Craig's MovieBlog

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Lots going on out there while I was traveling, so I thought I'd just throw them onto the pile for you:

• The critics awards have begun in a big way, and while MCN has their page, I'll probably find time to pull my annual recap together also. 
• Jim Hill creates an AMAZING list of cameos and cross-references throughout Pixar's film history.  For someone like myself who has been forced to watch Cars several hundred times, these are incredible.  But... he didn't call out the cameo from the Apple car in the first race.  It's just black and white, it wears the number 84, and it's only onscreen for a second or two. 
• David Poland calls Nikki Finke "a piece of shit."  Hee hee... 
• Anne Thompson reminds us that George Clooney is brilliant:  Why were films like Syriana and Good Night and Good Luck embraced by audiences while the more recent rash of political films have not been? "People like ambiguity," Clooney suggested, admitting that he had not seen all the films. "They don't want to be told what they should think."

Lesson #1 - Don't Write a Screenplay for an Animated Blockbuster

Whoa - did you know that writers of animated films get absolutely nothing when it comes to their films being sold to TV, video, and DVD?  The LA Times enlightens us...

"Writers of live-action features get royalties when their work is repackaged and sold. But writers of animation don't. Their 'ancillary profit participation,' as it's known, is paid in multiples of zero."

That seems a bit criminal when you consider that 3 of the top 7 box office films of the year so far are animated movies (Cars, Ice Age: The Meltdown, Over the Hedge).

Though they claim not to have ditched animation, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, whose credits include Aladdin and The Road to El Dorado, haven't written an animation screenplay since Shrek, in 2001, for which they earned an Oscar nomination. And who can blame them? Their script for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, which has just broken into the top 10-grossing films of all time, is likely to net them each at least an extra $1 million when the film explodes onto the video market. That money never would have materialized if they had written, say, Shrek the Third instead.

The Value of a Good Publicist: Connie Chung and Britney Spears

Did we learn nothing from Tom Cruise's various meltdowns after firing his publicist?  Look, it's okay to be completely nuts, smell bad, sleep with sheep, act like an egomaniac, whatever... that's why you have managers and PR people to keep your image intact. That way, your project won't tank like Mission: Impossible 3 did. 

(...and yes, at just $130 million domestically, it did tank.  It cost $150 million just to make, not including marketing, didn't come close to the M:I2 total, and is already way behind Da Vinci, X-Men 3, Ice Age, with Cars, Pirates 2, Superman and others to pass it shortly.  Sure, it's over $300 worldwide, but it's still behind M:I2 , and what percentage of that do you think is going directly to Tom's manpurse?)

Well, Connie Chung and Britney Spears apparently decided to give "their people" some time off last week, because they dropped some stunners. 

Enjoy the video of Connie closing her latest failure on MSNBC, then read on to find out why Britney was such a mess during Matt Lauer.

From Page Six:

"Neither of her publicists, Leslie Sloane Zelnick or Nanci Ryder, showed up," said our source. Spears insisted on doing her own hair and makeup - a regrettable decision. Web sites derided her hair as a "rat's nest" and, when she started crying during the interview, one of her fake eyelashes fell off. "When [the NBC crew] got there, they thought they had the wrong day . . . During the interview, no one was there to rein things in," we're told... Reps tried to control the damage on Friday. "They asked NBC not to release footage to places like E!," said a source. Asked why Spears was on her own for the interview, Sloane Zelnick said, "Britney is a grown-up and makes her own decisions."

Summer Box Office by David Poland

I love how David always adds a dose of reality to the noise that the alarmist media spits out.

According to him, this summer's looking quite good:

"There has only been one summer with as many as three $70 million-plus openings (there have been 13 such summer openings in all movie history) and we have two already. There is little doubt that we should expect at least two more, breaking the record. We'll see how Cars does."

New Cars Trailer

The first few trailers really didn't do it for me, but this one is more fleshed out, and the story is starting to really come together with that typical Pixar charm.  While I still think Cars looks like an animated version of Doc Hollywood, I'm pretty sure this version won't have a Julie Warner nude scene.

Jeffrey Wells Looks Forward to the Summer

In this week's piece, he's surprisingly optimistic about the big films coming out this summer, rather than the normal huge studio dreck that normally accompanies June, July, and August.

Here, he riffs on (and offers alternatives to) Mission: Impossible III, Poseidon, The DaVinci Code, X-Men: The Last Stand, The Break-Up, Cars, Nacho Libre, Superman Returns, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, The Lady in the Water, Miami Vice, Flags of our Fathers, Apocalypto, World Trade Center, and Snakes on a Plane.