Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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The Blue Velvet Project, #23
Second #1081, 18:01 “There are opportunities in life for gaining knowledge and experience,” Jeffrey has just said to Sandy as they sit in Arlene’s. In 1844, two years after his eldest son died of scarlet fever, Ralph Waldo Emerson began his most radical essay, “Experience,” with these sentences: “Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward […]
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WHEN IN ZURICH, PRINT THE LEGEND: ON “ROMAN POLANSKI: A FILM MEMOIR”
Succumbing to the most numbing of documentary aesthetics, Laurent Bouzereau’s Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir had its “secret” world premiere at the Zurich Film Festival Tuesday night. Aftering being hyped as a groundbreaking work of filmic autobiography, what unspooled in this most expensive of European cities consisted mainly of footage shot by longtime Polanski friend and former producer Andrew Braunsberg, who convinced Polanski to spend 20 hours talking with him in Polanski’s Gstaad estate during his house arrest following his apprehension at Zurich’s ambitious young festival a few years ago. The film’s cumulative effect is rather enervating given its fascinating subject, […]
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Take Shelter — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Before world-premiering in the dramatic competition at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, Take Shelter was picked up by Sony Classics. It went on to win the Grand Prize at Critics Week, as well as the FIPRESCI Prize, in Cannes. It opens theatrically in New York City and Los Angeles on Friday, September 30, 2011. Visit the official website to learn more.) [DISCLAIMER: I am very good friends with several of the key collaborators involved with the Take Shelter production. Ordinarily, I would absolve myself from writing a review based on far more tenuous connections, but in this particular case, I […]
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MORE IS MORE: THE NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL (PART ONE)
The New York Film Festival is “the most famous and prestigious in the country,” according to the website of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. It may well be–though I think San Francisco and Telluride might balk at the statement. And the term the country only technically leaves out Toronto. Superlatives aside, this 49th edition, quite a good one overall, is nothing if not admirably ambitious. No longer can the NYFF be accused of replicating Cannes, or of including a disproportionate number of gallic films. What is called the Main Slate, the core of the festival, is, however, top-heavy with […]
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Week Two at the Edit Center
It is the first day of my second week at The Edit Center and we are no longer paired off with partners. Left alone with my computer, I cannot remember how to do anything. Alan Oxman (whose editing credits include Control Room, Happiness and Welcome to the Dollhouse) has joined us, as our teacher. We are to start working on a feature film currently going into post-production. The film is called Happy Sad, written by Ken Urban and directed by Rodney Evans. I am delighted to learn that my friend Maria Dizzia is acting in it. We have all read […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #22
Second #1034, 17:14 The beauty of hair in the mid-Eighties, curling ironed and a little bit feathered. Sandy’s friends are trapped somewhere between 1956 and 1986, in their long skirts and sweaters. “Don’t you guys dare say anything to Mike, okay?” Sandy warns them, as Jeffrey waits for her in his classic red Oldsmobile convertible. “It’s not what you think, okay? Promise?” For all its references to the past—especially in this scene—Blue Velvet resists the lure of nostalgia. In the best and most obscurely written book ever on postmodernism, Fredric Jameson argued that realism itself was the casualty of late […]
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RADIOHEAD: “THE NATIONAL ANTHEM”
From last night’s remarkable appearance on The Colbert Show.
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Far From Afghanistan: U.S. Filmmakers Agitate on 10th Anniversary of the War
“Though I don’t have any children,” says John Gianvito, “I imagined a child someday saying to me, ‘You regard yourself as a political filmmaker, did you do anything during the longest war in U.S. history?’” Gianvito, the Boston-based director of the acclaimed feature The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein, recalls this thought coming to him earlier this year as the 10th anniversary of the U.S. war in Afghanistan approached. On Thursday, October 6, in honor of that day of infamy, Gianvito and a team of filmmakers will unveil an ambitious omnibus project to raise awareness about the enduring conflict. […]
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EXPERT ADVICE
I watched a 14 second ad for this? Unintentionally hilarious screenwriting advice from a “motion picture expert and experienced executive producer.” How to Format a Three-Act Structure for Movie Scripts — powered by ehow
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TRAILER WATCH: HBO’S “LUCK”
Michael Mann, David Milch, Dustin Hoffman, Nick Nolte… count me in. (Hat tip: Hollywood Elsewhere.) Season 1 Tease
