new york times Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The complicated story of Roman Polanski and his flight from the US over 30 years ago is starting to get very, very simple – at least when it comes to the law. The NYT reports that Polanski (and his legal representatives) have lost the appeal to have the director released from a Zurich jail following his arrest for a 2005 international warrant. The appeal was rejected by the Swiss Justice Ministry and a spokesperson for the ministry was quoted as saying the reason they rejected the request was that they felt "there is a high risk of flight" -- and it's not like you can blame them, the man does have a habit of disappearing when in the middle of a sticky situation.

That hasn't stopped his legal representatives from asking Switzerland's highest criminal court to free Polanski, but representatives from the Justice Ministry even submitted letters explaining their opposition to freeing the director. However, there is still a chance the director could be freed, and according to the NYT, "The Federal Criminal Court has said it will rule in the case in the "next weeks," and a verdict in either direction can be appealed to the country's highest judicial body, the Federal Tribunal."

I guess Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are too busy waiting for her to give birth, because they're no longer in this whole prom business. In June, Christopher Campbell posted about how a New York Times story was going to be made into a feature film, and that Brangelina had brought it to Paramount and Plan B to get it off the ground.

Now Variety reports that Miramax films have sealed the deal to bring This Strange Thing Called Prom to the big screen. However, they've only got the premise right now. Either they're going to create their own idea from this story, or move on and get the rights from each of the kids involved. As of now, no producer or writer has been attached.

If you're not familiar with Brooke Hauser's article, it follows a bunch of high school seniors at an international high school who are getting ready for prom. Instead of the usual band of promgoers, these kids come from all over the world, areas from Venezuela to Poland. But it's not all magical dances and perfect memories, and the experience "ranged from magical to miserable." But what's particularly cute about this story is that it's a bunch of international students who know nothing of prom coming together, researching the world of prom, and throwing their own. Just their discussions on what prom should be are worth the read.

And here's to hoping they keep the story and diversity in tact.

It seems fairly certain that Hancock will do decent business when it hits theaters this week, if only because Will Smith rarely stars in a dud these days -- especially when it's his face selling the movie before all else. Whether or not the film has staying power after opening weekend, however, remains to be seen, but Sony Pictures clearly has a lot of faith in its potential: Last week, the studio revealed its intentions of releasing the film online sometime after its theatrical run and before its DVD release, but only to users with Sony Bravia TV sets. It's a bold maneuver, one that assumes its core base of consumers actually have an interest in Hancock -- but the movie will make a profit either way, so it's a reasonable choice for this intriguing experiment.

Left in the dust by Apple's iPod, Sony continues to struggle in its search for a piece of the digital revolution. Company head Howard Stringer recently told the New York Times that the strategy for releasing Hancock "vanishes the memory of the failures of the Sony Walkman." Well, maybe. While on-demand technology has changed the way audiences consume their media, they don't like paying more money than necessary. Asking your audiences to buy a special device in order to access what, at this point, amounts to one movie -- well, that's asking a lot. But it's still a step in the right direction.

What do you think?

This past Sunday, The New York Times featured a popular City-section story about the first-ever prom held for students of Brooklyn's International High School. In case you don't like to read, you can simply watch the video accompaniment here. And if you don't like to read and you don't like documentary-style videos, and have a lot of patience, you can wait for the feature film, which will apparently be hitting theaters some time in the future. According to New York magazine's Vulture blog, a number of producers are interested in optioning the article, while Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have personally brought it to the attention of Paramount Pictures, where Pitt's Plan B Entertainment has a first-look deal. Supposedly an unnamed non-Paramount studio exec beat us all to the punch by joking that "maybe Maddox and the twins can star in it." Of course, he forgot about Pax and Zahara (and the twins aren't really international).

