Fuckin' Genius: Weinsteinco withers Wellspring

It was too good to be true: Eugene Hernandez reports at indieWIRE that the Weinsteinco acquisition of Genius Products for their rack-jobbing expertise does not extend to keeping Wellspring alive as a distribution entity. “The Weinstein Company confirmed that it would be the exclusive domestic distributor for any future Wellspring theatrical releases… Wellspring staff are expected to leave the company by the end of April and the Wellspring Home Entertainment division will move to Santa Monica… In early December, the Weinsteins announced a deal with Wellspring’s corporate parent, taking a 70% stake in the newly named Genius Products LLC, a company comprised of Wellspring’s large library of some 750 feature[s]…. including the work of Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Rohmer, Fassbinder, Greenaway, Almodovar, Antonioni and many others… About 10 people are expected to lose their jobs at Wellspring as a result of the decision to curtail Wellspring’s theatrical arm. The company indicated today that it would save nearly $1 million in overhead… “This realignment supports an aggressive acquisition campaign to build on the Wellspring brand with critically acclaimed films that celebrate intelligent cinema, while at the same time, supporting our strategy of leveraging our core competency by focusing on the sales and distribution of higher margin, packaged entertainment products at retail,” Genius Products CEO Trevor Drinkwater is quoted as typing… “Genius remains committed to the independent film industry and we are moving forward with indie releases. We’re just going to handle them in a different manner than we did before.” …

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Stone, 9/11 and carry on doing what you love

in Bangkok, the Beeb’s Neil Smith listens in as Oliver Stone explains his “austere” World Trade Center: “Speaking at the Bangkok International Film Festival, Stone called the feature a “24-hour document” in the lives of two New York Port Authority officers who became trapped under the rubble… “It’s an investigation into how they survived – how they mentally made it under those terrible conditions… [It’s] a very austere, technical attempt to be realistic about what happened – to show it as it really was”… When asked whether the world in general and America in particular was ready for a drama about the 9/11 attacks, the director was dismissive. “I would hate that to be the main question about the movie, though I sense that is what’s going to happen… I’m not in the business of knowing whether America is ready. You just hope it will be… I’m not the only director who has had to deal with rejection, failure and defeat… But either you get a gun, load it and shoot yourself in the head, or you carry on doing what you love.”

Rocket's redglare: an arthouse simply died

Small cities continue to have mixed success with arthouses: the Quad City Times’ Tory Brecht reports, “Less than a year into its reincarnation, the Rocket Theater in downtown Rock Island will fall dark again, a victim of growing competition in the independent film market.” Owner-operator Devin Hansen says, however, the screen may reopen as “a dinner-beverage-and-movie theater.” “The type of films shown at the Rocket — and Hansen’s former theater business venture, Brew & View, which closed in August — began to be shown at Showcase Cinemas 53 in Davenport and Great Escape Theatre, Moline, taking away much-needed business from the theater that operates on narrow margins. “March of the Penguins and Brokeback Mountain became big hits in multiplexes across the country… Had we landed one of these films, our future may have been different…. We might have been able to survive as a music-only club had we not had so much debt from both movie theaters… Movies were always our main focus, our bread-and-butter, and that simply died.”

Everything is Polleytical: Sarah Polley's feature directorial debut

Ever since her written-directed-co-produced 2001 short, I Shout Love, a witty, tonally sophisticated 38-minute black comedy about emotional dependency and the love of the Leafs, I’ve been waiting for Sarah Polley to make her feature debut. It’s official: The 27-year-old actress is writing and directing Away with Her in rural Ontario, a feature based on fellow Canadian) Alice Munro‘s short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” which Polley calls her “favourite short story.” A diverse cast includes Julie Christie, Olympia Dukakis, Michael Murphy and uber-Canadian Gordon Pinsent. Atom Egoyan, who showcased Polley in The Sweet Hereafter is executive producer; it’s being shot by Saddest Music in the World DoP Luc Montpellier.

