The Circuit

IFC Films has picked up U.S. rights to Anges Jaoui's French family drama "Let it Rain," making its North American preem at the NY Film Fest on Friday.  Pic will be released next year through IFC in Theaters, the company's day-and-date platform.

Jaoui was nominated for an Academy Award for "The Taste of Others" and directed the Cannes winner "Look at Me."

IFC Films' Arianna Bocco and Lizzie Nastro negotiated the deal with StudioCanal's Harold van Lier and Anna Marsh.

In his NY film fest piece, Stephen Holden puts Jolie and Rourke in the ring as "shameless Oscar bait," saying they are remarkably similar:

If “The Wrestler” repeatedly body-slams you from wall to wall, “Changeling” does the same thing emotionally.

After a Venice film fest win and a quick sell in Toronto, Darren Aronofsky unspooled "The Wrestler" to press on U.S. soil at the New York Film Festival.  The pic closes the 46th NYFF on October 12. 

Aronofsky said this U.S. preem kicks off a whirlwind tour as he and Fox Searchlight look to sell the film to auds and awards voters before its December 19 release. 

The film's lead, Mickey Rourke, is their focus.  Rourke plays a down-on-his-luck wrestler, looking for a comeback.

Talking to press after a packed screening, Rourke fidgeted with an unlit stogie as he remembered the exhaustive prep.  "Darren had ring put up in his office and every day would make me go to wrestling practice.  At first I didn't get it," said Rourke.  "In boxing you're taught to hide everything.  In wrestling you have to show it."

Moderated by fest programmer Richard Pena, Rourke and Aronofsky were joined by the film's producer Scott Franklin and co-star Marisa Tomei, who plays a stripper in the film.  "Darren didn't have a strip pole in his office for me," she added.

"Wrestling and boxing are like ping pong and rugby.  Two totally different sports," Rourke continued.  "I got hurt more in three months of wrestling than sixteen years of boxing.  I think I had three MRIs in two months.  Darren would screech at me, 'You're only giving me 50 percent!'  I'd tell him, 'I can't move, brother!'" 

"I can honestly say this is the best and the hardest movie I ever made," said Rourke.  "I was so goddamn thankful the day we were done."

"The whole attitude was to try to stick us in as many real situations as much as possible," said Aronofsky.  "We had real wrestling promotions, real fans.  Mickey wrestled a real wrestler, not a stuntman.  There was a financial reason for that, but that wasn't the motivation.  It was to try to create as much reality as possible."

Regarding the film's scribe, Rob Siegel, Aronofsky said he liked the former Onion editor's dark humor and drama.  "When I started to talk to him it was clear he understood.  There was a lot of development.  About 30 drafts.  A lot of incarnations to get there."

Franklin said financing was challenging since many doubted Mickey's comeback.  France's Wild Bunch believed in it, but came up short in how much they were willing to spend. 

"As we got closer the Euro kept rising and the dollar kept plummeting," remembered Franklin.  "So they were able to finance for the original amount, which by then was six or seven hundred thousand dollars more."  They prepped the 35 day shoot in two quick months, hoping the dollar would stay down.

The topic of comeback seemed to humble Rourke, and further blurred the lines between him and the film's character, Randy "The Ram" Robinson. 

"If I knew that it would take 15 years to get back into the saddle, I would have done things differently," Rourke offered pensively.  "I'm trying to do things differently this time around, trying to be responsible, trying to be a professional, to be consistent.  Those are things that weren't in my vocabulary back then.  I realized I had to change or blow my fucking brains out. You had to change, move on with life, or else you were a piece of shit.  I thought it was a weakness ot change.  I didn't want to until I lost everything… It took me 16 years out of the game.  But it's nice because I get to come back work with these people here."

Rourke trailed off as he began to choke up.  Pena took over, closing the press conference with an arm on Rourke's shoulder, "Anyone who loves film is very grateful that you are here."

"We choose how engaged or disengaged we want to be," said Steven Soderbergh after today's screening of "Che" at the Ziegfeld Theater.  "Once Che made his decision to engage, he engaged fully."

