Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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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 […]
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AND THE BEAT GOES ON
“This year’s program captures how eclectic and varied in genre and style Latin American cinema has become,” says the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Marcela Goglio, who, along with colleague Richard Pena, programs the films that play at the Walter Reade Theater during the 12th edition of Latin Beat (August 10-24). “In spite of ongoing financial struggle, good commercial films coexist with low-budget and more experimental ones.” Even though it is the oldest of all, Latin Beat has not received its just due in a community that hosts so many mediocre Latin American and Latino film festivals and exhibitions. (Check […]
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Gun Hill Road — A Hammer to Nail
(Gun Hill Road world premiered in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, which is when the original version of this review was first published at Hammer To Nail. It was picked up for distribution by Motion Film Group and opens theatrically in New York City on Friday, August 5, 2011, and Los Angeles on Friday, August 12th. Visit the film’s Facebook page and official website to learn more.) A late work by the Cuban director Tomas Gutierrez Alea called Strawberry And Chocolate is one of the few films I’ve ever seen to confront the strange relationship […]
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The Microbudget Conversation: Script vs. Story
I have come across many folks who have allowed the completion of a perfect script to derail their entire production. I have also sat through (I’m including my own films here) more films that I can remember in which the filmmakers hoped improv will create something magical. In microbudget the latter is a necessity, in large indie films, it’s risky, and in Hollywood, no one but a select few can pull it off. I recently started a conversation with an Austin filmmaker in the very thick of making her second feature film, What’s the Use (pictured below), and this battle […]
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Kentucker Audley Launches No-Budget Streaming Site
Memphis-based filmmaker Kentucker Audley (Team Picture, Open Five), selected for Filmmaker’s “25 New Faces” list in 2007, is releasing today online his new film, Holy Land (pictured here, with stars Bunny Lampert and Cole Weintraub), and with it a platform for fellow directors working in the no-budget trenches. The site is called “No Budge Films,” and it is described simply as “a place to watch no-budget films… Post your short film or feature // for a short run or indefinitely.” Why such a simple site? “Because most films don’t get distributed + it’s cool to give away your film for […]
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You Have no Business Being In This Business
I have been thinking about Kevin Smith quite a bit lately. Beyond the obvious happenings with his film Red State and his decision to follow in my footsteps (wink) by embracing the Topspin platform to go about his business of building a media empire, I’ve been a bit in awe of how this guy from New Jersey, who began his journey with a $27,000 ’90s Sundance hit that many in the artistic film world passed off as garbage, has weathered many a storm, some arguably manufactured, to be quite possibly the last man standing and perhaps most forward thinking in […]
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TRAILER WATCH: FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA’S “TWIXT”
When I listened to Francis Ford Coppola give a master class at last year’s Marrakech Film Festival, some of the most valuable information imparted was about the creative process. So that’s what struck me when I watched this trailer of his latest film, Twixt, premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival this month. Val Kilmer stars as a mass market horror novelist, and there’s clearly some kind of meditation going on about the workings of the imagination. As quoted at First Showing, Coppola says the film “‘was inspired by the eerie writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe’ and […]
