A month or so, we featured T-Rex — the debut doc directed by 2012 “25 New Faces” alums Drea Cooper and Zackary Canepari — on our Kickstarter page. The currently shooting film is all about Claressa “T-Rex” Shields, a 17-year-old African-American boxer from Flint, Michigan. “It’s the first time in 2,000 years that women boxers will compete at the games,” Cooper said when Vadim Rizov interviewed him for the pair’s “25 New Faces” profile. “It’s pretty much the only thing we talk about these days.” And now the film got a whole lot more interesting. Earlier today, the young fighter won a […]
In Everardo González’s Drought, the residents of a barely-there area in northern Mexico called Cuates de Australia (a strange names whose origins even they aren’t sure of) search for water and travel about during the annual drought. The toll it takes on the land, people, and animals is sometimes deadly. A sort of documentary answer to Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring, the film won the nonfiction prize at this year’s L.A. Film Festival and will play at the IFC Center in New York and Laemmle’s NoHo 7 starting this Friday as part of DocuWeeks. Filmmaker spoke to González about the project’s origins, participants, and […]
Big news: New York independent film producing veteran Ted Hope has been hired as the San Francisco Film Society’s new Executive Director. Co-founder, with James Schamus, of the seminal Gotham indie production company Good Machine, producer of dozens of films, including Dark Horse, Adventureland, In the Bedroom, The Savages and American Splendor, and, in recent years, a prolific blogger and industry critic, Hope will take the reins of a 55-year-old organization that not only mounts a large and respected annual festival but also engages in outreach, education and funding programs for filmmakers. From the press release: “Ted Hope is the […]
On of our favorite independent films of 2011, Sophia Takal’s debut feature, Green, has been acquired for distribution by Factory 25. Factory 25 will debut the film theatrically next month, with runs planned at reRun Theater in Brooklyn, Chicago’s Facets and other venues, will release the film digitally and on VOD platforms in November and will issue a DVD next Spring. Writer/director/actor Takal was selected as one of Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces of 2011, and Green scored a Filmmaker-sponsored “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You” Gotham nomination. Here’s the lede of my “25 New Face” profile of […]
(2 Days in New York world premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and was picked up for distribution by Magnolia Pictures. It is available through various VOD outlets—Amazon, iTunes, etc.—on July 6, 2012, and opens theatrically on August 10, 2012. Visit the film’s official website to learn more.) I’ve been known to knock the French, toodling around on bicycles with their phallic baguettes, vin rouge, and perennial boredom with all things Americain. But is there any way to withstand the Julie Delpy charm offensive? She had me at bonjour in this witty comedy, a sequel to her earlier film 2 Days in Paris. Delpy (who wrote and directed the film) […]
It’s rare that one week brings not one but two ambitiously cinematic, outside-the-box music videos. The first is “Cut the World,” from Antony and the Johnsons and directed by Nabil. Starring Willem Dafoe, Carice Van Houten and Marina Abramovic, it starts out like a bittersweet tale of office longing… and then turns into something else. From Tom Waits and ’80s music video superstar director Matt Mahurin is “Hell Broke Luce,” which Waits describes as picturing “an enlightened drill sergeant yelling the hard truths of war to a brand new batch of recruits. The video grew from the gnawing image of […]
Oscilloscope Pictures has added to its consistently strong catalog of films by snapping up Only the Young, the debut feature from documentarians Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims. The film made its debut at True/False earlier this year and won Silverdocs shortly afterwards, while its directors made it onto our “25 New Faces” list for 2012. In his profile of Tippet and Mims, Scott wrote the following aboutOnly the Young: One day, [Tippet and Mims] met high school seniors Kevin Conway and Garrison Saenz at a skate park in Canyon Country, an economically ravaged town located within Santa Clarita, Calif. Skaters, Christians […]
Tim League’s Drafthouse Films yesterday acquired the Sundance 2012 title Wrong, the latest film from French director Quentin Dupieux (aka dance music star Mr Oizo), the man responsible for last year‘s Rubber and the forthcoming Wrong Cops, starring Marilyn Manson. So now’s as good a time as any to post what is one of the most insane trailers I’ve seen in a long time. Even if the film doesn’t turn out to be fantastic, it certainly seems like it will be, at the very least, distinctively different. Let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.
Philosophical musings on the nature of time, an unlikely friendship between a sexy Cali chick and an elderly woman, a bizarrely fast-forwarded comical look at a very sad life, and an indictment of systemic oppression in China: these are the subjects of the four films from Locarno’s main competition (“Concorso internazionale”) that I’ve caught over the past few days. First on the docket is Peter Mettler’s intriguing but disappointing—relative to his other work, at least—The End of Time, an epic non-narrative film about the multitude of perspectives that render an objective definition of linear time meaningless. At times expressive and […]
A rough road from the existential world to the sickie ward to the movie screen, dodging hungry demons and embracing cinematic gems, while maintaining a clear eye on the tall grass on the horizon. For several years, my life revolved around attending film festivals and screening movies and writing reviews. Then the bomb dropped. The C-bomb! Now I’m fighting cancer and enduring chemotherapy and struggling as a whacked-out Chemo Head. Unlike Speed Heads and Flop Heads and Crack Heads, whose chem-soaked brains are tightly wrapped around a single heat-seeking obsession and whose emotions are riveted to one Pavlov […]