Would you believe it! The new Mel Gibson movie, The Beaver, isn’t getting too great a reception, taking in a paltry ?64,000 at the box office. Seriously. Charlie Sheen spends that on coke before he’s even had his breakfast.
And the producer of the film, Jodie Foster, can’t quite fathom what is to blame for the lukewarm response.
Could it be something to do with the fact that the public’s general consensus of Gibson is that he’s a wife-slapping, Jew-hating, N-bomb dropping nutter who is thoroughly dislikeable in every single way and that, perhaps she may have had more joy if she’d cast Robert Mugabe in the lead role? Well, this totally isn’t the case if you ask Foster.
Jodie says:
“[The Beaver]’s designed to do something different. And very often Americans are not comfortable with [that].”
Aaaah! So it is the fault of American cinema audiences! It seems pretty obvious now! America really doesn’t like experimental film making do they? Like The Blair Witch Project. Like Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. Like Memento.*
Americans HATED those films didn’t they?
Of course, Foster expects The Beaver to get a nicer reception from European audiences. Well, we are hugely xenophobic and knock our spouses about, so we don’t hate Gibson like those good, upstanding Americans do.
This comes on the back of Jodie’s mealy-mouthed reasons for casting Gibson in the first place.
“I think the first order of business is to say who’s the right actor for the role. And especially at this point I can’t think of anybody else but Mel. He was definitely the first on my list. He’s somebody that really understands how to handle humour and the lightness and the charm of the character, but also has a deep understanding of the struggles and that he would keep his feet firmly placed in the drama.”
Yes, yes, yes, but what about Mel’s personal problems (aka, him being more mental than a laughing haddock)? Unbelievably, Foster says that she had “no inkling” of these problems while they were shooting her movie, which means that Jodie Foster can now add the skill of being able to stick her entire head up her colon for months on end to her CV.
Well done you.
*Feel free to show yourself to be the hideous movie nerd that you are by disagreeing with the choices of films and proffering others which are more successful and out-there.
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arzkazoo says
Shit-movie-translated-into-shit-film-shocker!
Cookie Monster says
There appears to have been a slight misunderstanding when the studio suggested to Ms. Foster that millions of people would pay good money to see “the beaver”, especially if Mel Gibson were to be “in” said beaver.