A new kind of film emerged in the late ‘80s and first half of the 1990s to as an alternative to the mind-numbing noise of the Boomer Blockbusters. Smaller studios like Miramax rose to champion independent films. Generation X auteurs shaped by obsessive home video viewing – Quentin Tarantino, P.T. Anderson, Robert Rodriguez, Kevin Smith, and Darren Aronofsky – passed on the Hollywood path and instead built careers through low budget, DIY productions. “Reservoir Dogs,” “Sydney,” “El Mariachi,” “Clerks,” and “Pi” launched careers that would lead to Academy Awards and some of the most exciting films of the 1990s and 2000s.

These filmmakers’ origins are true to the generational temperament of their peers.

Children born in the ‘60s and ‘70s did not grow up in the affluence and tranquility of the 1950s consensus. Instead they took a backseat as the Consciousness Revolution of the 1960s raged. It was now when the younger Silent and Boomer Generations rose up to challenge the cultural institutions built and maintained by the GI Generation who fought World War II.

The children of this era were forced to become independent, entrepreneurial, and innovative early on. Unlike the Boomers growing up in the ‘50s and the Millennials in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Gen-Xers were not protected. The adults were too busy with the cultural chaos of the ‘60s and ‘70s to be the parents they should have been. Thus, Gen X knew that they had no one to rely on except for themselves. According to William Strauss and Neil Howe in their histories of American generations, this is standard for “Reactive” generations – and equips them for crises come middle-age. George Washington, John Adams, Ulysses Grant, Dwight Eisenhower, and Harry Truman were all part of “Reactive” generations too.

We can see how this mentality applied itself to Gen-X filmmakers. When these future auteurs wanted to make a film they maxed out their credit cards (Smith,) or volunteered for medical experiments (Rodriguez) and shot with the cheapest supplies available.

For Andrew Breitbart the path tread has been comparable. How can one reform a corrupt media complex that’s in the Democrats’ back pocket? Become the Media. Control of NBC is not necessary to launch stories that result in the defunding of ACORN or a congressman’s resignation.

Breitbart was born in 1969 – almost the middle of Generation X. The first 100 pages of Righteous Indignation, his hybrid memoir-manifesto, trace a trajectory not uncommon to others now in their mid ‘30s to late ‘40s. Breitbart’s college years were a time of high grade slack, irresponsible gambling, chemical self-destruction, and Marxist indoctrination. Emerging out of the haze with a worthless degree Breitbart set about rising from the bottom of the Hollywood pecking order.

His job as a script deliverer meant shuttling packages around town while listening to the radio. This drew Breitbart into politics and the media, with the first blow to his anti-intellectual Hollywood leftism dealt during the Clarence Thomas hearings. The coup de grace came in the subsequent search for alternative answers when Breitbart dared tune his radio dial to someone he thought was a “Nazi,” Rush Limbaugh.

Then began a media voyage through the late ‘90s and first half of the ‘00s including apprenticeship with Matt Drudge during the Clinton years and constructing The Huffington Post while George W. Bush was in office. Righteous Indignation then shifts into manifesto form with two chapters that should be released as stand-alone pamphlets. Chapter 6 is “Breakthrough,” an accessible summary of the Left from Rousseau through Marx to the Frankfurt School and Saul Alinsky. In chapter 5 Breitbart lays out his rules of political warfare in his “Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Revolutionaries.”

The remaining chapters tell Breitbart’s narrative putting the Rules and the Breakthrough knowledge into practice to fight ACORN and defend the Tea Party.

What won’t you find in Righteous Indignation? Some manifesto of Breitbart’s political beliefs.

Breitbart is not driven by creating some “right-wing” utopia. He’s not obsessed with Liberalism vs. Conservatism as David Mamet is. He’s focused on disrupting and exposing the practical and concrete effects of the Left.

The takeaway from Righteous Indignation is that citizen journalists now have all the tools needed to bring down corrupt politicians, bad laws, and destructive organizations. Breitbart has bypassed the mainstream media gatekeepers just as his Gen-X cinema peers overcame the boomer blockbuster mentality.

The endowment of Generation X Hollywood Apostates is pragmatic independence: Ideology is not important. Dealing with the problems themselves in an effective way is what matters. Results matter. New institutions can and should be built.

In Part 5 of the Hollywood Revolt, we’ll conclude with a look at the future of both film and politics as a new generation rises and an old one is reincarnated.

But when we look at the leading actresses of 2010, the dearth of great performances and great parts is stunning.  The Golden Globe nominees for best actress this year were Halle Berry in the anonymous flick Frankie and Alice, playing a crazy person in her usual over-the-top style; Nicole Kidman in the anonymous flick Rabbit Hole, playing a grieving mother in her usual cold and remote style; Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone, playing a teenage girl looking for her meth-making dad; Natalie Portman in Black Swan, playing a crazy person with a constipated look plastered on her mug; and Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine, playing a spoiled girl who gets knocked up, married, and presumably divorced.  Has anyone seen any of these women in any of these films?  And if the disastrous Natalie Portman – Queen Amidala masturbating, anyone? – is the frontrunner for Best Actress at the Oscars, how far have female figures fallen?

Far.  Quick, think of the ten greatest living film actors.  It’s not that tough – we have iconic male film stars all the time.  Now think of the ten greatest living film actresses.  Now take away all women over 50.  Still thinking, aren’t you?

