That NPR-spikes-Nathan Lee‘s-Outrage-review story is so cold you could wrap fish in it. It happened last weekend and Indiewire, slow on the pickup, ran a story about it four hours ago. Forget it, dead…this morning’s news. The reason for the spiking is that NPR editors didn’t want Lee to be able use a discussion of the content of Outrage to indirectly “out Idaho Sen. Larry Craig or Florida Governor Charlie Crist. Lee, naturally, was hugely pissed about this, and tried to post a protest.explanation on the NPR site. This too was removed by NPR.
My Three Days of the Condor Bluray arrived this morning. There’s a certain level of ’70s grain in Owen Roizman‘s cinematography. It’s a New York-based film, after all, and it wasn’t shot with the idea of looking “attractive.” But it sure looks nice all the same. Some shots are so pleasing (I’ve only seen about 30 minutes’ worth) they brought a smile to my face. This may be my last post before heading out to JFK.
I wrote publicist Phil Symes this morning about my keen interest in seeing Gaspar Noe‘s Into The Void in Cannes. I’m departing Cannes on Thursday, 5.21 and the first scheduled press screening is on Friday, 5.22, so I was hoping to catch a slightly earlier market showing. But Phil dashed my hopes.
“There will be no screenings prior to the 14:40 screening on Friday 22nd,” he replied. “The film is expected only to be completed the previous day. So sorry, this is not going to be possible.
I wrote back the following: “So Gaspar’s pulling a Wong Kar Wai this year, eh? I understand the exactitude and perfectionism that drives directors, of course, but a plan to have the film completed only one day before a Cannes debut seems a bit extreme. Not two or three or four days before the Cannes screening, which would be cutting it close enough, but only 24 hours before? Something manic in that.
“If Gaspar manages to finish it a tad earlier, please advise. I respect Gaspar highly and was looking very much forward to seeing this during the festival.” Phil promised to keep me in the loop if something changes.
Its reputation as perhaps the best written, best acted mumblecore bromance flick of all time more or less intact/unchallenged, Lynn Shelton‘s Humpday (Magnolia, 7.10) could/should emerge as an indie summer punch-through — here’s hoping. But isn’t it a basic rule of movie marketing that your two stars (in this case Mark Duplass and Joshua Leonard) should have the same stylistic appearance on the release poster that they have in the film?
Here’s the HD trailer, which went up…what, three or four days ago?
Pretty much everyone seems impressed by Star Trek‘s $72.5 million haul on 7,400 screens. Dissings from various HE talkbackers aside, the word on the street is apparently pretty good so there’s a better than decent shot at tripling the $72 mil and cresting $200 mil. But poor Wolverine‘s Sunday night figures were 68% less than last weekend’s…all she wrote.
“I just saw Warwick Thornton‘s Samson and Delilah, an Australian film selected for Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival,” says Down Under critic Joel Meares. “It’s a tough slog that takes you into remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory (basically the outback) and is relentlessly grim in some ways. But also extremely touching. It delivers emotionally like little else I’ve seen recently.
“This is definitely one to look out for. It’s probably the best and most profound thing to come out of this country for a few years at least. Two leads, untrained actors, perfectly natural, great perfs. I said to someone today it was like a good shot of Listerine washing away the bad taste of how ludicrously Aborigines were presented in Baz Luhrman‘s Australia.”
I just got back from a 7:45 pm show of Kirby Dick’s Outrage! at the Clearview Chelsea plex on 23rd Street. Two tickets cost me $25 bills, which I didn’t like at all. Why didn’t they charge $15 a pop? And then I noticed maybe 30 people in the theatre. Chelsea is a gay neighborhood and the locals can’t be bothered to patronize one of the strongest and toughest films about the Washington realpolitik and the denial of gay civil rights? What are they doing, sipping Chardonnay and looking for action?
And then the trailers start and they look like dogshit — washed-out, pixellated, pathetic. This is because they’re being projected off a DVD with some kind of low-rent DVD projection player. And then Outrage! starts and it looks just as bad. I’d seen it initially at a Tribeca Film Festival screening at the School of Visual Arts theatre on 23rd Street (i.e., about a block west of the Clearview) and it looked much sharper, crisper, cleaner.
This is bullshit, I tell myself. I paid $25 for two tickets and the best the Clearview can do is pop a screener into their P.C. Richards DVD projection player and make Outrage! look awful? I paid money to see this? I could have asked Jeff Hill for a screener and watched it on my 42″ plasma and it would have looked just fine. What a rip.