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Miramax Dies ... What About the Remaining Projects?
Filed under: Executive shifts, Disney, Distribution, The Weinstein Co., Miramax
Well, so much for that. Right on the heels of the Deadline news that the Weinsteins wanted their Miramax back, The Wrap reports that the studio is closing. The New York and Los Angeles offices are being shut down, eighty people are losing their jobs, and there's no buyout in sight. It seems Disney didn't respond to buyout options, although Bob Iger said he would sell the studio outright for the oh-so-reasonable price of $1.5 billion.
Harvey said of the news: "I'm feeling very nostalgic right now. I know the movies made on my and my brother Bob's watch will live on as well as the fantastic films made under the direction of Daniel Battsek. Miramax has some brilliant people working within the organization and I know they will go on to do great things in the industry."
More than a name is dead. There are six movies waiting for distribution, three of which we've noted before.
The Weinsteins Want Miramax Back?
Filed under: Deals, Executive shifts, The Weinstein Co., Miramax
Miramax Films was born in the late '70s, the child of Harvey and Bob Weinstein. The brothers, chilling in Buffalo, had produced a number of rock concerts over the years, and in 1979 (using their parents' names Miriam and Max) they used their cash to create Miramax Films and feed their love of cinema. The projects that would follow included The Thin Blue Line, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Pulp Fiction, and Clerks. In 1993, they sold the company to Disney, and in 2005, they left their fully grown company to create a new shingle -- The Weinstein Company. Now they want their baby back?According to Deadline Hollywood, London sources have told the site that Harvey wants to buy Miramax back from Disney, and is already working towards that goal. Since Disney isn't doing anything with it, assumption suggests that this should be able to move forward. Harvey has already grabbed Miramax executives Peter Lawson and Lucas Webb, which is certainly a step towards the goal.
The original break from Disney was due to feuds with Michael Eisner, who left the company himself in 2005. No Eisner, no fued ... Will the Weinsteins be successful? And if they do, would moving back to the world of Miramax renew their fame and success like The Weinstein Company failed to do? Is there that much in a name, even if it's named after one's parents?
Review: Youth in Revolt
Filed under: Comedy, Theatrical Reviews, The Weinstein Co.
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By Erik Davis (reprint from TIFF '09 -- 9/15/09)
As with most of the popular-book-to-film adaptations, you can look at Youth in Revolt a couple of different ways: From the point of view of someone who has read the source material, and (of course) from the point of view of someone who hasn't. C.D Payne's epic, 499-page novel is to teenage angst what the bible is to Christianity -- and it's always sort of reminded me of what a sequel to The Catcher in the Rye might look like if it was set in modern-day (if somewhat outdated) Oakland -- and featured a 14-year-old Frank Sinatra fanatic who would literally destroy an entire city if it meant winning over the girl of his dreams.
The problem with Youth in Revolt (the book) is that it's practically impossible to smash 499 pages of dark comedic brilliance into an hour and a half on the big screen, and, as such, Youth in Revolt (the film) definitely ends up feeling disjointed and forced in some areas -- but thanks to a wickedly hilarious performance from Michael Cera (easily the best of his career), this brainy teenage sex comedy does manage to dole out a handful of great scenes, making it worthy of your hard-earned box office dollars ... but only if you promise to read the book afterwards.
Review: Nine
Filed under: Music & Musicals, New Releases, Theatrical Reviews, The Weinstein Co., Remakes and Sequels
Give me a movie where people burst into song and dance for no logical reason and I'm happy ... assuming the musical numbers are good, the story isn't dull and the characters are interesting. Nine, the latest movie musical directed by Rob Marshall (Chicago) has a lot of flash and dash ... so why wasn't I charmed?
Veteran screenwriters Michael Tolkin and Anthony Minghella scripted this adaptation of a 1982 Broadway musical, which includes a few new songs. The Broadway version itself is a musical remake of the Federico Fellini movie 8 1/2. That may be part of my difficulty with Nine -- I've always found Fellini's film tiresome and interminable. I'm more of an Amarcord girl myself.