The simple truth is that actresses were far more iconic fifty years ago than they are now.  We may want to shtup most of the actresses we see on screen today, but we don’t show up to see them because of their standout screen personas.  That isn’t because today’s actresses are less talented than their predecessors – we have many talented actresses on the scene.  It’s because screen executives have decided that truly feminine women, with both brains and looks, are no longer in keeping with the times.  Instead, film execs have cut a sharp dichotomy between “sexy” women and “smart” women – it’s either Megan Fox or Kate Winslet.  Charlize Theron can’t play a strong, graceful, beautiful woman – she’s got to be either a lesbian serial killer or a piece of eye candy.

The feminism embraced by most of today’s execs is antiquated.  They still think that women must act like men in order to promote equality of the sexes.  Make Natalie Portman’s character a man in Black Swan and take away Darren Aronofsky’s idiotic and self-centered camera movements and you’ve got an oversexed Ronald Colman in A Double Life.  There’s nothing feminine about Ellen Page in Juno – she’s more of a dude than Michael Cera in the same film.  What ever happened to Bette Davis, to Vivien Leigh, to the old-school, unmannered Meryl Streep?  They’re gone, replaced with pale imitations starring in angst-filled nonsense glorifying aberrant behavior.

Ironically enough, the feminism of today’s Hollywood has killed the female movie star.  If Hollywood wants to restore that luster, they’ll need to embrace femininity, in all of its three-dimensional glory, once again.

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Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” inhabits the mind of such a performer, one whose psyche has at some point suffered a crippling blow. Its heroine seeks perfection of ballet, her craft, but proves ill-suited to the character creation process. Performers have all sorts of methods and philosophies on the subject, but most seem to say that any performance is in some way grounded to the self. But what about one who has very little self to ground their performance to?

Natalie Portman stars as Nina, the aforementioned ballerina. It’s her best screen performance, one that conveys the distress of a tortured soul coupled with roiling psychological repression. That’s apart from the physicality of portraying a top-tier ballerina, for which she reportedly trained for 10 months. Those only accustomed to her popular image as either, a) the Effervescent Love Interest, or b) the Deeply Concerned Love Interest, are in for a surprise.

Nina lives with her mother (Barbara Hershey), one of those stage mothers who lives vicariously through their child’s talent under the guise of paternal love and concern. There’s a uneasiness in their rapport. Nina’s room is decorated like a child’s, she walks on eggshells, and Mom meticulously tracks her movements lest a moment of the day go unaccounted.

If Nina’s home life is ruled by her mother, work falls under the authority of Thomas (Vincent Cassel), the director of the New York ballet company.  He decides that they will “re-imagine” the great ballet “Swan Lake,” with Nina in the lead thanks to her violent rebuttal to one of his sexual advances. Thomas knows she’s perfect for the virginal, flawless White Swan, but wants to see her seductive and electrifying side as the Black Swan. Since Nina appears to have never even had a romantic or even sexual experience in her life, this presents a great challenge, one poised to shatter a psyche already teetering on the brink of madness. Lily (Mila Kunis), a dancer from San Francisco, has the provocative edge perfect for the Black Swan, making her the obvious competition, though her friendly overtures tear a hole in Nina’s fragile reality.

Aronofsky unfolds the rapid degradation of Nina’s world as a horror film, very reminiscent of Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion” and with flavors of David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive.”  If the setting for a horror picture is one’s mind, then the menace comes from the torments of the imagination and the brutality inflicted on the body. “Black Swan” might not be the first film with moments that emphasize the excruciating physical toll professional dancing can take on the body, though I suspect it might reach the most audience members.

In a sense,“Black Swan” represents a stylistic advance from Aronofsky’s previous film, “The Wrestler,” though it also loses that picture’s heart. Portman’s character is never afforded the pathos that allowed Mickey Rourke to give such an enthralling, heartbreaking turn as another performer, a washed up pro-wrestler whose life knows no bottom. Nina’s collapse thrills but simultaneously retains a cool detachment from our sympathies, her naiveté effectively stripping away much of the humanity that allows an audience to become truly invested in a character’s fate. We don’t really know her, because there’s not much to know.

Aronofsky also directed 2000’s “Requiem for a Dream,” a film about drug addiction so hyper-actively nightmarish in tone and style that it should be screened to high school students in lieu of near worthless anti-drug lectures. With “The Wrestler,” he demonstrated a capacity for character studies. This falls somewhere between the two, impressive in its ways, though not nearly as good as either.

The problem, I decided, was two-fold. For one, I am a crank and a pessimist, and becoming more so with every passing hour it seems. And for another, we are living in era of chronic political, cultural, and creative decay of the kind that afflicts all empires in their twilight (Of course, I don’t have to tell you that the two are not unrelated, and that the latter is very much a proximate cause of the former).

So there we have it. I cannot give you a best of, because what I have seen this past year has been mostly dreck – occasionally tolerable dreck, but dreck just the same. So instead I shall give you the only honest list a pessimist can give, and that is my top letdowns of the year, the movies that were advertised as good, and should have been good…but weren’t. Shall we begin?

1) Iron Man 2: Oh boy, what a botched, senseless mess, made all the more unwatchable by the sublimity of the first outing of the franchise two years previous. The first Iron Man gave us – at last – a superhero fighting America’s enemies, blasting terrorists out of their Afghan caves with an archetypal American inventiveness. Robert Downey, Jr’s Tony Stark was part Batman, part Henry Ford – an American smart-ass cum bad-ass. Conflicted, sure, but a genius and wealthy and unashamed of both. On top of that, the film was sharply crafted, moved briskly, and contained fantastic performances by some great actors who took their movie very seriously, but still looked like they were having a blast.

It was so great, that when we were offered another helping, we salivated “Yes, please!” but instead were served an incomprehensible plot with a side of bad editing, and for dessert a villain who looked like he hadn’t read the script (he hadn’t). Everyone either gave the impression that they were trying too hard or couldn’t care less – often at the same time, which is quite a hat trick when you think about it.

