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Deals. What a busy seven days! Cannes starts in a week, so distributors are clearing the decks by firming up their release schedules for the next several months in anticipation of more deals to come. We've already reported on the acquisitions of Blood: The Last Vampire and The Eclipse, but that just scratches the surface (complete details can be found at indieWIRE):

Crude. First Run Features picked up Joe Berlinger's documentary about a lawsuit pitting 30,000 rain forest dwellers in Ecuador against oil giant Chevron. (60 Minutes broadcast a story on the case this past Sunday.) A theatrical bow is planned in New York on September 9, followed by expansion to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and other cities.

Beeswax. The Cinema Guild acquired rights to Andrew Bujalski's low-key comedy / drama. They plan to open the film in New York on August 7, followed by a national release. Jette Kernion called it "a good movie that does some surprising things in a quiet way."

Also acquired: Uruguayan comedy Gigante, crime drama La Linea, psycho-sexual tale Death in Love, and bleak but black comedy Sugisball, whose very cool trailer (in Estonian!) is embedded below.

Box Office. Was it the power of my review? (Probably not.) Jim Jarmusch's very fine The Limits of Control raked in $18,607 per-screen at the three theaters in New York and Los Angeles where it opened over the weekend, according to Box Office Mojo, demonstrating Wolverine-like power. The film expands to eight more locations on Friday. Tyson, James Toback's doc about the controversial former heavyweight boxing champ, and Il Divo, Paolo Sorrentino's dramatic biopic about a controversial former Italian prime minister, followed modestly behind, grossing $5,757 and $5,657 per-screen, respectively.

After the jump: New Sundance Director of Programming; festivals in Los Angeles and Seattle unveil lineups.

Finally, we have our first ridiculously odd film of 2008: Visioneers. Truth be told, I knew nothing about this film when Cinematical received the exclusive clip above. And if you watch that clip, you'll say "okay" and get mildly turned on by Judy Greer in a nightgown with her husband (played by the wonky Zach Galifianakis) and friend "Betty." But then you have to watch the trailer for this flick (either on the official website or after the jump). That's when Visioneers takes it up to a whole different level; one that involves lots of yelling, exploding people, middle fingers and what has to be one of the oddest stories we'll see on screen this year. Quite frankly, I cannot wait to see this.

Here's the synopsis from the site: George Washington Winsterhammerman lives an ordinary life. He has a wife, a kid, a house and a boat. Every day George gets in his minivan and goes to work as a Level Three Tunt at the Jeffers Corporation, the largest and most profitable corporation in the history of mankind. It is an utterly comfortable life, but when people around George begin exploding, he fears he might be next. George visits his doctor and learns that the dreams he's been having are a symptom of impending explosion. Unfortunately, George can't stop dreaming, and as the explosion epidemic worsens, he is forced to question the life he's been living.

Visioneers premieres at the Seattle International Film Festival on June 12th and 14th, before hitting up CineVegas (where Cinematical will review) on June 18th and 19th. (I know it's early and it's only a clip and a trailer, but I think I'm in love ...)

I know your mind is probably on a different Indy right now, but won't you spare a moment for The (Mostly) Indie Film Calendar? It's our weekly round-up of movie events happening beyond the multiplexes -- and if you know of something that we should include in a future edition (special screenings, retrospectives, mini-festivals, etc.) let me know! Send links or info to Eric.Snider (at) Weblogsinc (dot) com.

First up, four indie films are hitting theaters this week, and none of them have snakes or Nazis.

• Postal is the latest video-game-based film from German attention whore Uwe Boll, whose most recent shenanigans involve declaring his inability to secure wide release for the film a "conspiracy." The film may be atypical, but it's definitely independent. It's opening today in just four theaters, in New York, L.A., Denver, and Austin.
  

• War, Inc. stars John Cusack, who also co-wrote it, and it's a scathing political satire about war profiteers. Most of the reviews so far are negative, including the one from Cinematical's Joel Keller, who really, really hated it. But I note that the critics who liked it really, really liked it. There doesn't seem to be any middle ground here. Opens in New York and L.A. today.

After the jump, two more indie film in theaters, plus our city-by-city list of special events....

When I first saw Randy Walker and Jennifer Shainin's film Apart from That at the Seattle International Film Festival in 2006,. the thing that struck me most was it's transparent honesty. The film was relegated to the "Experimental" category at the fest, a section that tends to be like the grab bags you can buy for fifty cents at a carnival: you never know if you're going to end up with something really nifty -- a mood ring, perhaps, or a cool brainteaser puzzle -- or if you'll get stuck with something vaguely annoying and unpleasant, like one of those Chinese finger handcuffs that squeeze your fingers tighter the more you squirm to get out of them.

Fortunately, Apart from That turned out to be a little gem of a film, and it's gone on to play at a slew of film fests far and wide since Seattle, racking up Walker and Shainin lots of airline miles and acclaim. The film is about loneliness, and the desire for connection and feeling loved and needed, told through the disparate tales of three people; we meet the protagonists at the beginning of the film, as guest of a party, and then the tale unravels from there to show us their disconnected lives, held together only by this common theme.

