With that in mind, I’ve devised a list of films that I’m excited to see (for the first time or not) and talk about in the coming 12 months. Later in the week, we’ll take a look at some movies we saw at festivals in 2008 which now have a release date in 2009, and also films which have no release date, but which we expect to see show up on the festival circuit in the coming months. But we’re going to get the macro out of the way first: after the jump, you’ll find three Big, Stupid Hollywood Movies which I’m assuming will be awful, but possibly in an interesting way. Do share the titles you have your own eyes on in the comments.
Admittedly, I haven’t seen Kelly Reichart’s Wendy and Lucy since Cannes. But I’m still going to stand by the contention that it seems just a little weird for a film about a girl and her dog–nudity-free, with some moments of tension but very little violence as I recall–-to receive an R rating (for “language”), while Richard Kelly’s horror film The Box, said to contain “some violence and disturbing images,” gets a PG-13.
This is probably not worth getting upset about. I’m not even sure if cutting off a teenage audience will really hurt Lucy’s theatrical success––Michelle Williams’ adolescent fan base has had a good five years to come of age since Dawson’s Creek, although one does imagine that there are a lot of teenage girls following the actresses seemingly unwanted appearances in the tabloids. But at least, it’s testament to that old chestnut about how Hollywood productions have an unfair edge over indies in the ratings game. If anything, Kelly was probably contractually obligated to deliver a PG-13 and engineered his cut of The Box to comply, while Kelly Reichart, who made Wendy and Lucy without a distributor on board, simply made the film she wanted to make. Too bad she had to put so many swear words in it.
Screen Daily reports that the sequel to Donnie Darko, which begins shooting on May 18, will be looking for international buyers in the Cannes Market. Wait, back up––there’s a sequel to Donnie Darko? Yeah, and Richard Kelly, who is quietly working on a mainstream horror film in the aftermath of Southland Tales, has nothing to do with it. S. Darko will focus on Donnie’s youngest sister, played as she was in the earlier film by Daviegh Chase, and will catch up with the character seven years after her brothers death, when she and a friend embark on “a roadtrip to Los Angeles when they are plagued by bizarre visions.” So presumably, her commitment to Sparkle Motion will not be an issue. The film, which will be helmed by Nightstalker director Chris Fisher, has apparently already secured U.S. distribution through Fox.
If Southland Tales is to survive its Cannes drubbing and crap box office to become the cult classic that it has the potential to be, it will be thanks to two primary factors: in-depth, after-the-fact considerations of the film’s power to seduce even those who want to resist its sloppiness and vulgarity, like this one from Steven Shaviro; and the Justin Timberlake musical number at the center of the film, which is the target of much of Shaviro’s swoon.
Shaviro’s certainly not alone in this–virtually everyone I’ve talked to who finds themselves unable to entirely dismiss Southland Tales talks of that scene, set to “All These Things That I’ve Done” by The Killers. I’ve thought that it was the final image of the scene that really did it for me–Timberlake’s facial expression when the hallucination starts to fade is maybe the only truly felt moment of acting in a film that’s otherwise pretty much about bad acting–but Shaviro nails something about the whole cocoon of it:
Here’s a look at the notable films opening this week that we’ve previously covered here on SpoutBlog:
Redacted: Bill O’Reilly can finally get a look at the film he’s sight-unseen been threatening to boycott, while Magnolia finally gets to put that whole all-press-is-good-press maxim to the test. Here’s my review from Telluride; for a recap on the possibly-contrived battle between director Brian DePalma and producer/distributor Mark Cuban, see here, here and here.
Beowulf: Is director Robert Zemeckis not doing press for this film because he knows it’s a bad idea to compete with the post-Comic-Con gushage over Angelina Jolie’s nakedness?
Smiley Face: Kevin and Paul are big fans of Gregg Araki’s stoner comedy, which came off a successful festival run to be all but abandoned by its distributor. The film opens on one screen in L.A. today before going straight to DVD. Listen to Paul’s interview with Araki here.
Margot at the Wedding: Noah Baumbach’s follow-up to The Squid and the Whale is disappointing, despite Nicole Kidman’s strong performance as a wicked sister. Read the review here.
