Archive for the ‘HBO Films’ Category
Filed under: Documentary, Awards, Movie Marketing, HBO Films, Cinematical Indie
I finally saw the Oscar-nominated documentary Which Way Home over the weekend. And maybe some of you did, too, if you live in New York or LA and had the chance to check out AMC’s Best Documentary Feature showcase on Sunday. If not, don’t fret, the DVD of the film, which follows Central American children as they travel — with hopes of immigrating — to the U.S., will be available for purchase this Monday (March 8), and apparently HBO is re-airing it intermittently.
Anyway, due to the way it’s shot, Which Way Home is not really the sort of doc you need to watch on the big screen. Even on my TV it looked quite pixilated, and since HBO was involved in its development, it’s possible there was always the idea in mind of shooting for cable presentation (which could be used to argue against its Oscar-worthiness, but that’s a topic for another time).
This isn’t to criticize its low-budget video look, especially since the lightweight cameras used for the film clearly allowed for better access and coverage of the migrant children’s stories. Seeing the Mexican landscapes shown in the film through 35mm or even HD might have been nice, but the filmmakers certainly couldn’t have hopped atop freight trains with lots of bulky equipment. Nor would they have gotten the night scenes that appear in the film.
Filed under: Documentary, Foreign Language, Awards, Michael Moore, Oscar Watch, Columns, HBO Films, Cinematical Indie
I keep forgetting there are ten nominees for Best Picture this year. And when I try to name them all, a few titles are consistently lost in the bunch. Are District 9 and Up really in contention? And A Serious Man, too? Because it sure doesn’t feel like it. Seems more like a five-film race, as always.
Likewise, it’s hard to think of there being five Oscar nominees for Best Documentary Feature when the race is clearly focused on only two films, The Cove and Food, Inc. These are obviously the popular favorites because they are available on DVD. Could you even name the other nominees without looking them up?
The sad thing is, looking up the other three films might not even help you out. Two nominees, Which Way Home and The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, don’t even have Wikipedia entries. That’s a bad sign for the public awareness of and interest in your project.
Which Way Home was likely seen by a significant audience when it aired on HBO last August, while Most Dangerous Man opened in a number of U.S. cities this past weekend (First Run Features expands its scope even further this Friday). Where is the support and fanbase for these nominees?
It should be enough that the Academy has recognized these films, as well as Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country (which does have a Wikipedia page), and surely its members aren’t only concerned with which documentaries are more popular in the mainstream. If that were the case, Anvil! The Story of Anvil, It Might Get Loud and Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story might have been at least shortlisted, if not also nominated.
Continue reading Doc Talk: Discuss This Year’s Oscar-Nominated Documentary Features
Filed under: Documentary, Newsstand, HBO Films
One of the best-known documentaries about the effects of Hurricane Katrina and the levee failures in New Orleans is from Spike Lee. His four-hour film When the Levees Broke aired on HBO in 2006 and won several Emmys as well as awards at the Venice Film Festival. Now, more than four years after Katrina, Lee is returning to The Big Easy to shoot a follow-up film for HBO. The filmmaker is scheduled to start shooting this week in New Orleans, but also plans to spend time along the Gulf Coast, an area some critics felt he neglected in his original film.
Interestingly enough, Lee’s 40 Acres and a Mule production company is not the only one shooting Katrina-related material for HBO in New Orleans right now. David Simon, who produced the TV show The Wire, is finishing 10 episodes of a New Orleans-set show called Treme, focusing on characters who are musicians. The show is set to premiere on April 11. No date or title has yet been announced for Lee’s documentary.
Filed under: Documentary, Drama, Music & Musicals, Casting, HBO Films
So while I might not be the biggest Jackie O or Jeanne Tripplehorn aficionado, I will say this: they do look an awful lot alike. The Hollywood Reporter announced that Tripplehorn has signed to play the iconic Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in the HBO Films ‘remake’ of Grey Gardens. Tripplehorn will be joining Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange in the ‘true’ story of two of the most eccentric women you could ever meet.
