Weekend Of Movies

See The Informant!
You made not love it the first time out. But like a Coens Bros movie, it will grow on you. It’s quite funny, smart, and surprising… and Damon would not be a bad candidate for an Oscar nod.
I’ve seen it twice and look forward to seeing it again. It’s a classic dramatic story, but this film is a comedy and it’s a comedy of expectations. But it is also about how people see themselves… and the humor comes from how they don’t see themselves.
Don’t see Jennifer’s Body
Karyn Kusama directed Girlfight in 2000 and the only feature she has done between that in this was Aeon Flux, which had its charms, but basically ate her alive. Girlfight was full of great energy, but not a ton of directing prowess. Kusama still shows promise, but she has to learn to do the job… and she has not.
Every performance in JB is just fine. Megan Fox shows that, away from the machines, may actually have a real actress in the Maxim bod. Seyfried, who is actually the star of the movie, does well. The boys are good. But while creepy good fun can be creepy good fun, Kusama just doesn’t know how to get it onto the screen.
Meanwhile Diablo Cody’s script is a parody of a Diablo Cody script. One can only wonder how she would rewrite the female genital mutilation scene in Antichrist… cutty cut, clit-o-me! Blech! Her script here proves to us just how skilled a director Jason Reitman is. If ice cream isn’t sweet enough for you (forget any food of substance) and all you want is the hot fudge and cherries, this script is for you. Me? I’m in a Diablo Coma.
Do see Bright Star… assuming you like Jane Campion. It is small. It is gentle. It lingers. But Abbie Cornish is a star and Campion wrings soul out even when it is unexpected.

Review: Moore Is Less, Collapse Is More

There is a tale of two documentaries happening here at TIFF this year. Michael Moore, a gifted thinker and showman, delivered the weakest documentary of his career. Capitalism: A Love Story is little more than one of Moore

BYOB Th9179

Gift Of The Magi: Trades Edition

As usual, C. Nikki is trying to turn what everyone else respectfully regards as sad, inevitable gossip into an EXCLUSIVE. But yes, there is ongoing discussion of The Hollywood Reporter going out of print and Variety going pay wall. Either may or may not happen.
Here is the background – The Hollywood Reporter, after getting slashed by Variety stealing talent – almost all of which has since been jettisoned, less than 2 years later – cut its own narrow throat in the last 6 months by eliminating a lot of its free Academy and other guild subscriptions and publishing fewer tha 20 pages a day on a pretty consistent basis. The entire game of selling Oscar space, which the trades lived and ae now dying on, is the idea that it will be seen by the core of voters. The Hollywood Reporter has made itself unreliable for buyers.
Of course, come the summer, as awards sales for this next season started up, the trade attempted to sell its former self. Not much luck. Moreover, even with print cutbacks, the infrastucture of the trade is too top-heavy.
And here is the greatest irony… the only real asset left, aside from its history, for either trade to exploit as a differentiator from The Web is being a print publication. It Is the only way to raise ad buys beyond the relatively low ad sales prices on the web. Yet it is prohibitively expensive.
Variety is in better shape but is still in serious danger of being reduced to a shadow of its former self. But the idea of closing the internet wall before the Oscar season is over is even more odd than the general conversation of re-closing the wall. Even though Variety would happily give free web access to any Academy member, the problem is that any resistance (“please enter your user name and password”) makes their website one step less attractive to web surfers.
Moreover, closing the pay wall on a narrowly read site like a trade magazine that does almost no investigative journalism and has no must-read columnists is a disaster waiting to happen. Ask yourself, when’s the last time you heard anything about Howard Stern?
There is only one way that Variety can decimate its subscription circulation… by closing the wall and making Hollywood send its publicity – which is the vast majority of what trade reporting is – to every other outlet at the same time or even earlier. We have already seen some publicists and executives choose to break stuff on Finke because of the comfy berth she gives her sources. We have seen “breaking stories” spread between Variety, Finke, the LA Times, etc. In 2009, movie news is not news until it is circulated. And a closed wall means no circulation outside of a very narrow group. And that might work if there was anything that was really exclusive. But none of it is. From aggregators like MCN to specific focus sites like Box Office Mojo to gossips like Nikki and across the wide range of sites out there, we are not in a business where news breaks, but rather is gently placed next to a broken shell so it looks like it escaped.
But I digress…
Anything either trade does before the Oscar season ends is an undeniable signal that that part of their revenue stream is broken in a BIG way. Award Season Print has been the primary revenue for THR for over a decade… if there is no more print, there is no more THR. Flipside, if Variety is narrowing their web presence during the season, they certainly cannot charge MORE for Phase II ads… and it is most likely they would have to charge less. Why would they cut into revenues on purpose? They wouldn’t… unless there wasn;t much revenue there to cut into.
I’m not saying these things will not eventually happen. I called THR’s demise a couple of years ago, so their death march is sad, but not a shock. And Variety has been pulling back for almost a year on almost everything that differentiates them from the rest of the entertainment media, including slashing their review budget. But either move, timed as suggested in Nikki’s EXCLUSIVE, is an even worse sign of trauma than has been anticipated at this time of year.

