“Ten years have passed since Happiness, but I prefer not to be beholden to the literalness of time or circumstance. I like to tweak things, get at stuff from a fresh angle, and so, for example, some characters have aged five years, some twenty years, some histories have been altered, and I have allowed race not to be something set in stone. Of course, it’s a completely different cast. It’s more fun and interesting that way.”

So says Todd Solondz, in reference to his highly-anticipated sort-of sequel to Happiness. Formerly titled Life During Wartime, The Playlist passes along word that the film is now being called Forgiveness, and that Fortissimo Films has acquired worldwide sales rights. Fortissimo were initially on board to fund the film, back when it was first announced in 2006 at Cannes.

In November, we learned a few casting details, including that  The Wire’s Michael Kenneth Williams would be playing the part originally played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Paul Reubens would be taking over for Jon Lovitz. The film’s IMDb profile has been expanded a bit, and it looks like Ally Sheedy is taking Lara Flynn Boyle’s Happiness Part, and Allison Janney is taking over the role of “Trish” for Cynthia Stevenson.

The Playlist discovered a long synopsis for the film with character names matched up to actor names, and he presumes that Hilton’s role must be “small if they mention eleven actors and not even a peep of her.” But I had another thought: what if the producers are just carefully guarding the film’s biggest casting joke?

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The Vicious Kind, a love triangle drama starring Adam Scott and Brittany Snow, directed by Lee Toland Krieger and executive produced by Neil LaBute, is described in the always remarkable Sundance catalogue as “a glimpse into the soul of a damaged man whose obstinate defense mechanisms are laid bare by his fractured relationships.” We subjected Krieger to the 4 Questions We Ask Everyone, and he divulged about his unusual choice of film stock and taking cues from Cassavetes, and twice implied seething hatred for Paris Hilton.

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It’s been almost a year since we heard word on Todd Solondz’s long awaited follow-up to Palindromes. The last we heard, the project was still called Life During Wartime, and it was pitched as a sort-of sequel to Solondz’s two most popular films. Paul “Pee Wee” Ruebens confirmed at the time that the script involved “characters from Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness whose paths converge. It’s all different people playing the same roles [from] those movies.” With little else to go on, we tried to guess which Solondzverse character would be assigned to Ruebens, and concluded: “Given Reubens’ personal history, the Dylan Baker character is probably the most obvious, but I think the Jon Lovitz character might be more interesting.”

There’s finally new news about the project today, and it looks like we guessed right! …Read more

There’s no denying that Repo! The Genetic Opera has plenty of imagination, but right now it’s still spinning around in my brain and I’m trying to decide if I like it or not. The first time I saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show, I thought it was one of the worst movies I’d ever seen, despite Tim Curry’s stellar performance. Is Repo! destined for the same cult status? The only answer I can come up with is… maybe.

Based on a 10 minute opera called “The Necro-Merchant’s Debt” by Darren Smith and Terrance Zdunich (who plays the Graverobber in the movie), Repo! later become a stageplay, and then they brought Saw sequel director Darren Lynn Bousman on board, and now a movie. It’s an epic opera set in the future, where a corporation called GeneCo has mastered the art of creating synthetic body organs. However, they come at a steep price, and if you don’t pay up, the company will send Repo Men after you to reclaim their property. Which of course usually results in the death of the implantee.

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When I sat down yesterday with Adria Petty, director of TIFF controversy-baiting, press magnet doc Paris, Not France, I asked her if she wanted to respond to some of the rumors as to why her film has mutated in the span of a week from a relatively normal festival entry into a mysterious object, destined to have a single screening in a form that––in the words of its sales agent, Cassian Elwes––”will probably never be seen again.” Before I could start ticking off the laundry list of reported factors––concerns from the Hilton camp, legal pressure from the record company who hired Petty to make a 20 minute DVD extra, clearance rights on the Beatles and Madonna and, well, Paris Hilton songs used within––Petty broke in.

