So with the film officially getting released finally, it was now time for a strategic marketing scheme. Slumdog Millionaire was first shown at the Telluride Film Festival in late August, and then at the Toronto Film Fest a week later. At both places, the film received unanimous praise and even received the People’s Choice Award at the latter.
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Not everybody loves Slumdog. Much like your favorite band that got too big, many indie film sites have abandoned the picture and moved on to other movies. An mild indie backlash was probably inevitable [sic].
Above: quotes from a post at The Playlist breaking down Slumdog Millionaire’s bumpy road from target of pre-production bidding war, to its loss of initial distributor Warner Independent, to virtual Best Picture sure thing. This is a useful endeavor. It would be more useful if it were a little more accurate.
We’ve never been big fans of Slumdog Millionaire here at the SpoutBlog. Kevin Buist was first underwhelmed with Danny Boyle’s hyperactive Mumbai game show movie at Telluride, where he called it “hectic and sloppy, especially considering the rigid and somewhat boring structure upon which the film is built,” and noting that the love story in particular was “sorely lacking.”
When we re-posted this review around the time of the film’s general release, commenters started attacking Kevin right away. “i think you have no knowledge of being a movie reviewer,” ‘prady‘ wrote. “Just watch the movie and its great.You might have some problem,contact your doctor soon.” And ‘clearly’ had a number of questions: “um, Kevin, really? Why are you qualified to write reviews.. perhaps another line of work for ya? Rigid and boring structure? are you blind, ignorant or just stupid?” The onslaught became so much that Kevin responded and defended his position on an episode of FilmCouch.
This review originally appeared during the Telluride Film Festival. Slumdog Millionaire opens in select markets tomorrow.
Danny Boyle’s latest offering, Slumdog Millionaire, is generating a fair amount of buzz here at Telluride. Not unlike last year’s Juno, the film showed up in one of the mysterious TBA slots, delighting audiences made weary by a slate of good but somewhat depressing films, such as Hunger, Waltz with Bashir and Adam Resurrected. Slumdog Millionaire follows the story of Jamal Malik, an unlikely winner of India’s version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Jamal, his brother Samir, and fellow orphan Latika, manage to survive an almost absurd number of scrapes, the memory of each one coincidentally providing Jamal with answers to the game show questions. The film is big, fast, fun, and colorful, but ultimately a mess.
Remember Adam Resurrected, the Paul Schrader-directed, Jeff Goldblum-starring film that Paul saw at Telluride which made him admit to wanting “to make out with Jeff Goldblum in the back of his Toyota Prius”? I got an invite for a press screening for the film a couple of hours ago, which I thought was weird, because the last I heard, the film didn’t have distribution. Now Mike Jones at The Circuit has posted an item that solves the mystery: it looks like Bleiberg Entertainment, the company that financed the film, have decided that rather than wait for a distributor to pick it up and miss this Oscar season, they’ll fund a qualifying run for the film in New York and LA themselves.
Jones says producer Ehud Bleiberg was “unhappy with the offers he received after the pic’s Toronto fest screening,” Bleiberg himself implies that if any of those offers were promising in other respects, they didn’t include a timely release or support for an Oscar campaign. “Why would we screen the film at Telluride and Toronto and release it a year later,” he asks rhetorically. Considering that Goldblum’s performance is apparently so good that it propells heterosexual Midwesterners to contemplate the actor as an object of physical (and eco-friendly!) love, that question seems eminently reasonable.
Robert Downey Jr has signed on to star as Tony Stark in Iron Man 2, Iron Man 3, and The Avengers. This, plus his starring role in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, will put the Less Than Zero survivor in at least one summer tentpole per year through 2012. Say it with me: poor, poor Andrew McCarthy.
Mike Nichols will direct a David Mamet-scripted remake of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low. Martic Scorsese comissioned the script from Mamet; he’ll now executive produce.
In an unusual deal, Janus and sister company Criterion Collection have acquired theatrical and DVD rights to Revanche, the Austrian Foreign Language Oscar contender which premiered in Berlin and went on to Telluride. Janus, known for its library of classic art films, hasn’t handled a first-run theatrical release in 30 years.
This story originally appeared during the Telluride Film Festival. Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky opens in theaters today.
Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky begins as a leisurely yet engaging character study, seemingly unconcerned with a traditional conflict/resolution narrative. Sally Hawkins’ performance as Poppy, a bubbly, sarcastic, and endearing elementary school teacher is a delight to watch. An hour into the film, I pleasantly resigned myself to enjoying it as a disconnected series of episodes. This could have been annoying, if not for the stellar performance by Hawkins. Her comedy and breezy demeanor nearly covers Poppy’s immaturity and apparent fear of commitment, while still giving us a glimpse that something more lurks beneath all the giggles and quips.
