AJ Schnack has posted the Academy’s shortlist for the Best Documentary Feature nomination. As expected (at least, by me), Ellen Kuras’ The Betrayal, Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World, Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure, and Sundance winners Man on Wire and Trouble the Wire all made the cut. It’s also nice to see a few smaller films on the list, including In a Dream and They Killed Sister Dorothy. But there are also a few notable omissions, including Religulous and Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, both of which had their semi-secret shortlist qualifying runs at the Creative Entertainment Coliseum Quad on 181 Street in the nosebleed section of New York City. Coincidence?!?? Probably! (For what it’s worth, Expelled, Religulous‘ political polar opposite, also failed to make the cut.)

The full list can be found here. Expect chatter and analysis in the days to come (probably not least from the snubbed Bill Maher).

• The weekend box office went just as expected with Beverly Hills Chihuahua unfortunately coming out on top with $29 million and Rachel Getting Married earning the best per-screen average ($33,667) with an impressive $303,000 gross from only 9 locations. Also, with so many new films debuting, Flash of Genius, Blindness and How to Lose Friends and Alienate People couldn’t even open in the top ten — the latter placed as low as #19 — and An American Carol and Religilous only placed ninth and tenth, respectively. Still, for a documentary, Religilous‘ $3.5 million debut and $6,972 per-screen average are both honorable achievements. The film had the highest non-fiction debut of 2008, and it’s sure to be the highest-grossing non-concert doc of the year.
• Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist also debuted relatively well this past weekend, which made it a perfect time for Mandate Pictures to annouce that the film’s screenwriter, Lorene Scafaria, will make her directorial debut with the romantic comedy Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.
• For awhile now I’ve noticed the headlines about Mamma Mia!’s incredible overseas business, but I’ve so far ignored them. Well, here’s the latest off-balanced tally: compared to its already hit-qualifying $143 million domestic gross, the musical has taken in close to $400 million extra from international markets. That’s nearly three-fourths of its total take, for those who like fractions.
• 200 projects developed by DreamWorks while living under Paramount’s roof will be divided up rather fairly between the two studios now that they’re separating. About one-fifth of those will remain joint efforts, of which one-half will be primarily developed by DreamWorks with Paramount having an option to co-finance and co-distribute. While some of these special-circumstance projects are rumored to be Spielberg’s directing and producing gigs, there’s still no news on what’s going on with the Tintin trilogy.

INTERVIEWS

Paul Rudd and David Wain Interview, Role Models, Fantastic Fest 2008

Ronnie Bronstein: The Media Diet

Watchmen director Zack Snyder on Hollywood and Video Games

REVIEWS

Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist

Rachel Getting Married

The Pleasure of Being Robbed

Che Review and Steven Soderbergh Press Conference, NYFF 2008

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This review originally appeared during the Toronto Film Festival. We’re re-running it because Religulous opens in theaters today.

“I’m on the street corner peddling doubt.” That’s how Bill Maher categorizes his personal attitude towards and mission against religion in Religulous, and that’s sort of how I feel about Maher’s professional schtick: I am aggressively, even evangelically, skeptical. I’ll stick around and watch his HBO show when I catch it whilst flipping channels, mostly because impressed by his ability to make the quick change from sub-Leno, pun-dependent one-liners to actually asking hard-hitting, legitimately provocative questions of his panelists. On Real Time, Maher uses (mostly bad) jokes to soften up both his guests and his audience for the serious discourse that inevitably follows, and even though much of Maher’s humor is unbelievably hokey and old-fashioned, there’s something admirable about the marriage he’s arranged between his desire to entertain and his compulsion to interrogate and lay blame.

Hopeful that his feature-length collaboration with Larry Charles would offer a similar balance writ large, I went in to Religulous with an open mind –– which is more than can be said of Maher. The comedian-turned-political pundit/committed agnostic, and star and producer of this non-fiction film, explains early in the picture that he thinks organized religion of any kind is “detrimental to the progress of humanity.” Writing off the contents of the bible and all historical narratives of faith as “fairy tales,” he says he’s on a journey in search of an explanation as to how otherwise rational adults can buy into this kiddie stuff. “It’s too easy,” he complains.

