Uwe Boll Bringing "Arthouse" Pain

I hesitated before writing this post. There's been quite a bit of Uwe Boll on this blog lately, and I share the opinion that Boll-haters have inflated the man's importance out of all proportion. Had this been a story about Boll adapting another stupid video game, I'd have let it alone, but it's at least interesting in a howling, head-clutching sort of way.

Boll is moving away from his stock-in-trade to make two films for a more limited audience. (I snickered a little as I typed that last part.) The first, called Stoic, has already wrapped and is about a 2006 incident in which three German inmates, incarcerated for minor offenses, raped and tortured a cellmate for 10 hours before inducing him to commit suicide. The film stars Edward Furlong, Sam Levinson, and Shaun Sipos, the latter of whom has a scene in which he licks his own vomit off the ground. Boll, speaking like a proud father, explains that "[w]hen the actor licks his puke off the ground, he will be seen eating it for a minute, not just a little bit." The puke Sipos consmes will be fake, but the actor did, apparently, eat a real tube of toothpaste. Though Boll hopes the film will squeak through with an R rating "for [its] social commentary," he suspects it might merit an NC-17 and have to be released unrated.
The second film, Janjaweed, will tackle the Sudan genocide, focusing on journalists who have to decide whether to stay and help victims or go back and report on what they saw. Boll will shoot that one in January. Both films had treatments but no scripts, with most of the dialogue improvised by the actors.

The Hollywood Reporter says, with thinly veiled irony, that these films are "aimed straight at the arthouse crowd." I don't want to prejudge -- oh, the hell with it. Boll is an emotional retard and no self-respecting arthouse will play his films. He plans to submit Stoic to Sundance and Berlin, where acceptance is about as likely as a 1500-screen release of Postal. Good luck man.