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The road back from The Road to Guantánamo: rumors of freedom of speech unwarranted

The actors who starred in Michael Winterbottom’s award-winning The Road to Guantánamo were given a good talking-to under terror act on their return from the Berlin Film Festival, reports the Guardian’s Vikram Dodd: “Four actors who play al-Qaida suspects… were detained by the police at Luton airport as they returned… and questioned under anti-terror laws, alongside two of the former terrorism suspects they play on screen. They were returning last Thursday after the premiere… [The Road to Guantánam] depicts the life of three men from Tipton in the West Midlands, who go to Afghanistan and end up being held for two years by the US at its military base on Cuba before being released without charge… It depicts the alleged shackling, torture and other ill treatment the Tipton detainees claim they suffered at the hands of the Americans. The film’s producers say four actors from the film, who all play terrorism suspects, were detained at Luton airport after flying back from Germany on an easyJet flight. They included Rizwan Ahmed and Farhad Harun, who were stopped along with Shafiq Rasul and Rhuhel Ahmed, the former Guantánamo inmates they play on screen… Rizwan Ahmed said police swore at him and asked if he had become an actor to further the Islamic cause. He said he was at first denied access to a lawyer and was questioned about his views on the Iraq war by a policewoman. “She asked me whether I intended to do more documentary films, specifically more political ones like The Road to Guantánamo. She asked ‘Did you become an actor mainly to do films like this, to publicise the struggles of Muslims?'” Mr Ahmed alleged that he had a telephone wrestled from his hand as he tried to contact a lawyer and was later abused. He claimed that one police officer had called him a “fucker”. A spokeswoman for Bedfordshire police was reassuring: none of the men had been arrested. “The police officers wanted to ask them some questions under the counter-terrorism act… All were released within the hour. Part of the counter-terrorism act allows us to stop and examine people if something happens that might be suspicious.” If only the UK would turn its security over to the United Arab Emirates, things like this would never happen.

A new Broomfield sweeps clean: a UK doc retro

Nick Broomfield has a new doc about the aftereffects of South African apartheid, debuting on Channel 4, His Big White Self, revisiting an earlier subject, Afrikaner extremist Eugene Terre’Blanche. In the Guardian, Paul Hoggart uses the new pic as a way to describe Broomfield’s output. “Broomfield bravado is nothing new, providing such memorable moments as his standing up at an American Civil Liberties Union awards ceremony, where Courtney Love was guest of honour, to denounce her for threatening journalists (Kurt and Courtney), and walking into an American high-security prison yard to interview Suge Knight, the jailed head of a record company called Death Row, whom he suspected was behind the murders of the famous rappers Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls (Biggie and Tupac)… Broomfield edits his films in his rural bolt-hole, an idyllic spot about an hour south of London…. Broomfield has just turned 58 and turns out to be as genial, laid-back, softly-spoken and ruminative as he is in his films. There is an air of old hippy-bohemian about the place. An antique roll-top bath sits in the middle of his office – only one item in a fine selection of Victorian sanitary ware…. “I was taught by someone who loved observational films where people are made to feel completely adequate about the way they are. That is what makes an insightful film,” he says. He still thinks of his films as “political”, though in a broader sense. “A film is a portrait of an aspect of society.” …

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Taylor made: Charles Taylor post-Salon

At The House Next Door, Jeremiah Kipp talks with critic Charles Taylor about what reviewers do (and ought to do) today: “I’ve heard people say that if a critic has a professed dislike for someone’s work, someone else should review it so the artist gets a fair hearing. Well, we already have that. It’s called publicity. It’s not a critic’s job to go in concerned with being positive. But news people are trained in that journalist’s way of thinking, “You get the facts. You report them. You provide evidence to support the position.” Critics take imaginative leaps, they employ] hyperbole and that makes the reportorial mindset very nervous, and they don’t get it. It all comes back to that line Truffaut said about how no one at a newspaper has less respect than the movie critic. No one is going to tell the dance critic or classical music critic how to do their jobs… No one is going to say to a reporter who has been on the scene he or she is writing about, “Oh, you don’t know what’s happening there.” … Like a reporter, the critic is the one going out day after day, seeing movies, thinking about how they fit into the culture. Editors, for the most part, sit behind their desk saying they heard buzz on this or that.

