Out Now – 19th September 2014

The Riot Club
If there is one aspect of culture I don’t understand it is “lad culture”. All the bloody lads, top banter, and all the homoerotic fun that comes with it. This film is essentially about what happens when the lads in question are wealthy and can indulge in more decadent loutishness. The BBFC promises “strong violence, very strong language, strong sex, sex references, and drug use” so prepare to have your morals compromised.

The Giver
Set in a dystopian future where the government has taken on totalitarian control and the masses, dressed in muted colours, lack free will and don’t even seem to realise that they are being oppressed proper noun discovers that the world they live in is not what it seems. With their new-found knowledge proper noun decides to escape their society and change things for the better. PLOT TWIST! Proper noun is a boy!

Think Like a Man Too
Following on from the presumed success of Think Like a Man this sequel adds cast members, a different (but not too different plot), and the word “Too”. Enjoy!

A Walk Among the Tombstones
A drug kingpin’s wife is kidnapped so he hires the one man who has the specific set of skills needed to get her back; Liam Neeson. Here Liam Neeson is totally not playing the same character from Taken. For legal reasons it is very important that we all agree that he is not playing the same character from Taken. He is playing the same character from Taken.

Wish I Was Here
If you can get past the title, and the whole Kickstarter debate, you might (might) enjoy this second feature from Zach Braff. If you are like me and have gone from loving Garden State to being scared to ever watch it again then I advise you to read Melissa’s review of attending a preview screening as she shares our reservations. Wish I was here… Oh! I am here! In fact here is the definition of where I am. I am so silly sometimes.

Magic in the Moonlight
Woody Allen has bounced back from the success of Blue Jasmine to bring us a period comedy that critics worldwide are calling “not great”. Regardless of the quality, or lack thereof, we get the charming combination of Emma Stone and Colin Firth. This charm will shortly be followed by uneasiness when we realise they are supposed to be a romantic pairing.

Salomé / Wilde Salomé
Al Pacino directs and stars in a film adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s play that, for the sake of editorial authority, I will pretend to be familiar with. Also we have a documentary in which we follow Al Pacino attempting to direct and star in a film adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s play that, because it is my favourite play ever, I perform to crowds in Covent Garden every Friday night. Essentially you are getting a film and its DVD extras all at once. for the price of two trips to the cinema. Yay?

The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq
Michel Houellebecq gets kidnapped! If only his family had contact details for Liam Neeson’s character from Taken.

Khoobsurat
“Remake of 1980’s Khoobsurat starred Ashok Kumar and Rekha with modern touch.” Hmm… this synopsis really relies on me knowing something about the original Khoobsurat. Which I do not.

20,000 Days on Earth
Nick Cave stars in a film about Nick Cave. Perfect for fans of Nick Cave or caves in general.

Night Will Fall
Alfred Hitchcock and Sidney Bernstein shot a film together in 1945 about German concentration camps and nobody has seen it until now. Imagine that. In fact don’t just imagine it get down to the cinema and see it with your eyes!

Grand Piano
“Moments before his comeback performance, a concert pianist who suffers from stage fright discovers a note written on his music sheet.” I’m no expert but as I understand it notes are precisely what you want on your music sheet. A music sheet with no notes is actually just a sheet.

Wish I Was Here – UK Trailer

Presented to you with a healthy dose of morbid curiosity and trepidation we have the UK trailer for Zach Braff’s upcoming second feature Wish I Was Here. It is a decade since his first film Garden State made hipsters worldwide, myself included, experience emotions and want to be rescued by an epileptic Natalie Portman.

Over time Garden State has lost its title as the greatest film of all time but does remain an indie touchstone for the twenty-first century and I won’t be getting rid of my DVD any time soon. I have a sentimental attachment to the first film I saw that wasn’t wholly mainstream. Ten years, and a controversial Kickstarter campaign, later and Braff appears to be on familiar territory.

While the protagonist may be appropriately older than before there is still a mid-life crisis, parental woes, and total uniqueness to be dealt with while The Shins play on perpetually in the sweet but angsty universe indicative of Zach Braff.

Will the film be any good? Was it right for Zach Braff to use Kickstarter to fund it? Will they invite me to a press screening to help me decide? The trailer below can only begin to answer some of these questions but there’s a version of me down inside, roughly ten years younger, who is very excited about Wish I Was Here and wants it to be good. Four stars at least please.

