What’s it like to get out of jail and try to rebuild your life when that life was running a hugely successful brothel in the middle of New Orleans and the Lifetime movie of your experience is about to air? Cameron Yates’ new documentary, The Canal Street Madam, asks that question of Jeanette Maier and generates even more questions than answers. Was Maier a dangerous criminal, transporting women across state lines for the purposes of her own profit and their vicitimization as sex workers, or was she herself the victim of a hypocritical system that convicted and exposed her but […]
by Alicia Van Couvering on Mar 15, 2010Geoff Marslett’s Mars is a whimsical rotoscoped space exploration romance starring Mark Duplass, the kind of film whose possible existence may never have occurred to you, but one that you are very glad to have discovered. Marslett, an Austin native and much-lauded teacher of animation at UT Austin, studied mathematics, philosophy, art, science and languages before arriving in Texas to get his degree in narrative filmmaking. Gradually, he began to get interested in animation, taught himself the process and started inventing new techniques for his short films, now numbering over a dozen. Monkey vs. Robot, for instance, has screened at […]
by Alicia Van Couvering on Mar 15, 2010Love was in the air at the Filmmaker Brunch on Friday afternoon, where the top shelf tequila ran rampant. Against the backdrop of the soon-to-be-retired Troublemaker Studios green screen — where almost every Robert Rodriguez film has ever been shot — filmmaker pairs mixed and mingled. They were implored to hold this moment dear, because “this is the moment,” in an actually very moving speech by Up In The Air director Jason Reitman, who got into his car the day after the Oscars and drove straight to Texas. Jody Lee Lipes, co-director of NY Export: Opus Jazz and DP of […]
by Alicia Van Couvering on Mar 13, 2010…at the Texas Hall of Fame Film Awards, a glorious benefit for the Austin Film Society that drew the cream of the Texas to Austin Studios last night. And indeed, there were Cowboy hats aplenty — Robert Rodriguez even gave one to Quentin Tarantino, the evening’s honoree. Some pictorial highlights: Kim Le Blanc of the Texas Film Commission, Lovers of Hate director Bryan Poyser, whose film is part of IFC’s day-and-date “Direct from SXSW” initiative, and Janet Pierson, Director and Head of Programming at SXSW and the kind of woman who can start sentences with, “When I was running a […]
by Alicia Van Couvering on Mar 12, 2010