Actually, the first joke I thought about was the running gag on TV's The Critic about the kid from Easter Island who attends the United Nations School. Then, the second joke I thought of was about Brangelina's adopted children. Then I kept thinking of other things, such as how thanks to Prom Night people might assume this other prom-themed movie is also a horror flick. But that's not so much a joke as it is me trying to think on a studio exec's level (hey, we were synchronous with the Maddox bit) in order to contemplate what they'd call the thing. International Prom? A Prom for All Nations (ala the video's title)? Or will Hollywood appropriately go for one of those song-based titles? Been around the World, perhaps?

Adam Sandler's movies haver never represented the apex of cultural awareness, but they do tend to grapple, if somewhat brashly, with the finer points of human relations. In his latest raunchfest, You Don't Mess with the Zohan, the insolent comic creates "his stupidest character ever" (as an audience member muttered five minutes into last night's New York preview screening), but it's also his most symbolic one: Sporting a hyperbolic flair for disco music and using hummus as toothpaste, hardened Israeli soldier Zohan is a bloated creature of Semitic extremes.

Overall, however, the movie uses metaphors more than stereotypes. When Zohan and a furious Palestinian terrorist (John Turturro) use paddles to bat a live grenade back and forth, the result is a lowbrow editorial cartoon.

Just when it was looking like No Country for Old Men had a monopoly on successful interpretations of Cormac McCarthy's drearily minimalistic prose, production on an adaptation of The Road suggests the possibility of healthy competition. The movie, which recently finished shooting in Pennsylvania and hits theaters in November, remains a wild card until post-production wraps. Nevertheless, if this colorful report from the set in The New York Times offers any indication, The Road appears poised to capture McCarthy's original gloomy lyricism. Reporter Charles McGrath points out the difficulties the filmmakers endured when the weather got too nice and the grass looked too green. In other words, they're working really hard to keep things bleak. The story, about a father and son wandering through desolate landscapes after a cataclysmic event destroys civilization, demands that the dark aura remain intact. However, it wouldn't work without two strong leads, and McGrath implies that with Viggo Mortensen and eleven-year-old Kodi Smit-Mcphee (the next Haley Joel Osment?), that need has been fulfilled.

The best match for The Road, however, is its director, John Hillcoat, whose work on The Proposition proves he's the man for the job. That woefully undervalued western had the intensity of a Sam Peckinpah movie in overdrive, and The Road screams for the same raw, stripped-down approach. It's nice to hear that Hillcoat sees the movie as an antithesis to Mad Max, meaning he wants to eschew cartoony violence in order to create a scarily realistic depiction of post-apocalyptic duress. Bring it on.

[Photo above: Kodi Smit-Mcphee on the set of The Road, courtesy of the New York Times]

Considering how much puffing is usually done to launch those "little movies that could," it's ironic that a documentary about blowing up balloons has made its way into the spotlight without an inflated media campaign. Sounds like the New York Times's Douglas Quenqua has noticed Sara Taksler and Naomi Greenfield's documentary about balloon twisting during its nationwide tour. After debuting at 2007's SXSW (Cinematical's Scott Weinberg notes the opening of Twisted: A Balloonamentary here), the film now has a solid run going at St. Louis's Landmark Tivoli theater.

Deer Park, Texas' Ralph Dewey, who uses balloon twisting as part of his gospel ministry, told the Times he isn't going to see the documentary on the grounds that there's too much uncleanliness in it. Unfortunately, some artistes twist the poor innocent balloon into hard-R and even unrated shapes, as you've probably seen at bachelorette parties and on cruise ships. The conflict between "gospel twisters" and "adult twisters" is unflinchingly depicted here, in accordance with the rule that every successful doc needs heroes, villains and conflicts. ("Michelle" seen above, supposedly paid for her house with the unholy art of adult balloon twisting.) Taksler, now a producer for The Daily Show, raised the money for the film by auctioning off the executive producer credit on eBay. And Jon Stewart himself hosts an animated sequence of the film. Twisted: A Balloonamentary opens in June in NYC.

