Screening Gotham: "We Got Jokes" Edition

Some of today's movie news of note from around New York:

--The award for 2007's best April Fool's Day prank goes to Zoom-In contributor Reid Rosefelt, who last Friday introduced readers to the struggling, if promising, Wisconsin indie filmmaker Ken Schmidtke. "I'm sure that if I showed the cheese scenes alone to the critics at Film Comment, Ken might be seen as a very promising talent," Rosefelt wrote of Schmidtke's cheese-maker drama Michigan Sunset, before attributing a 486-page tome on the Mariah Carey clusterfuck Glitter to Wisconsin film professor David Bordwell. Pretty funny, right? Maybe not if you fell for it.

--The gang at IFC Films was just pulling everyone's chain on Sunday as well when it reported a $300,000+ weekend for The Wind That Shakes the Barley. After several inquiries, the company's head of distribution came around -- to less than a quarter of that figure. OK, so it was wasn't as funny as Ken Schmidtke. But still.

--The latest member of the Hustle & Flow team to confess to snookering of her own is Taryn Manning. "The one thing that sucked was that our contracts weren't really honored by [director] John Singleton," Manning told Stuff Magazine (via Page Six). "The movie sold at Sundance for all this money, and we really just got nothing ... It's such a joke because the guy completely fucked us over." Laugh it off or get in line, sister.

Posted at April 4, 2007 10:04 AM