Unfortunately, this last line turns out to be auto-critique: as Maher and Charles hop from backwoods America to international holy hot spots and back again. Maher continually flips the script, here using serious questioning not as an end, but a means to immature, unenlightening mockery. It quickly becomes apparent that Maher’s journey is not about finding out what makes religious people tick, but about using the tics of mostly fringe religious people to prop up the thesis Maher came in with. Which is––in a nutshell, but totally without irony––that everyday religious practice will soon result in global apocalypse.

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“I’m on the street corner peddling doubt.” That’s how Bill Maher categorizes his personal attitude towards and mission against religion in Religulous, and that’s sort of how I feel about Maher’s professional schtick: I am aggressively, even evangelically, skeptical. I’ll stick around and watch his HBO show when I catch it whilst flipping channels, mostly because impressed by his ability to make the quick change from sub-Leno, pun-dependent one-liners to actually asking hard-hitting, legitimately provocative questions of his panelists. On Real Time, Maher uses (mostly bad) jokes to soften up both his guests and his audience for the serious discourse that inevitably follows, and even though much of Maher’s humor is unbelievably hokey and old-fashioned, there’s something admirable about the marriage he’s arranged between his desire to entertain and his compulsion to interrogate and lay blame.

Hopeful that his feature-length collaboration with Larry Charles would offer a similar balance writ large, I went in to Religulous with an open mind –– which is more than can be said of Maher. The comedian-turned-political pundit/committed agnostic, and star and producer of this non-fiction film, explains early in the picture that he thinks organized religion of any kind is “detrimental to the progress of humanity.” Writing off the contents of the bible and all historical narratives of faith as “fairy tales,” he says he’s on a journey in search of an explanation as to how otherwise rational adults can buy into this kiddie stuff. “It’s too easy,” he complains.

Unfortunately, this last line turns out to be auto-critique: as Maher and Charles hop from backwoods America to international holy hot spots and back again. Maher continually flips the script, here using serious questioning not as an end, but a means to immature, unenlightening mockery. It quickly becomes apparent that Maher’s journey is not about finding out what makes religious people tick, but about using the tics of mostly fringe religious people to prop up the thesis Maher came in with. Which is––in a nutshell, but totally without irony––that everyday religious practice will soon result in global apocalypse.

…Read more

The 2008 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival begins today, and Kevin Kelly and I will be there for the next ten days reporting back. What follows is not exactly an iron-clad preview of our Toronto coverage––in addition to some of the films below, I’m definitely planning to see new works by Claire Denis, Agnes Varda, Jonathan Demme and Richard Linklater, and would of course recommend that anyone on the ground see some of my favorites from past festivals, including Medicine for Melancholy and A Christmas Tale. This is more of a list of predictions of what everyone else is going to be talking about, while I’m pushing my glasses up my nose and rushing to to the next screening of the a South Korean movie about drunken lonliness. Enjoy! If you have your own predictions for what will catch fire in Ontario, let us know in the comments.

1. Zach and Miri Make a Porno (TIFF screening info)

Obviously, anything with “porno” in the title has a certain automatic contingent (hello, Google searchers! Sorry to disappoint!) But then, so does anything with the credit “written and directed by Kevin Smith.” And then there’s the leading man. Some perspective: Smith’s last three films have grossed an average of $26 million each; the last three films starring Seth Rogen have grossed an average of $117 million each. With Jay and Silent Bob finally retired (we think/hope), and Rogen in tow for the usual, MPAA-baiting Smithism, Porno could––however ironically––become what Jersey Girl was supposed to be: the tipping point that expands the Smith fan base beyond the longtime Clerks faithful.

2. Slumdog Millionaire (TIFF screening info)

Crowdpleasers make me itch. But then, to borrow a line from David Fincher, I’m an asshole. Assuming you are not, you might be interested to know that Slumdog Millionaire shows all the symptoms of becoming The Next Juno. Like Juno, Slumdog premiered in a TBA slot at Telluride, where reaction from all but our own Kevin Buist was enthusiastic, even hyperbolically so. Also ike Juno, it’s a music-fueled piece of pop art in which young love results from unlikely circumstances. And, thanks to Warner Brothers’ loss of faith in this tier of the distribution market, it’s now being distributed by Fox Searchlight––just like Juno. If looking for The Next Juno is now part of our jobs, at least Searchlight is taking all the arduous work out of it.

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Though Religulous, like other anticipated fall films, has been screening for critics in New York (and, I assume, in LA) in advance of its official premiere in two weeks at the Toronto Film Festival, major outlets have thus far stuck to the presumed pre-festival embargo. But when your big Toronto premiere is screening for the public in (well, near) two major cities, how do you enforce an embargo on outlets with a mandate to run every commercial release through the critical mill?

