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R. Dittmar
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
420 Posts |
 Posted - 11/30/2007 : 5:16:28 PM
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In a bid to be completely non-controversial let me ask if anybody been following this interesting series of reviews over at the Onion?
http://www.avclub.com/content/blog/flops
Rabin's planning on reviewing a hundred movies this year that have flopped totally at the box office and he's quite funny. Two words of warning - the site is a bit hard to navigate so you have to work to track down all 80+ flops to date and Rabin's deploys the F-bomb a bit too frequently for my taste so parental discretion is advised. |
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Sardu
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
1126 Posts |
Posted - 11/30/2007 : 5:36:12 PM
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I love 'em but there is a LOT to assimilate. But after Ken, Scott Foy and Nathan Shumate I'd say it's my favorite writing about (mostly) bad movies.
"Meeting you makes me want to be a real noodle cook"
--Tampopo |
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Citizen Carrier
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
322 Posts |
Posted - 11/30/2007 : 6:00:12 PM
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Hey, I liked City Heat!
Well, I liked watching Clint and Burt shoot people with Prohibition-era firearms while wearing period costumes.
But no, it wasn't exactly high cinema.
So many bad movies there. Many I never saw. Many I can barely remember seeing because they were so bad and the mind does have defense mechanisms. Thank God.
Hmm. Dreamcatcher. That has to be THE worst Stephen King-based movie ever...and I've seen Maximum Overdrive. Even the book was lousy. Like King phoned it in with two soup cans and a piece of string.
Number 61. Freddy Got Fingered. Didn't watch it. Seth Green.
If only we could get Clint and Burt back together so I could watch them shoot Seth Green with Prohibition-era firearms whle wearing period costumes... |
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Capt. Nemo
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
630 Posts |
Posted - 12/01/2007 : 7:25:08 PM
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Call me crazy.
But when I read [url="http://www.avclub.com/content/blog/my_year_of_flops_case_file_83"]#83 Swept Away, [/url]I got a chill down my spine.
The third paragraph:
"Then there’s Madonna’s infamous lip-lock with Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera at the MTV Movie Awards a few years back. It now is abundantly apparent that Madonna wasn’t kissing her much younger rivals so much as she was draining them of their life essence and career mojo. Has anything good happened to Spears since Madonna gave her the kiss of professional death? As I argued in my Inventory piece on Great Moments in The Co-Option Of Hip-Hop, Madonna is pop culture’s preeminent vampire, a ghoulish parasite who must feast on the lifeblood of the young and vital to postpone the seemingly inevitable descent into irrelevancy."
Does anyone think that assessment is a little TOO on the mark?
Remember what happened to Sean Penn when he was married to her? AND when he got away from her?
An interesting experiment would be what would happen if Madonna kissed Uwe Boll.
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"Ward, the Beaver blew up the 7-11 again."
"I'll have a talk with him Dear" |
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Mark Hawley
Minister of the Sacraments of Jabootu
Canada
48 Posts |
Posted - 12/01/2007 : 8:25:37 PM
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Yeah, it is rather hilariously on the mark.
It's interesting that during that performance, immediately after she kissed Britney, the progam cut to Justin Timberlake's reaction so we barely got to see her kiss Christina Aguilera. I think we saw the tail end of it at best. Christina, at least by comparison, seems far more successful, not to mention far more sane, than Britney nowadays. |
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zombiewhacker
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
1475 Posts |
Posted - 12/02/2007 : 02:01:01 AM
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| Also Madonna locked lips with Warren Beatty in Dick Tracy and Beatty never had another hit film again. |
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Neville
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
Spain
1590 Posts |
Posted - 12/02/2007 : 04:46:31 AM
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| Well, it took him tears to recover, but when he did he made Bulworth. |
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R. Dittmar
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
420 Posts |
Posted - 12/02/2007 : 07:51:07 AM
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quote:
Originally posted by zombiewhacker
Also Madonna locked lips with Warren Beatty in Dick Tracy and Beatty never had another hit film again.
