Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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TRAILER WATCH: “MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE”
Less than one year after Sean Durkin’s short, Mary Last Seen, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival comes this new trailer for the feature that resulted from it. (Click on the headline if you don’t see the video.) Durkin was one of our “25 New Faces” of 2010, and now his feature, which premiered at Sundance, has its international premiere at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard section. From Jason Guerrasio’s interview with Durkin: I made Mary Last Seen to have something to send out with the feature script,” Durkin admits. But after taking a second pass at the edit […]
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AMY SEIMETZ BEGINS “SUN DON’T SHINE”
From an email from director, actress and producer Amy Seimetz: I am making my next feature– Sun Don’t Shine. I have started a ChipIn site for it. 10% of the funds raised will be donated to a shelter for abused women and children in Florida, which I volunteered at in high school. Feel free to donate what you can or pass it along. You can read more about the film and donate here. …And yes– our donation to the shelter is a hint to the plot. Here’s more from the film’s website, which contains a blog with updates on the […]
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Lord Byron — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Lord Byron opens on Friday, May 6, 2011, at the reRun Gastropub in Dumbo. Read Zack Godshall’s “Revolution and Apocalypse: The Lord Byron Manifesto” if you haven’t already, then visit the film’s official website to learn more.) Zack Godshall’s Lord Byron was not shot on the Canon 5D (aka, the everybody’s-using-it-so-you-should-too-consumer-grade-Digital-SLR-camera-of-the-very-moment !). Instead, Godshall used a Sony Z1U that he purchased all the way back in 2005 (the horror!). This means that the movie’s images were captured at a 29.97 frame rate, as opposed to the more cinematic 23.98. Which is to say that this 2011 narrative feature has a […]
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The Madness Of Full Metal Jacket
“Matthew, don’t allow yourself to ask “Why is he doing this to me?” Wonder why is he doing this to himself.” The blown-to-hell chaos of productions like Apocalypse Now, Fitzcarraldo and Jaws are often evoked as legendary examples of disasters turned into classic motion pictures, but after reading Matthew Modine’s Full Metal Jacket Diary, I get the feeling that was par for Stanley Kubrick. It’s one thing to hear stray anecdotes about life on his films, but it’s something quite different to swim through a first-person account of an entire project — an account that isn’t even a memoir but […]
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Zenith Creator Vladan Nikolic
As Vladan Nikolic’s Zenith continues its slow roll-out — finishing its U.S. screenings while premiering on Amazon and iTunes — I thought I’d post on the blog this piece on the film that originally ran in slightly different form in our Winter, 2011 issue. “What is Zenith?” was the question posed on About Top Secret and other conspiracy-related websites last Spring. Paranoid-minded posters jumped in and followed a breadcrumb-trail of online clues relating to everything from the Bavarian Illuminati and fluoridated drinking water to biochemistry and the New World Order. They clicked through a maze of 50 other websites (priestoftruth.com, […]
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THE RETURN OF M DOT STRANGE
Out of all the 25 New Faces we’ve done in my time at the magazine one of my favorites is M dot Strange. The DIY whiz behind the animated feature We Are The Strange, M dot has been laying low the last four years. So I was ecstatic when he emailed me the first teaser for his next feature, Heart String Marionette. (He also sent an exclusive still from the film, which is above.) M dot hasn’t gone into detail about what the film is about, but watching this it looks like many of his trademarks are returning — demented […]
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Director Alex Gibney on Catching Hell
Few documentary filmmakers’ careers are as fascinating to follow as that of Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), and that’s not just because of the consistent quality of his films, but because of the astonishing rate at which he produces them. In the midst of three other projects — an untitled Wikileaks documentary in pre-production; The Road Back, about Lance Armstrong, in post-production; and the newly completed Magic Bus, about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters — Gibney was at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival with his sports documentary Catching Hell, which […]
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MAY VOD CALENDAR
Now up on our VOD Calendar are the titles available in May. Some of the highlights include Derek Cianfrance‘s Blue Valentine, John Carney‘s Zonad, Mark Ruffalo‘s directorial debut Sympathy for Delicious (which is also in select theaters now, read our interview with Ruffalo), Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu‘s Biutiful and the premiere of the Adrien Brody/Penélope Cruz starrer A Madator’s Mistress. To find titles from other months go to our VOD Calendar homepage.
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TEST SCREENING “THE LOST CHILDREN,” PART ONE
In other places I’ve talked about our process for trying to vet a story ahead of time. We’ve had script readings, we’ve made small test videos expressing the tone we would shoot for in the feature. We’ve shot shorts with the characters from the feature. Now in the rough cut phase, we’re about to have a test screening of my feature film, The Lost Children, on May 4th. This screening is generously provided by Cinema Speakeasy out in L.A. The purpose of this screening is to show a rough cut and get some audience feedback before we lock. We will […]
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10TH TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL ANNOUNCES WINNERS
Tonight at the W Hotel Union Square the winners of the 10th Tribeca Film Festival‘s competition categories were announced, with the grand prize in the international narrative competition going to Lisa Aschan‘s She Monkeys (pictured), an evocative Swedish thriller about the burgeoning, sexually explosive rivalry between a pair of teenage girls engrossed in the world of competitive equestrian acrobatics. Both a daring coming of age tale and an increasingly tense thriller, the Danish born Aschan’s directorial debut made its North American premiere at Tribeca after winning the best new Nordic film prize at last year’s Goteberg Film Festival. Alma Har’el stunningly […]
