Iraq fatigue: the conventional wisdom settled on in the last year that nobody wants to go to a movie theater for an Iraq war movie (most recently: Stop-Loss). Is it a new phenomenon or are all movies questioning war during wartime doomed to financial failure?
The new Wholphin quarterly DVD magazine is out. It’s probably the best curated source for short films outside a major festival and we give it the attention its due on FilmCouch.
As expected, 21 came in at the top of the box office this weekend, with a not-huge $23.7 million. And as hoped for by many––maybe even Paramount, who opened the thing on suspiciously few screens––Stop-Loss tanked with $4.5 million.
Just three months before their mutual contract expires, the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists have severed ties. AFTRA president Roberta Reardon said the move was prompted by her former sister union’s dirty dealings in the contract negotiation process. Actual quote: “We can’t trust SAG.”
A group of British directors has formed their own union of sorts, called Directors U.K. The goal, according to Variety, is “securing a standard collective bargaining agreement with British employers.”
I’m going to spend about four hours this weekend with my celebrity boyfriend, Young Albert Brooks, at Anthology Film Archives‘ double feature of two of Brooks’ early, still super-relevant films, Modern Romance and Real Life (see above). But if you’re not lucky enough to be in New York, there are three films opening in general release that we covered at SXSW.
Chris already mentioned Run Fatboy Run today. He also reviewed Robert Luketic’s gambling porn thriller, 21: “[I]t’s basically Little Caesar set in the world of card counting, which in fact isn’t illegal, yet in Vegas is viewed as being just as criminal as bootlegging was during Prohibition…[but] nerds just aren’t as entertaining as gangsters and blackjack and brains just isn’t as cool on screen as bank robberies and machine guns.” And then, of course, there’s Stop-Loss. Michael Lerman said MTV/Kimberley Pierce’s Iraq PTSD movie is too centrist for its own good: “Perhaps the performances and plotting would’ve worked better as less of an unbiased study of aggression and more of a critique of the current political situation, as the script seems to be. It’s as if the two things are working against each other and the actors are veering off in a different direction from the themes.”
Paramount is putting together a new division designed to craft new video games based on both current and classic Paramount films. You know what that means…”I Drink Your Milkshake” for the Wii!!!
New York’s state Senate and Assembly are expected to soon announce a compromise on the tax credit issue that was left in the lurch when governor Eliot Spitzer resigned to spend more time with his soul-crushing self-hatred. The new deal will favor the Democrat-led Assembly’s plan, which aimed to increase tax credits on below-the-line costs, thus supporting the state’s filmmaking infrastructure over luring flashy out-of-town productions.
2008’s total box office is so far 3 percent above 2007’s, but that’s mostly due to that 3D Hannah Montana thing, and 2007 holdovers like Alvin and the Chipmunks––not a single action film has grossed over $100 over the past three months. And that’s not going to change this weekend, although both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter seem confident that 21 will do well, and Stop-Loss will not.
Director Alexis Spraic, producer James Scurlock, and Bunim-Murray Productions are joining forces on a documentary about the “globalization pioneer” who founded DHL.
At GreenCine Daily, David Hudson rounds up the reviews of Stop-Loss, which are, surprisingly, pretty positive (Peter Keough and Bill Weber are the exceptions that prove the rule). My favorite pullquote comes, as usual, from Armond White’s mixed review: “Peirce conflates war tragedy with her own sense of melodrama, making Stop-Loss a coincidentally sexy polemic. It could be worse.”
There seems to be a lot of eye-rolling over Kimberley Pierce’s Stop-Loss, as if there’s some kind of collective embarrassment over the fact that this highly-stylized policy polemic––literally, an MTV Film––is seeing the light of day so many months after last fall’s D.O.A. Iraq movie wave. Mainstream reviews have so far been mixed, and blog chatter has (predictably) skewed towards suspicious, but there’s one potential audience sector that’s apparently not ready to write it off yet: actual veterans.
In a post at Eat the Press on military media, Rachel Sklar points to this post at VetVoice.com, where members of the community weigh in on the Stop-Loss trailer. Of the 17 comments on the post as of this writing, most express some interest in seeing the film, even if it’s just to justify the commenter’s previously held assumptions that Hollywood is ideologically out of touch and, in terms of military accuracy, either willfully ignorant or just plain incompetent. As ThisDudesArmy puts it, “Me and some buddies are going opening day.Planning on laughing at all the inaccurate hoopla. Just from one promo picture I saw, there were two guys in a parade with CIBs, but no combat patch. Yikes!” Another commenter argues that even if a movie like this gets details wrong, he/she will still pay money to see it because “If the mainstream media is going to continue to keep Iraq off the public’s radar screen, then culture has to pick up the ball.”
