Cinemascope

“Waltz With Bashir” an animated feature chronicling the real life experience and aftermath of director’s Ari Folman recollections and traumas as a soldier in the first Lebanon war (the third one on the way?) will have its world premiere on Thursday at the Cannes Film Festival, where it’s competing for the Palme D’or. It will be the second competition entry to be unveiled to the jury and the press on the festival’s first full day of screenings.
Meanwhile, here is the exclusive world premiere of the breathtaking trailer to this animated quasi-documentary. It looks stunning.

“Donnie Darko” has a sequel on the way, called “S. Darko” (S for Samantha, Donnie’s sister, which actually makes the movie a spin-off rather than a sequel). But Richard Kelly, “Donnie Darko”s writer-director want to make one thing perfectly clear: he has nothing to do with this movie, which starts pre-sales in the upcoming Cannes market (damn the buyers that will pour money what seems on the outset as a blasphemous and disrespectful project) and begins shooting May 18th. In fact he holds no rights on the Donnie Darko franchise. Here is Richard Kelly’s blog post from today, where he also adds a riddle concerning his upcoming movie, “The Box”, now in post-production:

Over the last couple of days, a few people have asked me what’s up with “this Donnie Darko sequel.” So to set the record straight, here’s a few facts I’d like to share with you all - I haven’t read this script. I have absolutely no involvement with this production, nor will I ever be involved. I have no control over the rights from our original film, and neither I nor my producing partner Sean McKittrick stand to make any money from this film.
Now . . . I will leave you with some good news!
The last few months have been an amazing time for us on the editing of The Box. We’re starting to work with a very famous band who is honoring us with being the first fillmmakers they’ve ever scored a film with.
Hopefully there will be an announcement soon about who it is!

Anyone wants to guess who that band is? I say it’s Radiohead. What do you think?

Monday afternoon update: I’m hearing now it’s Arcade Fire.

In May 2006, exactly two years ago, film distributors in Israel decided to wage war on local movie critics. They wanted to stop critics and magazines from running reviews on opening weekends, claiming that bad reviews are hurting their box office business and that journalists should give movies at least 3 days grace period and run the reviews on the Sunday following opening weekend. Trying to reason with the distributors, and telling them that in the age of broadband internet you can read the review of any movie online weeks before it’s premiere fell flat on tin ears. When asked what is the logic behind such a move, when the film business is moving into the globalization mode of day-and-date release and marketing, a distributor proxy said “we will turn the clock backwards”. Meaning that modern film practices, in exhibition and distribution, mean nothing to those banning Israeli distributors (indeed, they are also the last to employ digital projection in Israel).

Most distributors folded their ban within 2-3 months, some did so after the studios they represent heard of it and went ballistic. But two major distributors are adamant with their ban, and are at it for two years now. They are the distributors that represent Disney, 20th Century Fox, Sony, Miramax, New Line and The Weinstein Company.

Indeed, some blockbusters don’t need any reviews to succeed. “Enchanted”, for instance, was released in Israel without any press coverage and did just fine. But Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood” was idiotically released without reviews and did poorly.

“Deadline Hollywood” blogger Nikki Finke wrote about this moronic ban a year ago here and here. Variety’s Ali Jaafar wrote about the ban almost n real time. Even David Poland commented on it.

Israeli distributors are also Israel’s movie chain owners - with two companies controlling most of the screens and titles in what may seem as a virtual cartel (though no evidence to an actual cartel was ever substantiated) - so their hold on the film business is tight. There is no one to tell them what to do. The banning distribution company, Forum Film - a family business operating since the 1940’s - also has some gentleman’s club clout with major Hollywood business, with whom they deal for decades and who obviously look away.

But apart from not letting movie critics do their job properly - writing a review in a print paper or online, has a lot to do with the timing of the publishing as it does the content of the writing - this ban elucidates the impotence of most newspaper editors who are willing to see their critics banned from screening (or worse: letting their critics attend preview screening and promising the distributor they would wait the weekend before running the review) just not to hurt their chances of getting a roundtable interview in a junket with the big star of an upcoming blockbuster.

It also shows how much of an ego power-trip this entire ban is. Because not only are reviews (indeed in English, and not in Hebrew) available online - on movie blogs and sites such as Variety - a week before a film’s release, but online critics in Israel could easily buy a ticket to see the morning show of a new movie (films are released here on Thursdays) and have a review up by noon, so the ban is actually pointless. (Although I am one the banned critics, both my online blog in Hebrew and my print column has been mostly unaffected by the ban, either by writing on opening day online, after a morning matinée, or writing in print with the aid of screeners sent to me by colleagues abroad. (I have to really not care about a movie to let it slide, as I did with “What Happens in Vegas” yesterday: the movie was released here with zero publicity, no billboards, nothing except a quarter page ad in a newspaper, and I found it not interesting enough to go see it on opening day).

