Atom Egoyan's films really sell for 7 figures?

I read earlier today that Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisition Group had nabbed the latest from Atom Egoyan, but IndieWire is reporting (and maybe I missed this detail when I read it elsewhere) that Sony "negotiated the low seven figure deal" for Chloe, which premiered to lukewarm reception at Toronto last month. As of 27 September, Egoyan's last film Adoration has yet to cross $300,000 at the domestic box office, and that was a Sony release as well. I suppose Julianne Moore, Amanda Seyfried and Liam Neeson are a draw, but remember, Chloe is a remake of Anne Fontaine's abysmal Nathalie... from 2003, and that film had Fanny Ardant, Emmanuelle Béart and Gérard Depardieu. I have yet to see a film I wouldn't describe as a waste of my time from Fontaine, and while that's certainly not a claim I could make for Egoyan, his recent output has been dismal (and not exactly profitable). It's quite possible though that a low seven figure deal for worldwide rights is a modest deal. We'll just have to wait until spring to see how well this pays off.

The Decade List: (Some of) The Worst Films (2005)

Every year, the list seems to be getting longer. The sentimental issue with 2005 was that a list of the Worst Films of 2005 was my very third blog post ever on here, so unlike the previous years, I've written quite a few venomous words about the films below (I was pretty hostile when I started writing this blog). So for both your and my pleasure, I've selected some really mean and/or smart-ass "pull quotes" from what I had to say about these, the worst films I saw from 2005.

On The 40-Year-Old Virgin: "The 40-Year-Old Virgin is essentially a bunch of laughless sketch appendages (the worst involving foul-mouthed Eastern Indian coworkers), branching from a thin backbone of a lifeless romance." On Amnesia: The James Brighton Enigma: "Amnesia ends up being an idea film with nothing to say and Langlois a lousy psychological researcher who’s happy enough to just to ask the questions instead of looking for the answers." On Dirty Love: "That this film presumes we’re going to care about a woman who flops around a supermarket looking for tampons to stop her Shining-size bloodbath of a menstrual flow is not only dead-wrong, but also rather insulting."

On Fratricide: "There’s grittiness and then there’s absurdity, and Arslan can’t figure out the difference." On Happy Endings: "Happy Endings’ mix of nastiness and earnestness is like water and electricity… when you’re in the bathtub." On Hard Candy: "Hard Candy is one of those films you could see someone handing into their teacher as a genre assignment. Everything is "fine" about the film, if you consider "fine" to be hitting all the points of a job or assignment. Or if "fine" simply means passionless."

On Havoc: I quoted my friend Mike on this one: "About as sharp and edgy as an oval-shaped blanket full of kittens." On Lower City: "Merely a collection of reminders of better films." On Me and You and Everyone We Know: "Weaving a bunch of quirky moments (involving setting hands on fire, a cuuuuuuuute little boy wanting to shit in a woman’s ass, a goldfish in peril, and tag-team fellatio from a duo of sassy teen girls, among other things) into a sloppy motion picture, Ms. July created the “indie” groan of the year."

On Monster-in-Law: "Setting women back nearly fifty years with this one, Jane Fonda returns to the screen, opposite the sweet-as-pie, stripped-of-race Jennifer Lopez. It’d be one thing for this film to just be unfunny… but it’s a two-hour-long cat fight, turning women into caddy, selfish, backstabbing cunts." On Pretty Persuasion: "Siega has accomplished the feat of making his film the only thing more despicable than [teen edge queen Evan Rachel Wood's protagonist]." On The Puffy Chair: "Do I really want to choose to join in on the roadtrip when I hate the people I'm traveling with... and don't really care where we're going?"

On Sorry, Haters: "Allow me to introduce you to the 9/11 exploitation film." On Transamerica: "The tolerance that Tucker does expect from us is even more offensive than a sweet "trannies are people too." He expects us to continue with his annoyingly familiar film because of Felicity Huffman." On Walk the Line: "When Johnny Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) proposes marriage to the love of his life June Carter (Reese Witherspoon), he asks her to come up with a fresh answer. Strange, we as an audience were asking the same thing out of this film."

