Paramount Vantage »

Once upon a time, Marc Pease (Jason Schwartzman) flipped out during his high school's production of The Wiz, despite every assurance from his drama teacher, Mr. Gribble (Ben Stiller), that he was at the very least capable ("You set the bar... so that others can go beyond it!").

Eight years later, Gribble's giving The Wiz another shot, while Pease tries to keep the remaining half of his once mighty a cappella group together and heading towards some modest goal of stardom. The two of them share a common love with present-day senior Meg (Anna Kendrick), and all three of them have a love for performing -- and an aversion to anything resembling comedy over the course of The Marc Pease Experience.

Apparently, the Japanese American Citizens League thinks so. The group is angry about a scene featuring a racist rant against the Japanese that leads to an ass-kicking of the lone Asian in the group, played by Ken Jeong, who is of Korean heritage.

The AP reports there are other things in the movie that the JACL are displeased with besides the Pearl Harbor rant given by Jeremy Piven's character, Don Ready, like when he uses the word "Jap" and engages in other human resource department nightmares.

Paramount Vantage responded, "We understand that when presented out of context, jokes and situations in the movie about a variety of topics might be offensive to some people... To be very clear, The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard is in no way meant to be mean-spirited, disparaging or hurtful to any individuals and we regret any offense taken."

If you want to chat about whether or not The Goods tickled your funny bone or pissed you off, producer Adam McKay wants to hear about it. He announced last weekend on Twitter that he'd respond to calls about the movie and live-stream his answers, and based on how it went last Sunday, he is planning to do it again. He's also responsive to Tweets (and is very, very funny), so I suggest you follow him, Goods or no.

Have you seen The Goods? Were you offended?

How strange it is to think that a comedy isn't brash enough or absurd enough or funny enough (okay, that one's not so strange), but the truth about The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard is that, while it is brash and absurd and funny in fits and starts, it also seems to lose its nerve as it goes on, running low on laughing gas and coasting to a stop or whatever it is that auto-minded metaphors for auto-minded comedies do.

A wheeler and dealer even in grade school, the now-grown Don Ready (Jeremy Piven) sells cars like nobody's business when somebody's business is in trouble, and that's just the predicament that Ben Selleck (James Brolin) finds himself in. Ready's entourage includes the likes of Ving Rhames, Kathryn Hahn and David Koechner; I'll leave you to guess which of the three is the willful slut. Selleck's staff includes Ken Jeong, Tony Hale and Charles Napier; I'll leave you to determine which of those three suffers most at the racist outbursts of another (hint: not Hale).

It's rare that even a movie's biggest fan can recall all of the little throwaway lines of dialogue and performance details from supporting players. But if that supporting player is Jeremy Piven, you can almost guarantee it will come immediately to mind, whether he's an assaultive partygoer who turns introspective during a Gas 'N Sip hangout session in Say Anything, or a pal searching for romantic redemption during his high school reunion in Grosse Pointe Blank. Finally in charge of his own film, The Goods, Piven is no less generous with his comedic set-ups, sharing the screen with a talented ensemble of players (including Ving Rhames, Katheryn Hahn and Rob Riggle) who find themselves tasked with the challenge of liquidating an entire dealership's stock of cars over the Fourth of July holiday.

Cinematical recently spoke to Piven via telephone to discuss his participation in the film, which is produced by Adam McKay (Step Brothers) and directed by Neil Brennan (Chappelle's Show). In addition to talking about the good fortune that found him at the helm of a summer comedy, Piven discussed the prospect of making a car salesman a charming fellow, and reflected on the reasons why folks seem to find him such a convincing con man.

Cinematical: A car salesman is perhaps not the first person you think about when you imagine a sympathetic character. How much did you want this guy to be genuinely likeable and how much of a snake-oil salesman did you want him to be?

You'd think that the next movie featuring the star of a very recent blockbuster would be a surefire candidate to get a splashy theatrical release. Yet despite the presence of Ben Stiller in its cast, chances are that you won't see The Marc Pease Experience this summer.

Stiller, who starred in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian -- which has earned nearly $400 million worldwide since its release in late May -- plays a supporting role as a mentor to Jason Schwartzman, who must come to terms with his dream of becoming a musical star on Broadway. Rising starlet Anna Kendrick is also featured. As reported by The Playlist, Paramount will be releasing The Marc Pease Experience on August 21 in just 10 markets: Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Miami, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Sacramento, San Francisco, Seattle ... and "maybe" Boston, according to director Todd Louiso. Those are definitely major markets, but New York and Los Angeles will be avoided, and I'm guessing those of us in the selected markets will need to search out where exactly the movie will be dumped be playing.

Production on the film began under the Paramount Vantage banner, a division that has since been shuttered. The Playlist speculates that "there was basically a mandate from Paramount to all the Paramount Vantage movies 'on the way out' that 'We're just not going to put any more money into them.'" Whether that's true or not -- and I'm inclined to hope that they evaluated each movie on its own merits -- you might need to buy a plane ticket to see another Ben Stiller comedy this summer. Failing that, The Marc Pease Experience is expected on DVD before the end of the year.

It's hard to ignore the Oscar polish involved in Revolutionary Road; an Oscar-winning director, Sam Mendes, reunites the stars of the Oscar-gobbling Titanic. To that end, Mendes does his best to make the film look serious and prestigious. And if you give it a cursory glance it's possible to come away with the impression that it is indeed a great and important film. But in truth, it's both relentlessly grim and nearly pointless.

