I remember when I first typed documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras as one cool customer. I was interviewing her on the phone about her 2010 documentary, The Oath — for my money the best of the year. The film is about two Yemeni brothers-in-law, one a low-level driver for Osama bin Laden and the other a soldier who became an al-Qaida member and one of bin Laden’s personal bodyguards. But only one was sent to Guantanamo Bay — the driver, not the bodyguard who, at the film’s start, is seen driving a cab through Yemen and discussing jihad with the young […]
Playing at New York’s IFC Center tonight — and on newsstands now in the current issue of The Believer — is Laurel Nakadate’s The Wolf Knife, one of Filmmaker‘s Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You Gotham Award nominees for 2010. Tonight’s screening is at 9pm, and will feature an on-stage Q&A between Nakadate and novelist Rick Moody (The Ice Storm). Additionally, all ticket-buyers will receive the new issue of The Believer containing the DVD. The video and photography artist’s second feature, The Wolf Knife is a mysterious parable of female adolescence, following two teenage girls who ditch […]
Alesia Weston, who many filmmakers know from her work as Associate Director of the Sundance Institute’s Feature Film Program, has been named the new Executive Director of the Jerusalem Film Center. She will begin her new job mid-June and will oversee all of the center’s artistic and educational programs, including the upcoming Jerusalem International Film Festival, the organization wrote in a press release. From the press release: “I am thrilled to be associated with this great team, especially Lia van Leer, and I am looking forward to expanding the vision she set in motion as founding director. The vibrant Israeli […]
Second #4700, 78:20 “Donny! Donny! Donny, no! No! Donny mommy loves you!” This is moments after Frank has said, in reference to Dorothy, “Let Tits see her kid.” The tenderness of her hand upon the door molding. A glimpse of a woman in pink in the room with Donny. “What the real world is: that is a very difficult problem” (Haruki Murakami, IQ84). The two lamps in the corner of the room. Who puts two lamps in the same space? Dorothy’s hand, again, the elegant length of her fingers, and the hands of the woman sitting beneath the light switches. […]
The third in Mike Plante’s Home Movie Show is ten minutes of calm as three animators just draw. With Brent Green (Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then), Julia Pott (Belly), Kataneh Vahdani (Avocados).
It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, but now that the new issue is shipped and off to the printer, here’s what I’m catching up on. What’s one measure of good dialogue? According to the Physics arIXv Blog at MIT, it’s the memorability of its quotes. A Cornell University study found that there’s a reason lines like “You had me at hello,” “You can’t handle the truth” and “Hasta la vista, baby” lodge themselves in our memories. “The cloud” — that system of networked and very terrestrial computers that store and stream are data — may have […]
Second #4653, 77:33 The sidebar exchange between Frank and Ben, and an exchange of money, too, and a mysterious slip of paper. Ben drops a pill into Frank’s mouth. Frank, in return, says something cryptic about Detective Gordon (Fred Pickler). Another frame-within-a-frame, as the doorframe moldings serve as movie screen curtains. In his essay “Theater and Cinema, Part II,” André Bazin wrote that a screen is not a frame like that of a picture but a mask which allows only part of the action to be seen. When a character moves off screen, we accept the fact that he is […]
(Your Brother. Remember? opens for a theatrical run in NYC at the reRun Gastropub on Friday, April 6, 2012. Visit the film’s Facebook page or Oberzan’s official website to learn more.) For those of us who, as adults, continue to take the preposterous cliff-jump that is making movies with nary a paycheck in sight, there are almost certainly VHS/Hi-8/mini-DV tapes hidden somewhere that contain our earliest “work.” Most of this “work” can be categorized as such: backyard/basement/garage variations on—or outright recreations of—whatever big-budget spectacles we had most recently encountered. As a combination performance artist/filmmaker in his mid-30s with just two […]
Second #4606, 76:46 Frank has just hurt Jeffrey, and now it’s Ben’s turn. A casual sort of hurtfulness. The frame comes from second number 6 in a shot that lasts just over 53 seconds. In the background, staring back at the camera (at us) is the same Party Girl from earlier. The frame, cut vertically by the curtain and Dorothy’s right arm, is pulled apart by a clash of gazes and lines of vision: Dorothy’s and Frank’s leading our eyes toward Ben, and Ben’s and Hunter’s leading our eyes towards off-screen Jeffrey. In Barry Gifford’s 1990 novel Wild at Heart […]
Just when you’d think speculation about NAB releases would be starting to appear, Sony goes and ruins the surprise by pre-announcing a camera two weeks before the show! The NEX-FS700 is the big brother of the NEX-FS100, and it appears that Sony intends to continue selling the FS100, with the FS700 “fitting in” between the $5k FS100 and the $14k PMW-F3. The FS700 resembles the body of the FS100, but the barrel that the lens is attached to is much larger, and adds a hump on the side to accommodate ND filters. It continues to support Sony’s E-mount. The FS700 […]