Interesting observations from the director of Dogtooth and the forthcoming Alps.

Puss in Boots (Also 2 Disc Blu-Ray/DVD Combo) (Four Stars)

U.S.: Chris Miller, 2011 (DreamWorks)

This review is dedicated to my friend Pica.

Another Shrek movie, or, more accurately, a series spin-off? Another super-spectacular feature cartoon? Another big studio lollapalooza, this time from DreamWorks? In 3D yet? Didn’t sound artistically promising, even when the receipts started pouring in. But you can’t always tell.

Puss in Boots, which gives its starring role to Antonio Banderas’s’ swashbuckling cat, turns out to be one of my favorites of the year, a movie chockfull of goodies and a few surprises: funny, lively, charming, well written, full of action, full of character (and not just from the one with the boots), packed with genuine good times. The show centers around Banderas and his magnificently daffy voice acting and the delightful onscreen character he’s playing (to the hilt) :  the dashing feline adventurer Senor Puss in Boots of the Shrek series. It’s a real gem of cartoon characterization. Banderas makes the movie, but the surprise is that the show has so much going in support of him as well, including first rate supporting performances by the likes of Salma Hayek, Zach Galifianakis, Billy Bob Thornton, Amy Sedaris and others. Directed by Chris Miller from a witty script by Tom Wheeler (and others) and visualized by production designer Aretos Guillaume and a gifted horde of artists, the movie is also often spectacular and gorgeous in a way that many of the big 3D specials unfortunately aren’t.

It’s actually one of the best movies of the year, and one of my own personal favorites: a first class entertainment, a rousingly well-made show, and a perfect showcase for Banderas.

The plot of “Puss” comes from the  fairytale world of Charles Perrault  (Puss’s original creator), by way of Alexandre Dumas, Zorro, Casanova, Sergio Leone‘s ‘60s Italian-made, Spanish-shot spaghetti Westerns, some film noir archetypes, and a hip take on Mother Goose,  and all the other other Disneyfied or Looney Tuned cartoon fairytales you can cram into one movie. Especially Leone, almost as big an influence here as he was in Rango. In the story, Puss is on the trail of some magic beans, now in the possession of that sleazy old couple Jack and Jill (Thornton and Sedaris), and he hooks up with the luscious Kitty (who does a torrid flamenco dance) and also with his dubious one-time best friend Humpty Dumpty (Galifianakis), who , like Puss, has gone beyond the law and who also also has reason to feel betrayed by his old buddy.

Soon, the trio have collected the beans, climbed Jack‘s beanstalk though the clouds (just like Mickey, Donald and Goofy in the classic Mickey and the Beanstalk) and gotten their paws and shell-fingers on the goose that lays the golden eggs, and its mother, The Goose That Can Take on Godzilla. (Goose-Zilla?) Fights, chases revelations, tender moments and cliffhangers follow. (And when we say cliffhangers, we’re talking really big cliffs and really hair-raising hangers.) It may not seem too original, but that‘s one of the reasons it works so well. You always have the feeling that everyone involved knows what they’re doing, isn’t taking themselves too seriously,  and are having a ball.hat makes this Puss in Boots work so sell? We start with Banderas. Like the great Looney Tunes vocal maestro Mel Blanc, when he gave voice to sarcastic Bugs Bunny or frazzled Daffy Duck or explosive Yosemite Sam, Banderas has contrived a speech pattern for Puss (admittedly closer to his own than Blanc’s were) that perfectly suits the visual image of his role, while also playing hilariously just a bit against it.

Banderas gives us a totally cute little cat, who’s also suave, arrogant, well-dressed and elegantly charming, a swords-puss in a Spanish-looking Fairyland who can fence as well as Errol Flynn (or even better, Basil Rathbone), who can paw his way into a cantina/bar (a horse opera tavern right out of Sergio Leone or Rio Bravo), eye the barhounds and gunslingers and fearlessly order a bowl of milk. A cat of cats whose hot-blooded, cool-talking Spanish charm drives all the little pussycats mad. I defy you not to giggle at this gato!

