Barack Obama gave a speech to the American Medical Association yesterday in an attempt to get the organization’s members on board with his plans for healthcare reform. The president’s appearance alone may have been good for his cause, given that it was the first such address to the AMA in 26 years, but many doctors are apparently still skeptical of the government’s ideas and how they’ll actually work.

Meanwhile, the issue of healthcare reform continues to be a difficult topic in Congress, and the road to legislation is sure to be long and filled with much debate. So, to help Washington in the process, or at least to keep the politicians sane with a little entertainment, we’ve come up with a little healthcare movie marathon.

The ten films selected are admittedly more left-leaning in their potential influence, but that’s not necessarily a political move on our part. We simply chose titles we like, and maybe it just so happens that we like movies that show charity as good, greed as evil and healthcare as a right that all humans should be afforded.

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• Kristin Thompson weighs in on the “I Drink Your Milkshake” phenomenon. “But great art has always been subject to humorous treatment and tends to come through unscathed. Marcel Duchamp stuck a mustache on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa and put it in a museum, and the act is considered a daring stroke of avant-garde art…The internet has accelerated such of manipulation of artworks and made us more aware of them, but its not new—and it is inevitable.”
• Michael Musto reports from last night’s Film Forum screening of Sidney Lumet’s unlikely “lovely chick bonding” flick, The Group. Arrested Development fans, cover your eyes: according to Musto, Jessica “Lucille” Walters says she was ” desperate to play the Candice Bergen lesbo part.”
• I wasn’t the only one to watch Amy Winehouse on Sunday night and think “didn’t Judy Garland already make this movie?” Via Radar.
• The strike may be over, but UnitedHollywood isn’t. The WGA’s unofficial bloggy club house is warning that comment management will be slow for a while while the site preps a relaunch.

At The Envelope, Tom O’Neil has a no-names-named recap of what went on at yesterday’s New York Film Critics Circle vote. First: the inside story on I’m Not There’s aforementioned non-showing:

I’m Not There did surprisingly well in many top races today. It didn’t win any awards, but it came in third place for best picture after champ No Country for Old Men and runner-up There Will Be Blood. Ditto for its helmer Todd Haynes, who placed third in the directors’ lineup behind the winning Coen brothers and second-placed Paul Thomas Anderson…In the supporting-actress race, Cate Blanchett came in second place.

I don’t know how “surprising” that really is, considering that three of the critics in the room are on the record as giving the film a score of 90 or higher. I think the only surprise is that the staunchest suckers for Haynes’ soulless scrapbook schtick defenders of the film actually let it leave the room without a single honor, and apparently without a fight. But let’s move on…

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• indieWIRE broke big acquisition news over the weekend: Having seen just a script and a two-minute show reel, up-and-coming distribution force Summit Entertainment has purchased Rian Johnson’s unfinished The Brothers Bloom. The film was expected to open and be offered for sale at Sundance, but fears over an unpredictable buying season convinced the filmmakers to allow Summit to take Bloom off the market. Exact numbers weren’t disclosed, but the resulting deal is surely much bigger than anything that’s been seen in the recent festival market; Eugene Hernandez says it “may ultimately be valued at more than $20 million.”
• A gimme headline, no slanguage required: Saw IV butchers competition. At Variety, the sequel’s $32 million bow is a shot in the face to the “conventional wisdom that hardcore horror no longer works.” The Hollywood Reporter notes that, above and beyond a victory for torture porn, this is a victory for indie studio Lionsgate, who have now had three number one hits in the past two months.
• Meanwhile, for all the grumbling over the sluggish specialty division market, Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead opened huge in limited release this weekend, netting $36,750 on each of its two New York screens. We’ll see how word of mouth carries through its expansion; the people I sat next to at brunch on Saturday said they preferred Before Sunset, whatever that means.
• Warner Brothers has hired WB TV network survivor Greg Berlanti to direct Green Lantern. Berlanti was a writer and executive producer on Everwood and Dawson’s Creek, which I guess makes him uniquely qualified to tell the story of “an ordinary man who has been charged with defending a sector of the universe” … ? Anyway, do not confuse Green Lantern with Green Hornet, which, as far as we know, Seth Rogen is still on board to write and star in.
• The president of Libya, Moammar Gadhafi, is financing a film about the Italian occupation of his country. Just the press conference to announce the project is said to cost $400,000.

