News

Emmy winner Robert Weide – principal director and exec producer of Curb Your Enthusiasm for the show’s first five years – has penned a moving farewell to his late wife Linda, who died in December. Weide’s tribute has been published in the Los Angeles Times and includes poignant descriptions of the “low maintenance” way Linda liked to spend her time, during the couple’s 28 years together.

Weide writes: “We both appreciated the occasional meal in a fine restaurant and traveling abroad, but some years I’d ask what she wanted for her birthday, and she would answer, ‘a grilled cheese sandwich.'”

The director also detailed their first meeting in 1994:

“I walked into Café Aroma in Studio City, and there she was. She had it all – beauty, style, grace, intelligence, wit, a great laugh, a blinding smile and (can I say this in 2023) legs that demanded to be shown off,...

To mark the release of Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck In Time, out now, we’ve been given a bundle of Kurt Vonnegut novels including Mother Night, Breakfast of Champions, Timequake, and Slaughterhouse 5 to give away.

Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck In Time is a remarkable, essential tribute to the iconoclastic superstar author, guru, philosopher and oracle who wrote, hilarious and scathingly about how to act decently in an indecent society. This decades-in-the-making feature documentary – the first of its kind on Vonnegut, and released in the centenary year of his birth – is a wildly entertaining and enlightening look at the author’s upbringing and his creative output, supplemented with a wealth of never before seen footage.

Please note: This competition is open to UK residents only

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time is in cinemas and on digital exclusively at Altitude.film from 22 July

https://www.altitude.film/kurt-vonnegut-unstuck-in-time?country=united-kingdom

https://www.

Our first episode back in the studio! Robert Weide discusses a few of his favorite movies with hosts Josh Olson and Joe Dante.

Show Notes: Movies Referenced In This Episode

How to Lose Friends & Alienate People (2008)

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World (2010)

Mother Night (1996)

Woody Allen: A Documentary (2011)

Mort Sahl: The Loyal Opposition (1989)

Lenny Bruce: Swear to Tell the Truth (1998)

Marx Brothers in a Nutshell (1982)

W.C. Fields: Straight Up (1986)

Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time (2021)

It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) – John Landis’s trailer commentary

Mary Poppins (1964)

The French Connection (1971) – Dennis Lehane’s trailer commentary, Mark Pellington’s trailer commentary, Randy Fuller’s wine pairing

The Magnificent Seven (1960) – Jesus Treviño’s trailer commentary

The Godfather (1972) – Ernest Dickerson’s trailer commentary, Randy Fuller’s wine pairing

The Exorcist (1973) – Oren Peli’s trailer commentary

Patton (1970) – Rod Lurie’s trailer commentary

Mash (1970)

Short Cuts (1993) – Glenn Erickson’s Criterion Blu-ray review

Lenny...

C’mon C’mon from A24 turned in the best per-screen average for a limited platform release since Covid at five theater in New York and LA as stellar critical response was met by strong exit polls ahead of a wider rollout into top markets over Thanksgiving and continued expansion thereafter.

The Mike Mills’ awards contender led by Phoenix and newcomer Woody Norman posted a PSA of $26,889, grossing $134,447. It was the distributor’s first attempt at a platform release since First Cow early last March into the teeth of Covid. Per screen numbers aren’t apples to apples — Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch did about $25K in ten times the locations (52) when it opened Oct. 22. But this is another twinkle in a sluggish specialty market whose key older demos are slow to return to theaters. That reluctance coupled with (exacerbated by?) early availability on streaming/on demand saw many...

There’s a good reason why so much of Robert B. Weide and Don Argott’s “Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time” is spent explaining why and how the film came to be: This is a biographical documentary aimed at people who love Vonnegut’s books, but people who love Vonnegut’s books have already read about the key points of his biography. Not only do they bleed through the bindings of “Slaughterhouse-Five” as if his wounds were still fresh, they’re also smudged across the most dog-eared pages of novels like “Player Piano,” “Breakfast of Champions,” and “Timequake” (the last of which even interrogates his creative process in its own playful way).

Vonnegut’s writing laughs at our place in the stars by seeing it through the pinhole of personal experience, and his readers can’t have their minds blown by the cosmic adventures of characters like Billy Pilgrim and...

“Listen” a voiceover says as a puff of smoke fills a black screen. Borrowed from the first chapter of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s most well-known novel ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’, Robert B. Weide and Don Argott’s documentary ‘Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time’ is well versed in the iconography of its subject. Unfortunately, the film lacks the author’s witty creativity. The voiceover continues, “we don’t understand the first thing about time.” What follows is a mostly linear greatest hits look at the life and work of one of the 20th century’s most unique literary voices.