Please, Marvel, and everyone making superhero movies – story, story, story.

2) Black Swan:  This movie, a coal-black tale about a ballerina’s descent into madness and murder by director Darren Aronofsky, seemed to have everything going for it. Visionary filmmaker? Check. Sky high reviews? Check. Two hot chicks making out? Check and check.

Black Swan has been compared to a lot of movies, especially Susperia, The Red Shoes, and Repulsion, all of them classics and all of them far superior to this tripe. Put it this way, the only thing Aronofsky seems interested in is filming Natalie Portman masturbate and engage in possible hallucinatory sapphism; he certainly ignores everything else. And while you may say fine, that is a noble goal in and of itself (then again, you may not), let me just say the the two young women are so emaciated that the scene contains all the eroticism of two broomsticks going at it. It is undoubtedly a sign of advancing years to watch such a scene and think “Someone get that poor girl a sandwich!” but, there you go.

So these are the two movies that disappointed me most this year. I’ll now say goodbye to you, my Big Hollywood readers, and wish you a very Happy New Year. I look forward to sharing my disappointments with you in 2011.

I know you’d be disappointed if I didn’t.

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Early on, director Darren Aronofsky (“The Wrestler”) does a wonderful job creating the story’s atmosphere. Aronofsky shows the drive and ambition that consume ballerinas as they rehearse. The world he depicts is one of fierce competition, unbridled passion and intense dedication.

Nina is one of the most intense dancers performing in an upcoming staging of “Swan Lake.” Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel) will be directing and s searching for a new lead. Since she has passed her prime, former prodigy Beth Macintyre (Winona Ryder) is being replaced, much to her disdain. Leroy thinks Nina is a good dancer but the lead actress must be able to show the two distinct sides of this particular character.

The lead “Swan Lake” is the coveted role of the Swan Queen. The Swan Queen must play the White Swan and her evil twin, the Black Swan. Leroy notes that Nina would do well as the White Swan but not as the loose and carefree Black Swan. After he admits this, Leroy tries to take advantage of a disappointed Nina. When she fights back, she earns his respect and is soon offered the lead.

Nina knows that Ryder’s Beth has been left behind but she’s too focused on her own ambition to care. Eventually, newcomer Lily (Mila Kunis) arrives in town to join the ballet. Lily is a carefree and natural performer and soon Nina becomes obsessed with her and comes to believe that Lily is trying to steal the role of the Swan Queen. Egged on by a controlling mother (Barbara Hershey) who was a former ballerina herself, Nina begins to lose her grip on reality as opening night approaches. 

As Nina becomes obsessed she also starts hallucinating. She walks down the sidewalk and a woman approaches who looks just like her. She also becomes obsessed with physical pain. She scratches herself, picks at her own skin and even has disturbing fantasies about self-mutilation. Time and again, we in the audience are forced to watch skin being picked at and ripped out, scenes of physical anguish intended to gross us out, but they quickly grow tiresome.

Aside from her self-mutilation, Nina develops an obsession with Lily which leads to an unflinching lesbian love scene between the two of them. The physical relationship between the couple seemingly comes out of nowhere and doesn’t really fit the rest of the story. Alongside the scenes of physical pain, these scenes are over the top and eventually make the story completely unbelievable.

The story is also hurt by some of the supporting characters who don’t add any depth. Nina’s overzealous mother and her sex-obsessed director aren’t well developed and are only used as plot devices to push Nina further over the edge.

Although I can’t recommend it, “Black Swan” does create an intoxicating atmosphere difficult to under appreciate. Aronofsky has crafted a beautiful setting for a story that doesn’t deserve it.

Then, alas, came word that the script for the film was “a mess.” The oddly named “Vulture” dropped the bomb that Snyder had been hired because the studio wanted a director capable of putting together a hacky “rush job” so Warner Brothers could keep the rights to the Man of Steel. Director Darren Aronofsky, fresh off the buzz of his upcoming film “The Black Swan” passed on the project because it was in such disarray and reeked of a studio cash grab…. Great Ceasar’s ghost, what’s going on here?

If you haven’t been reading Big Hollywood, or living on Planet Earth, you might not know that Hollywood has a leftist bent to it. You also may not know that the Hollywood press is just as corrupt, self-serving and leftist as their cousins in the mainstream media. The reports of “Superman’s” death are greatly exaggerated. This is nasty spin, aimed to take down two of Hollywood’s new school power players while boosting up a critical darling who has little appeal outside the coastal critics community. It also has a lot to do with politics and ideology.

One has to feel for Darren Aronofsky. I like his films to a certain degree, but don’t think that he is a ground-breaking visionary the way that many film students, mainstream critics, and hipsters claim him to be. “Requiem for a Dream” is not some seminal milestone in the history of film. I do think he is capable and incredibly talented. He has been attached to several high profile projects, and it seems that whenever a film is hunting for a director, his name pops up. He was attached to “Batman” before Nolan and has long been rumored to be the man behind the camera for the “Robocop” reboot. Yet, instead of those films, he continues to do well received, smaller, art house projects like “The Wrestler” and “Black Swan.”

Toiling in the indie world may be emotionally and creatively satisfying, but it doesn’t satisfy a thing called your wallet. Reports indicate that he didn’t take a salary in order to get “Black Swan” made. If you are his agent or manager, you’ve got to be dying. IFP spirit awards, cocktail parties, and glowing reviews from the Village Voice don’t help pay off your Mercedes SUV. Simply put, Aronofsky needs to prove that he can handle a blockbuster. He needs the paycheck that goes along with that task.

