Screen Daily reports that Roadside Attractions has picked up RJ Cutler’s VOGUE documentary The September Issue, for a planned September release. Here’s our review of the film from Sundance. We’ve added that news, plus info on the sales of Push, Cold Souls and more to our deals chart.
Initially, The September Issue comes off as something like the Teen Vogue segments of The Hills (though her royal highness Anna Wintour is swapped in for cut-rate LA imitation Lisa Love, the MTV reality show’s masterful manner of spinning diegetic commentary out of eye rolls taken out of context is left intact), genetically blended into an alternate universe version of The Office. Except in this office, the workers actually work, and in fact are terrified not to because their boss is Michael Scott’s polar opposite: impatient, undemonstrative, and absolutely incapable of taking no for an answer.
As a portrait of Wintour the person, RJ Cutler’s documentary does little to dig under the surface of Wintour’s iconic, impassive under bangs image. But as a meditation on art vs commerce, emotion vs rationality, and the role of fantasy merchants in the recently-burst economic bubble, The September Issue is both cerebral and accessible. If it’s not as provocative as it could be, it’s definitely entertaining.
…Read more
My trip to Cannes begins at a bar at JFK––a Chili’s Too!, to be precise––where I flip through an abandoned issue of VOGUE whilst waiting to board. It just so happens that this issue of VOGUE exists to promote the Sex and the City movie––which, not so long ago, was rumored to be premiering at Cannes, before its gala debut was inexplicably bumped up a few days and over the English Channel (for coverage, Google “‘Sarah Jessica Parker’, ‘crazy hat’”).
This issue of VOGUE is the ultimate work of movie marketing synergy. It’s not just that Sarah Jessica Parker is on the cover, it’s not just that there are pages and pages of ridiculous photos inside, most of a couture-clad Parker canoodling with on-screen love interest Chris Noth, both ostensibly in character (more on that later). The story and the pics were literally baked into the movie itself, with the actual author of the story and the actual photoshoot’s actual director playing themselves in a VOGUE shoot scene in the film. Meta, right? Not really––it seems to be a matter of pure economics, and rather than be cynical about, sitting in that Chili’s Too! I decided to embrace it.
…Read more
