Ever since word broke at Toronto that IFC had picked up Steven Soderbergh’s Che for US distribution, there have been conflicting rumors as to how the company, known for its day-and-date theatrical and VOD releases, would handle a film of this length, scope, and potential Oscar cachet. At yesterday’s NYFF press conference, Soderbergh talked a bit about the “roadshow” concept, through which the entire two-part film will first hit theaters.

He confirmed that in each market the film enters, it’ll screen for just one week, on one screen, with ticket buyers paying a premium (probably $25 each, including full-color printed program) for the experience. “I think that’s the ideal way to see it,” the director said, although he acknowledged that “it’s a lot to ask of an audience, to throw away an entire day.”

A source told me last night that IFC is banking that a lot of people are going to want to throw away their days on Che.

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The other night, someone with knowledge of these things approached me at a party and said, “Have you heard that Magnolia’s bought Che? I’ve never heard a more premature rumor in my life.” Any suspicion in my mind that this party chat was mere misdirection has just been proved unfounded with IFC’s announcement that they’ve bought Steven Soderbergh’s epic for U.S. release.

In not specifying that IFC will release the two halves of the film separately, the press release implies that Che’s “two stand-alone parts” will be shown in theaters back-to-back. But this is the only specific language regarding their distribution plan:

Che will be released for one week awards qualifying run in New York and Los Angeles in December. The company will then re-open the film in January through IFC In Theaters, its day-and-date distribution platform which makes independent films available to a national audience in theaters and on-demand, simultaneously. It will also be included in the company’s exclusive video rental deal with Blockbuster Video.

I’ve pasted the full release after the jump. More when we get it.

UPDATE: Anne Thompson clarifies the “one movie, or two?” issue: “IFC will open the full four-hour movie with an intermission for one-week Oscar-qualifying runs in New York and Los Angeles before opening Che Part One (The Argentine) in 15 to 25 key markets in January; Part Two (The Guerilla) will follow the Oscar nominations announcement.”

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“Sexuality is one of the great mysteries of humanity.” Or so declares famous, 50-something novelist Charles Saint-Denis, near the beginning of Claude Chabrol’s latest film, A Girl Cut in Two. A bit too much of an on-the-nose of a thesis statement for a film about various crimes of passion? It might have been, if not for the portentousness with which actor Francois Berleand delivers the line, and the distance at which Chabrol places the camera in order to shoot it. Even if Charles’ young, vivacious but sexually naive weather girl mistress Gabrielle (a just-barely grown-up Ludivine Sagnier) accepts each of her lovers words of supposed wisdom at face value, Chabrol doesn’t exactly give the impression that we should.

Gabrielle’s last name translates to “snow”, and the obvious joke seems to be that Charles seems to believe she’s pure as an un-mussed embankment until he starts driving her. But as Charles vacillates between the poles holding up his romantically mopey middle-age––Gabrielle, his work, and a long-standing wife who choses to deny rather than suffer over her “perfect man”’s indiscretions––his young love interest is also being courted by Paul Gaudens, a spoiled scion who won’t take her coy nos for an answer. Gabrielle bounces between the two, always with a wider eye for Charles who, paradoxically but inevitably, only wants her after he’s pushed her away.

The script is transposed from the story of Evelyn Nesbit, the early-20th century it girl whose teenage relationship with an older sexual mentor led to tragedy once she settled with someone more age-appropriate but far crazier. A cursory familiarity with how that real-life story turned out will spoil a few of Girl’s beats, but the constellation of plot points isn’t what’s important here. Though Girl does eventually build up to a murder, there’s no mystery concerning how or why––that crime happens out in the open, while the events that animate it are largely kept discreet. At 78, the living master of the French thriller is less interested in forensics than in the perplexities of violent acts a bit outside the jurisdiction of the French police––those that happen behind closed doors, inspired by the insanity of desire. The joke’s on Charles if he thinks that he, as one who strip-mines human behavior for a living, is closer to cracking the case than anyone else.

A click on the image above will take you to an exclusive clip from A Girl Cut in Two. The movie opens this Friday, August 15 in New York at the IFC Center & Lincoln Plaza Cinemas and will also be available On Demand via IFC in Theaters. It’ll roll out to further cities in the coming weeks.

