Parts
About
Peter Cameron is an American novelist and short-story writer. He published his first short story for The New Yorker in 1983 & would later contribute to the magazine for many years. His first book, One Way or Another, is a short story compilation that was published in 1986.
His debut novel, Leap Year, was published at the start of the 1990s. His follow-up, The Weekend, was published in 1994 & received much acclaim, so much so that it was adapted into a film directed by Brian Skeet.
Brian Skeet is an English director who started out working for the BBC, directing multiple episodes in the documentary series Omnibus. He collaborated with Simon Curtis & Peter Sellars on directing various theater productions: Performance, starring John Malkovich & The Merchant of Venice, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman
After leaving the BBC, he made his first short, The Boy Who Fell In Love. He would later make his first feature, The Misadventures of Margaret, a musical comedy starring Parker Posey, which was featured at the Sundance Film Festival.
The Weekend would be his follow-up film, and he managed to assemble quite a cast: Gena Rowlands, Brooke Shields, Deborah Kara Unger, Jared Harris, D.B. Sweeney & James Duval. The film was at the festival circuit in 1999, & managed to win an award at the Seattle International Film Festival for Best Ensemble Cast. The film was released on November 22, 2000, in LA & New York.
Over the years, the film has languished in obscurity, with its only cultural relevance being its appearance in an episode of Ebert & Roeper's At the Movies. It's an interesting watch, primarily because of its cast.
Gena Rowlands & Brooke Shields have a passive-aggressive mother-daughter relationship, which is interesting to observe. Deborah Kara Unger is solid as the primary female character where all the backstories and drama transpire, & James Duval is surprisingly good here, bringing the gay ingenue from the Araki films and applying it in a standard drama like this. My favorite parts are where he interacts with Gena Rowlands; they have a tender relationship throughout the film, which is very sweet by the end.
James Duval commented on the film in 2022, stating that the cast all lived in a bed and breakfast for 3 months. He was paired with Rowlands, Shields, and Sweeney to live in one house, while the other cast members lived in another home. He stated that Gena Rowlands was his favorite person he had ever worked with, not only because he was a big fan of her work, but also gracious to him & helped him through a bad breakup at the time.
Other interesting factoids: -The production company behind the film is Granada Film Productions (Ghost World, The Queen, etc).
-Strand Releasing is the distributor of the film, responsible for distributing a lot of Gregg Araki's films.
-Brooke Shields's second collaboration with Brian Skeet, the first one being on The Misadventures of Margaret.
-This is James Duval's fifth time playing a gay character (The other times were in Araki's Teen Apocalypse Trilogy & A River Made to Drown In).
- Archive
- Internet Archive, in More feature films
- Licence or status
- The Internet Archive states none for this item.
- Credit
- Brian Skeet
- Language
- English
- Who can watch
- The archive gives no rating. Invisible Network shows it to Teens profiles and older, judged from its collection and subjects. How films are placed