In this case, I doubt Lionsgate put much effort into surpressing Variety’s early review of the Larry Charles/Bill Maher documentary, since it’s pretty much a flat-out rave. “[T]he particular intensity and seriousness of Maher’s project are nearly unprecedented,” Robert Koehler writes. “Indeed, its arrival shortly after the death of George Carlin — a profound influence on Maher’s standup act and politics — suggests the kind of film Carlin might have made in his prime.” More here.

According to Jeff Wells, Larry Charles and Bill Maher’s Borat-style religion doc Religulous is playing this week in Claremont, CA in order to meet the Academy’s rule stating that non-fiction films must screen for one week in a commercial theater in both New York and L.A. in order to qualify for a Best Documentary nomination. “That means Religulous is probably playing in some out-of-the-way theatre in the Manhattan area also,” Wells writes.

Sure enough, a Moviefone search reveals that the film is currently playing a publicity-free two matinees per day run at the Creative Entertainment Coliseum Quad on 181 Street–the same theater where Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired had its qualifying run last spring. So far there’s been no surreptitious Manohla Dargis review of Religulous, so if you find yourself in Claremont or in the noseblood section of Manhattan and decide to check it out, by all means, report back.

How did Bill Maher and Larry Charles get religious figures to agree to be interviewed on camera by the notoriously hostile-towards-religion Maher for their upcoming doc Religulous? According to an interview the comedian gave Patrick Goldstein, they didn’t:

It was simple: We never, ever, used my name. We never told anybody it was me who was going to do the interviews. We even had a fake title for the film. We called it ‘A Spiritual Journey.’ … The crew would set up and at the last second, when the cameras were already rolling, I would show up. So either they’d be seen on camera leaving the interview and lose face or they’d have to talk to me. It was like–’And now here’s … Bill!’ You could usually see the troubled looks on their faces.

This method calls to mind two recent films: the Charles-directed Borat, which used these deceptive documentary tactics within the framework of fiction, and Expelled. The extent to which the producers and star Ben Stein misled some of their interview subjects caused a minor firestorm––which didn’t do anything bad for the film’s box office, but certainly damaged the credibility of the filmmakers and their argument.

I’m fairly certain Bill Maher doesn’t care about ethical credibility––he’s probably primarily concerned with getting a punchline by any means necessary. But *I’m* kind of concerned about this growing trend of deception in ostensible non-fiction. Or maybe I just didn’t think Borat was that funny. Thoughts?

Mike Jones has two sets of additions to the Toronto International Film Festival lineup at The Circuit. The first, detailing nine Gala and Special Presentations, informs us of the existence of a documentary about A Chorus Line, as well as the news (I *think* it’s news–I haven’t been following TIFF updates closely enough to remember what’s just been rumor and what’s been officially confirmed) that the festival will world premiere the Larry Charles/Bill Maher doc Religulous, and host the North American premieres of Guy Ritchie’s RockNRolla and Waltz with Bashir. Meanwhile, the other release tells us to look forward to the continental premieres of Delta (the incest-tinged Adam and Eve story from Cannes) and Tokyo Sonata, as well as a number of world premieres from Scandinavia, and much more. Click forth for the details.

***Lionsgate will distribute a still untitled doc about religion, shot partially in Israel and around the middle east, directed by Larry Charles (the TV vet who wrangled Borat) and featuring comic/blowhard Bill Maher. Charles and Maher promise Variety that it’s a comedy, but let’s hope the jokes are better than this clunker from Charles: “Nietzsche said God is dead, but he didn’t see the grosses for Passion of the Christ.” Ooooh, topical!

***Scott Foundas takes a look at Shortcut to Happiness, the long-delayed movie Alec Baldwin doesn’t want you to see. “Filmed in 2001, then waylaid by investor bankruptcies and other infernal torments, the result, like so many troubled A-list productions, is less compelling than all the behind-the-scenes Sturm und Drang.”

***Dig out that sequined, halter-top, parachute-pants jumpsuit–Xanadu is back! Variety says the Broadway spoof of the eyesore 80s musical is riding good reviews to box office glory. Not bad for a production featuring almost wall-to-wall ELO, but I’ll have to see it in order to believe that it’s got anything that can top the tight rope dance from the original (starting at about the two minute mark on the clip embedded above).