Death of a President has been an oddity since its inception — a film about the murder of George W. Bush that got reamed by many reviewers, yet won the International Critics award at September's Toronto film festival. Its strange journey continues: Now its studio, Newmarket, is having trouble finding theaters willing to show it. ''We don't feel it's appropriate to play a film that depicts the assassination of our current president,'' declares an AMC rep. Newmarket execs, who know a thing or two about controversy after releasing The Passion of the Christ in 2004, claim they're content with the 100 or so theaters opening the flick on Oct. 27. ''In the places it's not available, I'm hearing, 'Why not?''' says marketing and distribution head Richard Abramowitz, who denies DoaP's release was timed to coincide with midterm elections. (Speaking of which, White House reps say ''[the film]does not dignify a response.'') ''People [will] make up their own minds about the film,'' Abramowitz adds. Unfortunately for him, that's what at least one chain has done — stressing that their dissent stems from a different taste test. Quips a Cinemark exec: ''It's not a great [filmgoing] experience.''
(Posted:10/27/06)
By Borys Kit
Mon Oct 30
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Universal Pictures has won the intense bidding war for "Bruno,"
Sacha Baron Cohen's follow-up movie to "Borat."
Sources said that Universal is paying $42.5 million for the worldwide rights to the film. The price includes the production budget of the film, rumored to be in the $20 million-$25 million range. Also included is a significant profit-participation component for the film's participants, believed to be the 15% range.
The price has raised eyebrows in Hollywood because Baron Cohen's much-hyped "Borat" does not open until November 3. Despite much advance praise for "Borat," distributor Fox scaled back its Friday opening to about 800 theaters because it is concerned that the movie wasn't registering high enough in audience-awareness tracking.
With "Bruno," Baron Cohen is calling upon another of his comic alter egos, Bruno, a gay fashionista from Austria who fancies himself as "the voice of Austrian youth TV" and who sashayed from New York Fashion Week to Miami nightclubs in his previous appearance on HBO's "Da Ali G Show,"on which Baron Cohen also first introduced Borat to American audiences.
As in the case of "Borat," Jay Roach would produce with Baron Cohen. No director is on board, though it has been reported that Baron Cohen wants to shoot the movie during the summer.
Reuters/Hollywood Reporter
EW
(excerpts)
WEDNESDAY, October 18, 2006
One evening this summer, a number of Hollywood's finest comedic minds gathered in a Los Angeles screening room to watch an early rough cut of a new comedy, awkwardly titled Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. The audience, which included legendary stand-up comic Garry Shandling, Simpsons writer George Meyer, 40 Year-Old Virgin director Judd Apatow, and Curb Your Enthusiasm star-creator Larry David, thought they were just there to offer the filmmakers a little helpful feedback. When the movie ended and the lights came up, everyone realized they'd just seen something totally original, perhaps even revolutionary. Capturing the sense of collective astonishment, Meyer turned to Apatow and said, ''I feel like someone just played me Sgt. Pepper's for the first time.''
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Baron Cohen has rarely agreed to be interviewed as himself. In advance of Borat's release, he will only conduct interviews in character, via e-mail. His commitment to his concept is nothing short of extreme. For example, not only is Baron Cohen's Borat mustache real (it takes six weeks to grow), but the drab gray suit he wears is left unwashed to make him smell more ''foreign'' to people he meets. At a time when the line between the real and the unreal in popular culture seems ever more blurred — fake reality TV, fake news, fake Internet celebrities, fake memoirs — Baron Cohen has taken our sense of uncertainty about what can be believed to its logical cinematic conclusion.
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Baron Cohen has said that the character of Borat was inspired by a Russian doctor he once met, but one of the undeniable masterstrokes in bringing him to life was having him hail from Kazakhstan. Though Kazakhstan is the ninth-largest country in the world — look at a map, the sucker is big — the former Soviet republic represents one of many gaping holes in the average American's shaky knowledge of geography. Even in a time of supposedly heightened awareness about our nation's place in the wider world, Baron Cohen exploits the fact that Americans can be made to believe the most absurd things about life in other countries. The truth is, when playing Borat, Baron Cohen is not even actually speaking Kazakh but mainly pure gibberish with a sprinkling of some Hebrew and Polish.
But even more remarkable than what Baron Cohen gets people to accept about Kazakhstan is what he gets them to reveal about themselves.
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In spring 2003, he brought the idea for a Borat movie to Jay Roach, director of Austin Powers and Meet the Parents. (They were introduced by their manager Jimmy Miller.) Roach agreed to co-produce the movie, and together they pitched the idea to studios, ultimately going with Twentieth Century Fox, which greenlit it immediately. A longtime admirer of South Park, Baron Cohen sought out its creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone (whose South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut grossed $52 million in 1999), to bounce around story ideas. When Parker and Stone went off to make 2004's Team America:World Police, he brought in Todd Phillips (Old School) to direct.
