Hellboy producer Mike Richardson is bringing the saga of Emily the Strange––the sad little black haired cat girl who you might remember from t-shirts and stickers with you were a teenager in the 90s––to the big screen. Terrible timing––this is the role Christina Ricci was born to play, but not only is she probably too old by now, but after Speed Racer she probably wouldn’t be able to get the job.
David Gordon Green will directYour Highness, a fantasy comedy written y Danny McBride and Ben Best, the stars/co-writers of The Foot Fist Way.
“Best-case scenario would be for Sex and the City to wind up with same kind of numbers as The Devil Wears Prada, with $200 million internationally,” predicts Variety. The trade doesn’t mention that tracking currently has the film pegged at a $30 million opening weekend, far below the $50 million that Variety claims the Indiana Jones sequel could take in in its second week.
Would a second place opening weekend dim SatC director Michael Patrick King’s confidence? Upon landing a first-lookdeal with Dreamworks on the eve of his directorial debut’s release, he coyly hinted at the possibility of a sequel. “The actresses are great, and if the gods smile and people are still interested, why not?” he told Variety. Sex, excess, and pantheism––it’s ancient Rome all over again.
If my Twitter stream is to be believed, I was the only female, 20-something writer in New York City who was NOT invited to the Sex and the City premiere last night. (Could it have been because of this? Or this? Or this? Hmmm.) Certainly, each picture Julia Allison staged at the event offers up at least 1,000 word on the matter, but who has time to do all that reading? Jeff Wells‘ take is much more succinct:
The film is another Taliban recruitment film — a grotesque and putrid valentine to the insipid “me, my lifestyle, my accessories and I” chick culture of the early 21st Century. Guys everywhere — if you’re in a brand-new relationship, take her to see this thing. If she even half-likes it, dump her and walk away cold. Save yourself!
Funny side note: I remember the moment when, as a senior in college, I decided that I could no longer in good conscience watch Sex and the City. It was, I think, the premiere of the first season to air after 9/11, and there was a scene where Carrie announced that she was going to help rebuild downtown by going shopping. It was such a direct aping of George W. Bush’s commerce-as-opiate for the troubled masses prescriptive of the time that it seemed like the ultimate sign that the show had cut loose the thread of critique that once seemed to be woven into its pornographic depiction of excessive consumption.
We obviously couldn’t have hoped that the movie would have transcended the worst aspects of the show––at least, not after having heard Fergie’s theme song––but I honestly didn’t think it was going to go as far as this, to become the embodiment of not just what *I* hate, but Why They Hate Us.
For all the Sex and the Citypromotional madness and media hype, says Diane Garrett at Variety, “there’s no escaping the fact that the movie is a chick flick with strong appeal among an older femme demo but questionable interest among others. All the magazine coverage in the world — 63 pages in the May 23 edition of Entertainment Weekly alone — and Sex and the City TV marathons haven’t really moved the needle among men, many of whom suggest they’d rather be shot than sit through the movie.”
Seemingly determined to try to recreate the relationship of Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda whether or not the Barbarella remake works out, Robert Rodriguez is apparently “shopping around Women in Chains!, a violent drama set at a woman’s prison starring his fiancee, Rose McGowan.” Oh, right––it’s camp, so it’s neither misogynist nor creepy
IFC continues their Cannes buying spree days after the end of the festival, picking up Grand Prix winnerGomorrah. The Italian mafia flick has done solid business in its homeland since opening last week.
The CineVegas film festival will honorAnjelica Huston. Don Cheadle, Rosario Dawson, Viggo Mortensen and Sam Rockwell with their Half Life award, while James Caan will be declared a Vegas Icon.
“Over the last 10 weeks, the independent film “industry” has been restructured before our eyes,” writes Bob Alexander at the Indiepix blog. “Is the world of indie film burning up? Or is a new era about to emerge?”
Defamer points to seven clips from the Sex and the City movie, posted over at BlackFilm.com. I couldn’t get any of them to play all the way through, but the above screencap of Chris Noth (who’s starting to age into some kind of Tim Burton-era Batman villain…Melt Face?) looking like he’s going to eat Sarah Jessica Parker is proof that I tried.
The Playlist points to an Onion, um, exclusive: “Michel Gondry Entertained For Days By Cardboard Box.” Who’s the Gondry impersonator?
The Auteurs, a newish film site previously mentioned here, is hosting a short film competition at Cannes. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington has a prediction: “These movies are going to be awful.”
Sarah Jessica Parker is talking about her latest perfume. She’s also, indirectly, talking about her appeal, her brand, what she does for a living, the reason why an audience in the low triple digits (mostly female, mostly younger than the actress by a decade) has rushed to the Times Center on a Friday evening exactly four weeks before the premiere of the Sex and the City movie, to see her interviewed on stage by journalist William J. Carter. I was invited to the event as a member of the press; I accepted the invitation in the spirit of making an honest effort to learn something about why adult women find Parker and the Sex and the City phenomena appealing.