Adding music to Fellini's story doesn't change it much. Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis) is a famous Italian director in the early 1960s who is two weeks away from the start of production on his next film ... and he has no screenplay and no idea what he wants to do. He tries hiding at a remote resort to brainstorm and canoodle with his mistress Carla (Penelope Cruz), but is soon found out by his producer and entourage, including his wife Luisa (Marion Cotillard), who used to be the star of his earlier films.
Cinematical Seven: Best Mayhem of 2009
Filed under: Action, Animation, Comedy, Foreign Language, Horror, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Thrillers, Mystery & Suspense, Lionsgate Films, Magnolia, Sony, Universal, Warner Brothers, Fandom, 20th Century Fox, The Weinstein Co., Family Films, Dreamworks, Brad Pitt, Quentin Tarantino, Cinematical Seven, Comic/Superhero/Geek, Remakes and Sequels, Lists, Best/Worst, War
At this time last year, I was proudly tasked with chronicling 2008's finest moments in "big-screen mayhem, violence, destruction and other such shenanigans." I've still opted to sort these sequences out by specific manner of cinematic excess, and I've swapped out a category for "Most Tasteless Slaughter" (think effectively restrained moments of off-screen violence) for "Most Ridiculous Action" (think the exact opposite of that).
As usual, your comments/suggestions are welcome, and as usual, we didn't intentionally leave any titles off. Besides, if we went ahead and listed every single action or horror flick from 2009, what fun would that be?
Review: A Single Man
Filed under: Drama, Gay & Lesbian, New Releases, Theatrical Reviews, The Weinstein Co.
A Single Man is based on a novel by Christopher Isherwood, which is written as the internal monologue of a man who has made up his mind to commit suicide. If you know this, the first few minutes of the movie are a bit unnerving. Colin Firth, playing the title character -- a handsome, low-key college professor named George -- narrates the opening scenes by essentially reading lengthy passages from the book: the laziest possible approach to a challenging adaptation. There's little that does more to try my patience than this sort of extended "literary" voiceover. Not to be melodramatic, but in its worst incarnations, it's an affront to cinema. At the very least it misses the point.
Within a few minutes, though, first-time director Tom Ford finds his groove. Ford is a fashion designer by trade, a fact to which early reviewers have done their darnedest to ascribe significance -- a bit of a contrived exercise, it seems to me, since one certainly could not guess his prior occupation just from watching the film. In fact, despite the shaky start, Ford finds an elegant, striking way of bringing this material to the screen. Much of A Single Man is an elegiac tone poem, rendered haunting by Ford's beautifully composed images, and propelled by a gorgeous, somewhat Philip Glass-like musical score by little-known Polish composer Abel Korzeniowski. If you want a reference point, I'd name The Hours, which may send some readers screaming from the room -- but Ford's film has the same sort of nimble flow and sorrowful beauty.
Interview: Viggo Mortensen
Filed under: Fandom, The Weinstein Co., Interviews
Viggo Mortensen is a study in contradictions: rugged and undeniably virile, and yet thoroughly and irresistibly sensitive; the kind of man movie stars are made from, but seemingly more satisfied in a more subdued role in a smaller film. Appropriately, his latest film is both a post-apocalyptic epic and a profound character study; The Road is an adaptation of the acclaimed Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name, and Viggo plays its main character, a father desperately trying to protect his son from an unhospitable world, both physically and emotionally.
Cinematical recently sat down with Mortensen at the film's press day to discuss his work in the film, which was directed by John Hillcoat (The Proposition). In addition to talking about navigating an unforgiving landscape, he discussed the challenges of balancing fealty to source material and simply making a fulfilling movie, and revealed a few of his own fears and insecurities when facing the prospect of sustaining a career both as a movie star and character actor, often at the same time.
You can read our interview with director John Hillcoat over here.
Cinematical: Given the richness of the source material and the familiarity that audiences will have with it, do you make an effort to draw upon the text for your character, or do you have to divorce yourself from it and focus on what's in the script?
