Review: Remember Me - A Love Letter to Kristen Stewart

Many Photos from This Site - click to see more

This film has been trashed for being sentimental, playing on 9-11, Pattinson's performance, the fact it didn't make blockbuster money, but hey, neither did Orson Welles The Immortal Story, a beautiful film that resonates strongly with Remember Me, for me at least.

The Immortal Story is a 55 minute film made for TV still not out in the US on DVD the last time I looked. It plays on an old folk tale in seaport cities of a sailor who is picked up as he goes to shore by a beautiful woman in a limo and taken to her beautiful abode for a night of passionate love. A fairy tale, eh? Starring the always beautiful and perfect Jeanne Moreau and Orson  himself as the wealthy man who promotes the becoming true for a sailor coming to port. It is lovely, romantic, and well, Orson Welles made it so what else can one expect. It is sentimental. It was not made for the box office. It was not made to get an award or Oscar. It was just made for love. And that is Orson.

Remember Me is that kind of film. Just made for love. And Rob Pattinson has made it for Kristen Stewart. It is a love letter to her. The other love letter I remember is that of Otto Preminger for Jean Seberg, although he was a kiss and slap kind of guy. Preminger searched all over for an unknown for his Shaw's Saint Joan (1957) film and after a running field of 18,000 chose the 17 year old Seberg and it flopped at the BO. Afterwards he made Bonjour Tristesse in 1957, a hot book by Francoise Sagan, the enfant terrible of New 

Wave France and the Riviera.This one was the love letter. Seberg flopped in that one too but now used copies on Amazon sell for 18.00 minimum (so much for the fucking BO), but was seen by the great Godard and cast in Breathless 1959. It was Godard's valentine to the lovely Seberg. (He was another kind of kiss and slap guy.) She was the first to stare at the camera with a blank look. Just pure appearance. Breathless also was made for love.


Interview with Jenny Lumet Details March 2010

Coulter suggested I do some rewrite work on Remember Me (for the record, there is only one credited writer, Will Fetters), the first American release in which Rob will portray a mortal, nonmagical, carbon-based life form of the earthly realm—..... As Rob scribbles away on the script's pages, it's clear he is starting his own revision process.


Pattinson has said that this is the first script he's had any control over. Towards the end of shooting he jumped on as a producer of RM to make sure it would be the film it was filmed to be. 


And I would say this is the first film he appears as intelligent, confident, and able to hold his own with Pierce Brosnan who has been great since 007 and the always perfect Chris Cooper who has never made a bad decision in choosing a film nor ever given a poor or stupidly directed performance.


Pattinson has some remarkable moments in this film. He is wonderful to watch and his character has been lifted out of prep school boys in the 50's. There were many like Tyler. Wealthy, quick witted, intelligent, well read, sexy, and desiring a meaningful creative life. You never see these beautiful young men anymore. But women of a certain age will recognize his type if they knew any of them.


And that beautiful drag gesture Pattinson makes putting out the cigarette in the crystal vase in the lobby of his father's office. Just perfect. Justin Timberlake will play Sean Parker with drag gestures in Social Network.


Actually Tyler is simply finding himself, especially after suffering from his brother's suicide. The fact that this death has hurt him so much indicates the kind of person he is. It's pretty clear that he is living the kind of life of someone who is going to end up a writer. I think the same of Meyer's Bella. Observant, perceptive, thoughtful, sensitive, and wondering. And of course he's conflicted.


Why is it a love letter? He has assumed a more powerful role in producing this film. He is making a statement for her, that he is willing to grow up and be someone for her. Kristen is a serious actress, chooses her parts carefully, and gives as excellent a performance as she is capable of giving. Pattinson's past performances have been spotty. Here's a rundown on my Twilight blog. With lovely pics. To be fair he has had shitty directors, and he has not chosen well, so he was complicit in this. And he makes the same mistake by accepting WFE  with Francis Lawrence.


So why is Remember Me a love letter to Kristen Stewart? 

Whenever someone comes into your life and half of you says you’re nowhere near ready, but the other half says, make her yours forever. Tyler Hawkin's Journal

He clinches it with his scenes with Ruby Jerins. He is the perfect father. What girl wouldn't want to be with him and have children with him. He is  fun loving and natural with her.  Considerate and caring. He relates adult to adult with her (Transactional Analysis).