The two women sitting next to me, who breathlessly climbed over my legs a few minutes after the program began, left behind their own fragrance trail: hair products, manicures, menthol cigarettes and pink drinks. A surface-only snap-judgment says these women were a representative sample of those in attendance: young(ish), upper-middle-class, not particularly cosmopolitan but enthusiastic about both cosmopolitans and Cosmopolitan.
The Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading, which made some snippy headlines last month after Focus gave the film an undesirable September release date, has been selected to open the Venice Film Festival. For those keeping track: the last film Focus landed in that slot at that festival was Atonement; three years ago, they used the ame method to launch Brokeback Mountain.
There’s a long piece in this morning’s Hollywood Reporter on Sex and the City––the show, the movie, the brand––as a New York City tourist attraction. Says Michael Patrick King, director of the film: “The amount of girls coming to New York to have a $17 cosmo — everybody benefited in a great way.”
2929 Productions have bought in to two projects from producers Kevin Spacey and Dana Brunetti and Ben Mezrich––AKA the creative team behind the hit 21. Brunetti sums up the appeal of working from a Mezrich literary source: “Guys that normally aren’t readers will dive into a Ben Mezrich story and read it quickly, and then pass it around to other guys. It’s chick lit for men.”
The theme song for the Sex and the City Movie, performed with heavy pitch-shift assist by the girl from Kids Incorporated who wasn’t Martika, is the embodiment of everything that has become loathsome about the franchise.
The aesthetics are godawful––the theme song from the television show is injected with helium and then laid over a beat borrowed from various hip hop hits of the early oughts, then finally zapped with that radio-friendly glitter sound that I think has been scientifically proven to melt brains––but it’s the vapid lyrics, and Fergie’s roboticized delivery of them, that truly turn the song into a celebration of the zombification that the show devolved into celebrating in its last few years. It’s straight-facedly about consumer gluttony in place of human connection, a fashion-forward Dorian Gray story in which women appear younger as they become richer and actually older. Life as a VOGUE spread with no end is a fairly sick fantasy, but at least in terms of “women’s pictures”, it has historical precedent (The Women, anyone?) and is thus cinematically tolerable. But you’ve got to wonder what’s on the screen if the brand geniuses think they need a plot song dance anthem to drive the message home.
At The House Next Door, Keith Uhlich has a lengthy wrap-up of the Sarasota Film Festival, which he begins by contemplating the idea of falling asleep in movies. I, unfortunately, have been known to suffer from mid-festival narcolepsy––in fact, I dozed off whilst sitting next to Keith in two separate Sarasota screenings. Keith doesn’t have this problem, and he explains why: “For me, movies approximate a dream state. The basic act of watching them is invigorating, my attention focused to a finely honed point.“
What’s this? The Sex and the City movie is no longer screening at Cannes? But why? Jeff Wells has a few ideas, natch: “My guess is that the Warner Bros. handlers simply decided against the Cannes option because they didn’t want to endure a DaVinci Code-like pummeling by festival correspondents and figured London would offer more of a slurpy kiss-ass reception.”
Finally, a tossed-off bit of film criticism from Ryan Adams, embedded deep in a lengthy blog post about his sobriety: “[M]en should just wish they were shoes, but that is another story and and if you have noticed, Q.Taratino has been trying to tell it over a lot of stray bullets for quite some time…” Sic, of course.
“Once Upon A Time in America, Dead Man, L’Argent, Ivan the Terrible, Crash—these are some of my favorites in the BFI series of monographs,” Girish writes. “Are there others in the series you particularly like and would recommend?” I read tons of these in grad school; my favorites included Groundhog’s Day, Independence Day, Salmon Rushdie on The Wizard of Oz, and Camille Paglia on The Birds.
Jeff Wells, after trisecting Gus Van Sant’s career, worries which version of the filmmaker showed up to make Milk. “If Van Sant who made Drugstore Cowboy is making Milk, terrific. If a blend of that Van Sant along with the guy who made Elephant is directing Milk, beautiful. But if the Finding Forrester Van Sant is anywhere near the Milk set, watch out.”
On a recent press tour for Smart People, Sarah Jessica Parker was reluctant to speak about the Sex and the City movie at all, but she did try to assuage worries that, content wise, the film is going to be more TBS than HBO. “I don’t think we have any interest in doing some homogenized, conventional version, in order to appeal. We don’t think mass.” Via Michael Musto.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock (and/or have better things to do than spend your days on trashy filth-peddling websites like, um, FOX News and MSNBC), you’ll have already heard that two stars of the upcoming Sex and the City movie have been in the tabloid news this week. First, news broke that Kristin “The Cute, Demure One” Davis had starred in a sex tape; by late Tuesday, the scandal had been downgraded from “sex tape” to “just sex photos” (see them in their very not-safe-for-work glory here). Then, blogs started passing around an excerpt from a British magazine interview with Sarah Jessica Parker, in which the SATC star/executive producer reacted defensively towards a MAXIM article designating her “the unsexiest woman alive.”
