Baby Mamahad a big weekend. The Tina Fey comedy made $18 million dollars, beating Harold and Kumar’s take by about $4 million and easily enough for the top box office slot. Still, the stoner comedy more than made back its production budget in its first weekend, and that’s cause enough for Warner execs to take credit for handling their first post-merger New Line release successfully.
The Hollywood Reporter says IFC is in “final negotiations” to distribute The Pleasure of Being Robbed, the Josh Safdie feature which has been the subject of much chatter since it was announced as the only American film to screen at the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes.THR’s Gregg Goldstein is calling this turn of events ” a final triumph for SXSW producer Matt Dentler,” who selected the film for his final Emerging Visions sidebar before departing for Cinetic.
Idiocracy is not even mentioned in this Variety story about Mike Judge’s next project, a workplace comedy called Extract which is set to star Jason Bateman. Pay no attention to the political satire which spawned an energy drink even though the film itself was barely released––me want more Office Space!!!
In his round-up of the various stories on Matt Dentler leaving SXSW for Cinetic, David Hudson pays tribute to Dentler’s years at the festival. “As I’ve said here in the past, any history of American independent cinema in the 00s is going to have to include a passage on the impact of Matt’s smarts, instincts and sheer guts as a programmer.” David also links to Scott Kirsner, who has some reservations about the digital division of Cinetic that will becomes Dentler’s new home, at least in terms of its potential attractiveness to filmmakers.
Matt Dentler, whose name has become synonymous with the SXSW Film Festival’s ascendancy over the past several years as both a studio launching pad and a platform for no-budget American indies, is leaving the festival to take a position on a new digital rights wing at sales agency Cinetic. He’ll be replaced at SXSW by Janet Pierson who, with husband John, repped for sale some of the biggest indie success stories of the 90s, including Roger & Me and Slacker. For the full details behind these moves, check out this story at indieWIRE.
Time Warner has fired roughly 450 of New Line’s 500 employees, as part of their move to fold the long-independent speciality division fully into the corporate beast. The news has been expected for awhile––so much so that, after the requisite mourning, David Poland’s already looking at mini-studio’s demise as an opportunity to lessen urban blight.
The Academy has announced some key dates for the 2009 Oscar calendar. Most of note: nominations will be announced two days later than is traditional, in order to give the presidential inauguration on January 20 some breathing room.
At Slackerwood, Jette Kernion fills in the back story on this cryptic post by Matt Dentler, in which the SXSW Film Festival director teased details of “a production that will make its debut at SXSW 2008.”
If you attended SXSW Film Festival in 2002 — or if the culty word-of-mouth reached you later — you may have heard about the Burger Hut film-fest house ads that year. You know how film-fest house ads can often be incredibly lame and annoying, especially if you have to watch them before 15 or more movies in a week? Apparently that didn’t happen with the goofy Burger Hut ads. I wasn’t there in 2002 and I haven’t tried to watch the ads 15 times in a week, so I can’t vouch for this personally, but word gets around. People are very nostalgic about the Burger Hut.
The Burger Hut promos were co-written by and starred Kent Osbourne, recently of Hannah Takes the Stairs fame, and even more recently pictured in Burger Hut-character on that Dentler blog post. You can watch one of the old promos above, and the rest on YouTube; for new Burger Hut, it looks like you’ll have wait until SXSW 2008.
It’s that time of year again: Mr. Skin counts down the Top 20 Movie Nude Scenes of 2007. Marisa Tomei takes the top slot (that’s punny, right?) for her work in Before the Devil Knows We’re Dead. The Mr. Skin crew were either really impressed with how well she’s aged since My Cousin Vinny, or they just couldn’t resist the alliterative treat that is “topless Tomei-toes.” I know I can’t. [Via Rex]
Matt Dentler traces Frownland’s road to victory: “It was almost precisely a year ago that I fished Ronnie’s film out of the submissions, put it on, and was instantly hypnotized. For all those filmmakers out there who feel you have to have “connections” and “legacy” to get attention or noticed, Frownland is proof against that.”
Vulture points to an MP3 on Zeon’s Music Blog of “Teen Horniness is Not a Crime”, sung by Sarah Michelle Gellar in character as Southland Tales‘ ambitious porn star Krysta Now. Zeon’s verdict is that it’s “not very good [but] it’s supposed to be a joke anyway so maybe it is intentionally crappy.” Personally, I don’t understand how anyone can resist a lyrical couplet like “‘Cause these statistics do not lie/Just ask those nerds who shot up Columbine/They weren’t getting laid/No.”
There’s a lot to say about Amy Taubin’s takedown of mumblecore, which recently appeared online as a preview to the November/December issue of Film Comment. Unfortunately, I’m traveling this week and don’t have much time to devote to it; fortunately, David Hudson and Matt Dentler (himself the target of some of Taubin’s wrath) have picked up the slack. Go read their posts for a coherent view; then, click through the jump for some thoughts I scrawled late last night at the Denver airport. If this meme has any staying power, I’ll revisit it when I’m back in New York.
