The-visitor | SpoutBlog

Oscars vs Box Office Chapter 735

By Karina Longworth posted 1 year ago

Conservative film blogger Dirty Harry is often best ignored when he’s aggressively railing against the liberal Hollywood elite, but when he offers a faux-populist view of filmgoing that’s so obstinately limited in scope that it’s actually potentially dangerous, I have to say something.

The gist: the cursed Hollywood elite is once again pushing movies with purely elite appeal for awards, and audiences are not responding to these films because after years of reading reviews written by partisan elitists who are out of touch with What The People Want, they no longer trust film critics. Also, elitism! An excerpt:

From early predictors, it looks as though the ever-widening disconnect between Hollywood and their audience will reach into 2008. The Visitor, The Wrestler, Slumdog Millionaire, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Rachel Getting Married… Any of these on your radar? Any of these captured your imagination?…what a sad statement that the films the industry are most proud of are met with almost complete indifference at the box office.

Dirty Harry’s commenters take it from there; the basic consensus is that if any of the above named films get the Best Picture nomination that should rightfully go to The Dark Knight, why they’ll … become really indignant about the tyranny of the liberal media? Not watch the Oscars? Boycott movie theaters? So, pretty much status quo, right?

Anyway. First things first: that Variety story he bases the post on is three weeks old, which is a lifetime in the prognostication game. And let’s leave aside the fact that neither Slumdog nor the Wrestler have opened anywhere yet, and that only a very small percentage of the population would admit to having their “imagination captured” by a Woody Allen film, even though Vicky is still on almost 100 screens almost three months after its release and is currently about a million dollars away from being Allen’s highest-grossing film in 22 years.

Regardless: Dirty Harry chooses to extrapolate two films named in that story as evidence that “the films the industry are most proud of are met with almost complete indifference at the box office”: Rachel Getting Married and The Visitor. I’m far more of a fan of one of these films than the other, but Harry’s assessment of audience “indifference” is misleading for both. As is common for him, he willfully refuses to acknowledge that expectations and accounting are different for films that open on 3 screens and then expand, than they are for films that roll right out into 3,000.

So, some numbers: …Read more

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Hollywood, Indies

FilmCouch #65 Indiewood mashup

By Paul Moore posted 1 year ago

teh visitor carson mell

If you’re visiting a theater and tired of the same old movie clichés, conventional wisdom would point you to the independent movie selection. However, a string on indiewood flicks–most recently The Visitor (opening tonight)–are caving in on their own “indie” clichés. Like rogue environmentalists tracking an invasive species in an Appalachian creek bed, we digest their ways and spew out some indiewood movie pitches of our own.

As a palette cleanser, we talk to Carson Mell. We formed a crush on him last week watching Wholphin DVD No. 5. His sharp wit and creativity are on display in his short animation, Chonto.

FilmCouch 65 [30:52m]: Play Now | Download

filmcouch-65

(Subscribe to FilmCouch–Spout’s weekly movie podcast–in the iTunes store and an episode will download each Friday)

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FilmCouch, Podcasts

Toronto Deals: Trade Roughage, 09/11/07

By Karina Longworth posted 2 years ago

The film will unspool in the States uncut and with an NC-17 rating, but Ang Lee has agreed to slash 30 minutes from Lust, Caution for its Chinese release. “The spirit of the film remains despite the cutting and the fluency will not be affected…for a viewer who has not watched the full version, the short version remains reasonable,” the director told Variety.
Variety reports that the crush of serious issue films at the festival has led to a dearth of sales, and with so many films about Iraq, immigration and terrorism in the mix, lighter diversions such as Juno are hogging all the good buzz with audiences. “The question of audience fatigue is rearing its head before any of these pix have actually bowed in theaters,” write Ali Jaafar and Dade Hayes. The Visitor, one of the films cited in that story as having “no movement,” did eventually sell last night to Overture Films.
Other sales: Helen Hunt’s directorial debut Then She Found Me sold to ThinkFilm; IFC picked up the Icelandic procedural Jar City; and The Weinstein Company bought Boy A.
IFC and B-Side are working together to acquire overlooked festival films for TV and online distribution. IFC’s Evan Shapiro says B-Side’s online community of festivalgoers is “like the world’s largest focus group”; B-Side’s Chris Hyams says the IFC partnership is aimed at combating a certain “perversity in the traditional upfront payment model.”