The Master is Paul Thomas Anderson’s follow-up to There Will be Blood, my favorite film of that year. After this trailer I’m even more psyched.
Detropia, the latest documentary from Jesus Camp and 12th & Delaware directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, premiered at Sundance earlier this year and is being self-distributed by the filmmakers through their company, Loki Films. (To do this, they raised $70,000 on Kickstarter.) The film, a poignant portrait of the decline of Detroit, will be released on September 7, and you can check out the newly launched trailer below.
As I left the screening of the documentary The Queen of Versailles, my immediate thought was, “This is why we can’t have nice things.” Director Lauren Greenfield has created a complicated, fascinating, and humbling film, perfectly calibrated to the zeitgeist. Election-year rhetoric aside, we remain in the ever-widening wake of the Great Recession, and Greenfield’s riches-to-rags story releases waves of conflicting emotion: pity, schadenfreude, guilt, empathy, disgust. With fortuitous—and perhaps shrewd—timing, her film captures an America in flux. The Queen of Versailles tells the story of David and Jackie Siegel, a billionaire couple who were building the largest house in America, a […]
“I’m gonna let them find you on their own,” Jeffrey quietly says to himself, invoking Frank, who will appear again in a few minutes. Turning away from the camera, his ear might actually hear the song on the soundtrack, Ketty Lester’s version of “Love Letters,” released as a single in 1961: [jwplayer mediaid=”48654″] The song was written in 1945 by Victor Young and Edward Heyman, and appeared in the film Love Letters, which starred Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten. Adapted by none other than Ayn Rand (“People should be able to build what they want to build, when they want […]
Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace’s LCD Soundsystem movie Shut Up and Play the Hits has a one-day-only release today through Oscilloscope Pictures (in partnership with TUGG). The following interview was conducted just prior to the film’s premiere earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival. Over LCD Soundsystem’s ten-year career, the band grew from early blog darlings to lauded indie stalwarts. After telegraphing the group’s demise years in advance, band-leader James Murphy officially disbanded LCD last April with a star-studded, marathon-length performance at Madison Square Garden. Now, less than a year later, Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace present Shut Up […]
On the first Sunday of July, a group of filmmakers gathered at the Salem Willows Park in Massachusetts to participate in a Three-Minute Film Challenge. The brainchild of local d.p.s Rick Macomber and Paul Antico, the event was as much a gathering of enthusiasts as it was a competition. “I was watching a 48-hour film fest,” says Rick, “and I had an idea that maybe we could do something like this, with a group of people, and [a film length limit of] three minutes. I’d never tried anything like this, and it was my first narrative attempt.” “We’d talked about […]
This week, Sundance Institute announced its 2012 participants in the Creative Producing Initiatives. The week-long program begins with two concurrently-running Creative Producing Labs (July 30-Aug. 3)—the Feature Film Program and the Documentary Film Program and Fund—before capping off with the Creative Producing Summit (Aug. 3-5). Keri Putnam, Executive Director of Sundance Institute, said, “Sundance Institute is committed to supporting emerging independent film producers, and our Creative Producing Initiative is a rare opportunity for them to sharpen their creative instincts, evolve their problem-solving skills, and deepen their knowledge of the distribution landscape. In doing so, they are better equipped to successfully […]
On the heels of Alma Har’el’s wonderful video for Sigur Ros’ “Fjögur Píanó” (which may be the best thing Shia LaBeouf has ever done) comes another entry from an American independent filmmaker in the Icelandic band’s Mystery Film Experiment. After Sigur Ros’ keyboard player Kjartan Sveinsson did the music for Ramin Bahrani’s 2009 short Plastic Bag, the band chose the Man Push Cart director to make a video for ‘Ég Anda,” the fifth entry in the Mystery Film Experiment. Valtari, the group’s new album, is much more understated and less grand in scope than their previous records, and so the videos […]
As we put the finishing touches on our “25 New Faces” list — which comes out this week — I’ll note the latest project of one of last year’s selections, director Alrick Brown. Last fall he had his Sundance hit Kinyarwanda arrive in theaters, and now he’s directed an episode of a new ABC series, Final Witness, that airs tomorrow night, July 18 at 10PM EST on ABC. The Wall Street Journal covered this show this past weekend, describing the style as “Sundance-era poetic indie film”: Over seven Wednesdays each stand-alone true crime story dramatized and documented on “Final Witness,” […]
Todd Mahoney recently spent ten days shooting a documentary project using the Sony NEX-FS100. It was his first experience with the camera. He was documenting the pre-voyage progress of the Solar Odyssey Project, the voyage of a solar powered boat that will be traveling The Great Loop. You can read more about that in the first half of this series [“THE SOLAR ODYSSEY”: TAKING PART IN A DOCUMENTARY, PART ONE] In this interview, conducted after he had returned, Todd talks about his experiences shooting with the Sony NEX-FS100, the Sony NEX-7 and a GoPro Hero. So what happened? The boat […]