SonyPicturesClassics Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Sony Pictures Classics didn't waste any time hob-nobbin' on la Croisette or catching a 3D showing of Up before buying shelling out some francs for new movies on the opening day of Cannes. SPC snatched up Michael Haneke's latest discomfort-fest The White Ribbon (which is also in competition for the Palme d'Or), as well as the dramatic romance Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky. According to IMDb, The White Ribbon's plot is as follows:

"Strange events happen at a rural school in the north of Germany during the year 1913, which seem to be ritual punishment. Does this affect the school system, and how does the school have an influence on fascism?" Creepy!

The official Cannes site has more information:

"A village in Protestant northern Germany. 1913-1914. On the eve of World War I. The story of the children and teenagers of a choir run by the village schoolteacher, and their families: the baron, the steward, the pastor, the doctor, the midwife, the tenant farmers. Strange accidents occur and gradually take on the character of a punishment ritual. Who is behind it all?"

Haneke most recently remade his own movie Funny Games in English just in case us dumb Americans didn't fully grasp our own preoccupation with violence and our own culpability in violence just by watching it. Previous films include The Piano Teacher, an adaptation of the book by Elfriede Jelinek starring Isabelle Huppert as a piano teacher who likes to self-harm her hoo-hoo, among other things, and Benny's Video, starring one of the actors from the original version of Funny Games as a teen who films himself shooting a girl with a pig-slaughtering gun.

Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky will probably be the better date movie of the two, but hey, I'm not here to judge what you see on your dates.

Back at this year's Sundance Film Festival, a bunch of folks were "losing it" over Jonathan Levine's The Wackness -- saying, to a certain extent, that it was the dopest flick of the fest. And that's cool. Support those films you love, right? Well, not long after the film premiered at Sundance, it was acquired by Sony Pictures Classics. Wonderful! A film a lot of people loved was picked up and would hit theaters at some point later in the year. Ah, but all was not well in blogger land -- see, a few bloggers were disgusted that SPC picked it up, going so far as to send an email around trying to get other people to either join their cause and/or write about it. Their reasoning was that SPC had a poor track record when it came to promoting indie films, and were afraid The Wackness would become yet another casualty. That it would disappear in limited release ... and be eaten by a Cabbage Patch Kid, or whatever.

And so it was. Some folks agreed with their cause, while others couldn't understand why they'd be upset when, in reality, their favorite film WOULD eventually hit theaters. You can't say that about every Sundance film, or festival film for that matter, and so the simple act of being picked up for distribution is, well, kind of a big deal. After a flurry of posts from a few different blogs which attacked the deal, attacked the teaser poster and then attacked the first teaser trailer, it all seemed to fizzle out. From that point on, SPC continued to poor on the Wackness marketing: We got roughly four or five different trailers, a poster, a viral campaign, a dope website, TV spots and a slick soundtrack.

Was SPC botching it all up? Hardly ... but then came the film's box office debut this past weekend ...

Among the handful of titles Sony Pictures Classics snatched up for American distribution at the conclusion of the Cannes Film Festival, the animated Israeli documentary Waltz with Bashir makes the most sense. While Tyson certainly has potential to alter the public perception of the country's infamous boxer, and Lorna's Silence has appeal for crime fans and art house aficionados alike, both movies could perform well regardless of which distributor picked them up (more or less). Bashir, on the other hand, has SPC written all over it: Relentlessly downbeat and frequently unsettling, Bashir is director Ari Folman's account of his 1982 experience in the Israeli military during the infamous massacre of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. The animated approach sometimes has a gimmicky feel to it, but that's probably the point; Folman's memories are so foggy that his reconstructions of them seem plausibly unrealistic.

Bashir isn't easy to get into, but you could say that about Thomas Pynchon, too. What we have here is an animated movie for grown-ups, which puts it squarely in SPC's line of expertise. The company has guided many mature animated films to audiences in a manner unparalleled by their colleagues. Last year, talented SPC co-presidents Michael Barker and Tom Bernard commandeered the releases of the outlandish anime Paprika and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, and the latter film very nearly won an Oscar. Remember The Triplets of Belleville? That was them, too. These people know their stuff. Listen up, guys: I hear Bill Plympton's new movie is quite good.

Our pals over at Sony Pictures Classics just sent us the first and only planned poster for The Jane Austen Book Club, a romantic dramedy hitting theaters on September 21. Based on the popular 2005 novel by Karen Joy Fowler, which the Washington Post described as something more than just "elegant chick-lit," the film revolves around a group of Californians who start what the title suggests -- a Jane Austen book club -- and then start to see parallels between the works of Austen and their own lives. The leads are Maria Bello as Jocelyn, rising star Emily Blunt as Prudie and Hugh Dancy as Grigg. There's also a supporting cast of well-known names, and the whole thing is being directed by Robin Swicord, who wrote the script for Memoirs of a Geisha and the Sandra Bullock romcom Practical Magic. Click on the image above to get the full-sized poster.