Controversy
Ways to object to "Precious."
By Vadim Rizov on 11/06/2009
Filed under: Controversy
For anyone familiar with habitual barnburner Armond White and his politics, it's zero surprise that the NY Press critic objects strenuously to "Precious." His review of the film has, as usual, much food for the comment trolls, particularly in his insistence that, by attaching their names and confessing personal histories of abuse, Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey are converting "their private agendas into heavily hyped social preoccupation," which I guess means... child abuse is really just another way for a couple of whiny celebrities to beg for attention? He also compares "Precious" to "The Birth of a Nation" and does... MORE »
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Doom, gloom and Michael Haneke.
By Vadim Rizov on 11/02/2009
Filed under: Controversy
As Michael Haneke's Palme d'Or-winning laugh riot "The White Ribbon" opens in the UK and Sony Classics ramps up for the December 30th US release of the film, Hari Kunzru comes forth to praise the director and Stuart Klawans to (covertly) bury him. What's funny is they both end up pointing out the same thing. Kunzru -- the awesome British novelist whose "Transmission" is one of my favorite novels of the decade -- offers up his thoughts on the political context of Haneke's films, and on the groundswell of disgust at the way Austria tried to disassociate itself from its... MORE »
How to diss the dead.
By Vadim Rizov on 11/02/2009
Filed under: Controversy
Robert Altman's been dead for nearly three years, and apparently the time for politeness is over. (Hey, it's longer than Heath Ledger got). Mitchel Zuckoff's "Robert Altman: An Oral Biography" hit shelves last Tuesday, a book built out of Altman's final interviews and the voices of his collaborators that doesn't skirt the fact that, however acclaimed he was as a filmmaker, Altman could be a real dick. Janet Maslin notes actor Michael Murphy's anecdote about how "Bob would make the best bloody mary I've ever tasted. Then he would stand up and make a speech, pretty much the same speech... MORE »
Is this it? This is (not) it!
By Vadim Rizov on 10/28/2009
Filed under: Controversy
You know, I really wanted to ignore all the Michael Jackson-related hoopla today, but fat chance. The title "This Is It" is distracting for a concert movie built out of Michael Jackson's rehearsal footage; mostly it just makes me think of The Strokes, but that's my problem. It is, nonetheless, a grim way to commemorate Jackson's legacy; depending on how you feel, one final film could be a promise not to exploit his legacy Tupac-style. Or maybe you believe the exploitation happened long before Jackson died and it's your moral duty to lead the investigative charge, in which case I... MORE »
Lil Wayne in real life.
By Alison Willmore on 10/22/2009
Filed under: Controversy
This morning, Lil Wayne pleaded guilty to attempted possession of a weapon in the second degree, which could mean up to a year in jail. So "The Carter," the documentary portrait from director Adam Bhala Lough that Wayne tried to prevent from premiering at Sundance, is probably not the first thing on his mind. In the face of jail time, the concerns that led the rapper to seek an injunction preventing distribution of the film he and his management claimed "would cause irreparable damage to Wayne's reputation and career" probably seem a little less pressing. Perhaps he feels he's got... MORE »
Ken Loach vs Israel, round four.
By Vadim Rizov on 10/16/2009
Filed under: Controversy
Throughout the summer and fall festival season, Ken Loach has gotten more headlines for his statements against Israel than his new movie "Looking For Eric." Now his Israeli distributor is fighting back. Loach first pulled the comedy from the Melbourne International Film Festival in July because the Israeli government had given the festival funds to cover the travel of an Israeli director. Then he bugged the Edinburgh Film Festival into returning a small grant from the Israeli Embassy, and topped it all off by signing a call for a boycott of the "City to City" portion of the Toronto International... MORE »
Is "Astro Boy" Marxist?
By Vadim Rizov on 10/14/2009
Filed under: Controversy
That's what Jason Newman at Moviefone (of all places) sees in the upcoming film, an adaptation of the '60s anime series that was the first to be broadcast outside of Japan. A mere 57 years after "Astro Boy" first burst onto the world, a CGI version will hit theaters next Friday, aiming to entertain families while apparently, er, encouraging discourse of class structure. From Newman: While it's no secret that Hollywood films tend to skew left in general, 'Astro Boy' may be the first animated blockbuster to discuss, if not necessarily endorse, explicit Marxist ideologies (albeit in cute robot form,... MORE »
Eight offensive quotes on the Polanski situation.
