Big Screen Little Screen

Beastie Boy Adam Yauch directed this run and gun New York B-ball tribute with Harlem’s legendary Rucker Park (all flash, no pass) listed as one of the stars. The doc follows 8 of the country’s top high school talents participating in the first annual “Elite 24″ all-star streetball game before they are officially indoctrinated into the hype machine and guaranteed contracts of professional basketball. Three of the participants (Michael Beasley, Jerryd Bayless, and Kevin Love) are now projected Top 10 picks in this month’s NBA Draft. Scheduled release: June 27th.

Gunnin’ for That #1 Spot - trailer

Unofficial but most trustworthy of P.T. Anderson fansites Cigarettes and Red Vines has trudged up some speculation that the Oscar nominated director may soon be heading up the Robert Evans produced, Las Vegas set drama, Power Play. Paramount picked up the rights for Power Play, written by Variety Editor-in-Chief Peter Bart, back in 1998. In this 10-year old piece in Variety (via SlashFilm) Evans mentioned that he had hopes of roping in Jack Nicholson for the project, and that Anderson had already expressed being “very excited about adapting and directing it.” Power Play focuses on the struggles between a Native American entrepreneur and the established Vegas moguls that see him as a threat to their gambling turf stronghold.

P.T. has already logged some screen time within the gambling culture with his modest debut feature Hard Eight (1996) set in Reno, but knowing that he has a propensity to jump around to entirely new themes from one film to the next - not to mention that 10 years and three Anderson films have passed since this project was first announced - makes you wonder about the chances that this one will come to fruition. Though at face value it’s certainly more plausible than that Metal Gear Solid rumor that lasted all of one weekend.

If you absolutely must see a Steve Martin film released in this decade, try the dark comedy Novocaine with Helena Bonham Carter and Laura Dern (2001). Nice creepy facelifted try, but no cigar to Shopgirl.

PP2 teaser, more of a warning than a suggestion. (via Coming Soon)

Directed by Larry Charles (Borat, Curb Your Enthusiasm), Real Time’s Bill Maher takes his signature skepticism on a world tour. Fahrenheit 9/11 meets Jesus Camp in this “nonfiction film about the greatest fiction ever told.”

Religulous trailer

Statement from Bill Maher (via Anne Thompson):

“Since starting on Politically Incorrect in 1993, it has been my pleasure over the last decade and a half to make organized religion one of my favorite targets. I often explained to people, ‘I don’t need to make fun of religion, it makes fun of itself.’ And, then I go ahead and make fun of it too, just for laughs.

With religious fanatics like George Bush and Osama bin Laden now taking over the world, it seemed to me in recent years that this issue — this cause of debunking the man behind the curtain — needed to have a larger, more insistent and focused forum than late night television. I wanted to make a documentary, and I wanted it to be funny. In fact, since there is nothing more ridiculous than the ancient mythological stories that live on as today’s religions, this movie would try to be a real knee slapper. Unless, of course, you’re religious, then you might not like it.”

Scheduled release: October 3, 2008

While promoting the French release of Broken English (review, previously), director Zoe Cassavetes revealed that she’s piecing together a project consisting of four shorts, directed by herself, sister Xan Cassavetes (Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession), the Hughes Brothers (From Hell) and Jonathan Caouette (Tarnation). Xan Cassavetes and the Hughes Brothers all contributed to the not yet released New York, I Love You. (IONcinema)

– Sopranos writer Terence Winter has been hand-picked to write Martin Scorsese’s Boardwalk Empire for HBO. The drama is based on the Nelson Johnson book, “Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times and Corruption of Atlantic City.” (Variety)

– Was Wayne McClammy selected to helm the Fox feature, Cool School based on the strength of the I’m Fucking Matt Damon and I’m Fucking Ben Affleck videos? (Variety)

– Showtime has officially picked up the Diablo Cody penned The United States of Tara, with Toni Collette to star. Great casting for Collette, who plays a mother with multiple personality disorder, and the fact that Cody will have to tone down her faux 17-year old verbal kitch for her more mature star gives this one some legitimate promise. (Hollywood Reporter)

– Don’t call it a remake, says Werner Herzog of his retelling of Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, which will be set in New Orleans instead of New York. As for Ferrara, who expressed his hopes that the principles involved in the new Lieutenant would “die in Hell.” Herzog says ““Maybe I could invite him to act in a movie! Except I don’t know what he looks like.” (Screengrab)

– “[The film will be geared towards] 10-year-old kids, 12-year-old kids [who] don’t really know the old ‘Beverly Hills Cop.’ So it’s an opportunity to make it new for kids,” Ratner said. “The same way it felt for me watching ‘Beverly Hills Cop’ when I was a kid, that’s what I want to do for kids today.” - Brett Ratner cuts to the chase and saves us all at least a year (plus two hours, plus 10 dollars) in wondering whether Eddie Murphy could possibly regain his edge and if Beverly Hills Cop 4 will be worth the bother. (MTV News)

– Lost Boys: The Tribe, described as a “homage” to the original Lost Boys that features both Corey Feldman and Corey Haim, has been designated a straight to DVD feature, to be released on July 29th. Related: Heathers, the 20th Anniversary DVD will be released on July 1st. (HR)

– “George W Bush has hyperbolically expressed all the cowboy mentality the world holds of America.” - Screen Daily with Oliver Stone on Bush biopic, W.