DP/30 Sneak Peek – TIFF '09 – Tim Blake Nelson dir Leaves of Grass

A preview of a chat with Tim Blake Nelson, who directs and co-stars in Leaves of Grass opposite Edward Norton, who plays twins in the film.

DP/30 Sneak Peek – Jonathan Demme, dir, Neil Young Trunk Show

Jonathan Demme brought the second film in his 2-film collaboration with Neil Young (the first film was Heart of Gold) to TIFF ’09… here is a preview of our conversation.

2nd TIFF Buy

Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions Group picked up the virtual sequel to Kick-Ass, Defendor.
Commercial buy. Smart. Not so surprising. No Oscar buzz. Just movie biz…
In some ways, it’s a little sad. SPWAG does give some good movies a home. But they are bought into a kind of orphanhood, destined for DVD, but with their theatrical life determined by someone caring to release them within Sony or then being shipped off to small distributors who “partner” to fulfill the theatrical obligation.
But these days… a lot better than nothing.
(4:55p – Edited for mistake in which division of Sony was buying… the following was the joke that ran… which was not accurate then or now….
The buy fuels speculation about whether SPC, unable to get much attention for An Education, will bump that film for a major Oscar campaign or Woody Harrelson as the mentally defective wannabe superhero. Barker & Bernard were seen during the fest screaming at Carey Mulligan to “be more adorable!” while Woody blew skunky smoke in her face.
Ha ha. )

Frontloading Killed The Festival Star

TIFF ended on Monday night.
A little extreme? Perhaps.
But from a media and buying perspective, when the sun came up on Tuesday, all that was left at the festival was odds and ends. Some of those odds and ends are pretty great, whether it

DP/30 Sneak Peek – Jason Reitman, Director and Co-Writer of Up In the Air

The Nine (The Musical) Situation

Rumors are now swirling around The Weinstein Company’s Nine this week, made all the more (overly) dramatic by the purchase of A Single Man here at TIFF.
Here’s the deal: Nine is not being moved to 2010 at this point. But we should expect a Chicago-style rollout, with exclusive releases in NY/LA around Christmas, followed by an expansion to 200-300 screens in January, then a wider release after Oscar nominations in early February. Chicago did over $100m of its gross after nominations.
What does A Single Man have to do with this? Nothing at all.
There has been some wrestling over the cut of the movie. Harvey wants it shorter… and tested it to strong numbers his way a couple of weeks ago. Rob wants it longer… and his test was not as strong. Meanwhile, even though the film is months from release, a musical needs to lock this early because the music mix takes a long time. (They have already done a lot of work on the singing in DDL’s numbers, though his acting performance is said to be very strong.)
So that seems to be the deal. Yes, I am sure the company would like to have some revenue in from Youth In Revolt, The Road, and even Hoodwinked 2 before making the BIG push for Nine. I don’t think it’s unfair to suggest that Nine means a whole lot to the future of the company.
But the endless repetition of old rumors about TWC (and even some old news) really misses it. Yeah, when things aren’t going well and the media is waiting for you to kick the studio bucket, every choice is defined by that notion. But this choice for Nine makes every kind of sense. Not launching wide on a film like this is, in reality, a sign of confidence, not fear… no matter what the condition of the distributor.
None of this means that Nine will, in fact, be a magic bullet for TWC. It could crap out. Or like Inglourious Basterds, it could be a success with little significance in the bigger economic picture for the company. But, as the man says, only time will tell.

