ON FILM Films are like horses: Slow starts often fatal

By Philip Martin

LITTLE ROCK — One thing I hate about the movies is the way every weekend has become a Darwinian battleground, with those films that draw more customers than others surviving to fight another week while the perceived losers are subject to having their studios pull the plug on their promotional budgets.

Often a film’s fate rests on its performance on the Friday it opens - studio bean counters watch advance ticket sales and pay close attention to how a film performs in its opening hours. Sometimes, a movie’s fate has been decided by Friday evening in Los Angeles.

While the disappointing box-office receipts - about $6.3 million over last weekend - for Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant may not automatically scuttle Universal’s plans for a sequel or two, it certainly makes the prospect less likely. These days, the usual pattern is for studios to cut their losses and allow box-office losers to sink into oblivion.

That’s tough, given how much effort and care goes into even misbegotten movies. While some of them are genuinely cynical enterprises, most movies aren’t purely capitalistic ventures and most people who make them are seeking a satisfaction beyond a reasonable return on their investment. Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant is far from a bad film; it is a promising “the adventure begins” scene-setter for what might be an entertaining franchise. If it doesn’t get off the ground, I doubt any of the principals will suffer any longterm harm to their careers, but it’s disheartening to think that a weekend’s worth of shows can be so decisive.

At least we had a great turnout at the special screening in Little Rock, which featured a question-and-answer session with the film’s executive producer Courtney Pledger and lead actor Chris Massoglia. If you didn’t make it and are curious, Levi Agee recorded the session for the Little Rock Film Festival’s blog and you can see it at: http://bit.ly/44ySlG.

HOT SPRINGS WRAP-UP

There simply isn’t enough space in the newspaper - or time in the day - to run everything I’d like to run in this section. In a perfect world, we’d have reviewed every film in the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival before the festival opened. We’d have made them available to potential festivalgoers along with a schedule and maybe some pointed suggestions.

Logistically that’s impossible. And given the robust attendance at the festival, apparently pretty unnecessary from the attendees’ point of view. Plenty of people find out about the festival, and a lot of people go. The screenings we attended were crowded if not quite filled to capacity.

Still, this year’s festival struck me as having one of the best film lineups in the festival’s history, and there are lots of movies that I missed that I intend to track down over the next few weeks. (Including local filmmaker John Sims’ short Crater People, about the people who hunt diamonds at the Crater of Diamonds State Park. It might make a nice double feature with Brian Petty’s Finders Keepers: The Arkansas Diamond Legacy, a film airing on AETN on Nov. 20 and 26.)

And while I was aware of many and had seen a few of the festival films before the festival, I’m always surprised by what grabs me. This year the big surprise was Peaceable Kingdom: The Journey Home, a film by Jenny Stein that made an eloquent and level-headed case for a reassessment of our relationship with livestock.

I was also immensely entertained by Cass Warner’s excavation of her famous family’s history, The Brothers Warner, which told the Shakespearean story of the rise of the Warner Bros. empire and the gothic betrayal that occludes its roots.

And look for a full review of the Renaud brothers’ Warrior Champions - which was screened at the festival - in these pages next week, in anticipation of the film’s theatrical world premiere Nov. 12, 7 p.m. at the Lakewood Theater in North Little Rock. Tickets are $100 each (a DVD copy of the film is included in the ticket price), and proceeds from the event will be used to establish a scholarship for an Iraq or Afghanistan war veteran from Arkansas to the Clinton School of Public Service.

E-mail:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

MovieStyle, Pages 33 on 10/30/2009