Cinema Nolita, one of the only independent videostores left in New York City, was supposed to close down at the beginning of this month, but they’ve managed to stay open and continue to rent movies. According to their Facebook page, after this New York Times blurb was published, the store’s landlord agreed to give the organization a couple of weeks to raise money to pay their back rent, and they’re throwing two fundraisers over the next few days to that end. Tomorrow night, Abel Ferrara will appear for a Q & A after a screening of Bad Lieutenant at Anthology Film Archives. This should be a must-attend event for those who have been gleefully following Ferrara’s rage towards Werner Herzog’s remake. Then, on Monday, The Virgins (who appeared in Ry Russo-Young’s You Wont Miss Me) will perform at a benefit show at Santos Party House, also featuring a DJ set by Animal Collective. There’s more info about both events and the general effort to save Cinema Nolita on their website.

UPDATE: At /Hammer to Nail, Lena Dunham talks to Cinema Nolita employee/The Pleasure of Being Robbed star Eleonore Hendricks about the benefits. Apparently, Ferrara will also be screening his still-undistributed Go Go Tales at Anthology on Sunday, with proceeds again going to the Cinema Nolita cause.

In response to the leaked promo trailer for Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant remake, some people are claiming the film doesn’t look like a Herzog work at all. This is surprising, especially since the scene with the old ladies reminds us of the Aguirre act-at-gunpoint legend. Plus, ever since we heard the news of this “reimagining” we thought it was too befitting for Herzog to rework Abel Ferrara. However, that had more to do with the idea that both filmmakers are batshit crazy, not that their films are really that similar.

Still, wouldn’t it be more exciting to see Herzog take on something even less appropriate for his style and taste? Inspired by the Twitter meme #wernerherzogremake, which began yesterday in connection with the Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans promo, we’ve selected ten films we’d love to see Herzog redo just to see what his warped perspective would bring to these stories. While most of them are slightly tied to something he’s made in the past, each is still a completely unlikely project for Herzog to take on. But hopefully he’ll only see such implausibility as a challenge and actually go with one of our suggestions.
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What, you don’t have a lucky crack pipe?

See also: “I wish these people die in Hell.”

Anthology Film Archives regretfully announces that it will not be able to open the new feature CHELSEA ON THE ROCKS for its premiere engagement, which had been scheduled to screen daily from March 20 to 26. Anthology has been informed that the distributor with whom it booked the film, Empire Film Group / Hannover House, has decided not to, or is unable to, follow through on its plans to represent the film. The producers have thus canceled the engagement despite the prior commitment for the NY Theatrical Premiere which was announced by Anthology. Citing contractual reasons, the producers have declined to honor this commitment.

An (all-too-rare) Reeler post informs us that Abel Ferrara’s Chelsea Hotel documentary Chelsea on the Rocks, which we covered at Cannes, has been pulled from its planned one week run at Anthology Film Archives later this month.

What could they mean by “contractual obligations”? A “misplaced” (or more likely, never obtained) release? Complaints from the people behind the hotel itself, which was in the middle of a management change while Ferrara was filming in 2007? Considering Chelsea’s relative lack of freshness, we’ll assume it’s not the same kind of contractual obligation that AFI Dallas’ John Wildman blogged about today, the kind that causes a film to drop out of one festival so it an play another … although it is interesting that the Ferrara news comes within 24 hours of Wildman going public about a film dropping out of his festival so it can play Tribeca. In any case, we’ll keep our ears open…

I recently submitted a ballot for indieWIRE’s annual Critics’ Poll, which offers respondents a chance to create two separate lists of the best films of the year: one comprised of films which received theatrical distribution (which is described as, at minimum, a one week run in a commercial theater in New York City, essentially the same type of release required for Oscar consideration); and a list of the best films which weren’t distributed commercially in 2008––ie: those which screened only at festivals, and/or in other non-commercial venues, and/or outside of New York. Because I see so many films at festivals, I had a far greater pool of candidates for the latter list than the former. My “true” top ten list would combine films which were made readily available to audiences via studio subsidiaries (such as Synecdoche, NY and Rachel Getting Married), with films that I fell in love with at a festival and may never get a chance to see again, and with films which had the bare minimum New York release, but nevertheless were probably still seen by fewer people than the average distributor-less festival hit (such as Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness). That said, I understand the purpose of making the distinction––even if there was no other benefit to it, there’s always the hope that some smaller theatrical and straight-to-DVD distributors will look to the annual Best Undistributed list as a reference to films they might have missed. After all, 2007’s “winner,” Hong Sang Soo’s Woman on the Beach, was purchased and ended up in theaters barely a week into the new year.

