LA Film Festival to announce lineup Wednesday
The Los Angeles Film Festival announces its full lineup on Wednesday morning including the opening and closing night films. Last year the festival opened with the world premiere of Kasi Lemmons’ Talk to Me starring Don Cheadle and closed with the North American premiere of Danny Boyle’s Sunshine.
If the festival organizers stick to last year’s pattern, they’ll follow up Wednesday’s main announcement with one or two centerpiece gala films to be unveiled in the weeks to come. Last year was George Ratliff’s Joshua staring Sam Rockwell and Vera Farmiga and the world premiere of Michael Bay’s Transformers starring a lot of computer generated carnage. The justification for having a feature length toy ad stink the joint up was that it was loosely tied into the special series LA Destroys Itself featuring LA based disaster movies including Earthquake, Night of the Comet and Them!
This year, they could conceivably premiere Peter Berg’s Hancock starring Will Smith. It’s a flashy blockbuster set in LA and it’s also scheduled to open in the same July 4th holiday weekend slot that Transformers filled last year. Will Smith would be a less crass and annoying choice than Rock Em Sock Em Robots: The Movie, but I’m just speculating. Whatever the film turns out to be, it will be chosen to get attention for the festival but otherwise have nothing to do with what makes it a hit or a miss.
This year’s LA Film Festival takes over Westwood from June 19 - 29 and LiC will be there.
Filed under: Film Festivals
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Wow, very cool. I look forward to the daily dispatches from the monkeys.
I really wish there were more film fests. in SA.
Enjoy it!
As always, I wait with baited breath to see what the monkeys come up. Good luck.
I’m looking forward to this one. I wasn’t really prepared last year and I ran out of gas 3/4s of the way through. I learned a lot at AFI so I’m ready to go.
For one thing, I’m going to start planning what to see earlier this year.
Luckily, the first weekend it’s running, the summer schedule takes a fairly significant dump: Get Smart, Kit Kittredge and The Love Guru, so I won’t be missing anything there. The weekend after that I’ll have to make room for WALL-E, but that shouldn’t be a problem.
Yeah I would get your highlighter out first thing tomorrow. I was only able to attend 12 of the 17 days of the festival here, but even that was a scheduling nightmare. Are you getting press or otherwise special access?
I’ve applied for press credentials, but we’ll see if it pans out. It can’t hurt to ask, right?
If that doesn’t work, I’m going to cough up the money for a pass. You have to see a crap load of movies to make it worth the money, but the flexibility is awesome.
Hope you get them - I’m sure you will. LA is probably both the easiest and the hardest place to succeed with this kind of thing, but you appear to be on your way. Maybe it’s like a SAG card. If you get in for this fest you’ll be set for the rest. Before long you’ll be launching the First Annual LiC Film Festival.
I’ve gone the festival volunteer route, which saves you a bundle of money but obviously comes with its own scheduling difficulties, not to mention the responsibility of herding cats.
If they deny me, one day when I own the Internet, they will regret it.
I’m not sure how picky they are. LAFF isn’t Cannes or Toronto or Sundance so the demand won’t be as high, but they still have limited spots for press types I’m sure.
We’ll see.