Back in 1975, Albert and David Maysles, Susan Froemke, Ellen Hovde, and Muffie Meyer made a documentary about the lives of Edith “Big Edie” Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edith “Little Edie” Bouvier Beale. They were the aunt and cousin to Onassis and lived a bizarre life in almost total isolation in a ramshackle mansion by the name of Grey Gardens. After trying for years to have the home brought up to code, the two were finally separated when “Big Edie” died in 1977 (Little Edie finally sold the house in 1979 to a former editor for the Washington Post). The documentary inspired an award winning stage musical in 2006 starring Christine Ebersol as Little Edie. The new film from HBO will not be a musical (thankfully, I might add) and instead was based on the original documentary.
The cast also includes Daniel Baldwin as Julius Krug, the former secretary of the interior and true love of Little Edie (Barrymore). Tripplehorn is doing some post-production work for Winged Creatures, an ensemble drama about a group of people who survive a shooting in an L.A. diner (I guess it will be kind of like Crash, but with more gunfire). Grey Gardens is being directed by Michael Sucsy (who also co-wrote the script with Patricia Rozema) and is currently shooting on location in Toronto, Canada. Grey Gardens will hit theaters in 2008.
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Filed under: Drama, Sports, Casting, Celebrities and Controversy, Scripts, Home Entertainment, HBO Films
Variety reports that HBO Films will bring the Barry Bonds story to their network. San Francisco Giant Bonds recently broke baseball’s all-time home run record, “allegedly” lied to a jury under oath concerning his use of performance-enhancing drugs, and was indicted on federal charges. Say it ain’t so, Barry! HBO has purchased the rights to Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO and the Steroids Scandal That Rocked Professional Sports, which is said to paint Bonds as “a gifted player who made a Faustian bargain to increase his power.” Ron Shelton will adapt the book with John Norville (co-writer of Shelton’s Tin Cup) after the WGA Strike. Shelton is also set to direct.
Ron Shelton is a terrific writer/director of sports movies when he’s on, but he doesn’t have the greatest batting average. Bull Durham, White Men Can’t Jump, and Tin Cup are classics of baseball, basketball, and golf film, respectively. But Cobb? Play it to the Bone? The dreadful Hollywood Homicide (not a sports film I realize, but so bad I had to mention it)? Hopefully the Bonds film will be one of his “hits.” I always find it interesting when movies are made about figures who are not only still alive, but still going strong. It just seems like it’d be…awkward for all involved. Who do you think should play Barry Bonds? Shelton regular Kevin Costner? I kid, I kid. Do you think they should get a newcomer or go for a star? And which star?
Continue reading Barry Bonds Gets an Indictment and His Own HBO Film
Filed under: Festival Reports, Podcasts, Interviews, HBO Films, Cinematical Indie
An award-winning photographer, Lauren Greenfield’s work has appeared in magazines, newspapers and her own books; her debut documentary, Thin, was an impressive and sensitive examination of eating disorders in America through the lives of women at an outpatient center recieving treatment for their problems. She’s back at Sundance with her short Kids + Money, an examination of shopping and spending among L.A. teens. Greenfield spoke with Cinematical about finding her subjects, whether school uniforms help keep kid consumerism at bay, and her own high school years in Los Angeles. Greenfield thinks her mix of L.A. kids — from striving lower-class ones to pampered and privileged ones — all have something to say about the mindset of teen America: “Sometimes the stories that they tell seem shocking or seem extreme, but I really think they speak to the mainstream that young people are experiencing all over the country.”
This interview, like all of Cinematical’s podcast offerings, is now available through iTunes; if you’d like, you can subscribe at this link. Also, you can listen directly here at Cinematical by clicking below:
Filed under: Comedy, Romance, Warner Brothers, Fandom, Movie Marketing, HBO Films
There is nothing new about the debate over rampant commercialism and Sex and the City. So, I’m not even going to go into whether empowerment can be achieved through shopping. But, Fergie’s new theme song for the big-screen SATC has hit the web, and she has no qualms about making an ode to designer labels. Titled Labels or Love, the track sounds like a My Humps redux, and frankly, it’s pretty awful. For starters, throughout most of the song I had a hard time understanding what she was even saying. But when you can make out the lyrics, they include such philosophical statements as: “Love is a like a runway,” “Stop chasing those boys and shop some more,” and “No emotional baggage, just replace it with Dior.”
