Trailers are an under-appreciated art form insofar that many times they’re seen as vehicles for showing footage, explaining films away, or showing their hand about what moviegoers can expect. Foreign, domestic, independent, big budget: What better way to hone your skills as a thoughtful moviegoer than by deconstructing these little pieces of advertising? This week…
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The battle between The Weinstein Co. and the MPAA over the rating for Lee Hirsch's Bully could finally be winding to a close, as sources claim that The Weinstein Co. is preparing a PG-13 cut of the anti-bullying doc after all. The unrated, unedited version of the film opened in five New York and Los…
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OK, this is getting absurd. First, let's recap. Lee Hirsch made a documentary called Bully that takes on the issue of bullying in schools, spurred in part by the suicides of several kids who were victims of bullying. The Weinstein Company is distributing the film, but found the picture tagged with an R rating by…
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The MPAA began, in slightly different form, to act in part as a tool for the early Hollywood studios. But it also quickly became a self-regulating arm of the film industry, an attempt to pacify those who accused movies of moral lapses without letting control over the business pass to a government agency. The MPAA…
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Here's the trailer for Bully, a documentary from director Lee Hirsch (NextWorld, Amandala!) about the ways that schoolkids and their families deal with bullying. We've seen several cases in the past few years where bullied kids have taken their own lives, or attempted to, and this film seems intended to address the issue both as…
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Trailers are an under-appreciated art form insofar that many times they’re seen as vehicles for showing footage, explaining films away, or showing their hand about what moviegoers can expect. Foreign, domestic, independent, big budget: I celebrate all levels of trailers and hopefully this column will satisfactorily give you a baseline of what beta wave I’m…
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