Interview: 'The Road' Director John Hillcoat
Filed under: The Weinstein Co., Interviews
Outside of the established and expanding franchises for book series like Harry Potter and Twilight, there don't seem to be a whole lot of literary works that audiences are just dying to see adapted – except perhaps for The Road. Remarkably, Cormac McCarthy's remarkable 2006 story of a father and son making their way across a post-apocalyptic landscape has been successfully adapted for the screen by director John Hillcoat, who eschewed 2012-style spectacle in favor of a more harrowing and humanistic portrait of two people surviving in the harshest possible environment.
Cinematical recently spoke to Hillcoat at the film's Los Angeles press day, where he was wrapping up a long afternoon of roundtables and one-on-one interviews. Thankfully, he rallied for one more short conversation about The Road, and in addition to talking about the challenges of bringing McCarthy's words to life, he spoke about conceiving the scope of the film, and finding the right faces to fill its damaged landscape.
Cinematical: You obviously began with extremely rich source material when starting to adapt The Road. What was the thing you knew you had to get right and then everything else would sort of fall into place?
'Nine' Gets a Huge Promo Push
Filed under: Music & Musicals, Disney, The Weinstein Co., Movie Marketing
We learned in October that Nine was getting pushed back to a Christmas premiere. Since The Road was already slated for release on the same date, it sounded like this was nothing more than a move to make the film's box office grab as smooth as possible. But maybe it was to plan the massive marketing push.Variety reports that the Weinstein Company have partnered with Disney/ABC Unlimited to market the film. This "megapact" will mean that Nine-flavored content will get infused into "a wide variety of shows, including ABC's Dancing with the Stars." For the dance-centric show, there will be a themed dance number on November 17 with songs and outfits from the film. The push will also work its way into the soaps on ABC -- the big trio of All My Children, One Life to Live, and General Hospital. Then there will be a "road-block" style trailer on the 22nd, making it's way onto a bunch of channels, a microsite on ABC.com, and late-night integration.
Inclusion on dancing reality shows make sense, but the rest is a little ridiculous -- both for the potential for over-saturation and this idea of market-injected content. I bet they're just ruing the fact that series get written well in advance and that they couldn't get Nine-themed fare into the likes of Grey's, Cougar Town, Lost, etc. And here we used to make fun of obvious product placement. At this rate, I wonder if we can come to expect films to be advertised in each other, like Spider-Man trying to make it to Mary Jane's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows premiere or somesuch.
Do you enjoy big marketing pushes, or does it all get real old real fast?
Rumor Patrol: Wes Craven Will Direct 'Scream IV'
Filed under: Horror, Casting, RumorMonger, The Weinstein Co., Remakes and Sequels
If you were one of the people who thought that another Scream movie was a bad idea (and who could blame you after the train wreck that was Scream 3), there might be a ray of hope...but I have to stress might. Over at Cinema Blend, their 'reliable source' is telling them that the man himself, Wes Craven, will return to direct the latest installment in the horror franchise. It had been reported that Craven would be involved in some capacity with the film back when the project was first green lit, but you have to wonder what might have convinced him to get behind the camera. Maybe it was all down to nostalgia and he wanted to get together with the old gang, or maybe it was Kevin Williamson's spec script. One thing is for sure, the big empty spot in his schedule since finishing 25/8 probably wouldn't hurt either. (By the way, 25/8 was just re-named My Soul to Take.)
Back in July, there were hints that the film was going to be a complete reboot, but once we found out that Neve Campbell and the Arquette-Coxes would be returning, a straight remake seemed unlikely. So this all sounds like any Scream fan's dream come true, right? You've got the original director, screenwriter, and cast all involved. Well, not so fast, because according to Cinema Blend's sources (and Erik's prediction), the original cast will only be appearing in cameos, and that they will be handing the reigns over to a new group of teens/cannon fodder -- and by handing over the reigns, I mean horribly murdered before the opening credits have rolled.
Do you think there's hope for Scream IV if Craven does direct, and would you be disappointed if the original cast didn't stick around? Sound off in the comments...
Tom Cruise and J.J. Abrams Reunite for 'Mission Impossible 4'
'Big Top Pee-Wee': The Original Benicio Del Toro Wolfman
Spin-ematical: New on DVD and Blu-ray for 2/9
Watch This: Brilliant Oscar-Nominated Short 'Logorama'
Chris Nolan to Lead 'Superman' Reboot!?
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