September 2008
The week on IFC.com: Flaming martians, Aki Kaurismäki and Fantasic Fest.
Friday, September 26, 2008 | 5:47 PM
A round-up of what's been happening on the rest of IFC.com:
+ Interview: Wayne Coyne on "Christmas on Mars" - The Flaming Lips frontman on his first feature, the Large Hadron Collider, "90210" and space ovens.
+ Interview: Chuck Palahniuk on "Choke" - The "Fight Club" author on the latest adaptation of his work, making people faint and coded security announcements.
+ On DVD: Aki Kaurismäki's Proletariat Trilogy, "Shadow" - Michael Atkinson on Criterion's new set of three films from the Finnish master of deadpan and a "mysterious and rarely discussed work" from the Polish New Wave.
+ IFC News Podcast #95: From Fantastic Fest - Matt Singer and I report, a little worse for the wear, from the country's largest genre festival in Austin, TX.
+ Opening This Week: Ladyboys, sex addicts, Spike Lee - Neil Pedley rounds up what's new in theaters.
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[Photo: "Christmas on Mars," Cinema Purgatorio/Warner Bros., 2008]
Fantastic Fest 2008: "Ex Drummer."
Thursday, September 25, 2008 | 5:30 PM
Interesting that at a festival that celebrates visceral cinematic shocks -- the over-the-top splatter of "Tokyo Gore Police" and the "we dare you to walk out" boundary pushing of "Martyrs" and "Deadgirl" -- the two most disturbing films I saw weren't horror at all. The first is "I Think We're Alone Now," and the second Koen Mortier's feature debut "Ex Drummer," which wins the prize for moral decay. It's been compared to "Trainspotting," and, like that film "Ex Drummer" has visual style to burn and threads of seedy surrealism, but in terms of content it makes Danny Boyle's work look like something from the Disney vaults. "Ex Drummer" would kick you in the teeth if it had a pair of steel toe boots and feet to wear them on, a whirlwind of nihilism in which every character is either an impulsive animal, a destructive misanthrope or a willing and deserving victim.
Fantastic Fest 2008: "I Think We're Alone Now."
Wednesday, September 24, 2008 | 3:42 PM
Like "American Movie" and "Billy the Kid," Sean Donnelly's "I Think We're Alone Now" makes you squirm at its relationships with its subjects and its audience. I wouldn't say that, as a documentary, it's unethical, but it does focus on two people who suffer from unknown degrees of mental illness and, watching it, you have to wonder why they ever agreed to be filmed in the first place.
Jeffery Deane Turner and Kelly McCormick are obsessed with, and in the case of the former, have also stalked former '80s star Tiffany. Tiffany is the faded pop center of their troubled lives -- Turner, who suffers from Asperger syndrome, claims to be in a loving relationship with her and able to communicate with her via radionics, while McCormick, who's intersex and transitioning to female, believes she's fated to be with the singer after having a vision of her while in a 16-day coma following a severe bike accident.
Fantastic Fest 2008: "JCVD."
Wednesday, September 24, 2008 | 12:42 PM
Centering your film on the tragedy of being famous is a iffy proposition -- it's not a topic to which the majority of the world will relate, and from any normal and honest perspective, the benefits of celebrity far outweigh any downsides. But director Mabrouk El Mechri has as his star the Muscles From Brussels himself, Belgian action icon Jean-Claude Van Damme, a man whose legitimate claims to fame were staked decades back, and who's now a figure of ridicule with a history of cocaine problems, four divorces, a tendency to spout ludicrous things in televised interviews and a recent track record confined to direct-to-DVD foreign productions. He's also a pretty good sport, since all of these things factor it into "JCVD," a film in which Van Damme plays a somewhat more pathetic variation on himself, headed back to Brussels after losing both custody of his child and a role in another throwaway action film he didn't really want (to Steven Seagal, even, who promised to cut off his ponytail for the part), broke and broken and hoping to rest and to spend time with his parents. Instead, he ends up in Van Damme Day Afternoon, when a trio of incompetent robbers hold up the bank at which he's awaiting a wire transfer to pay his L.A.-based attorneys and a tussle leads to a stand-off with hostages in which the police mistakenly think the star is the one in charge.
Fantastic Fest 2008: "The Substitute."
Monday, September 22, 2008 | 9:44 AM
Paprika Steen, the Danish actress best known for her roles in Dogme films like "Festen," "The Idiots" and "Mifune," is to die for in Ole Bornedal's horror-comedy "The Substitute." Like, she eats someone whole. She plays the forbiddingly named Ulla Harms, a substitute teacher who takes over sixth grade class 6B and whose hair-raisingly cruel instruction technique is augmented by what seem to be the abilities to read minds, balance pencils on their sharpened tips and force people to say nice things about her. In short, Ulla is an alien, a fact 6B, led by moody protagonist Carl (Jonas Wandschneider), gets wise to early on but the verity of which they can't convince their well-meaning, oblivious parents, even as it becomes clear she means to abduct the kids and abscond to her brutal home planet in order to use them as specimens in an attempt to understand the human capacities for empathy and love.
