Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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THE NORTHSIDE FESTIVAL SCREENS FILMMAKER MAG FAVORITES
A number of our favorite independent films of the year are screening this week at the Northside Festival, a Brooklyn-based film and music event that gathers a number of film organizations, includuing Filmmaker, to guest curate some of its programming. Filmmaker‘s night is Wednesday, when we screen in its New York premiere Andrew Neel’s wickedly funny King Kelly (pictured) and Jeremiah Zagar & Nathan Caswell’s haunting short, Remains, but there are a number of other favorites dotted throughout the schedule. For example, tonight there’s one of the best documentaries of the year, Ashley Sabin and David Redmon’s Girl Model (presented […]
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CRISIS? WHAT CRISIS? VIEWS FROM MARCH 2012’s THESSALONIKI DOC FEST
It’s the Greek moment. Again. Still. Thousands of years of civilization, and we’re still anxiously awaiting an epistle from Hellas! In the first hours after Sunday’s fraught second Parliamentary election of the year, few analysts are confident there won’t be a third election or that even the successful formation of a coalition government would last, or be able to withstand the growing force of the Euro-wide economic crisis. The Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, also known as “Images of the 21st Century,” in its fourteenth year, took place in mid-March 2012, before the inconclusive May 6 elections had even been set. Here […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #125
Second #5875, 97:55 André Bazin once wrote, in “The Life and Death of Superimposition” (1946), that the fantastic in the cinema is possible only because of the irresistible realism of the photographic image. It is the image that can bring us face to face with the unreal, that can introduce the unreal into the world of the visible. By this point in Blue Velvet, with only around 20 minutes left in the film, we might feel justified in thinking that we have figured out the geographic parameters of its narrative world. The hardware store. The hospital room. Jeffrey’s car. Jeffrey’s […]
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BLOOD AND TAKE-OUT: “MISSION CHINESE”
Adele Romanski, producer (The Myth of the American Sleepover) and director (Leave Me Like You Found Me), passed along this link to her latest short production: Mission Chinese, a stylish and bloody revenge fantasy directed by Cole Schreiber and David Parker. The short is a branded-content piece for the New York/San Francisco men’s store, Freeman’s Sporting Club, and is a collaboration between Freeman’s, Mission Chinese (the New York/San Francisco-based restaurant) and Sunday Paper, Schreiber and Parker’s start-up production company, whose work you’ve seen on this site before. It was shot by James Laxton (The Myth of the American Sleepover, Medicine […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #124
Second #5828, 97:08 At the basement party, Sandy has just assured her friends that it’s okay that she’s there with Jeffrey, not Mike. “It’s all taken care of,” she’ll tell Jeffrey in a few seconds, as “Mysteries of Love” is about to begin. They were asking a lot of money for the [“Song to the Siren” by This Mortal Coil] track, and we didn’t have any money. At one point Fred Caruso said, ‘David, you’re always writing little things. They could be called lyrics. Why don’t you write something and send it to Angelo and he will write you a […]
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NICOLAS WINDING REFN ON ANDY MILLIGAN
Back in 2009, I interviewed Nicolas Winding Refn about his movie Bronson, and in the course of our conversation he mentioned a director whose name meant very little to me: The filmmakers I would have loved to meet are more obscure, like Andy Milligan. He’s a very obscure filmmaker who made films for Times Square in the 60s and 70s. After our conversation, I went to seek out more information about Milligan and discovered that, little-known as he was, there was a book on him by the biographer Jimmy McDonough called The Ghastly One. (This book was, in fact, what […]
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Nacho Vigalondo on Extraterrestrial
If a massive UFO descended upon the city you lived in, what would you do? Would you cower in fear, waiting for rescue? Or would you rally a ragtag band of resistance fighters to confront this encounter of the third kind? Or maybe you would do nothing, waiting for the aliens to make the first move and inviting a cosmic game of chess with the fate of Earth at stake. Nacho Vigalondo offers his own answer to this question in his latest film, Extraterrestrial, a romantic comedy/science fiction synthesis about a love triangle struggling to resolve itself in the wake […]
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Five Questions with Breakfast With Curtis Director Laura Colella
25 New Faces alum Laura Colella’s Breakfast with Curtis unfolds at its own pace, not unlike the leisurely chats it spends so much time documenting. Colella, who wrote, directed, and acted in the film, used her own home as a shooting location and cast her real-life neighbors and housemates in prominent roles. Centered around a bookseller named Syd (Theo Green) who enlists the help of his young neighbor (Jonah Parker, in the title role) to record a series of video diaries for his business, the story hinges on the subtle interplay between family and friends as they cautiously come closer […]
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Up All Night With Robert Downey Sr.
Robert Downey Sr.’s films are ribald, socially-conscious, highly experimental works that make Richard Lester’s oeuvre seem polite and Godard’s plot-heavy. Though he achieved cult success with 1969’s Putney Swope, some of Downey’s other, more radical works from the period are arguably more interesting, and their revival by way of an Eclipse box set is exceptional news. Up All Night With Robert Downey Sr. brings together five early films which show the director at his unhinged best, and if nothing else should prove a hedge against Downey becoming a mere footnote to his more famous son’s career. A part of New […]
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PERSONAL DEMOCRACY
The Internet is transforming social life and the political landscape. The growing pallet of digital media content-production technologies and social networking distribution sites, like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, is redefining the meaning of “democracy” and an individual’s ability to participate in the political process. The annual Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) is a geek and political-wonk fest, a 21st century Woodstock – without the drugs, rain and rock ‘n’ roll – and this year’s gathering was no exception. This is a momentous election year, with a day of reckoning coming in November. The nation is living through what Nobel Prize-winning economist […]