Could any film ever hope to overcome a festival drubbing like the one that greeted Southland Tales at Cannes 2006? Screened in competition, in an early incarnation clocking in at 2 hours 40 minutes (director Richard Kelly later claimed it had been a rough cut all along, but that’s apparently not how it was billed to the press at the time), Kelly’s follow-up to the slow-burning cult hit Donnie Darkowas roundly, emphatically, infamously booed. Sometime after the first shockwave of bad buzz hit the States, a handful of critics rose to defend Kelly’s vision. The rest of us sat back and waited a year and a half to get a look for ourselves.
Southland Tales may never be able to live down that first, fateful, fatal screening, but you can’t say Richard Kelly didn’t try to reverse the damage; in fact, he spent a good portion of the 18 months following the film’s ill-fated premiere streamlining his disasterpiece. The 2 hour 24 minute cut premiering in theaters tomorrow boasts a newly-fashioned prologue (wherein a July 4th barbecue is interrupted by a mushroom cloud, touching off World War III), a re-recording of Justin Timberlake’s narration (stoney and oblique, but purposefully so), and the exorcism of one or two subplots (Janeane Garofalo used to be in this film; now she is not).
Most auspiciously, Kelly brokered a deal with Sony that required him to shave a sizable chunk off the running time in exchange for their bankrolling of 90 new effects shots. It would seem that this money was put to good use: I’m not someone who usually takes much pleasure from good CGI, but if there’s one thing we should all be able to agree on when it comes to Southland Tales, it’s that the effects are truly special. Particularly in the film’s spectacular final twenty minutes, Southland Tales contains some of the most purely beautiful digital effects that I’ve ever seen on a big screen.
And the rest of it? It really comes down to what you’re willing to let Kelly get away with.
Richard Kelly’s re-tooled Southland Tales screened at Harry Knowles’ Fantastic Fest this weekend, and reaction, though still mixed, skewed decidedly more positive than at the film’s infamously disastrous debut at Cannes over a year ago. “Most of the complaints about the film are accurate to varying degrees,” writes Todd Brown at Twitch. “That said, for those who make it through the initial overload of information and can latch on to Kelly’s vibe, Southland is also a dazzlingly smart, funny, and engaging work, one that fuses political fears with apocalyptic religiosity and techno-dread and wraps it all in a glossy, colorful package.”
But Mike Curtis disagrees: “One wonders if the whole thing were just a huge joke on us the audience, the investors, Hollywood, and everyone else desperately watching to see how he’d follow up on Donnie Darko. A big ‘Psych!’ shout out to all of us - and we stand here confused - was this a joke, a mess, or just a failed multi-layered thingamabob?”
Wow — I guess this means they’re really going to release it (see previous coverage of the drama surrounding Southland Tales’ wavering release date here, here and here). I’m a little wary of the Mystical Female Asian Character, but we’ll see.
David Cronenberg’s Russian mob movie was a hit with Toronto audiences, too: it picked up theaudience prize for best film at the Toronto Film Festival over the weekend, edging out runners-up Juno and Body of War.
In Toronto acquisitions news, IFC picked up Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, and in what is being billed as the Festival’s biggest sale, First Look Studios purchased the Aaron Eckhart/Jessica Alba comedy Bill for at least $3 million.
Southland Tales and Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly is launching Darko Entertainment, a production company designed “to back modestly budgeted, director-driven films.” Their first venture will be Dirty Girl, a co-production with Christine Vachon’s Killer Films.
MTV Films and Old School director Todd Phillips are producing a feature around YouTube sensation Million Dollar Strong (aka Mike O’Connell and Ken Jeong). O’Connell is writing the screenplay with Peter Kline.
Brian Lowry has a favorable review of The SimpsonsMovie: “Put simply, if somebody had to make a Simpsons movie, this is pretty much what it should be — clever, irreverent, satirical and outfitted with a larger-than-22-minutes plot, capable (just barely) of sustaining a narrative roughly four times the length of a standard episode.”