Fantastic Fest 2008: "Seventh Moon."
Sunday, September 21, 2008 | 2:03 PM
There was an episode of "The Maury Povich Show" in which people confessed to serious but laughable phobias -- birds, pickles, balloons -- after which, for scientific purposes, you understand, a PA would come out and confront them with their object of terror. As I watched a housewife be chased around a sound stage, shrieking, by an intern wielding a balloon, it occurred to me that the segment was one of the most awesome things I'd ever seen on TV, and also that, in a far-off way, I could relate to the woman. I can't stand the low-grade torture of seeing a balloon in the hands of someone with the intent to ultimately pop it -- the pop itself is nothing, but the anticipation of it, the not knowing when it's coming, is agony.
Fantastic Fest 2008: Opening Night, "Zack and Miri Make a Porno."
Saturday, September 20, 2008 | 9:34 PM
There's incredible (and welcome) cultural whiplash in sneaking away from the middle of the determinedly highbrow New York Film Festival to head to Austin for Fantastic Fest, an event that's most certainly not. Dedicated to horror, sci-fi, fantasy, cult and general genre fare, Fantastic Fest is the brainchild of Alamo Drafthouse founder Tim League with support from Ain't It Cool News' Harry Knowles, with a line-up of international fanboy sprawl that this year includes everything from Icelandic LARPing comedy "Astropia" to Korean Leone homage "The Good, The Bad and The Weird" to a documentary about William Castle and sidebars focused on Ozsploitation and Japan's softcore pinku films.
Everybody's gone online.
Monday, September 15, 2008 | 5:39 PM
Fantastic Fest kicks off on Thursday, which is also when I'm headed over to Austin (hot damn!), but with beaming internet generosity the festival has already unveiled five features and five shorts from this year's line-up that can be seen, in their entirety and for free, online here.
The features include Sean Donnelly's doc about Tiffany stalkers, "I Think We're Alone Now"; J.L. Vara's surreal noir "South of Heaven," starring filmmaking brothers Adam and Aaron Nee; and Reynald Bertand's comedy about an average man who discovers a face cream that temporarily turns him into a major celebrity, "La Creme."
Those films will be online until September 20th. October 17th, Magnolia will be releasing Wayne Wang's "The Princess of Nebraska," the companion film to his "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers," which opens in theaters this week, online for free on YouTube. Dennis Lim talked at Wang at the New York Times and reports that the micro-budget, DV "Princess" was a result of the director managing to fit a second feature in on "A Thousand Years"' budget, which, you would think, makes using the second film as a kind of online promotional tool for the theatrical release of the first a lot easier.
"Princess" was, incidentally, shot by Richard Wong, the director of the ultra-charming and ultra-indie "Colma: The Musical," who I interviewed last year -- from the Times piece:
Mr. Wong, 31, was the cinematographer on "Princess," which was shot on consumer-grade digital video, and is credited as co-director. "It must have been liberating for Wayne to do something so guerrilla, where you could make every decision on the fly," Mr. Wong said.
[Photo: "I Think We're Alone Now," Awesome and Modest/Greener Media, 2008]
+ AMD Fantastic Fest Online, September 14-20 (FantasticFest.com)
+ Screening Room (YouTube)
+ Bridging Generations and Hemispheres (NY Times)
David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008.
Monday, September 15, 2008 | 4:34 PM
I read "Infinite Jest" in college. A friend passed it along, told me it was something she knew I'd like. Hefting the 1000-plus pages, I thought that I was duty bound, therefore, to hate it, and started reading right away to prove so -- such is the unfortunate person I was. And still am. I ended up finishing the book in three days, at the expense of class, sleep and any social interaction, devouring it in great gulps of prose, propping it open on the kitchen counter as I poked at some occasional ramen on the stove and unsteadily suspending it, wrist trembling, in front of my face in one hand while I brushed my teeth with the other in the morning or at night. I didn't like it -- I grudgingly but thoroughly adored it, that brash, annoying, unbelievably smart and hubristically ambitious doorstop of a novel, and worked my way from there through his essays, short story collections, earlier novel and whatever other drips and drabs made their way into glossies and weeklies and other -ies. And I find myself more upset about the passing of David Foster Wallace than of any other person I'd never met. Glenn Kenny, who had and who worked with Wallace on three pieces for Premiere, remembers and mourns at his blog, while Michiko Kakutani posts an appreciation at the New York Times:
[T]he reader could not help but feel that Mr. Wallace had inhaled the muchness of contemporary America -- a place besieged by too much data, too many video images, too many high-decibel sales pitches and disingenuous political ads -- and had so many contradictory thoughts about it that he could only expel them in fat, prolix narratives filled with Möbius strip-like digressions, copious footnotes and looping philosophical asides. If this led to self-indulgent books badly in need of editing -- "Infinite Jest" clocked in at an unnecessarily long 1,079 pages -- it also resulted in some wonderfully powerful writing.
