• 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.

Filmmaker and former Marine JD Johannes is selling a compilation DVD called Outside the Wire on his website. The DVD contains three short documentaries that Johannes shot himself whilst embedded with troops in Iraq (a trailer is embedded above). On a blog on the site, Johannes positions his “pro-victory, pro-troop” films in opposition to docs like Body of War and The Ground Truth. “Actually going to Iraq, living down in the dirt with the grunts and making documentaries about what is happening on the ground appears to be a rather novel concept, but I think the best way to understand Iraq is to see it from 5′10″ off the ground,” he writes.

Fair enough. But wait––there’s a gimmick! Johannes is trying to sell 2,900 copies of his DVD in six weeks, in order to match the domestic box office gross of Brian DePalma’s fall flop Redacted.

I haven’t seen Johannes’ movies, and I’m certainly not opposed to as many views of the war as possible getting out into the market place. In fact, I’ve argued previously that the reason why films like Lions For Lambs and Stop-Loss are so disappointing creatively and commercially is due to a homogeneity of perspective––the anti-war choir really doesn’t need to be pandered to anymore.

But what is a little illogical to me is that Johannes has chosen Redacted as the target to beat. …Read more

Magnolia Pictures and Landmark Theaters Owner Mark Cuban was voted off ABC’s Dancing With the Stars last night. Above, watch his final performance; below the jump, in his ABC-mandated exit interview with Jimmy Kimmel, Cuban talks about wearing a onesie, buying the Cubs, and baring his “unshaved” hip replacement scar on national television. Throughout this whole DwtS thing, Cuban has downplayed his secondary career as an indie film mogul in order to play up his persona as a magnanimous billionaire of the people, so it’s not a surprise that recent Magnolia controversies did not come up on Kimmel.

More on the Dancing Mogul:

Mark Cuban’s Hobo Show
Mark Cuban on the Redacting of Redacted
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“I’ve been thinking about Medium Cool a lot lately,” writes Chuck Tryon at Newcritics. “In part because I’m teaching it, but also because the film’s treatment of history and documentary would seem to inform the debates about Brian DePalma’s Redacted and the decision to remove some documentary photographs from the film’s final montage.” Chuck hasn’t seen Redacted yet, but he makes some interesting connections in the full post, which you can read here. I havent’ seen Medium Cool since my first year of college (that’s about nine years, if you’re counting), and Chuck’s post inspired me to try to dig up some clips online. All I could find was the trailer above.

The thing that struck me when watching the trailer is that it looks very “real.” Obviously, I’m too young to have seen Medium Cool at the time of its release, so I don’t know if this is really a legitimate response–I don’t really know what “real” looked like in 1969. But even if it’s just a so-so approximation of 1969 reality, Medium Cool would seem to have something over Redacted, which wants to be a dispatch straight from contemporary popular media but, with its school play version of combat and video blogs kabuki, fails miserably.

Check out the Medium Cool trailer above, and the Redacted trailer below the jump. The almost image-free Redacted trailer is the ultimate teaser, a physical illustration of Brian DePalma’s insistence that the whole movie is comprised of material that an unnamed someone doesn’t want you to see. As Chuck notes, Medium Cool was, literally a movie that was considered too controversial and ground-breaking for release. In contrast, its trailer plays as a perfectly preserved slice of zeitgeist.

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• Kevin offered three tips for documentary filmmakers in search of the truth.
• A look at three fine examples of pre-code cleavage.
• It’s now easier for documentary filmmakers to qualify for an Oscar nomination.
• Did YouTube “borrow” branding from a successful internet film festival?
• Nikki Finke claimed Warner Brothers had instituted a corporate policy against casting women, then baited Gloria Allred into threatening a WB boycott. WB was like, “No you didn’t,” and then Nikki was like, “Yes, in fact, I did.”
• In more devastating Warner Brothers news, the studio continues to show a lack of support for Jesse James by making it nearly impossible for non-coastal critics to see it.
• Michel Gondry’s working on an autobiographical animated film with his teenage son.
• Harmony Korine explains how he solved his filmmaking block by joining a cult of fishermen in the Amazon.
• Juno is not a remake of another film about a pregnant teen with ‘Juno’ in the title.
• The Austin Film Festival memorializes Moonlighting.
• “Any network that can be used to share cat pictures can be used to bring down a government.” This and other pearls of wisdom from from academic/blogger Henry Jenkins.
• On FilmCouch, Paul and Kevin talk to Rob Parrish, the mastermind of Next to Heaven, a web series carved out of the public domain. Watch the most recent episode of Next to Heaven here.