And his scenes with Ruby are what real parenting looks like. Not the pretense of concern ("floating signs") many children get. 

Review: Snow Flower And The Secret Fan;The Inscription of the Body

Official Site

Oh what a gorgeous film this is. Wayne Wang is the director and he never disappoints. Ebert doesn't like it much but I like to read him anyway so maybe you will too. The official site tells you much more.

BFF Best Friends Forever now was named lao tong in the 19th century. With parents' consent,  two girls with good astrologically compatible signs were paired often before birth. It resonates with the two Elizabeths - John the Baptist's mother and Mary's mother, both of whom desired a child desperately as they aged and prayed together for God to grant their wish, depicted in Giotto's murals in  the chapel in Padua.
Your lao tong is a serious  relationship and was considered for life, no matter what changing circumstances intervened decreed by fate. Two women bound for life in a man's world. Nu shu, a secret language was invented by women, forbidden an education, to communicate their secret heart to their Other in this world of men. Only a handful of women now know this language and it threatens to be lost. Ebert misses all this but then he is a man, so understandably. He confuses it with lesbianism which it is not. All cultures must have rituals and institutions where women interact with other women and men with men. In the middle east, men get together to decide whom their sisters, cousins, aunts, will marry - who they will fuck. Deleuze describes the homo-erotic aspect of this in his book Anti-Oedipus. I hope all this is enough to interest and inform you about this movie. But none of this is my interest, because it is the binding of the feet, the bound feet that has riveted my attention. Because this is a specific and ritualized Inscription of the Body. And the body is never - never - inscribed without the Inscription of the Mind accompanying it. But it is known as the Inscription of the Body after Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals, where he lays out TORTURE as the necessary and sufficient condition for the dawning of human consciousness. Torture is required to inscribe MEMORY in the mind of primal unthinking and without language early humanity. Nietzsche acknowledges the ghastliness of the practice of torture as he tells us of its necessity.

Foucault will take torture up in his Discipline and Punish and elaborate its presence today in ensuring normality, normal behavior in both mind and body, in his 1974 Lectures on  Abnormal at the College de France. By the time you have followed Nietzsche and Foucault you will observe it everywhere in body language, in novels, in films, and you will never be free of it again. To inscribe the body is to inscribe the mind at the same time.   This is why human rights is not going to make a dent on the symbolic practice of genital mutilation of young girls to inscribe on their bodies and on their minds the excruciating torture and pain connected with sex.

Stephenie Meyer has made the Inscription of the Body a central theme in Twilight. Bella's heart races, it splutters, it stops, it restarts, her stomach clenches, her knees weaken, she swoons, she blushes, she stammers, she trips, she falls, and then in New Moon when Edward leaves her, all this is shut down, her mind is shut down, and she becomes the Deleuzean Body Without Organs. So I hope my readers are on the same page now with this Inscription of the Body.

The two young girls in the film are played in the 19th century and the present time by the same actresses. Wang keeps switching back and forth. One comes from a wealthy family and the other from a poorer one. The mother of the poorer child determines to ensure her daughter's prosperous future by binding her feet. This starts the day she is born. It continues as long as she grows. The torture is excruciating, relentless, unending and she is left with tiny stubs that cripple her for walking. She must be helped or carried as an adult. She spends much of her childhood in unending pain, her mother tosses in bed as she hears her daughter cry. But the mother deprives her daughter and herself of all compassion, pity, love, concern in her obsession to make her daughter's feet so perfectly bound that she will be married to an aristocratic son of a ruling family. Her face endures the torture without it marring her expression or her beauty. So we are witnessing a girl/woman who has endured unbelievable torture for all her growing life to avoid a primitive existence, in order to marry a wealthy and distinguished man from a ruling family. The perfection of the bound feet determined the quality of the husband. The miniaturization of the feet are the prized possession. We see a young woman, who has never run or walked any distance, who has a precarious sense of balance, totally dependent, who has been deprived of all love and affection, except from her beloved lao tong.