So, when word breaks that he lost the job to Zack Snyder, his people have to go into full-fledged damage control mode. Especially when the follow up scuttlebutt is that he’ll be directing the much lower profile “Wolverine 2.” Much like the New York Times parroting Nancy Pelosi’s talking points, entertainment industry reporters and moles are all too happy to run wild with spin from a friendly source like Aronofsky’s people. Think about it. Only one person benefits from this story, and it ain’t Clark Kent.

On top of that, the entertainment press loves to attack both Christopher Nolan and Zack Snyder. You can also toss Matthew Vaughn, Edgar Wright, and Sam Raimi onto that list. Just look at all the stories about “Inception” before it came out. All the prognosticating that the film was a huge “risk.” That it was stupid to make a smart film as a blockbuster. “Watchmen” was panned before they even started shooting it. And somehow “Kick Ass” is this monumental failure despite raking in over $100 million at the box office and DVD, despite having a production budget under $25 million.

These guys have all proven that they have little need for the traditional studio system. They are studios onto themselves, using complex financing mechanisms and tough as nails producing partners to bring their films to the screen. They have also managed to do what the studios have tried to do for decades and failed; to merge inventive and quality filmmaking with the “blockbuster.” Not since the heyday of the 1980s, when Zemeckis, Spielberg, Cameron and Reitman were cranking out tent pole films, have we seen so many big-budget action films that also deliver the goods on character and story. The list of directors above have brought us that rare thing, a “dumb” movie that wasn’t stupid.

And that, my friends, pisses off the mid-level executives at the studios. Their bread and butter is delivering notes and dictating the creative direction of genre films. Guys like Nolan and Snyder don’t seem to take these folks too seriously. On top of that, they’ve played their cards right and managed to financially insulate themselves from their influence. Think about it. How much fun must it be to give Brett Ratner, McG, or Paul WS Anderson notes? Nolan and Snyder take away their power, influence, and sheer joy of existence. These mid-level types are EXACTLY the same people who “leak” intel to the trades, blogs, and gossip rags. They are tight with the entertainment industry beat reporters. Christopher Nolan could care less what Nikki Finke thinks. Not so for a development person. So, it should come as no surprise that this cabal of entertainment reporters and business school grads who fancy themselves filmmakers would conspire to tarnish the reps of the only guys in the industry who “get it.”

Because the other people clearly don’t.

One should also consider what is meant by “the script is a mess.” If, hypothetically, the story didn’t fit into left-wing ideology, would that be considered “a mess” to the low-level development people and Sundance types? Let’s just throw it out there that perhaps, perhaps, the directors of “The Dark Knight” and “300” have cooked up something that will truly resonate with middle America. Something that is true to the original comic.

What if Superman travels the world as a reporter, then returns to Metropolis doubting his caped escapades? He realizes that since he can’t be everywhere at once, people have stopped trying to be self-reliant, believing that the messianic Superman will save them, rather than working to save themselves.

Enter General Zod.

Instead of waging war, Zod promises everyone that he, unlike the America-centric Superman, will be the world’s superhero. He will protect and provide for all, and all he wants in return is for you to surrender your free will and “kneel before Zod.”

Superman, knowing of Zod’s evil, launches unpopular attempts to warn the world and battle Zod. Being evenly matched, Superman must turn to an unlikely ally. The only man who has dedicated his life’s work to killing a Kryptonian: Lex Luthor.

In the end, Superman and Luthor wage a final battle against Zod before the United States, the last nation to submit, surrenders its freedom.

To a leftist, that movie isn’t a “mess,” it’s a full blown disaster.

And it’s exactly the kind of film we can expect from Nolan and Snyder.

Directors get too much credit when a movie goes right, and too little blame when a movie goes wrong.  There are certain directors, however, who get credit even when movies go wrong.  Here, then, are my top ten overrated directors of all time… 

10.  Ridley Scott:  Ridley Scott has, for some odd reason, received accolades that far outpace his actual accomplishments.  He’s made one entertaining film, Gladiator, and a host of second rate films masquerading as masterpieces.  Blade Runner is a bizarre and massively overpraised mess.  Thelma and Louise is liberal tripe, although it does provide the best imagistic summary of modern feminism: two irritating “independent” women driving themselves off a cliff.  White Squall is the single most depressing film ever made.  Black Hawk Down is loved by conservatives because it isn’t anti-military, but that’s about the only praiseworthy element to a film that is an endless series of quick cuts between white guys who look alike in their helmets.  Who’s been killed?  Who’s still alive?  You have no way of knowing.  Then there’s Kingdom of Heaven, which is an homage to the “religion of peace” and a slap at Christianity through and through.  Alien is slow.  GI Jane is hysterically terrible.  Plus, it’s got Orlando Bloom, who has about as much charisma and credibility as Al Gore.  Scott is a key player in the rise of the infernal shaky-cam, which is not only biologically inaccurate (the human eye adjusts for bodily movements), but incredibly annoying.  For that alone, he should be exiled to a land without cameras. 

9.  Michael Mann: All style, no substance.  

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8.  David Lean:  Everything Lean made is too long by at least half an hour.  I know it’s mortal sin to suggest that Laurence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Ryan’s Daughter are anything less than masterpieces, but … they’re all less than masterpieces.  Great Expectations was good.  Everything else was downhill. 

