Office Results [Box Office Mojo]

Unearthed Britney Spears Concert Footage Demonstrates The Value Of Lip-Syncing

Mark Graham — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 21:20:00 EDT

· You know how everyone used to complain that Britney Spears lip-synced her way through all of her concerts? Well, after seeing this video that isolates Britney's vocals during her "Live From Las Vegas" show, we're pretty sure you'll be thankful that backing tracks exist. [Funny Or Die via Buzzfeed]
· We know that we're supposed to bow at the feet of Radiohead because, well, everyone bows at the feet of Radiohead. But we can't help but concur with Hold Steady guitarist Tad Kubler's recent comments about the band: "I think they've lost the plot. I like them as a rock band, all the buttons and sequencing and stuff like that I don't really care for. I'm a fan of rock music, and what they're doing now I don't think is very good." [Vulture]
· We've been thinking a lot about Sharon Stone ever since we revealed her new twentysomething boyfriend yesterday. While her film career is stalled, we think we spotted a reality show opportunity that would be a perfect fit for her brand of crazy: Vh1's Cougar Camp. [NY Post]
· This headline has us thankful all of the film critics haven't been killed off yet: "Hamlet 2: The First One Was Better." [Time]
· Most of our favorite movies of the '80s require a healthy suspension of disbelief to enjoy. Teen Wolf was one of those films. But now, thanks to the comedy troupe Summer Of Tears, we're not sure we're ever going to be able to watch it again without contemplating how none of the characters raised an eyebrow when the bestiality angle came into play. [/Film]

Producing Partner Of Michael Eisner's Son Is AWOL, Feared Killed by Russian Mafia

STV — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 12:00:18 EDT

Coming off a $10 million sale of his comedy Hamlet 2 at Sundance, Michael Eisner's son Eric appears to have lost his film-producing partner to mob-related foul play. Page Six reports today that Leonid Rozhetskin, a 41-year-old Russian-born, US-educated lawyer-turned-billionaire telecommunications baron, was reported missing 10 days ago and that "[b]lood matching his DNA has since been found on the floor" of his home in Latvia. His plane is also AWOL.

Rozhetskin had sworn enemies all over the former Soviet bloc, where he was named in 2006 as part of an international money laundering scheme aimed at Russian telecoms. He had long been an outsider (and US citizen) fiercely critical of Russian ex-president Vladimir Putin's regime, which kept him a target in exile but not necessarily out of the public eye (if his Flickr stream is any indication). He left a meandering network of personal blogs and a MySpace page last updated March 19 in his wake as well, with most devoted to the trajectory of his partnership with Eric Eisner in L+E Productions — which struck gold two months ago at Sundance when Focus Features bought its first offering, the Steve Coogan/Catherine Keener comedy Hamlet 2, for a festival-high $10 million.

The Post mentions Rozhetskin was en route to Phuket, Thailand when he went missing; his wife and son are under watch in London. Our best wishes are with them and Eisner, but the odds here are more than a little sobering.

[Photos via Leonid Rozhetskin's Flickr]

Movie Murder Mystery [NYP]