Jim Emerson has collated an incredibly comprehensive account of the events of the 1983 Telluride Film Festival, where Andrei Tarkovsky made some obtuse statements about cinema and art, and Richard Widmark offered an eloquent counterargument, which can essentially be reduced to its most powerful two words: “He stinks.”
An intern in the Paramount Vantage publicity office Martin Scorsese has a MySpace profile.
If you have $95, you can buy a My Blueberry Nights tee shirt. Or, you can just go to indieWIRE’s Apple Store event tomorrow night and heckle Wong Kar Wai for indiscriminately distributing his branding rights for free.
It’s a good thing I work alone in an airtight concrete room, because I literally, audibly yelped when this press release landed in my inbox. Slavoj Zizek––the superstar Lacanian theorist who Sophie Fiennes bluescreened into Psycho, who analyzed 9/11 through terms set by The Matrix, who is probably the only former Princeton professor to star in a documentary with an exclamation point in the title––will Guest Direct the 2008 Telluride Film Festival. Telluride’s Guest Directors are charged with putting together a sidebar of films, and introducing the screenings at the Labor Day weekend fest. In keeping with Telluride tradition, Zizek’s picks, like the rest of the line up, will be kept secret until the week of the fest, but if anybody want to start putting money down on what Zizek might program, I’m game.
The above montage of scenes from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, set to two songs by Nina Simone, was posted on Vinyl is Heavy by Stephen Boone. I’ll let him explain:
The idea is that Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is two films. The first is about two lovers dealing with the terrible, disapproving world. The second is about the two lovers, having conquered the world, dealing with what poison it has left in each other’s system. Nina sings a song for each “film.”
I’m generally a big fan of the YouTube musical montage/tribute’s ability to condense an entire film experience into a concentrated crack hit of pop-scored pure emotion. The second half of this clip especially nails the devastating strangeness of the film’s final moments.
On Friday, we learned that HBO had quietly opened the Sundance hit doc Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired in one theater on 181st Street in Manhattan, so that the film could qualify for an Oscar nomination before it runs on the cable channel in June. The doc wasn’t screened for the press, because the release is obligatory and presumably TV critics will have at it soon enough. But the New York Times, who have a mandate to review every film that open in any theatrical venue in Manhattan, put Manohla Dargis on an A train up to 181st street and ran her review in today’s paper. The circumstances of the film’s virtual non-release were deemed remarkable enough for inclusion in the review’s second paragraph, where Dargis backhands the doc with praise and notes that the token, Academy-baiting theatrical release could be an exercise in futility. “Its one-week theatrical run will make it eligible for Academy Award consideration, though given that organization’s often pitiful record when it comes to nonfiction film, it seems unlikely that a movie this subtly intelligent would make its short list.”
AJ Schnack argues that a film which so stealthily end-runs an actual theatrical audience doesn’t deserve the slot on the short list that it’s so baldy fishing for. …Read more
Weather permitting, I should be at Yankees Stadium this afternoon for opening day. So, I figured I’d share one of my favorite jokes from Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three (a film I also wrote about last week). James Cagney plays a Coca-Cola executive in West Berlin who’s supposed to be making sure his boss’ 17-year-old daughter, Scarlett (Pamela Tiffin), stays out of trouble. He does a bad job, though, because Scarlett sneaks into East Berlin, marries a young communist and gets pregnant with his child. When Cagney’s character asks the girl why she’s been helping to blow up balloons featuring the words, “Yankee Go Home”, she replies that where she comes from (Atlanta), everyone hates Yankees.
I know it’s not meant to be baseball-related, but I sometimes like to pretend that Scarlett has foreseen the ‘96 and ‘99 World Series (the film takes place a few years after the Braves beat the Yankees in the 1957 World Series, but the team wasn’t yet in Atlanta at that time). And I wonder if most Yankees fans would appreciate that line or see it as a reason to hate One, Two, Three. I’ve encountered a lot of fans of the team who are just that serious that they would probably boycott a movie that makes their Bombers sound or look bad. Here’s five such films I figure no “true” Yankees fan can admit to enjoying:
Damn Yankees- Obviously it’s in the title that this is anti-Yankees propaganda. Adapted from a stage musical of the same name, the 1958 film is about a Washington Senators fan who sells his soul to the devil in order to play for the team and help them defeat the Yanks for the league pennant. …Read more
As expected, 21 came in at the top of the box office this weekend, with a not-huge $23.7 million. And as hoped for by many––maybe even Paramount, who opened the thing on suspiciously few screens––Stop-Loss tanked with $4.5 million.
