Archive for August, 2008
Friday, August 29th, 2008
As we enter a lazy Labor Day news cycle, Anne Thompson picks up on her Variety blog the press release that THINKfilm CEO Mark Urman is leaving the troubled distributor and will join Senator Entertainment as the head of its new theatrical distribution company.
Here’s the press release:
Effective October 1, veteran film industry executive Mark Urman will join Marco Weber’s Senator Entertainment US as president of his newly formed distribution company. The teaming with Urman follows Weber’s recent acquisition of all shares in U.S.-based Senator Entertainment Inc. in order to focus solely on the production of English language films and to establish this U.S. based distribution entity. The company will be fully bi-coastal with main offices in both Los Angeles and New York.
Urman co-founded THINKFilm in 2001, heading the company’s theatrical division and serving, most recently, as president. Prior to that, he was co-president of Lionsgate Releasing. Urman will work side-by-side with Weber in establishing all windows of distribution for the company’s slate, allowing Weber to concentrate on the original productions the company is making with a broad spectrum of A-list actors and filmmakers.
“I believe this is the perfect time to launch a company of this shape and size,” says Urman, “and I’m thrilled to be joining Marco in this exciting new endeavor. We start with an exceptional line-up that combines commercial crossover films with classically niche-oriented ones, and we’ll have the ability to alternate wide releases– involving hundreds of prints–with prestige titles that expand from exclusive platforms. By building a company that can be big and bold when it wants to be, but streamlined and strategic when it needs to be, we plan on being the best possible combination of a studio specialty division and a true independent.”
Weber commented, “Mark’s expertise in the independent film world is without rival. He has proven consistently that he understands how to design specific campaigns for movies that are high quality, yet challenging to release successfully. It is our good fortune to have secured him as a partner to work with us as the company prepares to release its
… Read the rest
Thursday, August 28th, 2008
IVAN BARNEV AND ASSORTED FEMALE FRIENDS IN DIRECTOR JIRÍ MENZEL’S I SERVED THE KING OF ENGLAND. COURTESY SONY PICTURES CLASSICS.Ji?í Menzel is rather like a character from literary fiction, the brilliant best friend who is beset by bad luck but accepts his lot in life with a wry, philosophical smile. Menzel, born in the former Czechoslovakia on the cusp of World War II, grew up with a passion for theatre but failed to get into drama school due to a perceived lack of ability. Instead he went to film school, where he was taught by the seminal Czech director Otakar Vávra and was part of a group of students that included pivotal Czech New Wave directors like Jan N?mec and V?ra Chytilová. All three contributed to the portmanteau film based on short stories by cult Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, Pearls of the Deep (1966), a project which lead to a lifelong friendship between Menzel and Hrabal. Menzel’s full directorial debut, an adaptation of Hrabal’s Closely Observed Trains (1966), won Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars, but soon after he was prevented from making further films until 1974 due to his anti-Communist views. Menzel’s 1969 film Larks on a String – yet another Hrabal adaptation – was banned until 1990, when it won the Golden Bear at Berlin. Menzel has also frequently collaborated with writer-director Zden?k Sv?rák (Kolya), who wrote the Oscar-nominated My Sweet Village (1985) as well as Menzel’s last film, The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin (1994).
Since the mid-90s, Menzel has essentially been inactive as a director (he contributed a segment to Ten Minutes Older: The Cello in 2002), but he was lured out of semi-retirement when offered the chance to helm his sixth Hrabal adaptation, I Served the King of England. The film is a colorful and hugely entertaining look at Czechoslovakia between the 1920s and the 1950s, told in flashback as recently released ex-con Jan Díte (Ivan Barnev) recalls his eventful progression from rags to riches and then rags again. Menzel brings a pleasingly light touch to … Read the rest
Thursday, August 28th, 2008
During this election season I recommend taking a break from the cable talking heads and reviewing some of the independent media that has been produced over the last couple of years about American foreign policy. One of the best documentaries is Charles Ferguson’s Academy Award-nominated No End in Sight. As Ray Pride report at Movie City Indie, Ferguson is streaming the film free on YouTube.