- The 40-Year-Old Virgin - d. Judd Apatow - USA
- Amnesia: The James Brighton Enigma [Amnésie: L'énigme James Brighton] - d. Denis Langlois - Canada
- Antibodies [Antikörper] - d. Christian Alvart - Germany
- The Aristocrats - d. Paul Provenza - USA
- Backstage - d. Emmanuelle Bercot - France
- The Cabin Movie - d. Dylan Akio Smith - Canada
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - d. Tim Burton - USA/UK
- The Civilization of Maxwell Bright - d. David Beaird - USA
- Diary of a Mad Black Woman - d. Tyler Perry - USA
- Dirty Love - d. John Mallory Asher - USA
- Don't Tell [La bestia nel cuore] - d. Cristina Comencini - Italy/France/UK/Spain
- Eighteen - d. Richard Bell - Canada
- Evil [To kako] - d. Yorgos Noussias - Greece
- FAQs - d. Everett Lewis - USA
- Feed - d. Brett Leonard - Australia
- Fratricide [Brudermord] - d. Yilmaz Arslan - Germany/Luxembourg/France
- Happy Endings - d. Don Roos - USA
- Hard Candy - d. David Slade - USA
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - d. Garth Jennings - UK/USA
- Havoc - d. Barbara Kopple - USA/Germany
- King's Ransom - d. Jeff Byrd - USA
- Lemming - d. Dominik Moll - France
- The Longest Yard - d. Peter Segal - USA
- Lower City [Cidade Baixa] - d. Sérgio Machado - Brazil
- Madagascar - d. Eric Darnell, Tom McGrath - USA
- Manuale d'amore [Manual of Love] - d. Giovanni Veronesi - Italy
- Me and You and Everyone We Know - d. Miranda July - USA
- Monster-in-Law - d. Robert Luketic - USA/Germany
- The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green - d. George Bamber - USA
- Mr. & Mrs. Smith - d. Doug Liman - USA
- Nanny McPhee - d. Kirk Jones - UK/USA/France
- Pervert! - d. Jonathan Yudis - USA
- Pretty Persuasion - d. Marcos Siega - USA
- The Producers - d. Susan Stroman - USA
- The Puffy Chair - d. Jay Duplass, Mark Duplass - USA
- Queens [Reinas] - d. Manuel Gómez Pereira - Spain
- Remedy - d. Christian Maelen - USA
- Robots - d. Chris Wedge, Carlos Saldanha - USA
- Sorry, Haters - d. Jeff Stanzler - USA
- Stoned - d. Stephen Woolley - UK
- Transamerica - d. Duncan Tucker - USA
- Walk the Line - d. James Mangold - USA/Germany
- The Wedding Date - d. Clare Kilner - USA
- Where the Truth Lies - d. Atom Egoyan - Canada/UK
- Witches of the Caribbean - d. David DeCoteau - USA
- Zerophilia - d. Martin Curland - USA

Atom Egoyan's Latest Among the Latest Unveiling for Toronto 09

While I knew the homegrown titles had yet to be announced for this year's Toronto International Film Festival, another round of additions to the line-up kinda makes you (really) wish everything had come in one big swoop. Atom Egoyan's Chloe, which stars Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson and Amanda Seyfried and sounds an awful lot like Anne Fontaine's awful Nathalie... [correction: it is a remake of Nathalie..., as if I couldn't be any less excited about a new Atom Egoyan film], will make its world premiere in the Gala section. Xavier Dolan's J'ai tué ma mère, which everyone expected to play considering the accolades from Cannes and because, well, it's Canadian, will play in the Special Presentations section, and Jean-Marc Vallée's The Young Victoria, with Emily Blunt as Queen Victoria, will close the fest, even though it already hit the DVD market in the UK last month. The titles are listed below. (Sorry for some of these bootleg-lookin' pics I found, but they were the best I had to work with).

[additional note: I'm too tired to fix the redundant use of "latest" in the title.]

Gala

- Chloe - d. Atom Egoyan
- Cooking with Stella - d. Dilip Mehta (brother of Deepa) - w. Don McKellar
- The Immaginarium of Doctor Parnassus - d. Terry Gilliam

Special Presentations

- Cairo Time - d. Ruba Nadda (Sabah) - w. Patricia Clarkson, Alexander Siddig, Elena Anaya
- Defendor - d. Peter Stebbings (directorial debut) - w. Kat Dennings, Woody Harrelson, Elias Koteas, Sandra Oh
- Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel - d. Brigitte Berman
- J'ai tué ma mère [I Killed My Mother] - d. Xavier Dolan
- The Trotsky - Jacob Tierney (Twist) - w. Jay Baruchel, Saul Rubinek, Colm Feore, Jessica Paré, Genviève Bujold

Contemporary World Cinema

- A Gun to the Head - d. Blaine Thurier
- Cole - d. Carl Bessai (Emile, Mothers&Daughters)
- Excited - d. Bruce Sweeney (Last Wedding)
- High Life - d. Gary Yates
- Passenger Side - d. Matt Bissonnette - w. Adam Scott, Robin Tunney
- Suck - d. Rob Stefaniuk - w. Malcolm McDowell, Dave Foley, Henry Rollins, Jessica Paré, Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper, Moby, Paul Anthony

Canada First!

