President Obama is magical. How else to explain how he found time in his busy pre-inauguration weekend to attend the Sundance Film Festival? He saw some films, attended some parties, pitched a high-concept movie idea and even met Steven Soderbergh, who admits he didn’t vote for the guy but wishes him luck. Filmmakers Jesse Epstein and Natalie Difford, of Chicken & Egg Pictures, managed to document our new commander-in-chief in Park City just before he was due in Washington for the swearing-in ceremony.
Okay, the real Barack Obama wasn’t there. Instead, the video short features an Obama action figure, one of the many popular products available last week in the great merchandization of Obama (one of these figures sits in my apartment, too, so I’m not judging). But the toy does at least represent the spirit of Obama, which was certainly present at Sundance throughout. That final moment is not staged; many festivalgoers abandoned screening rooms to see the inauguration. And no coverage of the fest was complete without reference to the concurrence of events.
Maybe one day the real Obama will find time to attend the festival. Sundance vet Al Gore can bring him.
indieWIRE reports that HBO has acquired the television rights to a long-in-the-works documentary about Barack Obama’s run for president, produced by Edward Norton, directed by Amy Rice and Alicia Sams and edited by Sam Pollard. Pollard’s oft-collaborator Spike Lee discussed the film a bit earlier this year at Silverdocs. More from Variety’s Michael Jones and Jeff Wells, who thinks it’s a mistake for the filmmakers to shoot the innauguration if it means the film won’t be ready for release until late 2009. Meanwhile, the film’s theatrical distribution rights are apparently still up for grabs.
It’s been a huge week in history, but not so huge at the box office. We decide to take a look back at some classic movies with conscience, each made at a pivotal moment in America history. Movies where the hero doesn’t stand up to a diabolical villain, but instead has to face a latent evil embedded in society. We discuss Fury, The Ox-Bow Incident, 12 Angry Men, and To Kill a Mockingbird, among others.
Karina reports on here disappointing experience of being shut in on Halloween. It wasn’t the lack of social engagement that spoiled the evening, it was sub-par horror programing on Turner Classic Movies. She offers some sound advice for putting together a killer classic horror marathon.
Are you walking around with your “I Voted!” sticker proudly adhered to your chest? If not, get out there and do some lever pulling, chad punching, and ballot dropping. Then take the rest ofthe day off and watch one of these movies that’ll get you through the rest of election day and away from the nail-biting edge of election return coverage. There are a few minor spoilers inside, but don’t view that as me messing with the ballot box. You’ll still love the movies more than CNN’s infographics.
Before you go to the polls today, you need to understand where the candidates stand on the really big issues. No, I don’t mean silly stuff like the economy. I mean the issues that threaten to plunge the world into an era of scorched, apocalyptic savagery. Sure, an ongoing war in the Middle East and gradual climate change are kind of scary, but how will Obama and McCain respond to the threats that can wipe out 99% of humanity overnight? These are dire times, and doomsday cinema has made one thing clear: this will probably be our last president before Armageddon sweeps from sea to shining see, so we’d better choose wisely.
After the jump we look at where the candidates stand on the issues, from Alien Invasion to Zombie Plague.
In yet another sign that 2008 is the new 1928, Hollywood, impressed by the massive first-weekend success of High School Musical 3, is rushing a number of music-based projects into production. Paramount is bumping their Zac Efron-starring, Kenny Ortega-directed remake of Footloose up the calendar; Nick and Norah director Peter Sollett has been asked to punch up the script before a spring shoot. Meanwhile, Fox is setting up their own big-screen musical around a passel of Disney Channel stars: this time, it’s the Jonas Brothers, and the project is the first film in a hoped-for franchise based on the “Walter the Farting Dog” books. Yes, there are apparently childrens books about farting dogs. Maybe it’s not The Great Depression 2 — maybe it’s Idiocracy 0.5.
Perhaps surprisingly, Dan Glickman says that although “there’s no fundamental difference between Obama or McCain on intellectual property issues,” an Obama administration might be slightly more favorable for the MPAA’s fight against piracy, as Obama be expected to connect to “newer, younger White House staffers and appointees about the value and importance of IP.” But the studios’ lobbying board would clash sharply with a Democrat administration over net neutrality, which Obama strongly supports, and Glickman … doesn’t.