“I’ll just tell you the truth,” she said. “The truth is that we just didn’t want the film pirated. There’s a lot of people involved in the film that own it or financed it. It was in a lot of different camps and different layers. And basically, at the end of the day, instead of having the whole thing canceled or pulled because of all these greedy or annoying people, Paris and I, who wanted the film to screen at Toronto and were honored by it, we were like, look let’s just do it once in one big theater. And then we put the night vision goggles in one time––because everybody is like, who pays for the night vision?”

Of course, every filmmaker who comes to a major festival is concerned about piracy, and many screenings at TIFF are patrolled by guards wearing night vision goggles to detect the use of recording devices. Piracy may have been an issue here, but in the above passage and elsewhere during our talk, Petty alluded that the major issue contributing to Paris’ “orphan” status may be its origin as a work of pure promotion. Warner Brothers Records didn’t want the film she turned in, but now, presumably because cigar-chomping execs look at a girl like Paris Hilton and see a walking dollar sign in a diamond tiara, it seems they’re afraid to let it go.

Excerpts from the interview, in which Petty sets Page Six straight, compares her film to Cocksucker Blues, and explains why Paris Hilton is not like Michael Jackson, follow after the jump.

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“I have to say, up until this moment, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do this,” said TIFF documentary programmer Thom Powers in his introduction of Paris, Not France, undoubtedly referencing the hullabaloo that sprung up over the past few weeks when the film’s four planned festival screenings were reduced to one amidst rumors of possible legal action from the Hilton camp. But if Paris Hilton (or anyone on her payroll) is suing Adria Petty (or anyone on her payroll) because of this film, she is a) insane, and b) so fiercely committed to putting on a pretty face for the camera that she’ll actually a walk a red carpet in support of a film which she allegedly doesn’t want you to see.

Yes, Paris was in the building tonight. As soon as the emergency exit door at stage left popped open, someone in the audience cried, “Paris!” and a hush fell over the crowd. The 800 or so ticket holders at the Ryerson watched in virtual silence as Paris––head down, face blank––allowed herself to be led by boyfriend Benji Madden to their reserved seats. And then the snapping started. Cellphones, point and clicks, professional cameras—it seemed like everyone had one, and everyone stood up to train it on the rail-thin blonde, panopticon-style. The snapping just went on and on until Powers took the stage and cracked, “Don’t you want to take a picture of me?” (As I write this, an hour after the screening let out, images of Paris on tonight’s red carpet have already hit the wires.)

In the lobby after the screening, a gang of journalists clustered together, and somebody threw out a phrase that seemed to float above the room and immediately etch itself larger-than-life in granite as the shortcut to Paris, Not France’s dismissal: “It’s a love letter.” That’s certainly one way to look at it. Another, is that if this is a film about Paris Hilton at all, whether loving or otherwise, then it’s a failure, because it so convinces that there is no Paris Hilton, only “Paris Hilton”––a brand designed to sell watches and perfume who has assumed the now-empty shell of the once-vivacious party girl. Though the director tries to sell the idea that her subject is a self-marketing whiz who calculatingly hides her real self behind a cover that is deliberately without content in order to make for smoother mass consumption, neither the film nor its star ever convinces that there’s a significantly more substantial real self to hide. But! If Paris is merely using the heiress as an in to talk about the cold, mechanical efficiency of today’s celebrity culture, to give the consumers of surface-as-depth media (that means you, and you, and of course, me) a demystified glimpse at the way our US Weekly is made, at the Invasion of the Body Snatchers-like process by which human beings are used as vessels to fill an unquenchable thirst on the part of the masses for yet more media about we which we just don’t have to think…well, that would really be something.

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The 2008 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival begins today, and Kevin Kelly and I will be there for the next ten days reporting back. What follows is not exactly an iron-clad preview of our Toronto coverage––in addition to some of the films below, I’m definitely planning to see new works by Claire Denis, Agnes Varda, Jonathan Demme and Richard Linklater, and would of course recommend that anyone on the ground see some of my favorites from past festivals, including Medicine for Melancholy and A Christmas Tale. This is more of a list of predictions of what everyone else is going to be talking about, while I’m pushing my glasses up my nose and rushing to to the next screening of the a South Korean movie about drunken lonliness. Enjoy! If you have your own predictions for what will catch fire in Ontario, let us know in the comments.

