The News: Today in List Clusterfuckery

By S.T. VanAirsdale

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

--The International Documentary Association left the equivalent of a flaming bag of dogshit in indieWIRE's inbox on Wednesday, drunkenly revealing its members' choices for the 25 best documentaries on the occasion of its 25th anniversary. This makes the inbreds at AFI look like meticulous scholars; nothing can qualify the straight-faced selections of An Inconvenient Truth (#6), Super Size Me (#11) or Fahrenheit 9/11 (#21) among the best of anything except marketing campaigns. Was the conspicuously omitted March of the Penguins just not hardcore enough to supplant Winged Migration (#22)? Anyway, Hoop Dreams came in #1, with The Thin Blue Line and Bowling For Columbine rounding out the top three. Grizzly Man -- which is probably Werner Herzog's fourth or fifth own best documentary -- is in there, as are token "highbrow" nods (Titicut Follies, Night and Fog) that IDA execs probably never heard of before voters wrote them in. If you're expecting truly seismic work like Shoah, The War Room or Why We Fight, keep looking; the only discussion this list will generate is the one gauging its commissioners' irrelevance.

--One doc that surely just missed the cut is Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project, John Landis' latest foray into nonfiction and a featured selection at this year's New York Film Festival. In this week's Voice, Aaron Hillis checks in with Landis regarding the comic's amenability to the documentary process and survival tips for those on the business end of his poisonous insults.

--OMG! Sex and the City: The Movie will feature a flashback of the leading ladies as teenagers! Ain't it Cool News has pictures! I have a migraine!

--MTV's Josh Horowitz had a peek at Michel Gondry's mainstream mindfuck Be Kind Rewind, following up with an interview. "After the first Planet of the Apes, they all got cheaper, but sometimes they became more interesting," Gondry tells Horowitz. "I thought, 'Let's take that process and push it even more.' " And just like that, Jack Black is mangling Ghostbusters.

Posted at October 4, 2007 8:07 AM