- Year of the Carnivore - d. Sook-Yin Lee (Shortbus actress)
- All Fall Down - d. Philip Hoffman
- Crackie - d. Sherry White
- George Ryga's Hungry Hills - d. Rob King
- Machotaildrop - d. Corey Adams, Alex Craig
- The Wild Hunt - d. Alexandre Franchi

The Rest...

- La donation - d Bernard Émond (La femme qui boit) [part of the Masters section]
- Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould - d. Peter Raymont, Michele Hozer [part of the Reel to Reel section]
- Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands - d. Peter Mettler [part of the Reel to Reel section]
- Reel Injun - d. Neil Diamond [part of the Reel to Reel section]
- Carcasses - d. Denis Côté (Les états nordiques) [part of the Vanguard section]
- Leslie, My Name Is Evil - d. Reginald Harkema [part of the Vanguard section]

DVD Release Update, 29 July: Buñuel, Jarmusch, Egoyan, Claudette Colbert

Luis Buñuel's Death in the Garden will make its DVD premiere on 27 October from Tranflux Films; dates have also been set for Atom Egoyan's Adoration, on DVD and Blu-ray, and Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control, only on DVD it seems. Universal also announced a box-set entitled The Claudette Colbert Legacy Collection, with six films new to DVD, including Mitchell Leisen's No Time for Love and Ernst Lubitsch's Bluebeard's Eighth Wife.

- OMG/HaHaHa, 2007, d. Morgan Jon Fox, Water Bearer Films, 29 September
- Adoration, 2008, d. Atom Egoyan, Sony Pictures, also on Blu-ray, 13 October
- Every Little Step, 2008, d. Adam Del Deo, James D. Stern, Sony Pictures, 13 October
- Jack Brown Genius, 1994, d. Tony Hiles, Lionsgate, 13 October, w. Martin Csokas
- Death in the Garden [La mort en ce jardin], 1956, d. Luis Buñuel, Transflux Films, 27 October, w. Simone Signoret, Michel Piccoli
- Five Element Ninjas, 1982, d. Chang Cheh, Tokyo Shock, 27 October
- The Narrows, 2008, d. François Velle, Image Entertainment, also on Blu-ray, 3 November, w. Vincent D'Onofrio, Kevin Zegers
- Say Anything..., 1989, d. Cameron Crowe, 20th Century Fox, 20th Anniversary Edition, also on Blu-ray, 3 November
- Franklyn, 2008, d. Gerald McMorrow, Image Entertainment, also on Blu-ray, 17 November, w. Eva Green, Sam Riley, Ryan Phillippe
- The Limits of Control, 2009, d. Jim Jarmusch, Focus Features, 17 November

The Claudette Colbert Legacy Collection, Universal, 3 November

- Three-Cornered Moon, 1933, d. Elliott Nugent
- Maid of Salem, 1937, d. Frank Lloyd
- I Met Him in Paris, 1937, d. Wesley Ruggles
- Bluebeard's Eighth Wife, 1938, d. Ernst Lubitsch
- No Time for Love, 1943, d. Mitchell Leisen
- The Egg and I, 1947, d. Chester Erskine

I Wanna Be Adored

Adoration - dir. Atom Egoyan - 2008 - Canada - Sony Pictures Classics

Written for Gone Cinema Poaching.

It seems a long time ago that Atom Egoyan, after the successes of Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter, was among the forefront of international cinema. By following The Sweet Hereafter, which garnered the Egyptian-born, Canadian-raised filmmaker two Oscar nominations, with the disappointing Felicia's Journey, we got our first indication that Egoyan might never create the magic he showed during the late '80s and '90s again. With Adoration, Egoyan returns to the style and structure that worked so well for him early in his career; unfortunately, something's missing, even if it feels like all the pieces are there.

