Indieville : Versus

Meryl Streep, luckless thespian

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:14:28 GMT

Sometimes The Onion's stories and editorials are pointed satire and sometimes they're just goofy conceits and absurdities. The much-discussed fake Meryl Streep editorial is something else. In it, "Streep" bemusedly points out that despite her reputation as one of America's best actresses, she's never owned a flat-out masterpiece. If you rewrote it not in Streep's voice, there's actually no joke; it's actually just kind of a curious thing someone picked up on...(read more)

What people know when they say they know movies.

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 22:30:00 GMT

Our friends at Time Out New York have whipped up a neat little alt-canon of 25 films most people wouldn't think of as essential to cinematic knowledge in the way of "Citizen Kane" or "Battleship Potemkin" but which, according to them, should be. Now, I applaud the TONY crew for digging deep into their personal loves and not pandering one bit: on their list, relatively well-known fare like "Barry Lyndon" rubs shoulders with rarities like Mikio Naruse's 1964 "Yearning...(read more)

The mentally ill are either saints or devils.

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 22:35:00 GMT

There's a long, annoying sub-genre of movies in which we learn that people who are "insane" are actually "saner" than "normal" people. You can trace it back to 1967's "King of Hearts," in which soldier Alan Bates is forced to hide out in a mental asylum, where he grows as a human being, learns that War Is Bad and falls in love. It's too bad that the new report from British mental health nonprofit Mind -- in partnership with Rethink, another charity...(read more)

Tokyo versus "The Cove."

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 23:35:00 GMT

"The Cove," the Louie Psihoyos-directed outrage doc about dolphin drive hunting, capture and killing in Taiji, Japan, isn't turning out to be the relative box-office hit it seemed on track to become after winning an audience award at Sundance and gathering glowing reviews. Having only pulled in a total of $422,812 so far in limited national release, the film was used as the lynchpin of an LA Times article last week about the struggles of environmental docs to attract crowds. Now the...(read more)

How to save indie film? Form bands, not labs.

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Ted Hope, the major indie producer behind "Happiness," "American Splendor," "Adventureland" and many others, is a worrier -- he wants new distribution models and new ideas for independent film, and he wants them now. This week he's got a provocative guest post on his blog from Caitlin McCarthy, a screenwriter and inner-city public high school teacher with her own ideas about how to right the world. The post is titled "How to save indie film," and for McCarthy...(read more)

Wes Anderson, tumor.

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 21:54:30 GMT

In his interview with Noel Murray at the AV Club, Will Oldham expresses from pretty strong thoughts on movie music in general and Wes Anderson in particular: AVC: You mentioned talking to Richard Linklater and Caveh Zahedi about your ideas on movie music. Can you summarize those ideas? WO: Well, for a while, it seemed like you were always seeing movies where all the music was determined by the music supervisors and their special relationships with certain record labels. And I just felt like, "Wow...(read more)

Tha Lawsuit III.

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 18:20:52 GMT

"The Carter," Adam Bhala Lough's unexpectedly artful documentary about Lil Wayne that premiered at Sundance earlier this year, is now the source of a lawsuit from the wee multi-platinum rapper, who's suing the film's production company for "Breach of Contract, Fraud by Intentional Misrepresentation, Constructive Fraud and Invasion of Privacy," among others, according to AllHipHop.com: Wayne and his company signed an agreement which stipulated that Weezy would make...(read more)

Copyright infringement, sadistic streaks and Hitchcock.

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 15:55:06 GMT

Sheldon Abend was a literary agent who purchased the rights to "It Had to Be Murder," a 1942 short story by Cornell Woolrich that was adapted by Alfred Hitchcock into "Rear Window." He died in 2003, but his estate endures and has finally noticed that the 2007 Shia LaBeouf thriller "Disturbia" is an awful lot like Hitch's film and filed a copyright infringement lawsuit. Abend was litigious in life, too: "It Had to Be Murder" has already been the basis of...(read more)

Chris Smith, Todd Solondz and the question of intent.

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 21:57:38 GMT

Chris Smith's feature "The Pool" opened in New York yesterday, and today the Onion AV Club's Scott Tobias takes on his 1999 documentary "American Movie" as part of his "New Cult Canon" series, noting that "the main knock against the movie is that Smith is condescending to his subjects and carting them out exclusively so we can laugh at their ineptitude... At the risk of passing the blame, I'd say that any condescension brought to American Movie comes...(read more)

Timing is everything.

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:23:18 GMT

Mike Scott at New Orleans' Times-Picayune notes the impeccable taste Lionsgate is showing in releasing "Disaster Movie" on the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, August 29th: Around these Katrina-scarred parts, Aug. 29 is still -- and will be for some time -- a black-armband kind of day. For Lionsgate studios, however, Aug. 29 isn't quite as sacred. For them, the third anniversary of the day the levees were breached and New Orleans slipped under is something on the order of...(read more)

We Todd Did.

IFC.com - Indie Eye — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:51:31 GMT

While the folks behind "Tropic Thunder" had obviously soldiered up in advance for -- and were probably counting on -- controversy surrounding Robert Downey Jr.'s (totally hilarious) turn as a method actor in surgically applied blackface, the vehement protests surrounding the film's frequent, gleeful use of the work "retarded" seem to have blindsided them. Bonnie Goldstein at Slate points to the 11-page kit released by a group that includes the American Association of People...(read more)