Jonathan Demme’s first fiction film since his 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidatee (and only his second non-documentary in ten years), Rachel Getting Married is orchestrated like an extraordinarily intimate work of direct cinema. Working from a script by Jenny Lumet (daughter of Sidney), Demme shot the dysfunctional family drama on a combination of grainy, handheld 35mm and consumer video––without rehearsal, with a huge ensemble cast made up of actors and musicians, with a soundtrack consisting entirely of diegetic music performed either on or just off camera by the likes of Robyn Hitchcock, New Orleans jazz saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr, TV On The Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe (who also plays the key role of the man Rachel is getting married to) and sometime American Idol Tamyra Grey. For a film featuring not only said reality competition castoff but a tour de force performance from a two-time Teen Choice Award nominee, it’s almost unfathomably dark and emotionally tough. It’s essentially a Dogme 95 film directed by Robert Altman, which will be a frightening proposition for some, and something akin to cinematic ecstasy for others. It’s the latter for me.
With the 2008 Telluride Film Festival wrapping up tonight, we’re in the process of posting our final reviews and uploading photos to Flickr. Above, the annual group shot of all the Festival’s filmmakers and guests. Check out our full Flickr stream here.
“There is, of course, cause for concern, and even alarm.”
These were some of the first words out of moderator Annette Insdorf’s mouth, at the start of a panel called Snip Snip: Are Cutbacks in Film Distribution and Criticism Affecting Quality Filmmaking? in Telluride on Sunday. She ticked off all the alarming factors––studio-funded arthouse distributors like Paramount Vantage and Picturehouse are shutting down; marketing costs for the average film have risen to the $20 million range, which means that true indie distributors can’t compete; there’s a glut of films in both festivals and in theaters; print outlets dedicated to film have all but disappeared, and general interest publications have come to see critics as a luxury. She closed this listlessness-inducing laundry list with the question, “Will we simply have to read blogs to be informed about non-Hollywood cinema?” The distributors and journalists on the panel (including Michael Barker of Sony Pictures Classics, Anne Thompson of Variety and Scott Foundas of Village Voice Media) ended up taking this querie and running it into a lively, contentious debate. But first, Paul Schrader declared that he’s already heard the death rattle of cinema as we know it.
This may qualify as hyperbole, but Richard Schickel’s You Must Remember This––which premiered at Cannes in May, screened here at Telluride as part of a tribute to Schickel and will debut on PBS in slightly different form this fall––is maybe the most appropriately titled made-for-TV Classical Hollywood documentary directed by a working film critic I’ve seen this year.
“You must remember this,” is, of course, a lyric from “As Time Goes By,” the signature song from Warner Brothers’ Casablanca. From the opening montage of a tour through the WB backlot, set to a soundtrack of memorable lines from maybe a dozen and a half classic productions from that studio, Schickel’s film is devoted to anecdotal recall of Warner Brothers’ various signatures, from experts and witnesses who are dishy and not uncritical, but still often as sentimemtal as the song that Rick commands Sam to play again. From silent doggie star Rin Tin Tin (who, snarked writer and eventual head of production Daryl Zanuck, had the biggest brain on the lot) to the Busby Berkeley musicals that not so subtly told the viewer that “Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler are gonna get laid, and we’re all part of it,” to the social issue films of the 30s which carried “a vision of the world that was darker, more cynical, and more problematic than any other studio’s,” Schickel finds a surprisingly rich balance between behind-the-scenes trivia and multi-layered criticism. Access to talking heads including Molly Haskell, Neal Gabler, Jeaninne Basinger and former WB contract player Ronald Reagan certainly helps with the gravitas.
Also surprising was the slightly salty candor that ran through Schickel’s Special Medallion acceptance chat, which both the honoree and the audience seemed to find too brief. Still, Schickel managed to get out som zingers involving Manny Farber, Pauline Kael, the youth of America and John McCain. Some highlights after the jump.
Irish filmmaker Cathal Black, known for making movies that fluidly mix fact and fiction, documentary tropes and dramatic technique, has maybe found his ultimate subject in Thomas Lynch. Lynch, who describes himself in Black’s Learning Gravity as “a father, a husband, an undertaker,” is also a renowned poet and essayist whose writings inspired Alan Ball to create his HBO series, Six Feet Under. In the film, Lynch says his poetry grew out of a desire to “leave a record” for his children of what was going on in his head while he appeared to be “staring at your ear, preoccupied.” Poetry, he says, is his way of making his subjective interpretation of his life, work and family into something concrete, an “effort to act out in language those most unspeakable feelings.” It’s a philosophy and practice tailor made for Black’s hybrid style.
