(Beasts of the Southern Wild world premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Narrative Grand Jury Prize, as well as Best Cinematography for Ben Richardson. It also won the Camera d’Or at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. It is being distributed by Fox Searchlight and opened theatrically on June 27, 2012. Visit the film’s official website—as well as the virtual home base of the Court 13 collective—to learn more.) I want to make this immediately, abundantly clear. Perhaps more than any other review I’ve ever written, this one is coming from the pained perspective of a […]
Second #6157, 102:37 “Mom . . . is Dad home?” Sandy asks. If Blue Velvet were a comedy (and it approaches one at moments like this) there might be canned laughter following this line. After all, Sandy has just entered the house with the local nightclub singer, naked, bruised, and clinging to Sandy’s new boyfriend Jeffrey. Jeffrey in the realm of women: Dorothy (the bad one), Sandy (the good one), and Mrs. Williams (the dutiful wife and mother). What we’re looking at here is pure, raw, sex, unrestrained by custom, duty, or conventional notions of morality. Sandy knows it; it […]
Walk Away Renee, Jonathan Caouette’s follow-up/sequel to Tarnation, is having its big day today, with both the “real-world” premiere of the new cut of the film playing at BAMcinemaFest tonight, and also its simultaneous online premiere through SundanceNOW’s Doc Club. Howard Feinstein had an excellent, long chat with Caouette which just went live on the Filmmaker site, and we’re also very pleased to have an exclusive clip from Walk Away Renee which captures one of the more experimental moments from Caouette’s portrait of the relationship between himself and his mentally ill mother, Renee LeBlanc.
TV shows like Aaron Sorkin’s new The Newsroom cost tens of millions of dollars to develop and make. They assemble top-flight talent, from people like its creator to stars like Jeff Daniels to the veteran craftspeople who work below-the-line on each episode. Their marketers are expert, and they have the budgets to match the ambitions of their campaigns. So, it must be somewhat enraging to them that the military precision of the show’s roll-out can be disrupted by a young reporter’s take on a single set of less-than-artful interview responses by Sorkin. I’m referring, of course, to Sorkin’s now-famous “Look […]
I’ve been struggling to find a metaphor for the very special, not to mention most unusual, connection between director Jonathan Caouette and Renee Leblanc, his mentally ill and frequently institutionalized mother and the subject of his most recent film, Walk Away Renee. The closest I could come is really a parallel, and it lies within Caouette’s body of work. In his 2010 surreal short All Flowers in Time, a beautiful young woman, played by Chloe Sevigny, has an indefinable relationship with an adolescent boy. In a bizarre world where young people’s eyes can turn glowing red, the two seem to […]
Marielle Heller, a New York-based screenwriter, actor and playwright, is attending the June Sundance Directors Lab with her project, The Diary of a Teenage Girl. “In the haze of 1970’s San Francisco, a teenage artist with a brutally honest perspective tries to navigate her way through an affair with her mother’s boyfriend,” is its description, and the film is being adapted from the graphic novel by Phoebe Gloeckner. Here is Heller’s second post from the Sundance Resort in Utah. Read the first here. The way the Sundance Lab is set up, you don’t always know how or when you’re going […]
The Sundance June Directors Lab is underway, and blogging here at Filmmaker from the Sundance Resort in Utah will be two of the Lab’s filmmakers. Here is Carson Mell, attending with his dark comedy, Ajax, about “a band of alcoholic astronauts and a young woman adrift in outer space [who] become at odds with one another after discovering the purpose of their mysterious mission.” Read part one of his series here. The Sundance Directors Lab is over now, and I’m starting the Screenwriters Lab again in a couple of days. Out of the last 17 days, we’ve only had two […]
For decades, Bob Fass has been a unique voice on the airwaves of New York City’s freeform radio station WBAI with his show “Radio Unnameable.” From hosting a young Bob Dylan to organizing spontaneous youth gatherings with the Yippies, Fass has come to define an era of radio that had a profound influence on our culture. In their new documentary film Radio Unnameable, Paul Lovelace and Jessica Wolfson tell Fass’ story by utilizing a treasure trove of archival material, interviews and audio (which is constantly updated and can be sampled here). After premiering at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, […]
William Friedkin’s first major movie in a long time, Killer Joe — a Texas noir based on the Tracy Letts play of the same name — is being released in just over a month, and as a result the legendary director has been a lot more visible. In addition to popping up at a string of festivals with the film, Friedkin is now an active presence on Twitter. A week or two ago, Friedkin posted the above (completely mind-blowing) Instagram picture of himself as Ali G on his Twitter feed, and then at the currently running Edinburgh International Film Festival […]
We’re very happy to exclusively premiere the trailer to Paul Lovelace and Jessica Wolfson’s buzz doc Radio Unnameable, a portrait of the legendary late-night radio DJ Bob Fass. The film, which premiered at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival earlier this year, won a Special Jury Prize at the Sarasota Film Festival and has its first NYC screening at BAMcinemaFest tonight. You can check out Filmmaker‘s interview with Lovelace and Wolfson here. Radio Unnameable Documentary Trailer from Jessica Wolfson on Vimeo.