From Rob Nelson’s interview with Rick Linklater in this week’s Village Voice: If Linklater leaves the big questions of his movies to their audiences, how does he think they’ll respond when A Scanner Darkly opens in July and Fast Food Nation in the fall? “You can never prove or predict the cause and effect of anything, whatever its purpose,” he says. “When The Jungle was published a hundred years ago, they enacted the FDA. But in today’s world, we’re more likely to see legislation enacted to prevent us from criticizing the way things are. In Texas, it’s against the law […]
Bill Condon may have turned sex researcher Alfred Kinsey into a mainstream movie figure, but underground filmmaker Bret Woods has turned to a slightly more esoteric source for his latest film. According to its new website, Psychopathia Sexualis “dramatizes case histories of turn-of-the-century sexual deviance, drawn from the pages of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s notorious medical text. Among the cases are a sexually repressed man who discovers an unhealthy appetite for blood; a homosexual man who submits himself to a doctor who promises to ‘cure’ his condition; and a masochist who hires a pair of corseted prostitutes to enact a most […]
Despite the subject matter, it was always going to be a little dicey premiering Sofia Coppola’s deliberately stylish, English-language, Yank-directed and anachronistically scored Marie Antoinette in Competition at Cannes, where, even on a normal day, audiences can resemble an angry lynch mob. And, from a business point-of-view, distributor Pathe’s opening of the film in France simultaneous with the Cannes premiere creates an interesting situation for U.S. distrib Sony Pictures who will have to either springboard off the film’s European performance or else actively ignore it when it debuts the film here in the fall. This morning the Drudge Report linked […]
In a very droll post, Caveh Zahedi puts the whole “decline of the theatrical box-office” brouhaha in perspective. He posts the results of I am a Sex Addict‘s opening in Corvallis, Oregon: The film opened in Corvallis, Oregon, this week. It made $5 on Friday, $5 on Saturday, and $9 on Sunday because of word of mouth. In the comments section, Josh Boelter is concerned: Do you mean five dollars or five thousand dollars? If it’s five dollars, what is that; one ticket? Caveh’s reply: I’m imagining that’s one senior citizen ticket.
Newsweek has a good interview up with director Kevin Keating, whose documentary Giuliani Time opens in theaters this week. I saw the doc in Rotterdam a couple of years ago, and it’s a straightforward and worthwhile pic that tries to throw some balance on the public’s reckoning of Rudy Giuliani. Before 9/11, Giuliani was suffering a severe case of second-term lethargy, forgoing any sense of mayoral ambition and instead initiating regressive policies targeting welfare recipients and the homeless, among others. (For those who wonder how Giuliani cleaned up N.Y.’s “homeless problem,” this film tells you how, and it’s not pretty.) […]
Boing Boing transcribes an interview science-fiction author William Gibson gave to Open Source Radio about the current NSA wiretapping scandal. Here’s the entirety of their quote: I can’t explain it to you, but it has a powerful deja vu. When I got up this morning and read the USA Today headline, I thought the future had been a little more evenly distributed. Now we’ve all got some… The interesting thing about meta-projects in the sense in which I used them [in the NYT editorial] is that I don’t think species know what they’re about. I don’t think humanity knows why […]
In his weekend report, Len Klady over at Movie City News cites the solid box-office performance of Courtney Solomon’s An American Haunting this weekend: The frame’s other national freshmen targeted horror and family fans to varying effect. An American Haunting, based on the historic Bell Witch incident, ranked fourth with good response that should pave the way for very good ancillary exploitation. Depending on who you quote, the film grossed between $5.9 and $6.4 million this weekend, and it opened against Mission Impossible 3. What’s really interesting, though, is that An American Haunting isn’t a studio release but an independent […]
I hate to do this because I quite like Craig Ferguson’s The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. The guy’s very intimate with the camera, generally charms the guests, and, instead of a monologue, spins out every night a piece of performance storytelling that is far cleverer and more multi-layered than anything the competing late night hosts come up with. That said, Karen Finley, Dennis Cooper and Susie Bright are cultural icons who have paid their dues. So then, I’m linking here to Bright’s open letter to Ferguson following what was apparently his condescending and clueless appearance at the LAT […]
Over at The Hot Button,, David Poland, while discussing Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival, throws out some industry analysis that feels pretty dead on and which is the kind of thinking that a lot of first-time filmmakers I encounter don’t really understand when they talk about the value of their film: The new small distributors are trying a new model. 12-16 movies a year. Nothing too big. $15 million is the top. Nothing too small. A $1 million or $2 million pick-up is possible… but only if the film looks like $8 million or more. Cover most of the money […]
The Tribeca Film Festival is throwing NYC’s normally dense exhibition signal-to-noise ratio way out of whack this week, but one film you should definitely not miss that’s opening today is Robinson Devor’s Police Beat. It was one of our “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You” Gotham Award nominees last year, and it was also a critical highlight of the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. Distilling influences ranging from Alain Resnais to Rick Linklater to Jim Jarmusch, Police Beat is an utterly gorgeous portrait of lovesickness set against the psychic turmoil that is post 9/11 American life. A Muslim-American […]