Mars or Bust: “Carter” Craters

THE WEEK FROM MY VIEW | REVIEW

by James Killough

I was moping in text messages to Tuttle yesterday afternoon about how lame my weekly round-up was turning out to be, when it hit me that I should write about what I’d been tweeting about all day: the colossal flop John Carter is destined to be.  Which meant that I had to get off my ass and fork over close to twenty dollars for the 3D version plus popcorn surcharge (it is a two-hour-nineteen-minute movie, and I’m a big guy who needs to be fed).  So I hope you appreciate the sacrifices this reviewer goes to bring you the freshest.

With "The Vow" killing at the B.O., and critics saying "21 Jump Street" is the next "Superbad," and advance word that "Magic Mike" is magic, this is Channing's year.

I admit it, I was drawn like Edward Cullen after Bella’s blood in Twilight to the throbbing, heady scent of schadenfreude emanating from the film: the industry awoke Friday morning to find out that analyst Alan Gould from Evercore had revised his predictions that John Carter’s losses could be one hundred sixty-five million, or double what he had previously estimated.  This is a lot of loss, and so far this weekend he is right.

Ring Around A Volcano

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES | REVIEWS

by James Killough

I know, I was supposed to post on Tuesday, but I’m not sure that properly speaking I had a Tuesday.  Well, I had sort of one, but it was in Delhi, which wasn’t really a Tuesday in the West, and we’re on a PST time schedule at PFC.  I worked flat-out all day, wrapped my last shoot a half hour before I travelled for twenty-eight hours home, eighteen of which were on a non-stop flight from Dubai to LA.  We had to skirt the volcano in Iceland and fly south.  The journey would have been more of a bitch than it was had it not been for the fact I was able to lie down and get a good night’s sleep, and gurgle when I was awake like a stupefied baby at the gazillion channels of entertainment on Emirates.

I would even be willing to endure a knee-lift like Demi if I thought I stood a chance with Kutcher.

I was going to blog from forty thousand feet, but I felt more inspired to watch inflight Hollywood crap.  Most of the plane was watching inflight Bollywood crap, which just goes to show that even when given the choice, Indians would rather keep it real with the caca; we will never prevail over them with our cinematic pablum.

Most inflight entertainment is crap that has just been released on DVD, which sort of justifies this mash-up of reviews.  In the case of Virgin Atlantic, which is more prone to have a selection of quality films side by side with the crap, they will often screen a British film that has yet to be released in the States, or an American one that hasn’t been released in the UK.  That’s what you get when a former entertainment company owns an airline: better contracts with the film companies. 

The Joy of Stalking

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

by James Killough

Alan Cumming has a new site up dedicated to obsessions, itsasickness.com.  I would say it celebrates passions more than obsessions in the truest sense of the word, and I am hanging on the truest sense because the site does have “sickness” in its title.  And sick obsession reminds of the time I went truly mentally ill and stalked a former lover.

Knowing Alan as I do, he probably means sickness as in the recent colloquialism “That is so sick,” like it’s a really good thing.  In the video up on the site right now, Zoe Kravitz is obsessed with a green dragon plushie costume, with how it makes her feel empowered.  This isn’t my particular experience of people obsessed with plushie.  The plushophiles I’ve met are rather lovable, extreme introverts who like to dress up as cartoon characters and have kinky sex.

Zoe Kravitz vogues plushophile lite in Williamsburg for itsasickness.com.

I had a brush with plushophilia and diaper fetishists back in the early Noughties through a friend, Gene, who also had extreme social anxiety disorder (SAD).  Gene was one of a trio of people who would trigger the mnemonic that gave rise to my play Hatter, the film version of which Alan Cumming has been attached to, just so you follow my meandering train of thought.  Gene had some hilarious stories about “furries”

Natalie Portman Carrying Satan’s Child

The title of this is an experiment.  It seems that when I write about hookers and celebrities the hits to this blog spike.  I figured that if I threw the devil in the mix I might attract Mel Gibson’s crowd as well. Yesterday’s backhanded self-help blog, which I tried to masquerade as vitriol flung at my (in my opinion) psycho landlady, Susan Blais, has the lowest rating ever. Clearly nobody out there wants to hear about how I’m pulling myself up by my bootstraps and soldiering on.  Hmpf.  All they care about is Amanda Seyfried’s boobs.

The obdurately angelic Natalie Portman. And they complain that there are no movie stars like there used to be. Just look at that swan's neck, wouldya? If Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier of Monaco, can you blame Natalie for doing one better and shacking up with the Prince of Darkness?

The reason I’m picking on Natalie is she is number one today on the IMDb Starmeter, which is a ranking of who has the most hits on the IMDb public page, as opposed to the IMDbPro page.  So by making this about her, I’m hoping for more hits to my blog when scandalized Googlers, who always suspected there was something fishy about that Portman girl, just way too nice, tune in here to get the real story about her hooking up with The Horned One.

Now, we people in The Biz are not supposed to care about our IMDb ranking, it’s decidedly not cool.  At most we use IMDBPro for its industry news aggregation and because it has a reasonably up-to-date listing of who represents what actor.  But I’ve just looked mine up for this blog (honestly, I swear, I never look at it), and I’m the 265,783rd most famous person on the IMDb, which is weird because last week my ranking was 444,840.  Hmmm. I know last week’s because the Starmeter keeps a record of it, and because last week I was writing about the IMDb for an audition web content article I scribbled for InteractMedia in which I commented about my lowly status in the industry, and I looked it up then.  So this means that people have been hitting the IMDb looking for me.  But I have had no news posted about me lately, nothing to warrant a surge of close to 50% in popularity.  I’m now paranoid.  What if it is the (in my opinion) villainous Susan Blais and her minions scouring the web for information about me to add to the pyre on which she intends to burn me alive?

A screenshot of my IMDb Starmeter page in detail. Note that I was extremely unpopular over Christmas; I dipped below one million, shamefully. Normally I would feel unloved except I remember that my bike was stolen on Christmas day, so obviously someone out there, albeit some junkie, was thinking about me.

We’re not supposed to care about this because those of us who are so lowly on the Starmeter rating system know that the big kids, the real celebs, the people ranked above 20,000, don’t give a damn about the IMDb, much less their Starmeter rating.  They don’t post pictures to their profiles, those are pulled from news services, or managed personally by IMDb staff members, I’m guessing.  I learned my lesson about this shortly after they invented the Starmeter and like a total dweeb I congratulated Louise Ward on her client Channing Tatum making the number one spot, currently occupied by Natalie Portman, who may or may not be carrying the spawn of Beelzebub; after all, her career has suddenly soared due to a horror movie, of all suspicious things.  Louise kinda went, “Huh? What’s that?  Oh, that IMDb thing.”  I felt small for caring.

The truth is there are people out there, people I work with, who do care very much about their ranking, much more than I do.  I won’t say who you are. Or maybe I will because I want your hearts pounding while you hold your breath and murmur, “Sweet, Jesus, James! Don’t let them know I monitor my rating!  I’ll option your script, promise!”  When I blog more about the HATTER dramedy two years ago, I’ll even introduce you to some characters who had pictures taken purposely, professionally for their IMDb profiles — that (in my opinion) is the height of dweeb.

I remember another Starmeter rating moment when I was having lunch at the Cannes Festival with a producer of mine in 2008.  This was the peak of my rating: I was above 70,000 that week.  When I told my colleague he said, “You bitch! Mine has never gone above a hundred thousand AND I’VE JUST PRODUCED A FILM WITH ROBERT PATTINSON.”

Yes, he’s gay.