Swede: to remake a film with limited resources, cheap effects and obsolete technology, as per Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind. The idiosyncratic Frenchman put his own concept to the test with his low-budget re-imagining of Taxi Driver. Upon watching the short, screenwriter Paul Schrader had this much to say: “I always maintained Taxi Driver should never [have a] sequel or [be] remade. Michel Gondry is making me rethink this position.” With Schrader recently dismissing talk of a Lars Von Trier Taxi Driver remake, now is the time to revisit Gondry’s version.
At times, independent film can be a homogenous place for women. Since the Lena Dunham boom, tastemakers obsessively concern themselves with tales of 20-something perpetual adolescents, jobless and adrift in Brooklyn, looking for love in all the wrong places. Not so much a tonic as a blast of originality, Eliza Hittman’s It Felt Like Love announced the arrival of one of the most assured and exciting young filmmakers in recent memory when it premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. Though the film’s narrative may not seem entirely unfamiliar — we’re still coming of age in Brooklyn, experimenting sexually — Hittman’s atmospheric […]
And now for our feature presentation… the folks at Red Bull have posted online What Difference Does it Make: A Film about Making Music. It’s an energetic mash-up of the events occurring during Red Bull Music Academy’s festival last year in New York, and it contains moments from Brian Eno, James Murphy, Van Dyke Parks, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Philip Glass, Steven O’Malley and many more.
“I am a Ukrainian, and this needs to go viral,” is the message in this video from a protestor in Ukraine, currently in the midst of violent government repression. As reported by Deborah Stambler in the Huffington Post, the video was “put together” by filmmaker Ben Moses, who is currently at work on a documentary, A Whisper to a Roar, about democracy activists around the world. The video, posted several days ago, has indeed gone viral, attracting almost one million views on YouTube. According to Stambler, there are some who dub it a hoax (one YouTube commenter accuses it of […]
The UK trailer for the Tom Hardy one man show Locke just dropped ahead of its April 25th U.S. release. Written and directed by Steven Knight (the screenwriter behind Eastern Promises and Dirty Pretty Things), the film plots the unravelling of Ivan Locke over the course of a singular drive home from Birmingham to London. Well-received upon its premiere at the Venice Film Festival, the constrained character study conveys dynamism despite its four door setting.
Barely five minutes long, Agnès Varda’s 1976 short Plaisir d’Amour en Iran finds a breadth of emotion in its surroundings. Shot in Esfehan at the Shah Masjed, Varda conveys the blossoming relationship between a French tourist (Valérie Mairesse) and an Iranian (Ali Raffi) across narration, dialogue and, most effectively, architecture. It’s a transported exercise indigenous to its original time and place (France, Rive Gauche/Nouvelle Vague) that proves visuals and words can do their finest work as distinct properties. Read more at UbuWeb.
Epochal post-rock pioneers Slint are the subjects of a new documentary, Breadcrumb Trail, by Lance Bangs. In 1991, the Louisville-based band made the now-classic Spiderland for Touch and Go and, just before its release, promptly disbanded. In the years since, the album has remained enormously influential, making its mark on math rock, post-hardcore and various other sub-genres with out-of-date critical sobriquets. As Ron Kretsch notes at Dangerous Minds, one thing pops out of this trailer: these guys were young when they laid down this thing! “So, how’d YOU change the world before you finished school?” he asks. Here’s director Bangs […]
The radical documentary, The Act of Killing, won yesterday the Best Documentary prize at the 2014 BAFTA Awards on Sunday night. In his speech, director Oppenheimer thanked his anonymous co-director, who is not able to publicly reveal his or her role in the film, and said the picture “is helping to catalyze a change in how Indonesia talks about its past…” But one section of Oppenheimer’s speech was omitted from the video, above, that BAFTA posted online. His acceptance speech also included this section: I urge us all to examine ourselves, and acknowledge that we are all closer to perpetrators […]
Actress Ellen Page (Juno, X Men: Days of Future) came out as gay yesterday at the Human Rights Campaign’s inaugural Time to THRIVE conference in Las Vegas. “I’m here today because I am gay,” Page said in a moving speech at the conference dedicated to LGBT youth. “And because… maybe I can make a difference. To help others have an easier and more hopeful time. Regardless, for me, I feel a personal obligation and a social responsibility. I also do it selfishly, because I am tired of hiding and I am tired of lying by omission.” In the speech, in […]
You’d be hard pressed to find a modern movie lover who doesn’t own at least one DVD/Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection. With a catalogue of hundreds of auteur and contemporary titles, Criterion is just as much about preservation as it is curation. This video from Gizmodo takes you behind the scenes at Criterion’s Gramercy office and inside the process of restoring Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent. Beginning with a negative from the Library of Congress, the print is scanned, color corrected, retouched and sound edited before making its way into one of the company’s signature disc covers. I recently visited the office to interview […]