She marries and her new husband touches her first by kissing her feet, acknowledging the suffering she has undergone to be worthy of becoming his wife. She withdraws. She will never know any real physical pleasure, and will only submit to give birth to sons and serve her mother-in-law, who also has bound feet, is jealous, will not let her communicate with her lao tong. The older woman is a tyrant. But the older woman has endured the same Inscription of the Body and Mind and then we see its real purpose within the rituals of this culture before Chairman Mao. Lily will always serve her mother-in-law before anyone. She will always want the approval of this cold woman who is like her own mother. She will forever be trying to get too little too late. She serves her mother-in-law before her own children, with whom she is cold. Her only love is Snow Flower, her lao tong.

And so we see how this brutal Inscription of the Body holds up the entire aristocratic family, freezing it from change, determining its loyalties and practices, ensuring the care of old mother-in-laws by the accompanying practice of crippling the mind and the emotions. One can only imagine the horror of a girl child enduring this, and her emotional crippling as she suffered and suffered and suffered in an emotional void.

The American Quaker from Philadelphia, William Hinton was in China during the Cultural Revolution in the mid 1960's spending the year in Ox Bow Village, telling about it in his book Fanshen, (turning about), while the peasants there went through the Cultural Revolution change. One older woman with bound feet at last liberated but crippled went and worked in the fields, attended all the meetings and proclaimed her freedom at last. I wonder.

At the end of Reading Bel Ami Through Marx, Foucault, Baudrillard and The Inscription of the Body is another horrifying example of The Inscription of the Body.

I am nowhere near finished with this theme.

Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland: A Heroine’s Quest for Self By Heidi Nelson Hochenedel, Ph.D

                                                   
          Between two worlds                                                                                           Id      ego   superego
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"
-Lewis Carroll- opening stanzas to “The Jabberwocky”
Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland: A Heroine’s Quest for Self    
                                      By Heidi Nelson Hochenedel, Ph.D                  

Alice confronts the Jabberwocky/superego

Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is a brilliant reworking of Lewis Carroll’s classic tale, making use of the same familiar characters in a dramatically different and more mature context.  Because of the complexity and obscurity of the material, however, the film’s writing has been woefully underappreciated by mainstream audiences and begs for some kind of clarification from the academic community.  The purpose of the paper is to offer my own interpretation of what director Tim Burton and screenplay writer Linda Woolverton, are up to in this exquisite and fascinating film.  My basic theory is that the characters in Wonderland represent an array of Jungian psychic archetypes even as they epitomize  a Freudian stratification between the id, ego, and superego.  The entire drama can be boiled down to the process by which Alice reveals her psyche to herself and achieves personal integrity and wholeness by determining who in fact she really is.  In short, the film is a rich depiction of that classic drama, the search and realization of personal identity and answers a very simple question: Who am I? (And more importantly: Given who I am, what am I able to do with my life?)  More specifically, the film epitomizes in a very formal way, Joseph Campbell’s formulation of the Hero’s Journeyfollowing almost step by step the path of the hero that he elucidates.
At the film’s opening, 19 year old Alice (Mia Wasakowska), perched on the brink between adolescence and adulthood, finds herself unexpectedly required to make a fundamental decision about her life.  Will she acquiesce to social norms and expectations by accepting the marriage offer of a wealthy lord, or will she determine her own destiny?  Indeed, this is a decision that is not Alice’s alone, but is rather a primary human dilemma.  In order to resolve this problem, Alice, like all the great heroes of literature past and present, must undertake a quest, which on the surface appears to be the quest for the Vorpal blade required to slay the Jabberwocky, but upon further inspection is a mission to reveal Alice’s own identity and what’s more, an attempt to recover what the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) describes as her lost “muchness”.  Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland written by Linda Woolverton is a classic Jungian examination of the human psyche and the drama that we all play out in our lives to achieve what Jung thought was our most important task, the realization and integration of the self.
Just as Alice is listening to the proposal of Lord Hamish amid an assembled crowd of expectant onlookers (representing social pressure), she spots the white rabbit, clad in a waist coat and baring a pocket watch.  Intrigued, she quickly leaves Hamish on bended knee to pursue the rabbit down the rabbit hole, whereupon she enters the world of the unconscious mind. She falls down the rabbit hole exactly as in Carroll’s work. Oddly, she knows on some level, probably from experience, that Wonderland is just a dream and that ultimately, in Wonderland, she is in control of her own destiny and those of the colorful characters that populate this dreamscape.........(much more so follow the link).

