The shortlist has been announced for the 2009 Cinema Eye Honors. The list includes a number of titles that many felt were unjustifiably snubbed from the Oscars shortlist, some based on qualification quibbles, including Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, My Winnipeg, The Order of Myths, Stranded: I’ve Come From A Plane That Crashed Into The Mountain, and Waltz With Bashir. Omitted: Dear Zachary, a number of Oscar shortlisted titles including I.O.U.S.A., and each of the top five highest grossing non-fiction films of 2008, including Religulous.
I’ve pasted the full shortlist after the jump with links back to previous coverage of the films on SpoutBlog. Though I haven’t personally seen all of these, between everyone on the Spout team we’ve previously covered all but two.
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About.com’s Jurgen Fauth has put together a list of the ten films he was most disappointed by in 2008. Among them: box office champion The Dark Knight (”turgid”), preordained indie “surprise” awards darling Slumdog Millionaire (”completely falls apart by the light of day”) and the year’s token “but it’s good for grown ups too!” animated hit, Wall-E (”predictably schematic kid’s fare”). Three cheers for contrarianism!
It should be noted that many of Jurgen’s disappointments are amongst my favorite films of the year. If I made a top ten of 2008 today, spots for Burn After Reading and Synecdoche, NY would be assured, and I’m a fan of Ballast and Vicky Cristina Barcelona as well. “Many of the movies that disappointed me most in 2008 were grossly over-hyped, flagrantly overpraised — and zealously defended by people with wide-ranging vocabularies,” he writes. I’m one of those zealots!
Since the Chicago Reader’s Pat Graham extended the meme on his own blog, I thought I might as well. My own picks for the biggest disappointments of 2008 are after the jump. Chime in with yours in the comments, or write your own blog post and paste a link there.
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AJ Schnack has posted the Academy’s shortlist for the Best Documentary Feature nomination. As expected (at least, by me), Ellen Kuras’ The Betrayal, Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World, Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure, and Sundance winners Man on Wire and Trouble the Wire all made the cut. It’s also nice to see a few smaller films on the list, including In a Dream and They Killed Sister Dorothy. But there are also a few notable omissions, including Religulous and Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, both of which had their semi-secret shortlist qualifying runs at the Creative Entertainment Coliseum Quad on 181 Street in the nosebleed section of New York City. Coincidence?!?? Probably! (For what it’s worth, Expelled, Religulous‘ political polar opposite, also failed to make the cut.)
The full list can be found here. Expect chatter and analysis in the days to come (probably not least from the snubbed Bill Maher).
This review originally appeared during the Toronto Film Festival. We’re re-running it because Religulous opens in theaters today.
“I’m on the street corner peddling doubt.” That’s how Bill Maher categorizes his personal attitude towards and mission against religion in Religulous, and that’s sort of how I feel about Maher’s professional schtick: I am aggressively, even evangelically, skeptical. I’ll stick around and watch his HBO show when I catch it whilst flipping channels, mostly because impressed by his ability to make the quick change from sub-Leno, pun-dependent one-liners to actually asking hard-hitting, legitimately provocative questions of his panelists. On Real Time, Maher uses (mostly bad) jokes to soften up both his guests and his audience for the serious discourse that inevitably follows, and even though much of Maher’s humor is unbelievably hokey and old-fashioned, there’s something admirable about the marriage he’s arranged between his desire to entertain and his compulsion to interrogate and lay blame.
Hopeful that his feature-length collaboration with Larry Charles would offer a similar balance writ large, I went in to Religulous with an open mind –– which is more than can be said of Maher. The comedian-turned-political pundit/committed agnostic, and star and producer of this non-fiction film, explains early in the picture that he thinks organized religion of any kind is “detrimental to the progress of humanity.” Writing off the contents of the bible and all historical narratives of faith as “fairy tales,” he says he’s on a journey in search of an explanation as to how otherwise rational adults can buy into this kiddie stuff. “It’s too easy,” he complains.
Unfortunately, this last line turns out to be auto-critique: as Maher and Charles hop from backwoods America to international holy hot spots and back again. Maher continually flips the script, here using serious questioning not as an end, but a means to immature, unenlightening mockery. It quickly becomes apparent that Maher’s journey is not about finding out what makes religious people tick, but about using the tics of mostly fringe religious people to prop up the thesis Maher came in with. Which is––in a nutshell, but totally without irony––that everyday religious practice will soon result in global apocalypse.