Imagine, two actresses from the same heavily-anticipated film with “Sex” in the title, making headlines for their sexiness of lack therof in the same week! What an incredible coincidence, right? No matter how furiously both actresses camps try to paint their clients as women wronged totally independently of each other or the multi-million dollar project both are promoting, there’s evidence that the SJP story, at least, was fully manufactured.
Chuck Tryon points to this story, in which he’s quoted, about an upcoming Luke Wilson film called Tenure, set in the wild world of academia. Tryon, a tenure track professor himself, notes the challenges the filmmakers will have in making his lifestyle cinematic: “[S]ince my ongoing pursuit of tenure typically involves me sitting in front of my laptop until 1 a.m., I don’t know how interesting that would be to watch.”
At io9, Charlie Jane Anders assesses the problem with sci-fi prequels: “I love small, intimate portrayals of people’s lives. But that’s not what I look for from movies with “Star” in the title. (Well, maybe A Star Is Born.)”
Stuart Elliot at the New York Times reports on some of the many branding deals New Line has arranged to cross-promote the upcoming Sex and the City movie. There are basically two types of deals being made. On the high end, the producers of the film have inserted luxury brands into the narrative, based on what the actual characters might consume; Mercedes-Benz, for instance, has created a special limo for Mr. Big and a giant SUV for Samantha (insert penis substitute joke here). But then there’s a passel of more plebian-oriented brands looking to siphon some SATC cred to sell their products to the film’s target audience. Which is, apparently, suburban moms who tend to have a little too much too drink at faux-upscale family restaurants. Behold:
When it comes to products helping to promote the coming film based on the popular TV series Sex and the City, it seems the sky is the limit. Better make that the Skyy is the limit, as in Skyy vodka, which is being named the “official spirits sponsor” for the movie. Among the tie-ins are drinks made with Skyy to be served at Houlihan’s restaurants and named after characters like Carrie, Samantha and Mr. Big.
Well, at least New Line (or whatever corporate faction is handling these deals at this point) seems to understand a good half of their audience. Let’s just assume The Mr. Big cocktail recipe will make it to the gay bar circuit on its own and sweep up the other half.
The New Line Fallout continues: Sex and the City: The Movie (we can link to the trailer now! But we can’t embed it! Because the intern responsible for uploading trailers to YouTube has probably already been fired!) and Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay are amongst the upcoming films facing release limbo in the wake of news that 75% of the former standalone studio’s staff is expected to be fired. Variety says Warner Brothers’ consolidation plan in the months ahead is “reminiscent of what happened to Disney’s Miramax arm after the Weinstein brothers departed in 2005,” which doesn’t bode well for the fate of the films: in the fall of 2005, Disney dumped 10 Miramax films in 10 weeks with little fanfare, and even star-propelled projects like Proof and The Libertine couldn’t recover from the insult.
Semi-Pro managed to come in at number one at the box office this weekend with just $15 million. The Other Boleyn Girl debuted on a third of the screens but made over $2k more on each of them, proving that, even in the darkest economic times, there’s always a market for implied lesbianism.
Speaking of implied lesbianism: Ellen Page has dropped out of Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell, which will begin shooting two weeks later than expected.
indieWIRE reports that the Tribeca Film Institute and funding organization Renew Media are merging “to create one institution dedicated to innovation in film and media, the enrichment of audiences and the promotion of education, understanding and creativity through the media arts.” The new org will be headed by Renew’s Brian Newman.
New Line is showing a promo video for the Sex and the City movie at New York Fashion Week. Jezebel says: “Samantha’s L.A wardrobe is all in primary colors; Charlotte is mainly wearing Prada, and Miranda continues to wear suits. Because she works.”
Did Xanadu invent the mashup? The Underwire looks at the evidence.
Speaking of the disasterpieces of the 80s, RC at Strange Culture wonders if there were any legitimately “good” films released that entire decade. “In fact, most 80s films are so quirky they might as well be instantly considered period pieces, even if at the time they had every intention of being contemporary or non-script in their portrayal of time.”
At Pajiba, The Boozehound Cinephile pairs rum with Juno. “Once I lost myself in the film, the rum-and-coke flavor allowed me to fantasize that I was making out with Alison Janney and that she tasted like a rum-cola slushee, so that part was an A+.”
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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If my Twitter stream is to be believed, I was the only female, 20-something writer in New York City who was NOT invited to the Sex and the City premiere last night. (Could it have been because of this? Or this? Or this? Hmmm.) Certainly, each picture Julia Allison staged at the event offers up at least 1,000 word on the matter, but who has time to do all that reading? Jeff Wells‘ take is much more succinct:
For all the 
“Once Upon A Time in America, Dead Man, L’Argent, Ivan the Terrible, Crash—these are some of my favorites in the BFI series of monographs,” 
Unless you’ve been living under a rock (and/or have better things to do than spend your days on trashy filth-peddling websites like, um, 
Funny how 
