Long before Chick-fil-A fried their way into the center of a gay rights firestorm, Compliance director Craig Zobel was searching for the right setting to tell his chilling tale of order and obedience gone terribly wrong at a fast food joint. “In the back of my head, I probably could have told you that they were on the wrong side of history,” said Zobel, who rocked Sundance with the drama, based on incredible true events, in which a telephone prankster manipulates the manager of a fictional chicken restaurant into the increasingly dehumanizing treatment of one of her employees. "I just didn’t want to look at it."
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Anyone who's been tracking the controversial 2010 horror pic A Serbian Film along the film festival circuit knows to expect something either artfully transgressive, dreadfully offensive, or something in between; even critics who liked it seem to agree that life would be better without having seen the acts depicted onscreen. But does anything in A Serbian Film warrant the child pornography charges reportedly lobbied at the Sitges Film Festival for merely screening the film?
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Although it wasn't quite as universally panned as Dito Montiel's Son of No One, and no one lost it and shouted at the filmmakers in a post-screening rant, Mark Pellington's dark bromantic thriller I Melt with You was the most controversially-received film at this year's Sundance Film Festival to land a distribution deal. (Read Movieline's assessment of the film and its disastrous first screening.) Hours after it was announced that Magnolia Pictures would release the polarizing film, Movieline caught up with Pellington and screenwriter Glenn Porter to discuss how they've been processing the negative reviews, how the deal with Magnolia went down, and what kind of tweaks will be made to the film before its theatrical release.
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