Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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“WINTER’S BONE” LEADS NOMINEES FOR THIS YEAR’S GOTHAMS
Announced moments ago on UStream by Elvis Mitchell, the nominees for IFP’s 20th annual Gotham Independent Film Awards have been revealed. Known as the official kick off to the awards season, a total of 26 films were nominated across six categories for an event that gives recognition to this year’s top independent films. Listed below are the full list of nominees. Standouts include Debra Granik‘s Sundance Grand Prize winner Winter’s Bone, which received Best Feature, Breakthrough Actor (for lead Jennifer Lawrence) and Best Ensemble Performance; while Lisa Cholodenko‘s The Kids Are All Right and Lena Dunam‘s Tiny Funrinture both received […]
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ELVIS MITCHELL TO HOST GOTHAMS ANNOUNCEMENT
Critic Elvis Mitchell will be livestreaming the 2010 Gotham Award nominations Monday, October 18th. Tune in and hear all the nominations, including the five films we picked for the Filmmaker-sponsored “Best Film Playing at a Theater Near You Award. More details from the press release: Signaling the official kick-off to the film awards season, the Gotham Independent Film Awards™ nominations will be announced at 1 p.m. ET / 10 a.m. / PT to a global audience on UStream TV at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/gotham-independent-film-awards-2010 There will also be a link from IFP’s website. Mitchell, currently host of the public radio show The Treatment, […]
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THE ANXIETIES OF “LET ME IN” AND “ENTER THE VOID”
Two new pieces up here at Filmmaker. In the latest “Into the Splice” from Nicholas Rombes, he goes to a lonely multiplex on a Monday night to see Let Me In, stewing on the way to the theater over the sacrilege of its production: I went to see Let Me In with low expectations. Like so many, I had seen and been awed by the original Swedish version, Let the Right One In (directed by Tomas Alfredson), whose quiet pacing and lonely stretches of relative silence only made the horror more horrible when it came. An American version, surely, would […]
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TODD SOLONDZ RIDES A “DARK HORSE”
In a press release today Ted Hope announced that Todd Solondz’s new film, Dark Horse, went into production on October 11. Hope is producing through his new Double Hope production company, and the cast includes Justin Bartha, Selma Blair, Mia Farrow, Jordan Gelber, Donna Murphy and Christopher Walken. Andrij Parekh (Blue Valentine) is shooting, Derrick Tseng is co-producing, and Goldcrest is handling international sales. From the press release: Mr. Solondz helms the tale of Abe (Jordan Gelber), a 30-something who lives with his parents, reluctantly works for his father (Christopher Walken), and avidly collects toys. When Abe isn’t playing backgammon […]
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A Movie is Like a Person: Enter the Void
“Then, too, there is always something other than content in the cinema to grab hold of, for those who want to analyze,” Susan Sontag wrote in her seminal essay Against Interpretation. “For the cinema, unlike the novel, possesses a vocabulary of forms — the explicit, complex, and discussable technology of camera movements, cutting, and composition of the frame that goes into the making of a film.” Toward the very end of the same essay, she advocated, “The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to […]
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JAMIE STUART’S “NYFF 48”
Jamie Stuart’s NYFF 48 is the latest in his annual cinematic trips to the New York Film Festival, “a 13-minute impressionistic juxtaposition of modern film’s evolution and man’s progress.” Turn your lights out, crank your speakers and watch. With appearances by David Fincher, Clint Eastwood, Olivier Assayas, Joe Dante, Charles Ferguson, Frederick Wiseman, and others. The 720p file can be downloaded here. Visit Jamie at Mutiny Company.
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SHERI CANDLER OFFERS CROWDFUNDING ADVICE
Marketing and publicity specialist Sheri Candler has a post up on her blog entitled “Five Ways to Fail at Crowdfunding” that is a good read for those thinking of kickstarting of gogo’ing their indie feature. She opens: I am prompted to write this post because I have been hit up many times lately about supporting, advising or donating to various crowdfunding initiatives. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t quite a complaint because I have been known to support many campaigns by doing any one of these things (ask anyone else offering their advice if they have done any of these […]
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AARON SORKIN ADDRESSES “SOCIAL NETWORK” SEXISM CHARGES
Amidst the widespread acclaim for David Fincher’s The Social Network have been criticisms that the film is sexist in its depiction of the Harvard social scene and the seemingly all-male world of computer programmers that combined to create Facebook. As Xeni Jardin noted in Boing Boing, the film fails the Bechdel test. Others have asked why screenwriter Aaron Sorkin didn’t create a role for Priscilla Chan, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s longtime girlfriend, who was in the picture (although, apparently, not romantically so) during the timespan of the film. In the Daily Beast, Rebecca Davis O’Brien asked where in the film […]
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“NAPOLEON DYNAMITE” GETS ANIMATED
Get ready for awesome drawings, yummy tots and shouts of GOSH and IDIOT because the indie darling Napoleon Dynamite is getting the animation treatment. According to Deadline, Fox has picked up an adaptation of the 2004 hit for six episodes with the film’s writer-director Jared Hess executive producing and star Jon Heder voicing Napoleon.
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SAM GREEN, “UTOPIA IN FOUR MOVEMENTS”
After Sam Green and Dave Cerf premiered their “live documentary” Utopia in Four Movements at Sundance, I wrote the below as part of a Sundance wrap-up at FilmInFocus. Also part of New Frontier was Sam Green and Dave Cerf’s Utopia in Four Movements. In what was billed as a “live documentary,” filmmaker Green, who previously helmed the doc, The Weather Underground, explores a precondition for revolution: a shared vision of utopia. The score was composed and played live by The Quavers (Catherine McCrae, Dennis Cronin, T. Griffin, and Cerf), and Green did live voiceover over film clips and slides. Recalling […]
