Eight months after debuting at Sundance ’06 and being pretty much praised to the heavens, Christopher Quinn and Tommy Walker‘s God Grew Tired Of Us has finally landed a distribution deal.
National Geographic Films, which “co-presented” March of the Penguins, is pooling forces with Newmarket Films on a plan to open it “early next year”, according to this story by Variety‘s Nicole LaPorte.
NGF “is providing funds to complete the film,” she reports. (What does that mean? Pay off the catering bill? It looked completed to me when I saw it eight months ago.) Nicole Kidman is narrating the doc. Brad Pitt exec produced; Catherine Keener and Dermot Mulroney co-produced.
“We’re a big media company with a lot of different moving parts,” NGF president Adam Leipzig told LaPorte.
Leipzig and his homies saw God at Sundance also (probably the same screening I attended). “We were blown away,” he tells LePorte. “We walked out of the theater and found the agents at CAA who were representing the movie, and said, ‘We have to be involved in this movie.’ It was one of those responses that was instantaneous and completely clear to us.”
And yet it took eight months to put a deal together. Lots of deal points to smooth out, right? Everybody’s gotta get their cut, lotsa lawyers involved. Anyway, fast work!
Will the film at least open sufficiently for it to compete for the Best Doc Oscar? It should.
God Grew Tired of Us tells the story of three young Sudanese guys — John, Daniel, and Panther — all of them refugees from their country’s ongoing, utterly devastating civil war, and members of a massive army known as the “lost boys of Sudan”. The film is about their escape to America to start new lives only to encounter profound longings for home and family, and no small measure of guilt.
The HE piece I wrote about the film last January is called “Lonely Deliverance” — you’ll have to scroll down some.

A very nicely rendered trailer for Clint Eastwood‘s Flags of Our Fathers (Dreamamount, 10.20). There’s some kind of deal in place by which www.miltary.com is the only website currently showing it….cool.

The Venice Film Festival jury has given the Golden Lion to Jia Zhangke‘s Still Life — hah! — and not Stephen Frears ‘ The Queen or Emilio Estevez‘s Bobby . The latter two were named as the most likely Golden Lion winners in a recent Reuters story by Mike Collett-White and Silvia Aloisi…wrong! The Silver Lion for Best Director went to director Alain Resnais for Private Fears in Public Places , and a Silver Lion Revelation trophy went to Emanuele Crialese for Nuovomondo — Golden Door.

I read an earlybird “review” two or three months ago that said Ridley Scott‘s A Good Year (20th Century Fox, 11.10) was a little too mild and unassertive for its own good. The writer was somewhat persuasive because ever since I’ve been referring to this film in my column jottings as “Ridley Lite.”
Well, back up on that. A Good Year, which had its first press screening this morning at 9 ayem, is a lightweight film, all right, and, okay, more than a little formulaic from the get-go…but it goes down so easily and smartly, and after the first 35 or 40 minutes or so the mood of it begins to sink in like expensive French skin cream, and the result is a kind of airy, nectary enchantment that is relatively rare in mainstream cinema these days.
And I swear on my kids that Russell Crowe, the fuming, flying-phone-man of legend, is 50% of the cause of all this sweet, mellow charm. The other 50% contributor is Scott, of course. And let’s give some credit, also, to the late Harry Nilsson, whose songs turn up on the soundtrack three times. (“Gotta Get Up”, one my favorites, is one of them.)
And let’s offer a toast, also, to the cinematography, the French sun, the vineyards, the aroma, the taste of it, the beautiful women…the whole succulent package. This, to me, is first-class escapism.
The Good Year press conference is about to begin (I’m typing this from the press room at teh Sutton Place hotel) so I’ll continue this piece later on this afternoon ….probably.

Peter O’Toole‘s performance as an aging, spirited, rogue-ishly randy actor in Roger Michell‘s Venus (Miramax, 12.15) hasn’t been overhyped — I saw the film late yesterday afternoon and it’s certainly one of his very best. But it has been, I think, under-described. It’s a performance of profound tenderness and vulnerabilty …artful frailty, if you will.

O’Toole is 74 and is playing a man in his early to mid ’80s, and bravely, it seemed to me. He makes you chuckle at times, and of course is charming to the last, but it’s not an audience-pleasing “performance” as much as a piece of naked exposure about what it is to be at death’s door and stll wanting to be alive in every way you can.
It’s a beautiful job, and it makes me all the more sad that O’Toole won’t be coming to Toronto after all. It was announced yesterday that he’s too sick to travel from Britain. Something about “intestinal problems, which he’s had before,” according an a story in Tom O’Neill‘s column.

Emilio Estevez‘s Bobby “is bound to get mixed reactions from critics, especially those not attuned to the times and attitudes it depicts,” says a voice from Los Angeles. “Estevez is aping Grand Hotel and every other multi-story ensemble pic right up to last year’s Crash. Taken as a whole it’s admirable and, I feel, necessary.” I get what he’s saying. The under-40s who aren’t especially liberal or political-minded aren’t likely to respond like boomers who were “there” in one way or another.

James Bond is dead, poor Daniel Craig is the first mate on a sinking ship, Bourne is the new Bond, etc. But people keep sending me the brand-new Bond/Casino Royale trailer and I have to admit…fuck that, I don’t have to admit anything. But it’s well cut and gives you a good jolt. I’ve just been disliking 007 producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli more than usual because they persuaded director Roger Michell to bail on the next one.

I somehow missed this two-day-old Radar Online poll about who’s Hollywood’s biggest hack (answer: Brett Ratner), most wanted actor (answer: Brad Pitt), most dysfunctional director (answer: Michael Mann) and so on. The reporter (whom I assume is Marcus Baram, whom I’ve known since his days working for George Rush at the N.Y. Daily News) talked to roughly 50 “power brokers”.

Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson on the three amigos — directors Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu (Babel) and Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men) — who huddle, collaborate, advise each other on creative matters, and generally watch each other’s back.