Recalling his early years mixed with Sixties feminists and Black Panthers, filmmaker John Waters again charmed and amped an audience at the start of Outfest late last week where he received the Los Angeles LGBT film festival’s 2012 Achievement Award. Never one to bore or to deliver a saccharine tale, he implored the audience to take a “Act Bad” and to use humor as a way of social dissent. He told a cheering audience to hail fashion insults outside the homes of anti-gay politicians and told budding filmmakers that if a studio says your story is “too gay,” then to get your “gay screenplay friends and go back to the studios and yell out the grosses of all their hetero-flops.” He talks about being a Yippie (‘to get laid’) in the ’60s and a hilarious chant in London at a protest against the pope. The 30th edition of Outfest runs through July 22nd in L.A.
The market for films addressing Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential candidacy and his term to date in the Oval Office has proven volatile at best: Hagiographies like the all-access, Edward Norton-produced By the People co-exist alongside a cottage industry of microbudget anti-Obama slam pieces like Hype , The Obama Deception and this past weekend’s 2016: Obama’s America . And thanks in part to election-year grassroots mania (and an interview with the president’s Kenyan half-brother), the latter film may yet prove to be the most lucrative of the Obama subgenre to date. But this weekend’s other release, The Obama Effect ? Not so much. Released on one screen in Houston by Rocky Mountain Pictures (the scrappy purveyor of such right-leaning fare as Atlas Shrugged and the sleeper hits End of the Spear and Expelled: No Intelligence Required ), 2016 pulled in a handsome $31,750 over three days. The showing followed a free word-of-mouth screening last Thursday which featured author/interviewer Dinesh D’Souza (on whose book the film is based) and Oscar-winning co-producer Gerald Molen in attendance; “some moviegoers sat in the aisles Thursday and waited as much as 90 minutes to meet,” according to a THR dispatch . An expanded release is foreseen, perhaps comprising 400 screens total in the lead-up to next month’s Republican National Convention. Meanwhile, down the box-office line (like, way down the box-office line) you’ll find The Obama Effect . Written and directed by and starring Charles S. Dutton, the film focuses on a man circa 2008 who overlooks mounting health and family issues in his fervor to campaign on Obama’s behalf. In a radio interview last week , Dutton described the film as a satirical look at a man who loses perspective on his life (and the political animals who come to surround him), but a glimpse at the trailer and other limited background on the film don’t really combine for much of a message or even much of a story. Which (along with a lack of D’Souza-esque, Obama-thwacking source material) helps explain why the film, released by Arc Entertainment, stumbled this weekend to a meager $73,000 on 25 screens — a per-theater average of $2,920. Lessons? Many remain to be determined, especially as campaign season chugs ahead, though producers and agents alike may immediately be advised that apparently the president’s half-brother George can open a movie better than Andrew Garfield, at least per screen . And think what he could have done with Battleship ! Ahem. Just throwing it out there. [ THR , Box Office Mojo ]
There has been some push-back in the blogosphere over the apparent “genetic enhancement” associated with Aaron Cross, played by Jeremy Renner in the all-new manifestation of the Bourne series, The Bourne Legacy , which comes out next month. But director Tony Gilroy assures that the latest film is “consistent” with the three previous installments, which of course starred Matt Damon . Director Tony Gilroy said he knew he could “enhance everything” and still have it be consistent with “what we had before.” He said the project was purposely changed visually and they’re “blowing the doors open to make it bigger and wider,” adding, “We want to keep the testosterone of it, but it demands a slightly different visual vocabulary.” Noted Renner: We had three movies prior to this, we we knew what they had done. [This] was a brand new canvas for us.” Gilroy also gives kudos to Jeremy Renner who plays Aaron Cross in Legacy . “ou want a character that is worth being at the center of these movies. When you have that, you need a proper actor. You need to find someone who has the chops, gravitas and physical ability – and he’s available…” Check Gilroy and Renner’s interview with AMC Theaters…
Some crazy stuff went down in the Grey’s Anatomy finale last night, but I don’t know about any of that because 1) I got off that train after about season three and 2) Fringe’s season finale was nearly perfect, drawing the episode’s threads together (namely the Peter dilemma) in a tenuously satisfying conclusion, only before everything went to hell in the last two minutes. It reeked of Jabrahms-inspired madness. It was wonderful. But enough fawning. Let’s break this down into our usual mad science capsules:
Bret Easton Ellis has written six books (his seventh, Imperial Bedrooms, comes out next month ), and all six have been optioned by Hollywood. Of those six, four were made into movies, and they run the gamut from iconic to underseen, acclaimed to lambasted. Each day this week, Ellis has tackled a different adaptation of his books for Movieline, giving his take on what worked, what didn’t, and what went on behind the scenes. So far this week, Movieline’s talked to Bret Easton Ellis about movies made from his own books — movies he often didn’t script himself. His upcoming screenplay, The Golden Suicides , is for a very different film entirely. Adapted by Ellis from a Nancy Jo Sales article for Vanity Fair and written for producer Gus Van Sant, it’s based on the true story of artists Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan (pictured above), a glamorous couple who eventually secluded themselves in a cocoon of paranoia when they believed that government organizations and Scientologists were out to get them. Duncan killed herself in July 2007, and a week later, the despondent Blake walked into the Atlantic and drowned.
