Charles Bramesco
Amidst Legal Troubles, Alex Gibney Documentary ‘No Stone Unturned’ Pulled From Tribeca
There’s prolific, and then there’s Alex Gibney. The nonfiction filmmaker works at a rate bordering on inhuman, cranking out 14 documentaries over the past five years alone. He assembled three releases in 2016, mapping the breadth of his subjects: the alarming (and, to some, alarmist) Zero Days traced potentially ruinous lines between computer viruses and nuclear capabilities, The Agent cast a skeptical eye at the C.I.A.’s preparation and response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, and Cooked offered Gibney the chance to tackle some lighter material with a food documentary. He’ll return to weightier fare with the murder investigation doc No Stone Unturned, but a new report today indicates that he won’t do so at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Charles Manson Biopic on the Way (Featuring Tom Snyder and Roger Ailes, Too)
It’s pretty unilaterally agreed that Charles Manson was a bad egg. As the leader of the hippie cult known as The Family, he terrorized Southern California with a killing spree that claimed seven lives, including that of actress and Roman Polanski spouse Sharon Tate. He was sentenced to nine consecutive lifetime sentences in prison, where he continues to hang out today. Pop culture has made no bones about its continuing fascination with this charismatic, repulsive figure and a new project will soon provide a fresh perspective on the real-life villain — with another villain along for the ride.
Seat-Kicking Incident Leads to Stabbing at Los Angeles Movie Theater
A few years ago, I wrote up a brief item about an incident taking place at Los Angeles’ AFI Film Festival wherein an irate woman maced a man in the face for having the gall to ask her to turn off her cell phone during a screening of Mike Leigh’s J.M.W. Turner biopic Mr. Turner. “Wow, being at the movies sure makes people do crazy things!” I thought to myself. “I wonder how long it’ll be until the next time I get to write about a violent movie theater conflict over petty nonsense.” That day has come at last, and this time [beat to let the moment breathe] the stakes are even higher.
Watch Actors Recreate a Heinous Crime in the ‘Casting JonBenet’ Trailer
One of last year’s finest films, and certainly the most challenging documentary, was Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine. The concept was ingenious: the film tracks actress Kate Lyn Sheil as she prepares to portray the late newswoman Christine Chubbuck and tease out what factors could have compelled a woman to shoot herself in the head on live television. It was a beguiling interrogation of authenticity and artifice, tracing the limits of performance as a means to locate truth, and now the world of documentary film has begun to follow Greene’s groundbreaking example. The new trailer for Casting JonBenet offers a glimpse at a film using Greene’s methods, and applying them to an equally disturbing footnote in history.
Hollywood Studios Considering Early Home Releases for New Films
Almost exactly a year ago, tech entrepreneur Sean Parker (better known as the guy who correctly identified a billion dollars as cooler than a million dollars in The Social Network) fronted a proposed business venture called The Screening Room, a potentially game-changing set-top box through which Hollywood studios would offer their biggest new releases to stream at home the same day they premiered in brick-and-mortar theaters. (With an astronomical price tag, naturally.) Though it gained some traction and support from significant voices in the film community, it ultimately sputtered and spun out. But with the rebirth of spring, so comes a rebirth for this impractical, frightening, cineplex-annihilating idea. (Kinda.)
China Now Owns ‘Rambo,’ ‘The Expendables,’ America’s Strategic Reserves of Oily Muscles
To quote our illustrious new Commander-in-Chief: “China. China China China. CHIIIIINA. China. China. China China China China. CHINA. China!” Our friends to the East have been gobbling up real estate in Hollywood at a rate that would be alarming if it didn’t bring us The Great Wall, which ruled, so things are cool for now. But the influence of China’s entertainment economy has become unavoidable among studio films, with Asian entertainment conglomerate Wanda recently purchasing Legendary and Paramount selling a 25% stake in their next three years of projects to Shanghai Film Group and Huahua Media. Today brings news of another Hollywood takeover spearheaded by a Chinese company, with nothing less than American icon John Rambo caught in the middle.
115 Reviews In, ‘Get Out’ Still Has 100 Percent on Rotten Tomatoes
I was fortunate enough to attend a screening of Get Out earlier this week, and hoo boy, that right there is one fine motion picture. Our beloved Editor-in-Chief Matt Singer made as much clear in his ringing endorsement from Sundance, but take it from me: very spooky, very funny, has something to say, insanely well-cast and even more well-acted. It’s an easy movie to love, and while the box-office receipts from this upcoming weekend will rule on whether audiences agree, the critics of America have already made their voices heard. And those voices are ringing out in perfect unison, a harmony sounding out as if from an angelic choir: “THIS MOVIE RULES.”
Groundbreaking Japanese Filmmaker Seijun Suzuki Dies at 93
Of course, no individual could be fairly credited with having singlehandedly invented the modern understanding of what it means to be cool, but Japanese filmmaker Seijun Suzuki is as good a place as any to start. With such films as Branded to Kill and Tokyo Drifter, he reimagined the gangster figure as an icon of bold sartorial style, unflappable stoicism, and casual Zenlike profundity. A few years later, these films would go on to inspire French New Wave classic Le Samouraï, which would later trickle down to the cinema of Quentin Tarantino and Jim Jarmusch. But to ascribe Suzuki’s importance to his influence on others would be an insult; his films map an entire engrossing world unto themselves.