Emotional Rescue (2012) 
The Flying Machine (2011) 
Vengeance: A Love Story (2010) 
Unhappy ending for movie love affair
IT IS the Hollywood divorce that eclipses even Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston in sound and fury, but next month Harvey and Bob Weinstein finally break up their successful but tumultuous partnership with Disney after 12 years. And as with many divorces, the split has caused some devastation, since this is a divorce with children. As the company winds up, almost two dozen long-overdue films have been taken off Miramax’s shelves, dusted down and sent out into cinemas to face their uncertain futures.
When you watch The Crying Game, Pulp Fiction, Il Postino or Chicago, the first thing you will see is the stylised rendering of the Manhattan skyline at night, the brand image of Miramax. In the 26 years since founding the company, which they named after their parents Miriam and Max, the Weinstein brothers have become the most influential executives in the indie film world, charging up the art-house sector with a more competitive, more aggressive approach to marketing their movies to the mainstream. A Miramax movie carries the promise of a little darkness, a corkscrew of the conventional, emotion and danger.
Since Miramax was bought by Disney in 1993, they have produced such highly profitable films as Pulp Fiction and the Scary Movie and Spy Kids series. Miramax also brought Disney prestige in the shape of best-picture Oscar winners such as The English Patient, Shakespeare In Love and Chicago.
But one of the hazards of relationships is that someday someone will fall out of love. Disney’s chief executive Michael Eisner felt the brothers, especially the freewheeling Harvey, had strayed from their low-budget roots and developed a taste for expensive flops such as Gangs of New York and Cold Mountain, while Harvey chafed at what he perceived as penny-pinching ingratitude, given that Miramax gave Disney some 50 Oscars and about $200m in annual operating profit, mostly from the modestly budgeted Dimension Films, run by brother Bob.
The crunch came last year when Disney decided against renewing the Weinsteins’ employment contract, which expires in September. Now the Weinsteins are setting up a new film distribution and production company, known temporarily as The Weinstein Company, while Disney holds on to Miramax as a name, a company and a lucrative library of hits. But as co-chairmen Harvey and Bob prepare to leave the company, movies that had been delayed and held over are finally being dusted down and released so that the Weinsteins’ successor, Daniel Battsek, will have a clean slate.
THERE’S A LOT of dusting to be done: some of the projects produced or acquired by the Weinsteins have been hanging around for so long that the filmmakers have gone on to shoot and complete new films with other studios.
This month director Marcos Siega sees the release of two of his films within seven days of each other. His police drama Underclassman, made for Miramax, opened at the start of the month. His new comedy, made two years later for another company, opens the following week. Siega says he has not heard anything from the Weinsteins since Underclassman was put on hold: “I made Pretty Persuasion because I was scared to death my movie was going to get shelved. I had no control,” he said. Underclassman was released in a week with some formidable competition: it opened the same day as the more heavily marketed update of The Dukes of Hazzard.
Asif Kapadia has another tale of frustration. His film The Warrior was bought by Miramax in September 2001. The company then hummed and hawed about dubbing its few lines of Hindi dialogue into English or retaining its original subtitles. It finally went out, subtitled, last month. “I hope people, especially the critics, will forget about the time it was made,” says Warrior producer Bertrand Faivre. “You can say very good things about the film, but when you say it was made in 2001, it kills the movie right there.”
One hazard of being left in limbo for a year or more is that some themes lose their topicality or stars lose their lustre. Lasse Hallstr�m’s An Unfinished Life, reckoned to be a solid enough film, was initially set for a Christmas 2004 release. Starring Robert Redford and Jennifer Lopez, it now opens just as Jennifer Lopez’s star has dipped to its lowest level, and the film itself is possibly overshadowed by Hallstr�m’s next movie, Disney’s Casanova, which arrives three months later.
Even one of the Weinsteins’ favourite lucky actresses, Gwyneth Paltrow, has been a victim of Miramax’s current bulk clearout. Officially Miramax says they postponed her film Proof, along with An Unfinished Life, because it was felt their release would have strained the Weinsteins’ Oscar campaign staff, which was handling The Aviator and Finding Neverland. (In the end, neither of the films secured Miramax the desired best picture award). Like Unfinished Life, Proof will be out next month in America. However, September is notoriously a slow month for ticket sales. It is also a poor time to market your film for prizes. The Johnny Depp period drama, The Libertine, was supposed to arrive last December, in time for the awards season. Now the producers are complaining that releasing The Libertine in September means it will soon be wiped from voters’ short-term memories, hurting its Oscar and Bafta chances. The whole situation has reopened one of the pet arguments in the film industry: whether Miramax is really responsible for revitalising independent film or for murdering it.
Sometimes the company has marketed its films brilliantly and still holds the loyalty of filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, who are following the Weinsteins to their new home. On the other hand, Miramax can also be high-handed with its films and some of the artists the company claims to have nurtured. Besides delaying and shelving movies that the Weinsteins feel would be hard to sell, there is also Harvey’s habit of re-editing films to his own satisfaction, earning him the soubriquet ‘Harvey Scissorhands’ among disgruntled filmmakers
Still, as the Weinsteins take their leave and start their new production line, they will be relieved to have finally disposed of troubled Miramax releases such as Prozac Nation, starring Christina Ricci, which sat around for more than four years but has now been bumped off to cable TV.
Even that fate seems more tangible than the treatment afforded Danny Boyle’s Alien Love Triangle, a project that appears to be not so much released as allowed to wander off into the undergrowth. Made between A Life Less Ordinary and The Beach, this was a truly small film and has never been shown publicly. Miramax first commissioned it as part of a trilogy of science-fiction shorts, then decided to turn the other segments into full-length features (Impostor and Mimic), leaving Boyle’s section effectively orphaned. Boyle himself wasn’t sure what fate awaited the picture recently. A 28-minute fable about sexual stereotypes, it’s a light-hearted feature in which Kenneth Branagh’s scientist discovers that his wife (Courteney Cox) is really a male alien, just as Cox’s own green, bald wife (Heather Graham) comes calling. Boyle called it charming but says that the film couldn’t be expanded to a feature because “there’s a limit on charm”.
“I don’t know if it’s coming out on DVD or not. I hope it is, perhaps as an extra feature, but I can’t see how you could watch it as a new release in the cinema. And I made it when Branagh and Courtney and Heather were rising young stars,” he laughs. “And they’re not that any more.”
Source: Scotsman.com