Pride reports:
No End in Sight is being made available free to the public to reveal the facts about the Bush Administration’s invasion and occupation of Iraq to voters concerned with the issues of national security and the adverse economic impact of the war when making decisions in this crucial election. NO END IN SIGHT condenses and clarifies the murky decisions made before and after the invasion and is invaluable to the public’s understanding of what went wrong. The film is both an analysis of an ill-conceived war and a plea to consider the impact of future military actions. According to the film’s director, Charles Ferguson, he underwrote the exhibition of the film on YouTube because, “I wanted to make the film, and the facts about the occupation of Iraq, accessible to a larger group of people. My hope is that this will contribute to the process of making better foreign policy decisions moving forward in Iraq and elsewhere. During this election year, it’s important to examine the leadership mentality and policies that caused Iraq to descend into such a horrific state that after 4,000 American deaths, at least a quarter million Iraqis killed, 4 million refugees, and over $2 trillion spent, Iraq remains in a state of near collapse.”
Beginning September 1 you can watch the entire movie on this YouTube channel.
I interviewed Ferguson a year ago for our Summer, 2007 issue. Here’s my intro, and you can read the entire piece at this link.
In the current debate over the Iraq war, Charles Ferguson’s debut documentary, No End in Sight, takes what is perhaps the most troubling position of all: the war could have gone right. Largely sidestepping questions about
… Read the rest
Thursday, August 28th, 2008
I like Aaron Sorkin, but I don’t know what to make of the fact that he’s so loudly publicizing the fact that he knows so little about the online world he’ll be writing about in his Scott Rudin-commissioned script on Facebook. I’ve listened to interviews with Sorkin before in which he’s talked about capturing the rhythms of intelligent speech and about how one doesn’t have to know all the details of a character’s profession in order to write that character. And yes, often an outsider’s eye can be the best when it comes to entering into a world and finding the moments of drama that will connect with a larger audience.
But did he have to go so far as say that his dead grandmother knows more about the internet than he does?
You can visit Sorkin’s Facebook group here.… Read the rest
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
Everyone’s talking about small screens — what it’s like to watch movies on mobile devices like cell phones and iPods. Mark Cuban’s musings about the Olympics and The Dark Knight, however, lead him in the opposite direction:
Of course it would also not be a stretch to place the biggest screens in existence in open air locations where huge gatherings and related events can take place. Would families pay 50 bucks for a day of Olympics fun outside on 100 acres? Olympicsalooza anyone ? Why should it be any different than all the events that take place SuperBowl, or NBA or MLB All Star weekends ? Make it a huge party. In 100 cities across the country.
Could you sell 20mm tickets to attend out of home Olympic events at an average of 20 bucks each ? That’s 400mm minus the cut to the theaters, locations, etc of 50pct, or 200mm. Plus of course there is all the non stop advertising that will be built into all of these events. On screen, at stadium/field/farm/theater………
NBC proved that the Olympics can still be a communal event in the USA. Dark Knight proved that if enough people get excited about the same event, if you make it a special event, they will leave their homes to see it. Sports leagues have done an amazing job of building specialty events around the main event. Could technical advances in large stadium screens be a tipping point in the economics and presentation of the Olympics ?
How big can a screen be in 2016 and at what price ? Why not a panoramic emerssive experience in the new Cowboys stadium ? Or a 10 story tall 3D presentation of Olympics Basketball in the American Airlines Arena ? 20k or 50k or 100k people screaming U-S-A and watching on a screen that makes you feel as ifyou were there, is that worth 20 bucks ?
… Read the rest
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
A couple of weeks after organizations for the disabled attacked Tropic Thunder for an epithet used in the movie, the Council on American-Islamic Relations is objecting to the title of Alan Ball’s new film, Towelhead, which opens next month. But Eric D. Snider at Cinematical argues that the film’s title shouldn’t be considered offensive as it can’t be separated from the intentions of the film itself:
I think CAIR’s objections could be remedied by simply watching the movie. Over the course of it, the girl (played amazingly by Summer Bishil) comes to feel empowered and confident in who she is. She overcomes the slurs and the harassment, and she embraces her identity as an Arab-American and as a young woman. To complain about the title is to miss the forest because you’re too busy looking at the trees. I think people who have actually seen the film understand that.
Towelhead is also the name of the novel by Arab-American Alicia Ehran that the film is based on. Both she and Ball comment in this Reuters piece:
Erian, who is Arab-American, said that although the title is an ethnic slur, she “selected it to highlight one of the novel’s major themes: racism.”
She called CAIR’s work “admirable,” but said that “the solution … is not to force the artist to alter her work, but instead to use the occasion of that work as an entry point for meaningful debate and discussion.”
Ball said he felt it was important to retain the title of Erian’s novel because “she so effectively dramatizes the pain inflicted by such language, something many people of non-minority descent never have to face.”