The character may owe a little something to another Blanc-Looney Tunes-Chuck Jones creation, that persistent and amorous skunk Pepe’ Le Pew (of “For Scentimental Reasons“). But Banderas, using a voice recognizably close to his own, acts the part so well that we always feel Puss is doing his own talking, as well as his own fighting and loving, and his own fleeing the territory with the law of San Ricardo a few horse-lengths behind. The Commandante chasing Puss, by the way, is voiced, as is The “Mustached Man,” by one of this movie’s executive producers, Guillermo Del Toro (Pan‘s Labyrinth), whose stamp is definitely on the picture.

Chris Miller got no respect (and deserved at least a little) for the other Shrek movie he directed, the critically ill-received Shrek the Third. But sometimes you get better as you go along and it’s hard to find fault with anything he or the other filmmakers do here. 

Banderas has been stealing the Shrek movies (and they‘re not all that easy to steal), since he popped up in Shrek 2, and observers have been predicting a Puss spin-off for a while. Now the newly elevated leading man can spend part of his time trying to keep his own movie from being stolen by the ensemble behind him: Hayek as the formidable feline fatale Kitty, Galifianakis as the disturbingly flip-flopping egghead Humpty Dumpty, and Thornton and Sedaris as those pathological climbers Jack and Jill. They’re all good, and Galifianakis is sometimes touching as well.

Towering above them all, however, is that Casanova of cats, that purring Zorro, that meowing musketeer, Puss in Boots. What grace under pressure! What a feline! Banderas may never find a role that suits him so well, not even if Pedro Almodovar writes it, not even if Guillermo Del Toro directs it. (Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In, with Banderas as a perverse, obsessed doctor, was in theatres at the same time and he’s terrific in that too, though there he plays a sullen, unlikable wretch.)

Despite the temptations of cynicism though, I loved Puss in Boots, and I wouldn’t be at all unhappy if this wasn‘t the last time we saw Senor Boots on screen, here or with the Shreks. He was great here: doing the perfect purr of a voice, sidling up to the bar for his milk, hanging on cliffs with Galifianakis’s egg, dancing with Salma, or shooting the cantina up for a Fisftful of Fancyfeast. Adios, Gato! Viva Galifianakis! Vaya con Kitty. Ole, Puss Puss.

(Dedicatee Pica, by the way, pictured above, was the late pet and longtime pretty little calico pal of blogdom’s Film Noir Blonde. She was a feisty little feline fatale, a stray cat rescued from the streets and later saved by FNB on what would have been the last day of her life. Instead, she had 14 more years, and she took guff from no one.  Senor Puss, I know, would have loved her.) 

Extras: Featurettes, Deleted Scenes; Games; Fairytale pop-up book; Trivia track; Digital copy.

Sell-outs from the get-go. Two more night’s showings in 35mm.

FIND Fast Track
Deadline: February 27
Application Fee: $40
What it is: Access to three days of intense meetings with financiers, producers, agents and managers during the Los Angeles Film Festival.
Must have: Completed feature-length script (narratives) or detailed feature-length documentary proposal. No treatment-only for narrative submissions.

Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting
Deadline: Early Bird – March 15; Regular – May 1
Application Fee: Early Bird – $35; Regular – $52
What it is: Up to five $35,000 fellowships awarded; fellows are expected to complete a feature-length screenplay during their fellowship year.
Must have: Completed feature-length narrative screenplay.

Sundance Institute Screenwriter’s Lab
Deadline: Open now – May 1
Application Fee: $35
What it is: 12 projects selected for participation in the January Screenwriters Lab (the only open-entry point into the Sundance Labs). First or second feature films only.
Must have: Completed feature-length narrative screenplay.