So what’s the point? Ego. Power. Trying to prove they are allnighty, and having the ability to make newspaper publishers kneel in front of them and succomb to their might. And thus they have succeeded.

So in the upcoming summer season Israeli newspaper readers may read a junket interview with Will Smith in one magazine (that’s the way it goes here: if one magazine gets it, the others don’t), but they won’t know what “Hancock” is actually about, or whether it’s any good. And the same goes for Disney/Pixar’s “Wall-E”, and also “Narnia: Prince Caspian” and “Sex and the City”. I will admit that the latter movies will be huge here even without reviews, but superhero movies perform mediocerly at best with the Israeli teens, so no reviews means also almost zero visibility for a major release (last summer “Ratatouille” was huge in Israel but “Spiderman 3″ did poorly, in relation to its worldwide success - both films were banned from critics on opening weekend).

But assisting in the movie’s financial prospects is a side-affect of film reviews. This is, ultimately, another example of  corporations shutting out the media. And because as far as I know they do not manufacture Uranium in Israeli multiplexes it is not done to protect state secrets. Just to show who’s really the boss here. And it’s not the press or the freedom of the press.

The date may sound science fictiony but after scooping 200 million dollars world wide in just three days, Marvel Studios is feeling safe (i.e cocky) to announce the slate of their upcoming superhero movies from here to eternity. er… um… nope, just 2011.

“The Incredible Hulk”: June 13, 2008
“Thor” (Directed by Mathew Vaughn): June 4, 2010
“The First Avenger: Captain America”: May 6, 2011
“The Avengers” (the Iron Man, Incredible Hulk, Captain America and Thor supergroup): July 2011
“Ant Man” (directed by Edagar Wright): TBA
“Spiderman 4″: TBA

This is the minute playing after the end credits of “Iron Man”. Watch this quickly before Paramount yanks down the video:

Israel will be jubilantly celebrating its 60th Independence Day anniversary on Thursday. As an Israeli I will join the many flooding the streets in Tel Aviv, watching fireworks display, but at the same time my stomach keeps turning at the news of the continuous civil rights infringements in the occupied territories. As this is a movie blog and not a political blog, this next story is relevant:

Palestinian filmmaker Annemarie Jacir will have her film “Salt of this Sea” premiere next week at the Cannes film festival, in the Un Certain Regard section. But last week, when she tried to enter from Jordan into the West Bank, where she was born and where she lives, her entrance was denied after a long interrogation she was escorted back to the bus to send her back into Jordan. This is not the first time Ms. Jacir’s entrance into the occupied territories was banned. When she wanted to shoot scenes for her movie (co-produced by Danny Glover), she was not allowed, ultimately having to settle for the French area of Marseille double as a Palestinian town.

Annemarie Jacir on the set of her Cannes bound film “Salt of this Sea” (photo via vertigomagazine.co.uk)

Ms. Jacir has written about her troubles last week at the Israeli border for the blog Jordanian Indie Films:

April 29, 2008

I have been looking forward to this week for months now – it was to be one of the most important moments for me - the world premiere of my feature film “milh hadha al- bahr” (Salt of this Sea) in Palestine.

The premiere was to take place in Amari Refugee camp in Ramallah, with the cast and crew, the people who helped make this film happen, who believe in it, to be in attendance. An outdoor screening and an occasion to share the completion of a project which has been the result of a five-year struggle. What made this event so special was that it is also a big celebration for us – that we received the incredible news that the film was selected for the Cannes Film Festival as an Official Selection (May 14th – 25th, 2008).

As you may know, the Israeli Authorities have not allowed me to return to Palestine for 9 months now. Because of this we were not able to film a main scene of the film and in the end, the scene had to be shot in Marseilles, France. My lawyer has been working now for eight months on the issue of my return home. So for the premiere of the film, I also had an invitation from the French Consulate in Jerusalem, who have been supporters of the film, and the International Art Academy of Ramallah were co-sponsoring the screening. There was nothing I was looking forward to more than finally being back in Palestine and sharing the film.

From Amman, Jordan, I took the bus to the Allenby bridge (Sheikh Hussein) in order to cross the Jordanian border and enter the West Bank. I arrived at the bridge at 10 in the morning. The Israelis held me there for six hours, during which time I was interrogated approximately five times. In the beginning I was made to wait in the main room with all the other people crossing. After some time, I was taken to another section in the back, separated from the others, and spent the remaining period of my time waiting there alone. Every now and then people would come in and out of a door, sometimes to ask me questions, sometimes just on their way somewhere else. My telephone was taken from me.

