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Tribeca’s Itch: Trade Roughage 04/21/08

Karina Longworth
By Karina Longworth posted 1 year ago
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  • With the Tribeca Film Festival beginning on Wednesday, Winter Miller analyises the festival’s “7 year itch” for Variety. “Logistics and that intangible thing known as the “festival experience” might well improve, but seven years after its founding as a call to bring the city together post 9/11, the fest is still seeking a clear identity,” hew writes. Perhaps the first step would be to do something about the fest’s institutional indifference to quality in its obsession with quantity, which Miller alludes to: “Unlike fests with mandates to screen what they perceive as the absolute cream of the crop, Tribeca wears its number of international and first-timer participants as a badge of honor.”
  • Martial arts epic Forbidden Kingdom grossed almost $21 million over the weekend, enough to take the top box office slot ahead of Forgetting Sarah Marshall; the latest widget from the Apatow factory earned a not-great, not-terrible $17 million. Also: the tactic of opening Expelled wide in rural and suburban communities paid off, as the doc made $3.1 million (and almost double per screen what Morgan Spurlock’s docu-farce Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden? managed in a smaller run), in spite of almost universally negative reviews.
  • A former TV exec and a producer of Bend it Like Beckham have teamed up to launch Filmaka, a “a digital entertainment studio that sponsors worldwide contests for aspiring filmmakers.” According to The Hollywood Reporter, the first contest will be judged by a panel of filmmakers including Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders and Neil LaBute.

Jackie Chan Suffers To Satisfy Martial Arts Fans Wet Dreams

Karina Longworth
By Karina Longworth posted 2 years ago
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jackiechan.pngEarlier this week, Grady Hendrix (co-founder of Subway Cinema, the collective that puts on the annual New York Asian Film Festival) re-launched his Kaiju Shakedown Asian cinema blog at Variety. Yesterday, Hendrix posted a mighty listicle, in an effort to catch his readers up on the Asian film world gossip that they missed while the blog was on its “six month bathroom break.” And thank God he did, because otherwise, we would have never known about this post on Jackie Chan’s official blog, dated July 16 and titled “Absolutely No Fun”. An excerpt:

Today is Monday. I have to begin my fourth day of prosthetic make-up. Thinking about doing the same thing tomorrow just makes me feel like there is no joy in life. Supposedly, I was scheduled to finish filming my prosthetic make-up shots today. But they told me they needed an extra day because they haven’t finished filming all the shots. When I heard this news, my whole body felt like it was about to break down. I totally lost my appetite. I didn’t want to drink. I didn’t want to speak. I didn’t want to make any phone calls. Even if someone called me, I didn’t want to answer the phone. I didn’t want to write my diary. If they needed me to film, then I would film. Otherwise, I didn’t want to do anything else…

The prosthetics are for a film Chan is making for The Weinstein Company with Jet Li, called Forbidden Kingdom, and since the pairing of the two stairs makes this a huge project for martial arts fans he’s apparently contractually forbidden from releasing pictures of the “no fun” make-up job (Twitch linked to some cast photos in June, but there are no close-ups of Chan). We wouldn’t want to wish this kind of suffering on anyone, but you’ve got to wonder: is Chan undergoing some kind of karmic retribution for continually enabling the ascendancy of Brett Ratner?