Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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EXPLORING TERRY GILLIAM’S ARCHIVE
Terry Gilliam’s daughter Holly has created a blog, “Discovering Dad,” dedicated to the exploration of her father’s enormous and rich archive. Here’s her opening post: In October 2011 I took on the mamouth task of organising my father’s archive – all his work from pre-Python days, as a cartoonist, photojournalist & assistnat editor for Help! magazine, through all his original artwork and cut-outs for Python animation, posters, logos and generally everything Python, to his storyboards, designs and sketches for his feature films and other non-film related projects (including his opera of “Faust” and that infamous Nike commercial). Why!? Because I […]
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A GLANCE AT NEWFEST 2012
NewFest, New York’s LGBT film festival, returns this year with bicoastal fortification, its programming taken over by the folks at L.A.’s Outfest, whose motive for the merge is to foster a national queer arts entity. But is the alliance holy? With Outfest having just wrapped its 30th anniversary, an 11-day event that boasted nearly 150 titles (including Ira Sachs’s Keep the Lights On, Jonathan Lisecki’s Gayby, and David France’s riveting ACT UP doc, How to Survive a Plague), NewFest has the not-so-faint whiff of an afterthought, its 18-feature lineup looking more like the subpar cache of a scavenger than a […]
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The Week in Cameras: Canon Goes Mirrorless, BDCC Accessories And A New Sony Camera
The Canon EOS M Canon this week announced the Canon EOS M, a small camera that takes an APS-C sensor and stuffs it into a smaller body by doing away with the DSLR mirrorbox and using a new lens mount. The EOS M follows a trail blazed by Canon’s competitors — namely Panasonic and Sony. Sony has had a hit with their NEX- series cameras, and obviously Canon has been watching. What does it mean for video? Well for one thing, it does away with the mirrorbox, which for video shooters is a mostly useless piece of equipment. This shrinks […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #144
Second #6768, 112:48 Fragments: 1. Frank’s back to the camera. 2. Dorothy’s apartment stretched out in horizontal like a widescreen nightmare. 3. The vintage fridge, solid. 4. The black circle mirror above the bathroom pedestal sink. (If Roberto Bolaño had done the set design for Blue Velvet, the mirror would have been inscrutably evil.) 5. The silencer, attached. 6. The sconce on the wall above the couch, looking at first glance, in its isolated away, like the screaming mouth on Jeffrey’s wall. 7. The sadness of Dorothy’s husband’s dead paunch. 8. Frank’s death in under two minutes, uncertain at this […]
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TRAILER WATCH: “MIDDLE OF NOWHERE”
Ava DuVernay won the Best Director prize at Sundance for her second feature, the powerful, superbly acted Middle of Nowhere. The first trailer has just dropped; watch it below, and look for DuVernay’s interview with Spike Lee in our current print edition.
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CORY MCABEE LAUNCHES NEW “CAPTAIN AHAB’S MOTORCYCLE CLUB” PROJECT
Cory McAbee, the ingenious, idiosyncratic talent behind The American Astronaut and Stingray Sam, is on the festival circuit at the moment with his most recent film, the 50-odd-minute Crazy and Thief. (This sweet portrait of childhood, starring McAbee’s children, Willa Vy McAbee and John Huck McAbee, premiered at LAFF last month, moving on to BAMcinemaFest shortly afterwards.) Despite having just put one new work out in the world, McAbee has already launched his next creative project, the very intriguing Captain Ahab’s Motorcycle Club. Here’s how its website describes it: Captain Ahab’s Motorcycle Club was conceived by filmmaker/musician Cory McAbee. The club […]
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“25 NEW FACE” IAN CLARK DEBUTS TWO MOVIES ONLINE
A few days ago, Scott posted on the blog about Julia Pott, one of our new crop of “25 New Faces,” putting her wonderful, latest short, Belly, online. (On that subject, you should also check out a really excellent article on Pott and Belly over at Motionographer.) Also now showcasing work online is another of this year’s “New Faces,” Ian Clark. Until August 13, you can watch Clark’s gorgeous 25-minute film Searching for Yellow (which I described in his “25 New Faces” profile as “hauntingly lovely, simultaneously intimate and expansive”) and his naturalistic 64-minute portrait of small-town life, Country Story. […]
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Killer Joe — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Killer Joe world premiered at the 2011 Venice Film Festival. It is being distributed by LD Entertainment and opens theatrically on July 27, 2012. Be forewarned, gentle viewer: this one has an NC-17 rating! Visit the film’s official website to learn more.) As I get older with each passing year, I’ve begun to process the world—and, by extension, cinema—in a different light. While I’m not turning into an outright prude, I am becoming much less tolerant of art and entertainment that takes a condescending and contemptible attitude towards humanity. On an ethical, theoretical level, there’s no denying that the way […]
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Five Questions with Searching For Sugar Man Director Malik Bendjelloul
When Swedish director Malik Bendjelloul first came across the story of ’70s singer/songwriter/cult-hero Rodriguez, it must have seemed too good to be true, especially for a music-focused documentarian. Sixto Rodriguez, the Detroit-based troubadour who blended street-savvy folk, rock, and socially conscious soul on two under-the-radar early-‘70s albums, was completely unknown in America (and almost everywhere else) for decades. But in a twist worthy of an O. Henry story, Rodriguez (who has always worked solely under his surname), somehow ended up an iconic figure in South Africa, where his reputation assumed Bob Dylan-esque dimensions. The catch: most South Africans have long […]
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BYINGTON’S “SOMEBODY” AND CASSIDY & SHATZKY’S “FRANCINE” GET PICKED UP
Today two recent festival favorites, Bob Byington’s Somebody Up There Likes Me and Brian Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky’s Francine, found distribution. Somebody, which stars Parks and Recreation‘s Nick Offerman and former “25 New Face” Jess Weixler, premiered at SXSW earlier this year and has now been picked up by Tribeca Film, to be released in Spring 2013. The fifth feature from Byington (Harmony and Me, RSO [Registered Sex Offender]), it is about a trio of friends (Offerman, Weixler and regular Byington collaborator Keith Poulson) who waste their lives on meaningless relationships as time ebbs away. Geoff Gilmore, the former Sundance head […]