Fans of the show have been awaiting the feature film version with bated breath since the news first hit, and the fever pitch has only risen now that Kim Cattrall and Sarah Jessica Parker have been letting the spoilers fly. Unfortunately, SATC was never really my thing, so I only have a passing curiosity to see how they translate Carrie and the gang on the screen. One thing is for sure, if this theme song is an indication of the music for the movie, I definitely won’t be buying the soundtrack.
Take a listen and tell me what you think: Did Fergie improve upon the original? Or is this track best reserved for the closing credits?
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Filed under: Documentary, Foreign Language, Tribeca, Theatrical Reviews, HBO Films
The HBO-produced documentary film Baghdad High offers a fairly basic yet intriguing enough premise: The filmmakers gave video cameras to four Iraqi high school students and asked them to simply record as much of their “normal life” as possible. (I’m of the opinion that any time you give a teenager a camera, you’re getting everything BUT “normal life,” but obviously I’m not the first to claim that the act of recording something instantly obliterates “normalcy.”) The point here seems to be that … hey, you know what? Aside from the fact that they live very far away in a country that’s going through some terrible problems these days, these teenagers are a whole lot like … our teenagers! Wow, how shocking is that?!?!?
What’s most interesting about these kids is that, despite the fact that they all live in Iraq, they also come from very different religious backgrounds — and yet they’re still friends! (Hope for the future sometimes comes in small packages, I suppose.) All four of the boys are perfectly charming and entirely typical: They whine about homework, they stress over studies, they gripe about being bored, they argue with their parents, and they do all the stuff that your favorite teens do: Video games, pop music, sports, rough-housing, etc. So far all its admirable intentions, the simple truth is that Baghdad High makes a very good point about the similarities of human nature (especially where teens are concerned), but then it just sort of … keeps making the same point over and over.
Filed under: Independent, Deals, New Releases, Sundance, Festival Reports, Shorts, Fandom, DIY/Filmmaking, HBO Films
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For an emerging filmmaker, the Sundance Film Festival provides a starting point for the life span of a feature-length work. There’s a far greater sense of immediacy, however, for the filmmakers involved in the shorts program, where a wide variety of material tends to begin circulating the festival world before fading into complete obscurity. That’s why the short films that screened yesterday as part of the third annual Sundance Institute at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) signified the most important aspect of the two-week event: With few exceptions, the films on display received the kind of exposure that helped validate this frequently neglected format. While some of the titles are available on iTunes, many that were shown to a packed house finally got the long-delayed reception they deserved.
Animated efforts almost always offer the best ingredients in any shorts program, since it’s here that you’ll find a combination of inspired side projects from gainfully employed studio animators and the works of struggling independent artists. The latest program couldn’t beat the sheer brilliance of cult animator Don Hertzfeldt’s short Everything Will Be Ok in last year’s showcase, but two particularly memorable films left distinct impressions this time around.
Filed under: Documentary, Drama, Deals, HBO Films
One of my favorite documentaries last year was Crazy Love, about a New York couple named Burt and Linda who have been together off and on for 50 years despite some serious setbacks, e.g., the time Burt hired a man to throw lye in Linda’s face and blind her. These are people who should hate each other — she for the way he physically harmed her, he for the way she nags and pesters him now — and yet they are in love. And yet I, a normal person, remain single. Life is bizarre and unfair, that’s the message I got from the film.
Crazy Love did well enough for a doc, but of course a non-doc would reach wider audiences. So now Variety reports that the doc’s director, Dan Klores, will make his narrative debut writing and directing a fictionalized version of the story for HBO Films. There’s no announcement yet on whether it will premiere on HBO or open theatrically, but either one is a possibility. Crazy Love premiered at Sundance, as have many other HBO Films productions, and sometimes the level of success on the festival circuit determines whether it goes to theaters or straight to cable from there.
Continue reading ‘Crazy Love’ Story to be Fictionalized for HBO Films
