In addition to winning Best Picture (and seven other awards) at the Oscars last week, Slumdog Millionaire passed a major box office benchmark. It has now grossed more than $100 million in the U.S., which is pretty astonishing for a film with one-third of its dialogue in a foreign language. But is Slumdog’s popularity a one-shot in terms of its audience’s interest in India, or are moviegoers actually now more curious about the nation and its own films?
Some websites are simplifying the question of whether or not Slumdog will be a gateway film with polls asking if American moviegoers will now “go Bollywood” (40% of Cinematical readers flat out answered, “no.”), which is rather silly since Danny Boyle’s movie bears no resemblance to the majority of Bollywood pictures. In fact, Americans have in the past received far greater entry points into Indian cinema by way of films involving Anglo or NRI (non-resident Indian) protagonists directed by culturally bridging filmmakers (such as NRI helmers Deepa Mehta, Mira Nair and Gurinder Chadha), than the more-touristy type of filmmaking represented with Slumdog.
If someone truly wants to become familiar with Bollywood, he or she should probably just jump right in and then patiently get used to the style, which can be quite difficult for Westerners to immediately grasp. The extremely interested might benefit from reading the section on popular Indian cinema in Dimitris Eleftheriotis and Gary Needham’s Asian Cinemas: A Reader & Guide, a book that does a really great job acquainting the Western spectator with Eastern film form. Or, the more casually curious cinephile could simply follow our guide to accessible Indian (or India-based) films for the Slumdog lover to watch next: …Read more
Here’s our running tally of each of the distribution deals announced just before, throughout the course of, and just after the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. We will update this post whenever new information comes in, so bookmark it and keep checking back for the newest latest.
This may qualify as hyperbole, but Richard Schickel’s You Must Remember This––which premiered at Cannes in May, screened here at Telluride as part of a tribute to Schickel and will debut on PBS in slightly different form this fall––is maybe the most appropriately titled made-for-TV Classical Hollywood documentary directed by a working film critic I’ve seen this year.
“You must remember this,” is, of course, a lyric from “As Time Goes By,” the signature song from Warner Brothers’ Casablanca. From the opening montage of a tour through the WB backlot, set to a soundtrack of memorable lines from maybe a dozen and a half classic productions from that studio, Schickel’s film is devoted to anecdotal recall of Warner Brothers’ various signatures, from experts and witnesses who are dishy and not uncritical, but still often as sentimemtal as the song that Rick commands Sam to play again. From silent doggie star Rin Tin Tin (who, snarked writer and eventual head of production Daryl Zanuck, had the biggest brain on the lot) to the Busby Berkeley musicals that not so subtly told the viewer that “Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler are gonna get laid, and we’re all part of it,” to the social issue films of the 30s which carried “a vision of the world that was darker, more cynical, and more problematic than any other studio’s,” Schickel finds a surprisingly rich balance between behind-the-scenes trivia and multi-layered criticism. Access to talking heads including Molly Haskell, Neal Gabler, Jeaninne Basinger and former WB contract player Ronald Reagan certainly helps with the gravitas.
Also surprising was the slightly salty candor that ran through Schickel’s Special Medallion acceptance chat, which both the honoree and the audience seemed to find too brief. Still, Schickel managed to get out som zingers involving Manny Farber, Pauline Kael, the youth of America and John McCain. Some highlights after the jump.
Veteran documentarian Ken Burns is on the Board of Governors for the Telluride Film Festival. The creator of classic PBS documentary mini-series like The War, Baseball, and Jazz, all of which have a total runtime of many hundreds of minutes, it’s a wonder this guy watches anything other than the archival material he uses to assemble his films. He mentions a film called Hunger by Steve McQueen that’s playing here. No, it’s not the ghost of the Steve McQueen you might be thinking of, this Steve McQueen is a Turner Prize winning British video artist turned filmmaker. A full review of Hunger with an interview is coming soon.
Ken Burns talks Mad Men and David Fincher after the jump.
Yesterday, I dropped the name of Deborah Scranton’s The War Tapes, a documentary shot by the soldiers on the ground in Iraq, within this story about the ultra-indie “pro-troops” doc challenging Redacted’s sales. It had slipped my mind that Scranton has a new documentary, also shot by soldiers, called Bad Voodoo’s War. Chuck Tryon describes Scranton’s “virtual embed” technique in his review:
Bad Voodoo’s War focuses on the experiences of a California National Guard platoon, showing us, as the website claims, “the war through [the soldiers’] eyes, filmed with their own video cameras.” In order to make the film, Scranton equipped the soldiers with cameras and then kept in close correspondence with the soldiers via IM and email as they continued to send her tapes of their experiences.
Because the film is part of PBS’ FRONTLINE series, you can watch it in its entirety on PBS.com. There’s also an associated website, where the soldiers in the film are blogging and posting video extras. I found out about this today via a Facebook message from Scranton; she pointed specifically to this clip, called “It’s Not A Matter of If, It’s A Matter Of When”––referring to a change in attitude about the chances of an attack at any time. There are also many video extras on YouTube, including the preview embedded above.
Yance Ford, a producer for PBS’s documentary series P.O.V., has a long consideration of Tuesday night’s Cinema Eye Honors at the P.O.V. blog. Though Ford has much praise for the project as a whole, she takes umbrage with one portion of Thom Powers’ opening remarks, and it happens to be one section of the evening that irked me, as well. Over to Yance:
I know Thom Powers to be a thoughtful, passionate programmer and a great filmmaker in his own right. But his opening remarks included a remark that I found troubling.He said that “distributors don’t get it, critics don’t get it and the general public doesn’t get it. We wanted to fill [this auditorium] with people who get it.” I’ll be the first to agree that independent documentary does not get the recognition it deserves, but I don’t think that the problem is the fact that the general public doesn’t “get it.” The problem is that the general public doesn’t get to see it.
Ford goes on to make the case that “as long as the documentary community prioritizes theatrical release and festival runs over broadcast, the public will continue to miss a large and dynamic body of work,” which could be construed as being a bit self-serving coming from the producer of a broadcast documentary program. But I think she’s right to point out that “the general public” hardly deserves blame for not supporting films that get little to no publicity, which are reviewed in only a fraction of publications. The average moviegoer would have to do a good deal of detective work to know that 80% of the films nominated for a Cinema Eye even existed. Isn’t that why the Cinema Eyes exist in the first place?
Whether intentionally or not (and I would assume probably not), Powers is basically making the same argument that Lou Lumenick made in the most hateable quote in that Hollywood Reporter story that everyone’s mad about: the New York Post critic claimed that it’s not his responsibility to review smaller films because “The only complaints we’ve gotten (on not running some reviews) are from publicists and distributors…Not a single one from readers.” In no other market sector would the consumer be blamed for not demanding a product that they didn’t know was available.
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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