Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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What to See from the Tribeca Film Festival Online
Screenings have just kicked off in Manhattan for the Tribeca Film Festival, but as always not all the films are showing in theaters–and there’s more available online this year than ever before. Here’s a quick guide to what you can see and how to see it. Streaming select titles: Four feature films and four shorts will be online after their initial theatrical screenings this week and next; they’ll also be eligible for an audience choice award with prize money totaling $15,000. All of Tribeca’s online material discussed below, including these eight films, is available at http://tribecafilm.com/online. The short films include: * Love in […]
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Tribeca: 5 Questions for Glass Chin Writer/Director Noah Buschel
“Boxing has always drawn dumb, confused macho guys like myself,” writes filmmaker Noah Buschel. “It’s cool, it’s tough, it’s naked, it’s true…. But the thing about boxing, as Norman Mailer pointed out, is that it’s just as sensitive as it is murderous. If you go to a boxing gym, and Floyd Mayweather’s not there, it is a remarkably quiet and tender place.” Buschel heads straight into that quiet and tender place with his latest, Glass Chin, premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival. Since he’s already written an essay for us about the film itself, we sent Buschel a set of […]
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“Let Some Air In!”: Nathan Silver on Directing Improvisation
I asked Nathan Silver to write a guest post on directing improvisation, largely because a spur of the moment slipup — in which one of his actors mistakenly entered a scene and decided to stay put — ended up reshaping the narrative of Soft in the Head, which opens today at Cinema Village. I wanted to know how he tacitly guides the actors without stifling them, how much preparation his outlines necessitate, and what sort of challenges the process presents in editing. He sent me the following, with the note that he “might be having a nervous breakdown.” Incidentally, it’s […]
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Spell of the Cat People
I was watching TV late at night, in a motel room. Having been on the highway all day, I just wanted to get the speeding landscape out of my face and eyes. I searched through the channels for something that had some gravity to it. Something that would pour molasses all over the spinning tires in my mind. Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People had just started. Within a minute, it had blasted the day away, and rolled me like a black-and-white wave. Soft, hypnotic, thunderous. The movie came out of the TV, went into my head and then down into my […]
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Five Questions with Five Star Director Keith Miller
A generational meditation on masculinity, Keith Miller’s sophomore film Five Star explores the relationship between Primo — a Blood since puberty — and his would-be protégé, John. Set against sun-scorched Brooklyn projects, the film folds a casual shooting style into heavier thematic territory. Maintaining an alternately protective and imposing arm, Primo struggles to reconcile his history with his paternal instincts as John is pulled deeper into the gang’s underbelly. Filmmaker spoke to Miller about the film’s non-fictional foundations and his collaboration with the leading “non-actors.” Five Star world premieres today in the World Narrative Competition at the Tribeca Film Festival. Filmmaker: This is a world […]
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When Filmmakers Dream: A Story of Attainable Success
When filmmakers dream, we dream big. And why not? Shoot for the stars, and hell, you might just get one to act in your next movie. While not every filmmaker has designs for commercial success, one would be hard-pressed to find one that would shun recognition and the opportunity to create more films and get paid to do so. Every young filmmaker would love his or her first film to win Sundance so they can be plucked out of obscurity, handed the keys to Hollywood, and asked to direct every episode of True Detective. And why the hell not? When […]
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2014 Cannes Lineup Announced
There were few surprises to be had at this morning’s announcement of the Competition, Un Certain Regard and Special Screenings sections for the 2014 Cannes Film Festival — perhaps barring Fremaux’s proud, misleading assurance that a whopping 15 female directors were included in the lineup, which is evidently French for eight. Familiar faces returning to the Croisette include Assayas, Cronenberg, Zvyaginstev, Bilge Ceylan, Hazanavicius, Egoyan, Loach, Leigh and the Dardennes, whose Two Days, One Night may prove to be Marion Cotillard’s successful shot at the Best Actress title, after snubs for Rust and Bone and The Immigrant. The two American titles in Competition […]
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Jon Jost Announces Fundraising Plans For 2K Transfers of Mark Rappaport’s Films
The fight between the great director Mark Rappaport (Local Color, From The Journals Of Jean Seberg) and Boston University film scholar/Cassavetes specialist Ray Carney has its origins in 2005, when the filmmaker entrusted copies of his movies to the professor. In 2012, Rappaport went public with the troubling contention that Carney refused to return his work, effectively making it impossible for the director to earn any revenue from exhibiting the films. As Rappaport wrote last year, “the chances of anyone or any organization either having the interest, inclination, and, even more importantly, the cash to go through the very expensive […]
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For Holy Week, Philippines Censor Board Makes Sure Buses Show “Wholesome” Movies
In the Philippines, Holy Week (the period between the last day of Lent and Easter Sunday) is a big deal, as you’d expect from the third largest Catholic country in the world. Part of Holy Week involves a mass exodus from capital Manila to smaller villages as residents go to be with their families, creating major logistical headaches on the traffic front. As part of gearing-up efforts, inspections of the bus stations began yesterday. 594 buses were granted special permits to drive outside of their normal routes, part of a larger array of regulatory measures. Separately, the country’s censor board […]
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History on Autopilot: Errol Morris’ The Unknown Known
Throughout season one of The Newsroom, viewers could play an idle game before each episode: which recent news item would be put through the Aaron Sorkin wringer, morphing from painful recent incident to an amusing babble of rapid-fire speech set in comfortably familiar rhythms? Sorkin’s been around so long his trademark back-and-forth/walk-and-talk exchanges smack of self-parody even when well-executed. His familiarity/inflexibility suggests a belief that any historical event or dramatic situation can be processed through the writer’s usual dialogue tricks and emerge with a sufficiently revelatory perspective. The same erroneous assumption underlies Errol Morris’ The Unknown Known, which has expanded […]
