SpoutBlog on spout.com

Last week a photoshop of Harvey Weinstein as Darth Vader made my birthday. Today, a whole video featuring “Darth Weinstein” has made my week. And it’s only Monday. The animated companion to the Stop Darth Weinstein! campaign comes to us via Harvey’s biggest fan, Stu Van Airsdale of The Reeler, now in his second full-time week over at Defamer (in case you haven’t been paying attention). Though the video is pretty stationary for the most part, it’s worth at least listening to for its dead-on parody of where Harvey’s head is likely these days. Be sure to watch the opening intro, though, and the end, which gives more details on the Weinstein Co. boycott protests happening in NY and LA (and, if you organize, your town) this Friday. I might just have to venture up to the AMC in Times Square for my own look at the protesters who attend in costume (it’s being encouraged).

And don’t forget, if you love Star Wars and want to see Fanboys as it was meant to be seen, then boycott Superhero Movie this weekend.

Under discussion:

Less Than Zero  (1987)

American Psycho  (2000)

The Rules of Attraction  (2002)

The Informers  (2009)

With an almost completely dead, holiday hungover RSS, I spent the morning leisurely slogging through this LA Times profile of 80s it-boy novelist Bret Easton Ellis. Much of the story’s 3,000 words are devoted to defenses of Ellis’ literary reputation, most notably for our purposes from New York Times film critic A.O. Scott, who praises Ellis as “a much more radical writer than he seems.” The rest of it details the oft-adapted novelist’s own attempts to break into screenwriting.

Ellis’ published work has so far formed the basis of three released films: the gloriously trashy Less Than Zero, in which Robert Downey Jr. essentially plays a future version of himself; Mary Harron’s American Psycho, which broke with Ellis’ trademark moral passivity in order to turn the material into obvious satire; and Roger Avery’s Rules of Attraction, which seemed to be kind of more about Roger Avery learning how to use Final Cut Pro than anything else. Somewhere along the way, Ellis apparently “realized he’s not very good at script doctoring” and started concentrating on crafting scripts from scratch. The first of these efforts to see the light of day will be the upcoming The Informers, for which Ellis adapted his own shot story collection in collaboration with Nicholas Jarecki. But to say that Ellis’ outlook on his new career is less than rosy would be an understatement. After the jump, an excerpt from the end of the article, in which Ellis semi-bitterly acknowledges that he’s in a “lost period.”

(more…)

Under discussion:

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three  (1974)

Under the Same Moon  (2008)

Meet the Browns  (2008)

• Tyler Perry’s Meet The Browns made $20 million this weekend, which wasn’t enough to beat Horton Hears a Who at the box office.  Drillbit Taylor opened with just $10 million; Variety vaguely says it’s “the second lowest” opening for Owen Wilson after The Big Bounce, but that statistic must exclude every Wes Anderson film and anything else that’s opened in platform release. Speaking of platform releases, The Weinstein Company has finally has a successful one to speak of: Under the Same Moon broke the record for the biggest opening of a Spanish-language film in the U.S. this weekend with $2.6 million on 266 screens.
• James Gandolfini will play the mayor of New York City in that remake of The Taking of Pelham 123.  The film hasn’t been shot yet, and it’ll still probably hit theaters before what was suppossed to Gandolfini’s first post-Sopranos project, Where the Wild Things Are.
• Regal Cinemas is looking to double its number of IMAX screens over the next two years, via a deal where the theater chain and the giant screen guys share both the cost of the expansion, and the resulting profits.