Laura Miller at Salon wonders "What will we do without him?" And Sam Leith at the Telegraph reminisces that "I tried, a couple years ago, to get Zadie Smith to interview DFW and wasn't able to make it happen. Zadie later told me she was scared of him."
There's a lot of DFW non-fiction floating around the web to be read:
On David Lynch during the production of "Lost Highway": David Lynch Keeps His Head, Premiere
On locking oneself in one's cabin for much of a luxury cruise: Shipping out, Harper's (PDF)
On "the American idea": Just Asking, The Atlantic
On John McCain in 2000: The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys And The Shrub, Rolling Stone
On, with splendid disregard to editorial appropriateness, the ethics of lobster eating: Consider the Lobster, Gourmet (PDF)
On 9/11: The View from Mrs. Thompson's, Rolling Stone
On John Updike: Is This Finally the End for Magnificent Narcissists?, New York Observer
The only film adaptation of Wallace's work is an upcoming film that marks the directorial debut of "The Office"'s John Krasinski, an adaptation of "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" that still has no distributor or release date attached.
[Photo: David Foster Wallace, Marion Ettlinger]
+ Dave Wallace (Some Came Running)
+ Exuberant Riffs on a Land Run Amok (NY Times)
+ In memory of David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008 (Salon)
+ David Foster Wallace's Defunct (Telegraph)
The week on IFC.com: Diane English defends "The Women," remaking your own film.
Friday, September 12, 2008 | 5:17 PM
A round-up of what's been happening on the rest of IFC.com:
+ Interview: Diane English on "The Women" - The director defends softening up George Cukor's 1939 "bitchfest" into a celebration of female friendship.
+ Review: "Burn After Reading" - Matt Singer calls the Coens' comedy "one of their zaniest, most immature films in the best possible way."
+ List: Remaking Your Own Foreign Language Film - Five international directors who rehashed their own work in good ol' American English.
+ Interview: Jamie Kennedy on "Heckler" - The actor/comedian leaps (sort of) into the "does criticism matter" fray and comes up with an interesting toaster metaphor.
+ On DVD: "Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis," "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" - Michael Atkinson on Mary Jordan's documentary that's a :smashing introduction into the world of mid-century, iconic D.I.Y. rooftop moviemaking," as well as a one of the great masterpieces of American television.
+ IFC News Podcast #93: Debating Two Toronto Films - Matt Singer and I go yeah/nay and nay/yeah on "Miracle at St. Anna" and "Happy-Go-Lucky."
+ Opening This Week: A 9/11 noir, a Flaming Lips film and a Coens comedy - Neil Pedley rounds up what's new in theaters.
Rooftop shorts online: "The Hardest Goal", Steve Watson's doc on the village of Ashbourne's Royal Shrovetide Football Match, also known as "mob football"; and "Wood," David Fenster's look at the workers, machines and raw material along the path of timber from the forest to the sawmill.
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[Photo: "Burn After Reading," Focus, 2008]
Watch your mouth.
Thursday, September 11, 2008 | 4:12 PM
"My apologies."
--Viggo Mortensen, after going off about the things "that have been happening in the last eight years in this country," and being reminded that he's actually in Toronto, from the New York Times.
"Contrary to what I was quoted as saying, I feel very proud of my country and through my work I have always tried to contribute to its culture within and outside Spain and to honour my people."
--Javier Bardem backpedals after calling the Spanish "a bunch of stupid people" in an earlier interview, from the Indepedent.
"My wife Tonya told me I may have hurt my chances with the Clint Eastwood stuff... They (Oscar voters and Academy bosses) take everything into account with me. They take into account that I like the Knicks or that I'm in New York."
--Spike Lee regrets (?) his Eastwood tiff, while not himself taking into account the possibility that "Miracle at St. Anna" is also not a very good movie, from King magazine via Huffington Post.
[Photo: Viggo Mortensen in "Appaloosa," New Line Cinema, 2008]
Trailering: Three "Nights."