Several movies that we’ve covered previously on SpoutBlog are opening in theaters today:

• Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, starring Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman, has been widely hailed as a “return to form” for director Sidney Lumet. That’s probably not inaccurate, but the last thing Devil feels like is the work of an old man recycling old tricks. Ballsy and occasionally incredulous in its illustration of extreme, self-manufactured desperation, Devil’s not exactly a masterpiece, but if can roll with its plot contortions, it’s a deeply satisfying bit of pulp melodrama. And it’s got the opening sex scene to end all opening sex scenes. Read my NYFF review here, and listen to Lumet talk about his late-career embrace of digital video here.
• The Darjeeling Limited expands yet again this weekend, but the real news is the theatrical unveiling of Hotel Chevalier. See a review of the feature here, and coverage of Wes Anderson’s short here, here and here.
• Saw IV’s opening box office has been positioned as a test of the lasting allure of the torture porn genre. But it’s also a test of the power of sex to sell blood.

• New indie production/distribution company Elephant Eye is teaming with Palm Pictures to produce Craig Zobel’s follow-up to the Gotham-lauded Great World of Sound. Zobel co-wrote Turkey in the Straw with Barlow Jacobs, who wrote and starred in one of my favorite underseen films of the year, Low and Behold. The Hollywood Reporter says the project is expected to have a higher budget than Sound and to “include more A-list stars.”
• Following in the illustrious footsteps of Clint Eastwood and, um, Ben Affleck, Martin Scorsese’s next project will be based on a Dennis Lehane novel–this time, it’s Shutter Island. Scorsese will once again direct lil’ buddy Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead.
• Sidney Lumet will receive a Career Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association at their annual awards gala in January.
• Marc Graser reports on how the Southern California wildfires are impacting Hollywood life. You’ll take some comfort in knowing that although flames threatened to shut down productions in Santa Clarita and half of Los Angeles’ luxury hotels are booked full of Malibu refugees, “Paris Hilton’s home just steps away up the beach was unaffected.”

“Those devil horns and that crooked arrow strongly suggest that the ghost of legendary art director Saul Bass created the new one-sheet.” Jeff Wells breaks down the elements of ThinkFilm’s very old-school new poster for Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. See my NYFF review of the film here, and to listen to Lumet talk about his newfound love of HD, click this.

photo by Karina Longworth

Last year at a New York Film Festival press conference following the premiere of Inland Empire, David Lynch announced that he would never again go back to shooting on film. Yesterday, at the press conference following the New York Film Festival press screening of his HD-shot feature, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, veteran filmmaker Sidney Lumet made an almost identical declaration, predicting that celluloid will be all but obsolete in five years. “I don’t think there’s one director who has ever liked film,” Lumet said. “It’s a pain in the ass, it’s cumbersome, and it’s rigid in its rules.”

Check out the audio clip below for Lumet’s elaboration on the rise of HD, why he thinks “naturalistic photography” is an oxy moron, and anecdotes on the how the drawbacks of celluloid stifled both Dog Day Afternoon and John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (the female voice heard at the beginning and end of the clip is NYFF selection committee member/EW film critic Lisa Schwarzbaum, who moderated yesterday’s conversation). We’ll have more coverage of Lumet’s excellent Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead later today.

 

 Sydney Lumet On Film vs. HD @ NYFF 2007: Play Now | Download

In the last ten years, movie screens have squashed podiums as the place for politicians to build a voter base. Should old entertainment formulas be used in politics? Do these politi-dramas spur us to action or whining? Under discussion: Sicko (2007), The Party’s Over (2000), Network (1976) and the sprawling entity known as Michael Moore.

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