DETAILS Magazine has invited their readers to submit film pitches. In partnership with Larry Meistrich of Shooting Gallery and Film Movement, the mag will seek a winning idea targeted at “intelligent, modern, metropolitan men,” they’ll then actually produce.
Yesterday we pointed to a clip showing that everybody and their Pokémon-loving little brother seems to be endorsing Obama. Well not so fast, my friends, we’ve got them right where we want them. What if some legendary Hollywood directors produced attack ads for the McCain camp? Then we’ll see who has an eleven point lead! Folkinz points us to a clip of what it might look like if John Woo, Kevin Smith, and Wes Anderson went GOP. Although it would never happen in reality, anything is possible on the internet!
The Wes Anderson piece at the end is particularly good. If McCain just put guys in yellow jumpsuits running through the background in slow-mo in a few of his ads, I think he’d get at least a two point bump. The John Woo bit is pretty funny, but it could have used a much bigger budget, to the tune of ten million or so. But with McCain’s current fund raising woes, it’s not likely. Maybe Palin can hire Michael Bay to do some ads for her inevitable 2012 bid. They’d better start financing and preproduction right now.
It’s no secret that Obama is ahead in the polls. Democrats don’t want to jinx it by saying they’ve got it in the bag, and Republicans don’t want to loose hope that an upset is still possible. Still, at this late stage in the game, a lot is being said about the endorsements Obama is getting. Colin Powell and The Chicago Tribune are both big ones, but smaller endorsements are coming out of the woodwork as well. Neil Cicierega, internet-famous for his Potter Puppet Pals YouTube videos, has finally broken his silence and thrown his support behind Barack Obama. It seems like the above video also has something to do with Pokémon, and it may or may not cause epileptic seizures. Two observations:
One, I just did some math and found out that 18 year-olds who will be heading to the poles for the first time next month, those all-important young voters, were six years old when Pokémon made its American debut! Six! I feel really old now. I guess appealing to voters’ ironic/nostalgic connection to Pokémon is not so silly after all.
Two, I can’t help but wonder if this sort of thing will exist four years from now. Let’s just assume Obama is going to win (according to some polls, he has a 10 point lead with less than two weeks to go). Assuming his first term goes relatively well, can he expect the same kind of grass-roots support, especially from hipsters? How much of this kind of support is based on his policies, and how much is based on the fact that he’s not George W. Bush? Come 2012, will John Cleese, Matt Damon, and Hayden Penettierre produce viral videos where the message is, “Let’s keep things the same!” It’s hard to imagine.
Jeff Goldblum is at Telluride to promote his new film, Adam Resurrected, directed by Paul Schrader. The film follows the story of a Holocaust survivor who also happens to be a clown. Committed to an asylum after the war, he becomes a ring leader of sorts. On the opening day of the festival Goldblum was graciously hugging young fans and striking odd poses for snap-shots. We got a chance to ask him about his media intake, which includes a substantial amount homework from Schrader.
So far all of my fears about this trip to Denver– that my flight would never make it out of JFK, that I’d get stuck in a traffic jam trying to get into downtown Denver, that the Secret service would decide I had insufficient credentials and throw me in a secret DNC prison–have been proven to be totally unfounded. 90 minutes after my plane landed (early!), I was sitting in the Starz Green Room, eating brie, awaiting my first Impact Film Festival screening. Maybe the Democrats can run the world after all.
The photo above? That’s in front of the security checkpoint outside the Denver Film Center. At some point I’ll try to get a pic of the billboard for Oliver Stone’s W, which sits right on the highway opposite the football stadium where Obama will speak on Thursday. The Starz! employee who drove me to the Film Center sighed as we passed by, “I never thought I’d see Brand from Goonies playing the President of the United States.” Did you?
The epic battle between McCain and Obama will shape America’s future. To prepare, we look at an eerily similar battle from America’s past, the 1960 primaries between JFK and Hubert Humphry, as portrayed in Robert Drew’s verité classic, Primary.