Mumblecore on a hot plate. Karina gets tired of the spitfire debating over Hannah Takes the Stairsand the rest of the mumblecore movies playing at IFC Center this week. Paul and Kevin review LOL (on DVD this week) and Quiet City for all non-new yorkers.
If you read a lot of film blogs, you might have noticed a virus going around called Dentler Takes the Stairs. It’s all the brainchild of Matt Dentler, who is like the P.T. Barnum of the SXSW Film Festival, and who, by being the first person to program movies like Kissing on the Mouth and Dance Party, USA, has played a huge role in legitimizing this wave of no-budget American indie filmmaking over the past few years. Dentler conducted interviews with the major players in Hannah Takes the Stairs (the Joe Swanberg drama starring Greta Gerwig and filmmakers Mark Duplass, Andrew Bujalski, Kent Osbourne, Ry Russo-Young and Todd Rohal), and asked a number of us film bloggers to each broadcast one of these interviews on our blogs.
Matt asked me to carry the interview with Mark Duplass, and of course, I complied. I reviewed The Duplass Brothers’ The Puffy Chair, which Mark starred in and co-wrote, in 2005 after seeing the film both at SXSW and the Chicago International Film Festival. At the time I said this:
It’s amazing how [The Puffy Chair] nails the mealy-mouthed way people my age have of saying what we mean by dressing the same words, over and over again, in different kinds of inflection. Between Rhett and Josh, the word “dude” has a thousand meanings; Emily isn’t satisfied being referred to by any of them. Fleshing out that tension, between what is being said and what it obviously means, is where The Puffy Chair really succeeds.
After the jump, I turn it over to Matt and Mark, who talk about Hannah’s Atari-fueled set, Andrew Bujalski’s boxers, and what Duplass did to get the film’s mythic stairs cut out of the picture. …Read more
Please join me in thanking SXSW’s Matt Dentler for the above. Earlier today, Matt posted a video on his blog titled “How Mumblecore Saved My Life.” In it, a young, female filmmaker named Erin (peruse her full YouTube oeuvre here) explains at some length how films like Andrew Bujalski’s Mutual Appreciation have restored her faith in independent cinema. If you’ve got seven minutes to kill, it’s great, but oh–there’s so much more.
Matt pinged me this afternoon to draw my attention to another of Erin’s videos, and this one shot to the top of my list of potential Clips of the Day. It’s Erin’s version of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl … rewritten as a tribute to one Lindsay Lohan. As you’re surely aware by now, Ms. Lohan was busted yet again this morning for driving with alcohol in her bloodstream and coke in her pants (for more details, go to TMZ and read their 60 or 70 updates from the bottom of the page to the top).
Allen Ginsberg is okay, but Erin’s poem is really, really genius. It begins: “I have seen the best actresses of my generation destroyed by madness–starving, hysterical, drunk, driving through Beverly Hills at dawn looking for a place to crash.” My favorite is verse is probably, “Who got busted in their thong from a night of parting with a belt of cocaine, headed to the Coffee Bean.” Either that, or “I am with you at Promises, where your condition has become serious and is reported on the internet!”
This clip was posted on on YouTube on June 7 and as of this writing has only been watched about 150 times. Won’t you join me in making Howl (For Lindsay Lohan) the internet phenomenon it deserves to be?
Hannah Takes the Stairs director Joe Swanberg recently married Kris Williams, his girlfriend of 7-plus years, who has appeared in/collaborated on most of Joe’s projects, and who is a filmmaker in her own right. Kent Osbourne, who occupies one corner of the love triangle that forms the meat of Hannah, has produced a video in three parts documenting the festivities. If you’re familiar with this whole “mumblecore” crowd, you’ll see a lot of familiar faces: Greta Gerwig, Kevin Bewersdorf, Ry Russo-Young, etc. SXSW impressario Matt Dentler posted just the third part on his blog; I’ll post the second part here, because the drawing of Kris and Joe captioned “this is the only relationship that should ever exist” is so cute that it brought tears to my eyes. Also, I love the stuff with the ducks.
Film lovers lucky enough to live in one of this country’s great film cities, Austin, not only have loads of great theaters to see movies in. They also have a PBS program called “SXSW Presents.” Every Tuesday evening, this program–which is in its third season and is hosted by the SXSW festival producer, Matt Dentler–offers up an out-of-the-way, must-see movie. For free! In the comfort of living rooms all over Austin! Must be nice.
We can’t all be talented enough to jerry-rig our antennas and pull in Austin’s public television signal. Sigh. But luckily the show has started putting its after-film panel discussions online, where we can all listen in. For now, that’s just going to have to do. (Thanks for giving us a clearer taste of the great films we’re missing!)
Check out the schedule of films and find the panel discussions at the program’s site.
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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Baby Mama
While I gather my final thoughts on the Moving Image Institute, check out the most recent dispatches from my fellow attendees, Doug Cummings and Kevin Lee.
Matt Dentler, whose name has become synonymous with the SXSW Film Festival’s ascendancy over the past several years as both a studio launching pad and a platform for no-budget American indies, is 
It’s that time of year again: Mr. Skin counts down the 
Mumblecore on a hot plate. Karina gets tired of the spitfire debating over 