1. Zach and Miri Make a Porno (TIFF screening info)

Obviously, anything with “porno” in the title has a certain automatic contingent (hello, Google searchers! Sorry to disappoint!) But then, so does anything with the credit “written and directed by Kevin Smith.” And then there’s the leading man. Some perspective: Smith’s last three films have grossed an average of $26 million each; the last three films starring Seth Rogen have grossed an average of $117 million each. With Jay and Silent Bob finally retired (we think/hope), and Rogen in tow for the usual, MPAA-baiting Smithism, Porno could––however ironically––become what Jersey Girl was supposed to be: the tipping point that expands the Smith fan base beyond the longtime Clerks faithful.

2. Slumdog Millionaire (TIFF screening info)

Crowdpleasers make me itch. But then, to borrow a line from David Fincher, I’m an asshole. Assuming you are not, you might be interested to know that Slumdog Millionaire shows all the symptoms of becoming The Next Juno. Like Juno, Slumdog premiered in a TBA slot at Telluride, where reaction from all but our own Kevin Buist was enthusiastic, even hyperbolically so. Also ike Juno, it’s a music-fueled piece of pop art in which young love results from unlikely circumstances. And, thanks to Warner Brothers’ loss of faith in this tier of the distribution market, it’s now being distributed by Fox Searchlight––just like Juno. If looking for The Next Juno is now part of our jobs, at least Searchlight is taking all the arduous work out of it.

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Paris Hilton and her team have successfully pressured the Toronto International Film Festival into canceling all but one screening of Adria Petty’s Paris, Not France, a documentary about the celebrity heiress which “attempts to explore the Paris phenomenon and how it defines this moment in culture” and is also “modeled after the 1960s “it”-girl film Darling.” Though the film’s TIFF info page still lists three public screenings, TIFF documentary programmer Thom Powers confirmed to me that Paris will screen only once at the festival. “From my standpoint, of course, I wish we could do additional screenings,” Powers told me in an email. “But this is certainly a better option than not showing the film at all.”

Of course, the big question is why, and that’s something that no one seems willing to give up an answer for. As I’ve noted before, if it turns out that Hilton’s own life resembles the narrative of Darling, that might qualify as embarassing to a different kind of starlet (Orgies! Abortion! Glorified prostitution! Ennui!), but not Paris. As Steven Zeitchik joked when he first blogged about this, “the mind dances at what kind of footage can be seen so newly shameful to Paris Hilton, the enfant teribles whose entire reputation is based on shamelesness.” Zeitchik didn’t name his own sources, who apparently didn’t offer details as to what, exactly, rubbed the celebutante the wrong way. Publicist Mark Pogachefsky’s statement on behalf of the filmmakers is extremely vague: “For a variety of reasons - which we are unable to discuss - the film will only be screened once.  We are optimistic that the film will ultimately be released commercially, but we are not able to comment further.”

But I’ve got to wonder if there’s more to this than meets the eye. …Read more

California may have spent the last five years under the rule of a Republican movie star, but news that major industry players are anything but super-lefty liberals still seems to strike many as a surprise. Responding to a story in which it’s casually mentioned that Dennis Hopper is expected to attend the Republican National Convention, Defamer’s Kyle Buchanan writes, “Did we miss the memo that said the countercultural director of freaking Easy Rider was a Republican? We’d assumed his appearance in the right-wing Zucker film An American Carol was a strict paycheck gig…”

I’m not sure when the “memo” first went out, but Hopper has been a registered Republican for over 25 years. …Read more

It’s late August. Our brains have been fried by lust for Nastia Liukin Olympic spirit. We’re ten days away from the start of fall festival season/Oscar frenzy proper. For these reasons and probably loads more, we woke up this morning desperately in need of something to obsess over that would involve no brain power whatsoever.