What makes Apart from That even more interesting is the techniques the filmmakers used in making it. They shot on a schedule of two days on, one day off, and rewrote the script on the off days to accommodate the direction their cast was taking the film -- kind of a bizarre mix of improvisational theater with filmmaking, and all with a cast made up almost entirely of amateur actors, locals from their small Washington town. And somehow, it works.

The film, much to my chagrin, still hasn't been picked up for distribution, but f you live in New York City, and haven't yet had a chance to catch Apart from That at one of its many fest showings, you're in for a treat -- our pals over at indieWIRE are hosting a special screening of the film tonight at 7:30PM EST, at Cinema East Village, 22 East 12th Street. Following the film will be a Q&A with Walker and Shainin, and it should be an interesting Q&A; Shainin and Walker are a delightful pair, and this event will be most enjoyable. It's almost enough to make me wish I was living in NYC in July ... almost. Drag yourself out of your studio apartment and go show some support for indie film, and give Shainin and Walker some love. You'll be glad you did.

I've now missed seeing A.J. Schnack's film Kurt Cobain About a Son at least three times -- last year at Toronto, and this year at both AFI Dallas and Seattle. But now, thank goodness and all things flannel and depressing, I'll have another chance to see it, and so will you. Over at indieWIRE, Eugene Hernandez posted the other day that Balcony Releasing will debut the film at the IFC Center in New York City on October 3, followed by a Los Angeles opening at the Nuart a few days later. The film will play Seattle, Cobain's hometown, at The Varsity on October 12, and will get a DVD release early next year.

If you're not familiar with the film (read more about it on its official website) it's based on some 25 hours of previously unheard audio interviews with Cobain conducted about a year before Cobain's suicide by Michael Azerrad as research and background for his book Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana. In the interviews, Cobain discusses everything from his childhood, to music, to dealing with fame. I was a little old when Nivrana's album Nevermind came out to start dressing in flannel shirts and ripped jeans, but I've always loved Nirvana's music. Cobain's angst, no doubt, felt very personal to him, but his music conveyed those emotions universally; anyone who's been an adolescent and felt isolated from the status quo could find comfort and commonality in Nirvana's music.

October seems a long way off at the moment, but here's a roundup of write-ups of the film, which is currently sitting at 83% with a smattering of reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, to get you excited about it in the meantime. Oh, and when you're done with that, you can check out Schnacks' blog, All these wonderful things, where his latest post takes on the issue that's been taking the film and book blogging worlds by storm this week: embargoes. It's a well-written piece, so check it out.

"In 'Kurt Cobain About a Son,' Director AJ Schnack takes a fresh approach to non-fiction storytelling, turning the idea of the traditional music doc on its head ..." -- Jonny Leahan for indieWIRE


"It's clear almost immediately that Kurt Cobain: About a Son has little to offer detractors of the deceased Nirvana singer, though AJ Schnack's directorial choices admittedly lend the proceedings a surprisingly artful sort of vibe."
-- Reel Film's Toronto 2006 Update

"This film is not a typical rockumentary full of celebrity and friendly talking heads, archival concert footage or anecdotes and pictures from Kurt's past. What this is, simply, is Kurt Cobain's voice, carrying on an extended conversation." -- Mark Bell, Film Threat


"Impressionistic docu "Kurt Cobain About a Son" is a counterpoint to the iconic late Nirvana rocker's legacy." -- Dennis Harvey, Variety

It often feels like forever-and-a-day between the time I see a film at a fest, and when it finally sees light of day in a theatrical or DVD release. Such is the case with Police Beat, directed by Robinson Devor and written by Charles Mudede (the same team who just this year brought us an eye-opening look at the sub-culture of people who have sexual relations with animals in the documentary Zoo).

Police Beat was released yesterday on DVD, with Home Vision/ Image Entertainment handling distrib, and can be purchased through the Image Entertainment website (or, if you're local to Seattle, at Scarecrow Video or Broadway Market Video). The film, scripted by Mudede and based off his column of the same name which he writes for Seattle's alterna-weekly, The Stranger, follows an immigrant bike cop around scenic Seattle as he deals with one after another of a series of bizarre crimes (regular readers of Mudede's column will know that, as with many things in life, you just can't make up anything that would be better than the craziness cops deal with on a daily basis) while dealing with the possible break-up of his relationship with his girlfriend, who's gone off on a camping trip with a male "friend."

The film, though relatively low-budget, is full of gorgeous painterly shots of Seattle in the summertime (thanks to DP Sean Kirby, who shot in 35mm scope) and if you live in Seattle or have spent any time there, it's fun to see all the places you hang out in up there on the screen in all that technicolor glory. It also has the distinction of being the sixth film co-produced by Seattle not-for-profit Northwest Film Forum, which does some truly fantastic work supporting indie film and independent filmmakers.

It's great to see this little film getting some distribution at last; it had strong reviews overall, but for a while there I didn't think it would get out there for more people to see it. It's always nice to see the hard work of independent filmmakers pay off, at least a little, and I hope the film will get some strong support in Seattle, where the film was shot in over 100 locations with hundreds of locals. Even if you don't live in Seattle, Police Beat is a good film for indie film fans to see and support.