For a superb analysis of this film, both Freudian and Jungian, by a really first rate mind and therapist, and a very savvy blogger, continue http://home.comcast.net/~crapsonline/alice.html Her approach is consistent with Clarissa Pinkola Estés Women Who Run With the Wolves looking at fairy tales as ordeal and trial for the development of the self. I am guessing that Kristen Stewart's SWATH will be of this order also. Anyway fairy tales are in right now. But oh how I would love to see Donald Barthelme's Snow White and the interpretation given to Red Riding Hood by the late great Djuna Barnes in her enigmatic and profound and astonishing Nightwood.

Review: Reading Black Swan Through Foucault and Baudrillard and Nietzsche

Black Swan

Jean Baudrillard-Forget Foucault

Becoming a professional ballerina begins at age 3 to 4. Nina's mother  planned this for her, so Nina was caught in the grid of power/knowledge from the beginning, which Foucault defined and wrote about his entire life. It is obvious she had no wiggle room. Ever.

As she rehearses for her role we are treated to a particular kind of torture of the body. The






Inscription of the Body begins with a ballet


dancer immediately with the classes. We are


shown her master teacher's back where every muscle and tendon is delineated under a skin so devoid of any excess, or fat, that it is transparently stretched over the skeletal structure beneath. To feel each individual muscle in her back where vestigial wings can be imagined she digs with her fingernails to create pain to give her the muscular feedback she requires. When her mother sabotages her self torture, she employs tiny screws to dig in to make each muscle and tendon perceivable as she practices. Reading through Nietzsche this is why she does it: to bring each fiber into her consciousness. To feel so acutely she can move her arms as if they really are wings. She has the knowledge of a lifetime of training to know how to do this role, to perform a technically perfect interpretation.

But she does not have the emotional experience to play the Black Swan.

In experimenting on herself sexually she is watched while she sleeps and is left no alternative but to break out of her cage at home, but the cage of the dance studio is even more confining. There the grid of power/knowledge is absolute, totalitarian. She has no chance. Success will only delay her inevitable replacement, her future to teach others, or to follow her predecessor into disfigurement. No. Way. Out.

Leda and the Swan   by W. B. Yeats

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
                    Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

And this is where Baudrillard begins his defiant challenge to Foucault in his Forget Foucault. Baudrillard sees Foucault has come to the edge of the abyss. But he says that he stops. This is the end of linear time, the end of history and the leap is into Simulation. When simulation is total, then we will be in Virtual Reality.

It is the terrorist model to bring about an excess of reality, and have the system collapse beneath that excess. - Baudrillard

Living under complete surveillance and terrorism, Nina leaps into the Symbolic Order of Impossible Exchange, an excess of reality paired with Sacrificial Death.

I wanted to be perfect, she says. All perfection is destined for death.

William Burroughs Naked Lunch: Review of David Cronenberg's Film Plus+++

The film:

Burroughs NYC apartment in the 50's copies the exact colors of places like this at this time. The particular shade of green used on walls, hallways, countertops, almost brings back the smell of them. The dull browns of peeling wallpaper, the dirty cream of window moldings and doors locates that pervasive depression one experienced in these spaces.  And yet the slanting light of an afternoon sun in winter along the wall makes you catch your breath with its beauty. You are looking at an Edward Hopper painting.

This is due to his cinematographer,

Peter Suschitzky 

with whom he has worked since the 80's. It seems once Cronenberg has worked with someone, that someone becomes a permanent member of his support crew, and if an actor or actress,  becomes a focus for Cronenberg's artistic plans for the future. Cronenberg has said a number of times that an actor or actress has become someone he wishes to work with and has found his own screenplay reveals his interest in that person in a particular part.

