As Phil Nugent reported here earlier this week, the venerable New Yorker Films “has ceased operations” and its catalogue of foreign and art house fare is set for auction. At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir speculates about a potential landing spot for the treasure trove of classic films. “In a broader sense, New Yorker's long-term willingness to defy the marketplace realities of American film distribution never seemed like a sustainable business model. While the films listed above attracted at least some American viewers, New Yorker was worshiped in cinephile circles precisely because it often took on difficult and adventurous cinema that was destined to find almost no audience. Sometimes Talbot and Lopez seemed to be running an educational foundation under the guise of a for-profit business….New Yorker's library would have obvious appeal to "an online distributor, a TV network or a DVD company," Werner continues. Given that IFC is at least two and potentially all three of those things, and in recent years has assumed a commanding position in the distribution of foreign-language and American independent films, it might be the most logical potential bidder.”
At Some Came Running, Glen Kenny celebrates a new DVD release of Vanishing Point (which includes the UK version of the picture, containing an excised scene with Charlotte Rampling) by interviewing director Richard Sarafian. “At first I balked at Barry Newman being the star, ‘cause I had other possibilities and I felt…all I wanted was the adult male that looked like he belonged behind the wheel. And I had several major actors in mind that might have made a difference. It didn't turn out that way. It came back to me that either I use Barry Newman or Zanuck wasn't going to make the picture. I said, ‘Well, Mr. Zanuck, I'm going to make the car the star.’ And he said, ‘I knew you'd see it my way.’”
Spoutblog’s Karina Longworth revisits Eagle Pennell's The Whole Shootin’ Match. “It’s possible that this is just that time of year and I have SXSW on the brain, but when I watched The Whole Shootin’ Match a few days ago, more than seeing the film as a love/hate letter to the bottle, more than spotting its shared DNA with various films by Richard Linklater and Andrew Bujalski (and, to a lesser extent, Wes Anderson and Gus Van Sant), I saw it as a catalyst for a conversation about Austin’s evolving film cultural history…What interests me most about the ‘regional’ issue is that although Austin has become a place where independent filmmakers from all over the country — including LA and New York — come to show work, ironically, Austin’s past and present identity as a film town often gets lost in that process and excluded from the conversation.”
Roger Ebert hunts The Snark. “When Joaquin Phoenix appears on the Letterman program and behaves as a semi-catatonic weirdo, for example, he is instantly made the butt of imitators on the Indie Spirits and the Oscars, and the snarky presumption is that he is now a laughable buffoon. All memories of his splendid acting career are erased. He is past his sell-by date. The actor from Gladiator and Walk the Line, twice nominated for an Oscar, is now ridiculed on the Academy stage. Let's take him as a case study. When Phoenix was satirized on the Indie Spirits, I doubted anything on the Oscarcast was likely to equal it. The next day I wrote that the Oscar had proven me wrong. There was no hint that I objected to the portrayals. Those second thoughts arrived only belatedly, along with the reflection that if Phoenix really was ‘nutzoid,’ the segments were in poor taste. But nutzoid itself is snarkspeak, and I should have written ‘mentally ill,’ not to be Politically Correct, but simply to be decent.”
Finally, this week’s List-o-Mania comes from Den of Geek, which looks at the Top 50 Movie Special Effects Shots, including “the party crashers revealed” from The Fearless Vampire Killers. “Sometimes the oldest trick in the book is all you need. Thus reasoned Roman Polanski when his vampire-movie spoof required that the 'infiltrators' at a vampire ball be revealed as the only reflections in the ballroom mirror. Of course, the 'reflections' are out-of-focus doubles trying to 'mirror' principals Jack MacGowran, Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate, but once something works, anything more is pointless.”