When I first saw Inglourious Basterds at Cannes, I walked out of the theater and felt like something was … off. I rushed to my computer and wrote a dismissive review. “Quentin Tarantino,” I wrote, “has never seemed to strain so hard to just make A Quentin Tarantino Film.” I complained about the film’s pacing, the quality of its dialogue, the excessive exposition. “Basterds plays almost like an assembly edit, defiantly presented as-is,” I concluded.
And then I saw the film again, this week, in New York, in a version different from the one I saw at Cannes. Some scenes are said to be shorter, although I couldn’t tell you specifically which ones; one scene excised before the French premiere has been reinstated. After that screening, I went back and read what I wrote about the film from France, and cringed. The review of Inglourious Basterds I wrote in May simply does not apply to the film I saw with the same title this week.
This happens sometimes. We don’t talk about it much, but it happens. Sometimes movies change — and Tarantino and The Weinstein Company have made no secret of the fact that Basterds has changed sine its Cannes screenings. But critics change, too.
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About a week ago, a promo video started floating around for Kevin Smith’s upcoming Seth Rogen comedy, Zach and Miri Make a Porno. I didn’t write about it because, well, I have a hard time getting it up to care about new Kevin Smith movies. But I care about this! FilmDrunk alerts us to a post on Smith’s site, where the filmmaker explains that he was forced to remove the video from his production company’s movie news page because the MPAA insists on vetting all promo materials put forth by MPAA signatory companies, of which Porno’s distributor The Weinstein Company is one. An excerpt:
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I’m not totally convinced that this is not a joke, but the Huffington Post claims that the Weinstein Company is going to start running this TV ad for Under the Same Moon today. The immigration drama broke the record for the biggest opening for a Spanish-language film in the States last week, and essentially became TWC’s first Miramax-style success (acquire small/foreign film; identify and laser-target natural audience; use success with that audience to push film as general arthouse hit) since the Weinstein brothers divorced Disney in 2005. Apparently, Harvey thinks the way to maintain that success is by going after the segment of the audience that gets off on the idea that their movie choices could turn CNN pundit Lou Dobbs into a weepy little girl.
Each of the ad’s three pullquotes––from TIME, the Christian Science Monitor, and Entertainment Weekly––claim that Moon’s portrait of one family’s border struggle could wring sympathetic emotion from hardass Dobbs, who preaches almost nightly about how immigrants should be rounded up and launched into outer space, our agricultural and service economies be damned. And maybe that’s true––maybe Dobbs has been waiting his entire professional life for the indie film that would turn his schtick around––but with the three references lined up consecutively, the ad plays like an unfunny spoof of mainstream film critic laziness. Is “Lou Dobbs will cry” such internationally recognized shorthand for “this is a good movie about immigration that will appeal to your liberal sensibilities and change your conservative asshole friend’s mind”, that 90 percent of the print film critics who still have jobs simply could not conceive of stating the matter any other way?
Oh, and an Impending Snake Eats Tail media alert: TWC has apparently booked the ad on CNN in five major markets.
Via The Reeler comes news that Wong Kar Wai’s My Blueberry Nights, the Hong Kong auteur’s English language debut, which opened the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, has been bumped from its Valentine’s Day release date to early April. Release date delays of multiple months are rarely considered a positive sign––especially when we’re talking about a film that was mostly excoriated by the international press at the one and only film festival at which it screened––but in this case, I don’t know.
The Weinsteins haven’t started to promote Blueberry in earnest, so it’s not like they’re throwing away money already spent. There’s plenty of datey competition the first two weeks of February (although, it should be noted, nothing remotely arty or adult), with TWC’s own Diary of the Dead slotted in as Valentine’s counter-programming on the 15th. If nothing else, moving Blueberry to April gives the struggling Weinsteins time to support it without dividing their resources, which is what I blame for their inability to effectively platform either Control or I’m Not There.
But in that case, why not put it at the end of the month and try to relaunch it at Tribeca––a festival that, at least historically, LOVES throwing big, stupid premieres to launch star-studded product? Maybe this is actually a sign that Tribeca meant it when they said they were going to downsize and generally try to be less ridiculous. If so, good news all around!
Bryan Appleyard takes a look at the artists who died in 2007 for The Times, and says a few infuriating things about the state of comtemporary filmmaking in the process. The thrust of the piece is a bit of Summer 2007 nostalgia: “The deaths of Antonioni and Bergman drew painful attention to the lack of great European auteurs.” Post-colonial angst is SO exhausting, but let’s engage with it anyway, shall we?
In assessing the year’s disappointments, Appleyard lumps Quentin Tarantino in with Francis Ford Coppola and Philip Roth as artists “who did not die but, somehow, faded.” He dismisses Tarantino on the grounds that Kill Bill was “dismal” (although, both critically and commercially, it was undeniably successful, at least in the States). Death Proof also gets an unrealistic drubbing. In calling Tarantino’s half of Grindhouse “not so much a film as an act of pathological self-indulgence [which] convinced even some of his most devoted fans that the game was up,” Appleyard ignores the fact that Death Proof, which beat out films like Sweeney Todd, The Lives of Others and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead in indieWIRE’s comprehensive 2007 critics poll, is widely considered to be the chunk of Grindhouse that could actually stand on its own.