It's "nearly" pointless because the subject matter -- that the suburbs have mutated and destroyed the American spirit -- has already been covered, many, many times in far better films, ranging from scary (Blue Velvet) to romantic (Far from Heaven) to funny (Edward Scissorhands). In a way, those outside genre elements helped keep the material from becoming overbearing. For Revolutionary Road, Mendes and screenwriter Justin Haythe have adapted a novel by Richard Yates, which was groundbreaking for its time; Yates wrote it in 1961 when polite society just didn't discuss such things as infidelity, ennui, drugs and booze and insanity. But Mendes creates a period picture and thus fails to justify why the material is still relevant in 2008, especially when this stuff has by now become its own movie subgenre. (Click on "Suburban Dysfunction" at allmovie.com.) The main factor for Mendes is that it's an "important novel." Never mind why -- or when.

In a week littered with plenty of big-budget trailers piggy-backing on James Bond's undeniable popularity (Quantum of Solace just had the biggest opening day of any Bond film to date), the new one for Sam Mendes' domestic drama Revolutionary Road very nearly slipped through the cracks (thanks to Rob for passing it on, and Variety's Anne Thompson for premiering it).

This trailer plays more like a teaser than its predecessor, and yet it's a simple and short way to lure one into the suburban woes of stars Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio. The very slightest rumbles and mumbles of its worthiness as an awards contender this season are beginning to issue from the earliest guild screenings, and I suspect that the weeks to come will only bring more buzz before the film bows in limited release the day after Christmas -- the same strategy that Paramount Vantage employed last year with a little film they like to call There Will Be Blood. Now, if you'll excuse me, I should really get back to this book Eugene kept going on about...

By now we all know that Michael Moore doesn't make documentaries like our grandfathers did. He's a master of polemics, using his films to rail against corporations, guns, governments, insurance companies, and whatever else riles up his David vs. Goliath sensibility. When his most recent project was announced in May, it was described as a sequel to Fahrenheit 9/11 that would "tackle what's going on in the world and America's place in it," as pointed out by The Hollywood Reporter. Now, however, THR says the film will focus on "the global financial crisis and the U.S. economy."

Moore is still "feverishly shooting" and it's hoped the film will be ready for release next spring. At first blush, though, it sounds like he decided to make the mid-project adjustment in reaction to (or in anticipation of) the Democrats' victory. Without Bush to bash, and without the Republican Party in control of Congress, how much mileage could he get out of criticizing U.S. foreign policy with a new President steering a (presumably) different course?

Unlike many documentary filmmakers, Moore appears to start with a conclusion on his projects and then search for footage to back it up. Documentarians often say they don't really 'find' their film, or discover the story, until they're knee-deep in editing, but it doesn't sound like Moore works that way. Which doesn't mean his films lack meaning or substance or entertainment value, just that they're more like personal essays than traditional docs.

Winners
Rachel Getting Married (Sony Pictures Classics)
The Duchess (Paramount Vantage)
Fireproof (Samuel Goldwyn)

Riding a wave of positive buzz and the rising stardom of Anne Hathaway, Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married crushed all comers, earning $33,667 per screen at nine theaters in New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto, according to estimates compiled by Box Office Mojo. Hathaway appeared everywhere to promote it, even gamely spoofing herself as host on Saturday Night Live. (Loved her as Mary Poppins!)

Too much attention may be paid to Keira Knightley's ribs, but she was undoubtedly the reason that The Duchess made $7,047 per screen as it expanded to 127 locations in its third week. Keira and costume dramas seem to be the right fit; I wouldn't be surprised if this one drew an older audience that consistently attends British historical flicks.

Still ignored by the mainstream press (in contrast to Bill Maher's Religulous), faith-based Fireproof dropped just 40.5% (about the same as Eagle Eye) and took in $4,776 per screen at 852 theaters in its second week. So far the film has grossed more than $12 million. Was it ever advertised on TV? Or was the marketing done entirely through church groups? Whatever the case, with a reported budget of only half a million dollars, Fireproof appears to be a healthy success story.

Sex Still Sells
Elegy (Samuel Goldwyn)
Frozen River (Sony Pictures Classics)

Elegy, the 'old professor in love with a younger woman' adaptation of a Philip Roth novel starring Ben Kingsley and a sometimes naked Penelope Cruz, is in its ninth week of release and still playing in 70 theaters. The theater count is dropping, but the film has grossed more than $3.3 million.

It wasn't that long ago that documentaries carried the stigma of being educational first and entertaining second. As with foreign-language fare, an audience for them lingered on the fringe, and an industry was willing to offer them their very own awards, but they really weren't terribly high-profile box-office prospects... that is, until the '04-'05 summer successes of Fahrenheit 9/11 and March of the Penguins made it seem perfectly okay for audiences to see, and for studios to market, a film without so much as one measly explosion in it.

But then along comes American Teen: a film openly marketed as - and arugably assembled to be - anything but a documentary that finds itself underperforming in its current limited runs (it goes wide this Friday). Last May, I witnessed a group of young women leaving whatever indie they caught at Washington D.C's Landmark E Street Cinema as they approached the film's poster and wondered aloud if someone was remaking The Breakfast Club, with a tone that suggested neither horror nor concern, nor any great interest in the big, fat what-if scenario placed before them.

What I wonder now is, at what point did we begin to craft documentary filmmaking specifically to the masses, and then what happens when the masses simply don't show?