Thursday, September 11, 2008 | 3:34 PM
There are three different teaser trailers, or maybe they'd be better described as anti-trailers, for Joe Swanberg's "Nights and Weekends" up on the official site here -- like the film, they're without music, based instead around single conversations ("You kiss harder... than I recall") cut through with other footage. Here's my review from the SXSW premiere; it opens October 10th.
For a trailer that's very much A Trailer, see this one for "The Soloist," director Joe Wright's first excursion into the present day after "Pride & Prejudice" and "Atonement," and extremely Oscar-baitey in a totally different way. Robert Downey Jr. plays a flaky L.A. Times columnist who finds a befriends a schizophrenic homeless man (Jamie Foxx) who's happens to be a musical prodigy who once attended Juilliard. It's not even "based on a true story," it's simple "a true story," and its got a November 21 release date.
And here's a trailer for documentary "Whaledreamers," a "Julian Lennon Production" that centers around an Aboriginal tribe. And also Pierce Brosnan? It features the first pullquote I've ever seen from someone's personal Angelfire URL.
[Photo: "Nights and Weekends," IFC Films, 2008]
+ Trailer: "Nights and Weekends" (NightsandWeekends.com)
+ Trailer: "The Soloist" (Yahoo)
+ Trailer: "Whaledreamers" (Apple)
September.
Thursday, September 11, 2008 | 3:19 PM
"Man on Wire": Philippe Petit in 1974, © 2008 Jean-Louis Blondeau / Polaris Images
"Che" goes to IFC Films.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008 | 10:55 AM
It looks like those rumors that Steven Soderbergh's "Che" was going to be released by Magnolia Pictures were just that -- this is from the freshest press release:
IFC Films has acquired all North American rights to Steven Soderbergh's epic "Che" starring Benicio Del Toro, produced by Laura Bickford and Benicio Del Toro and written by Peter Buchman. The film had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival where Benicio Del Toro won the Best Actor Prize. It is currently screening at the Toronto International Film Festival and will be screening next at the New York Film Festival."Che" will be released for one week awards qualifying run in New York and Los Angeles in December. The company will then re-open the film in January through IFC In Theaters, its day-and-date distribution platform which makes independent films available to a national audience in theaters and on-demand, simultaneously. It will also be included in the company's exclusive video rental deal with Blockbuster Video.
IFC Films' (which is, yes, a sister company of IFC's) on-demand platform is certainly one way around "Che"'s runtime and the theatrical distribution challenges it poses, But while I liked "Che" a lot, it's no easy viewing experience, and I have trouble imagining making it through the film in a home-viewing situation. I am looking forward to seeing it again at the New York Film Festival in a few weeks.
[Photo: "Che," IFC Films, 2008]
"I would simply go to the Internet and watch real people having real sex."
Tuesday, September 9, 2008 | 1:52 PM
"I was on a roll, so I kept going with it. I said, 'Look, if I were a 13-year-old boy, and I saw ['Zack and Miri'] on cable back in 1983? Yes, it would send me to the bathroom to jerk off. Now, as a 13-year-old boy, if I saw this movie? It would not titillate me. I would simply go to the Internet and watch real people having real sex. How can you possibly say this is too erotically charged when it's so obviously a comedy with people having over-the-top fake sex, when we can see examples of real sex at a keystroke?' "
--Kevin Smith on appealing "Zack and Miri Make a Porno"'s NC-17, at Salon.
"[I]t's weird, because everywhere I go, people yell, 'Grasshopper!' or 'Bill!' but down there in Mexico or Colombia or anywhere in South America or most of Europe, people will yell, 'Serpent's Egg!' And I'll go, 'Wow, man, these people are really hip.' "
--David Carradine on acting in Ingmar Bergman's 1977 "The Serpent's Egg," at the Onion AV Club.
"To be clear, Kirby Dick's movie was a one-sided and inaccurate view of the system and it should by no means be considered a credible source on the topic. The ratings are an informational guide for parents -- and that's it. The rating board doesn't censor films. It doesn't say if a movie is good or bad. It isn't the morality police of our society. None of that is appropriate. It simply makes sure parents have the information they need to make decisions as they raise their kids."
--MPAA CEO Dan Glickman on "This Film Is Not Yet Rated," at the New York Times.
"I went to camps way out in the middle of nowhere and shook hands and took pictures with over 17,000 troops. I'd go to an outdoor toilet and there are Chuck Norris facts on the walls. When I arrived in Iraq, I saw a sign that said, 'Chuck Norris is here. We can now go home.' Man, I wished that was the truth."
--Chuck Norris, who otherwise unamusingly talks politics, policy issues and his new book "Black Belt Patriotism," at Time.