DP/30 Sneak Peek – TIFF '09 – Nick Hornby, Screenwriter Of An Education

I Wonder Whether Poynter Should Be Allowing Kelly McBride To Speak For Them In Public

Said as only a person who has no experience reporting could say it…
“If you’re sitting there with a microphone on, you don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy,” said Kelly McBride, an expert in journalism ethics for the Poynter Institute. “If you’re a governor or president, you know that.”
She also questioned whether news organizations should be agreeing to go off the record with the president.
Judging by the things written by other Twitter users since West’s action, Obama wasn’t in the minority, she said.
“The president calling Kanye West a ‘jackass’ is perfect information for a tweet,” she said. “In fact, that’s the ideal format. You can do it in 140 characters. There’s not much else to say.”
The full story.

A Single Man

How do we know the indie world is running a bit brain damaged at the moment? A Single Man turns out to be the first real film sale of the festival.
Does that mean I dislike the movie? No. But in a festival with a lot of good, small films, why is the one they all suddenly had to have the Strand release blown up by Tom Ford hype? Just odd.
Ford, as a first timer, does a nice job creating a living, breathing Vanity Fair magazine. The film is pretty. And Colin Firth is excellent as a closed off, pained man who feels his life is over with the loss of his lover. It’s the kind of performance in the kind of movie that could draw an Oscar nod in the thin list of actress contenders each year. But Best Actor is a 1000 to 1 shot. In fact, Julianne Moore has a better shot at Supporting, which might be why The Weinsteins bought the film… to protect their category, which is likely to already be an uphill fight with 2 likely nominations for Dench and either Hudson or Cruz.
Anyway… the movie is good, but self aware to the point of what will be comedy for some audiences. It’s practically made in Gay-O-Vision, with the most beautiful men on the planet, Julianne Moore as The Ultimate Fag Hag ( beautiful, drunk, and desperate to sleep with our gay hero because she no longer can deal with the idiocy – and ungroomed hair – of straight men), and even a color scheme change to signal the audience that sexual arousal is occurring.
I admit, if this was a straight story and the star was Harrison Ford or Kevin Coster or Richard Jenkins, it would be a different, more commercial animal. But it never would have been shot like a J Crew catalog shoot where the stylist forgot to bring the clothes. Thing is, that IS Ford’s accomplishment. He has made a pretty movie of a tiny, fragile story and it works. In many ways, it is the gay Precious… only there is no gay Oprah to front it as Important. (No, I’m not sure that Ellen will relate.) But is is, all in all, a better movie than Precious. Ford shows a skill and though it is a very, very specific skill, it includes solid, simple storytelling and he gets good work out of all of his actors.
So… what to make of it? It’s a ghetto film, but it’s the most beautiful ghetto ever. Ford shows none of the subtextual complexity or range of Todd Haynes or the brutal intimacy of Ozon or the camp insight of Sam Mendes and Alan Ball’s American Beauty. It’s like an extended version of one scene from the work of those masterful films. But that’s good company and a good start. I, for one, will look forward to seeing if this pony has a second trick.
I saw it, I was fine with it, I can see it being “a film for us”, and I applaud the idea of films for us. It will play great on wide screens in retail stores with no sound. And I would be afraid that this was an insult, except I also feel that this is exactly what the filmmaker intended on this one.

DP/30 Sneak Peek – Ellen Page & Alia Shawkat WHIP IT

NBC's Leno Select

NBC sent out this clip from The Jay Leno Show premiere ahead of posting it on the NBC site.., but because I am in Toronto, I can’t watch it. Ah… region coding…