By Steven Zeitchik

Australia’s numbers so far prove a curious mix of things. Epic westerns with heartthrobs don’t match up to teen-vampire movies with heartthrobs. Older people, with whom the movie appears to be doing well, will still go for a sweeping war romance. And Crocodile Dundee jokes aren’t dead.

If the movie, which has earnned a little over $5 million as of Friday morning, ultimately succeeds, it will prove that naysayers were reacting wrongly and prematurely by branding it another Fox ‘08 underperformer (and underestimating the Oprah Effect). If it doesn’t, it will prove another disappointment for Fox in a tough year – but not in the way you’d expect.

The Rothman-run studio has been pigeonholed as the place (there’s one in every generation) driven by quadrants; come up with a marketable concept and build everything else around that. And so far this year rivals have had fodder to criticize that model, as concept- and brand-driven movies like "Space Chimps," "Meet Dave" and and "The X-Files: I Want to Believe" have disappointed.

"Australia," if it doesn’t work, will likely get lumped in by many as another example of the studio’s cold streak. But the film actually represents the opposite — a big passion project, complete with (Warners-ish)carte blanche to a vision-driven star director and a splurge on name talent. It’s also the first awards-oriented movie the studio has done in five years (six if you don’t count "Master & Commander").

Tough years tend to make studios re-chart their course. But ending this particular tough year with underwhelming numbers for such an un-Fox-like project as "Australia" may only reinforce the studio’s desire to return to its usual approach — some kangaroos, in other words, making it act more like a Fox.

By Steven Zeitchik

Fiction, nonfiction, what’s the difference? Filmmakers with surprisingly different backgrounds are moving fluidly between the two this holiday weekend.

One of the holiday hopefuls to try to close the day of Twilight these next few days is “Four Christmases,” which comes courtesy of Seth Gordon, who’s about as likely a candidate to direct a big Hollywood comedy as your Uncle Murray is to finally get everyone’s names right at Thanksgiving dinner.

Gordon was a producer on Barbara Kopple’s unfairly underrated “Shut Up and Sing” a few years back and directed one of the best movies of 2007, straight up, with “King of Kong,” his look at the machinations, characters and even integrity of the retro gaming scene. But he’s switched to the slick holiday comedy of Vince Vaughn & Co. How did he find the shift?

Not that difficult, it turns out….at least not when it came to the creative elements. “When you’re making a film all by yourself,” he tells Jay Fernadez, “that requires you to have quite a bit of a point of view in order for anything to get done. The hard part (with ‘Christmases’) was never the filmmaking; the hard part was the politics and fielding and understanding all of the different opinions.”

Meanwhile, Michael Cera seems like about as much of a fictional character as you can get. The guy is so entwined in the public mind with his characters that fans are known to show up on set and call him “Superbad.” Try looking at him and _not_ thinking of the track shorts from “Juno.”

Yet he’s going to want us to do just that in a few months, when a documentary — yes, a documentary — he stars in makes its bow at Sundance. The movie is called “Paper Hearts,” and you basically get to see him and real-life grilfriend Charlyne Yi (she of the stoner girlfriend in “Kocked Up”) in all their various states of love and harmony and comedy and whatever it is they do when they’re alone. That seems about as intituitve as, well, a documentarian and holiday hijinx.

Then again, Cera’s actual personality is described by people who’ve worked with him as opaque, deadpan, awkward and sometimes awkwardness-inducing. Maybe truth and fiction can live together.

There are certainly many more serious and tragic implications to the terror attacks in India Wednesday than its effect on the film business. But it’s testament to the scope of the event that Bollywood did not escape unscathed.

The main attack happened at the Taj Mahal, which as Asia correspondents Nyay Bhushan and Jonathan Landreth write in a dispatch, is to Bollywood what the Carlton is to Cannes.

And the attacks also targeted a movie theater, leading in prart to the shutdown of cinemas on Thursday. A number of films are slated to open this weekend, including Fox’s “Max Payne” and Indian film “The President is Coming.” Like everything else in India, uncertaitny and anxiety are currently reigning in Bollywood.

By Steven Zeitchik

Paramount’s Benjamn Button is one of the most original and poignant movies to come out of big-budget Hollywood in a long time.

But elements of the movie about reverse aging are unmistakably like another Paramount movie that was once of the most original and poignant movies to come out of big-budget Hollywood in a long time.

