Two years ago at Toronto there was a tight little slasher flick called All The Boys Love Mandy Lane. I had a good time watching dumb teen boys trip over themselves trying to hook up with Amber Heard as the beautiful and pure title character. Had a better time watching them trip over their own insides once a group escorts Mandy to a country house for a getaway weekend of drinking and sex.
Harvey Weinstein liked it too; he was prominently hanging out in the lobby after the first midnight screening, and bought the pic shortly after. And in true Weinsten fashion, it’s never seen a non-festival cinema since. Release dates have tentatively come and definitively gone; first theatrical, then a fall 2007 DVD release, and now Senator has the rights and theatrical plans for February in the UK and March in the US. Yeah, that poster on the right is a little bit out of date.
With director Jonathan Levine being one of the few outright Sundance successes this year thanks to his second film The Wackness, maybe Harvey is realizing he’s been using a good thing for a chair cushion for the past two years. Perhaps there’s a good business reason the film has waited that long*, but it’s much more fun to envision Weinstein as a film-devouring hydra.
With that upcoming UK release in mind, Yahoo UK has the first ten minutes of the flick online. It’s a pretty dodgy streaming presentation, but you can enjoy the beauty of Amber Heard and chuckle as a kid is convinved to make a leap of stupidity in an effort to bed her.
* Good business example: the Weinsteins sold the North American rights for what they paid for the worldwide, which they’ve partially parceled; they’ve already made money on the movie. And they still control DVD rights, which means you might get to wait even longer before seeing the movie at home.