angelheaded hipster

I have no love lost over Miramax splitting with the Mouse; if anything, this might be the best thing to happen to the brothers Weinstein in a long time. Sure, Miramx has provided us with some great movies in the past (Crying Game, Pulp Fiction) and in the present (Barbarian Invasions), but their track record of late has been inexcusable. Their scissor happy treatment of filmmakers is atrocious. Read this excerpt from the fine Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum.

"A good example of the sort of film Miramax puts its muscle behind is Iain Softley's The Wings of the Dove, and good examples of major films it has chosen to dump over the past few years are Abbas Kiarostami's Through the Olive Trees, the color version of Jacques Tati's Jour de fete, and the restoration of Jacques Demy's The Young Girls of Rochefort. The Wings of the Dove was treated with vastly more respect and attention by the national press than the rest of these pictures, implying that a soft-core, middlebrow reduction and distortion of a late Henry James novel was vastly more important than key works by some of our greatest filmmakers -- and this was almost entirely a consequence of the message sent by its distributor's advertising dollars and overall handling. The implication that this respect accurately reflected the taste of the public is both insulting and impossible to disprove. But if Miramax's campaign "worked" on the public as well as on the critics, then a comparable campaign on behalf of the color Jour de fete might have worked as well, even if the targeted audience would have been substantially different.

In Chicago Jour de fete and The Young Girls of Rochefort received limited runs only because the Music Box made repeated requests to show them; when Miramax finally agreed, it stipulated that no money be spent advertising either picture. Through the Olive Trees received an even more limited run at the Film Center; no advance screenings for the press were permitted, and requests for videos for preview purposes were denied...Miramax has the clout to dictate which of its releases are important and which are not, and magazine and newspaper editors, TV producers, and reviewers don't have the nerve, imagination, knowledge, intelligence, or wherewithal to buck the system -- and none of them expect to be called on their decisions because those decisions are virtually invisible to the public."

I completely agree. Why bother buying the rights to a film like Through the Olive Trees, only to not release it , not even to video, thus forbidding any other company like Janus or Criterion to release it here? Sure, movies like Jay and Silent Bob or She's All That make money, but why deny world renowned directors like Kiarostami and Jarmusch the same opportunities? Here's hoping this split with the Mouse will clear the minds of the Weinsteins and put their focus back on producing and releasing cutting edge and provacative films and away from the dollar.