There are, as we and others have noted, some obvious comparisons between “Button” and “Forrest Gump” — the blank-slate main character whom big events seem to find, the Southern setting, the screenwriter Eric Roth, the sweep through history (especially wars).

And while the tone of the film, about a Brad Pitt who is young when he looks old and old when he looks young, is a lot less upbeat than that of the flying feathers and boxed-chocolates (chalk it up to mid-90’s optimism versus late 00’s bleakness, maybe?), there are more subtle similarities as well: a free-spirited woman who’s as much an idealized version of love as she is the real thing, a strong single mother, folk wisdom from said mother about life’s unexpectedness, a director seeking to break free from the “he’s good but he’s an entertainment guy” stigma.

Critics and bloggers are starting to pick up on the comparison between the pics, and you can almost begin adding the Gump factor to the litany of opportunities/challenges Par will face (a list that includes whether it will be able to woo the women who go for big romances as well as Fincher fans).

The Gump factor, if it continues to catch on, boils down to how that will play with both awards voters and moviegoers. On the one hand, there’s a general nostalgia for that film (it plays often and well on cable, for instance). And it won six Oscars — including, as “Button” could well do,” both the big categories like Best Picture and technical ones like visual effects. So a few well-placed reminders may serve it well.

On the other hand, part of the whole “Button” argument is (justly) its originality. That could make too many Gumpian analogies a bad thing, at least with voters if not with filmgoers. Maybe new movies are also like a box of chocolates — you never know which ones are young and which just seem that way.

By Steven Zeitchik

Indie directors have long found endlessly inventive way to get movies made. There was dad’s credit-card approach. There was cast-you-friends-and-family approach. There was, more recently, find-some-Wall-Street-sucker approach.

But now Paul Schrader, who defined some of the best movies of the last generation, has a new idea, and it’s as radical as it is logical: he’s heading east — like, all the way east, to India, where there’s a ready supply of capital and some very open arms. Indies may be a wasteland, but India is a whole different story.

“It’s cold out there,” he told Risky Biz of the U.S. indie market. “I take a good look around and what I see is a barren, barren place — in terms of the financial community, in terms of audiences, in terms of distribution.”

India offers something else, he says — a market that’s still pretty strong, a hankering for talented U.S. directors who want to work on lower-budget, non-franchise fare and a surprising flexibility about reinventing their own conventions.

In fact, Schrader says that all the strictures of Bollywood are falling away — at exactly the same time that those of U.S. independents (casting requirements because of foreign-sales, budget constraints, tonal imperatives) are kicking in more than ever.

It’s either a sign of the apocalypse or a sign of doors-closing-but-windows opening that the U.S. film is faltering while India seems to be flourishing. And there’s no way to know if the movie is a smart bit of pioneering or a more reflexive reaction to find a new home when the old one won’t have you. 

Either way, Schrader opened a few doors when he was part of the inmate revolt that took over the studio asylum in the ’70’s. Here’s hoping he can do it on the other side of a a few oceans thirty years later.

So "Twilight" is the box-office story of the year, coming in with the fourth-highest opening weekend in 2008 ($70.6m) even though it’s budget is a fraction of the Iron Mans, Indiana Jones’s and Dark Knights ahead of it.

And it’s no doubt going to spur not only a sequel that could come out as soon as 2009 but a slew of copycat development and marketing. If they’re smart, Magnolia’s Magnet label puts together a quick campaign to promote current release "Let the Right One In" as the alternative (smarter?) teen vampire pic.

Of course all that doesn’t matter when it comes to the success of this film; seventy mil has a way of making any other effort seem inconsequential. But what’s the real appeal of the series — and how seriously do fans take it? THR’s Jillian Karger, a writer squarely in the property’s demo, tells of what she sees as its appeal…and how seriously its fans take the phenomenon.

By Jillian Karger

At about 1:00 am Friday morning in Union Square in New York, veteran Twilight fans watched as Edward Cullen looked deep into Bella Swan’s eyes and uttered the trademark line, “And so the lion fell in love with the lamb.” A titter was heard among the crowd.

That’s all it took to send the audience howling into laughter.

This was only one of many instances in which lines that were tolerably romantic in the book were entirely too corny to be taken seriously on screen.  ”Twilight” may have received some not great reviews from critics, but no one would judge the film as harshly as the tweens and twenty-somethings who made the book such a sensation.