By Vadim Rizov on 09/30/2009
Filed under: Controversy
In a case as tangled with moral, legal and straight-up emotional arguments as the ongoing Roman Polanski one, there's plenty of room for reasonable people to disagree. But wherever you stand, you'd hope at least people would avoid making the debate needlessly glib. And you'd be wrong. Here are eight of my favorite stupid statements made, in the interest of being fair and balanced, by both the media's prosecution and defense of Polanski: Prosecution 1. "He raped her in a lot of different ways. We're talking sodomy and... other styles of rape." --Wendy Murphy on MSNBC's "Hardball". Without being too... MORE »
Almodóvar gets left off the list.
By Vadim Rizov on 09/18/2009
Filed under: Abroad, Controversy
There's a hot new drama from Pedro Almodóvar; it's just not his new movie. Spain's most famous living filmmaker has had a tempestuous relationship with the Spanish Cinema Academy for year. He and his brother Agustín left the Academy in a huff in 2005 to protest the new voting rules for the Goyas (Spain's Oscars). Now the Academy's returned the favor by leaving "Broken Embraces" -- Almodóvar's latest -- off the short-list for their official Academy Award submission. The nods instead went to Daniel Sanchez Arevalo's "Gordos," Fernando Trueba's "The Dancer and the Thief" and the Isabel Coixet's little-loved "Map... MORE »
Werner Herzog declares war. Again.
By Vadim Rizov on 09/16/2009
Filed under: Controversy
No content to simply pick a fight with Abel Ferrara, whose 1992 film may or may not have provided source material for his own, Werner Herzog is now using the press kit for "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans" to launch barbs at the academics in the audience who dare to compare the two. The Wrap has an excerpt from the apparently awesome director's statement: It does not bespeak great wisdom to call the film The Bad Lieutenant, and I only agreed to make the film after William (Billy) Finkelstein, the screenwriter, who had seen a film of the... MORE »
"Creation" vs. America.
By Vadim Rizov on 09/15/2009
Filed under: Controversy
Biopics about Important Men ironically tend to be Very Mediocre. So the fact that Toronto opening night film "Creation," a Charles Darwin drama directed by Jon Amiel (who once helmed the original "The Singing Detective" but lately has turned out the likes of "The Core") premiered to roundly indifferent reviews is no great surprise. What is a surprise is the fake controversy the film's producer is trying to drum up to get attention. Jeremy Thomas, clearly no fool, took to the UK's Telegraph to complain that the film's been sold everywhere but the U.S., because, of course, of the evangelical... MORE »
Meryl Streep, luckless thespian
By Vadim Rizov on 09/01/2009
Filed under: Controversy
Sometimes The Onion's stories and editorials are pointed satire and sometimes they're just goofy conceits and absurdities. The much-discussed fake Meryl Streep editorial is something else. In it, "Streep" bemusedly points out that despite her reputation as one of America's best actresses, she's never owned a flat-out masterpiece. If you rewrote it not in Streep's voice, there's actually no joke; it's actually just kind of a curious thing someone picked up on. She accurately describes "The Deer Hunter" as "overrated" and moans about her luck with directors: "The annoying thing about all of this is that I've worked with directors... MORE »
What people know when they say they know movies.
By Vadim Rizov on 08/26/2009
Filed under: Controversy
Our friends at Time Out New York have whipped up a neat little alt-canon of 25 films most people wouldn't think of as essential to cinematic knowledge in the way of "Citizen Kane" or "Battleship Potemkin" but which, according to them, should be. Now, I applaud the TONY crew for digging deep into their personal loves and not pandering one bit: on their list, relatively well-known fare like "Barry Lyndon" rubs shoulders with rarities like Mikio Naruse's 1964 "Yearning." But mostly the alt-canon got me thinking about how dreary the idea of "canon" can be as a selection of the... MORE »
The mentally ill are either saints or devils.
By Vadim Rizov on 08/24/2009
Filed under: Controversy
There's a long, annoying sub-genre of movies in which we learn that people who are "insane" are actually "saner" than "normal" people. You can trace it back to 1967's "King of Hearts," in which soldier Alan Bates is forced to hide out in a mental asylum, where he grows as a human being, learns that War Is Bad and falls in love. It's too bad that the new report from British mental health nonprofit Mind -- in partnership with Rethink, another charity -- passes up a chance to take on these twee, sub-"One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest" stereotypes. Instead,... MORE »
Tokyo versus "The Cove."