He also seemed to link that commitment to an aud's decision in watching the film -- clocking in at over 4 hours.  "It's a lot to ask people to throw away an entire day.  It requires a certain kind of personality to watch this."

"Great thing about his job is I get paid to educate myself. And what I learned is what a hard-ass he was. He was a strict disciplinarian; cold and distant at times. He was only warm when he was in doctor-mode."

Soderbergh filmed each part in 39 days -- "Fewer days than the first Oceans movie."

He was particularly excited about shooting a war movie. "The Cuban revolution was the last analog revolution.  I loved that we shot a period film about a type of war that can't be fought anymore." If it happened today, he said, technology would destroy a revolution like Che's in a matter of minutes.

Asked for his thoughts on the film's political nature, Soderbergh said, "Any movie that actively portrays an unpolished life is to me a political film. I'm not a communist. There's no place for me in Che's perfect society. Che would have hated me. He didn't have much use for artists."

That said, Soderbergh is very much against the embargo. "It's shocking to me. We haven't been very smart in how we played this. If we really want to change Cuba we should flood the island with tourists. That would bring a flood of ideas."

He was unapologetic about casting names in side roles (Matt Damon pops up as minister). "I was trying to stack the film with a lot of well known names. I made a lot of calls. I had to." Financing was a years-long struggle but "I'm glad we're not looking for money now," he said. "Thankfully there were a few people that believed in the commercial marketability of this communist figure. Kinda surreal."

Talking afterward about the award campaign, IFC Films Jonathan Sehring and Ryan Werner said they are working on a screener campaign that will include SAG, DGA and WGA. Soderbergh, Benicio Del Toro, and other cast are planning a road-show like tour of the film to New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Dallas, among other cities.

Not reported much among the indie film gloom is that Sony Pictures Classic's "Frozen River" is nearing the impressive $2 million mark at the box office -- $1,918,023 after 9 weeks, so far. 

Making the rounds at the New York film fest party at Tavern on the Green, SPC's Michael Barker was both thrilled and tired.  The distrib unspooled 10 films at Toronto, their most ever.  "It's very exciting," said Barker. "We're the busiest we've ever been."

"Frozen" actress Melissa Leo (pictured right of Misty Upham) took the Silver Shell at San Sebastian over the weekend.

From San Sebastian, John Hopewell reports here that Rezo has sold the film to more territories.

In prepping the audience for the ominously titled "Film Criticism in Crisis?" panel at the New York film fest, Film Comment's Gavin Smith (pictured) said "If you've come to see the fur fly, you may be disappointed.  We're not going to have a showdown between online and print.  Hopefully we've moved beyond that."

Immediately after, critic Kent Jones said exactly why they'll be no fight -- print doesn't have the strength to fight. 

"It's certainly an economic crisis seeing the number of people dropped from newspapers and magazines.  It's also alarming to note the difficulty with which magazines and newspapers have in just staying alive.  But that is economic crisis and not a film criticism crisis.  There are a lot of very devoted and eloquent people out there online."

Cahiers du cinéma editor Emmanuel Burdeau continued the theme: "One could say they has always been crisis. If I want to be honest, I can only talk about the current situation with Cahiers.  As you know the magazine has been owned by Le Monde... and it's been losing about 100,000 euros a year.  The situation is dramatic.  The enterprise itself doesn't mean anything right now.  If you want to buy it, you can have it for a single Euro." 

Burdeau said the publisher Phaidon is interested, but it's a matter of how much a buyer could put up to reinvent the magazine, not just own it.

Burdeau linked the decline of Cahiers to the decline of French distribution.  Abel Ferrara's two last movies haven't been released in France, he bemoaned. 

Burdeau's idea is for reviewers to take on a more "militant" role -- reviewers should become distributors, pushing a title through a website, where viewers can read, watch a scene, comment on it, and buy the movie.

Jessica Winter, film critic for O Magazine, seemed to feel as a fish out of water among the group.  She only spoke twice, offering a counter to the crisis by saying her readership is so vast and vastly different in a geographic sense that "I can't define who my readership is."  Yet she sees her job more a curator.  Now that Netflix has entered the mainstream, she can push smaller films that normally wouldn't make the cineplex.

Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum remembered that to write for film meant living in New York, London, or Chicago. "Now sophisticated film criticism is coming from the middle of nowhere.  I go to my man, David Hudson," he said, motioning down the table to the prime aggregator of film words.  David Hudson's blog on Greencine has long been a first-stop for cineaeste's daily fix.

Rosenbaum also said he's happy not to go see new movies all the time.  He waits for the DVD.   That prompted Smith to remark on DVD's ability to breakdown the TV/film barrier, and where film criticism seems to be going.  Interestingly, the most discussed movie on the panel wasn't a movie at all.  Jones and Burdeau both professed to be moved and completely sucked into "The Wire." 

"I think everyone is crossing the lines," said Burdeau  "The discussion in France right now isn't about a movie but 'The Wire.'  That is what people are talking about.  And it's not contrary to a very conservative point of view that TV is better than movies.  It's that DVD's are another way of saying 'we' as my friends and I pass these DVD's around and discuss them.  It's a fragmentary community which in a very paradoxical way is more suited now with television than with movies." 

After NYFF's Richard Pena proudly declared that all three of his children were in the audience this year, Laurent Cantet director of the opening night film "The Class," introduced his actors.  "I hope your children like the film, Richard," said Cantet, sounding slightly uncertain.


"Hedwig" superstar John Cameron Mitchell and Galway fest's TC Rice. 

Mitchell leaves on Monday for Russia, where the Side by Side Film Festival makes history as the region's first gay fest in Saint Petersburg.  Mitchell said that theaters have bowed to government pressure, robbing the fest of a venue.  So they've moved it to bars and clubs.  "We're still concerned about skinheads," said Mitchell, citing the recent violence sparked by the comments of the State Artist of Russia that homosexuals were "perverts" who suffered from "an illness."  More info here.


IFC Film's Ryan Werner, indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez, and UT Austin prof John Pierson.  John and Janet Pierson, now head film programmer at SXSW, are long-time NYFF attendees.

It was a strange choice to make on Friday, yet many Gothamites in their evening best chose a drama on the French school system over a spiraling U.S. economy and tense presidential debate, happening at the very same moment as the "The Class" unspooled. 

The McCain/Obama face-off quickly eclipsed discussions at the party, with most feeling it was a tie and some die-hard Obama fans declaring it a victory.  It was hard to find passion about the film.  Most said it was okay yet it was clearly not on auds minds.

Jamie Stuart has unleashed Part 1 of his New York Film Festival inspired videos.  Check out the Filmmaker Magazine site here.

Regent has nabbed North American rights to Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Tokyo Sonata," winner of Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes. 

"Tokyo Sonata" will have its US preem at the New York Film Festival on October 9.  Regent will open the film in the US in early 2009.

The distrib also recently got "Serbis" during Toronto.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center will honor Tom Hanks in a black-tie Gala Tribute at the new Alice Tully Hall on April 27. 

“There are so few actors who have been able to make the struggle and drama of being a good man compelling,” said Kent Jones.

Hanks becomes the third U.S. born thesp to earn a Tribute, next to Al Pacino (2000) and Dustin Hoffman (2005).  The Tributes were begun in 1972, when Charles Chaplin was brought out of exile to the US to receive his award.


Photo of Hanks at the Creative Arts Emmy Awards by Mathew Imaging/WireImage.com

Clint Eastwood's "Changeling"  will be the centerpiece of the 46th New York Film Festival, while Darren Aronofsky's "The Wrestler" will close the event.  They join the previously announced opener, Laurent Cantet's Cannes winner "The Class."

Eastwood's period piece on LA police corruption starring Angelina Jolie preemed at Cannes.  Darren Aronofsky's latest, starring Mickey Rourke as an aging wrestler, will first screen at the upcoming Venice fest.

France is heavily repped in the NYFF's main slate.  Joining "The Class" are Arnaud Desplechin's "A Christmas Tale," Agnes Jaoui's "Let it Rain," and Olivier Assayas's "Summer Hours." 

