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Paul Schrader Books for Bollywood. Trade Roughage 11/25/08

By Christopher Campbell posted 11 months ago

Paul Schrader is reportedly done with Hollywood. His next film will be a Bollywood production titled Extreme City. The action pic will be a cross-cultural story, though probably more Bollywood-style than Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire; it won’t be a masala film but is likely to have a few more musical numbers.
Universal is producing a French-language biopic of Serge Gainsbourg, which will neither be animated in claymation nor with Thunderbird-like puppets, despite what you might suspect after seeing Variety’s choice of photo. It will instead star real people, including Laetitia Casta, who is to portray Brigitte Bardot.
Lionsgate has acquired the LeBron James doc More Than a Game, which will be released next fall accompanied by marketing tie-ins from Nike, Coca-Cola, State Farm and the NBA.
In a much more respectable marketing tie-in, The Soloist has been connected to a food drive called Feed the Need, which will collect 1 million pounds of food by December 15 — four months before the film opens.
The moviegoing demographics for this week’s “stuffed” Thanksgiving schedule are to be as follows: older woman to Australia; younger women to Four Christmases; youngest women/girls to Twilight; all men to Transporter 3; kids to Bolt. And some lucky people in 19 cities who don’t mind sold out shows will go see Milk.

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Hollywood, Indies

‘Vogue is Racist!’ Says Other Racists

By Christopher Campbell posted 1 year ago

Wanna know how I know I’m not racist? I’ve been staring at the cover of the latest Vogue magazine for weeks and I didn’t once link the image of LeBron James and Gisele Bundchen to King Kong and Fay Wray. But plenty of other people have been making the connection, calling the Annie Leibovitz-photographed cover offensive. Sure, maybe the pose makes James, who is apparently now the first African-American male to appear on the cover of Vogue, look too violent, but I wouldn’t necessarily claim he’s made to ape Kong (pun intended).

Then again, it took me years to find out/realize that King Kong was as racist a film as they come. Perhaps I’m more ignorant than racist, at least in the way NAACP spokesman Richard McIntire puts it: “some younger folks who don’t have that exposure may not even know what the King Kong movies were, may not get that.” (quoted by Women’s Wear Daily). However, when I finally did watch the 1933 original in its entirety as an adult, the colonialism allegory was clear as day. And I believe the film is pretty racist in retrospect, as are so, so many early films. Yet for all the places that have been colonized in history, I think it’s even more racist to claim that Kong is necessarily metaphoric of black victims of colonization.

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