The Treatment Tagged Articles at Cinematical
New Yorker Films Picks Up The Treatment
Filed under: Comedy », Drama », Independent », Casting », Deals », New Releases », Scripts », Cinematical Indie »
There is a long tradition of the mid-life crisis movie -- audiences seem to respond to watching a breakdown from a safe distance. City living, suburban boredom, family crisis -- all of these can be the source of a good old-fashioned film freak-out. Throw in a wacky psychiatrist a la Running With Scissors, and you've got yourself a movie.Variety has announced that New Yorker Films has made a distribution deal for Oren Rudavsky's The Treatment. The film is based on the Daniel Menaker's novel of the same name and follows an upscale private school professor and his relationship with an unconventional therapist. The film stars Famke Janssen, Chris Eigeman and Ian Holm with a script penned by Rudayvsky and Daniel Saul Housman. The film sounds like your typical urbanite in crisis story with plenty of quirky observations about family, psychiatry, and urban isolation.
Films like The Treatment don't break any new ground with their subject matter; Woody Allen has pretty much made a career out of the male mid-life crisis, so I think he's got it covered. New Yorker films better hope they've hit the right combination of actors, writer and director to make this story worth the re-visit.
Tribeca Winners Revealed
Filed under: Documentary », Drama », Foreign Language », Independent », Awards », Tribeca », Newsstand », Cinematical Indie »
The 2006 Tribeca Film Festival was brought to a close last night with the awarding of prizes, and several major awards went to war films. The winner of the International Documentary Competition was The War Tapes, a film built from footage shot by soldiers stationed in Iraq, and Blessed By Fire, an Argentine film about the lingering effects of the Falkland Islands War, took top prize on the International Narrative Competition. In the New York-specific categories, the best doc award went to When I Came Home, which explores the post-war experience of Iraq veteran Herold Noel, while The Treatment was named best feature. Also recognized were Egyptian epic The Yacoubian Building (best new feature director), The Play (best new documentary director) and The Cats of Mirikitani (audience award and special mention in the New York docs category).Apart from The Cats of Mirikitani, I didn't see any of the winners -- and most of the films that impressed me most were screened outside of competition. That said, my favorite of the weak narrative pool was easily the Croatian comedy-drama Two Players from the Bench, and my choice from the competition docs (a pool in which I saw a fair number of films) was probably Blue Blood, a charming, intimate piece about the Oxford Boxing Club. Those of you who were able to attend the festival, feel free to chime in here and let us know which competition films were your favorites -- what do you think of the results?
Tribeca Review: The Treatment
Filed under: Comedy », Independent », Romance », Tribeca », Cinematical Indie »
There's nobody better at delivering overwritten and/or expository dialogue than Chris Eigeman. From the three near-masterpieces he starred in for MIA indie auteur Whit Stillman in the 90s, to his twenty-episode arc as love-interest for Lorelai on that hallmark of overwritten genius, Gilmore Girls, there's no one out there as capable of making an artificially literate script seem natural. In Metropolitan, his 19-year-old preppie casually counsels a friend, "barbarism is cloaked with all sorts of self-righteousness and moral superiority" -- in the midst of a conversation that was ostensibly about detachable shirt collars. Such densely packed rejoinders flow out of Eigeman's mouth with perfect naturalism, to the point where one wonders why he isn't called in last-minute by big-money productions to deliver all of the rough, expository dialogue that Hollywood script doctors can't quite smoothe out. This guy could have made Crash seem witty and urbane.
MovieMail: Tribeca
Filed under: Documentary », Independent », Music & Musicals », Tribeca », MovieMail », Cinematical Indie »
With the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival officially opening to the public on Tuesday, Martha Fischer, Christopher Campbell and I decided to hash out the good and the bad, as we've seen it thus far. Here I am, starting the conversation; Martha and Chris will chime in over the next couple of days.
Hey Chris and Martha,
So, here we are, with another Tribeca upon us. With this being your first attempt to cover the Festival, I tried to prepare you guys for the challenge; unfortunately, I think we're finding that once again, the almighty Programmers have answered their critics by allowing the previous year's problem spots to become measurably worse. The question that seems to be on everyone's mind this year is: why does Tribeca feel the need to be so damn big? Certainly, Tribeca 2006 seems to have contracted a disease that more and more festivals are catching: when scope is of primary concern, taken as a whole, any great big lineup is going to be padded heavily with films that, quite simply, really suck. And if the Festival is daunting enough to journalists that the torture of covering it seems to take up more ink and pixel space than actual coverage of films, one can't imagine that the average New Yorker is too enthused about standing in endless lines, all over the city, to lay out $25 for a pair of seats.
Which is a shame, because in the last week, I've caught some amazing documentaries that definitely deserve to be seen.
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