Karina on SpoutBlog

Under discussion:

Children of Men  (2006)

• Are you ready for Children of Men: The TV Series? John Brownlee isn’t! Alfonso Cuaron’s film is “genre-defying masterpiece, exactly as long as it needs to be, every shot and line perfect,” he writes at Sci-Fi Scanner. “So obviously it requires weekly extrapolation to dilute the effect.”
• “It dawned on me as I was getting started that there is an important piece of information that many of you younger Pajibans may not be aware of. It saddens me to think this might be the case, and thus this review is given another purpose: to perhaps educate y’all. Because you see, here’s the thing: Eddie Murphy used to be funny.” Dustin Rowles watches 48 Hours with a hangover.
• Tee hee. Critic of Creationism/science blogger PZ Myers was banned from a screening of Ben Stein’s anti-Darwin propaganda film Expelled, but was told his guests could attend. One of Myers’ guests? Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, whose arguments the film basically exists to refute. Via Boing Boing.
• Andrew Bujalski has moved to Austin. He doesn’t know when his next movie will be finished.

Under discussion:

Funny Games  (2007)

Films by well-regarded international auteurs such as Michael Haneke rarely receive the critical drubbing afforded to Funny Games. Haneke’s scene-for-scene remake of his own film did actually earn high praise from a few major critics (Owen Gleiberman and Scott Tobias among them), but most critics concurred with J. Hoberman: “Haneke is pretty much a humorless pedant,” the Village Voice critic wrote. And then, the antithetical poster quote: “Professional obligations required that I endure it, but there’s no reason why you should.”

So you know things are bad when the one story that makes an effort to rehab your film’s rep from “atrocious” to “polarizing” is itself something of a trainwreck, boasting quizzically misread facts and apparently rushed to publication before its time.

I’m particularly troubled by the effort within this Variety story to make excuses for Games‘ disappointing opening weekend performance. Diane Garrett writes: “The pic did resonate with a certain aud, generating $520,000 at 289 theaters for a $1,799 per-screen average in its opening weekend.” How many screenings do you get from Friday-Sunday––say, 15? So $1,799 divided by 15 is about $120. Assuming the average ticket price is $8, that means 15 tickets were purchased for each screening. Is that the kind of number that passes for “resonance” these days? We know it’s Variety’s job to tell the studio’s side of the story (at least, apparently), but isn’t this a little extreme, even for them?

But it’s also pretty clear that this version of the story was not meant for our eyes. I screen capped the story at 1pm EST (see below the jump), after waiting five hours for a glaring editorial note to be removed from the online version. As of this writing, it hasn’t been. See my screencap, with the gaffe marked in red, after the jump.

(more…)

Yance Ford, a producer for PBS’s documentary series P.O.V., has a long consideration of Tuesday night’s Cinema Eye Honors at the P.O.V. blog. Though Ford has much praise for the project as a whole, he takes umbrage with one portion of Thom Powers’ opening remarks, and it happens to be one section of the evening that irked me, as well. Over to Yance:

I know Thom Powers to be a thoughtful, passionate programmer and a great filmmaker in his own right. But his opening remarks included a remark that I found troubling.He said that “distributors don’t get it, critics don’t get it and the general public doesn’t get it. We wanted to fill [this auditorium] with people who get it.” I’ll be the first to agree that independent documentary does not get the recognition it deserves, but I don’t think that the problem is the fact that the general public doesn’t “get it.” The problem is that the general public doesn’t get to see it.

Ford goes on to make the case that “as long as the documentary community prioritizes theatrical release and festival runs over broadcast, the public will continue to miss a large and dynamic body of work,” which could be construed as being a bit self-serving coming from the producer of a broadcast documentary program. But I think he’s right to point out that “the general public” hardly deserves blame for not supporting films that get little to no publicity, which are reviewed in only a fraction of publications. The average moviegoer would have to do a good deal of detective work to know that 80% of the films nominated for a Cinema Eye even existed. Isn’t that why the Cinema Eyes exist in the first place?

Whether intentionally or not (and I would assume probably not), Powers is basically making the same argument that Lou Lumenick made in the most hateable quote in that Hollywood Reporter story that everyone’s mad about: the New York Post critic claimed that it’s not his responsibility to review smaller films because “The only complaints we’ve gotten (on not running some reviews) are from publicists and distributors…Not a single one from readers.” In no other market sector would the consumer be blamed for not demanding a product that they didn’t know was available.