We featured Paul Thomas Anderson in conversation with Robert Downey Sr. last week on the blog, and now we’re pleased to share the first clip from Anderson’s upcoming The Master. The 1950s-set drama about a religion not dissimilar to Scientology will be released by the Weinstein Company on October 12 and is bound to be a major player come awards season. Just from this sneak peak alone, it looks like this might be a career-defining role for Joaquin Phoenix…
As expected, Alex Holdridge’s inspirational interview — about the creative boost he received from making a life change and swapping L.A. and “the system” for a very different life in Berlin — prompted some spirited discussion in the comments section. In case you read the article but not any of the dialogue that followed on from it, it’s definitely worth flagging up one of the comments — from Holdridge himself — that responded to director Zak Forsman’s list of things he loved about Los Angeles. Here’s what Holdridge had to say: I spent 8 years living there, making a film […]
On April 5, President Obama signed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, known as the JOBS Act. The Act establishes a number of registration exceptions from traditional securities laws to facilitate a wider adoption of micro-financing practices, including crowdfunding. This is the phenomenon by which a relatively large pool of small investors can use the Internet to make an equity investment in a company. Filmmaker has covered this important development. Scott Macaulay presented a helpful introductory overview to the Act and discussed some of its likely consequences for indie makes. Matthew Savare, an attorney, and Richard Jaycobs provided a more […]
Second #5452, 90:52 In Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Roland Barthes wrote about the studium (the cultural and political meanings of a photograph) and the punctum (the piercing of the photograph into the realm of personal meaning): Now, confronting millions of photographs . . . I sense no blind field: everything which happens within the frame dies absolutely once this frame is passed beyond. When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means they do not emerge, do not leave: they are anesthetized and fastened […]
The French feminist collective known as La Barbe (French for “The Beard”) printed an open letter in France’s daily newspaper Le Monde earlier this week addressing the complete absence of films directed by women in the Competition section at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. La Barbe is made up of actress Fanny Cottençon, writer/director Virginie Despentes and director Coline Serreau, who have also set up an online petition which has been signed by numerous luminaries, including feminist icon Gloria Steinem and filmmakers such as Ry Russo-Young, Gillian Armstrong and Ava DuVernay. The British newspaper The Guardian ran a translation of the […]
Here’s friends and fellow directors Paul Thomas Anderson and Robert Downey Sr. talking about Babo 73, one of the five early Downey features included on Criterion’s new box set from their no-frills Eclipse series, Up All Night with Robert Downey Sr., which comes out next week on DVD.
When discussing the lineup at the upcoming BAMcinemaFEST a while back, I noted that a new cut of Walk Away Renee, Jonathan Caouette’s long-awaited follow-up to Tarnation, would be playing as part of the festival on June 27. While that’s exciting news on its own, now comes word of a very savvy move by IFC to capitalize on the interest in the film by giving the film a simultaneous online premiere on SundanceNOW’s Doc Club, the SVOD (Subscriber Video-on-Demand) series curated by documentary maven Thom Powers. “Walk Away Renee makes a perfect headliner for the June [Doc Club] theme of […]
Second #5405, 90:05 Detective Gordon (aka The Yellow Man, or The Man in Yellow, played by Fred Pickler) sits at his desk at police headquarters, where Jeffrey has gone to see Detective Williams. He spots Gordon in his office and, startled that this is the same man he’d seen earlier with Frank, takes a moment at a drinking fountain across from Gordon’s office to get a better look, which constitutes this shot. Gordon is a terrifying presence for reasons that are impossible to sort out. The fact is he shouldn’t be terrifying, sitting there in his yellow (yellow!) jacket, working […]
Wes Anderson, the cover star of the latest issue of Filmmaker, kicked off the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday with his new film, Moonrise Kingdom, which opens Stateside on next Friday. (The estimable David Hudson, now operating at Fandor, collects the critical consensus on the movie here.) If you, like me, are not on the Croisette this year, you can still get your Anderson fix via the Cannes website, which takes a special look at Anderson’s body of work through the prism of his use of pop music, collecting together clips from a string of movies plus an interview with […]
The following article about Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky’s documentary Indie Game was published during the Sundance Film Festival. The film opens today in Los Angeles, New York (at the IFC Center), San Francisco and Phoenix. For a complete list of venues and upcoming screenings, check out the website. Independent film, depending on how you define it, has had many births. But for the purposes of this blog post, let’s consider the one in the 1980s, just before the launch of this magazine. She’s Gotta Have It, Parting Glances, Poison, True Love — these were narrative features made by lone […]