PAGE International Screenwriting Awards
Deadline: Regular — March 1; Late — April 2
Fee: Regular — $49; Late — $59
What it is: Screenwriting competition with $50,000 in cash and prizes
Must have: Completed feature-length screenplay. Animation and musical scripts are accepted for this contest.

American Zoetrope
Deadline: Early — August 1; Final — September 4
Application Fee: Early — $35; Late — $50
What it is: Francis Ford Coppola’s screenwriting competition. Winner and finalists have access to studios and agents reading their script. Winner gets $5,000.
Must have: Completed feature-length narrative screenplay.

Hammer to Nail Short Film Contest
Deadline: Monthly
Application Fee: $30
What it is: Short film contest judged by a rotating panel of judges. Monthly winner gets fee waivers to a slew of major fests.
Must Have: Completed short film

Summer 2012 Will Be Covered As A Slump When May Titles Perform Well, But Not Sensationally – Ah… the spring and early summer start to come into focus. March looks to have at least two, if not three $100 million domestic hits… compared to just Rango last year, which was labelled “disappointing” versus the March DWA numbers of the past. On the other hand, April, which last year boasted three $100m grossers – including the $200m Fast Five – has its best hopes in a re-release of Titanic and a reunion sequel to American Pie. Meh.

So strong March… soft April, in comparison to last year.

And then, The Avengers. Will it be at Iron Man levels ($300m+) or will it be at the summer movie levels for Marvel of the last few years ($145m – $185m)? Somewhere in between? This will be the sixth straight summer to be led off by a Marvel superhero. And it will set the tone. Last summer’s $65m launch for Thor was the smallest. Spider-Man 3 and Iron Man 2 were the two over $100m ($151/$128m, respectively). Anything under a $100m launch will probably be seen as coming up short. A bit silly, but such is the nature of all this stuff.

Dark Shadows is Depp, but kitschy, Burton-y Depp. Realistically, a $25m opening is about where that can be expected to land if it lands nicely. Sacha Baron Cohen will hope to open as high as $20m with his latest character.

The big non-Marvel horses are Battleship and Men in Black 3. Who the hell knows? There were no $100m openings last May and $100m 3-days over Memorial Day weekend are a challenge, even though there are now 3 titles that have done the trick. There hasn’t been more than one $100m launch in May since 2007, the summer of the Three Threequels (Spidey/Shrek/Sparrow).

The big upside on both Battleship and MiB3 is likely to be overseas, not here. So I expect there to be a lot of itchy box office writing in May, coming off of a soft April and only Avengers likely to pull its perceived weight initially.

But then June starts loading up. This summer could match last summer’s six $100m domestic grossers, with Kristen Stewart’s Snow White, a Madagascar sequel, Prometheus (which I expect to be Top 5 worldwide next summer and could be the biggest R-rated film ever). a Sandler, a Pixar, and GI: Joe Rock-dux…. plus some high potential smaller titles in Rock of Ages and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

But July is where things get really nuts and the reporting will be all lovey dovey… Spiderman and Batman alone are pretty sure to bring in over $750m domestic. Then add on Ice Age 4… a franchise that’s never done less than $175m domestic and which did almost $900m worldwide last time. Only 8 movies are scheduled to open in July this summer… very unusual. But everyone else is just getting out of the way… with 3 movies looking for $3 billion or more worldwide in a matter of weeks. But there is still a Stiller/Vaughn movie being thrown in there that will be hoping to do 9 figures.

August is a bit of a crap shoot. Bourne looks like a hit, but it’s rebooting. Total Recall should be viable… but why open it opposite Bourne if you think it is? Rivals/Dog Fight, a political comedy pitting Will Ferrell vs Zach Zach Galifianakis could be an underdog hit. Can the geezers do it again with The Expendables 2? Will Joseph Gordon-Levitt stalked by Michael Shannon draw a late summer audience looking for grit? Will WB get a Chronicle out of The Apparition?