"Dexter resonates so loudly in the depths of my soulless soul that laughs bounced around in there and come screaming out. I feel somehow when watching Dexter as if it speaks only to me. I love rooting for the serial killer. That's the essence of noir -- the highly imperfect hero who convinces you that you would kill too, and that, indeed, it's the right thing to do if only you had the courage."
--Paul Krik, director of the low-budget 9/11 conspiracy noir "Able Danger," at Spout.
[Photo: "Zack and Miri Make a Porno," Weinstein Company, 2008]
Copyright infringement, sadistic streaks and Hitchcock.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008 | 10:55 AM
Sheldon 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 at Wikipedia.
On the Hitchcock tip, John Russell Taylor at the London Times asks if the director really was a misogynist, and attempts to refute what's become generally accepted with anecdotes. Strangest snippet:
The playwright Rodney Ackland, who worked with Hitchcock on the script of Number Seventeen in 1932, was exceptional in that he was openly gay. Hitch was fascinated, and once said to him: "I think I would have been a poof if I hadn't met Alma at the right time." An exaggerated view of his coming to terms with his feminine side? Who can say? But undeniably he was more at home with women.
Also at the Times -- Jonathan Coe draws comparisons between Hitchcock and Disney, noting that they were both "brands," and that they both displayed a "virulent streak of sadism." And Sally Kinnes gets Hitchcock quotes from Stephen Frears ("When I made Dangerous Liaisons, the shot of Glenn Close and John Malkovich coming downstairs is absolutely based on the ending of Notorious."), Anna Massey, Bharat Nalluri and others.
[Photo: "Disturbia," Paramount Pictures, 2007]
+ NY lawsuit claims 'Disturbia' copied short story (AP)
+ Was Alfred Hitchcock a misogynist? He was adored by actresses (London Times)
+ Sir Alfred Hitchcock: Giant with a taste for bondage (London Times)
+ The genius of Alfred Hitchcock, the man who knew so much (London Times)
Same old song?
Monday, September 8, 2008 | 2:55 PM
The heart of the newest issue of Cineaste is a massive symposium on that favorite topic of debate of film writers -- print criticism versus online criticism, critics versus bloggers, and on and on.
I'll 'fess up to only scanning it -- this used to be a treasured topic of mine as well, but lately it's seemed awfully insular, much retreading of old arguments with no ground gained (is there ground to be gained?), focused on medium when its content that's actually at stake. As laid out in the intro, print versus online is hardly the appropriate divide anymore: "A certain number of longtime print critics have either been forced--or chosen--to become full-time bloggers, writers who started out as bloggers or Web critics have found print jobs, diehard Internet critics occasionally make appearances in film magazines..." The issue is more short form versus long form, or academic tendencies versus populist ones, or those knowledgeable about film history versus those who think cinema started in 1977.
Still, there's plenty of food for thought there, and I'd like to salute Amy Taubin for making a point I don't agree with but that should really be used to launch its own symposium:
I never believed that film critics had much stature or authority in our culture. If there is some kind of perceived loss of same, it probably has more to do with the fact that the century in which history was written as cinema is over, and film itself no longer has the cultural, social, and political importance it once did. The Internet has marginalized traditional film culture. Employing the Internet as a means of distributing and exhibiting movies will make more movies available to more people, but it will not restore the status of film culture--neither the status of movies per se nor the chatter that goes on around them.
Providing a bit of extra context and commentary on their contributions: Andrew Grant, Glenn Kenny and Girish.
+ Film Criticism in the Age of the Internet: A Critical Symposium (Cineaste)
+ Critics vs. Bloggers, Chapter 387: The Cineaste Critical Symposium (Filmbrain)
+ Crits Blitz For Net Hits (Some Came Running)
+ Cineaste, Toronto (girish)
Rourke roars.
Monday, September 8, 2008 | 10:52 AM
Darren Aronofsky's "The Wrestler," with Mickey Rourke starring as former pro Randy "The Ram" Robinson, is shaping up to be the film of the fall, having just won the Golden Lion for best film at Venice. The Silver Lion, for best director, went to Aleksey German Jr. for "Bumažnyj Soldat" (Paper Soldier) -- the complete list of awards is here.
"The Wrestler"'s still without distribution, but that should change in the next day or two at Toronto -- Steven Zeitchik and Borys Kit at the Hollywood Reporter have been monitoring the sales talk, and note that as of this morning, "Negotiations continue between CAA and potential distribs, with the newly revived Senator thought to be joining Overture and Searchlight in the bid to pick up the film. A deal could come as early as Monday afternoon." UPDATE: Anne Thompson at Variety reports that Fox Searchlight has snagged the film for $4 million.
Incidentally, Aronofsky's been keeping up a not terribly revealing blog here; in his latest update, from Saturday, he writes "today i finally get some rest. it's been a crazy few days filled with press and screenings. folks seem very supportive. mickey and evan are here and it's been a thrill showing them off."