How to Succeed at Kickstarter: A Statistically Unsound Guide

Yesterday one of the Kickstarter stories we were following came to a surprisingly abrupt end as Melissa Joan Hart closed the campaign for Darci’s Walk of Shame two weeks early and with a mere fraction of the target raised. Clearly Hart and chums were hoping to have the same success as Rob Thomas with his Veronica Mars project and Zach Braff with his ongoing Wish I Was Here endeavours but Hart could see she wasn’t going to pass the $2-million mark she needed and pulled the plug.

So why didn’t Darci experience the same success as her contemporaries? Is it as simple as the fact that Sabrina Goes to Rome was a long time ago, was awful and that Hart has a much smaller fan base than Braff and Veronica Mars? Is there a convoluted and inaccurate mathematical analysis I can perform? I bloody well hope so.

To begin my numbers-based investigation I gathered together some statistics for each project. I looked at their Kickstarter success, or lack thereof and the three lead actors Twitter accounts to get an idea of fan base size. I also looked at the three existing titles which the respective Kickstarter projects relate to (Veronica Mars, Garden State, and Sabrina Goes to Rome) and noted their IMDb user rating and the number of years since their release. Here’s what I gathered:

The first thing to note is that Mars and Braff are pretty similar when it comes to their average pledges and Twitter followers yet differ greatly in the amount of money they have raised. Melissa Joan Hart has much less money and followers but gets far more money per pledge. No proper trend here so I will be ignoring the number of Twitter followers a lead actor has.

At a quick glance however it does seem that a higher IMDb rating for the previous release and a more recent release make for a larger amount of money raised. The bubble chart below makes this clear:

The size of the bubbles is the amount of money raised on Kickstarter and the largest is for the highest rated film/show which was released the most recently. From here I continued on my pointless journey and created a new metric of IMDb score divided by the number of years since release (a sort of combined recency and quality score) and plotted it against the amount raised:

And there we have it! A direct relationship between how much you can raise on Kickstarter for your film based upon the recency and quality of your previous work.

Amazing! Inaccurate! Time-wasting! Superb!

An endlessly useful formula I think you’ll agree. What this means is that we can calculate the ideal value of IMDb Rating/Years Since Release that will get you to the $2-million mark. That value is 0.705 and is also endlessly useful because we can use it to make the table below:

This tells us how many years you can wait until you try to make a follow-up film on Kickstarter based on your TV show or film’s rating on IMDb. For example Buffy the Vampire Slayer has an IMDb rating of 8 and has been off-air for 10 years so still has another 1.35 years until it will no longer raise sufficient funds on Kickstarter. On the other hand Freaks and Geeks has an IMDb rating of 8.9 but has been gone for 13 years now so is just too late.

So if you own the rights to an existing franchise and fancy raising money on Kickstarter use my handy formula to see how much you will be able to raise. You are welcome.

DISCLAIMER: This is in no way accurate, does not take enough projects into account, and ignores far too many other factors to be of any use.

Braff Promises an “Ass-ton” of Funding for Kickstarter Film

In a bid to remain unbiased and balanced (HA!) I figured I should share with you Zach Braff’s message from last week. I’d have done it sooner but it was sunny outside and I got distracted. For a background on Braff’s Kickstarter project click here and read me rant.

Last week Braff posted a public update to the Wish I Were Here Kickstarter page. The fact that it was public makes me think that it was less a message to his backers and more a response to those of us who remain sceptical about giving him our money.

In the update Braff raises the issue of “stretch goals”, a funding goal way beyond someone’s initial Kickstarter target funding which will enable a specific extra something to be created, then sort of meanders away from the topic and never really sets one. What he does do is make it clear that Kickstarter alone will not be funding the film:

The budget will be comprised of 3 elements:

• The money raised here on Kickstarter. (That’s you. You rule. I love you.)
• My own money. (Don’t worry. A LOT! An ass-ton.)
• Pre-selling select foreign distribution rights to a few countries.

This at least reduces my concern that he is using Kickstarter as a way to fund his film without any financial risk of his own. I don’t know how much an ass-ton is (With a total budget target of “somewhere between 4 and 6 million dollars” it depends on how much he can get from selling distribution rights. So somewhere between nothing and $4-million? I suppose this is why we don’t use ass-tons as standard units.) but it is always reassuring when someone asking for my money has something at stake too.

Braff goes on to list the expensive parts of his production which include “fantasy sequences with special effects” and “a computer generated flying droid”. If he manages that on such a small budget I will be incredibly impressed. Maybe he should give Gareth Edwards from Monsters a call?