The tone about the entire summer, which could well be a record-setter, as this year’s was, may well be set by some of these smaller titles and their perceived success or failure. Or it could just a be a referendum on the numbers for Men in Black 3D. What we can be sure of is that it will be reactionary and once positions are taken, attitudes will have to be pried from cold, dead word processors.

Studio Ups & Downs – After a sensational 2011, Paramount will take heat for a reduced schedule and a lack of high-profile product coming through the pipeline. The success or failure of World War Z will become an enormous pressure on the psychology of the studio.

Universal will see more executive turnover after Battleship underperforms domestically, even though it will make up for it overseas. Soon thereafter, Snow White, Bourne, and the Oscar success of This Is Forty (or whatever it ends up being called) will seem ironic.

Fox will take its usual heat until an exceptionally strong summer, but the boo birds will return in the fall, as the studio hits singles and doubles.

Disney will be ducking for cover all year long after John Carter, having a decent success with The Avengers, but not much else that gets anyone excited – Pixar’s Brave being a wildcard – until Spielberg’s Lincoln in Nov/Dec.

Sony will have its biggest summer ever and its first billion dollar title, with Bond and Bigelow in the holiday season. Solid year.

Warner Bros = Batman & Hobbit in 2012. But there are some very interesting smaller titles, starting with Project X, Dark Shadows, Rivals, Gangster Squad, and what many hope will be major Oscar bait for Ben Affleck, Argo. It could be a sensational year for the studio.

Netflix Will Keep Losing Subscribers In The US – Netflix continues to signal that they are angling at becoming a competitor of HBO. What this means, when uncoded, is more original/exclusive content, less content overall.

I see this, as I have seen it, as a necessity of the future of this company and not a simple strategic choice. Netflix simply cannot afford to be what Netflix was as a DVD rental business as an ongoing streaming business. There is nothing wrong with this. But it is a wildly different model than the Netflix that built a new paradigm.

Logically, as Netflix becomes a more narrow business, some of its audience will move on, as they have for 2 straight quarters. As best as my research tells me, HBO has never cracked 16 million paying domestic subscribers. They have not only a wide array of channels, but a strong reputation for its original programming and a very solid movie package from WB and elsewhere. The monthly cost of the service is similar to the cost of Netflx and includes HBO Go for most cable/satellite users.

Obviously, no one has to choose between Netflix – which has a much deeper library at this point – and HBO. You can have both. But as more competitors enter the market in Everything Everywhere mode, the number of $8 monthly subscriptions will pile up and people will start feeling compelled to make decisions.

In 2012, I expect inertia to keep the leakage slow, though steady. But as we get to 2013, Netflix will be forced to define itself in clear ways that it isn’t ready to do now. And that will surely be a tipping point… not for the company to go out of business or become a minor business or any of the extreme things that defenders like to throw out there to unbalance the conversation. But for Netflix to become, as it is aiming to, more like HBO, competing more like HBO competes with Showtime and Starz… and with a subscription base back under 15 million.

Majors Will Start To Move Into The Day-N-Date VOD Business – One major is getting ready to launch an international VOD arm of one of their divisions. This will continue and expand.

Studios and more significantly, studio Dependents have stayed out of day-n-date VOD models so far. There are too many layers of well-established, highly profitable distribution that have to worry about cannibalism and perceived cannibalism to go there. But as the Magnolias and IFCs make the case for a VOD-driven business model and margins tighten and DVD is phased out, the potential for VOD-first as a business opportunity for movies that are not going to get a studio release looks more and more attractive (not unlike the indie business was before they decided the upside wasn’t up enough.

Someone Will Start Paying Cable & Broadcast Nets For Full Mobile Streaming & Perhaps In Package Agreements With AT&T Or Other Wireless Provider – This one came to me in a flash the other day and really inspired this entire piece.

Most of the major cable and satellite outlets now have streaming opportunities within the same wi-fi reach as your converter box. HBO, ESPN, CNN, and a few others are offering completely mobile platforms for live streaming with membership through you cable/satellite provider.

