Filmmaking
Filmmaking
-
THE YOUNG PERSON’S GUIDE TO KATHRYN BIGELOW
A big congratulations to Kathryn Bigelow, Mark Boal, and the team behind The Hurt Locker for their well-deserved Academy Awards tonight. (I’m pretty sure it’s the first Filmmaker mag cover film to ever win Best Picture and Bigelow the first cover director to win Best Director.) For any newcomers to Bigelow out there, here’s a quick history courtesy of YouTube. (Missing, unfortunately, is her 20-minute Columbia University student film The Set-Up. According to the New York Times‘ Manohla Dargis, it portrays “two men […] fighting each other as the semioticians Sylvère Lotringer and Marshall Blonsky deconstruct the images in voice-over.”) […]
-
RUNNING FROM RODARTE
Here’s an eerie and visually stunning short film that’s a promo for the design house Rodarte. From Nowness, where you can find other similarly compelling fashion, art and culture-oriented material and produced by the Director’s Bureau, it’s directed by Todd Cole, shot by Shawn Kim, and scored by No Age. From Nowness: Guinevere van Seenus stars in Aanteni, a high-fashion techno-thriller from CFDA award-winning design sisters Rodarte, shot by their friend and frequent collaborator, the photographer and video artist Todd Cole. Set in the deserted grounds of Paypal founder Elon Musk’s Space X jet lab in Hawthorne, California, the film […]
-
How To Still Watch The Oscars
UPDATE#2: 17 minutes into the show Cablevision subscribers get back ABC. UPDATE: Sounds like there will be no 11th hour apologies. Nikki Finke at Deadline says Cablevision is giving its customers free On Demand tonight and will have someone tweeting and liveblogging at the Oscars. If you’re one of the 3 million Cablevision customers in New York’s tri-state area who awoke this morning to find their ABC affiliate blacked out you may be asking: “How the f*** do I watch the Oscars tonight?” Over at Moviefone, they have a list of sites where you can get updates throughout the […]
-
SXSW TRAILER WATCH: “A SERBIAN FILM”
Twitch has got the goods on Srdjan Spasojevic’s button-pushing A Serbian Movie, the story of a retired porn-star lured back into the biz for that one last job with an insane director on what looks like the set of Hostel. “This is graphic, brutal, wildly transgressive stuff,” Twitch’s Todd Brown writes. “And that Spasojevic’s film has some brains to back up all the shocking imagery only serves to make it all that much more appalling.” The trailer below is over-18 and very much NSFW.
-
“EVE’S NECKLACE” (OR, TODD HAYNES STARTED WITH DOLLS…)
Via Harry Knowles at AICN, here’s a trailer for what looks like one of the more interestingly odd films on the indie circuit at the moment: Eve’s Necklace. It’s playing tonight in Austin at the Alamo Drafthouse Village, and while the on-screen actors may seem a little stiff, their voices are provided by John Hawkes, co-star of the Sundance Grand Prize-winning Winter’s Bone, and Cyndi Williams, lead actress in Kyle Henry’s The Room. This is director Daniel Erickson’s first movie in 20 years. He’s an Austin-based music video director whose two previous feature credits are the independent Scary Movie and […]
-
“PRECIOUS” SWEEPS THE 2010 SPIRIT AWARDS
It was a big night for Lee Daniels’ Precious at the 2010 Spirit Awards. The film picked up awards for Best First Screenplay (Geoffrey Fletcher), Supporting Actress (Mo’Nique), Actress (Gabourey Sidibe), Director (Lee Daniels) and Picture. The only other film to win more than one award was Crazy Heart, which picked up Best First Screenplay and Actor (Jeff Bridges). Hosted by Eddie Izzard and presented by Film Independent, the awards were the first Spirits held in downtown L.A. on a Friday night rather than Saturday afternoon at the Santa Monica beach. The Spirits’ gently irreverent tone remained the same — […]
-
STORYTELLING AND TRIBECA’S NEW DISTRIBUTION INITIATIVE
Every Thursday I pen an Editor’s Note that goes out to subscribers of our email newsletter (you can subscribe for free here) that is usually not also posted on the blog. I’m reposting today’s newsletter below because some kind of software glitch stripped out most of the punctuation from the copy as well as certain key words. Apologies if you received it and it was less than elegant. Here it is again: The big news in the independent world this week was Tribeca Enterprise’s announcement that it would launch a “virtual film festival” alongside this Spring’s Tribeca Film Festival event. […]
-
IFP ANNOUNCES SCRIPT TO SCREEN LINEUP
On March 20 & 21, IFP, with The Writer’s Guild of America, East, will present its annual Script to Screen Conference in New York City. This year’s conference opens with The Daily Show’s Steve Bodow and closes with Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen, Twilight) and Brian Koppelman (Rounders, Ocean’s Thirteen). Other guests include Peter Hedges (About a Boy), Debra Granik (2010 Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner Winter’s Bone) Sophie Barthes (Cold Souls), Ry Russo-Young (You Wont Miss Me) and recent Filmmaker “25 New Face” Lena Dunham (Delusional Downtown Divas) to name a few. The guests will discuss new challenges and opportunities taking […]
-
THE ROTTERDAM FILM FESTIVAL VISITS BAM
The International Film Festival Rotterdam has always been an exciting oasis in the festival calendar, a place to see new directors, experimental programming, and to connect with new projects away from the din of more market-defined festivals and red-carpet affairs. (Full disclosure: I’m on the board of Rotterdam’s CineMart.) This year’s festival was a good one — you can read Michael Tully’s wrap-up here — and now New Yorkers have the opportunity to discover the filmmakers of the Tiger Competition. The Tigers consist of films by new filmmakers, and the gamut runs from edgy dramas to intriguing doc-fiction hybrids to […]
-
CUTTING TO THE RHYTHM OF PINK
There’s a fascinating article in the New York Times’ Science section today called “Bringing New Understanding to the Director’s Cut.” It details a scientific study in which the shot length of films over the decades were analyzed and it was determined that as cinema has progressed its editing rhythms have been more closely resembling a natural frequency found in the brain as well as in in “natural and artifactual surroundings.” From the piece: According to the new report, the basic shot structure of the movies, the way film segments of different lengths are bundled together from scene to scene, act […]
