Man, another film we had on the brain (you’ll see tmw in another 2010 preview piece we’re doing) and were wondering when it was going to get picked up.
Sales at TIFF 2009 were pretty slow this year and that was a given in this shaky film climate. Buyers were tentative and took a wait and see approach, but with a new fiscal year on the books, distribs do seem to have some extra cash at hand. Two TIFF films finally got picked up in the last two weeks — Neil Jordan’s “Ondine” and Gaspar Noe’s “Enter The Void” — and now a third has also landed a U.S. distribution deal: Todd Solondz’s “Life During Wartime.”
Acquired by IFC Films for release in the summer (no exact date yet), Solondz’s dark, twisted, but more mature effort is a quasi-sequel to his 1998 film “Happiness” and centers around the theme of forgiveness for heinous acts.
Reusing characters from that film (and a few from 1996’s “Welcome To The Dollhouse”), Solondz’s messed with the idea of identity, hiring all new actors to play familiar parts once made famous by the likes of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Jon Lovitz.
We saw the pic at TIFF and while it was better than recent efforts and a soft return to form/step in the right direction, we didn’t exactly do backflips for it either. Still, we’re glad its coming out and people will get a chance to see it. But don’t bank on Criterion putting it out as part of its exclusive IFC deal. Case in point: the film will be one of those IFC day-of-date releases meaning it will hit theaters and VOD simultaneously.
The pic stars several actors including, Allison Janney, Paul “Pee-Wee Herman” Reubens, Ciarán Hinds, Ally Sheedy, Shirley Henderson, Charlotte Rampling, Michael Kenneth Williams, Michael Lerner and more (we made a handy cheat sheet last year so you could see what new actors took over the old roles).
But what we wanna know: what happened to Paris Hilton? She was supposed to have a role in the film and it was even announced in the trades.
Well, chances are she got cut out of the final film and you’re probably not going to see it on the DVD either.
Solondz notoriously shot an entire third story to his scabrous 2001 film, “Storytelling” with “Dawson’s Creek” star James Van Der Beek in the role of a gay teenage football quarterback (complete with a graphic sex scene), but the complete section of the film was deep-sixed (hence the reason that film is a mere 87 minutes), wasn’t on the DVD extras and in fact it’s never been seen outside of the editing room. “We had no idea,” Selma Blair told EW in 2002. “I had a much bigger part, people had amazing performances cut completely: Van Der Beek. Emmanuelle Chriqui. Adam Hann-Byrd’ (plus “Welcome to the Dollhouse” star Heather Matarazzo) it must have been heartbreaking to cast them aside.”
We’ll admit, to this day we’re still curious, but it doesn’t sound like we’ll ever see it.