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“I’m on the street corner peddling doubt.” That’s how Bill Maher categorizes his personal attitude towards and mission against religion in Religulous, and that’s sort of how I feel about Maher’s professional schtick: I am aggressively, even evangelically, skeptical. I’ll stick around and watch his HBO show when I catch it whilst flipping channels, mostly because impressed by his ability to make the quick change from sub-Leno, pun-dependent one-liners to actually asking hard-hitting, legitimately provocative questions of his panelists. On Real Time, Maher uses (mostly bad) jokes to soften up both his guests and his audience for the serious discourse that inevitably follows, and even though much of Maher’s humor is unbelievably hokey and old-fashioned, there’s something admirable about the marriage he’s arranged between his desire to entertain and his compulsion to interrogate and lay blame.
Hopeful that his feature-length collaboration with Larry Charles would offer a similar balance writ large, I went in to Religulous with an open mind –– which is more than can be said of Maher. The comedian-turned-political pundit/committed agnostic, and star and producer of this non-fiction film, explains early in the picture that he thinks organized religion of any kind is “detrimental to the progress of humanity.” Writing off the contents of the bible and all historical narratives of faith as “fairy tales,” he says he’s on a journey in search of an explanation as to how otherwise rational adults can buy into this kiddie stuff. “It’s too easy,” he complains.
Unfortunately, this last line turns out to be auto-critique: as Maher and Charles hop from backwoods America to international holy hot spots and back again. Maher continually flips the script, here using serious questioning not as an end, but a means to immature, unenlightening mockery. It quickly becomes apparent that Maher’s journey is not about finding out what makes religious people tick, but about using the tics of mostly fringe religious people to prop up the thesis Maher came in with. Which is––in a nutshell, but totally without irony––that everyday religious practice will soon result in global apocalypse.
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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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Though Religulous, like other anticipated fall films, has been screening for critics in New York (and, I assume, in LA) in advance of its official premiere in two weeks at the Toronto Film Festival, major outlets have thus far stuck to the presumed pre-festival embargo. But when your big Toronto premiere is screening for the public in (well, near) two major cities, how do you enforce an embargo on outlets with a mandate to run every commercial release through the critical mill?
In this case, I doubt Lionsgate put much effort into surpressing Variety’s early review of the Larry Charles/Bill Maher documentary, since it’s pretty much a flat-out rave. “[T]he particular intensity and seriousness of Maher’s project are nearly unprecedented,” Robert Koehler writes. “Indeed, its arrival shortly after the death of George Carlin — a profound influence on Maher’s standup act and politics — suggests the kind of film Carlin might have made in his prime.” More here.
According to Jeff Wells, Larry Charles and Bill Maher’s Borat-style religion doc Religulous is playing this week in Claremont, CA in order to meet the Academy’s rule stating that non-fiction films must screen for one week in a commercial theater in both New York and L.A. in order to qualify for a Best Documentary nomination. “That means Religulous is probably playing in some out-of-the-way theatre in the Manhattan area also,” Wells writes.
Sure enough, a Moviefone search reveals that the film is currently playing a publicity-free two matinees per day run at the Creative Entertainment Coliseum Quad on 181 Street–the same theater where Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired had its qualifying run last spring. So far there’s been no surreptitious Manohla Dargis review of Religulous, so if you find yourself in Claremont or in the noseblood section of Manhattan and decide to check it out, by all means, report back.
How did Bill Maher and Larry Charles get religious figures to agree to be interviewed on camera by the notoriously hostile-towards-religion Maher for their upcoming doc Religulous? According to an interview the comedian gave Patrick Goldstein, they didn’t:
It was simple: We never, ever, used my name. We never told anybody it was me who was going to do the interviews. We even had a fake title for the film. We called it ‘A Spiritual Journey.’ … The crew would set up and at the last second, when the cameras were already rolling, I would show up. So either they’d be seen on camera leaving the interview and lose face or they’d have to talk to me. It was like–’And now here’s … Bill!’ You could usually see the troubled looks on their faces.
This method calls to mind two recent films: the Charles-directed Borat, which used these deceptive documentary tactics within the framework of fiction, and Expelled. The extent to which the producers and star Ben Stein misled some of their interview subjects caused a minor firestorm––which didn’t do anything bad for the film’s box office, but certainly damaged the credibility of the filmmakers and their argument.
I’m fairly certain Bill Maher doesn’t care about ethical credibility––he’s probably primarily concerned with getting a punchline by any means necessary. But *I’m* kind of concerned about this growing trend of deception in ostensible non-fiction. Or maybe I just didn’t think Borat was that funny. Thoughts?