You can get a glimpse of some footage from the film in this Italian news report from Venice. The early reviews have been good and Rourke-centric, with Todd McCarthy at Variety raving that the actor "creates a galvanizing, humorous, deeply moving portrait that instantly takes its place among the great, iconic screen performances," and Fionnuala Halligan at Screen International adding "rarely, after all, has a star been so perfectly matched to a role." Stephen Farber at the Hollywood Reporter is a bit more subdued, writing that "Although the film teeters on the brink of sentimentality, it never topples into the slush, and this is a tribute to the rigorous direction as well as the astringent performances."
[Photo: "The Wrestler," Protozoa Pictures, 2008]
+ Official Venezia 65 Awards (LaBiennale.org)
+ 'Wrestler' interest high in Toronto (Hollywood Reporter)
+ Fox Searchlight pins 'Wrestler' (Variety)
+ VENICE (Darren Aronofsky's Blog)
+ Venezia65 (YouTube)
+ The Wrestler (Variety)
+ Film Review: The Wrestler (Hollywood Reporter)
+ The Wrestler (Screen International)
Odds: It's the shoes.
Thursday, September 4, 2008 | 7:20 PM
Wonkette's Liz Glover caught up with Spike Lee at the DNC and posed to him the Mars Blackmon question. He reacts pretty well, considering.
The New York Post's Lou Lumenick claims that Magnolia Pictures has signed to distribute Steven Soderbergh's "Che," with a December 12th release date. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere has heard that the fatally bad Danny Glover voiceover narration has been dropped from Fernando Meirelles' "Blindness." There are deep flaws in the film beyond that, but wow, was it awful.
Michael Moore will release his new film "Slacker Uprising," which follows his 62-city, 2004 tour to rally young voters, for free on the web starting September 23rd, reports the AP: "Moore said that 'Slacker Uprising' cost about $2 million to make and that he will end up paying about $1 million out of his pocket. Neither he nor the distributor, Brave New Films, plan to profit from the release."
And here's robbiefreeling at Reverse Shot on animator Bill Meléndez, who passed away on Tuesday, and his work on "A Charlie Brown Christmas":
Schulz usually gets all the credit here (and certainly Christmas and its brilliant follow-up, It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown are full of delicately wrought laugh lines), but just think about the direction of Christmas's penultimate scene. Few things in this world give me chills more consistently than Linus's dramatic, fateful walk to center stage after Charlie Brown's face-raised imploring "Isn't there anyone who can tell me what Christmas is all about?", shown in extreme long shot, the tiny boy's body dwarfed by some greater being.
[Photo: Spike Lee for Nike Air Jordans, 1988]
+ spike lee (YouTube)
+ Toronto: 'Che' Finds a U.S. Home (NY Post)
+ Speaks For Itself (Hollywood Elsewhere)
+ Michael Moore to release new film online for free (AP)
+ Bill Melendez, 1916-2008 (Reverse Shot Blog)
"Oh, Lynch is way weirder than I am."
Thursday, September 4, 2008 | 6:16 PM
The world in quotes:
"Oh, Lynch is way weirder than I am. That's obvious."
--David Cronenberg weighs in on the eternal question of which David is weirder, at Defamer.
"You know how there's no Asian American players in the NBA yet? There are Asians -- Yao Ming, Wang Zhizhi -- but no Asian American has yet broken that barrier. My theory is that that guy exists or did exist who had the natural ability and the physiology and everything, but his parents were so fixated on him playing the piano or violin, studying for the SATs, that they didn't cultivate his natural talent. So that guy is probably now doing bookkeeping. Or in the IT department of a big company."
--Jimmy Tsai, co-writer, co-producer and star of "Ping Pong Playa," at the LA Times.
"Outlander is set in Viking times in Norway, and very early on in the script an alien ship crash-lands on Earth and brings with it, as well as Jim Caviezel, this terrifying dragon. It's taking a while to come out."
--Sophia Myles describes Howard McCain's "Outlander," a movie that really couldn't sound more awesome, at New York.
"I don't really respect her enough to want to play her, and I find it sad and disappointing."
--Susan Sarandon on Hillary Clinton, at the Advocate.
[Photo: David Cronenberg (on the set of "Eastern Promises," Focus, 2007) and David Lynch (on the set of "Inland Empire," Absurda, 2006)]
Chris Smith, Todd Solondz and the question of intent.