But what is really cool? Being about to watch what you want, when you want off of your cable/satellite. Slingbox for all!

What is the biggest problem? 5g a month max for most data service without being throttled.

If people are paying $8 for Netflix and $8 for Hulu, and $100 for DirectTV, how much more a month would they play to watch anything anywhere? $25 a month? And if $20 of that went to AT&T because they’d be using more bandwidth and $5 is split between the content providers and DirecTV while any station watched gets the benefit of viewership?

And obviously, all the better – for the viewing experience – if used on wi-fi… self-interest.

If cable companies are worrying about cord cutting, this can be the beginning of a more inclusive package. Don’t fight streaming… become streaming. What does it cost to keep a household connected to the wired infrastructure? How much is it worth to keep customers?

Personally, I don’t want to be on streaming only. When the wi-fi slows down, I don’t want to be waiting on the cache to fill. I want my reliable, consistent, high-quality satellite stream. But I also want to be able to flip on anything I already pay to receive at home in any hotel, stadium, restaurant, or outing I like. And I’d pay for the right… at least until the cord cutting price wars of 2015.

It only makes sense, as the technology now allows, that someone moves forward in this direction.

About Central Institute Technology

As one of Australia’s largest training institutes, Central Institute of Technology trains more than 29,000 students annually, including 1300 international students.

P.S. We also have a brand-new IMdB page. It still has that “new database entry” scent.

A rollicking interview… these two are very funny together.

Then, one should consider the fact that WB, the distributor of The Bodyguard, does NOT have a deal with Netflix for streaming. So how would The Bodyguard be on Netflix in the first place? Of the top 10 films released by WB in 1992, the year the studio released The Bodyguard, only Lethal Weapon 3 is currently streaming on Netflix. How? Through Starz. This is also the ONLY way that The Bodyguard would be streaming on Netflix. And as with all Starz titles, the streaming window is tied to the cable play window.

Starz does run Black History Month programming this month, which includes WB titles The Color Purple and Rosewood. Did it include The Bodyguard sometime this month? Maybe. But the two WB movies that are playing this week are NOT streaming on Netflix. Maybe they will on Feb 22, the day they are scheduled to run on the cable net. But not now.

Waiting To Exhale is also bouncing around as a Whitney title still streaming on Netflix. Via Starz. Fox, which released that film, also doesn’t have a Netflix streaming deal. And of their 1995 top ten titles – the year Exhale came out – four are streaming via Starz, one through a deal with Saban, and mysteriously, Die Hard 3. But when Starz goes, so will the four Starz streaming titles.

Looking at the source of the story… complaints in the comments on the The Bodyguard page on Netflix, the only specific claim of a date on which the film was available for streaming was October of last year. There is no sign of the film on Starz schedule for that month, so I don’t know how it would have been streaming through them. There may have been some sort of WB streaming deal that had some play dates in 2011… but there is no indication of one now.

This is not to say that WB is not taking advantage of Whitney Houston’s death to sell stuff, The film is now available on VOD on DirecTV… and I can’t imagine that it was before last week. Digitial sales have been strong. Etc.

But this story has every earmark of being a hoax… perhaps even an honestly started hoax. People think Netflix streams everything. But if it’s a WB movie, your memory is – in all but Starz cases… and only for another week or so – either old or just wrong.

ADD: By the way… if there was a streaming deal in place, it is possible, but highly unlikely that there would be a death clause allowing movies to be pulled at will at a moment like this. Netflix plays a ton for streaming. This is the rare moment where there is real value that would accrue to them… that is, if they had a deal to stream The Bodyguard… of which there is no evidence.

ADD, 5:03p – It turn out that the source of the Gawker story retracted his story at 3:05p today. Two hours later, Gawker is running neither the retraction or the Netflix denials. So maybe they weren’t hoaxed… maybe they didn’t care about spreading false information around the web, where hundreds of sites ran the bad info as fact.