Odds: Monday – Playing catch-up.

This did make us giggle. It's awful, but we did giggle. From Caveh Zahedi's blog:The film opened in Corvallis, Oregon, this week. It made 5 dollars on Friday, 5 dollars on Saturday, and 9 dollars on Sunday because of word of mouth.At Slate, Armond White lavishes exorbitant praise on something we, for once, actually like: that Wes Anderson commercial. But really, the piece is a springboard for White to discuss the slowness with which certain hipster filmmaker churn out films: "For unaccountable reasons, it seems to take forever for this generation of bright young film artists—Wes Anderson, Spike Jonze, David O. Russell, Alexander Payne, Paul Thomas Anderson, Sofia Coppola—to make their next move on the Hollywood chessboard." We thought White himself coined the phrase "American Eccentrics" for this crew (here he  lightly writes that they're "Captiously dubbed the American Eccentrics") — either way he finds space to backhand them a...

This did make us giggle. It’s awful, but we did giggle. From Caveh Zahedi‘s blog:

The film opened in Corvallis, Oregon, this week. It made 5 dollars on Friday, 5 dollars on Saturday, and 9 dollars on Sunday because of word of mouth.

At Slate, Armond White lavishes exorbitant praise on something we, for once, actually like: that Wes Anderson commercial. But really, the piece is a springboard for White to discuss the slowness with which certain hipster filmmaker churn out films: "For unaccountable reasons, it seems to take forever for this generation of bright young film artists—Wes Anderson, Spike Jonze, David O. Russell, Alexander Payne, Paul Thomas Anderson, Sofia Coppola—to make their next move on the Hollywood chessboard." We thought White himself coined the phrase "American Eccentrics" for this crew (here he  lightly writes that they’re "Captiously dubbed the American Eccentrics") — either way he finds space to backhand them a bit ("Meticulousness is no guarantee") while writing what’s far more interesting an essay than we’ve seen him come up with in his reviews at the New York Press of late.

At the Boston Globe, Bobby Hankinson questions a group of art students about the accuracy of "Art School Confidential," while at Salon, pilot Patrick Smith weighs in on the realism of "United 93."

At USA Today, Susan Wloszczyna tries to coin her own new term: "phenom films."

These aren’t cult faves. That term implies a late bloomer, and many of these out-of-nowhere hits made money the minute the projector clicked on. Porky’s, the bawdy template for all boys-gone-wild sex farces, oinked up a whopping $111.3 million back in 1982 — in today’s bucks, that’s a heaping $229 million of piggish behavior.

Declaring them sleepers doesn’t cut it, either, since they tend to be more like wake-up calls to an industry that often is clueless about what audiences really want.

At Wired News, Scott Carney reports on the community of expats working in Bollywood:

Filmmakers in India have always been wary of India’s powerful censor
boards, and until recently it was taboo to show kissing or drinking
alcohol in general-release films. Even when filmmakers thought they
could make it past the censors, they often had trouble casting local
actors for potentially career-destroying scenes. The answer to the
problem: Cast a foreigner.

While in the LA Times, Don Lee writes about how whole villages in China (grouped around Hengdian, the "Hollywood of the East") have found it more lucrative to serve as extra in the local film industry than to work as farmers.

Desson Thomson at the Washington Post really shouldn’t be encouraging the "personal memoir" in filmmaking  — for fuck’s sake, Thomson, the thinly disguised autobiography is already the plague of literature, don’t ruin films too!

Susan King at the LA Times talks to the stars and filmmakers behind "Goal! The Dream Begins," which we’re actually mildly intrigued by — it looks like it’s may be a post-Hollywood Hollywood formula flick, in which the US is finally reduced to the miserable, unappreciative location the hero must be rescued from.

Everyone’s linked to this already, but it’s worth it: Reid Rosefelt discusses the earlier days of New York indie film.

And, finally, Todd at Twitch turns up a full-length (FLV) trailer of Tom Tykwer‘s hotly anticipated "Perfume."

+ Word of Mouth (Caveh Zahedi)
+ Dear Wes Anderson (Slate)
+ But is it art school? (Boston Globe)
+ Ask the pilot (Salon)
+ What makes a film a phenom? (USA Today)
+ Try Out Bollywood’s Casting Couch (Wired News)
+ Chinese Villagers Trade Plowshares for Film Scripts (LA Times)
+ To Thine Own Tales Be True (Washington Post)
+ Timeliness: Will it help ‘Goal’ score? (LA Times)
+ Stranger Than Paradise – A Memoir (Zoom-in Online)
+ A Full Trailer For Tykwer’s Perfume (Twitch)