Thursday, September 4, 2008 | 4:57 PM
Chris 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 subjects in mind, but what made "American Movie" so worm its way into my brain is that the film's a constant and uncomfortable reminder of one's participation in its subject-filmmaker-audience set-up. Smith's intentions don't matter once the film is finished and put into the world -- if mockery is what the average viewer draws from it, that is essentially what the film becomes. The second half of Todd Solondz's "Storytelling" was a memorable reaction to that aspect of "American Movie" (one of the subjects, Mike Schank, had a small role), something Solondz discussed in an interview that also ran in the AV Club, back in 2001 when the film was hitting theaters.
I admire Chris Smith, I liked this film, and yet it raised certain troubling issues that connected to what I was doing. You couldn't help bristling or feeling somewhat uncomfortable at the response this movie was soliciting. I mean, you have some hapless, somewhat naïve guys from Wisconsin fumbling through their filmmaking ambitions, and you have a kind of laughter that's being generated at this center of hip, so to speak, here. You have to question, exactly, the nature of that laughter, and what that really means, and to what extent this is really respecting or connecting to Chris Smith's intentions.
Aaron Hillis interviewed Smith for IFC.com this week, and asked him in turn about his reactions to that section of "Storytelling." He seemed unperturbed:
You're right, I've never actually been asked that. I didn't have a big opinion on it, to be honest. If that's something he wanted to spend his time on, that seems fine. I wasn't sure what exactly the point of the film was in regards to "American Movie," but you could make assumptions. [Solondz] had written me a letter after "Storytelling" came out and said that he was frustrated with the reaction the audiences had towards [my] film. He felt that they misunderstood it, and I thought that was valid. I barely even remember "Storytelling," but it wasn't anything I spent a lot of time thinking about.
[Photo: "American Movie," Sony Pictures Classics, 1999]
+ The New Cult Canon: American Movie (AV Club)
+ Todd Solondz (AV Club)
+ Interview: Chris Smith on "The Pool" (IFC)
Trailering: Sean Penn as St. Harvey Milk.
Thursday, September 4, 2008 | 12:16 PM
When the International Museum of GLBT History opened in San Francisco in 2003, its inaugural exhibit was entitled "Saint Harvey: The Life and Afterlife of a Modern Gay Martyr," and included, as its central relic, the bloodstained suit in which Harvey Milk was assassinated in 1978.
There's an identical air of a commemoration of martyrdom in the trailer for Gus Van Sant's "Milk" (I mean, the music) which you can find here. The film's being looked at as Van Sant's return to straightforward narrative from the realms of "Paranoid Park" and his "death trilogy," but like the films that make up the latter, it's once again a story dominated by its own tragic ending. "Milk"'s due out November 25th.
Twitch has an extended trailer for Bruce La Bruce's "Otto; or Up with Dead People," the "world's first gay zombie movie" and the latest in a string of indies to make unusual use of the metaphorical value of the undead, here. Strand picked up the US rights to the film for a fall release of some sort.
And here's a trailer for "Passengers," an Anne Hathaway/Patrick Wilson thriller that seems to be a mash-up of "Lost," "Fearless," "The Dead Zone" and "Stir of Echoes."
[Photo: "Milk," Focus Features, 2008]
+ Trailer: "Milk" (Apple)
+ An Extended Trailer For Bruce LaBruce's Gay Zombie Movie OTTO! (Twitch)
+ Passengers - Trailer (Reelz Channel)
Paris Hilton takes Toronto.
Thursday, September 4, 2008 | 9:40 AM
Adria Petty's Paris Hilton doc "Paris, Not France" has been cut down to a single screening at its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. Steven Zeitchik at the Hollywood Reporter rumored that this was because the heiress was so unhappy with the film that she was threatening legal action, but Karina Longworth at Spout wondered if it wasn't all just a savvy publicity stunt:
It would be one thing if the Hilton camp has insisted that the film be removed from the festival completely... but they didn't. Instead, they've made tickets to Paris' single TIFF screening a hot commodity. Though technically this single screening at the Ryerson (one of TIFF's largest venues with about 1200 seats) is open to the public, behind the scenes press and industry folks will jockey for tickets, sucking attention away from the Fest's competing red carpet events, all but guaranteeing Hilton dominance of the following day's TIFF coverage.
And now the tale has trickled up to, of all places, the New York Post's Page Six, where Hilton's manager suggests this was, indeed, all part of a nefarious publicity plan:
Paris' rep Jason Moore told Page Six: "We wanted to create more buzz - create some hype . . . We felt the impact would be more extreme if we had one screening."Miffed festival programmer Thom Powers told Post movie critic Lou Lumenick: "I wish we could do more, but it's better than not showing it at all."
Paris' manipulation of the annual festival - considered the Cannes of Canada - stands to make more money for the movie when it is released commercially.
"She is a partner with the documentary and will be attending Tuesday's screening in support of it," Moore told us.
Asked whether Paris had a financial interest in the flick, Moore replied, "I can't discuss that."