I grew up in Los Angeles and have fractured but fierce memories of seeing movies in Westwood, the theater-packed micro-city surrounding UCLA, in which the Los Angeles Film Festival is now based. I think I saw Jurassic Park four times at the Avco. I know I saw my first Lubitsch movie (Design for Living) at UCLA. Yesterday I was standing in line at Rite Aid and had some kind of out-of-body flashback experience of getting ice cream at the same Rite Aid after my mother took me to a matinee of Flight of the Navigator. I’m sure people go to film festivals in their hometowns all the time and don’t think it’s weird at all, but I get painfully nostalgic. I, like, went to school and stuff, but hanging out in these theaters for entire summers is how I fell in love with movies.

Funny, then, that I’ve been here for almost two full days and I haven’t yet been able to see a single film. Part of this is a scheduling issue––I got in too late on Monday to make it to a screening, and I had already seen many of the films that played yesterday, including Medicine for Melancholy and The Pleasure of Being Robbed. I did actually try to make a screening of Largo, the documentary about the famed Fairfax club, but I, um, went to the wrong theater by mistake and missed it. And then, there were parties to go to. More on that, with photo evidence, after the jump.

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• IFC has picked up Medicine for Melancholy for day-and-date distribution. It’ll be released sometime next year; in the meantime, it’ll play in competition at the impending Los Angeles Film Festival.
• Paramount is getting sued by Mario Puzo’s son, based on allegations that he wasn’t paid proper royalties on a video game based on The Godfather. He’s trying to make the studio stick to contract they made with his father seven years before his death, which was in turn intended to provide reparations for Paramount having gyped him when first buying the Godfather rights.
• Sienna Miller will play Maid Marion opposite Russell Crowe’s Robin Hood Sheriff in Nottingham. Sure, it’s an unnecessary retread of a beloved brand, but it should be a nice break for her after filming G.I. Joe, don’t you think?

• For all the Sex and the City promotional madness and media hype, says Diane Garrett at Variety, “there’s no escaping the fact that the movie is a chick flick with strong appeal among an older femme demo but questionable interest among others. All the magazine coverage in the world — 63 pages in the May 23 edition of Entertainment Weekly alone — and Sex and the City TV marathons haven’t really moved the needle among men, many of whom suggest they’d rather be shot than sit through the movie.”
• Seemingly determined to try to recreate the relationship of Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda whether or not the Barbarella remake works out, Robert Rodriguez is apparently “shopping around Women in Chains!, a violent drama set at a woman’s prison starring his fiancee, Rose McGowan.” Oh, right––it’s camp, so it’s neither misogynist nor creepy
• IFC continues their Cannes buying spree days after the end of the festival, picking up Grand Prix winner Gomorrah. The Italian mafia flick has done solid business in its homeland since opening last week.
• The CineVegas film festival will honor Anjelica Huston. Don Cheadle, Rosario Dawson, Viggo Mortensen and Sam Rockwell with their Half Life award, while James Caan will be declared a Vegas Icon.
  

• Confirmation came yesterday afternoon that the films long expected to open and close the Cannes Film Festival, Fernando Meirelles’ Blindness and Barry Levinson’s What Just Happened?, will in fact do so, despite recent rumors that the latter film had been nixed due to its post-Sundance loser taint.
• Magnolia has purchased Wayne Wang’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, which premiered last fall at the Toronto Film Festival.
• At Tribeca, IFC has selected the “Spanish-language psychological thriller” Fermat’s Room for its Festival Direct video-on-demand only program.
  

Four Eyed Monsters - Episode 9 - Shock

It’s been almost two years since the last “official”, non-news oriented episode of the Four Eyed Monsters video podcast. Today, IFC releases a new Four Eyed Monsters DVD, which contains the film, the previous 8 video podcast episodes, and five new episodes that finally pick up the Arin & Susan saga where episode 8’s cliffhanger left off. It’s worth the wait: episode 9 gets right into the nitty gritty of What Happened After Susan Kissed That Guy in Park City. Watch it above, and keep an eye on IFC’s Four Eyed Monsters page, where they’ll be releasing the remaining new episodes online next week.