Variety has a loooong consideration of Lindsay Lohan’s future career prospects, as well as an update on the status of Poor Things, the film the rehab rat was scheduled to begin shooting next month alongside Shirley MacLaine. Can Linds make a Robert Downey Jr.-like comeback? The story quotes sales agent Andrew Herwitz, who speculates that Lohan might be able to find redemption in indie film: “She wanted to break free of kid roles, anyway. A lot of indie producers are probably going to be able to cast her in interesting parts because she will actually be reading their scripts. Not a lot of other scripts may be sent to her for a while.”
It’s the news Richard Kelly geeks have been waiting 15 months for: Southland Tales, the long-awaited film from the Donnie Darko auteur, has been given a release date. According to indieWIRE, Sony, Destination Films and Samuel Goldwyn are partnering to put the film in U.S. theaters on November 9th. November and December are usually reserved for “prestige” releases. Could this mean that a year and quarter worth of editing has somehow managed to transform Southland from Cannes pariah to possible awards contender? We can’t wait to find out.
While you wait (and wait and wait and wait) for further word on Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, take a look at this Donnie Darko-inspired video for “What’s a Girl To Do” by Bat For Lashes [via Ultragrrrl]:
As for Southland Tales… we are about halfway through completing all of the new visual effects. We have to deliver everything by the end of summer. I have to tell everyone that the amount of visual effects work being added to the film is SIGNIFICANT… and I am so grateful for the work being done by Thomas Tannenberger and his team at Gradient VFX in Venice Beach.
And I can confirm that a company has been hired by Sony to begin work on a trailer. The release date will be announced very soon.
This post would seem to be carefully designed to telegraph two messages:
1) Those are his caps on SIGNIFICANT. At ComicCon last summer, Kelly distanced himself from the Cannes cut of Southland, insisting that the version shown to critics the previous May lacked the special effects needed to flesh out the story. (Post-Cannes 2006, there were rumors that the stars of Southland were looking for distance, too–rumors which were given credence by the fact that not a single boldfaced name joined Kelly on stage in San Diego.) He’s clearly saying, “This movie looks totally different from the movie that got those crappy reviews.”
2) Based on the phrasing of the final sentence, it;s sounds like Sony isn’t planning on setting a release date until they have a trailer/a better idea of how/when/to whom they can market the film. Considering the time and money they’ve already invested, that would make sense.
The verdict? This news is better than no news, but Kelly fans can hardly breathe easy.
Word hit the web yesterday afternoon that Richard Kelly, the writer/director of cult hit Donnie Darko, has been hired to direct The Box, a PG-13 horror film based on his own script, and set to star Cameron Diaz. “My hope is to make a film that is incredibly suspenseful and broadly commercial, while still retaining my artistic sensibility,” Kelly told Variety.
Okay, fine. But what about Southland Tales? An allegedly unfinished cut of Kelly’s second film (a gonzo sci-fi meta-epic starring The Rock, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Justin TImberlake) was savaged by most critics when it screened at Cannes last year, but staunchly defended by Amy Taubin and J. Hoberman. That summer, the film was acquired by Sony, and Kelly made an appearance at Comic Con promising fans that the studio was committed to releasing the film. Then, in early April of this year, Kelly posted a message on his MySpace page saying that Sony had agreed to fund one last round of special effects. “The film will be completely finished for the first public screening sometime mid-summer,” Kelly promised.
Wouldn’t that be … now? Kelly hasn’t updated his MySpace page since the Variety story hit, but I’ve sent him a message asking for more details. I can tell you one thing: there’s no lack of curiousity about Southland Tales amongst comic book geeks. I’ve been trying to get my hands on the third installment of the Southland Tales prequel graphic novel series, but Forbidden Planet has been sold out for weeks.
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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Oh, 2008 … where has the time all gone to? It seems like just yesterday that we were 
Admittedly, I haven’t seen Kelly Reichart’s Wendy and Lucy since Cannes. But I’m still going to stand by the contention that it seems just a little weird for a film about a girl and her dog–nudity-free, with some moments of tension but very little violence as I recall–-to receive an R rating (for “language”), while Richard Kelly’s horror film The Box, said to contain “some violence and disturbing images,” gets a PG-13.
Here’s a look at the notable films opening this week that we’ve previously covered here on SpoutBlog:
Richard Kelly’s re-tooled 
With 