Continue reading ‘Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck In Time’ Review: The Well-Versed Documentary Lacks The Subject’s Witty Creativity at The Playlist.

“Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time” is two documentaries in one. It’s a film about the life and work of Kurt Vonnegut, and on that score it covers most of the bases and captures what it was that made Vonnegut the quintessential pop-philosopher novelist of his era — the quips and catchphrases and sci-fi curlicues, the whimsically upbeat cynicism of his chain-smoking Mark-Twain-of-the-counterculture image, the way that, in “Slaughterhouse-Five” (1969), he took his experiences as a witness to the bombing of Dresden in World War II and turned them into a mythology of war that caught the despair and bitter insanity of the Vietnam era, and the fact that he wrote fervently, obsessively, but always in the spry, plainspoken, wit-as-dry-as-kindling voice of the Midwestern scion of Indianapolis he was. If you want a handy primer on one of the fabled writers of his time, “Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time” will more than do.

As befits a documentary about an unconventional thinker, Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time takes an unconventional approach. It serves the expected functions of a typical artist documentary, combining interviews with the subject, interviews with experts, and archival documents and footage into a solid summary of his life, his work and his legacy. But threaded through the narrative is one about the making of the documentary itself — an impish approach that, though it doesn’t always pay off, feels like a creative swing in the spirit of Vonnegut himself.

The story of the film begins in 1982, when filmmaker Robert Weide,...

In the wake of Sony’s attempt to reboot Ghostbusters in 2016 with a female leading cast, the studio hasn’t given up on the IP and finally is releasing an all-new Jason Reitman-directed sequel, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, which it has protected for a theatrical release throughout the pandemic.

Exhibition bosses went nuts at CinemaCon for the movie, which has been described as having a Steven Spielberg-esque sensibility in its cast of kids — one of whom is the descendent of Harold Ramis’ Dr. Egon Spengler from the original 1980s movies. Franchise vets Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Sigourney Weaver and Annie Potts are back as well.

There’s been a fervent response to Ghostbusters: Afterlife from local press out of recent screenings, and Sony is betting that the feature, which is also produced by original Ghostbusters filmmaker Ivan Reitman, will be a holiday sleeper. If the pic comes up...

"What happens when a writer stops writing?" IFC Films has unveiled a trailer for the documentary film Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time, a unique look at the life of this famed writer. This is premiering at the Doc NYC Film Festival in a few weeks. The film began 39 years ago when young, struggling filmmaker Robert B. Weide wrote a letter to his literary idol proposing a film on Vonnegut's life and work. Shooting began in 1988 and the resulting doc reflects the friendship and bond Weide and Vonnegut formed over the decades. Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time is first and foremost a biography of a beloved American author. But it also documents a filmmaker's odyssey as he examines the impact of a writer's legacy on his life, extending far beyond the printed page. Looks like an especially intellectual doc considering the years of connection and footage he has ...

A new documentary, Unstuck In Time, covers the story of Kurt Vonnegut over a period of almost 20 years...

One of the most important American writers of the 20th century, Kurt Vonnegut's novels were full of intelligence and dry humour. Perhaps his most famous work, the semi-autobiographical novel Slaughterhouse-Five, was both a horrifying account of the firebombing of Dresden and a dark time travel comedy.

Such books as Cat's Cradle, Player Piano and Breakfast Of Champions offered up amusing and often worryingly accurate portraits of human nature at its lowest, where lives are ruined or existences snuffed out through naivety or plain madness. In short, Vonnegut was one of the sharpest sci-fi writers of all time.

In 1982, filmmaker Robert Weide wrote to Vonnegut in the hope that the author would let him make a documentary about his life. To Weide's surprise, Vonnegut agreed. Between 1988 and 2007, Weide met with Vonnegut many times,...

The most frequent question Curb Your Enthusiasm co-creator Robert B. Weide gets asked is apparently, “When are you going to finish your Kurt Vonnegut documentary?”. Weide started filming the author in 1988, having secured Vonnegut's blessing for a film project as early as 1982. And 33 years on, Weide is finally getting round to using the footage, co-directing Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck In Time with documentarist Don Argott (As The Palaces Burn, The Art Of The Steal). A Kickstarter campaign has just launched, which comes with a trailer."It's going to be amazing," Argott tells Empire. "Bob Weide did the Woody Allen documentary a couple of years ago: a Lenny Bruce documentary, a Marx Brothers documentary... he's been a filmmaker for years. I met him in Kiev and we hung out and hit it off and had known and liked each other's work, and he called me to ask if I'd be interested in...