• Warner Independent Pictures has picked up adaptation rights to Beautiful Children, the hot-right-now literary debut of Charles Bock. Bock, who was the subject of much high-profile press earlier this year, managed to finish his novel in just ten years by ignoring his girlfriend five nights a week.
• Trumbo, a documentary on blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, in which the writer’s letters are read by stars like Joan Allen and Paul Giamatti, will open the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival on April 3.
• IFC has picked up Fear(s) of the Dark, a French animated film which “presents the stylized interpretations of nightmares from six graphic artists and cartoonists.”
• Bob Marley’s ex-wife wants Lauryn Hill to play her in the biopic she just sold to The Weinstein Company. Oddly, the adaptation of Rita Marley’s autobiography is being handled by Working Girls director Lizzie Borden who, according to IMDb, hasn’t worked since directing an episode of Red Shoe Diaries a dozen years ago.

• IFC has acquired Ballast for day-and-date release in a deal apparently worth “a six-figures…plus gross participation and a real P&A commitment.” Lance Hammer’s excellent drama premiered last month at Sundance; see my review here and Kevin’s interview with Hammer and the film’s cast here.
• Diane Garrett says reporters at yesterday’s Oscar nominee’s luncheon tried to keep the conversation light––what are you wearing, etc––but stars like Viggo Mortensen, George Clooney and Michael Moore kept returning to the issue of the writers strike. Everyone agreed that unless the strike is full resolved by Oscar night, AMPAS can throw whatever kind of alternate event they like, but not a single SAG or WGA member will show up.
• Beastie Boy Adam Yauch has hired two former ThinkFilm employees, David Fenkel and Dan Berger, to help him start a “a full-service film distribution company” called Oscilloscope Pictures. Fenkel’s summing up of the curation strategy: “We do the films we want to do.”

Alison at the IFC Blog points to the 50th and apparently final episode of Dinner For Five, which premieres on IFC Friday night, but which you can watch online via Brightcove now. According to this press release, it’s basically a promo for a soon-to-be-released film documenting Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show, but in practice, it doesn’t feel that shilly.

The show has always had a boy’s club romanticism to it that can either be fantastic or unbearable, depending on the assortment of guests, but this last episode is interesting if only because it draws attention to the entire series as a work of Jon Favreau/Vince Vaughn autobiography.

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• IFC is expanding their efforts to bring film festival hits to the masses by developing a second video-on-demand label. Called Festival Direct, it will bring international festival favorites directly to cable boxes, skipping the middleman theatrical run afforded films on the IFC FirstTake program. Already on the slate: Ken Loach’s It’s a Free World…, and the Icelandic festival hit Jar City. 
• Roger Avary’s publicist issued a statement yesterday, apologizing for the screenwriter’s role in the accident that killed a friend and seriously injured his wife. “Words cannot express how sorry he is, and this tragic accident will always haunt him,” the statement read in part. Avary is due to be arraigned on charges of vehicular manslaughter on Friday.
• Charlize Theron will star alongside Viggo Mortensen in the upcoming adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Mark Cuban’s 2929 Entertainment is producing the film, for distribution by Weinstein subsidiary Dimension.
• Guatemalan Handshake director/Hannah Takes the Stairs co-star Todd Rohal, True/False Film Festival director David Wilson, and IFP’s Amy Dotson are some of the familiar names on the recently-announced Slamdance jury. 

In about 40 minutes, the nominations for the 2008 Independent Spirit Awards will be announced live by Zach Braff and Lisa Kudrow. You should be able to watch a stream of the announcement on IFC’s website starting at 11 EST. If you can’t watch at work, don’t fret–just check back here a little later, as I’ll have a recap early this afternoon.

IFC Blog has a visual breakdown of the references employed by critics to describe Javier Bardem’s haircut in No Country For Old Men. Prince Valiant references were most abundant; ever the lone wolf, Armond White was the only critic to namedrop Richard III. Jim Emerson seems to have dropped his Tony Danza reference too late to make it into IFC’s calculations, but I think it’s spot-on (and period accurate, if we’re buying the contention that No Country takes place in 1980). Although, for the record, I’m with Andrew Tracy of Reverse Shot––it may engender colorful pie charts, but unnecessary quirk/kitsch like that haircut makes this film weaker, not stronger.