New York Film Festival:

• Mark Cuban confirmed to us that he would not release Brian DePalma’s director’s cut of Redacted. DePalma took the case to the DGA, who ruled that Magnolia could release the “redacted” version. DePalma eventually gives up.
• Peter Bogdanovich explains why his Tom Petty movie is four hours long.
• The Silent Light trailer breaks Karina’s heart.

Chicago Film Festival:

• The Affleck Brothers on the red carpet.
• The Filmspotting gang shares their take on the fest.

It looks like the “battle” over Redacted is over. Brian DePalma was a guest this morning on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show. Lehrer asked DePalma to comment on the lead story on the gossip page of this morning’s NY Daily News, which is essentially a transcription of the widely-circulated video documenting Monday’s DePalma press conference at the New York Film Festival. DePalma gave a restrained recap of the situation and then said, “I exhausted my legal options about 24 hours ago.”

He was most likely referencing the alleged DGA decision that ruled Magnolia can, against the director’s wishes, release the film with black bars placed over the faces in the images in question. I say “alleged” because this DGA decision has not been reported in the trades nor confirmed by press release––I’m getting my information from comments made on Movie City Indie by Magnolia’s Eamonn Bowles and someone who appears to be DGA General Counsel David Korduner.

Regardless, this appears to be as far as DePalma is willing to fight. At the end of the segment, Lehrer asked DePalma if the battle will delay Redacted’s release date, and the director said no. “I’m afraid that controversy is over,” he sighed, clearly resigned. There’s no indication he has any plans to take Mark Cuban up on his offer to let DePalma take the film off Magnolia’s hands.

Eamonn Bowles, president of Magnolia Pictures and key player in yesterday’s Redacted press conference dust-up, responds to the chatter that the incident was a publicity stunt on Movie City Indie. As I noted earlier, DePalma has been milking the issue at a number of festivals, and it appears that Bowles finally reached a breaking point:

there was absolutely no calculation involved at the press conference yesterday. depalma has been on a toot about how we’ve compromised his film, and then he stated publicly at the official nyff press conference that in no uncertain terms mark cuban, for aesthetic reasons, wanted the photos out of the film. i had just arrived and this was one of the first things i heard. in an almost tourette’s like moment, i just blurted out out that it wasn’t true. [...] the fact of the matter is, none of the companies that have released depalma’s work in the last 30 years would ever touch this film. and because our company, which has had it’s fair share of controversial, uncompromising films, actually was the one stupid/brave/committed enough to do so, we end up being the evil force trying to shut down a director’s vision.

Bowles also notes that the Director’s Guild has sided against DePalma on the matter. You can read Bowles’ full comments here. Jurgen Fauth also has video of the press conference, which I’ve embedded above; you can here his take on the fracas here.

UPDATED 10/10: Last night, a commenter at Movie City Indie calling himself “A. Nonymous” disputed Bowles’ note that the DGA voted against DePalma, and stating that “an arbitrator ruled the company could use redacted photos in the film, rather than the unredacted photos Mr. De Palma wanted to include”–so it’s not so much that the DGA voted *against* DePalma, but that they sided *with* Magnolia/Mark Cuban.

And in the comments to this post, Matt V writes: “Check out the TypeKey profile name of the anonymous commenter on the mcindie site. DKorduner - Who, since he has a “DGA email address” is probably David Korduner, who is the General Counsel for the DGA. Why is he making (or at least trying to make) anonymous comments on a blog site?” A fair question, although perhaps the bigger issue, is what kind of lawyer tries to make anonymous blog comments using his work email address?