US filmmakers in the mix include Steven Soderbergh bringing his two-part biography, "Che," which garnered a Best Actor prize for lead Benicio del Toro at Cannes.  Antonio Campos's "Afterschool," Kelly Reichardt's "Wendy and Lucy" and Alexander Olch's "The Windmill Movie" round out the American selection.

Other Cannes pics in the lineup include Matteo Garrone's "Gomorrah," Steve McQueen's "Hunger," Sergey Dvortsevoy's "Tulpan," and Un Certain Regard Jury Prize winner "Tokyo Sonata," by Kiyoshi Kurosawa.  There's also Ari Forman's animated autobiography,"Waltz with Bashir," Jia Zhangke's "24 City," and Wong Kar Wai's "Ashes of Time Redux."

Mike Leigh will bring his latest, "Happy-Go-Lucky," Darezhan Omirbaev will screen his Anna Karenina adaptation "Chouga," and Jerzy Skolimowski's returns with "Four Nights with Anna."

Lucrecia Martel's "The Headless Woman," Gerardo Naranjo's "I'm Going to Explode," and Brillante Mendoza's "Serbis" are also set, as is Hong Sang-soo's "Night and Day," Joao Botelho's "The Northern Land," and Pablo Larrain's tale of a John Travolta wannabe in Pinochet's Chile, "Tony Manero."

Fest will also screen a newly restored print of Max Ophuls' classic "Lola Montes."

The New York Film Festival runs September 26 - October 12.

As New York's Lincoln Center puts the finishing touches on their new film center, the Film Society has announced that Mara Manus is their new exec director.  Manus moves over from The Public Theater where as exec director she oversaw the company's financial stability and growth.

Board prez Daniel Stern said: "She will be a great leader for our organization and will take the Film Society to new heights.  Her expertise in strategic planning and fundraising, as well as her knowledge of the city, will be a great asset to the organization, and will serve us well in reaching our goals and charting a new future that maximizes the expanded capability of a new film center in an extremely complex landscape.”

The Film Society of Lincoln Center puts on The New York Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, publishes Film Comment Magazine, and programs the Walter Reade Theater.

Laurent Cantet's Palm d'Or winner "The Class" will open the 46th New York Film Festival, running Sept. 26 to Oct. 12.  Film follows a French schoolteacher working in a multicultural neighborhood of Paris.  Sony Pictures Classics picked up the film at Cannes.

Fest also announced a retrospective of Nagisa Oshima ("In the Realm of the Senses," "Night and Fog in Japan") and a presentation of Guy Debord's "In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni" which has a few different English titles, including "We Spin Around the Night Consumed by the Fire." 

Filmmaker Jamie Stuart's final two episodes from his series inspired by the New York Film Festival are up, produced by Filmmaker Magazine.  The third has a quick and good interview with Todd Haynes, while the final fourth has John Landis intercut with Stuart amid a celeb cockroach infestation in his NY apartment. 

As a former resident of an East Village walk-up, I know the feeling.

It's no wonder that "Persepolis" finally thawed Stephen Holden toward animation.  The great film version of Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel closes the New York fest before it plays the inaugural Middle East International Film Festival in Abu Dhabi.  (The Circuit will be there.)

Because it is animated, "Persepolis" is a bold choice for the festival's closing-night selection. "A cartoon?" you may sniff. "How dare they?" But the movie is so enthralling that it eroded my longstanding resistance to animation, and I realized that the same history translated into a live-action drama could never be depicted with the clarity and narrative drive that bold, simple animation encourages.

Mark Rabinowitz gives us more "Warmth."  Here John Landis talks about trying to get DeNiro to say Don Rickles is a good actor.

by Dade Hayes
There was a lot of A in Tuesday's Q&A with John Landis after the New York Film Festival screening of his lively Don Rickles doc "Mr. Warmth." Unlike other fests, New York goes way minimalist, with a couple dozen features, a modicum of parties (many of which involve formal attire) and a tight geographic focus. The hub of activity is the Walter Reade, a longtime cinema temple at Lincoln Center that went through a modest, butt-pleasing renovation (new seats!) over the summer. This year's 45th edition of the festival has been a busy one, with five films being picked up by distributors, a starry gala for New Line's 40th anniversary, and the noise and telltale orange netting of construction. A $37 million film center, opening in early 2010, is a big part of the larger Lincoln Center revamp.