Read the rest of Snider’s piece and the lively comments thread that follows at the link above.… Read the rest
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
Declining box-office… shuttered indie arms… busted distribution windows… the credit crunch… bankrupt distributors… creative malaise — they are all cited by Dade Hayes and Pamela McClintock in Variety as the reasons for indie film’s “dismal year.”
A key graph summarizes the debate that many in this business are engaged in right now:
The bottom line is that it’s a changing world — and it might be something cyclical, or things may have changed permanently. The matrix of different ancillaries — which has expanded radically from the early video days to include VOD, Web downloads, airlines, music and merchandise — puts a new spin on the still-crucial theatrical window.
… Read the rest
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
I mean, really, don’t. It’s one of the greatest movies ever made, and a personal top ten favorite… but here on this blog is not the way to see it.
Let me explain. I first saw Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter while visiting a friend’s house for the weekend. She had it on VHS and we watched it on a pretty small TV. I thought it was really good. Later, feeling I had missed out on seeing it on the big screen I caught it during a special run at New York’s Public Theater — back when the Public Theater had both a film theater and a film program. On its decent-sized screen, the film went from being a good film to being a masterpiece. A tiny moment at the end, when the boy is given an apple by Lillian Gish, gets swallowed up on the small screen, but projected this simple gesture is transcendent.
When Simon Callow’s monograph on the film was published by the BFI, I wrote about it in Filmmaker. An excerpt:
François Truffaut queasily likened The Night of the Hunter, actor Charles Laughton’s 1955 directorial debut, to a “horrifying news item retold by small children.” Quoted in Simon Callow’s new British Film Institute monograph on the film, Truffaut goes on to offer a bit of middlebrow advice proving that the confluence of film criticism and box-office commentary is not solely a turn-of-the-century phenomenon: “Screenplays such as this are not the way to launch your career as a Hollywood director. The film runs counter to the rules of commercialism … it will probably be Laughton’s single experience as a director.”
Indeed, Laughton’s use of an Expressionist, theatrical mise en scene and flashes of burlesque humor to adapt David Grubbs’s best-selling blend of Southern Gothic and Grimms’s fairy tales resulted in newspaper attacks on the film’s “arty” direction. The reviews weren’t all bad but enough were; depressed and unfinanceable as a director, Laughton soon abandoned his planned adaptation of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. Lack of critical support on its release coupled
… Read the rest
Sunday, August 24th, 2008
Okay, cool mentions across the blogosphere are one thing, but a fashion spread in the Sunday Times is something else. Check out this feature to see Josh Safdie, director of The Pleasure of Being Robbed (my favorite independent film of the year), his brother Benny, actress Eleonore Hendricks and the rest of the Red Bucket Films crew wearing some of the latest Fall fashions. There’s also this group of curated Red Bucket Shorts.… Read the rest
Sunday, August 24th, 2008
There’s a good edition of “The Medium,” Virginia Heffernan’s column in the Sunday Times Magazine this week. She tries to define what makes a web series work. In the most recent Filmmaker magazine newsletter I wrote about Max Richter’s new album, 24 Frames in Full Colour, which consists of 24 short pieces that Richter says are designed to be thought of as ringtones, not songs. In the letter I wrote about the perceptual change that prompted in the listener leading to a different kind of appreciation of the album. Applying this thinking to web filmmaking, I wrote that maybe we need to “forget that we are making films and to think of them as something else.” I asked, “If we sent a video message to a friend, what would it look like? What video might play in one of those digital picture frames in the sets of any one of our screenplays? If the protagonist of your screenplay had a Facebook page, what video might play on it?”
Heffernan makes a similar point, arguing that the lonelygirl15 was so much better when we didn’t think of it as scripted entertainment:
Just as some people don’t like to receive their humor under the banner of “funny” — their smiles fade at comedy clubs called Chuckles Café or Laugh Lane — I don’t like to watch Web serials as serials. What I loved about “lonelygirl15,” when its status as amateur filmmaking was still unclear, was not so much that I couldn’t tell if it was real or fake but that I could never tell if there would be another one. Poor, beautiful Bree, the housebound heroine, appeared to be uploading videos whenever her home-schooling overlords would permit it. At the end of an episode, you had no idea if she’d survive to make another. This thrill is present in all Web interactions in which a Facebook friend or far-flung colleague or gchat buddy is so there, writing the long 4 a.m. communications about Russia or his cat, until he isn’t. When you kick off an exchange with someone online, you don’t know
… Read the rest