For the reasonably minor but important role of Kiki (Joseph Scorsiani) in Naked Lunch, actors from all over the world were considered and then he found Kiki   right at home in Toronto. Such a nuanced face and body movement for the queer Arab young man, breathtaking. Not until John Lone does M. Butterfly for Cronenberg will we see the like. That a director takes such artistic interest in just the right person for a minor role illuminates his choice of Rob Pattinson for the role of Eric Packer in his upcoming Cosmopolis. He has not chosen Pattinson for his huge media splash, but for deeper artistic reasons beyond his beautiful face; his seductive intelligence and wit reflected in the camera perhaps? Certainly not as a beautiful prop as Francis Lawrence used him in Water For Elephants.

Judy Davis is a wonder in this film. Her luscious ironic mouth always enhanced by that precise color of red lipstick worn in the 50's. Not the purplish hue of Pink Lightening, but a deep bright outrageous red. But I forget the Revlon name of the color. And listening to Cronenberg's commentary you just know he knew that about that color. Her every nuance is captured: mouth, darting eyes, shifting body language you rarely see, she is so superb that one just knows Cronenberg did not have to utter one word of direction to her, which is the way he prefers to work. He is not an authoritarian director at all. So scrap all of the Scummit Twilight directors of the month from your minds, right here, right now, and I am including Bill Condon, the affable recent one for Breaking Dawn, who is going to get spotlighted by the brilliant distribution politics of juxtaposition with the Bel Ami trailers. See screen shot gifs here. (July 23-11 posting) Thank god I don't have to download them here. They are slow slow slow. Now you are warned. But they are lovely, and make Breaking Dawn look less so.

Paul and Jane Bowles

Characters Ian Holm as Paul Bowles and Judy Davis, who plays Burroughs wife Joan and Jane Bowles incite you to know more about the work of each of them if you don't already. Jane Bowles is an unrecognized genius and fanfic could learn much from her perverse exploration of character in her stories. She is a dark read. A similar to Lovecraft read in fact. And the evil, beautifully evil Julian Sands.

More Julian Sands images from Naked Lunch

Badmouthing CGI Cronenberg turns to puppetry. Burroughs recurring characters, the Mugwumps, Cronenberg's Talking Typewriters are real, the actors can relate to them, as they cannot to a green screen. The Arabic tyewriter feels like a precursor of eXistenz's (1999) Module. The Mugwumps (youtube link) are so beautifully detailed that being told only two of them remain makes you want to scream. Preserved and shown as art and auctioned on ebay would bring a hunk of money for the next Cronenberg film. Evidently he disregards the commercial value of his beautiful puppets. They are not used as props as Benjamin and Pirandello deplore, which Francis Lawrence extolls, but are real entities in his films. I could find no gifs and would even upload against my preference to their slow page loading if one were available. But here is one from youtube. Anyone who has ever seen a performance of Bread and Puppets will immediately understand what I just wrote. And damn I forgot to mention the cenipieds.

From Bread and Puppets Web Page

Peter Weller as Burroughs  is as perfect as one can get. He also comments on the commentary and as a Burroughs devotee, asked to play in the film, as did Roy Scheider who plays Dr. Benway. Each person is so perfect a choice, so perfect an actor that no one outshines anyone else. So we see how they got to Cronenberg. Cronenberg has commented in the past how actors come to him when they hear of his projects and how he envisions a particular actor as he begins to work on a project. His casting is personal and artistic and seductive. If you research box office success you will find he does not qualify. If you research awards from his peers and film festivals, he glistens at the top. I think we have the Canadian Film Board to thank for a great deal of his longevity in film. They have been supportive of his work from early on. Contrast that with the emphasis on first weekend box office here in the states and it is obvious why our Hollywood films splash and suck and burn then turn up on the 25 cent yard sale tables. While a Cronenberg film still generates DVD sales, reviewing, references, and accolades in film study programs throughout the world. And on blogs like this.