But back to the insult king. And I don't mean Rickles. While the well-paced film does wonders for the comedian's reputation and rare genius, Landis had clearly learned a few lessons while directing it. From the beginning of the marathon post-film session, Landis seemed eager for the chance to knock Hollywood down several pegs. But, befitting the self-described "geek" and Hollywood history maven who brought the world "Animal House," he kvetched in a consistently funny way, digressing and telling anecdotes and generally treating it like a disarmingly informal bull session. In the making of his $500,000 doc, which HBO will show Dec. 2, he had to gather clips of Rickles' performances over the years and found it exasperating. "I realize now that when you see footage in documentaries, it's what they could get," he said. Clearances proved a protracted headache, with major studios wanting five-figure fees for mere seconds of decades-old library titles in which Rickles appeared.

The film also winds up being a paean to old Vegas, the Rat Pack days of the Sands and the Desert Inn. It shows the eye-popping marquees of the day ("Liberace! And as a Special Added Attraction: Barbra Streisand"), contrasting that era with the slick corporate megamalls of today. Performers, Landis was shocked to discover, actually pine for the days when the mob ran things. "They felt they were treated better by those killers than they are by the corporate interests," he said. Some of the money clips in "Mr. Warmth" are from the Dean Martin roasts of the early 1970s. "The people who would be there were just amazing," Landis said. "I didn't put it in, but there's a great moment at one roast where Don looks over at Gene Kelly and says, 'Gene, 'Xanadu'?! I'll loan you money!"

When the laughter died down, a woman raised her hand to ask one of the few questions of the hour-long session. "Have you ever considered stand-up comedy?" she asked. Landis shrugged and then digressed a bit more until returning to his subject. "Don Rickles isn't really a stand-up comedian," he declared. "He's a performance artist. He doesn't tell jokes in his act. He just reacts to everything around him."

Dade Hayes is Variety's New York Bureau Chief.

 

Scott Macaulay sent a link to the second part of Jamie Stuart's New York Film Festival-set shorts.  First one is here.

Eerie, claustrophobic, and very well done.

A.O. Scott's midway view of the New York Film Festival reiterates my feelings on the fest circuit this year by comparing the Coens' "No Country for Old Men" and De Palma's "Redacted":

..each presents a cold, terrifying vision of a universe where justice is no match for brutality. This may be the dominant mood in American movies this season. Audiences in search of escapism may have to look toward France.

Janet Pierson watched the New York indie film scene unfold from the front lines.  Now in Austin with her husband John (author, film rep, UT prof) and their family, she blogged about her return to Manhattan - an anniversary she and John share every year for the New York Film Festival. 

Thursday, I was driving around Austin, happy, thinking about how much I love it here. Friday, at the crack of dawn, I flew to NYC. As my cab crossed the East River onto 53rd Street, a street very familiar from my youth, I felt an intense exhilaration. Not a conscious decision, but a bubbling up from somewhere very deep inside. Oh god, how much I love New York! The weather was perfect; sunny and warm, but I don't know, a good 10, 15, 20 degrees cooler than Austin. I get to our hotel, The Dream on 55th, a new experiment this year. Pretentious but adorable, perfectly situated for the weekend's activities.

Rusty with my subway lines, the concierge directs me to the R train at the end of the block which takes me straight to Prince and Broadway. The night before I'd thought, if only I'd had the time to see Joni, how wonderful that would be. Walking west on Spring to get to my 2:15pm coffee, I look to my right and see her husband crossing the street. He's only the first of several directors I'll see this weekend that I consider among my closest friends.

My former colleagues at Filmmaker Magazine (still essential reading) are sponsoring Jamie Stuart's annual video missives from the New York Film Festival. 