An hour before the film started, you could feel the anticipation in the air.  Though nothing compared with the pandemonium over ‘The Dark Knight’ this summer, there was a good-sized line already snaking through the theater.

But while fans were eager to see the movie, that doesn’t mean they couldn’t see its flaws. “I know it’s going to be horrible,” one fan confessed.  ”I mean, I’m really excited, but there’s no way this is going to be a good movie.”

The key to this insight lies in what we (yes, myself included) love about “Twilight”: the characters.  No one’s going to claim that Stephenie Meyer is the next Shakespeare.  But Meyer’s book provides the reader with both an amusing friend in Bella and a boy to fall in love with in Edward Cullen.

As a perceptive ‘Team Cullen’ t-shirt-sporting fan contributed, “People are hanging onto what’s not real.  They want so badly for him [Edward] to be real, but they know he doesn’t exist.”

Simply put, Edward Cullen is the ultimate unattinable man. He’s unrealistically devoted to Bella (adding to the fictional quality of the character), he’s a vampire (adding to the fictional quality of the character), and he’s a fictional character (and it doesn’t get much more fictional than that).  It’s easy for fans to fall for Edward since we’re sure we can’t have him.

While Robert Pattinson has more than enough brooding, look-how-gorgeous-I-am stares to satisfy your typical teenage girl, seeing any version of Eward in live action makes him a little too real for comfort for a ‘Twilight’ fan.  On the page, Edward can be as melodramatic as he wants and we’re sure to swoon, but up on the big screen, an angsty teenage vampire saying “You are my life now” can be a little too cheesy to bear.

Our knight in shining armor seems great in our heads, but when we see him in real life, we can’t help but notice how silly he looks on that horse.

By Steven Zeitchik

If you turned Benjamin Button around and, following both the conceit of the movie and the trajectory of its main character, watched it from end to beginning, you’d wind up with the same assessment as if you watched it the normal way: really strong, a little saggy, really strong.

For about forty-five minutes the concept takes you by storm (and makes your head hurt, in a good way), with the narrative and visual inventiveness not seen in an American film in a long time (at least one not made by Charlie Kaufman, anyway). The movie (some spoilers below) droops a little after that, as Button begins to make his discoveries out in the world.

But it rebounds powerfully in its final hour as the doomed love story (he’s getting younger, she’s getting older, and they can only be in love for a few years in the middle) finally takes flower and as Button reaches the end (that is, the beginning) of his life.  It winds down on a note of melancholy that will break your heart  (and make it, frankly, a slightly tougher sell than expected as a popcorn entertainment while winning it, undoubtedly, scores of awards supporters. Fincher — more from him in another post shortly — quipped in a post-screening talk Saturday: “All those big blockbuster themes — death, loneliness.”)

There are a few small flaws. A frame story about Hurricane Katrina might have felt organic as the New Orleans-set film was being made but feels a little out of place here. And Pitt’s acting and character are, contrary to how you might expect material like this to be handled, actually a little understated. We come in expecting moments of easy point-scoring, even broad comedy, as a man who looks old but thinks young fights to adjust to the world. Fortunately, there’s little of that. But the picture actually tips a little too far the other way — the idea of a teenage septuagenarian or a wise teenager is existentially wacky, and there could have been more fun had with that.

But these are small flaws. The movie delivers on pretty much every other level — it’s funny, thought-provoking, stylish, human, artful but not inaccessible. Even when it’s taking some obvious cues, you won’t mind.

The comparison most likely to make the rounds is Forrest Gump, and there’s something to it –  a kind of blank-slate main character who things seem to happen to; a life-changing experience in a war he didn’t intend to be in; persistently raised questions about fate and destiny; a lifelong love who’s as much an idealized version of beauty as she is the real thing; and a strong single mother (complete with her own aphorism about life’s unexpectedness to rival any box of chocolates line).

The comparison that also could be made is to another great work of art this season, the aforementioned Charlie K and his “Synecdoche, NY.” In each, we’re watching a man with a tragic air hovering above him move through his life and loves, ultimately knowing that in both cases, the man is doomed.

But this won’t matter. There’s much that’s original here — mythic storytelling, colorful atmosphere, philosophical depth, textured relationships — to trip over anything else. Plus there’s the visual panache that comes in the form not just of the older and younger versions of Brad Pitt but the period touches, often told in the style of various old movies. Doomed romance has never looked this good. Ditto for a big-budget, star-driven studio love story.