If there's a lesson to be learned here about building festival buzz, it... probably doesn't apply to any normal human being taking their film on the circuit. Er, be more famous! Plant gossip column items!
[Photo: "Paris, Not France," Pablocita Inc., 2008]
+ Paris Hilton: I Kind of Prefer Wiseman's Verite Work (Hollywood Reporter)
+ The Film Paris Hilton Doesn't Want You To See (Spout)
+ PARIS HILTON'S CANADIAN CAPER (NY Post)
Considering Nic Cage.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008 | 4:27 PM
"Bangkok Dangerous," the second U.S. film from Hong Kong sibling directorial team the Pang brothers, isn't being screened for critics -- this leaked clip provides a pretty good explanation as to why. Regardless, "Bangkok Dangerous" is a remake of an unexceptional Asian action flick of the same name (the Pangs' 1999 debut) notable for being about a deaf-mute Thai street urchin turned assassin who, in this new rendering, is neither deaf nor mute nor Thai, but who is played by Nicolas Cage. The awesome shamelessness of Cage's recent career has lead a few writers to giddily reflect on the once critically adored actor.
Dave White at MSNBC compares him to Michael Caine, explaining that "Back in the day, it was an easy assertion that Michael Caine was the hardest working actor alive. And the least reliable marquee name." White's actually all about late Cage, who he deems the "anti-Sean Penn" -- "if I never saw him in any 'quality' movie again it would be too soon."
And then he made "The Rock," which grossed one zillion dollars, and he was liberated from the shackles of artistic purity he'd begun gnawing at around the time of "Honeymoon in Vegas." From that moment on Cage didn't have a care in the world. And by that I mean he just didn't care. Which is a nice place to be in life. You're finally free.
Drew Tewksbury at Chicago Metromix actually pens haikus inspired by various haircuts in the Cage career.
Mac Rogers at New York's Vulture blog wonders "How much more abuse are we going to take?" and declares the upcoming Cage/Herzog non-remake of "Bad Lieutenant" "easily the title to beat for Batshit Craziest Flick of the Decade."
Elsewhere, Roger Clarke at the Independent gets the straight story on Cage's consumption of a live cockroach back in 1989's "Vampire's Kiss" from director Robert Bierman: " 'Nick ate it, chewed it, and after the shot spat what was left out and took a shot of vodka.' Bierman asked him to do it again. 'In fact the second take wasn't so good, and the cockroach didn't move enough.' "
[Photo: "Bangkok Dangerous," Lionsgate, 2008]
+ Nicolas Cage: The anti-Sean Penn (MSNBC)
+ Hair today...gone tomorrow (Chicago Metromix)
+ Are We Approaching a Nicolas Cage Tipping Point? (New York)
+ Story of the Scene: 'Vampire's Kiss' (1989) (Independent)
Life's like a movie - political edition.
Wednesday, September 3, 2008 | 3:15 PM
"McCain's situation really does mirror Snakes On A Plane," posits David Poland at the Hot Blog, who goes on to present a bizarre and elaborate box office metaphor that I don't buy, but enjoyed anyway: "But then... it turns out that the only movie opening against it is a Denzel Washington movie. Yeah, he's a movie star and everyone seems to love him, but there also seems to be a glass ceiling when it comes to his grosses."
Over at pullquote, the cinetrix sees some Palin movie parallels: "The patriotic, pro-life, pro-gun, pageant vet Alaskan governor shares DNA with the Leeman ladies from 1999 mockumentary Drop Dead Gorgeous." U.S.A. is a-okay, y'all.
On the flipside, Jonathan Demme and screenwriter Jenny Lumet, at Venice, tried to add some post-premiere political significance to their seemingly apolitical family drama "Rachel Getting Married" (which I only just noticed also stars TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe as the title character's fiancé). From the Hollywood Reporter:
Asked for her opinion about whether the struggles of the family in the film could be seen as a metaphor for something larger, Lumet said she agreed with that interpretation."This aspect didn't occur to me until just now, but, yes, I think it's a story about a family trying to pull itself together and heal," Lumet said. "I think that's what our country may be going through with this presidential election."
And Alan Ball's over at Salon discussing the nifty fluidity of the vampire metaphor of his new series "True Blood," which, for him, could also have a political read: "[Y]ou can see them as a metaphor for gays and lesbians. Or you can see them as a metaphor for the Bush administration. I think that's kind of fun."
[Photo: "Snakes on a Plane," New Line, 2006]
+ Snakes On McCain (The Hot Blog)
+ Jesus loves winners (Pullquote)
+ 'Rachel' players draw parallels to election (Hollywood Reporter)
+ Vampires that don't suck (Salon)