Those familiar with the director's work will spot some of the director's trademarks of style and theme easily. Airport customs, video recorders, fragmented narrative, paternal struggles, Arsinée Khanjian, devastating loss, the nature of truth, traces of personal ancestry. All are weaved into Adoration as one might expect, so why does the film feel so minor league? Like Ararat, the only post-Sweet Hereafter film of his that I genuinely like (even though I'm in the minority), Adoration never comes off like a sad act of self-mimicry. Egoyan continues to pose fascinating, gray-area quandaries; they just don't resonate or haunt the way his films always used to.

I suspect one of the reasons why could be attributed to the fact that Adoration (as well as Ararat) addresses very specific, button-pushing issues where Exotica, The Adjuster, Family Viewing and The Sweet Hereafter tackled more abstract ideas through less particular situations (Where the Truth Lies is another story altogether). It's not that Egoyan is preaching or over-symplifying these matters; it's that, like Charles Aznavour's character in Ararat says, Adoration feels like something he always "needed" to make. This necessity and self-applied obligation to explore terrorism and the waves of ignorance that surround it restrains the director and make the film's mysteries and revelations a hell of a lot less seamless and profound.

Additionally, the importance Egoyan places on keeping Adoration from being sanctimonious gives way for some glaring surface-level problems. It never seemed to dawn on Egoyan the preposterousness of the film's main plot detail, in which high schooler Simon (Devon Bostick) presents an assignment/monologue, with the encouragement of his French teacher Sabine (Khanjian) who also teaches drama, that adopts the perspective of an unborn child whose Middle Eastern father has planted a bomb on the child's mother as she boards a flight to Israel without him. Simon asserts that the story is true, even though his parents (Rachel Blanchard, Noam Jenkins) actually died in a car accident. This "experiment" leads to more social exercises between the boy and his teacher, all of which begin to enrage the (physical and online) community. All the major plot points and subsequent disclosures never rise above their own contrivances, and you can almost see an uneasiness in the way Khanjian, Egoyan's wife and muse, plays her scenes.

Despite fantastic turns from Scott Speedman, as Simon's uncle who raises him after the accident, and Kenneth Welsh, every bit as creepy here as he was in Twin Peaks as Simon's grandfather, Egoyan can't get much out of Bostick, who plays the youthful centerpiece that's so crucial in nearly all of Egoyan's films. After eliciting such a mesmerizing performance from Sarah Polley in The Sweet Hereafter, Egoyan hasn't been able to replicate that with Elaine Cassidy, David Alpay, Alison Lohman (though she has been forgiven thanks to Drag Me to Hell) and now Bostick. In his two principle actors, we can see a glimpse of Egoyan's own admirable, but disconcerting hereafter, where everything has become a murky reflection of what once was and the pieces that once fit together no longer do.

The Decade List: Ararat (2002)

Ararat - dir. Atom Egoyan

Edward (Charles Aznavour), a director twenty years past his prime, finally has the opportunity to make the film he's always needed to make. His only knowledge of his heritage comes from his mother's tales of surviving the devastating effects of the Armenian genocide. The timing couldn't be better for this type of personal "prestige picture," considering both his declining respectability and the release of a new book by an art historian (Arsinée Khanjian) which explores the work of abstract expressionist painter Arshile Gorky and his linkage to the historical tragedy which you won't find in any Turkish history books. The film, titled Ararat, is predictably artless, an exploitive piece of important-with-a-capital-i movie making on the level of a made-for-TV Biblical film (is Charles Aznavour a thinly veiled Nicolas Roeg?).

This is the sort of film one might expect with Atom Egoyan's Ararat, the director's follow-up to his notably disappointing Felicia's Journey which covers his own personal ancestry. Unlike the fictitious Edward, Egoyan doesn't concern himself with the details of what happened, despite using a number of historical consultants for the particulars of the film-within-the-film. Rather, the director uses historical tragedy to probe how it relates to those directly and indirectly affected by it. For the central character Raffi (David Alpay), the events separate him from his late father, who was killed during an assassination attempt on a Turkish government official. While their literal separation was a residual of the events in question (made greater by Turkey's refusal to acknowledge it), Raffi's comfortable existence in Canada, nearly ninety years and two generations removed from the genocide, prevents him from comprehending the mentality of what his father was trying to do.

Of Ararat's abundant complexities, the juxtaposition of Raffi's quest in understanding his father with his step-sister Celia's (Marie-Josée Croze) search for justification of her father's death is one of the more surprising examinations. All of Ararat's conspiracy theories lie within her, and none of them directly relate to the genocide. Celia fluctuates between claiming that her step-mother Ani (Khanjian) either pushed him off a cliff or convinced him to do so. Celia assumes that in both Raffi and Ani's minds his father and her first husband's death symbolized honor, dying for a worthy cause, which in turn makes her father's death both shameful and insignificant by comparison.