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Let's move on: Nick Cave and John Hillcoat on The Proposition

In the March Sight & Sound, director John Hillcoat and writer Nick Cave talk about their brilliant, brooding 18th century Western, The Proposition, to Nick Roddick. “The real theatre on which The Proposition is played out is the Australian landscape, lovingly captured by French cinematographer Benoi�t Delhomme [who] has responded to the light of the outback – harsh, unfiltered, almost horizontal – like many a northern DoP before him discovering the special properties of the southern hemisphere… The Proposition‘s aim is not to place its characters against a beautiful backdrop but to link them directly to the land’s Darwinian indifference. “These were brutal times,” says Hillcoat, “but the land also had a great beauty to it. I think it’s a metaphor for the whole thing. In the middle of the day it’s so harsh and oppressive yet when the sunsets come it’s stunningly beautiful. It goes from one extreme to another.” … “From my point of view,” says Cave, “we weren’t putting the film forward as truthful: we were looking for truth more at a poetic level – with, of course, the amount of research Johnny always does to keep things on track.” … “I think [Peckinpah] was doing something very radical that we have since absorbed and regurgitated to the point where it has become banal,” [Hillcoat] says. “I think a lot of people confuse violence: content gets muddled with intent. Personally I think Peckinpah’s films are very honest, in an uncomfortable way, about heroic male action in extreme conflict.” [The Proposition] is really fucking violent!” [Hillcoat continues]. “That it’s very much a part of the actual time. The violence is brutal and very real but it’s buried in the thrust of the story, which is why a lot of people don’t have a problem with it.” “There’s no ritualistic violence, there’s no fetishistic violence. There’s no slow-motion,” mutters Cave. “Let’s move on.”

Blurb of the day: Winter Passing

Sunday New York Times, Arts & Leisure, page 19: Searingly scripted and brilliantly birthed to life by its cast…, Elliot V. Kotek, Moving Pictures Magazine.

To make a good movie is not a hard job: A Bangladeshi perspective

Reader Abdul Malek, writing in from Shahjahanpur, Dhaka, offers his suggestions for a better Bengali cinema in Bangladesh’s New Nation: “Film producers and directors pay no heed to the advice of refraining from making vulgar movies. They think that vulgarism give them more revenue, meaning that money is more important than a creative cinema. We also agree that the investors have right to profit, but that can be done if all agree by making hale and hearty cinemas… We do not want to see our females in short uniform; to see them raped, violated; and in the dirty body language while they dance. We want them in heavenly look. A woman is more beautiful when she covers her head. She can play a role in the cinema and drama wearing head cover and without touching the hands of a male who is not her real father, brother, son and others so allowed.To make a good movie is not a hard job. Our film producers and makers can do it.”

Hollywood on Hollywood at the Shorty Machen Store

In the Birmingham News, Kathy Kemp junkets off to Hollywood, “in the Appalachian foothills just above Scottsboro… a far piece (roughly 1,830 miles) from the place where movies are made and celebrities frolic.” She surveys how much Hollywood (“‘We’re the real Hollywood,’ reads the… town water tower”) knows of Hollywood: “Hmmm,” Shorty Machen says, scrunching up his forehead… “Hmmm,” he says again before pausing to ring up a customer’s purchases. [The] Shorty Machen Store… seems to be the hub of activity in Hollywood, pop. 950, especially at lunch time. Besides groceries, gas, fishing tackle, pickled okra and hardware, Shorty’s offers a full-scale sandwich menu starring a cheeseburger worthy of Schwab’s drugstore… The word “Brokeback” does not ring a bell for Shorty, a quiet fellow whose favorite pastime is quail hunting. “That’s what Dick Cheney was doing when he got shot,” Shorty says, which suggests he does indeed follow current events…” The most movie-mad local Kemp found was “surprised to hear that [Brokeback Mountain] is up for best picture. “Once you get past the first part, it kind of had a good story to it,” Kemp’s focus group of one told her.