But accuracy might be a double-edged sword. As clejeuneputs it in a comment titled “Would love to see it, but won’t”: “Movies like this are either too hokey, and I pick them apart, or they are way too real, and I’m up all night.” It’s a losing proposition either way. Are contemporary war films failing because we’re asking them to strike a balance––in terms of political stance, in terms of moral address, in terms of realism––that may be impossible to achieve?
In this longish but fascinating video companion piece to his Atlantic story on how Hollywood has reverted to 70s-style dialectics in order to talk about current global conflicts, Ross Douthat explains why the recent wave of Iraq movies haven’t connected with critics or audiences. The problem, in part, is that “Hollywood hasn’t found anything new to say about the Iraq War that you wouldn’t expect them to say based on what they had to say about Vietnam.” Via The House Next Door. Also on the topic of the contemporary war film’s unwillingness to telegraph unexpected or unsafe points of view: The NY Times did a profile of Stop-Loss director Kimberley Pierce over the weekend, and though an inordinate amount of space is given over to explanations for why it took Pierce nine years to make a second film, there’s some interesting stuff about the attempts made to “move towards a political balance that should satisfy red and blue states.”
Here is a master guide to all of our reviews, interviews and assorted other coverage from the 2008 SXSW Film Festival. You can also revisit all of our SXSW previews here.
Stop Loss - or UKPP as most locals call it around here in Austin (short for The Untitled Kimberly Pierce Project) – was easily one of the most anticipated films of SXSW 2008. Written by a native, shot in and out of town and pertaining to residents of the area, the film generated so much interest that when festival producer Matt Dentler introduced the film as being, “the movie I got the single most calls about saying, ‘You have to play this.’”
The title comes from an unfair clause in a soldier’s contract that acts as a loophole in wartime that states the army can keep you even after you’ve served your tour of duty. This clause has been commonly exercised under the George W. Bush regime and has, in some ways, been the lifeblood that allows America to stay at war in Iraq.
The story is simple. A group of friends comes back home from war and reunites with their loved ones, for better or for worse. When memories of their final, particularly painful combat mission send them all mentally into different dark tortured places, their home lives fall apart and they desperately try to help each other out. But when the leader of the pack Brandon King (played by Ryan Phillippe) is stop-lossed and faces the decision whether to flee his country and his army, their lives might never be the same.
According to Channing Tatum’s official website (no, I’m actually not a regular visitor, but I guess it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that I spend my free time collecting information on a young, strapping “naturally talented dancer that taught himself how to dance by attending coming-of-age parties in the Hispanic community called Quiceneras when he was growing up in Tampa, Florida”), Kimberley Pierce’s troubled Iraq war drama Stop-Loss will be screening (premiering?) at the SXSW Film Festival in March.
Stop-Loss, Pierce’s first film since the Oscar-winning Boys Don’t Cry in 1999, was initially supposed to open last fall. According to various blog posts, it was then bumped to early March, then to April, and is now scheduled to open on March 28. When the first trailer for the film appeared online in October, Anne Thompson wrote that the Stop-Loss team were “heaving huge sighs of relief that they did not go out this fall, where they would have gotten lumped in with all the other ’serious’ ‘Iraq’ movies.” But regardless of timing, the film has already been damned, to some extent, by synopsis and marketing campaign alone.
I don’t know why the people at the NY Times‘ Style Magazine shot the above video of Joseph Gordon-Levitt talking about Godard, and Russian clowns, and Guys and Dolls, but after Mysterious Skin, I’ll watch that guy do anything. Well, maybe not anything. Via WOW Report.
MTV has the exclusive trailer for Stop-Loss, Kimberley Pierce’s long-awaited follow-up to Boys Don’t Cry. The film–which has already been the subject of muchpartisanbickering, sight unseen–stars Ryan Philippe as a decorated Iraq War veteran who resists a loophole that would send him back into combat after his tour of duty is up.
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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As expected, 21 came in at the top of the box office this weekend, with a not-huge $23.7 million. And as hoped for by many––maybe even Paramount, who opened the thing on suspiciously few screens––Stop-Loss tanked with $4.5 million.
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