Several film blogs have posted Jamie Stuart’s thoughts on yesterday’s NYFF press conference for Brian DePalma’s Redacted. In a nutshell: DePalma mentioned that the film’s final montage (which consists of real photographs of real victims of real terror and war-associated violence, and which is thought by many to be the most powerful portion of the film) is in danger of being “redacted” by the film’s distributor, Magnolia Pictures, at the request of the Magnolia/HD Net founder Mark Cuban. According to Stuart, DePalma’s comments were discredited yesterday by Magnolia’s president:

As [DePalma] began discussing the film’s use of actual war photographs and their graphic nature, Eamonn Bowles from Magnolia began shouting from the rear of the Walter Reade Theater to refute De Palma’s claims that Mark Cuban was trying to, well, redact them from the picture’s release. Then, just as the press conference was coming to a close, producer Jason Kliot rushed the stage and grabbed moderator Jim Hoberman’s mic to offer the crowd his version of this distribution controversy. I was left wondering how spontaneous this all was or whether they knew it would be immediately blogged upon to stoke media attention.

I was less inclined to see this as a pure stunt. I knew DePalma had been pushing this button at press conferences as far back as Telluride, where his statements were vague enough to be misinterpreted but loud enough to be difficult to miss. If this fighting between filmmaker and distributer started as a ploy for attention, then it doesn’t make sense that Magnolia would wait this long to publicly respond. Still, unsure how to interpret this latest event, I sent an email this morning to Mark Cuban to get the official word. Cuban confirmed to me that Magnolia has, indeed, asked DePalma to remove the images from the film, and will not release Redacted unless the final montage is cut. More details after the jump.

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Almost two weeks ago, I posted the news that Brian DePalma canceled a press conference previously scheduled to coincide with a screening of Redacted at the New York Film Festival. NYFF’s press office has just sent out a press release announcing that, “by popular demand”, DePalma has agreed to the meet the press after all.

The press conference, rescheduled for Monday afternoon, should be particularly interesting in light of the fact that Redacted has been widely reviled by most of the New York press (myself included). In fact, the only local defender of the film that I can name off the top of my head is New York Magazine’s David Edelstein, who just this morning blogged about not being able to get a word in edgewise at Tuesday’s Todd Haynes event. I wonder: will the Redacted haters cancel their Columbus Day plans en masse in order to get all up in DePalma’s face, or will Edelstein have a much easier time getting his questions answered?

For a recap of our NYFF coverage thus far, click here. Everything else you might have missed from the week gone by is linked below:

• Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales may not be a debacle any longer.
• Jesse James’ family slam Warner Brothers, lurve Brad Pitt.
• Brian DePalma declines to meet the NYFF press.
• Fosse!
• Harvey Weinstein moves a rook in his Oscars 2008 game, which right-wing bloggers drastically misinterpret.
• Sidney Lumet’s latest, dressed up like Saul Bass.
• When Michel Gondry has bills to pay, he sells recycled versions of his movies to cell phone companies. I’d *love* to get in on that racket.
• Billionaire indie film mogul Mark Cuban went on a reality show dressed as a hobo.
• Making fun of Mickey Rooney in Asian-face never gets old.
• Cover your windows in twee, courtesy of Miranda July.
• Sofia Coppola tries to sell her canned champagne via YouTube.
• The Showtime series that brought you voting zombies is moving to NBC.
• The stoner comedy of the year is going straight to DVD. How is that a bad thing for stoners?
• The extremely slim Natalie Portman unrobed for Wes Anderson’s short film, causing the entire internet to transform into twelve-year old rib cage fetishists.
• Paul Thomas Anderson’s hotly anticipated There Will Be Blood premiered this week in Austin to rave reviews.
• On FilmCouch, Paul and Kevin take a look at movie greed, by way of Wall Street and The Price of Sugar.
• The computer containing the script for Francis Ford Coppola’s next project has been stolen.
• Rueing the day you sunk your chunk of change into the ApplePaperweight? Jaman is here to help.