Actually and in near complete seriousness, has Beatty ever made a movie that even made money much less been a hit? I exaggerate a bit here because I know Dick Tracy turned a profit, but other than that which movies of his have actually made money? Take a look at the take from Bulworth for an example:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118798/business
As near as I can tell, it grossed about $3.5 million less in the USA than what it cost to make. Assuming the $30 million budget figure isn't a big fat Hollywood lie - a big assumption - maybe it ended up turning a tiny little profit after all the foreign take and later ancillary home video revenue was added in. Even so, those sub-prime mortgage guys are making a bigger return on their money than that! Maybe Shampoo was a big hit, but that was released even before my era of frock coats and gaiters so I can't comment.
And to make matters worse when he's not making movies that kind-of-sort-of turn an infinitesimal little profit about 25 years after their first release on home video, he’s making money hemorrhaging fiascos like Ishtar, Town & Country and The Only Game in Town (starring his distaff money-squandering doppelganger Elizabeth Taylor). I’d bet if we added up all of Beatty’s profits and losses while properly controlling for inflation and the time value of money we would find that he has actually lost Hollywood millions on net over the course of his career.
So if Madonna was looking to feast on the lifeblood of the young and the vital when she hooked up with him, she made a gross error in judgment – probably cracked a tooth on the dried up husk in fact. Either that or Anna-Nicole Smith’s ex-husband simply wasn’t available at the time. |
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Citizen Carrier
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
322 Posts |
Posted - 12/02/2007 : 08:56:33 AM
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From what I've read, Bonnie and Clyde grossed about $70 million by 1973. Mostly profit.
I suspect that part of what propelled that movie in popularity was probably the same period mentality in the 60s and 70s that made Billy Jack popular. Bonnie and Clyde were anti-heroes fighting against the heartless "establishment".
Denver Pyle, known to most of us as "Uncle Jesse" from The Dukes of Hazzard tv show, played Sheriff Frank Hamer in that movie. Hamer ambushes the duo at the end with two other cops, bringing the murderous pair's rampage to an end in a hail of gunfire into their car.
I've read in a magazine article biography of Pyle that he received all sorts of criticism and even death threats just because he played the character who killed Bonnie and Clyde in the movie.
Again, such was the mentality and political standing of the youth of America at that time that they villainized an actor for a part in which he killed two such "romantic" figures of protest and resistance.
So on the balance I think we should chalk up the Bonnie and Clyde success to the "Billy Jack Factor". In which a movie's success is wholly dependent upon the political environment of the time in which it was released.
In reality, Bonnie and Clyde were not really romantic figures. They were murderers. And if you read of their entire criminal "career", you'll find they were perhaps the dumbest, most inept and least successful of all the Prohibition-era "motorized bandits". |
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R. Dittmar
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
420 Posts |
Posted - 12/02/2007 : 10:01:44 AM
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quote:
Originally posted by Citizen Carrier
From what I've read, Bonnie and Clyde grossed about $70 million by 1973. Mostly profit.
C.C.,
This is a great point. For want of a life, I’ve been scanning through the Beatty oeuvre on the IMDB this morning and I honestly didn’t realize that Bonnie and Clyde was the hit that it was. I put this down to my ignorance of the silent film era, but it deepens my understanding of the Hollywood mentality. Apparently, every actor that has starred in a hit – even if it was released the last time McKinley was elected – is accorded a disproportionate amount of respect. (I know. I keeed, I keeed.) I’d still like to see that present value calculation though given that he’s done little but break even or fail spectacularly since.
quote:
Originally posted by Citizen Carrier
In reality, Bonnie and Clyde were not really romantic figures. They were murderers. And if you read of their entire criminal "career", you'll find they were perhaps the dumbest, most inept and least successful of all the Prohibition-era "motorized bandits".