And Thom Powers, in his infinite wisdom as documentary programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival, provided, by programming Paris, Not France, a documentary which purports to offer an exploration of “the businesswoman and the human being behind the public persona that is Paris Hilton…Modelled [sic] after the 1960s “it”-girl film Darling.” We’ve thus spent half the day digging up as much info on the film as we can find. Here’s what we know as of 2:04 PM, August 19, 2008:

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The Toronto International Film Festival sent out an email this morning with 15 attachments, and although many of them represent lists of films on the 2008 lineup which have already been made public, it’s still a *bit* overwhelming to have it all land in an inbox at once. 312 films from 64 countries, including 249 features. Where to begin?

If you’d like to look at the full lineup, indieWIRE has that–and please, do look at it, and tell me what you think I should see/report back on. I’ve made some notes about films from this series of releases that I’m excited about––whether out of name brand obligation (the new Coen Brothers, for instance), word of mouth (such as a number of films I’ve missed at other festivals) or pure morbid curiosity (ie: the Paris Hilton documentary Paris, Not France), after the jump. All film descriptons courtesy of TIFF.

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The Onion headline: MTV Movie Awards Snubs Director Jonas Mekas Yet Again. The fake-quote gem:

“It is a travesty that Mekas’ stark vision of elegiac melancholia has not been rewarded with the coveted Golden Popcorn statue,” Boston University film studies professor Ray Carney said. “His [1997] film Letter From Nowhere—Laiskas Is Niekur No. 1 should have easily walked away with Best On-Screen Duo, or Best Kiss, or at least Best Ass.”

Tee hee and everything, but there actually isn’t a huge gulf between Mekas’ most recent major project and the kind of thing you might see on post-Tila Tequila MTV.

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With news that a memorabilia collector has purchased a Marilyn Monroe “sex tape”, we now see the old starlet meets new starlet trend coming full circle. As if Lindsay Lohan’s aping Marilyn in her recent New York spread and Mamie Van Doren’s recent nipslip weren’t enough to show us both that today’s darlings are nothing compared to yesterday’s and that the media’s crucifixion of Lohan, Britney, Paris and the rest ignores the fact that actresses have been comfortably wild since before most paparazzi photogs were born, now we have an historical artifact that seems to validate Paris Hilton’s breakthrough via her sex tape “1 Night in Paris.”

Unfortunately for Paris, in her being validated, we also learn that in the 1940s, fellatio was perhaps a surer step to real movie stardom than it is in the 21st century. Of course, I also think that if Marilyn were alive and just starting out today, she would have enough talent to circumvent the “casting couch” and still become a bigger star than Paris. In the context of today, though, she probably wouldn’t become nearly as iconic nor would she have appropriated the same dumb blonde image. So, it’s difficult to tell where she’d fit in.

• The strike may not be legally over, but in an industry desperate to return to some sense of normalcy, this is apparently the sound of a fat lady singing: The WGA’s still needs their members to officially vote on the new AMPTP deal, but TV showrunners are nonetheless expected to return to work today, with regular writers back in the office on Wednesday. More in our frame of concern, the Oscars will go forth with writers and without picket lines.
• Meanwhile, writers seem to generally think the prolonged strike, which will net them each about $1500 per streamed television episode, was “worth it,” nevermind the losses incurred by those crew members who lost their jobs, or the hit taken to the Hollywood economy as a whole. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the strike is responsible for up to $2 billion in local losses.
• Fool’s Gold easily beat holdover Hannah Montana at the box office this weekend, with a respectable $22 million. Meanwhile, the Paris Hilton-starrer The Hottie and the Nottie, which garnered some of the best bad reviews I’ve read in a while (why did they even screen it for critics?), earned a disastrous $234 on each of its 111 screens.
• Berlin deals: Arthouse Films has acquired Christina Clausen’s doc The Universe of Keith Haring; the Jason Statham crime pic The Bank Job sold release rights to various distributors in 40 territories.