Just three months before their mutual contract expires, the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists have severed ties. AFTRA president Roberta Reardon said the move was prompted by her former sister union’s dirty dealings in the contract negotiation process. Actual quote: “We can’t trust SAG.”
A group of British directors has formed their own union of sorts, called Directors U.K. The goal, according to Variety, is “securing a standard collective bargaining agreement with British employers.”
Remember the Cold War, when we were led to believe that Americans and Russians are so different from each other? Turns out that all that time we could have just made peace in a movie theater, watching spoofs like The Naked Gunand Airplane! together. Well, I guess the Russians could have only grown to love these kinds of comedies in the last 16 years, since the fall of the Soviet Union. But in any event, this trailer for the new film Hitler Kaput! shows that senses of humor are currently equal on both hemispheres. Even if our own latest parody, Superhero Movie, performed rather poorly at the box office over the weekend.
Presently, there are no plans for Hitler Kaput! to be distributed in the U.S. (it opens in Russia on April 10), but were it not for the language barrier, it would easily be popular here. Seeming like a cross between the classic Zucker Bros. spy movie parody Top Secret!and any post-Scary Moviespoof film, it looks just dumb enough to appeal to the masses. Perhaps it could sell as a cult-ready DVD release if the dialogue is dubbed instead of subtitled. Actually, considering the fact that we can tell what is going on in the trailer, despite it being in Russian, we probably don’t need dubbing or subtitles. Visual gags like the silly dancing Hitler, the photo of Sean Connery, the swastika eye patch and plenty of slapstick bits make the movie exportable just the way it is.
Eugene Hernandez at indieWIRE is asking “filmmakers, critics, publicists and other festival organizers” to weigh in on a new rule instituted by the Tribeca Film Festival press office. Here’s the text, as it appears on the Festival’s credential application:
“Embargo” regulation for world premieres
Reviews of films that celebrate their world premiere at the Festival may only be published after the official premiere. All journalists seeking accreditation to the Festival declare their acceptance of this “embargo.”
When I applied for credentials, I saw this text and rolled my eyes, but I wasn’t really surprised. In my experience with the Tribeca Film Festival press office, it’s always seemed like they prioritize coverage of red carpets and parties far above reviews or any sort of serious consideration of the films themselves; every year, much of the program seems to be about courting the attention of Access Hollywood, rather than cementing Tribeca’s reputation as a venue for quality films. But sniping aside: really, Tribeca demanding that journalists refrain from writing about World Premieres before they screen for the public will not end in a materially different result than what happens at Sundance, where all press screenings take place either during or after World Premieres, and as press the only way to see a film before ticket buyers is to obtain a screener from a sales agent, publicist or distributor.
So I’m not exactly outraged by the embargo, but it certainly will change the type and quantity of coverage that I’ll be able to do of the festival. …Read more
This is interesting: a Defamer tipster points out out a tiny ad in what looks like the print edition of the Village Voice, listing screenings beginning today in way, WAY uptown Manhattan of Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. The much-discussed Sundance doc was picked up at that festival, as we noted on our deal chart, for domestic release and Oscar qualifying by HBO. Other than this little ad, there’s been no publicity and no reviews of the film in advance of this New York release; I consulted Moviefone’s AIM movie listings bot, and was told that “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired has not opened yet. It will open on 12-31-10.”
Defamer’s Stu VanAirsdale posits that this secret release is happening as a way of meeting Oscar nomination qualifications––and he’s probably right––but even token qualifying releases are usually given *some* kind of publicity budget. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised: Anne Thompson essentially predicted an in-name-only theatrical release for Wanted when the HBO deal was made at Sundance. As she put it on her blog,
Jim Emerson has collated an 
It’s a good thing I work alone in an airtight concrete room, because I literally, audibly yelped when this press release landed in my inbox. Slavoj Zizek––the superstar Lacanian theorist who Sophie Fiennes bluescreened into Psycho, who analyzed 9/11 through terms set by The Matrix, who is probably the only former Princeton professor to star in a documentary with an exclamation point in the title––will Guest Direct the 2008 Telluride Film Festival. Telluride’s Guest Directors are charged with putting together a sidebar of films, and introducing the screenings at the Labor Day weekend fest. In keeping with Telluride tradition, Zizek’s picks, like the rest of the line up, will be kept secret until the week of the fest, but if anybody want to start putting money down on what Zizek might program, I’m game.
On Friday, 
As expected, 