Chris Doyle: This is my Macau… my New York… this is how Phuket feels to me

Bangkok Post’s Kong Rithdee hoists a couple more with DoP Christopher Doyle as Pen-ek Ratanaruang‘s Invisible Waves opens the Bangkok International Film Festival. “Such visions comes from a mad-haired Aussie who speaks fluent Chinese, a genius goblin with a gush of energy bordering on drunken mania. Doyle is famous for quaffing Oktoberfest quantities of Heineken on set, and for inspecting the discotheques of the world’s various cities… When he speaks, what comes out is a heady mix of prophetic lucidity and riotous incoherence… “What’s important is the way Pen-ek and I collaborate. Once the script was ready to a certain level, we went to visit the locations, and we reworked the script based on our visits – what if we took this in or took this out. This way the script became more intimately related to the spaces. So the cinematography came in much more closer to the work.” Unlike the rapt sensuality Doyle gave to some of his most famous works, Waves acquires a surreal power from its mouldy look; every scene looks as if fresh air has been sucked out through the windows and only a remnant of luminous staleness remains. The scenes on the cruise ship – shot in a Bangkok studio – are a meditation on space as the character roams the labyrinth of his own consciousness… “I mean, if you do try to go there, to push towards it, you’ll find something that you wouldn’t have found if you say ‘oh no, it’s not what I want, what am I gonna do?’ For me, the idea is: just go there. If you are a filmmaker with an identity, or with a vision of how life is, you can overcome this kind of difficulty, or you can make it part of your style. This is something I learned from working with Wong Kar-wai – that you take what you have and make something more.”… Perhaps the most intriguing visual aspect of Waves is how Doyle’s images of Macau, Hong Kong and Phuket differ from… familiar images of those cities… “That’s part of our job, right? …

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I wake up screening: where movie titles go at night

Stephen Hill’s Movies Title Screens page is always a sweetly obsessive place to drop by.

More Errol: new projects from the Anti-Post-Modern Post-Modernist

Errol Morris has fact and faction on his plate, with 3 projects afoot, report Carol Beggy & Mark Shanahan in the Boston Globe. “In addition to a new documentary that he can’t talk about, Morris is set to start shooting… a studio project called ‘Nub City… a horror [movie] based on the bizarre true story of several Floridians who turned up missing arms and legs after taking out insurance policies on themselves. ”I’m not a big blood-and-guts guy, but this story’s been on my mind for close to 30 years… I actually like horror films. Hitchcock’s Psycho is a very important movie to me, and I love those Polanski pictures.” The director’s other film, also in pre-production, is a fictional account of the popular Michael Paterniti book, ”Driving Mr. Albert : A Trip Across America With Einstein’s Brain.”Says Morris: ”Following the Oscars, I just decided this’d be a good time to expand my repertoire.” Over at his own site, Morris publishes the lengthy transcript of his Harvard “History and Literature” lecture, The Anti-Post-Modern Post-Modernist, including the clips he showed at the event. “I like to think of myself as the ultimate anti-postmodernist postmodernist…

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Melancholy maybe: the Russian mood

A brief brood on the notion of why Russians like their melancholy, from Vladimir Kozlov in Moscow Times: “It has long been debated whether tragic plots indeed better coincide with the Russian mentality and cultural background, or whether that was just a stereotype successfully spread by greedy producers and distributors of the silent-film era, eager to cash in on anything. Some cultural theorists have explained the prevalence of tragic endings in early Russian films by stating that the entire Russian artistic tradition of the 20th century — including cinema — derived from ancient and, therefore, “sublime” art forms, as opposed to Hollywood-style mass-culture products…The practice of changing the finales of Hollywood films in order to bring them in line with the assumed tastes of Russian audiences started before the Bolshevik Revolution. At the time, domestic producers claimed that Russian audiences, brought up with 19th-century theatrical melodramas — which inevitably ended sadly — would not like films with happy ends, instead preferring death, blood and suicide… With the loosening of censorship as a result of glasnost in the late 1980s, topics that used to be taboo under the previous system began to be actively explored by filmmakers. A wave of chernukha, or dark naturalism, inundated Russian cinema and swept away almost everything else. There was no longer a place for happy endings. The teenage heroine of Vasily Pichul’s Little Vera attempts suicide; in Pyotr Todorovsky’s Intergirl, a reformed prostitute dies in a car crash; and in Sergei Solovyov’s Assa, the protagonist Bananan is killed by a mafia boss who, in turn, gets shot by his mistress…. Since then, despite drastic political and cultural changes in the country, Russian filmmakers’ inclination for sad endings seems to have remained unchanged. The last major international success story in Russian film, Andrei Zvyagintsev’s 2003 The Return, which won a Golden Lion at that year’s Venice Film Festival, has a tragic denouement in which an unnecessarily strict father dies in an attempt to save his younger son.”