In these supposedly progressive times, gender equality is one of those touchy issues relegated to the last paragraph of a trend piece nobody reads. When Katherine Heigl suggested to Vanity Fair that Judd Apatow's movies were sexist, the assertion came across like an after-the-fact shrug of acceptance. Ever the galvanizing provocateur, New York Times critic Manohla Dargis confronts the issue head-on with a thorough analysis of the gender bias in this year's summer blockbusters.

With "Iron Man, Batman, Big Angry Green Man" and other massive expressions of virility invading the box office, female roles appear to be relegated to the back of the multiplex. Dargis touches on the rumors that Warner Bros head Jeff Robinov believes no woman has been able to sell a movie since Julia Roberts (a point that Natalie Portman might contest, but not Paris Hilton) before sizing up numerous upcoming studio releases, with particular attention paid to Anna Faris, "who could be the next Judy Holliday but without the right material will, alas, probably end up the next Brittany Murphy." It's the kind of pronouncement that hits you in gut.

The Hollywood Reporter has an interesting piece up on the disappearing space in print publications for reviews of independent films. The loss of print film critics in numerous outlets, coupled with the increasing number of independent films being released each year, is making it more of a challenge for indie films to get reviews of their films in print pubs. Online critics have taken up some of the slack -- we here at Cinematical still review as many indies as we can, in addition to the more mainstream fare, but there's still a perception out there among some that an online review carries less weight than a review printed on paper.

The article has some interesting dueling quotes; THINKfilm's Mark Urman notes, "We're not at a point where Internet writers have the credibility of established media with proven records and editors." Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeff Wells begs to differ, saying in part, "... there are maybe eight or 10 online critics who genuinely matter and are, in the parlance of the trade, 'conversation starters.' Due respect, but insisting that review quotes are still about print critics is generational hubris."

There's an interesting post over on Green Cine Daily from yesterday that's worth pondering: How much is it okay for a film critic to reveal spoilers when writing a review? The post was inspired by a piece in the New York Times by Village Voice film critic Nathan Lee called "Giving it All Away," in which he pretty much revels in being a critic who spoils key points in a film for the people who read his stuff. This is an important topic for me -- when I review a film, I try to respect that people usually don't want to have it spoiled for them before they see it, and so I try to balance analyzing what I like and don't like about a film with not revealing too much.

This issue of spoilers has reached a fever-pitch with the release of the seventh and final Harry Potter book; I've had to scrupulously avoid any and all websites that might give anything away, and even in our house, where four of us are simultaneously reading the book, we're careful not to give away anything about the storyline so as not to ruin the fun of each of us discovering what happens for ourselves as the story unfolds. So I mostly disagree with Lee's perspective, just as I disagreed with the idiots who drove around my town with one of the key plot elements of the sixth Harry Potter book shoe-polished on their rear window right after it came out -- I suppose there's a bit of power and glee in spoiling things for those who haven't yet seen or read something yet, but why would you want to do that?

I guess it's also bit of a philosophical thing -- is the role of a critic to reveal the plot and analyze it in minute detail, as though writing a thesis paper for a grad school film class? Or is it to tell potential viewers what you like and don't like about a film, while carefully treading that line between explaining your point of view without giving too much away? I fall in the latter camp, but I know that Lee isn't the only one who doesn't care about revealing spoilers. If I'm reviewing a film, I never read other reviews until I'm done writing my own, because I don't want my perspective to be inadvertently shifted by reading another point of view; if I'm just deciding whether to see a film for pleasure, though, I have a few critics whose opinions I trust who I tend to gravitate toward, because I like to hear their perspectives going in; then afterwards I roll over their points in my mind and compare them to my own take on the film.

I guess it's a good thing Lee wrote this piece, though -- at least his readers will know once and for all that anything they read by him is likely to have spoilers, so those who don't want to have a film's plot spoiled for them can just avoid reading him altogether. What do you think, though? Is there a difference between how an arthouse film should be reviewed or critiqued, versus a mainstream flick? Do you care if a critic spoils a film for you by revealing key elements of the plot in a review? And if you know that a critic has a habit of doing so, do you avoid reading their reviews to begin with?