I’d even go further if that’s possible and argue that Bonnie and Clyde weren’t just murderers but spree killing sociopaths. It’s been a while since I’ve read up on the 30’s gangsters, but if I recall correctly Bonnie and Clyde were the kind of people who would walk into a gas station and shoot the proprietor dead for no reason prior to robbing him. I even seem to remember incidents in which they broke into private homes and shot the owners dead just to have a place to stay, although I’ll admit my memory may be somewhat faulty. They really remind me as nothing so much as a trial run for Starkweather and Fugate, another pair that Hollywood has idolized too much:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069762/ |
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Sardu
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
1126 Posts |
Posted - 12/02/2007 : 11:08:40 AM
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Bugsy was a modest hit in '91 (or somewhere around there). Of course, Beatty had no creative input into it; he was a hired gun actor only AFAIK. Which tells me something. Just for myself I found Bulworth physically painful. I've had a better time getting a prostate exam.
"Meeting you makes me want to be a real noodle cook"
--Tampopo |
Edited by - Sardu on 12/02/2007 11:10:23 AM |
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zombiewhacker
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
1475 Posts |
Posted - 12/02/2007 : 11:23:19 AM
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| Heaven Can Wait may have been a modest hit back in the late 70s... not sure. It certainly was one of Beatty's most innocuous efforts. |
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Greenhornet
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
1791 Posts |
Posted - 12/02/2007 : 1:07:09 PM
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Off topic, but:
http://texashideout.tripod.com/bc.htm
They have some great information on the Bonnie and Clyde movie, too.
"The Queen is testing poisons." CLEOPATRA, 1935 |
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Terrahawk
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
USA
644 Posts |
Posted - 12/02/2007 : 1:58:33 PM
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quote:
Originally posted by Citizen Carrier
Denver Pyle, known to most of us as "Uncle Jesse" from The Dukes of Hazzard tv show...
If only I were so lucky. I worked for a company in the 90's that ran about 150 nursing homes. They developed a program called Circle of Care that they showed to all of their employees. It was meant to let the employees know how to treat residents (they were not patients or cash cows). The program had a series of nice and professional video tapes. Yes, the star of the program was Denver Pyle. Someone at corporate decided corporate employees should go through the program and being in IT was not an acceptable reason to avoid it. After three days of singing (oh yes there is a Circle of Care song, it haunts my dreams), dancing, watching Mr. Pyle, and hugging, I was doubting my sanity. At the end, all of the corporate officers came down to the graduation and gave us hugs.
Sorry about the OT post there, but I need the therapy.
- While science has societal benefits, science is not a social virtue. - |
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Citizen Carrier
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
322 Posts |
Posted - 12/02/2007 : 2:16:06 PM
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Even further OT, I guess.
Americans eventually got their heads on straight. In the 1980s the Charter Arms gun company introduced a cased, matched pair of snub-nosed revolvers called "The Bonnie and Clyde". The "Clyde" was a .38 Special, the "Bonnie" was a similar gun chambered in .32.
It turned out to be one of the worst marketing ideas in gun history as the idea totally tanked and is considered instrumental in the failure of the original Charter Arms company. No self-respecting, law abiding gun enthusiasts wanted to buy or own revolvers inscribed with the names of two despicable characters like that.
For those who like looking at old photographs (which this thread has caused me to want to do), I recommend this website:
http://www.shorpy.com
I am amazed by the quality of the photography displayed there. I thought my 7 megapixel camera was a pretty good item until I started looking at that website. And notice the children in those photographs.
They haven't spent hours wasting away playing "Halo" or "Warcraft". Most of them were working. They look...happy. Satisfied.
A different era. One I miss without ever having really known.
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Neville
Holy Cardinal and Five Star General of the Righteous Knighthood of Jabootu
Spain
1590 Posts |
Posted - 12/02/2007 : 3:01:35 PM
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I have little interest in continuing talking about Warren Beatty's career, but another visit here was obligatory in order to thank R. Dittmar for the heads up on the reviews. I've been reading most of them throughout the whole morning and laughing like a maniac. The piece on The island of Dr. Moreau (Brando version, of course) is specially funny.
But again, so is most of the stuff about the movie I've been reading since 1996. |
Edited by - Neville on 12/02/2007 3:03:06 PM |
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