Today’s news that Summit Entertainment has already chosen a release date for Eclipse, the third entry in theTwilight series, suggests the studio is in a hurry. With New Moon, the second entry in the series, currently in a production surge under the direction of Chris Weitz for a November 20 release date, Summit’s latest decision raises the bar even higher, by placing Eclipse right in the heat of summer 2010’s blockbuster season. What’s the rush?
Former New Line marketing chief Russell Schwartz, whose resume includes a steadily successful franchise about hobbits and rings, offers one piece of advice for the newbies at Summit: Slow down.
Yesterday, I dropped the name of Deborah Scranton’s The War Tapes, a documentary shot by the soldiers on the ground in Iraq, within this story about the ultra-indie “pro-troops” doc challenging Redacted’s sales. It had slipped my mind that Scranton has a new documentary, also shot by soldiers, called Bad Voodoo’s War. Chuck Tryon describes Scranton’s “virtual embed” technique in his review:
Bad Voodoo’s War focuses on the experiences of a California National Guard platoon, showing us, as the website claims, “the war through [the soldiers’] eyes, filmed with their own video cameras.” In order to make the film, Scranton equipped the soldiers with cameras and then kept in close correspondence with the soldiers via IM and email as they continued to send her tapes of their experiences.
Because the film is part of PBS’ FRONTLINE series, you can watch it in its entirety on PBS.com. There’s also an associated website, where the soldiers in the film are blogging and posting video extras. I found out about this today via a Facebook message from Scranton; she pointed specifically to this clip, called “It’s Not A Matter of If, It’s A Matter Of When”––referring to a change in attitude about the chances of an attack at any time. There are also many video extras on YouTube, including the preview embedded above.
As expected, 21 came in at the top of the box office this weekend, with a not-huge $23.7 million. And as hoped for by many––maybe even Paramount, who opened the thing on suspiciously few screens––Stop-Loss tanked with $4.5 million.
Just three months before their mutual contract expires, the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists have severed ties. AFTRA president Roberta Reardon said the move was prompted by her former sister union’s dirty dealings in the contract negotiation process. Actual quote: “We can’t trust SAG.”
A group of British directors has formed their own union of sorts, called Directors U.K. The goal, according to Variety, is “securing a standard collective bargaining agreement with British employers.”
I’m going to spend about four hours this weekend with my celebrity boyfriend, Young Albert Brooks, at Anthology Film Archives‘ double feature of two of Brooks’ early, still super-relevant films, Modern Romance and Real Life (see above). But if you’re not lucky enough to be in New York, there are three films opening in general release that we covered at SXSW.
Chris already mentioned Run Fatboy Run today. He also reviewed Robert Luketic’s gambling porn thriller, 21: “[I]t’s basically Little Caesar set in the world of card counting, which in fact isn’t illegal, yet in Vegas is viewed as being just as criminal as bootlegging was during Prohibition…[but] nerds just aren’t as entertaining as gangsters and blackjack and brains just isn’t as cool on screen as bank robberies and machine guns.” And then, of course, there’s Stop-Loss. Michael Lerman said MTV/Kimberley Pierce’s Iraq PTSD movie is too centrist for its own good: “Perhaps the performances and plotting would’ve worked better as less of an unbiased study of aggression and more of a critique of the current political situation, as the script seems to be. It’s as if the two things are working against each other and the actors are veering off in a different direction from the themes.”
In this longish but fascinating video companion piece to his Atlantic story on how Hollywood has reverted to 70s-style dialectics in order to talk about current global conflicts, Ross Douthat explains why the recent wave of Iraq movies haven’t connected with critics or audiences. The problem, in part, is that “Hollywood hasn’t found anything new to say about the Iraq War that you wouldn’t expect them to say based on what they had to say about Vietnam.” Via The House Next Door. Also on the topic of the contemporary war film’s unwillingness to telegraph unexpected or unsafe points of view: The NY Times did a profile of Stop-Loss director Kimberley Pierce over the weekend, and though an inordinate amount of space is given over to explanations for why it took Pierce nine years to make a second film, there’s some interesting stuff about the attempts made to “move towards a political balance that should satisfy red and blue states.”
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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As expected, 
