Day: July 9, 2013

“The number one fact of the new low-budget cinema is that it is no longer impossible to get your film financed, but it is impossible to get anybody to see it,” says The Canyons director Paul Schrader in a new, Canyons-kowtowing issue of Film Comment. Both Kent Jones and Larry Gross give it little pats on the back. Oh, yeah? Then why didn’t The Canyons get into Sundance or South by Southwest? Why did Steven Soderbergh offer to recut it for Schrader, and why did Scharder turn him down? What about the likely bedrock truth of the matter?

The problem, says Schrader, is that “there are 10,000 people doing the same thing you’re doing, right now. And which one of those 10,000 films is anybody going to see? 15,000 films get submitted to Sundance, 100 or so get shown, eight get picked up, and two make money. Those are the economics.

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I just don’t relate to short guys, and I don’t mean that negatively. I’ve never agreed with Randy Newman and I completely agree that “it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” But I’ve always felt a certain remove from guys who’ve never grown beyond the size I was when I was ten. When I see a short guy pulling a gun or kissing a girl or beating up some guy in a bar, I don’t say to myself “okay, whatever” — I say to myself “whoa, that short guy isn’t letting his stature determine his attitude or fate!” And I respect their rage. Everyone knows angry short guys can be more ferocious than anyone. Napoleon Bonaparte, Truman Capote, Swifty Lazar, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, etc.

All to say that the first thing I noticed when I watched this Wasteland trailer is that Luke Treadaway is a little guy. (Roughly the size of Charlie Kaufman.) And Iwan Rheon, Gerard Kearns and Matthew Lewis are no giants-of-the-earth either.

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Earlier today Harvey Weinstein, attorney David Boies, MPAA honcho Christopher Dodd and First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams kicked around the Weinstein Co.-vs.-Warner Bros. Butler squabble on CBS This Morning. WB attorneys are clearly the ayeholes in this dispute. “What the hell do they need the title for?,” Weinstein said. “If you watched this as a movie, you would say ‘this smells.'” Why not just choose another title, Harvey? “What should I call it? Something Else? A Movie Formerly Known as The Bee?” The Lee Daniels pic opens on 8.16.

In a 7.9 review titled “Slaughtering Intelligence,” Marshall Fine calls Killing Season (Millenium, 7.12), the Robert DeNiro-vs.-John Travolta paycheck movie, “sadistically violent, over-the-top…laughably bad.”

Fine saw it last week at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, “[and] if I hadn’t, you wouldn’t be reading this review,” he notes, “because the only press screening in the U.S. is Wednesday night (7.10) and reviews are embargoed online until 6PM Thursday, 7.11.

Travolta introduced the Karlovy Vary screening “and warned the crowd that the film was violent ‘but not gratuitously so,'” Fine write. “That apparently included the scene where Travolta himself gets shot through both cheeks with an arrow, which embeds in a door, leaving him hanging as unhappily as a butterfly pinned to a specimen tray. That’s just before De Niro waterboards him with a mixture of lemon juice and salt.

“I’d call Killing Season a cat-and-mouse game. But that would insult felines and rodents, both of which are much smarter than this movie.”