The week after the Oscars, most of the contenders are moving on to home viewing. It was a terrific season, but the market needs strong new entries to stem the box-office slide.
Neither of this week’s two most prominent releases — “Table 19” with a national Fox Searchlight break and “The Last Word” (Bleecker Street) — will bolster box office. It also doesn’t help that two highly-touted and well-reviewed wide release studio films, Fox’s “Logan” and Universal’s “Get Out,” are competing for many of the same viewers.
A series of smaller niche audience releases remain. And four this weekend are either Israeli or aimed at audiences interested in Jewish topics. Led by “Women in the Balcony” (Menemsha) they could see further life over the next several weeks.
Opening
Table 19 (Fox Searchlight) – Metacritic: 38
$1,575,000 in 868 theaters; PTA (per theater average): $1,815
Fox Searchlight opted to take this poorly-reviewed wedding...
Neither of this week’s two most prominent releases — “Table 19” with a national Fox Searchlight break and “The Last Word” (Bleecker Street) — will bolster box office. It also doesn’t help that two highly-touted and well-reviewed wide release studio films, Fox’s “Logan” and Universal’s “Get Out,” are competing for many of the same viewers.
A series of smaller niche audience releases remain. And four this weekend are either Israeli or aimed at audiences interested in Jewish topics. Led by “Women in the Balcony” (Menemsha) they could see further life over the next several weeks.
Opening
Table 19 (Fox Searchlight) – Metacritic: 38
$1,575,000 in 868 theaters; PTA (per theater average): $1,815
Fox Searchlight opted to take this poorly-reviewed wedding...
- 3/5/2017
- by Tom Brueggemann
- Indiewire
Tax Day looms large over every American’s head, but brothers Jacob and Josh Kornbluth have manifested a nightmarish visit from the taxman in their new romantic comedy, “Love & Taxes.”
The film follows the story of Josh, a part-time autobiographical monologist who has not filed his taxes in seven years; this is despite the fact that his day job is working for a high-profile tax attorney. When his boss convinces him to “join the system” and file his taxes, things start going extremely well for Josh. His stage career starts to take off and he even finds a girlfriend. But then, things take a turn for the worse.
Read More: Watch ‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2’ Sweded Trailer
Written by Josh and directed by Jacob, “Love & Taxes” is a film adaptation of the 2003 stage production from Josh Kornbluth and David Dower.
“We made the film in bits and pieces over eight years.
The film follows the story of Josh, a part-time autobiographical monologist who has not filed his taxes in seven years; this is despite the fact that his day job is working for a high-profile tax attorney. When his boss convinces him to “join the system” and file his taxes, things start going extremely well for Josh. His stage career starts to take off and he even finds a girlfriend. But then, things take a turn for the worse.
Read More: Watch ‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2’ Sweded Trailer
Written by Josh and directed by Jacob, “Love & Taxes” is a film adaptation of the 2003 stage production from Josh Kornbluth and David Dower.
“We made the film in bits and pieces over eight years.
- 2/15/2017
- by Yoselin Acevedo
- Indiewire
Comedian Mike Birbiglia’s autobiographical monologue Sleepwalk With Me is now a movie directed by and starring Birbiglia along with other actors. It’s a giant leap, existentially speaking. The comedian-monologuist (or, as my friend Josh Kornbluth sometimes calls himself, monologiste) is responsible to no perspective other than his or her own — the opposite of a dramatist, whose very reason for being is to lay out different, unreconciled (often irreconcilable) points of view. Does Birbiglia manage to cross the solipsistic divide? He does not. But he’s honest enough to make his own iffy grasp of everyone else’s thoughts and feelings part of the story. From start to finish, his character, called Matt Pandamiglio, is all by his lonesome — reaching out of the fog. He’s a funny fog person.Birbiglia’s story has three strands. Foremost is Matt’s inability to make an emotional (or legal) commitment to his (too?...
- 8/31/2012
- by David Edelstein
- Vulture
Sundance Film Festival
PARK CITY -- You don't have to be paranoid for "Strange Culture" to scare the hell out of you. The film revolves around the ongoing legal case of the U.S. government v. Steve Kurtz, quite possibly the grossest judicial overreaching in the post-Sept. 11 world. If this isn't the grossest instance, then heaven protect anyone who wants to think and speak freely in this country.
Despite coverage in major newspapers and TV shows, the Kurtz case still has not received the media spotlight it deserves. Perhaps Lynn Hershman-Leeson's electrifying and alarming film will change this. Like last year's festival entry, "An Inconvenient Truth", the film needs a distributor that understands the solid business and political reasons for releasing the film.
Even before the tragedy of May 11, 2004, Kurtz's own work operated below the radar. A long-haired associate professor of art at SUNY Buffalo and founding member of the theater troupe Critical Art Ensemble, Kurtz was then working on an exhibition for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art that confronted the hot-button topic of genetically modified food. When his wife, Hope, died early that morning in her sleep of heart failure, Kurtz's called 911.
The paramedics grew suspicious of the professor's art supplies, which often consisted of petri dishes containing bacteria ordered over the Internet. The FBI was called in, and soon agents in hazmat suits were rifling through his house. They impounded books, computers and even his wife's body. He immediately was branded a "bioterrorist" and arrested.