In fact, I think singling out films which are still on the market, and in a perfect world wouldn’t be, is so worth doing, that not only am I revealing here the ten titles I included in the poll, but I’m adding a few bonus films. The following list is presented alphabetically and should be considered unranked, with the exception of the first title mentioned — they all deserve to be seen by wider audiences, but the reception thus far bestowed on the work of one French master in particular is actually a travesty.

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Hell hath no fury like Abel Ferrara underpaid for his intellectual property. In an lengthy interview with Nick Dawson for the FILMMAKER Blog (pegged to the long-awaited US first run of Ferrara’s 2005 film Mary, which starts at Anthology Film Archives on Friday), the filmmaker has more complaints about the Nicolas Cage-starring, Werner Herzog-directed remake of Bad Lieutenant. The big problem seems to be that rather than offer Ferrara and his crew a big (or, biggish), Ed Pressman and the producers of the remake simply paid Ferrara “twenty grand” and shut him out. My favorite quotes from the interview, taken out of context:

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Now that we know, courtesy of Stu at Defamer, that Werner Herzog’s remake of Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant is not so much a remake as it is like a new entry into a franchise, a la the James Bond movies, we at SpoutBlog wonder what other ’90s indie favorites could be continued with similar yet “completely different” installments.

I remember back in the day thinking that Clerks should be a franchise, each film focusing on a different crappy job experience, but now that Clerks II has come and gone, that idea will likely never be realized. Of course, the concept of sequels unrelated to the original aren’t new — just look at any sequel title substituting the number 2 (or II) with the word Too. But nevertheless, here’s a few suggestions for other crazy foreign auteurs to take into consideration:

1. Kids - Looking back, Larry Clark’s then-shocking debut is pretty tame. Nowadays you see teens doing worse things on commercial television. So, how about someone makes another Kids movie every decade or so to expose us to the latest generation of teenagers and how appallingly different they are from the previous generation. It would be like Apted’s Up documentaries, except it wouldn’t follow the same people.
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• Paramount doesn’t seem to be completely shutting down indie arm Paramount Vantage––they don’t seem to have given up on producing smaller-ticket prestige films, unlike Warner Brothers––but they are “folding the marketing, distribution and physical production departments of Paramount Vantage into the larger studio,” and eliminating three jobs in the process.
• Legendary 70s exploitation film I Spit On Your Grave is getting a remake. The producer of the remake cites the continuing meaninglessness of the rating system as the remake’s commercial imperative: “After seeing what was done with an R rating on films like ‘Saw’ and ‘Hostel,’ we think we can modernize this story, be competitive with what this marketplace expects and not have to aim for an NC-17 or X rating.”
• Independently produced films are expected to “dominate activity in the late summer and early fall,” as SAG continues to issue waivers to producers not affiliated with studios as strike talks drag on. Also: Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant has a July 8 start date!
• Brian DePalma will make a film about The Boston Strangler. Yawn.

In chronological order:

• James Toback’s Tyson
• Indiana Jones premiere, and Everything is Fine
• In the market: Uwe Boll goes to Vietnam
• How to throw a renegade karaoke party in Cannes
• In the market: Sex and Breakfast
• Raymond Depardon’s La Vie Moderne
• James Gray’s Two Lovers
• Che distribution speculation, and the French Forrest Gump
• Pre-Che jitters
• Post-Che fallout
• Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours and Terrence Davies’ Of Time and the City
• Quentin Tarantino <3s Quentin Tarantino
• Philippe Garrel’s The Frontier of Dawn
• In the market: Abel Danger
• Abel Ferrara on the Bad Lieutenant remake
• Wendy and Lucy and the too-bright spotlight
• Chelsea on the Rocks and Nick Nolte: No Exit

“Freud’s ultimate impulse, the reason why he did all his creative work, was to get laid –– which is ultimately a highly creative act.”

That’s a quote from Nick Nolte, pulled from Nick Nolte: No Exit, Tom Thurman’s experimental, quasi-existential documentary on the actor, his inner life, and his somewhat incredible journey from one dubious achievement to another: first PEOPLE Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive, then, just ten years later, star of the most mockable celebrity mug shot in recent history. (It’s the latter achievement that seems to give Nolte greater pleasure––the mug shot is prominently displayed in a laugh-out-loud bizarre flash intro on his official website.)