Here's his first, on Wes Anderson.  A better-looking Quicktime version is up here.  (Also, check out the magazine's great blog.)

by Laura Kern / Film Comment
The 45th edition of the New York Film Festival, which kicked off this Friday, is getting much attention for featuring works by an unusually large number of American filmmakers - many of them New York-based. But Wes Anderson's fest opener, the charming Darjeeling Limited, is set in India, and Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is purely French. Diving Bell traces the life of French Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby who becomes paralyzed after a stroke at age 43 and ends up dictating his memoir by blinking his left eye, the only body part left fully operational. Heartbreaking, inspiring yet never overly sentimental, it may be the movie of the year: Schnabel deservedly won Best Director at Cannes this year, and Mathieu Amalric, as Bauby is absolutely riveting.

Almost as striking as Diving Bell are two lesser-known entries, currently without U.S. distribution.

Mexico's Carlos Reygadas is a filmmaker who provokes strong reactions from audiences-negative and positive in equal parts. His stunningly beautiful new film Silent Light should find him many converts to the support camp. Set in northern Mexico and spoken in an unfamiliar language-a German dialect never before heard on film-the film follows a Mennonite family man with a devoted wife and six children whose two-year affair with another woman slowly tears him apart and puts his entire existence into question. Though bursting with influences - especially David Lynch and Carl Theodor Dreyer - Silent Light feels entirely fresh, and despite a measured pace, mesmerizes with a dread that looms over every exquisitely framed shot.

A similarly titled film, Secret Sunshine, by Korean director Lee Chang-dong, also provides a rich, singular experience. It's five (or possibly more) movies rolled into one-mother-son melodrama, thriller, faith inquisition, woman-on-the-verge tragedy, and road-to-recovery drama. In each, actress Jeon Do-yeon, displays a wholly different facet of her character, Sin-ae, a woman who moves with her young son from Seoul to her late husband's home town to start over, just to face more hardship. Jeon won the Best Actess award at Cannes this year, and she gets fine support from the wonderful Song Kang-ho as her tireless suitor, a sort of guardian angel, and provider of comic relief, which is welcome in the film-and in a festival that is generally known for being heavy on somber, challenging (and mostly rewarding) works.

Laura Kern is Managing Editor at Film Comment.

Silent Light trailer:


Secret Sunshine trailer:

From The Rabbi Report comes this nice snippet of Sidney Lumet at the NY Film Festival, talking about digital filmmaking.  His digitally shot "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" is screening there. (video by Mark Rabinowitz)

Underneath all the NYFF press about Baumbach, De Palma, Anderson and Van Sant, two "comedies" caught my eye. Abel Ferrara’s “Go Go Tales” is described as a “comic fantasy” -- Willem Defoe as a down-on-his-luck club owner struggling to keep his place afloat. Ferrara’s career is a wonderful mystery. Now close to 60 years old, his body of work is bizarre and disjointed. If you’ve ever met Abel frantically checking pay phones for quarters on the Lower East Side, it’s not hard to see why. Some of his stuff has yet to find US theaters – even with Forest Whittaker and Juliette Binoche his last film “Mary” hasn’t yet found a brave distrib. But when he hits, he hits hard and unforgettably – “Ms. 45,” “Bad Lieutenant,” and still his most respected work, “King of New York.”  (Abel at the 2005 Venice fest screening of "Mary", photo by George Pimentel/WireImage.com)

The other comedy comes from another unlikely source: Ira Sachs, director of indie dramas “The Delta” and “Forty Shades of Blue” brings “Married Life.” Set in the 1940s, Chris Cooper is a cheating husband who’d rather plan his wife’s death than put her through a divorce. When I asked him about the jump to comedy, Ira replied the film is more like "'Rules of the Game,' 'Shadow of a Doubt,' 'The Earrings of Madame D,' 'The Trouble with Harry'... The drama of life told with lightness. As opposed to the last time I went to Toronto, in '96 with 'The Delta,'  when I just wanted to be Fassbinder." "Married Life" will also be at Toronto. (Ira at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, photo by Rebecca Sapp/WireImage.com)   (Mike Jones)