Two and a half years later, the case still is pending in federal court. Because his lawyer advised him not to talk about certain aspects of the case, Hershman-Leeson has chosen to explore the situation in an experimental approach. Actors -- notably Thomas Jay Ryan as Steve and Tilda Swinton as Hope -- dramatize certain scenes. News footage, comic book drawings and talking-head interviews with colleagues and fellow artists fill in other gaps.
What emerges is a conspiracy, all right -- a conspiracy in the Justice Department with two clear agendas. In an effort to manufacture a crime where there is no obvious one, prosecutors have charged Kurtz and his longtime collaborator, Robert Ferrell, with federal mail and wire fraud. By using civil law to bring criminal charges, the Justice Department is attempting to expand its powers over U.S. citizens. The other agenda is to silence the scientific and artistic community in the debate over genetically modified foods. The government and agribusiness have a huge investment in GMF, so they do not appreciate people like Kurtz raising questions about Frankenfoods.
The most telling staged scene has one of Kurtz's colleagues (Josh Kornbluth) present a petition on his behalf to his students. This provokes a heart-wrenching debate by the young people about the wisdom of signing such a document. How might linking their names with Kurtz's restrict future job opportunities and their freedom of movement in and out of a country where a president asserts the right to label anyone he chooses as a terrorist?
With disarming directness and intriguing indirectness, Hershman-Leeson has made a document -- though not quite a documentary -- that speaks volumes about where free expression stands today in the U.S. in its ceaseless combat with the forces of repression.
STRANGE CULTURE
L5 Prods.
Credits:
Screenwriter-director-editor: Lynn Hershman-Leeson
Producers: Lynn Hershman-Leeson, Lise Swenson, Steven Beer
Executive producers: Melina Jampolis, Jessie Fuller
Director of photography: Hiro Narita
Music: The Residents
Co-producers: Loren Smith, Barbara Tomber
Cast:
Tilda Swinton, Thomas Jay Ryan, Peter Coyote, Josh Kornbluth, Steve Kurtz
Running time -- 75 minutes
No MPAA rating...
PARK CITY -- You don't have to be paranoid for "Strange Culture" to scare the hell out of you. The film revolves around the ongoing legal case of the U.S. government v. Steve Kurtz, quite possibly the grossest judicial overreaching in the post-Sept. 11 world. If this isn't the grossest instance, then heaven protect anyone who wants to think and speak freely in this country.
Despite coverage in major newspapers and TV shows, the Kurtz case still has not received the media spotlight it deserves. Perhaps Lynn Hershman-Leeson's electrifying and alarming film will change this. Like last year's festival entry, "An Inconvenient Truth", the film needs a distributor that understands the solid business and political reasons for releasing the film.
Even before the tragedy of May 11, 2004, Kurtz's own work operated below the radar. A long-haired associate professor of art at SUNY Buffalo and founding member of the theater troupe Critical Art Ensemble, Kurtz was then working on an exhibition for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art that confronted the hot-button topic of genetically modified food. When his wife, Hope, died early that morning in her sleep of heart failure, Kurtz's called 911.
The paramedics grew suspicious of the professor's art supplies, which often consisted of petri dishes containing bacteria ordered over the Internet. The FBI was called in, and soon agents in hazmat suits were rifling through his house. They impounded books, computers and even his wife's body. He immediately was branded a "bioterrorist" and arrested.
Two and a half years later, the case still is pending in federal court. Because his lawyer advised him not to talk about certain aspects of the case, Hershman-Leeson has chosen to explore the situation in an experimental approach. Actors -- notably Thomas Jay Ryan as Steve and Tilda Swinton as Hope -- dramatize certain scenes. News footage, comic book drawings and talking-head interviews with colleagues and fellow artists fill in other gaps.
What emerges is a conspiracy, all right -- a conspiracy in the Justice Department with two clear agendas. In an effort to manufacture a crime where there is no obvious one, prosecutors have charged Kurtz and his longtime collaborator, Robert Ferrell, with federal mail and wire fraud. By using civil law to bring criminal charges, the Justice Department is attempting to expand its powers over U.S. citizens. The other agenda is to silence the scientific and artistic community in the debate over genetically modified foods. The government and agribusiness have a huge investment in GMF, so they do not appreciate people like Kurtz raising questions about Frankenfoods.
The most telling staged scene has one of Kurtz's colleagues (Josh Kornbluth) present a petition on his behalf to his students. This provokes a heart-wrenching debate by the young people about the wisdom of signing such a document. How might linking their names with Kurtz's restrict future job opportunities and their freedom of movement in and out of a country where a president asserts the right to label anyone he chooses as a terrorist?
With disarming directness and intriguing indirectness, Hershman-Leeson has made a document -- though not quite a documentary -- that speaks volumes about where free expression stands today in the U.S. in its ceaseless combat with the forces of repression.
STRANGE CULTURE
L5 Prods.
Credits:
Screenwriter-director-editor: Lynn Hershman-Leeson
Producers: Lynn Hershman-Leeson, Lise Swenson, Steven Beer
Executive producers: Melina Jampolis, Jessie Fuller
Director of photography: Hiro Narita
Music: The Residents
Co-producers: Loren Smith, Barbara Tomber
Cast:
Tilda Swinton, Thomas Jay Ryan, Peter Coyote, Josh Kornbluth, Steve Kurtz
Running time -- 75 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 1/22/2007
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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