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7.  Darren Aronofsky:  Aronofsky is a talentless dud who has bamboozled his way into Hollywood upper echelon.  Every film he’s ever made is a disaster. Pi is a jumble of nonsense that starts nowhere and goes nowhere.  It may be the worst film ever made.  Watching it made me want to rip out my own retinas, then replace them through surgery, then rip them out again.  Of late, Aronofsky has been spicing up his chaotic, disordered crap with explicit lesbian sex scenes, a stylistic trait he apparently cribbed from David Lynch (don’t worry, we’ll get to Lynch shortly).  Requiem for a Dream is noteworthy only in that Aronofsky somehow convinced Jennifer Connolly to participate in a lesbian scene involving mutual anal sex and a dildo (the scene, by the way, is meant to be depraved, but therein lies Aronofsky’s problem: he’s got to have sympathetic characters before we feel bad for them).  The fanboy press is already agog over rumors that his newest ode to depravity, Black Swan, will feature a sex scene between Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis.  Clearly, his target audience is pathetic losers in college dorms looking for an excuse to watch girl-on-girl action in the name of art.  Not one of his films has been a major commercial success. Yet somehow, someone keeps giving him money.  It’s enough to make one question the existence of a beneficent God. 

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6.  Mike Nichols: No.  Just no.  The Graduate is contemptible and snort-worthy spoiled 1960s-child angst.  The ending of that movie alone makes it unworthy of human viewing.  All future directors take note: having your main characters staring blankly into nothingness is not an ending.  It is a cop out.  Nichols’ directorial style is ordinary and he picks bland material.  And he was an icon for the Baby Boomers.  If that’s not a sign of their mental disturbance, I don’t know what is. 

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5.  David Lynch:  Pure and absolute suckage, with the exception of The Elephant Man.  Lynch is one of those annoyingly “deep” directors we’re all supposed to puzzle over.  Forget it.  There’s nothing worth puzzling.  He’s as empty as they come, and he makes up for it with graphic sex scenes, just like his imitator, Aranofsky.  John Nolte calls Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, “Mesmerizing, sexy, frightening … and all driven by a visionary director who created a hypnotic puzzlebox unlike anything we’ve seen before or will again.”  Uh … no.  This movie makes no sense, doesn’t try to make sense, and then fills the vacuum with Naomi Watts and Laura Harring feeling each other up.  This ain’t great moviemaking.  It’s Vivid Entertainment spliced with the worst of Raymond Chandler.  Unfortunately, that just about sums up Lynch’s career. 

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4.  Quentin Tarantino:  I recently watched Inglourious Basterds and marveled at Tarantino’s skill.  But he is a gifted high school child given a camera for his birthday, and entranced with his knowledge of cinema.  Which means, in simple terms, he doesn’t know how to tell a story.  His films are Wagnerian: long periods of boredom and “artistic” violence punctuated by moments of utter brilliance.  To paraphrase William McAdoo on Warren G. Harding, Tarantino’s films are like an army moving over a landscape in search of an idea.  Sometimes Tarantino’s films actually capture a struggling thought and bear it triumphantly a prisoner … until the idea dies of servitude and overwork. Tarantino is to homages and gore what James Cameron is to spectacle.  Unfortunately, he is also to plot what Cameron is. 

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3.  Woody Allen:  He’s pretentious and unbearable.  His movies are like nails screeching on a chalkboard, only with less humor.  He is as nerdy as Peter Orszag, but he acts out his fantasies and illuminates his insecurities in film and expects us all to watch.  It’s okay for a director to be self-centered – Orson Welles was famously self-centered.  But you actually have to be an interesting person in order to spend that much time focusing on yourself.  Allen isn’t.  He’s a whiny narcissist with sexual inferiority issues.  And no one except for him cares about the status of his penis.  As a side note, he made Diane Keaton into a “legitimate actress,” which alone should qualify him for the Seventh Circle of Hell. 

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2.  Martin Scorsese:  In the musical Damn Yankees, a group of hapless baseball players sing the following lyric: “You’ve gotta have heart / All you really need is heart!”  Martin Scorsese never saw that musical.  His films are entirely devoid of anything resembling likable characters.  They are cold and calculating and ruthless – and boring.  Nobody cares what happens to Leonardo DiCaprio in The Departed (in fact, in one screening I saw, people cheered when he got it in the head).  The Aviator takes as long to tell as Howard Hughes did to live.  Gangs of New York featured a brilliant performance from Daniel Day Lewis, and not much else (on a side note, there is no excuse for killing Liam Neeson in the first ten minutes of a film).  Casino is nasty, brutish, and long.  Goodfellas is similarly disgusting – you feel the need to take a shower after watching.  Why anyone would want to spend several hours of his/her life with coke-snorting Ray Liotta and Co. is beyond me.  The Last Temptation of Christ is baffling.  The Color of Money is a snooze-fest (if you want to see a directorial clinic rather than Scorsese’s garbage, try Robert Rossen’s The Hustler, to which The Color of Money is a sequel).  Raging Bull is gross.  Mean Streets is gross and soporific.  Taxi Driver is perhaps the most overrated film in Hollywood history — dreary, grungy, and subzero.  Scorsese has never seen a main character he liked, a villain he hated, or a pair of editing scissors. 

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1. Alfred Hitchcock: He’s not even close to the worst on the list, but he’s certainly the most overrated.  He never made a great film.  He was the Stephen King of the silver screen: he made films with great premises, but he never knew where to go from there.  The psychoanalysis at the end of Psycho is laughable.  North by Northwest relies on the tried-and-true random helpful coincidence to save our hero, time and again.  It brings to mind one of Twain’s rules of writing, directed toward Fenimore Cooper: “the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.”  Not so much for Hitchcock.  Spellbound once again relies on amateur psychoanalysis.  Notorious is the same movie as Rebecca.  Rear Window makes one reach for the fast-forward button.  Vertigo makes one reach for the cyanide.  The Birds quickly becomes inane.  If you want to see good Hitchcock, rent Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  Restricted to the one hour medium, he’s at his best.  Left to his own devices, he’s slightly better than mediocre. 