Apologies for the poor quality video, but above you’ll find evidence of sometime-movie mogul Mark Cuban’s debut on Dancing With the Stars. The Magnolia Pictures chief/simultaneous distribution evangelist/financier and distributor of Brian DePalma’s Redacted performed last night; his fate as a reality TV star will be decided by “America” tonight.

What you don’t see above is the prologue, which you can allegedly watch on ABC.com (I’m still waiting for the video to load). In a segment designed to introduce the audience to Cuban and his partner, Kym, Cuban revealed that he had hip replacement surgery just seven weeks before rehearsals began for Dancing With the Stars. “Most people are still on crutches,” Cuban says, lifting up his practice shorts to reveal a massive scar. Kym’s voiceover commends Cuban for working through the pain while we watch footage of him practicing with a tortured expression on his face. Cut to Cuban, interview style: “I’m not going through all this pain and agony just because. I’m there to win.”

It strikes me that, whether it’s his doing or that of Dancing’s producers, Cuban has managed to hit on a magic combination of about 100 winning reality TV cliches: rich fish out of water, an American Idol’s beginner’s enthusiasm for competitive performance, Extreme Makeover-branded physical struggle, non-household name reifying his stardom by going on a show mostly staffed by declining B-listers united in the deception that they’re so famous they don’t need to be there. On a show like this, it seems like a brilliant strategy: the audience, it seems, unfailingly rewards not those who perform well, but those who perform *surprisingly* well.

More on the dance itself after the jump.

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While I’m busy digesting today’s mind-boggling NYFF double feature of Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light and Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales, here’s a few bits of news and thoughts from the last couple of days of press screenings:

Brian DePalma has backed out of a press conference previously scheduled to follow tomorrow’s press screening of Redacted. It’s the first real disappointment of the fest, and its announcement was met with an audible sigh from the assembled press this morning. I saw the film at Telluride and would not call myself its biggest fan, but I was looking forward to hearing from DePalma’s cast of non-professional actors. No specific reason for DePalma’s last-minute cancellation was given, although as he’s still scheduled to appear at Redacted’s public NYFF premiere on October 10, we can probably chalk this up to a travel conflict. But the fact that an audience of public ticket buyers and Lincoln Center patrons will make for a softer post-screening Q & A? That’s gotta be gravy.

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Stories from the Telluride Film Festival, 2007. Paul talks to surrogate father figures Leonard Maltin and Werner Herzog (who was showing his Antarctica doc, Encounters at the End of the World). Karina weighs in on Brian DePalma’s divisive Iraq film, Redacted. Kevin eventually gets a chance to ask Sean Penn about directing Into the Wild.

 

 FilmCouch 36 [25:51m]: Play Now | Download

FilmCouch 36

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Encounters at the End of the World, Redacted, Into the Wild

About 10 people walked out of this afternoon’s Telluride screening of Brian DePalma’s Redacted, most during a horrific rape scene right in the center of the picture. The bulk of those who stayed gave the HD dramatization of the real-life rape and murder of a 15 year old Iraqi girl by US soldiers an overwhelmingly positive reception.

DePalma, who is currently in Venice, participated via video chat in an after-screening Q & A that danced dangerously close to DePalma hagiography from the outset. Moderator Larry Gross (amazingly, the screenwriter of both 48 Hours and We Don’t Live Here Anymore) set the tone with his introductory statement, directed at DePalma: “Thank you for making this film, which seems like a real act of moral integrity on your part.”

That kind of language would have drawn a eye roll from me even if I agreed with Gross’ assessment of Redacted’s moral pedigree. It’s hard not to be cynical about a fictional film based on real-life events, made by a brand-name director, shot with documentary and “amateur” methods as a model but saddled with that famous filmmaker’s self-serving ideological assumptions about the military and the war. But on some level, it almost doesn’t seem to count as a “movie” at all. It’s more of a narrative aggregation of pre-existing elements aimed at serving the purpose of a singular ideology. Or, in two words: opportunistic propaganda.

Which is too bad, because conceptually, it’s a fascinating project.

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