It seems like an eternity since I first saw Snow Cake, starring Alan Rickman and Sigourney Weaver, at the Seattle International Film Festival in 2006. Finally, the film is actually opening. The film played heavily on the film fest ciricuit last year, opening at Berlin, then hitting a few more international fests before wending its way across the Atlantic to Tribeca, then meandering along to Seattle, Shanghai, Edinburgh and Toronto.

The film stars Rickman (who, I'm starting to think, couldn't turn in a bad performance if he tried) as Alex Hughes, a sullen man with a mysterious past who meets Vivienne (Emily Hampshire), a young hitchhiker, at a truck stop diner, and surprises himself by agreeing to give her a ride to Wawa, Ontario, where she's heading to visit her mother. A tragic car crash kills Vivienne just as they're starting out, leaving the traumatized Alan to deliver the news of her daughter's death to her mother, Linda ( Weaver). As it turns out, Linda is autistic, and doesn't handle the news of Vivienne's death quite the way Alex expected, and he ends up being drawn inexorably into Linda's life. Carrie-Ann Moss has a nice turn as the sexy next door neighbor.

A couple years ago at the Seattle International Film Festival, I attended a screening of a set of short films. I don't recall now what the topic of the set was, but the funniest of them was a cute little short called Cashback, about a group of hapless night employees at a grocery store and the various ways in which they fight off the relentless boredom of their jobs.

One of the guys -- an aspiring artist -- could stop time. And he used his boring night job to freeze time, turning the customers in the store into models so he could strip them and practice drawing nudes. It was a well-done little short altogether (even nominated for an Oscar), and when the screening was over, they mentioned that it was being made into a feature. Now here we are, two years later, and one of the funniest films I've seen at SIFF this year is Cashback -- the feature-length version ( which had its debut last year at Cannes).

In order to flesh out a short into a feature, you have to add in some details like more plot and characters. The challenge is in taking a well-made short like Cashback (which really stood alone just as it was) and trying to turn it into a bigger story, without losing any of the charm that made the short successful. Writer-director Sean Ellis (who, according to the "trivia" section on the film's IMDb site, wrote the feature-length script in just seven days, including the entire short within the feature ) backs up a little from where he started with his short, fleshing out the back story of the main character, Ben (Sean Biggerstaff, who has kind of a Brit Zach Braff vibe going here), who develops a terrible case of insomnia after a painful breakup with his girlfriend.

Tackling the heavy subject matter of an interfaith relationship between a Muslim and a Jew, Roschdy Zem, wearing two hats here as both director and lead actor, approaches his subject matter from a comedic angle, lightening the political and spiritual load of his film's premise. Zem plays Ishmael, a non-practicing Muslim with a Jewish best friend, who's been living with equally non-practicing Jewish girlfriend Clara (the lovely Cécile De France, also seen at SIFF this year in The Singer opposite Gerard Depardieu) for four years without religion being an issue. All that changes, though, when Clara gets pregnant. Suddenly, religious matters seem more important: Clara hangs a mezuzah (Jewish good luck symbol) on the doorway of their apartment; Ishmael insists that if the baby is a boy, he will be named after his father -- though he doesn't even like his father's name.

To further complicate matters, even after four years of living together, neither of them has told their parents about who they are dating. Having a baby on the way forces the issue, though -- they can no longer hide this potentially explosive issue from their families. Clara, when questioned by her parents about the identity of her mystery boyfriend -- is he a good Jewish boy? a Christian? -- will only reply that "he's French, like us." In a Guess Who's Coming to Dinner-esque scene, Clara decides to spring Ishmael on her family by inviting him to their house for dinner. Clara's father, opening the door to Ishmael holding a bouquet of flowers intended for Clara, mistakenly assumes that Ishmael is the delivery boy (yes, that's been done before, a lot, and it's just as predictable here as when we've seen it elsewhere, but that's a minor quibble).

Is there any creature on earth less scary than a sheep? When I think "sheep," I think bland, mild-eyed creatures growing furry coats of wool for all those wool sweaters sold in LL Bean catalogs, not blood-thirsty freaks of nature, but when a film about sheep has the tagline, "There are 40 million sheep in New Zealand ... and they're pissed off!" -- you know you're in for something different.

Black Sheep, written and helmed by Jonathan King, takes perhaps the most innocuous creatures in the animal kingdom, and turns them into blood-thirsty, viscous monsters who can either eat you for dinner, or bite you and turn you into one of them. The film starts out at beautiful Glenolden Station, farmed for over a century by the Olden family. Elder brother Angus (Peter Feeney, who some might recognize from his roles on Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules on television), who's been pathologically jealous of his younger brother Henry (newcomer Nathan Meister) since childhood, has turned the family sheep farm into a cutting-edge, scientifically-focused business focused on breeding the perfect sheep. Henry hasn't been home to the family farm in years; he suffers from a crippling sheep-phobia that was caused by Angus horrifically killing Henry's pet sheep when they were young boys.