Whom would you nominate?

And please do take a moment to give to the Hollywood Fund For Moral Illiteracy…

Source:

Woody Allen
Wes Anderson
Darren Aronofsky
Jonatham Demme
Stephen Frears
David Lynch
Martin Scorsese

Full list: (it might have been quicker to name who didn’t sign the petition)

Fatih Akin, Stephane Allagnon, Woody Allen, Pedro Almodovar, Wes Anderson, Jean-Jacques Annaud, Alexandre Arcady, Fanny Ardant, Asia Argento, Darren Aronofsky, Olivier Assayas, Alexander Astruc, Gabriel Auer, Luc Barnier , Christophe Barratier, Xavier Beauvois , Liria Begeja , Gilles Behat, Jean-Jacques Beineix, Marco Bellochio, Monica Bellucci, Djamel Bennecib, Giuseppe Bertolucci , Patrick Bouchitey, Paul Boujenah, Jacques Bral, Patrick Braoudé, André Buytaers, Christian Carion, Henning Carlsen, Jean-michel Carre, Mathieu Celary, Patrice Chéreau, Elie Chouraqui, Souleymane Cissé, Alain Corneau, Jérôme Cornuau, Miguel Courtois, Dominique Crevecoeur, Alfonso Cuaron, Luc et Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Jonathan Demme, Alexandre Desplat, Rosalinde et Michel Deville, Georges Dybman, Jacques Fansten, Joël Farges, Gianluca Farinelli (Cinémathèque de de Bologne), Etienne Faure, Michel Ferry, Scott Foundas, Stephen Frears, Thierry Frémaux, Sam Gabarski, René Gainville, Tony Gatlif, Costa Gavras, Jean-Marc Ghanassia, Terry Gilliam, Christian Gion, Marc Guidoni, Buck Henry, David Heyman, Laurent Heynemann, Robert Hossein, Jean-Loup Hubert, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Gilles Jacob, Just Jaeckin, Alain Jessua, Pierre Jolivet, Kent Jones (World Cinema Foundation), Roger Kahane, Nelly Kaplan, Wong Kar Waï, Ladislas Kijno, Harmony Korinne, Jan Kounen, Diane Kurys, Emir Kusturica, John Landis, Claude Lanzmann, André Larquié, Vinciane Lecocq, Patrice Leconte, Claude Lelouch, Gérard Lenne, David Lynch, Michael Mann, François Margolin, Jean-PierreMarois, Tonie Marshall, Mario Martone, Nicolas Mauvernay, Radu Mihaileanu, Claude Miller, Mario Monicelli, Jeanne Moreau, Sandra Nicolier, Michel Ocelot, Alexander Payne, Richard Pena (Directeur Festival de NY), Michele Placido, Philippe Radault, Jean-Paul Rappeneau, Raphael Rebibo, Yasmina Reza, Jacques Richard, Laurence Roulet, Walter Salles, Jean-Paul Salomé, Marc Sandberg, Jerry Schatzberg, Julian Schnabel, Barbet Schroeder, Ettore Scola, Martin Scorsese, Charlotte Silvera, Abderrahmane Sissako, Paolo Sorrentino, Guillaume Stirn, Tilda Swinton, Jean-Charles Tacchella, Radovan Tadic, Danis Tanovic, Bertrand Tavernier, Cécile Telerman, Alain Terzian, Pascal Thomas, Giuseppe Tornatore, Serge Toubiana, Nadine Trintignant, Tom Tykwer, Alexandre Tylski, Betrand Van Effenterre, Wim Wenders.

EDIT: new names

Isabelle Adjani
Antoine Aronin
Paul Auster
Morgane Beauverger
Candice Belaisch-Goldchmit
Yamina Benguigui
Pascal Bruckner
Jessika Cohen
Philippe Corbé
Jean-Paul Dayan
Katarina De Meulder
Arielle Dombasle
Nathalie Faucheux
Corinne Figuet
Pierre Forciniti
Louis Garrel
Albert Gauvin
Johanna Gozlan
Davide Homitsu Riboli
Taylor Hackford
Isabelle Huppert
Neil Jordan
Thierry Kamami
Milan Kundera
Gaelle Lancien
Claude Lanzmann
Bernard-Henri Lévy
Sam Mendes
Camille Meyer
Patrick Mimouni
Yann Moix
Mike Nichols
Sandra Nicolier
Marie Nieves Perez Neël
Salman Rushdie
Carine Sarna
Ysabelle Saura Del Pan
William Shawcross
Olivier Soares Barbosa
Steven Soderbergh
Nil Symchowicz
Danièle Thompson
Eugenia Varela Navarro
Diane von Furstenberg
Scott Foundas
Margaret Walker
Elsa Zylberstein

The brand new film adaptation of the classic graphic comic Watchmen is a hit of monstrous proportions on its opening weekend, but not everyone loves it. In fact, not only is there a prominent character named Rohrschach (played by Oscar nominee Jackie Earle Haley), the film itself is serving as a Rohrschach Test for critics, fanboys and the broader public.

The Zack Snyder-directed $120M epic started with $4.5M in Thursday midnight business which is outstanding. There was no way for Watchmen to approach the $18.5M midnight start for lat summer’s The Dark Knight. First off, it is March and not the middle of summer blockbuster season. Kids have school. People are working. These are not the lazy days of July when it is easier for many to see a movie at midnight on Thursday, and hit the office late on Friday. The other factor is the movie’s rating. This is an R-rated movie, not PG-13 like The Dark Knight.