When Appleyard moves on to consider candidates for The New Film Auteur (with a straight face, as if there’s going to be an election, or maybe a competition show on Bravo), his logic betrays even more personal bias.
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Amy Ryan has snagged at least five awards in the past four business days (I lost count after the NBR, New York critics, LA critics, DC critics and San Francisco critics) for her work in Ben Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone, and has thus usurped Cate Blanchett as the presumptive frontrunner in the Best Supporting Actress Oscar race. This is, to me, a fairly shocking turn of events, and judging by the noise it’s creating amongst Oscar bloggers, I’m not totally alone in my surprise.
It doesn’t help that Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There––the film that prompted Harvey Weinstein to promise to shoot himself if it didn’t net Blanchett an Oscar nomination––has been all but shut out of the critical derby thus far. I was particularly surprised to see the film earn nary a nod from the New York Film Critics Circle–it certainly has no shortage of local, effusive defenders. And yet, the film has sort of slunk into the shadows of the season. Putting Harvey’s silly, trigger-happy bravado aside, it’s no secret that The Weinstein Company is hurting for hits, and so far, There is part of the problem; still on less than 150 screens and consistently dropping 30% from weekend to weekend, I don’t see how the distributor will be able to justify any kind of expansion unless there’s a major, major reversal in awards momentum.
The question is: where’s the loudest man in pseudo-indie distribution when his films really need him?
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The Weinstein Company has apparently bumped the release date of Grace is Gone from October to December, and our favorite hyper-reactionary conservative film blog, taking a cue from the New York Post, says it’s a victory in the War on Terror.
In this post on his NYP movie blog, Lou Lumenick speculates first that the move might have something to do with the fact that the film was rejected from the New York Film Festival, which would have ostensibly given TWC a medium-profile platform from which to roll out the film in October. Lumenick (who is enough of a fan of Grace that his endorsement appears at the top of the film’s poster) then tosses out the possibility that Harvey Weinstein may have bumped Grace in reaction to “the soft opening numbers” of Paul Haggis’ In the Valley of Elah. It’s that suggestion that engenders this quip from Libertas: “Wouldn’t it be nice to think that every studio holding some vanity pro-Al Queda movie is right-now-as-I-write-this trembling at the inevitability of the red ink coming?”
Maybe that would be “nice,” but the thing is, Grace is about as far from a “vanity pro-Al Queda movie” as you can get.
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Earlier this week, Grady Hendrix (co-founder of Subway Cinema, the collective that puts on the annual New York Asian Film Festival) re-launched his Kaiju Shakedown Asian cinema blog at Variety. Yesterday, Hendrix posted a mighty listicle, in an effort to catch his readers up on the Asian film world gossip that they missed while the blog was on its “six month bathroom break.” And thank God he did, because otherwise, we would have never known about this post on Jackie Chan’s official blog, dated July 16 and titled “Absolutely No Fun”. An excerpt:
Today is Monday. I have to begin my fourth day of prosthetic make-up. Thinking about doing the same thing tomorrow just makes me feel like there is no joy in life. Supposedly, I was scheduled to finish filming my prosthetic make-up shots today. But they told me they needed an extra day because they haven’t finished filming all the shots. When I heard this news, my whole body felt like it was about to break down. I totally lost my appetite. I didn’t want to drink. I didn’t want to speak. I didn’t want to make any phone calls. Even if someone called me, I didn’t want to answer the phone. I didn’t want to write my diary. If they needed me to film, then I would film. Otherwise, I didn’t want to do anything else…
The prosthetics are for a film Chan is making for The Weinstein Company with Jet Li, called Forbidden Kingdom, and since the pairing of the two stairs makes this a huge project for martial arts fans he’s apparently contractually forbidden from releasing pictures of the “no fun” make-up job (Twitch linked to some cast photos in June, but there are no close-ups of Chan). We wouldn’t want to wish this kind of suffering on anyone, but you’ve got to wonder: is Chan undergoing some kind of karmic retribution for continually enabling the ascendancy of Brett Ratner?
The members of AFTRA have ratified a proposed deal with the APMTP over a new contract. This wrecks SAG’s hopes that they’ll be able to use the dissatisfaction of the hundred-thousand-plus actors who belong to both unions as leverage against their own stalled negotiations. Another factor to SAG’s woes: after the WGA strike, nobody wants to be out of work again.
The headline of Variety’s “
The Variety headline: “
A bunch of actors (including Natalie Portman, Ethan Hawke, Hayden Christensen, and Olivia Thirlby, aka The Other Broad From Juno) will 
Get out your violins: Hollywood is depressed! Seems that an expected post-WGA strike production boom hasn’t happened, due to some mix of the shitty economy and impending SAG-strike anxiety. An anonymous lawyer 
The Writers Guild of America have 