Egoyan's Ararat never criticizes Edward's Ararat, despite the negative description I gave it above. Egoyan's even postulates a defense for Edward's, despite some disapproval from Ani, who readily admits she doesn't think in the way filmmakers do, in the various "poetic licenses" the film takes in setting and in relation to Gorky. As Raffi watches Ali (Elias Koteas) and Clarence (Bruce Greenwood) act the scene in which the Armenians refuse to cooperate with the Turks, the visualization of the actions forges the pathway to understanding his father's feelings. Through a later dialogue between Raffi and Ali, Egoyan shows us the purpose of a film like Edward's, and through his own film (and despite the problems surrounding Christopher Plummer's final realization), expresses why this isn't the sort of film he would ever make.

With: David Alpay, Christopher Plummer, Arsinée Khanjian, Charles Aznavour, Marie-Josée Croze, Elias Koteas, Eric Bogosian, Bruce Greenwood, Brent Carver, Simon Abkarian, Raoul Bhaneja
Screenplay: Atom Egoyan
Cinematography: Paul Sarossy
Music: Mychael Danna
Country of Origin: Canada/France
US Distributor: Miramax

Premiere: 20 May 2002 (Cannes Film Festival)
US Premiere: 12 November 2002 (AFI Film Festival)

Awards: Best Picture, Best Actress - Arsinée Khanjian, Best Supporting Actor - Elias Koteas, Best Music, Best Costume Design - Beth Pasternak (Genie Awards, Canada)

2009 Notebook: Vol 4

I still haven't decided on how I want to list the films I've watched. Putting them into a hierarchical grouping feels like a cheap way of reducing the films to star ratings and grades, which always end up changing the more I think (or don't think) about them. I also don't feel like writing cute, singular titles for them either as that's just an even lazier version of a capsule review. So for now, they'll just be placed into two: First viewing and Revisited.

First Viewing

The Cabin Movie - dir. Dylan Akio Smith - Canada - 2005 - N/A - with Arabella Bushnell, Ben Cotton, Brad Dryborough, Ryan Robbins, Justine Warrington, Erin Wells

The Dark Hours - dir. Paul Fox - Canada - 2005 - Freestyle Releasing - with Kate Greenhouse, Aidan Devine, Gordon Currie, Iris Graham, Dov Tiefenbach

Doubt - dir. John Patrick Shanley - USA - 2008 - Miramax - with Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Viola Davis, Joseph Foster II

Dream Boy - dir. James Bolton - USA - 2008 - N/A - with Stephan Bender, Maximillian Roeg, Thomas Jay Ryan, Diana Scarwid, Randy Wayne, Owen Beckman, Tricia Mara, Rickie Lee Jones, Tom Gilroy

Six Days, Six Nights [À la folie] - dir. Diane Kurys - France - 1994 - N/A - with Anne Parillaud, Béatrice Dalle, Patrick Aurignac, Alain Chabat, Bernard Verley

The Story of Piera [Storia di Piera] - dir. Marco Ferreri - Italy/France/West Germany - 1983 - N/A - with Hannah Schygulla, Isabelle Huppert, Marcello Mastroianni, Bettina Grühn, Angelo Infanti, Tanya Lopert, Renato Cecchetto, Maurizio Donadoni

Revisited

Buffalo '66 - dir. Vincent Gallo - USA - 1998 - Lionsgate - with Vincent Gallo, Christina Ricci, Anjelica Huston, Ben Gazzara, Mickey Rourke, Rosanna Arquette, Jan-Michael Vincent, Kevin Corrigan

Exotica - dir. Atom Egoyan - Canada - 1994 - Miramax - with Bruce Greenwood, Elias Koteas, Mia Kirshner, Don McKellar, Arsinée Khanjian, Sarah Polley, Victor Garber

Freeway - dir. Matthew Bright - USA - 1996 - Republic - with Reese Witherspoon, Kiefer Sutherland, Dan Hedaya, Wolfgang Bodison, Brooke Shields, Amanda Plummer, Michael T. Weiss, Bokeem Woodbine, Alanna Ubach, Brittany Murphy, Guillermo Díaz, Tara Subkoff

Wild Tigers I Have Known - dir. Cam Archer - USA - 2006 - IFC Films - with Malcolm Stumpf, Patrick White, Fairuza Balk, Max Paradise, Kim Dickens, Tom Gilroy