After around three weeks of shooting in 2004, though, it was clear that the approach wasn't working — it created too much of a buffer between Borat and his subjects — and Phillips dropped out.
After a period of creative retooling, Baron Cohen hired Seinfeld writer and Curb Your Enthusiasm director Larry Charles, whom he'd met at a boxing match, to take the directing reins.
The unwitting subjects, whom Baron Cohen and his team carefully selected for their potential comedic value, were handed release forms that were, if not technically bogus, at least ambiguous as to the filmmakers' true intent. ''I don't want to get into the whole process,'' says Gianopulos. ''But people knew in advance they were being taped, so they signed the appropriate documents.'' Asked if the releases said ''Twentieth Century Fox'' on them, he answers, ''I don't know.''
Says Charles: ''I'd tell people, 'Right now this movie is only scheduled to be shown in Kazakhstan. I don't know what they're going to do with it. I'm just here to shoot it.'
One unsuspecting target, Ron Miller, took part in a formal dinner party arranged for Borat in Natchez, Miss. ''We signed the releases without even reading them,'' he admits. ''We have no idea what we signed.'' Miller says he and his fellow victims felt ''emotionally raped.'' To his relief, the scene didn't make the final cut, and he has no intention to sue anyone over the prank: ''Why be made a fool of twice?'' he says.
''Sometimes people would say, 'Is this real?''' says Charles. ''I'd say, 'Yes, it's totally real.' And in my mind I'm thinking, It may not be the reality you think it is, but trust me, it's real. There's film in the camera.''
Some have expressed concern that Borat's bigotry, particularly his virulent anti-Semitism, goes too far. The Anti-Defamation League recently issued a statement saying that, while it understands Baron Cohen's intentions, it fears that ''the audience may not always be sophisticated enough to get the joke.''
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"The day after I saw the movie, I told Sacha, 'Forget about Borat, you've f---ed that character every way you can — now go do a Brüno movie,' '' Stone says, referring to the final remaining Ali G Show character. ''He can't do a Borat sequel, but people will want to see a Sacha Baron Cohen sequel. People are going to want to see another movie like this, and he's really the only person in the world who can do it.'' (Matt Stone)
(Posted:10/12/06)
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The Kazakh government has shut down your website and threatened to sue Sacha Baron Cohen for defaming the people of Kazakhstan. What do you say in response?
Firstly I am respectable, professional journalist and I will not be drawn into mudslingings with anyone — especially not a Jew.
What do you think the people back home in Kazakhstan will think of the movie?
This movie have already been release in Kazakhstan and was blockbusterings! It open simultaneous on all seven of our country's screens and take top spot from Hollywood movie King Kong — which had been number one film in Kazakhstan ever since it was release in 1933.
What do you say to people who charge that your movie is particularly offensive to Jews?
Yes. Is a good observations. Thank you very much.
What do you think of American leaders such as George Bush, Hillary Clinton, and Gov. Schwarzenegger?
We think Premier Bush very strong man and very handsome, but not as handsomes as his father, Barbara.
You hosted the MTV Europe Music Awards last year. Who are your favorite pop stars and why?
I am current listen to 'Bing Bang' by Korki Butchek, 'Everbody Dancing Now' by C and C Music Manufacturing Plant, 'Girls Just Want To Have F---' by Cyndis Laupers, and also 'Candling The Winds' by bald homosexual Eltonjohn. I also big fanny of ladies man, Freddy Mercury. It was a shame he die in that car crash.
Your movie has been getting overwhelmingly positive reviews. How do you see your chances of winning an Oscar?
In anticipate of this Oscars event, my 12-year-old son Hooeylewis has set off travelling here on foot from Kazakhstan with his wife and two childrens. If he arrive in time I have promise him that he can make romance explosion inside most beautiful actress in world, Liza Minelli.
Shortbus
Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum
A squaresville term like hardcore just doesn't apply to the nonstop sexual activity in Shortbus. Core-free is a more apt description for the real sex performed by the noodly actors in John Cameron Mitchell's giddy carnal extravaganza. The participants demonstrate, as per the impish intentions of the man who invented the brilliant Hedwig and the Angry Inch, that inserting tab A into slot B is as unremarkable a daily activity as brushing one's teeth. Except maybe funnier, if that diddles your funny bone.
It'd be dishonest not to disclose that it doesn't diddle mine, not the way Mitchell has in mind. If I'm going to see sex on screen — as opposed to the brushing of teeth — I want something hotter. I find these people silly, and desperately antic.
Anyhoooo — the movie is a fiesta of effing as well as of joking, singing, and even of complaining the way clothed people do all the time. Sook-Yin Lee plays a sex therapist seen banging her way through positions A to Z with her husband, yet frustrated that she has never had an orgasm. Paul Dawson and PJ DeBoy play boyfriends looking for a willing third. A dominatrix has relationship issues. Everyone knows his and her way around downtown New York City streets.