Jackie Earle Haley, who played Kelly Leak in the original Bad News Bears, is wearing the Rorschach mask in Watchmen

The Thursday night start for Watchmen was 44% better than the $2.5M midnight shows for director Snyder’s last epic 300 (also rated R). It was also virtually double the $2.3M midnight start for November’s Quantum of Solace (PG-13). Those are much better comparables than The Dark Knight or say last year’s PG-13 rated Twilight, which grabbed a reported $7M midnight preview gross.

Watchmen was spectacular at the box office Friday, and, after consulting with multiple sources, I am projecting a staggering $25.2M (that does include midnight previews) for Friday. That is approximately the 32nd-best opening day in modern box office history, but it is the all-time #12 opening day for a non-sequel.

ALL-TIME TOP 15 OPENING DAYS FOR A NON-SEQUEL
1. Spider-Man – $39.4M
2. Twilight – $35.9M
3. Iron Man – $35.2M
4. Harry Potter & the Sorcerer’s Stone – $32.3M
5. The Simpsons Movie – $30.7M
6. I Am Legend – $30M
7. The Da Vinci Code – $28.6M
8. 300 - $28.1M
9. Transformers – $27.8M
10. Sex & The City – $26.7M
11. The Passion of the Christ – $26.5M
12. Watchmen – $25.2M (projected)
13. Planet of the Apes – $24.6M
14. Hulk – $24.2M
15. The Day After Tomorrow – $23.5M

When the numbers get this big, and the movie is this front-loaded, 3-day projections are problematic, and I am revising downward from the $62.5M I published Friday night (my final prediction on published Wednesday was $63M). It’s looking more like $57M as of Saturday morning. Running time is killing this movie. If the number holds, it would still give Watchmen the all-time #5 opening weekend for an R-rated movie, trailing only Matrix Reloaded, Passion of the Christ (which had better source material contrary to what fanboys may believe), Snyder’s 300 and Hannibal.

Still the all-time biggest opening for an R-rated movie

ALL-TIME TOP 10 OPENINGS FOR AN R-RATED MOVIE
1. The Matrix Reloaded – $91.7M
2. The Passion of the Christ – $83.8M
3. 300 – $70.8M
4. Hannibal – $58M
5. Watchmen – $57M (projected)
6. Sex & The City – $57M
7. 8 Mile – $51.2M
8. Wanted – $50.9M
9. The Matrix Revolutions – $48.5M
10. Troy – $46.8M

One interesting facet of this movie is the fact that three different major studios have a piece of the action. Warner Bros owns domestic distribution rights, Paramount has the foreign and Fox, which won a very public battle over the rights to the movie, is getting 5%-8.5% of gross participation that will be set by the film’s worldwide revenue success. That puts an awful lot of powerful Hollywood types on the same team, working to ensure Warchmen’s success.

Critics are divided about Watchmen as a movie. The movie has a 65% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but the most established critics – what Rotten Tomatoes classifies as the Cream of the Crop – has generated a lower 43% positive reviews. Here’s a sampling from writers that I know and like.

Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal –
“The reverence is inert, the violence noxious, the mythology murky, the tone grandiose, the texture glutinous. It’s an alternate version of The Incredibles minus the delight.”

Pete Hammond, Hollywood.com -
“A stunning, mind-bending, breathtaking densely-packed motion picture experience.”

David Poland, Movie City News -
“The problem with Watchmen is, in the end, that it is a bit of a big stiff bore for two acts with an improved, but mostly uninspired third act. Look at Watchmen from the back to the front. Do you care about what has happened to any of these characters, except Rorschach, by the time you leave the theater?”

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times -
“After the revelation of The Dark Knight here is Watchmen, another bold exercise in the liberation of the superhero movie. It’s a compelling visceral film.”

Watchmen author Alan Moore

Obviously, the reviews are all over the board. Although, there’s no question that the writer of the original Watchmen graphic novel, the enigmatic Alan Moore, hates the movie, it’s just as certain that he has not and will never see it. In fact, he put a curse on the whole project.

Watchmen director Zack Snyder

Director Zack Snyder signed on for a gig that proved too tough and too problematic for the likes of brilliant filmmakers like Terry Gilliam (The Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys), Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler, The Fountain) and Paul Greengrass (United 93, The Bourne Ultimatum). Perhaps Alan Moore is right. His book is “inherently unfilmable.” There’s no way to pack the dense details of the brilliant 1986 landmark into a movie – even when it’s 2 hours, 43 minutes long.

I am a huge fan of the graphic novel having read it in college. I deliberately didn’t re-read Watchmen in advance of the movie because I think it needs to be judged as its own individual piece of work. Snyder’s problem all along has been, “How do you make a movie that both satisfies hardcore fans and is accessible enough for people who have never even heard of Watchmen?”

For the time being, the spectacle, the buzz, the fanboy fervor and a pitch-perfect marketing campaign have set the stage for an historic 3-day opening. Once the mainstream audience discovers that Watchmen is more about ideas than it is about heroes with capes, it will be interesting to see how it holds up. For comparison’s sake, 300 fell 53% from its opening weekend of $70.8M, but the drop-off will almost certainly be bigger here.

300 ended up at $210.6M domestic and $456M worldwide, but Watchmen is likely to fall short of those numbers. In fact, whereas 300 finished with a 2.97 multiple (2.97 X $70.8M = total domestic box), Watchmen is more likely to be in the 2.4-2.6 range. That would translate to a, still impressive, final US gross of $137M-$148M. Given that spring break is coming for high schoolers and college kids, I think the movie can reach the upper end of that range.

