With Esy Casey and Sarah Friedland’s powerful (and beautifully shot) documentary Thing With No Name debuting on iTunes for rental and purchase, I’m re-posting part of a piece I published during LAFF 2008 on the film.
Sarah Friedland and Esy Casey’s Thing With No Name follows two women in sub-Saharan African villages as they controversially begin a program of anti-retroviral drugs after having been diagnosed with full-blown AIDS. Undeniably beautiful to look at and powerfully poetic in its depiction of a community of women stricken with poverty and sick with a virus that they don’t fully understand, the film ironically and sadly fails at its propagandist mission when tragedies of timing and fate intervene.
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Months ago, I wrote a post about rumors that Jaman.com (a service that lets you rent or purchase foreign and festival films online for less than five bucks apiece) was working on a method to make their films viewable on the AppleTV. As I explained then, this was exciting news for me, because I bought an AppleTV when I heard they were going to release a plug-in to allow you to watch YouTube videos on a TV, only to discover that the plug-in, well, sucks, and basically only allows you to watch the most popular clips on the site. My AppleTV has thus served as a $200 shelf for Netflix envelopes for the past few months.
Anyway: Jaman has finally released instructions to allow frustrated AppleTV owners like me to watch their films through the box. Unlike the YouTube thing, it works not through a plug-in, but via manipulation of the AppleTV’s operating system. I’m going to try it out this weekend, and will report back with my findings. If you’ve tried it already, let us know what you think in the comments.
Jumper only managed to clear $38.1 million at the box office over the five day weekend, which may be enough for sequel talks, but doesn’t seem like such a victory against the news that Step Up 2 made $28 million over the same frame. Meanwhile, The Band’s Visit, which is not a new release, managed the highest per-screen average of any film over the holiday weekend with $12,295 at each of its 13 locations.