And for the getting off of rocks, everyone makes visits to a weekly Brooklyn sex salon of Mitchell's invention, named for the stubby school vehicle that transports special-needs and special-ed kids. Shortbus is chipper, it's fresh, it emits a distinct musk of controversy. I'll take the longbus.
(Posted:10/04/06)
indiewire.com
What general advice would you impart to emerging filmmakers?
I'd tell them to check out "Tarnation."
- John Cameron Mitchell
Little Children
Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum
When did words like adult, child, suburban, and playground lose their neutrality — their innocence? When did the Pedophile Menace Alert get raised to red in this country so proud of its hazard-free swing sets and juice boxes? Little Children, a jolting, artfully made drama set in and around a suburban playground somewhere between American Beauty and In the Bedroom on America's psychic highway, is populated by parents who are surprised by adulthood and children who are treated like projects built by competitive students of What to Expect... books.
The trouble — satiric and dead-serious in turn — begins when two of those adults are shaken out of their own childlike stupors one day by dangerous grown-up desire: Sarah (Kate Winslet), the restless mother of a little girl and wife of a man (Gregg Edelman) lost in work and Internet porn (the latter's a misplaced satiric touch), meets Brad (Patrick Wilson), the passive, handsome father of a little boy and stay-at-home husband of an alpha-female documentary filmmaker (Jennifer Connelly).
What begins as an idle hug — a playground dare, really, to shock some gossipy mothers — becomes something first emotionally important, and then sexually urgent, even torrid. The coupling on screen is hungry and exposed, something with which only an actress as honest and confident as Winslet can be entrusted, and to which Wilson responds with vigor. The two make a riveting, attractive couple of unhappy lovers who, unlike the cartoon cavorters in Desperate Housewives, have no intention of messing up their nests, and then do so; it is no accident that Sarah joins a book-group discussion of Madame Bovary, or that Todd Field directs with the same sensitivity to male and female failings he brought to In the Bedroom.
Almost all the parents, meanwhile, remain pathetically immature in their lack of psychological self-awareness, a condition Field alludes to with just the faintest raising of an eyebrow and some judiciously applied third-person narration. (Will Lyman, the stentorian voice of so many Frontline documentaries, provides a cool tone of sociological detachment.) And that middle-class naïveté is brought into even sharper focus by the introduction of Ronnie (All the King's Men's Jackie Earle Haley, whose very skull conveys depravity), a pedophile who did time for indecent exposure and now lives nearby with his own aging mommy (Phyllis Somerville).
As Tom Perrotta makes clear in the 2004 novel on which he and Field based their fine screenplay, the parents in Little Children can't recognize need in themselves or their kids. But they think they're experts when it comes to Ronnie, urging constant monitoring and even further punishment at the slightest opportunity — a calling to which one overwound ex-cop (Noah Emmerich) responds with zeal. Who are the little children in this dark tragicomedy? It depends on how broadly you define the neutral word playground.
(Posted:10/04/06)
British actor Sacha Baron Cohen, dressed in his character 'Borat' poses for the press near the Eiffel tower in Paris, Monday, Oct. 9, 2006. Cohen is in France to promote his film called 'Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan'. (AP Photo/Christophe Ena)
9/20/06
NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - In the timeline of American punk rock, hardcore came between the punk of the 1970s
and 1990s grunge.
Characterized by fast, loud and aggressive songs, minimal musicianship and violent behavior by the audience, it remained below the radar of the mainstream. In "American Hardcore: The History of American Punk Rock 1980-1986," Paul Rachman and Steven Blush document this short-lived scene by talking to just about everyone who contributed to it.
Five years in the making, the Sony Pictures Classics release has a handmade look that nicely reflects its subject matter. Rachman and Blush avoid the use of voice-over. Instead, they allow almost 100 interviewees to ruminate on the significance of the scene and wax nostalgic about its loud, aggressive heyday. The documentary mainly will appeal to aficionados of the genre and will have more life on DVD than in theaters.
The film starts in 1980 and ends six years later when the scene vanished. The participants map out the history of the movement with surgical precision. Black Flag's articulate
Henry Rollins and the philosophically inclined Bad Brains are probably the best known exponents interviewed.
Most agree that hardcore was a reaction to the decline of '70s punk. When the Sex Pistols' Sid Vicious started taking drugs like a despised hippie rock star, some punks felt betrayed -- and decided to make the music themselves. Socially, hardcore was a reaction against the conservatism of the Reagan era.
Blush and Rachman treat the hardcore movement with reverence. The musicians tell them they believed in what they were doing and didn't expect to last or make money. The issues of audience violence -- fans used to beat one another up at concerts -- misogyny and racism are addressed. But the filmmakers' love of their subject means that they are too lenient in their criticisms.