– A.V. Club with Joel McHale of The Soup.

From the Seattle International Film Festival:

As a documentary trailing four teens over a 10-month span of their senior year in Warsaw, Indiana, Nanette Burnstein’s American Teen feels handled. The narration points out that Warsaw is a predominately conservative, Christian community, though from the viewer’s perspective it’s somehow stripped of almost all signs of red-blooded values or religion. You wouldn’t know you were in the Midwest if you weren’t told. Two of the more socially unconnected students repeatedly point out their desire to get the hell out of Warsaw, but you never find out what’s so bad about Warsaw. The high school and the four, all white teens (and a plus one, evidently made a fixture of the film after he became a love interest of a participant) were chosen by the director for their compelling stories. They fall into classic archetypes - geek, rebel, jock, and princess. The Breakfast Club parallels should be self-evident, but any smart marketer would no doubt demand that it be circled with multicolored highlighters. The most recent one-sheet for American Teen makes this point.

What is learned about Warsaw and its teens comes within the context of their goals and priorities for senior year. Jake, the pimpled band nerd, is singularly focused on finding a girlfriend. Student council leader and overall Queen Bee, Megan - who has said after the film’s release that she “really was a bitch,” needs to be accepted into Notre Dame to follow family tradition. Basketball star Colin shoulders the burden of making big shots for his team, as the only way he’ll make it into state college is through a scholarship. Hannah, an aspiring filmmaker that Burnstein has obviously taken a rooting interest in, sees no future in Midwest living, and intends to dash to California at the earliest possible opportunity.

We see their clique navigation, dating failures, and missteps. The Warsaw teens throw small parties with some drinking, but no drug use. At the screening of the film for SIFF, Burnstein was asked if that was by design or coincidence; she admitted that it was intentionally omitted, in part because she felt a sense of loyalty to her subjects and an obligation to keep them out of trouble, but also because she felt everything that she and her crew witnessed was on par with what she experienced in her own high school years. There are allusions to sex, though not to any anecdotal evidence of early dropouts, pregnancies, abuse, or serious financial hardships among the four central teens and their circle of friends. In the worst case, one acts on rage stemming from a family suicide years earlier, but as a whole, most obstacles are ordinary. Their onscreen dilemmas are timeless, and part and parcel with the high school experience - parental expectations. breakups, ostracism, rage, and shame.

Not to imply that this is a disingenuous Middle America take on The Hills - this is their senior year, more or less, as it happened. The question is not whether elements of American Teen have been treated, but rather what influence the filmmaker’s presence had on each story, and which moments documented over close to a year’s time were left on the cutting room floor.

What is the intended audience for American Teen? The PG-13 rating lends to the idea of a documentary, or non-fiction film about young adults, for young adults. What it lacks in hard-edgedness is compensated for by inspirational material. Early on the central characters were asked to provide a monologue, spoken over four animated sequences (another unfortunate, detracting factor), outlining their immediate and post-high school aspirations. By graduation, they all hit their goals or are within spitting distance of achieving the plans they had laid out. Everyone feels good. You can liken it to Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul.

Not every high school story needs to be of a jarring, scared straight variety, and in watching the film, teens, and maybe even their parents can walk away with the feeling that things aren’t so bad out there. That may be an accurate reflection of their own situation. It might not. As a documentary in the traditional sense, American Teen is not fully fleshed out. But, whether steered there from inception or in the editing room, it is a family-accessible crowd pleaser, and will succeed as such.

Scheduled release: July 25, 2008. Trailer

Werner Herzog travels to the National Science Foundation’s McMurdo Station in Antarctica, where a community of a little over 1000 marine biologists, physicists, and global nomads gather at one of the world’s most remote and inhospitable locales. Presented by ThinkFilm and The Discovery Channel. Scheduled Release: June 11, 2008.

Encounters at the End of the World trailer (via Coming Soon)

Sex and the City (heard of it?) star Kim Cattrall has signed on to executive produce and star in another New York based, sexually charged comedy for HBO, part of a development deal she negotiated while joining the SATC film. Based on the two-season long British series Sensitive Skin, Cattrall will play a “middle-aged wife and mother in New York who rediscovers her sexuality and begins to question her place in the world and the choices she has made in life.” The project, written and produced by Sopranos writers Mitchell Burgess and Robin Green, is the third adaptation of a British series in development for HBO following the comedy Suburban Shootout, and the women’s prison drama Bad Girls, brought to American viewers under the supervision of Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball. (Hollywood Reporter)

Johnny Depp (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) narrates the career retrospective of iconic “gonzo journalism” pioneer Hunter S. Thompson. Director Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) pieces together accounts and footage of Thompson’s first person reporting style in which he immersed himself in the cultures of drugs, activism, and politics during the sixties and seventies. Scheduled release: July 4, 2008.

Gonzo trailer