The nature of the quote––its balance between absurdity and plausibility, its revision of history through the lens of impulse––makes it seem like it just as well could have been housed by Abel Ferrara’s Chelsea on the Rocks, the other film I saw on my last day of screenings in Cannes. In addition to sharing an interest in the relationship between excess and art, both films offer us stories presented through the eyes of older men of some notoriety, offering dispatches from a space on the dividing line between mainstream celebrity culture and a tangetial space––dirtier, less stable, less a sub-culture than an afterworld.

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“Did everybody see the film?” Abel Ferrara cried at the jump of the Cannes press conference for Chelsea on the Rocks, compulsively putting on and pulling off a pair of black wraparound sunglasses, sipping on a can of Budweiser. Several journalists coughed in response. Said Ferrara: “What is this, avian flu? Everybody cough, yeah. We got a Howard Hughes complex as it is.”

The press conference as a whole was a woozy, half-sickly, half-populated affair…maybe typical of anything involving Ferrara meeting journalists, but definitely emblematic of the Festival itself at this point. But! But! Ferrara twice talked about Werner Herzog’s alleged Nicolas Cage-starring remake of his Bad Lieutenant––once in response to a question from a reporter, and once just because he apparently felt like he needed to vent.

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• You know how sometimes, things happen and you can’t really believe they’re happening, and you wonder if maybe you’re in a dream, or if maybe the universe folded in on itself and you got caught in some kind of warp in space and time that allows things to happen that wouldn’t be allowed on an ordinary plane? Um. Werner Herzog is remaking Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant. With Nicolas Cage in the Harvey Keitel role.
• Tommy Lee Jones will “adapt, direct, produce and star” in a feature based on Ernest Hemmingway’s Islands in the Stream.
• James Garner, who is 80, is said to be recovering from a stroke. He had surgery on Sunday and his publicist says it went “great.”

Sonic Youth: Sleeping Nights Awake (Trailer)

Another day, another line-up for a festival that I’ll be attending in June. This time it’s CineVegas, and in addition to some of the familiar fest circuit favorites (Momma’s Man, Gonzo, Goliath), there are some exciting surprises. The Circuit has the full lineup. Here’s a sampling of what I hope to check out over the course of my three or four days in town:

• Two films by Abel Ferrara, including Go-Go Tales (screening in the Diamond Discoveries section for films without distribution––thus squashing last fall’s rampant rumors that IFC had picked the film up around the time of the New York Film Festival?) and the US premiere of Ferrara’s doc about the Hotel Chelsea, Chelsea on the Rocks.
• Finally, Lillian and Dan: A no-fi indie which I’ve been looking forward to seeing ever since The Cinetrix described it as “like a Sebadoh cassette stuck in a hatchback’s tape deck.” There’s a hypnotic trailer on MySpace.
• Sonic Youth: Sleeping Nights Awake: A concert doc, shot on digital video by seven Reno teenagers in the crowd and backstage at the band’s July 4, 2006 show. See a trailer above.
• Dark Streets: Starring Bijou Phillips and Gabriel Mann, Variety’s Mike Jones describes it as a “noir musical.” That’s a combination of words to which I can’t say no.

indieWIRE has released the results of their annual critic’s poll for the best undistributed films of 2007, and Ronnie Bronstein’s Frownland has made the top ten. The Gotham award winner received seven votes, the same number as Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales, which is interesting for a number of reasons. For one thing, Ferrara and Bronstein were two of just three American directors to make the Top Ten. For another, in the case of both films, whether or not they’re actually undistributed is basically a question of semantics.

I first heard that IFC had acquired Go Go Tales back at the New York Film Festival in September, and have heard a number of confirmations of that rumor since. Anthony Kaufmann even references those whispers in his indieWIRE write-up of the poll, noting that “for now, [Go Go Tales is] still technically available.” It basically gets to keep its place on the list because IFC hasn’t yet issued a press release.

Meanwhile, Silent Light earned 20 votes in the poll, which would have been good enough to tie for second place…had the film not been disqualified because Tartan quietly acquired U.S. distribution rights last month. I certainly didn’t get a press release about that––I’ve got to be one of the film’s most vocal supporters, and I didn’t find out about the deal until a month after the fact. Frownland, meanwhile, has distribution in France, and due to the number of North American film festivals where it’s played, it’s probably been seen by more non-critics on this continent than the film ranked right below it on the list, Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha.

This is not about me fronting like Silent Light deserves recognition and Go Go Tales (which I’m on the record as having loved) does not, nor am I trying to argue with the rules of this particular poll. But it does seem like proof positive that not only is the line between “distributed” and “undistributed” getting a lot murkier, but the idea of distribution-as-victory is maybe not all it’s cracked up to be.

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