By Alison Willmore on 08/18/2009
Filed under: Controversy
"The Cove," the Louie Psihoyos-directed outrage doc about dolphin drive hunting, capture and killing in Taiji, Japan, isn't turning out to be the relative box-office hit it seemed on track to become after winning an audience award at Sundance and gathering glowing reviews. Having only pulled in a total of $422,812 so far in limited national release, the film was used as the lynchpin of an LA Times article last week about the struggles of environmental docs to attract crowds. Now the filmmakers are throwing down a very public gauntlet to the Tokyo International Film Festival for rejecting their film... MORE »
How to save indie film? Form bands, not labs.
By Vadim Rizov on 08/13/2009
Filed under: Controversy
Ted Hope, the major indie producer behind "Happiness," "American Splendor," "Adventureland" and many others, is a worrier -- he wants new distribution models and new ideas for independent film, and he wants them now. This week he's got a provocative guest post on his blog from Caitlin McCarthy, a screenwriter and inner-city public high school teacher with her own ideas about how to right the world. The post is titled "How to save indie film," and for McCarthy, the way to do that is to bring in what she refers to as "under-represented people" and "working class youth." She writes... MORE »
On-screen smoking, the new sex and violence.
By Vadim Rizov on 08/11/2009
Filed under: Controversy
Like many a moviegoer, the American Medical Association Alliance was unhappy with "Wolverine," but not for the usual reasons: "Millions of children have been exposed to the main star of the film, Hugh Jackman, with a cigar in his mouth in various scenes," president Sandi Frost told CNN at the start of this long blockbuster season. "I'm willing to bet that not one child would have enjoyed that movie or Mr. Jackman's performance any less if he hadn't been smoking." The question of how many enjoyed it at all was, presumably, moot. But ever since a 2006 study concluded that... MORE »
Wes Anderson, tumor.
By Alison Willmore on 04/15/2009
Filed under: Controversy
In his interview with Noel Murray at the AV Club, Will Oldham expresses from pretty strong thoughts on movie music in general and Wes Anderson in particular: AVC: You mentioned talking to Richard Linklater and Caveh Zahedi about your ideas on movie music. Can you summarize those ideas? WO: Well, for a while, it seemed like you were always seeing movies where all the music was determined by the music supervisors and their special relationships with certain record labels. And I just felt like, "Wow, I'll bet they spent months or years writing this screenplay, and I'll bet they spent... MORE »
Tha Lawsuit III.
By Alison Willmore on 04/07/2009
Filed under: Controversy
"The Carter," Adam Bhala Lough's unexpectedly artful documentary about Lil Wayne that premiered at Sundance earlier this year, is now the source of a lawsuit from the wee multi-platinum rapper, who's suing the film's production company for "Breach of Contract, Fraud by Intentional Misrepresentation, Constructive Fraud and Invasion of Privacy," among others, according to AllHipHop.com: Wayne and his company signed an agreement which stipulated that Weezy would make himself available for the 90-minute documentary and make photos and videos from his personal archives available to the producers. In exchange he was to be allowed to review "various scenes of the... MORE »
Copyright infringement, sadistic streaks and Hitchcock.
By Alison Willmore on 09/09/2008
Filed under: ControversySheldon Abend was a literary agent who purchased the rights to "It Had to Be Murder," a 1942 short story by Cornell Woolrich that was adapted by Alfred Hitchcock into "Rear Window." He died in 2003, but his estate endures and has finally noticed that the 2007 Shia LaBeouf thriller "Disturbia" is an awful lot like Hitch's film and filed a copyright infringement lawsuit. Abend was litigious in life, too: "It Had to Be Murder" has already been the basis of an influential copyright case, 1990's Stewart v. Abend -- that would be Jimmy Stewart, and there are more details... MORE »
Chris Smith, Todd Solondz and the question of intent.
By Alison Willmore on 09/04/2008
Filed under: ControversyChris Smith's feature "The Pool" opened in New York yesterday, and today the Onion AV Club's Scott Tobias takes on his 1999 documentary "American Movie" as part of his "New Cult Canon" series, noting that "the main knock against the movie is that Smith is condescending to his subjects and carting them out exclusively so we can laugh at their ineptitude... At the risk of passing the blame, I'd say that any condescension brought to American Movie comes mostly from the viewer, not the filmmakers." I'd agree that Smith doesn't seem to have made the film with mockery of his... MORE »
Timing is everything.
