cinetic rights management Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Movie blogging is cool and all, but I would argue that cinema's best use of the Internet is making rare fare available to the audience at large. That's slowly but surely starting to happen, and CRM (Cinetic Rights Management) is adding to the pile with a new arthouse deal. Teaming up with a bunch of arthouse film distributors, CRM will slip content online through their FilmBuff label, hitting desinations like iTunes and Hulu.

The plan is to make "award-winning and critically acclaimed films" available, and they've listed four titles thus far. There's Ti West's Trigger Man (Scott called it a "watchable curiosity"), Olivier Assayas' Demonlover (Jeffrey M. Anderson called it a "hopped-up, arty cover for a standard issue Hollywood thriller"), Mike Akel's Chalk (Jette said it was "a great illustration of how a movie can truly blossom with the right crowd"), and Margaret Brown's doc The Order of Myths (which Jette said "gives us a good feel for the fun and exciting parts of Mobile's Mardi Gras as well as the undercurrent of "traditional" racial segregation that still exists today").

Having grown up in a town that had nothing more than a "Video World" stocked with only the crappiest of B fare and mainstream numbers (I remember driving to the closest city to rent Tromeo and Juliet), I'm always jazzed about more rare fare getting out there. But the best piece of pie will come when anyone, anywhere, can read up on a movie and be watching it in one or two clicks -- no matter how rare it is.

Indie Roundup reviews the past week of news from the independent film community and provides a peek at what's coming soon.

Deals. Screen Media Films picked up U.S. rights to Women in Trouble and plans a release on November 13. The film, directed by Sebastian Gutierrez, is "a fun addition to the current trend of revisiting and reworking exploitation-film themes in a lighthearted way," wrote our own Jette Kernion earlier this year. "There's a certain pleasure in seeing a movie where the men are relegated to the Supportive Spouse and Lust Interest roles, after I've seen so many films where those are the only roles for women."

Dave Boyle's White on Rice, described as a heartwarming comedy, has been acquired by Variance Films and Tiger Industry Films; a theatrical release is scheduled to begin in Los Angeles on September 11 before expanding throughout the fall. Matt Bradshaw pointed the way to the quietly funny trailer. [More details on both deals can be found at indieWIRE.]

Online / On-Demand Viewing. All you Netflix "Watch Instantly" addicts can get your fix from even more indie films, thanks to Cinetic Rights Management. Matt Dentler notes that Richard Linklater's charming (and hugely influential) Slacker and festival favorites like Bob Odenkirk's Melvin Goes to Dinner and Gabriel Fleming's The Lost Coast, among others, are now available for online streaming to subscribers. I suppose it's a little too obvious to point out the irony of making a movie called Slacker even easier to watch, with almost no effort required at all? Ah, life in the 21st Century.

Who won the Indie Weekend Box Office? It's a laughing matter -- find out after the jump!

Now, I know Wayne Wang isn't in most cinephiles' good graces these days.* He's spent most of the decade making bland and unremarkable middle-brow flicks like Maid in Manhattan, Because of Winn-Dixie and Last Holiday. But the director behind The Joy Luck Club and Chinese Box still has a fair bit of cachet, and when he does something like make his new film available in its entirety online and for free, people pay attention.

So, pay attention: Wang's The Princess of Nebraska, an indie he premiered at last year's Toronto International Film Festival (where it got a positive review from Cinematical's Kim Voynar), will be offered for free on the internet in September. The filmmaker partnered with ex-SXSW chief Matt Dentler and his Cinetic Rights Management to make this happen, as a means of releasing Princess simultaneously with its companion film, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, which will come to theaters courtesy of Magnolia Pictures. The exact plans of the release (i.e. where, how) haven't been announced, but I'll keep an eye on it. Take a look at this IndieWire story for more.

Not, probably, the start of a new Hollywood trend, given that The Princess of Nebraska -- a no-budget drama about a pregnant Chinese teenager's struggles in the United States -- probably wouldn't have done much business anyhow. But if Dentler and his colleagues can figure out a way to get people to watch the thing, who knows. Indie filmmakers could always use a new channel.

*The exception is our own Eric D. Snider, who informs me: "I love Wang films!"