Unlike so many stalwarts of the movie blogosphere, I’m not going to San Diego tomorrow for the 2009 edition of Comic-Con International, and for the most part, I’m totally fine with that — I got my fill of shouting into the void last year. But one thing I never seem to get my fill of, is the annual Troma panel, and this year it seems like Lloyd Kaufman and friends are planning to take the stupid-fun madness up a notch with the Troma Roast. Monty Python’s Terry Jones, Penelope Spheeris, Trey Parker & Matt Stone, Ron Jeremy, Mick Garris and Stan Lee are just some of the boldfaced names who are schedule to show up to roast Kaufman on Saturday night. The full lineup of guests is listed at the bottom of the schedule here.
According to the Troma message board, the panel will be broadcast on G4 as part of their Comic-Con coverage, but searching G4’s site it seems like their “live coverage” ends a couple of hours before the roast starts, so I’m not sure when/if it’ll actually air. If you can figure it out, let us know in the comments.
July 4th weekend is typically reserved for huge blockbuster releases, particularly those starring Will Smith and/or showcasing America as a force not to be messed with (against aliens or the British). Very, very rarely does an independent release even bother trying to go up against the studios during the big holiday. For example, the only option for an American indie we have this weekend is IFC’s wrong-holidayed I Hate Valentine’s Day, which is uneventfully the second Nia Vardalos movie in a month. And this year we don’t even have the usual sort of event movie debuting on July 4th weekend. There’s just Public Enemies and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. Boring.
Isn’t it ironic that independent films can’t open on Independence Day? It would make sense for there to be a number of good U.S.-produced indies opening this week, going up against the big guys with their American spirit (including their disregard for broad, worldwide marketability) and evidence of the American Dream come true. Wondering if there have ever been great independents released at this time of year, we took at look at the last 30 years of cinema and found only a few significant titles.
See what little (American) films bucked the 4th of July weekend release system after the jump: …Read more
That Troma propaganda/war satire clip that Lloyd Kaufman showed at Comic-Con? It’s on YouTube, natch––and it’s apparently super old. Oh well––new to us! It’s embedded above.
The Troma panel at Comic-Con gets smaller every year, but the sense that you’re at a really fucked up family reunion never dissipates. “What I find is amazing about Lloyd, is that everybody is connected to him in some fashion,” said panelist Steven Paul at yesterday’s session. He gestured at the room––the smallest I entered all weekend. “I bet everyone here has acted in a Lloyd Kaufman film.”
Not quite, but part of the reason to show up to this thing every year is to see which disparate characters Lloyd will rope into making an appearance. This year, there wasn’t a guest more unexpected than Paul, a producer on Ghost Rider, the visual effects producer on Karate Dog (!!!), and the man responsible for a number of upcoming “is that really necessary?” video game adaptations, including Castlevania and Tekken. What, exactly, was this guy doing on what Kaufman himself billed as “a panel of independent thinkers?” “I at one time was Steven’s teacher,” Kaufman boasted. “So there’s a little bit of Troma in the mainstream world!”
Maybe more than a little bit. Seated on the far end of the table was Mark Neveldine, co-writer/director of the budding Jason Statham franchise, Crank. “You’ll have to excuse me, because this is the first panel I’ve been sober for,” Neveldine cracked with pitch perfect post-frat bravado––now that nerds are inheriting the earth, an awful lot of them look and sound suspiciously like recurring characters on Entourage. What’s this guy’s connection to Kaufman? He’s apparently Troma’s most dedicated plagiarist.
Even though some of last year’s Comic-Con secrets were leaked to the web ahead of time, the 2007 SDCC was a huge deal as far as revelations go. Whether it was the unveiling of Karen Allen’s involvement in Indiana Jones and the Then-Still-Not-Subtitled Fourth Installmentor cast updates for Watchmenand Star Trek or a bit of clarification on what the hell that Cloverfieldmovie was, Comic-Con 2007 left us super excited and highly anticipatory for the next year of movie releases.
But after a quick glance, the 2008 convention doesn’t seem like it will have as many big announcements. There should be plenty of new footage shown from movies like Watchmen (making its second Comic-Con round) and The Spirit(hopefully there’s some better looking stuff than the most recent trailer gave us), but what secrets are set to be let out of the bag?
