July
2
LAFF: Fox Searchlight Acquires Young@Heart
Fox Searchlight is keeping busy. At the LAFF closing ceremonies Sunday night, Brit Stephen Walker's Channel 4 doc Young@Heart won the audience award for best international feature. And Searchlight won the bidding war for the crowd-pleaser about a singing group of Massachusetts seniors, paying about $1.5 million for North American rights.
Here's a clip to give you some idea why this played so well:
Premiere.com has some more.
Searchlight closed the LAFF with Danny Boyle's anticipated sci-fi adventure Sunshine, which cost about $40 million (Searchlight put up $12.5 of that). The movie is a gorgeous, smart edge-of-your-seat suspense thriller with a strong ensemble led by Cillian Murphy, Michelle Yeoh and Rose Byrne, until it veers into its mind-bloggling finale. It's one of those movies that takes itself a tad too seriously. You have to go for it all the way, which the audience did, last night, up to a point. It opens July 20.
Even in a very competitive summer, Searchlight's Sundance food movie Waitress, written and directed by the late Adriene Shelly, has grossed more than $16 million. And without a lot of money behind it, another Sundance discovery, the Irish musical romance Once, is chugging along on strong word of mouth. It has grossed $3.8 million on 128 runs. (Searchlight is worried about hanging on to screens in some 60 markets until they bring the young cast into L.A. at the end of July to do some PR, including Jay Leno.)
Wes Anderson brought his latest, The Darjeeling Limited, written with Roman Coppola, to Searchlight, which made it for a price. The comedy, which stars Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman as three brothers on a quest through India, will launch opening night at the NYFF on September 28 and open the next day. Anderson's due for comeback.
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Sunshine, like a lot of very good SF, requires an "in for a penny, in for a pound" kind of mentality. Once you buy into the underlying premise -- failing Sol that can be "kickstarted" by a fission reaction -- most "realism" complaints have to go out the window.
But the film's emphasis on family, especially as emphasized by Cillian and Chris's characters, its emphasis on the importance of duty, and the ways the different characters mention/believe/don't believe in God might wear down on some viewers. It didn't bother me at all and I though Sunshine is one of the best "pure SF" films I've seen in a while.
I loved that the root of Capa and Mace's conflict was that Capa wanted to get his message home "just right" and that prevented Mace from sending a message. Capa's failure to be responsible for the welfare of the "community" is the first tension, and all the other tensions stem from one choice to forsake duty in order to do the immediate good deed. Masterful.
Posted by: Christian Johnson | July 02, 2007 at 02:42 PM
"Masterful"? Except for the fact that all of its drama is built on an avalanche of idiotic judgment calls, an utter lack of common sense, and last-minute mad-slasher hijinx, sure. Oh, and editing that ensures that we don't know what just happened or where we are, sure: "masterful." I was thinking "pitiful," myself. As in "a pitiful squandering of talent on the part of Mr. Boyle." How that script got greenlighted is beyond me....
Posted by: Doug | July 05, 2007 at 09:50 PM