Tonight’s Silver Medallion Tribute to David Fincher at the Telluride Film Festival closed with a screening of 20 minutes of Fincher’s much-anticipated new film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, starring Brad Pitt as a baby born old who reverse-ages over eight decades. Fincher called the footage “a series of scenelets,” meaning that, unlike the single reel of There Will Be Bloodshown at last year’s tribute to Daniel Day-Lewis, this reel was cut together to give us a teasing glimpse of the wider narrative and scope of the film.
First impression: it’s impressive. It’s absolutely gorgeous, for starters. Coming as it did after a show reel featuring excerpts from Fincher’s music videos and adverts (both cut into a montage set to “How Soon is Now?” by The Smiths, weirdly and unadvisedly divorcing both pop and product promos from what they were made to promote) and each of his features aside from Alien³, it’s clear that Fincher has moved beyond the cool blacks and blues with florescent highlights that have thus far defined his visual style. It’s a period epic, so the broader visual palette makes sense, but it came as a relief that, within all this beauty, the effects used to transform Pitt first into an 80-year-old man and then backwards into a child felt of a piece and not overwhelmingly effect-y.
Also exciting: though the reel gives every hint that Button is a proper epic tearjerker about love and pain and time and blah blah blah, it’s also infused with the dry, quippy sense of humor that cuts through the darkest swatches of Fincher’s filmography. This is, after all, the man who says he wanted to make Fight Club because he thought the book was “hilarious [and] ridiculous. But I’m an asshole.”
A detailed run-down of the clip follows after the jump. Not having seen the full film, I can’t say for sure whether or not there are spoilers, so I suppose if you want to know absolutely nothing, don’t click.
On Monday, I’m flying to Denver to spend a couple of days hanging around the Democratic National Convention before heading up to Telluride on Thursday. If I was reading that sentence unawares, two questions would inevitably come to mind. First: “Why, Karina, are you going to a political event when you have a movie blog to write?”
Answer: there actually are two major film events happening over the three days that I’ll be in town. The first, the Denver Film Society production Cinemocracy (previously mentioned here), will screen ten finalists in a short film competition that’s been winnowing down submissions online for months. You can watch the films and vote for your favorites here.
The second event is the Impact Film Festival. Founded this year by Jody Arlington, Jamie Shor and Kimball Stroud, IFF will screen “socially-themed documentary and dramatic films” every day at both the DNC and RNC. Films on the program include Battle in Seattle, I.O.U.S.A., and Flow. Check out the Bside page for info on the full lineup.
Joe Leydon points to the above promo widget for the Telluride Film Festival. If you’re going to Telluride, you’ll eventually be able to use the widget to customize your schedule. If you’re not going to Telluride––and, considering the geographic and financial inaccessibility of the Festival, which is incidentally one of my favorites, I assume that’s most of you––the widget is nonetheless surprisingly packed with interesting content.
There are videos from last year’s festival, including documentation of the tribute to Daniel Day-Lewis; there’s also a short on the festival’s 35 year history, featuring founding director Tom Luddy. You should be able to get your own widget by clicking the “customize and embed” code above. You’ll have to give your email address––be careful not to sign yourself up for Dell bacn.
Jim Emerson has collated an incredibly comprehensive account of the events of the 1983 Telluride Film Festival, where Andrei Tarkovsky made some obtuse statements about cinema and art, and Richard Widmark offered an eloquent counterargument, which can essentially be reduced to its most powerful two words: “He stinks.”
An intern in the Paramount Vantage publicity office Martin Scorsese has a MySpace profile.
If you have $95, you can buy a My Blueberry Nights tee shirt. Or, you can just go to indieWIRE’s Apple Store event tomorrow night and heckle Wong Kar Wai for indiscriminately distributing his branding rights for free.
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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We’ve never been big fans of Slumdog Millionaire here at the SpoutBlog. Kevin Buist was first underwhelmed with Danny Boyle’s hyperactive Mumbai game show movie at Telluride, where he called it “hectic and sloppy, especially considering the rigid and somewhat boring structure upon which the film is built,” and noting that the love story in particular was “sorely lacking.”
Remember 
Robert Downey Jr has signed on
On Monday, I’m flying to Denver to spend a couple of days hanging around the Democratic National Convention before heading up to Telluride on Thursday. If I was reading that sentence unawares, two questions would inevitably come to mind. First: “Why, Karina, are you going to a political event when you have a movie blog to write?”
Jim Emerson has collated an 
