Tag: Film

You can’t help but wonder what prompted the British to make a TV movie about assassinating Pres. Bush. One thing’s for sure: such a film could never be made in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

The program, to be aired Oct. 9, uses actors and digital manipulation of real footage to show a fictional account of Bush being gunned down after delivering a speech in Chicago, Peter Dale, the head of More4, told a news conference. More4 is the digital offshoot of Britain’s Channel 4.

“Death of a President,” which will first be shown this month at the Toronto Film Festival, in September, focuses on all those linked to the pretend crime — including nearby antiwar protesters, suspects, Secret Service guards and investigators, Dale said.

The White House declined to comment on the network’s announcement, saying it would not dignify the program with a response.

Plus, they couldn’t think of anything.

“It’s an extraordinarily gripping and powerful piece of work, a drama constructed like a documentary that looks back at the assassination of George Bush as the starting point for a very gripping detective story,” Dale told reporters. “It’s a pointed political examination of what the war on terror did to the American body politic.”

I wonder if it will be banned in this country.

We knew North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il was a film fan, but who knew he was an auteur. His latest film, “Diary of a Student Girl,” has them lining up to buy tickets, or else:

The North Korean’s official news agency KCNA reports that “Diary” — which conveys the trials and tribulations of a girl and her younger sister as they strive to be scientists — is screening “before full houses in [the capitol] Pyongyang every day, evoking lively response from people of all walks of life.” What’s more, KCNA says that the film “embodies the Juche-oriented idea of aesthetics of leader Kim Jong Il,” and that Dear Leader found time during his “continuous inspection tour of frontline army units” to work on the script and produce the film, hailed as “a masterpiece of the times.” (Juche is the guiding North Korean ideology of self-reliance.)

“Dear Leader” Kim has long had an obsession with film, claiming to have written and directed several movies. He also allegedly kidnapped the director considered the Orson Welles of South Korea and his actress wife, forcing them to create propagandist pictures for the Communist state.

Of course, we would tell you that “Diary of a Student Girl” was the top hit of 2006 in North Korea, but it’s not even 2006 there — the North’s calendar starts in our 1912, the birth year of Kim Il Sung, so over there, it’s Juche 95.

The rightwing just cannot resist lying about Al Gore. This time it’s Matt Drudge who retracted a story on his website saying that Gore and his party drove SUVs 500 feet from their hotel to a screening at the Cannes Film Festival because it proved to be untrue:

ThinkProgress contacted Gore’s representatives, who unequivocally confirmed that Al Gore and his associates walked from the Majestic Hotel to the screening at Cannes. Further, Paramount has committed to making the entire tour promoting the film carbon neutral.

LA Weekly’s Nikki Finke:

Way back on January 17th, I decided to nominate the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for Best Bunch of Hypocrites. That’s because I felt this year’s dirty little Oscar secret was the anecdotal evidence pouring in to me about hetero members of the Academy of Motions Picture Arts and Sciences being unwilling to screen Brokeback Mountain. For a community that takes pride in progressive values, it seemed shameful to me that Hollywood’s homophobia could be on a par with Pat Robertson’s. So in the February 1st issue of LA Weekly, I warned that, despite the hype you saw in the press and on the Internet about Brokeback, with its eight nominations, being the supposed favorite to take home the Best Picture Oscar, Crash could end up winning.

Well, turns out I was right. Hollywood showed tonight it isn’t the liberal bastion it once was. That’s pitiful if you’re a progressive, and pleasing if you’re a conservative.

I don’t usually care which film wins the Oscars, but last night I was rooting for “Brokeback Mountain” so the fact that it lost to “Crash” was a disappointment. Film reviewer Kenneth Turan says what I privately suspected in the Los Angeles Times this morning:

Sometimes you win by losing, and nothing has proved what a powerful, taboo-breaking, necessary film “Brokeback Mountain” was more than its loss Sunday night to “Crash” in the Oscar best picture category…

More than any other of the nominated films, “Brokeback Mountain” was the one people told me they really didn’t feel like seeing, didn’t really get, didn’t understand the fuss over. Did I really like it, they wanted to know. Yes, I really did.