EXCLUSIVE STEVE MASON EARLY FRIDAY ESTIMATES
1. NEW – Watchmen (Warner Bros) – $25.2M, $6,979 PTA, $25.2M cume
2. Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes To Jail (Lionsgate) – $2.5M, $1,162 PTA, $70.2M cume
3. Taken (Fox) – $2.3M, $763 PTA, $112.9M cume
4. Slumdog Millionaire (Fox Searchlight) – $2.05M, $709 PTA, $120.56M cume
5. He’s Just Not That Into You (Warner Bros) – $1.3M, $532 PTA, $81.92M cume
6. Paul Blart: Mall Cop (Sony) – $1.1M, $430 PTA, $130.5M cume
7. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Disney) – $1M, $437 PTA, $36.2M cume
8. Fired Up (Sony) – $920,000, $512 PTA, $11.68M cume
9. Jonas Brothers: The 3-D Concert Experience (Disney) – $850,000, $666 PTA, $14.85M cume
10. Coraline (Focus) – $800,000, $408 PTA, $63.1M cume

EXCLUSIVE STEVE MASON EARLY 3-DAY ESTIMATES
1. NEW - Watchmen (Warner Bros) – $57M, $15,785 PTA, $57M cume
2. Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes To Jail (Lionsgate) – $9M, $4,184 PTA, $76.7M cume
3. Taken (Fox) – $7.75M, $2,570 PTA, $118.04M cume
4. Slumdog Millionaire (Fox Searchlight) – $7.58M, $2,625 PTA, $126.1M cume
5. Paul Blart: Mall Cop (Sony) – $4.5M, $1,759 PTA, $133.5M cume
6. He’s Just Not That Into You (Warner Bros) – $4.05M, $1,659 PTA, $84.68M cume
7. Coraline (Focus) – $3.5M, $1,787 PTA, $66M cume
8. Jonas Brothers: The 3-D Concert Experience (Disney) – $3.1M, $2,380 PTA, $17M cume
9. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Disney) – $3M, $1,310 PTA, $38.5M cume
10. Fired Up (Sony) – $2.75M, $1,520 PTA, $13.5M cume

Steve Mason is on Facebook and now also on Twitter.

WATCHMEN writer Alan Moore has reportedly placed a curse on the movie

The original comic was written by Alan Moore and the lead artist was Dave Gibbons. The collaborators have radically different views of Snyder’s film adaptation.The latter has publicly expressed confidence in Snyder. Gibbons reveals to Wired magazine that at one point Joel Silver owned the film rights to Watchmen and that the producer was insistent that Arnold Schwarzenegger should play Dr. Manhattan. (That would have potentially been an unintentional disaster movie.)

Artist Dave Gibbons on the set of Zack Snyder's Watchmen

The artist says although he never had much to do with previous attempts to make the movie “I’ve been quite involved with the Zack Snyder one. I introduced myself to him at the U.K. premier of 300, and right from the very beginning we kind of hit it off, and I really had that gut feeling that he was going to do it properly. And I must say everything that I’ve seen since has only increased my confidence, to the point that I just think it’s a wonderfully fortuitous piece of timing and the right man at the right place at the right time.”

Moore, however, is very different kind of dude. On one hand, his story Watchmen has been named one of the top 100 English language novels ever written by Time Magazine, ranking alongside Harper Lee, John Steinbeck, George Orwell and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Simultaneously, he reportedly considers himself to be a warlock and has placed a curse on Snyder’s movie. The writer tells the LA Times that his philosophy about Hollywood. “It spoon-feeds us, which has the effect of watering down our collective cultural imagination. It is as if we are freshly hatched birds looking up with our mouths open waiting for Hollywood to feed us more regurgitated worms. The Watchmen film sounds like more regurgitated worms. I for one am sick of worms.”

A number of Moore-written comics have made the jump to the big screen, including V for Vendetta (excellent movie), From Hell (a mess), Constantine (more of a mess) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (complete disaster), and he claims that he has never seen any of them. According to its author, his classic graphic novel Watchmen is “inherently unfilmable.”

It will take all of Moore's warlock powers to keep WATCHMEN from cracking $60M this weekend

So, it is Zack Snyder vs. Alan Moore’s curse. Warlock or not, the industry pre-release tracking is sky high. In surveying my normal studio contacts Wednesday, the lowest prediction I could find was for a $55M opening weekend. One exec at a competing studio thinks that $70M-$75M is “in the bag,” but I’m going with a number a few ticks lower. The 163 minute running time will give the movie fewer showtimes overall and that sort of running time generally hurts late show business. I’m calling for $63M for 3 days.

If that number hits, Watchmen would post the all-time #3 March opening, trailing only Snyder’s 300 ($70.8M) and Ice Age: The Meltdown ($68M). It would also be the all-time fourth-best 1st quarter opening for Hollywood also finishing behind 2004’s The Passion of the Christ ($83.8M).

Curse…Schmurse.

FINAL PREDICTION FOR MARCH 6-8
1. NEW – Watchmen (Warner Bros) – $63M
2. Tyler Perry’s Madea Goes to Jail (Lionsgate) – $11.5M
3. Slumdog Millionaire (Fox Searchlight) – $9M
4. Taken (Fox) – $7M
5. Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience (Disney) – $6.75M
6. He’s Just Not That Into You (Warner Bros) – $4.2M
7. Paul Blart: Mall Cop (Sony) – $3.9M
8. Coraline (Focus) – $3.2M
9. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Diney) – $3.1M
10. Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (Fox) – $2.1M

Steve Mason is on Facebook and now also on Twitter.