Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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IFP ANNOUNCES 150 TITLES FOR PROJECT FORUM 2011
The IFP announced today the slate for this year’s Project Forum, which will take place during the 33rd edition of Independent Film Week on Sept. 18-22 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Elinor Bunin Monroe Film Center. The centerpiece of Independent Film Week, Project Forum is designed specifically as a place for industry to meet with new talent, as well as discover fresh projects from emerging and veteran filmmakers. Read the complete press release and full list of titles in this year’s Project Forum. All 150 projects showcased in the Project Forum this year are narrative and documentary features […]
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HAMMER TO NAIL REVIEW — “BAD POSTURE”
(Malcolm Murray’s Bad Posture, which premiered in Rotterdam, opens tomorrow in New York at Brooklyn’s reRun Gastro Pub theater.) You stay on this beat for long enough and things start to bleed together. One low-budget, poorly lit, competently acted, overhyped, overpriced festival hit after another seem to flood your brain with little sense of lived experience or aesthetic invention. No wonder the underpaid and overstimulated fall so hard for movies that have all of the symptoms of this toxic stew, as long as one seemingly clever gimmick is thrown in. (Oh look, a blonde who also writes! And jeeze Louise, […]
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PAUL RUDD ON MARKETING “OUR IDIOT BROTHER”
Funny or Die has made a very funny video with Paul Rudd pitching Harvey Weinstein marketing ideas for Jesse Peretz’s upcoming Our Idiot Brother. Check it out below. Paul Rudd Pitches Harvey Weinstein from Paul Rudd
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FLAMING LIPS AND THE WOMB GALLERY
On a trip last weekend to Oklahoma, the IFP’s Amy Dotson attended the opening of the Womb Gallery, spearheaded by the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne. Her short report follows. When you think Oklahoma City, usually Bigfoot, giant balloon-filled walk-in vagina sculptures and samurai serving alcoholic snow-cones are not what come directly to mind. But thanks to Flaming Lips front-man Wayne Coyne and his collaborators, all that is about to change. With its psychedelic exterior from Brooklyn artist Maya Hayuk and featuring campy, graffiti inspired art by Bigfoot One, The Womb Gallery launched this weekend. Not even the 114 degree night […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #2
Second #94: Lynch had been thinking about Blue Velvet since at least as early as 1973, and while his previous two films (Dune and Elephant Man) had been based on well-known stories, Blue Velvet was a return to the trembling, inner-psychic terrain of Eraserhead. In an earlier version of the script, Jeffrey’s mom and his Aunt Barbara pick him up from the airport after he’s forced to leave college because of the financial burden of his stricken father’s medical bills. As they drive into town, there is this exchange: AUNT BARBARA: They tore down the A & P, Jeffrey. Did […]
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SONY DISTRIBUTION CENTER DESTROYED DURING LONDON RIOTS
As the riots in London continue, with statistics including 563 people arrested, one man shot, emergency services attacked and multiple police officers injured in the last three days, last night the Pias/Sony distribution center in Enfield, London was set on fire by looters (see video below). Hundreds of thousands of CDs and DVDs were destroyed. Reports say independent filmmakers and music producers will be hit the hardest as the building was Sony’s only depot for CDs and DVDs in Britain.
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The Blue Velvet Project, #1
And so we begin our year-long journey through Blue Velvet, stopping every 47 seconds. Although released in the U.S. in September 1986, the film lingered at the dark edges of the imagination until the spring of the following year, when it was released on home video by Karl-Lorimar. The rapid ascendency of the VCR and the proliferation of rental stores (in 1980 there were only approximately 2,500 rental stores in the U.S.; by 1987 this had increased to over 27,000) meant that Blue Velvet found its way into the very same sort of leafy small towns as Lumberton. The titles […]
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Drive-In Memories
Has there ever been a more American idea than watching movies while sitting in your car? With the temperature hovering over one hundred and the humidity up there to match it, my thoughts go back to my childhood. I grew up in Washington D.C., with this kind of heat every summer. It always meant one thing to me: the drive-in movies. My babysitter used to put me and my two sisters in the back of her pick-up truck and head off to the drive-in. Parked and waiting for the sun to set, tiny fireflies would blink against the darkness. The […]
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Now it’s Dark… The Blue Velvet Project
Last year, after becoming a fan of Nicholas Rombes’s “10/40/70” series at The Rumpus, I did a short interview with him for the blog. I asked about his approach to film criticism, which involves extrapolating larger meanings from a film’s isolated moments. (His “10/40/70” series critiqued films by looking at the scenes occurring at those precise minute marks). His reply: When I first started teaching film in the early 1990s, we’d screen them on via VHS tapes playing on VCRs hooked up to TV sets. Pausing a film for an extended period of time to look at the composition of […]
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DAVID GORDON GREEN ON “THE SITTER”
In our Winter issue Michael Tully sat down with David Gordon Green to discuss the arc of his career, which has gone from small-scale, Malick-inflected indies to big, ’80s-riffing studio comedies. His latest is The Sitter, starring Jonah Hill, and while it may seem like a raunchy take on Chris Columbus’s Adventures in Babysitting, Green said he had a different model in mind. Here’s an except from the interview: Filmmaker: You’ve just finished shooting. Are you watching movies? Do you watch movies that reflect the mood you’re in and the movie you’re making? Or is it the opposite? Do you […]