Karina stays in for the weekend watching back-to-back movie marathons to settle an age-old debate: Who’s better, Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire? Also, she shares her fantasy of seeing Olympic gymnastic ass-kicker Nastia Liukin star in a prison-break exploitation flick. It never hurts to dream…
On a more serious note, we talk to director Richard Berge about his documentary The Rape of Europa. The film recounts the heroism of WWII monument men, soldiers tasked with protecting the most priceless artifacts of Western Civilization. Berge tells the story of two veteran monument men debating the film’s central question: can a work of art be more valuable than a human life?
Last Friday, I suggested that the prologue to Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympiabe featured ahead of Olympics coverage. But I’ve changed my mind after seeing this montage created by L.A.’s Cinefamily (the gang behind the recently revitalized Silent Movie Theater) & Pimpedelic Wonderland for a 4th of July event last month. It clearly says everything there is to say about America, and it would certainly pump us up adequately for patriotically rooting for the U.S. teams. Plus, unlike like Olympia, it’s not made by Nazis; like Olympia, though, it has nudity!
The only thing possibly more appropriately American than this video is Entertainment Weekly’s new interviews with Barack Obamaand John McCain about their pop culture preferences, a feature that finally allows us to make up our minds based on things more fun than “important issues”. I don’t know about you, but I’d never vote for anybody who honestly thinks We Were Soldiersis the best Vietnam movie of all time. Thanks, EW, for keeping me from making a terrible mistake on Election Day.
The Obama Movie: so inevitable, it’s as if it is already among us. You know that Will Smith will play Obama and that Oliver Stone will write and direct. John Williams and Quincy Jones will tag-team the musical score, a soulful, all-American gumbo that samples gospel, Aaron Copland and snap music. Kerry Washington will essay Michelle Obama.
No, Steven Spielberg will direct, with Chiwetel Ejiofor as Obama, same composers. Twelve Nobel, Pulitzer and Oscar winners write the screenplay. Special afro effects by Industrial Light and Magic. Spielberg intercuts between Barack cumming and Blackwater snipers pinned down in Mosul.
Corey Mburu Wainaina is 14 year old aspiring video game designer, honor student and one of the world’s greatest players of Super Smash Brothers. I could think of no better commentator with whom to discuss either the state of the nation or the state of summer movies. But, um, luckily we veered off on a far less boring Hancock tangent.
STEVEN BOONE: You have an interesting background. Your father is from Kenya and your mother is an American. Another African-American with heritage in Kenya is now famous around the world. What’s his name?
COREY WAINAINA: Barack Obama.
SB: What do you think about his candidacy?
CW: I think it’s nice, but (whispers) it doesn’t matter because it’s lies.
Either the URL is broken or the post has been removed, but according to my Google Reader, the horror site Bloody-Disgusting did a post this morning titled “Barack Obama Loses Our Vote, Insults Horror Genre,” in response to some comments the presidential candidate made at Thursday night’s Democratic Debate. Here’s the text of the post, from the RSS feed:
Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) said Thursday that he is concerned about TV content and that he believes as president, it would appropriate to “work with the industry” to address issues of sex and violence, including the marketing of violent films in TV shows, but he believes parental control, not government control, is the best response, reports Broadcasting Cable. Obama literally “calls out” our genre and indicates it’s a problem.
I actually took notes on that part of the debate, in the hopes that there would be a discrepancy between Clinton’s answer and Obama’s that might reveal something about which candidate is more beholden to Hollywood donors. Unfortunately, Hillary wasn’t given a chance to answer the questions. Reviewing my rough transcription of Obama’s comments today, what’s amazing is how it transitions from typical, weaselly politician non-response––which seems uncharacteristic for Obama––into a minor strike against the Hollywood publicity machine. But of course, he’s not actually pledging to do anything, and any horror fan who takes this as the sole evidence that Obama doesn’t deserve their vote probably shouldn’t be voting in the first place.
My rough transcription of the debate quote follows after the jump.
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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In yet another sign that 2008 is the new 1928, Hollywood, impressed by the massive first-weekend success of High School Musical 3, is rushing a number of music-based projects into production. 