In the privacy of the voting booth, as many political candidates who’ve led in polls only to lose elections have found out, people are free to act out the unspoken fears and unconscious prejudices that they would never breathe to another soul, or, likely, acknowledge to themselves. And at least this year, that acting out doomed “Brokeback Mountain.”

For Hollywood, as a whole laundry list of people announced from the podium Sunday night and a lengthy montage of clips tried to emphasize, is a liberal place, a place that prides itself on its progressive agenda. If this were a year when voters had no other palatable options, they might have taken a deep breath and voted for “Brokeback.” This year, however, “Crash” was poised to be the spoiler.

Movies as exquisitely made as “Brokeback” — I’m talking about the artistry, not the topic — come along once in a generation, if we’re lucky.

“Brokeback Mountain” did not lose last night because “Crash” is a better made film. “Brokeback Mountain” lost because a majority of Oscar voters were uncomfortable with its theme.

As a film geek, I’ll say this: In 50 years — when homophobia is looked at as an old fashioned prejudice the way anti-semiticism is now — “Brokeback” will be in the pantheon of great American films like “Casablanca,” “Citizen Kane” and “Gone with the Wind.” And last night will be considered a low point in Oscar history.

[…]

Atomfilms: Check out the short cartoon “Cheney’s Got a Gun,” spoofing Aerosmith’s “Janies Got a Gun.”

Watch video:

“Brokeback Mountain” won four prizes at the British Academy Film Awards today, including Best Picture, Best Director for Ang Lee, Best Adapted Screenplay for Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana and Best Supporting Actor for Jake Gyllenhaal.

Heath Ledger lost the Best Actor to Philip Seymour Hoffman who won for “Capote.” Reese Witherspoon won Best Actress for her portrayal of June Carter Cash in “Walk the Line.”

“Crash” was nominated for nine awards but only won one of the top tier prizes. Best Supporting Actress went to Thandie Newton.

“They’re not going to go see the gay cowboys in Montana. I’m sorry. They’re not going to do it.”

— Bill O’Reilly, Dec. 20, 2005

Au contraire, Monsieur Loofah: “Brokeback Mountain” is doing a brisk business in Montana, according to columnist Joe Nickell in the Helena Independent Record:

Here in Missoula, the film has been a smash hit since it opened at the 1,100-seat Wilma Theatre on Jan. 6. “It’s been super every night since we started showing it,” said Bill Emerson, who manages the 85-year-old theater.

Data collected by Focus Features, which produced the film, show that “Brokeback” grossed more than $33,000 at the Wilma during its first four weekends alone.

And…

“Brokeback” isn’t just doing well in this, traditionally the most liberal part of the state… It was the No. 1 draw during opening weekends in Helena and Whitefish…

And guess where the film enjoyed its best opening weekend in Montana? Hint: It wasn’t liberal Missoula.

Try Billings.

In its opening three-day weekend, “Brokeback Mountain” grossed … 15 percent better than the film did during its opening weekend at the Wilma…

So…

“O’Reilly apparently forgot that stereotypes and off-the-cuff prognostications, no matter how confidently voiced, have an uncanny way of falling apart under the cold light of reality.”

Last month, O’Reilly also admitted to Matt Lauer that he was scared to see the film, which has been nominated for eight Academy Awards:

“I’m afraid of cowboys. I’m from Long Island. I’m afraid of all cowboys. And gay cowboys? I mean, I don’t — I don’t get the whole shepherd-cowboy-pup tent connection. I’m not getting all of that stuff.”

Sadly, O’Reilly probably really believes that he understands the psyche of the average guy “out there” in the Red states, and that like him, Joe Sixpack’s heterosexuality is so tenuous and fragile that it might be destroyed by exposure to guy on guy action — even the 30 seconds of it in “Brokeback Mountain.”

That is scary. In my 50 years I’ve seen hundreds of hours of guy-on-gal tussling in Hollywood movies and it hasn’t moved me even a quarter notch off my perfect Kinsey 6.

The point is, O’Reilly’s “man of the people” persona is a hollow shell. He is as pampered and pompadoured as any TV star — and just as clueless about the real world in his first-class bubble as the average Republican senator or presidential advisor.