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Under discussion:

Cecil B. Demented  (2000)

One made Maggie Gyllenhall pretend to drink goats urine; the other has been accused of his own scatalogical crimes. What else do R. Kelly and John Waters have in common? I’ll let Evan Shapiro, EVP and general manager of IFC, explain:

[W]hen I brought Trapped in the Closet into the office to screen it for my bosses, people at the company suggested that I seek counseling.

Call me crazy (or obsessed), I find something in Trapped that makes it a natural next step in this experiment. While it might not be on the scale of Midnight Cowboy, in its own iconoclastic, pop-culture way, Trapped in the Closet challenges the traditional mores and sexual stereotypes of the current climate as boldly — and hysterically — as many films coming out of Hollywood or the indie movement. The cheating women, the closeted preacher, the pop star hiding in the closet, the adulterous midget with a paternity problem — Kelly makes a case to carry the mantle of John Waters into the new millennium. You may laugh, but you can’t look away.

You’ll find much more from Shapiro here, and though most of the insights take the form of barely-veiled plugs for IFC TV’s summer slate, it’s always nice to see a powerful TV executive draw attention to his pun on the term “doing it.”

Via The House Next Door comes this post from Scanners, where Jim Emerson (editor of Roger Ebert’s website) pays tribute to Michelangelo Antonioni by posting a letter to Ebert from actor Ronan O’Casey. The letter dates back to 1999: Casey, who played the corpse at the center of Antonioni’s biggest commercial hit Blow-up, read an appraisal of the film written by Ebert and felt compelled to contact the critic with some further details about the production.

According to Casey, key scenes depicting his character’s murder were scripted, but due to budget issues, were never shot:

You stated in your article that Antonioni must have been happy while he was making this film. Well, yes, he was, at least while he was overspending his budget lavishly…The producer was Carlo Ponti, and he had been supervising another production which delayed his arrival in London. When he got there, he was furious. “Basta, Michelangelo, finito, we are done!” Shooting stopped and the crew went back to Italy. Antonioni took the bits and pieces of the film that had been shot and wove them together in a film since hailed for its “mystery” and “enigma.” Of course it was mysterious; it was never finished!

The letter is pretty juicy; you can read the whole thing, including an anecdote about Jane Birkin’s “unadorned pudenda,” at this link.

Interestingly, Emerson contextualizes the corpse’s testimony by placing it alongside a quote from another letter to Ebert, this one pre-dating Casey’s letter by thirty years, in which Antonioni himself confesses that most of his films were the product of on-set improvisation and editing-room experimentation: “Until the film is edited, I have no idea myself what it will be about. And perhaps not even then.”

To me, that only strengthens the argument put forth earlier this week by David Hudson, that “as we head into the late 00’s, the almost standardized “festival film” bears the mark of no other director more than Antonioni’s.” And in fact, Antonioni’s self-described working method sounds remarkably similar to that of many of today’s festival darlings. But oh, how I can’t wait to hear the Derrièrist response…

Under discussion:

The Simpsons Movie  (2007)

Frownland  (2007)

The big movie/little movie dichotomy at extremes. Kevin calls in the biggest Simpsons fan he knows–his big brother–to talk about The Simpsons movie. We interview Ronald Bronstein about his movie, Frownland, a super low budget movie that completely polarizes audiences wherever it has the fortune to be screened.

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