PETA Tagged Articles at Cinematical

What's been going on over at Cinematical Indie the past few days? Let's take a peek ...

• In film distribution news, the provocatively titled Your Mommy Kills Animals (yeesh), which takes its name from a PETA brochure, scored distrib this week. The film played at HotDocs earlier this year to positive reviews from the likes of Variety and eFilmCritic, and sold out screenings at Montreal's Fantasia Film Festival. Congrats to director Curt Johnson.
• This week's Indie Film Blog Group Hug tossed some love around to lots of blogs writing about interesting things in the world of film. Highlights: Christopher John Stack's film An Exercise in Vigilance is screening at the Action on Film International Film Festival in Long Beach, Movie City Indie's Ray Pride interviews filmmaker Usama Alshaibi, Lost in Negative Space blogger Peet Gelderblom has seen Famke Jenssen's sister in her underwear, and guess who's dating indie-film darling Miranda July ... ?
• Been wondering what the members of The Fugees are up to? Even if you haven't, you might be interested to know that former Fugee Pras Michel is starring in a documentary about homelessness. In the film Skid Row, Pras lived as a homeless person for nine days, recording the results on video. The film has been picked up for distrib by Screen Media Films, and will open August 24 in a limited NYC-LA-Washington DC run. If it plays well in those cities, maybe it will get a wider open down the road and the rest of us might get to see it.
• The Guardian posits the question: What great filmmakers haven't had real bios?
• Jette tells us about Paul Verhoeven's Soldier of Orange being made into a musical in the Netherlands -- but she's holding out hope for Showgirls!
• Ryan Stewart reviews Dr. Bronner's Magic Soapbox.

That provocative title is taken from a leaflet handed out by PETA activists to children arriving at performances of The Nutcracker accompanied by fur-clad mothers. It's also the title of a documentary that has just been picked up for distribution. Filmmaker Curt Johnson was inspired to explore the animal rights movement by "a post-9/11 FBI alert identifying animal rights activists as the number one domestic terror threat." Johnson interviewed activists and detractors alike, seeking out as many points of view as possible. Variety's John Anderson hailed it as "a miraculously evenhanded treatment of a snarlingly divisive debate" when it played at HotDocs. "There are no good guys or bad guys in this propulsive film," Anderson wrote, "but there's enough in the way of odd characters and bad behavior to amuse and inform auds who only marginally care about the content." Other reviews have been equally positive.

Your Mommy Kills Animals sold out screenings recently at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal, playing as part of their "Documentaries on the Edge" series. At the festival, which continues through July 23, programmer Mitch Davis announced that distributor Halo-8 Entertainment had secured worldwide theatrical and home video rights to the film, beating out "numerous other buyers." You can see the trailer at Halo-8's web site, while the film's MySpace page has additional pictures, videos, a ringtone and merchandise. The best part? You don't have to wait long to see it -- though I recommend you don't wear fur to the theater. Halo-8 plans to release Your Mommy Kills Animals theatrically in September; a DVD will follow in November.

Hollywood has been using chimpanzees for years and years, so you'd think they knew how to treat them. Sure, back in the early days there wasn't as much monitoring of animal wrangling on film sets, but by now filmmakers certainly know what is right and wrong when it comes to possible animal abuse. For instance, nobody would ever beat a chimp. Right? Maybe not. If the allegations are correct, though, the chimpanzee playing 'Chim-Chim' in the Speed Racer movie has been hit. One thing that has been confirmed is that the animal bit a young actor, but Warner Bros. claims that no harm has come to the chimp. PETA has heard differently, however, and the animal rights organization has asked producer Joel Silver to replace the live animal with an animatronic chimpanzee.

When a film production uses live animals, it is supposed to have a representative from the American Humane Society watching over the care and treatment of them. The AHS even has a part of its website that loosely details a movie's 'featured animal scenes' and whether or not a movie gets the 'no animals were harmed' stamp. Occasionally animals do die on set, or they may be unintentionally injured, but otherwise, the AHS maintains that animals like the Speed Racer chimp are taken good care of (and they apparently prefer animal stars to animatronic stars). Despite Warners' assurances that the AHS has seen no animal abuse with Speed Racer, PETA argues that the AHS is not monitoring off-set abuse nor pre-production training of the animal. In a final response to the studio, PETA stated, "we regret to say that the assurances you offer are meaningless."