At the end, I was then taken to the general room once more and asked to sit and wait. After about 20 minutes, a woman in a blue uniform (the others wore a different uniform), came towards me with my passport in her hand and four security agents behind her. She handed me my passport and said, “The Israeli Ministry of Interior has denied you entry.” I asked if a reason was given. She said, “You spend too much time here.” I was then deported - escorted by two of the agents out of the terminal and onto a bus back to Jordan.

I got on the bus. I felt like my legs weren’t strong enough to carry me.

Although any violation of human rights is deplorable, whether it is done to a blacksmith or a poet, the prosecution of the people of the arts is doubly tragic. It’s also downright stupid. One would hope that agents of the State see artists as ambassadors of hope and not as political offenders. And if humanity doesn’t register, maybe common sense should: it’s quite clear that the persecution of an artist would lead to protests by the international arts and letters community. Not a wise move from a PR point-of-view. Ms. Jacir’s film was nurtured at the Sundance Lab, and is headed to Cannes, where it will play alongside Israeli movies. This was supposed to be a moment of optimism, not of torment.

In the latest issue of The Atlantic magazine, Israel’s bleak future is examined through the eyes of one Israeli novelist, the great David Grossman, whose been a peace and anti-occupation activist for many years. Here’s a sombre paragraph:

The 60th anniversary of Israel’s birth—it gained independence on May 15, 1948—is meant to be a celebration, but Grossman sees darkness ahead. “Our army is big, we have this atom bomb, but the inner feeling is of absolute fragility, that all the time we are at the edge of the abyss.”

Read the piece in full here. Learn about Israel’s civil rights infringements in the occupied territories here. Protest here.

Nuru Rimington-Mkali, a 21-year-old Londoner, won a short film contest sponsored by Web-based production company Filmaka. He will now receive funding of about $5 million for a feature film he will direct.

His winning film is the 3 minute short “And I Refuse to Forget“, a mixtape of “Pi”, “Memento” and “Primer”. Director Neil LaBute, one of the judges, said it’s a “wonderfully impressive paranoid thriller that was told with great economy and vivid imagery.”
Filmaka is now moving forward with new online movie competitions.

This is his winning submission:

What do you think, does it show great promise?

Yossi Harel, who was the commander of the ship “Exodus”, has died yesterday at age 90. Harel was one of the leaders in the clandestine operations to bring Jewish Holocaust survivors to Israel (before the state of Israel even existed). The British rule of Palestine, in the days before 1948, deemed these immigrants as illegal and sent war-ships to thwart their arrival to Palestine shores, and send them back to Germany. Harel was most famous for his operation “Exodus”, in which a beat-up river boat was loaded with over 4,000 Jewish European illegal immigrants that were intercepted by the British near the shores of Palestine. This heroic tale was made famous by Leon Uris’ novel “Exodus” and then by Otto Preminger’s 1960 film of the same name, where Paul Newman played Ari Ben Canaan, a character based on Harel.

Otto Preminger’s “Exodus” actually jump-started the Israeli film industry. Most of the movie was shot on location in Israel. There were almost no Israeli films made before 1960.
But Harel had also a contemporary role in the Israeli film industry, through his daughter, Sharon Harel.
Sharon Harel started out as producer and partner to Avi Nesher in his first two massive hits in the Seventies, “The Troupe” and “Dizengof 99″.
In 1989 she founded the London based production and financing company, “Capitol Films”, and was executive producer on Roman Polanski’s “Death and the Maiden”, Robert Altman’s “Gosford Park” and David Cronneberg’s “Spider”.

Talia Lavie is a promising young Israeli director whose thesis film “The Substitute” - a wry and ironic brilliant little movie about failed suicide attempts - won her prizes in festivals around the world in the last two years. After winning the grand prize at the Munich student film festival, she was asked back this year to sit on the jury of the festival. The president of the jury was Michael Ballhaus, whose turbo camera movements in “The Color of Money”, “After Hours” and “Goodfellas” blew me away. Now, after shooting “The Departed”, he claims he is retired, and back living in his native Germany, and not in Hollywood anymore. Lavie took the opportunity of sitting side-by-side with him on the Munich jury, and asked him to sit down for a little formal interview.
Some the material here is quite revelatory: he tells of how Martin Scorsese felt that “The Departed” may be his worst film and that he thought that Jack Nicholson is stealing the movie from him. He talks about working with Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day Lewis and Robert De Niro (”We were grateful for him actually staying in the room”), and the difference between a Scorsese and a Redford. And how a long, but abusive, relationship with Rainer Werner Fassbinder started it all.

Read the Michael Ballhaus interview after the jump:

(more…)