By Alison Willmore on 08/28/2008
Filed under: ControversyMike Scott at New Orleans' Times-Picayune notes the impeccable taste Lionsgate is showing in releasing "Disaster Movie" on the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, August 29th: Around these Katrina-scarred parts, Aug. 29 is still -- and will be for some time -- a black-armband kind of day. For Lionsgate studios, however, Aug. 29 isn't quite as sacred. For them, the third anniversary of the day the levees were breached and New Orleans slipped under is something on the order of perfect timing: a ripped-from-the-headlines release date for the big-screen, low-concept spoof "Disaster Movie." Oops. [Hat tip to Nikki Finke] Also... MORE »
We Todd Did.
By Alison Willmore on 08/14/2008
Filed under: ControversyWhile the folks behind "Tropic Thunder" had obviously soldiered up in advance for -- and were probably counting on -- controversy surrounding Robert Downey Jr.'s (totally hilarious) turn as a method actor in surgically applied blackface, the vehement protests surrounding the film's frequent, gleeful use of the work "retarded" seem to have blindsided them. Bonnie Goldstein at Slate points to the 11-page kit released by a group that includes the American Association of People With Disabilities and the National Down Syndrome Congress, encouraging boycotting and picketing of theaters throughout this week. Timothy Shriver, chairman of the Special Olympics and another... MORE »
Holmes, how you've changed!
By Alison Willmore on 07/02/2008
Filed under: ControversyLate yesterday it was announced that Sacha Baron Cohen has been cast as Sherlock Holmes with Will Ferrell as Watson in a new, Judd Apatow-produced comedy inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle's detective -- the second Holmes major reinvention in the works, with Guy Ritchie working on a version that will "be more adventuresome and take advantage of his skills as a boxer and swordsman." At the Guardian's film blog, Maxim Jakubowski has already expressed his displeasure: "The mind boggles. In the left corner Sherlock getting involved in over the top ultra-violence and in the right corner a farting Sherlock (or... MORE »
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Inappropriately Handled.
By Alison Willmore on 06/11/2008
Filed under: ControversyHBO was forced to change the ending of Marina Zenovich's acclaimed documentary "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired" shortly before its TV premiere on Monday, after Los Angeles Superior Court officials "complained the film's conclusion was a 'complete fabrication.' " Said conclusion, which relates an incident that allegedly occured in 1997, is explained in the LA Times: The documentary originally asserted that a local judge had offered [Polanski] a deal whereby he could return to the United States with no jail time if he allowed the legal proceedings to be televised... Allan Parachini, public information officer for the court, said that... MORE »
Versus: Spike Lee and Clint Eastwood, Werner Herzog and Abel Ferrara.
By Alison Willmore on 06/10/2008
Filed under: ControversyIn the left corner, you have the highly quotable, controversy-courting filmmaker Shelton Jackson "Spike" Lee. In the right, the generally taciturn but sometimes just as headline-quote worthy actor-director Clinton Eastwood, Jr. At stake: the accuracy of the racial makeup of the casts of "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters from Iwo Jima." Lee threw the first punch at a Cannes press conference on the film he's just finishing up, "Miracle at St Anna," a drama about four "Buffalo Soldiers" in the 92nd Division fighting in Tuscany during World War II that he suggests is a corrective to films like Eastwood's:... MORE »
Trendspotting: Brownface, bags, polibiopics.
By Alison Willmore on 06/05/2008
Filed under: ControversyI remain on the lookout for an overview trend as convenient and analysis-friendly as last year's Summer of Threequels, but so far, not so much. Will "the season of overlong run-times" count? How about "the summer of our discontent"? Trend: Brownface "Outside of color-blind Shakespeare adaptations, cross-race casting has been one of Hollywood's obvious taboos for decades now -- a no-no so basic it didn't even merit discussion. No more: Enough Hollywood stars are enthusiastically applying bronzer in 2008, either for a quick gag or for a serious leading role, that we're forced to hesitatingly declare this movie season the... MORE »
Creative differences.
By Alison Willmore on 04/23/2008
Filed under: ControversyJames Caan has left David O. Russell's political comedy "Nailed." From the Hollywood Reporter: The trouble started Wednesday on the first of Caan's two days of shooting the role of a U.S. speaker of the house who chokes to death on a cookie. Russell asked him to cough as he choked, but Caan argued that the character couldn't cough and choke to death at the same time. Russell suggested that they shoot it both ways, but the actor expressed distrust that his version would be considered and left the South Carolina set. A spokesman for Caan wouldn't confirm or deny... MORE »
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