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.
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.
Remember Adam Resurrected, the Paul Schrader-directed, Jeff Goldblum-starring film that Paul saw at Telluride which made him admit to wanting “to make out with Jeff Goldblum in the back of his Toyota Prius”? I got an invite for a press screening for the film a couple of hours ago, which I thought was weird, because the last I heard, the film didn’t have distribution. Now Mike Jones at The Circuit has posted an item that solves the mystery: it looks like Bleiberg Entertainment, the company that financed the film, have decided that rather than wait for a distributor to pick it up and miss this Oscar season, they’ll fund a qualifying run for the film in New York and LA themselves.
Jones says producer Ehud Bleiberg was “unhappy with the offers he received after the pic’s Toronto fest screening,” Bleiberg himself implies that if any of those offers were promising in other respects, they didn’t include a timely release or support for an Oscar campaign. “Why would we screen the film at Telluride and Toronto and release it a year later,” he asks rhetorically. Considering that Goldblum’s performance is apparently so good that it propells heterosexual Midwesterners to contemplate the actor as an object of physical (and eco-friendly!) love, that question seems eminently reasonable.
The Telluride Film Festival is what Sundance would be if it took place in heaven. Every year the tiny mountain hamlet hosts four days of hassle-free cinema paradise. There were grumblings about the lack of American films, but we still found plenty to love. Mike Leigh (Secrets and Lies, Vera Drake) came with his delightful new movie, Happy-Go-Lucky. He sat down for a disgruntled yet insightful interview. Paul Schrader (Affliction, Hardcore) seemed as blow away as we were by his latest film, Adam Resurrected, starring Jeff Goldblum.
Adam Resurrected is the new movie by Paul Schrader (Affliction, Auto-Focus) premiering here at Telluride 2008. I was at the first screening which was also the first time Schrader ever watched the movie with an audience. “I realized watching it how exhausting it is, ” he told me right after the screening, “And it’s full of extremes. Literally, that old saying ‘you don’t know whether to laugh or cry’ is true here, and some scenes I think either emotion is fine with me.”
It’s in the navigation of extremes that my crush on Jeff Goldblum, who plays the title character, was born. I’m not one to get into Oscar buzz, but I will with Jeff and even add easily excerpted blurbs: Jeff Goldblum is magnificent. Jeff Godlblum’s peformance is a tour de force. I want to make out with Jeff Goldblum in the back of his Toyota Prius. Like how Daniel Day-Lewis’ character, Daniel Plainview (There Will be Blood), would have seemed flat or absurd in another actor’s hands, Jeff Goldblum’s wry delivery and velvet wit take the absurdity of Adam Stein and make him believable. …Read more
“There is, of course, cause for concern, and even alarm.”
These were some of the first words out of moderator Annette Insdorf’s mouth, at the start of a panel called Snip Snip: Are Cutbacks in Film Distribution and Criticism Affecting Quality Filmmaking? in Telluride on Sunday. She ticked off all the alarming factors––studio-funded arthouse distributors like Paramount Vantage and Picturehouse are shutting down; marketing costs for the average film have risen to the $20 million range, which means that true indie distributors can’t compete; there’s a glut of films in both festivals and in theaters; print outlets dedicated to film have all but disappeared, and general interest publications have come to see critics as a luxury. She closed this listlessness-inducing laundry list with the question, “Will we simply have to read blogs to be informed about non-Hollywood cinema?” The distributors and journalists on the panel (including Michael Barker of Sony Pictures Classics, Anne Thompson of Variety and Scott Foundas of Village Voice Media) ended up taking this querie and running it into a lively, contentious debate. But first, Paul Schrader declared that he’s already heard the death rattle of cinema as we know it.
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.
Ever since the great humanistic film critic Manny Farber died last week at the ripe old age of 91, writer/director (and former film critic and Kael acolyte) Paul Schrader, who so eloquently has been making the tribute rounds to Farber, has been on my mind. I’ve always been a fan of Schrader’s writing – as much for his fearless risk taking as for his Travis Bickle triumphs. American Gigolo, his very-1980 follow-up to Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, in which Richard Gere’s rent boy to rich older women Julian Kaye falls for Lauren Hutton’s senator’s wife Michelle Stratton while simultaneously finding himself a suspect in the murder of a “rough trick,” is typical Schrader, forever probing overlapping lurid worlds with the attention of an obsessive pathologist. Even with mediocre acting, earnest dialogue sometimes bordering on the heavy-handed, and predictable hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold asides, American Gigolo is still a fine slice of celluloid cheese, containing camerawork both sleek and fluid and that sexy sing-along anthem (“Call Me”!) complete with Debbie Harry’s French coos. Incidentally, I’ve always been a fan of male prostitutes as well. So why is it that I’ve never been a fan of this flick?
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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Remember Adam Resurrected, the Paul Schrader-directed, Jeff Goldblum-starring film that Paul saw at Telluride which made him admit to wanting “to make out with Jeff Goldblum in the back of his Toyota Prius”? I got an invite for a press screening for the film a couple of hours ago, which I thought was weird, because the last I heard, the film didn’t have distribution. Now Mike Jones at The Circuit has posted an item that solves the mystery: it looks like Bleiberg Entertainment, the company that financed the film, have decided that rather than wait for a distributor to pick it up and miss this Oscar season, they’ll fund a qualifying run for the film in New York and LA themselves.