Here’s 10 things I hope they reveal over the next few days:
Arnold Schwarzenegger is back in Terminator Salvation- If this really happens, I’ll be flabbergasted. But a guy can hope, at least for official word on a cameo. And there’s no better place than Comic-Con for a confirmation to happen. Well, I guess if Warner Bros. could keep it a secret until the movie opens next May, then that would actually be better. But that’s impossible nowadays. …Read more
God, I love Lloyd Kaufman. The Troma figurehead was frustrated that the Tribeca Film Festival’s takeover of the Village East Cinema prevented the theater from being able to show trailers or post posters for Troma’s Poultrygeist</em> for two weeks before the film was set to open there. So he dressed up like a chicken and protested in front of the theater on the final weekend of the festival. According to the New York Post’s Page Six, Poultrygeist’s opening night at the Village East is now sold out. In the Page Six story, Kaufman complains that the “Tri-beak-a Film Festival” has never screened a Troma film, and there are probably a lot of reasonable reasons for that, but the fact remains that as an extremely corporate event blocking a local, truly independent filmmaker from promoting his upcoming release in the usual ways, they’re sort of asking for it.
As I type this from my living room/office in Long Island City, on the Southeastern tip of Queens, through the window I’ve got a prime view of the luxury real estate company setting up shop in the abandoned paper factory immediately across the street. Yesterday, they boarded up the upper windows and hung signs; today, they’ve parked three pedicabs with their logo on the sidewalk–because buyers who have been priced out of the Manhattan condo market are apparently so humbled by the experience that they couldn’t bear to walk a block and half from the sales office to the property.
Yes, the neighborhood’s changing, which is not altogether a bad thing–after almost a year and half in this apartment, the novelty of having to take the subway into another borough to get to the supermarket, the gym or a halfway decent bar has worn off completely. So I’m comfortable with the forward motion of gentrification. I just never thought Lloyd Kaufman would be one of the gentrifiers.
Hollywood’s sexiest Lefties, George Clooney and Leonardo DiCaprio, may be teaming up to bring the, um, tragedy of Howard Dean’s presidential campaign to the screen. Clooney would direct and DiCaprio would star in Farragut North, based on a play written by one of Dean’s former aides, about “an inspiring, though unorthodox, presidential candidate [whose] career is done in by more seasoned politicos who thrive on poisonous partisan politics, dirty tricks and back-stabbing.”
In other liberal disappointments, a British judge ruled yesterday that Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth contains “nine scientific errors”, and can only be used as a teaching tool in classrooms if accompanied by “fresh guidance notes to balance Mr Gore’s ‘one-sided’ views.”
Troma’s Lloyd Kaufman is hardly sleeping on his new job as chairman of the Independent Film and Television Alliance. In the three weeks since his election, according to Variety’s DaveMcNary, he’s already made a trip to DC to lobby on behalf of IFTA and push his three-part plan: “continuing IFTA’s campaign against media consolidation; focusing on new technologies, such as protection of copyright and keeping Internet access on a level playing field (’net neutrality’); and stepping up international outreach.” He’s been so busy that he apparently hasn’t had time for a new headshot–the Variety story features a pic of Kaufman on the set of Poultrygeist.
I got a press release this afternoon informing me that Lloyd Kaufman, the co-founder and public face of Troma Entertainment, has been elected to a two-year term as Chairman of the Independent Film and Television Alliance, “the global trade association of the independent motion picture and television programming industry.” In the release, the genius behind Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead and The Toxic Avenger clearly outlines his leadership agenda:
The independent community today faces rampant media consolidation and challenges to copyrights in the digital universe, and I will work closely with the IFTA Board of Directors, member companies and IFTA’s executives to give our fellow independents more control and opportunities in both the U.S. and abroad. New technology will continue to be our new frontier.
Kaufman is a fierce supporter of net neutrality. Earlier this summer, he responded to Hillary Clinton’s Sopranos spoof video with his own made-for-YouTube rant against the candidate, which I’ve embedded above. In the clip, Kaufman compares the current state of the web to the home video industry “before Blockbuster came and bought up all the mom and pop shops.” He warns that if Clinton is elected president, she’ll aim to appease her friends in Hollywood and will eventually “screw up the internet.” “We’re all going to be p0wned!” Kaufman cries.
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 I type this from my living room/office in Long Island City, on the Southeastern tip of Queens, through the window I’ve got a prime view of the luxury real estate company setting up shop in the abandoned paper factory immediately across the street. Yesterday, they boarded up the upper windows and hung signs; today, they’ve parked three pedicabs with their logo on the sidewalk–because buyers who have been priced out of the Manhattan condo market are apparently so humbled by the experience that they couldn’t bear to walk a block and half from the sales office to the property.
Hollywood’s sexiest Lefties, George Clooney and Leonardo DiCaprio, 