I have yet to give any money but know plenty of people who have, and plenty more who look at me like I’m insane when I mention the mere idea of paying to get a film made. And if Zach Braff wants to be interviewed by the UK’s 18th most influential film blog, just send us an email.

Veronica Mars What Have You Kickstarted?

Me and Kickstarter have been on an emotional rollercoaster of late and my poor friends have been subjected to a rant or two. Let’s see if I can get all of the rant out of me now so I can move on with my life and stop fretting.

My emotions started high when Veronica Mars achieved more than double its goal of $2-million. This was a show that I loved which wasn’t going to get a film made any other way. The film was largely being made for the sheer love of it all and us fans were happy to lend a financial hand. I did have some reservations about what this would mean for the future of funding for smaller films but all in all was pleased that Rob Thomas would finally be making a film follow-up to one of my all time favourite shows.

Then over a week ago I received an email/tweet/telegram from a friend telling me to have a look at Melissa Joan Hart’s Kickstarter as she was trying to emulate the success of Veronica Mars in a way we found ridiculous. The film Hart is trying to get made is called Darci’s Walk of Shame and is to be written and directed by Tibor Takács. Don’t remember Tibor? He directed the visually uninspired TV film Sabrina Goes to Rome. It’s not exactly the pedigree that inspires this particular Kickstarter user and their rewards were near carbon copies of the Mars project. This seemed less of a passion project and more a half-hearted attempt to get Hart a film to work on.

At this point I was all ready to write a slightly mean piece entitled Melissa Joan Hart, Veronica Mars is Smarter than You which would have been amusing and smug and make me feel like a happy little blogger. Then Zach Braff entered the fray.

Zach Braff is a bit of a special case where I am concerned. His debut, and so far solo, film as writer/director Garden State was the first film that made me realise there were other cinematic options outside the mainstream. The film is far from perfect but it is special to me and I have been waiting for a second feature from the Scrubs star for quite some time now. Braff last week launched his own Kickstarter for a second film, Wish I Was Here, with his eyes set on the now standard target of $2-million. I was elated. How much would I give? How much could I afford to give? This was all very exciting and gave my article a happy ending rather than a simple rant. And then…

And then…

And then I read his Kickstarter in full and had a think. Never a wise proposition. It turned out that Zach Braff had already successfully raised the money for this second film but had turned down the deal when Veronica Mars opened his eyes to an alternative funding route. Braff cites creative freedom as his motivation for taking the Kickstarter route and while this may well be true a large financial incentive should also be taken into account. With his original funding deal Braff would presumably have had to relinquish some of the film’s profit to his investors one it had been released. With the Kickstarter model Braff receives all his money from fan donors, and let’s be clear these are donors and not investors, and so takes on no financial risk for himself or anyone else.

Zach Braff, a man who at one point was earning $350,000 per episode on Scrubs, is asking his fans to pay for his next film. Yes, I realise that is totally at the fans discretion (and I hypocritically have yet to decide if I will join them) and they receive various rewards, but I can’t help but fixate on the fact that the film would have gone ahead with or without Kickstarter. Braff is not even offering a copy of the film as part of any reward tier; you can donate as much as $10,000 but you’ll still have to pay when the film itself comes out.

I like Zach Braff and I don’t think he is being particularly conniving or deceitful in his Kickstarter campaign but this was not his only option. If his Kickstarter had somehow failed to reach its target I imagine we would have still been able to see a relatively unchanged Wish I Was Here in a year’s time. In the meantime there are various projects that genuinely need Kickstarter to get them the funding they need for production. To pick one at random the feature film Bonobo is looking for just £7,500 to fund filming this summer but is struggling with no big names attached and no existing fan base.

When alternative funding sources are available, and have been offered, it seems almost insulting to instead ask for handouts from admittedly willing fans. I don’t think I will be able to afford it if every film I want to see requires a donation from me before it can enter production. When a film’s budget enters into the millions then they are likely to be expecting the profits to reflect this. Hollywood is a lucrative industry built on large investments and larger rewards. Relying on us to fund their projects means they remove the risk but keep the potential profits for themselves.

As I said I am a hypocrite and a fan and can’t promise that I will boycott all future larger Kickstarter project but I hope that anyone willing to give a millionaire $30 to make their next feature will consider throwing a few pounds at a smaller film like Bonobo. I can’t promise that Bonobo will be any good but after All New People I can’t promise that Wish I Was Here will be either.