And it cannot be overlooked how Cronenberg in his screenplay, in just a few sentences in a diner, encapsulates the crucial influence Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Ginsberg have had on American writers. How does Cronenberg do it!
Well as
a filmmaker, do you want critical acclaim or splash? Very rare to get both. Here's hoping Cosmopolis will do that for Cronenberg.

http://www.netflix.com

Box Office: Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and Water For Elephants

Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Domestic:	$10,095,170	9.7%
+ Foreign:	$94,289,245	90.3%
= Worldwide:	$104,384,415

 

Domestic Summary

Opening Weekend:	$335,502
(#23 rank, 34 theaters, $9,868 average)
% of Total Gross:	3.3%
> View All 44 Weekends

Widest Release:

202 theaters

Close Date:

February 24, 2011

Release Date: March 19, 2010Genre: ThrillerRuntime: 2 hrs. 32 min.MPAA Rating: RProduction Budget: $13 million

Water For Elephants

Domestic:	$57,192,169	50.3%
+ Foreign:	$56,430,306	49.7%
= Worldwide:	$113,622,475

Domestic Summary

Opening Weekend:	$16,842,353
(#3 rank, 2,817 theaters, $5,979 average)
% of Total Gross:	29.4%
> View All 9 Weekends

Widest Release:

2,820 theaters

In Release:

59 days / 8.4 weeks

Release Date: April 22, 2011Genre: DramaRuntime: 2 hrs. 0 min.MPAA Rating: PG-13Production Budget: $38 million

 I put these stats here for comparison. Allowing for the fact that GWTDT has been out 1 year longer than WFE the difference of 25 million in the production budget is significant. We do not know what the promotion costs were for WFE but when you trot trick ponies all around the world for promotion they are considerable. Add that in for all the TV time and trailers for months. Gulp!

GWTDT had none of that and opened at $335,502 and never had more than a total of 202 theaters at any given time, this is impressive. The US Domestic total at 10 mil is low but consider that the film is Swedish, with English subtitles and you have the answer. The American masses are not known for their literacy chops.

So a small limited release art house film is giving the Hollywood WFE a run for its money.

Without getting into an interpretive swamp here, I see an interesting trend emerging. Am I the only one? If you were an actor which way might you decide to go for both esthetic reasons and financial ones, and considering your time and energy selling as a large part of the equation?

Remember Me Made More Money Than Water For Elephants!

Remember Me

Domestic Total Gross: $19,068,240 Distributor: Summit Entertainment Release Date: March 12, 2010 Genre: Romance Runtime: 2 hrs. 8 min. MPAA Rating: PG-13 Production Budget: $16 million  Worldwide:  $56,032,889

Water for Elephants

Domestic Total as of Aug. 4, 2011: $58,684,819
Distributor: Fox	Release Date: April 22, 2011
Genre: Drama	Runtime: 2 hrs. 0 min.
MPAA Rating: PG-13	Production Budget: $38 million Worldwide:  $115,115,125

I have decided to do a repeat financial analysis of Remember Me and Water For Elephants the way I did for Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Water For Elephants. Very interesting.

WFE has a worldwide gross of 115 million. I always round off and estimate so don't bother me with details, OK?

Remember Me has a worldwide gross of 56 million. 

Removing, subtracting production costs the "net" for both now is:

WFE: 75 million.

RM: 40 million. 

Hmmmmmm. It's getting very interesting now.

I think the general figure for promotion is usually equal to production costs? So let's subtract from WFE again. The new "net" ladies and gentlemen is:  roll of the drum please:

WFE: 35 million

RM: 40 million

RM had little to no distributor promotion from Scummit. Only word of mouth. So it seems to me I can get the promotion cost close to zero. We can give WFE another 4 million as I rounded off production and promotion costs upward from 38 to 40. The 4 million is for those who are always looking at the trees.

WFE:39 million

RM:40 million

And now you see how the Dominating Discourse of Hollywood obscures the secret of something. Both films had actors and actresses (I shall keep using the word actress instead of actor for the feminine as I have explained elsewhere. Ask me again if you want me to elaborate. I want to change the Discourse of PC Feminists on this word) who took far less than their usual fees to do this Francis Lawrence career move film. They were suckered.

Within the folds of the Dominating Discourse lies the secret of the money game. We have no idea of how much it cost to trot these trick ponies all around to world premieres in addition to all the trailers and other promotional brou-ha. But let's accept the generally accepted figure of its being equal to production costs as I have said above. I really believe they were much higher for this film.

And don't ever forget the hassle and time of the actors and actresses being used as trick ponies.

Remember Me made more money than Water For Elephants!