Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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KICK-ASS TO OPEN 2010 SXSW
According to South by Southwest’s Web site, Matthew Vaughn‘s upcoming fanboy comedy Kick-Ass will open the festival when it begins March 12. The movie follows average teen Dave (Aaron Johnson), a comic-book fanatic who becomes a real-life superhero. Lionsgate will open the film April 16. A few other titles were announced for the 2010 SXSW, including Aaron Katz‘s new feature, Cold Weather; a doc on Motörhead frontman Lemmy Kilmister; and a doc by James Franco that takes a behind the scenes look at creating an episode of Saturday Night Live. The festival will run from March 12-21.
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BRANDON HARRIS’S MOST OVERLOOKED FILM OF THE YEAR
Over at his Cinema Echo Chamber, Brandon Harris extolls on Kim Gok’s Exhausted, a comically desolate whatzit of South Korean underground cinema. Minimalist and bleak but with a certain repetitive humor, Gok’s film had its U.S. premiere at the Syracuse International Film Festival and went on to play Pusan and Rotterdam, where Harris and I both saw it, but has played in few other places. It is not out in the States, can’t be streamed, as Harris notes, and I never remember seeing it at Kim’s before they closed. From Harris, the plot: An unnamed pimp and prostitute/girlfriend live and […]
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MICHAEL CERA’S ANTI-DRUG PSA…
… in the form of an Islands music video. Here’s Cera, who stars this week in Miguel Arteta’s Youth in Revolt, in the clip directed by Derrick Beckles.
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IS A-MINUS THE NEW CINEMATIC B-PLUS?
Over at his 401st Blow blog, producer Noah Harlan (who, one post below, reviews Sundance’s new iPhone app), gets all statistical on Anne Thompson’s post at indieWIRE on the Best Reviewed Films of the Decade. You’ll have to read his post to follow the math that details how the critics might have become softer as the last decade progressed, as evidenced by the average rating for the top 100 films on Rotten Tomatoes having risen from 76% to 90%. There’s a poll you can take to register your opinion as to why this is. I quickly voted for the “critics […]
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AN EARLY REVIEW OF SUNDANCE’S iPHONE APP
I don’t have an iPhone. There, I’ve said it. I’m still holding onto my Blackberry. (Note to Apple: please let me upgrade to an iPod Touch by putting a camera in it and, while you’re at it, switch to Verizon.) So when Sundance kindly sent me their new Sundance Film Festival iPhone app, I sent it to the most knowledgeable person about apps I know, producer Noah Harlan, whose 2.1. Films has a division, Two Bulls, that makes apps which have included everything from a film footage calculator to an app for Victoria’s Secret. First, here’s the official word from […]
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THE BEST WAY TO READ A SCREENPLAY ON A MACBOOK
I posted previously about a way to read a screenplay on a Macbook or other laptop by rotating the script page in a PDF reader and then turning the computer so it’s oriented vertically, not horizontally. John August had previously posted a little tutorial about this on his blog, and one day, for inexplicable reasons, that method stopped working on my computer. Whenever I’d advance the page the script would revert back to its normal orientation. I’m sure there’s a good reason for that, and if I spent longer playing around in Preferences I’d find it. (I’m sure there’s also […]
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MEETING SPENCER SUSSER AND OTHER SUNDANCE FILMMAKERS
The Sundance Film Festival is posting a series of “Meet the Artists” videos on its YouTube page in which ’10 filmmakers discuss the films they’ll be premiering there in three weeks. Here’s Hesher director Mark Ruffalo and screenwriter Christopher Thornton. Others up include Davis Guggenheim and Diane Bell.
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Viewing Zeitgeists and the Best U.S. Indies of the Decade
To try to recall your favorite films from an entire decade (and then to limit them to only ten titles) is to immediately set yourself up for uncertainty and ridicule: first off because it’s hard enough to remember what you saw ten days ago, much less ten years ago, and secondly because to limit the list to ten is to leave hundreds of excellent films out, titles that you’ll undoubtedly get bludgeoned to death with through later feedback (“You blithering idiot~pretentious snob~Hollywood tool! How could you leave out Judd Apatow~Jean-Luc Godard~Abbas Kiarostami~McG,” read the heated responses to already posted lists). […]
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The 25 Best American Independent Films of the Decade
Concluding a decade in which specialty film distribution boomed and busted, and in which the identity and composition of filmed entertainment itself was challenged, perhaps it’s not surprising that David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, the ultimate unstable cinematic text, wound up on top of Filmmaker Magazine’s Editor’s Poll of the Best American Independent Films of the ’00s. Begun as television pilot but finally assembled as a feature according to the unconscious urgings of its creator, Mulholland Drive is a dyspeptic musing on the cinematic dream machine, one that launched an actual movie star (Naomi Watts) while also serving notice that the […]
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It Was the Aughts, And I Went to the Movies
It was the aughts, and I went to (and made a few) movies. I did it mostly for pleasure, sometimes for distraction, often to see what others thought of the wild world around us; by the end, I did it simply because it was the only way I saw fit to make a living (sort of). It was a bell curve of sorts, a graph of this burgeoning obsession, this ecstatic object of study, of debate, of joy. By the middle of the decade, I was watching somewhere between three hundred and fifty and four hundred movies, old and new, […]
