Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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SECONDING MOMMA’S MAN
Nick Dawson’s Web Exclusive Director’s Interview this week is Azazel Jacobs, whose third feature, Momma’s Man, opens tomorrow. Of the movie, which details a few days in which a young, recent father, Mikey, travels home to his parents (played by Ken and Flo Jacobs, the director’s real-life parents) and is not able to leave, having become entangled in the crosscurrents of nostalgia for his childhood, Dawson wrote: …the film is particularly resonant and moving, as well as being funny and tender, and Ken and Flo Jacobs both give surprising, strong performances, despite never having acted before. But it is ultimately […]
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From the Archives: A Hard, Wonderful Look at the Movies in Manny Farber’s Film Class
This piece by filmmaker Barbara Schock appeared in our Summer, 2005 issue. The phenomenal painter, teacher and film critic Manny Farber called his film class “A Hard Look at the Movies.” It was the first upper-division college class I took. I’d transferred from a small college in the Midwest to the University of California at San Diego, and I’d never seen a foreign film, unless you count the Sergio Leone westerns. We watched the following films in a 10-week period, and it turned the way I looked at movies upside down: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Max […]
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LEARNING FROM MANNY FARBER
In Summer, 2005, the filmmaker Barbara Schock wrote a spirited piece for Filmmaker about studying film with critic and artist Manny Farber, who died on Tuesday. Mirroring Farber’s rapid-fire thinking, Schock makes you feel like you’re in his classroom as she writes about the man, his syllabus, and his teaching style. We’ve posted it in our Web Exclusives. Here’s the intro: The phenomenal painter, teacher and film critic Manny Farber called his film class “A Hard Look at the Movies.” It was the first upper-division college class I took. I’d transferred from a small college in the Midwest to the […]
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TRAJAN HORSES
A year ago Gary Hustwit came out with Helvetica, showing how the typeface became the ubiquitous graphic signifier for… just about everything in the post-’60s era. Well, everything except one thing. As this web video demonstrates, when it comes to movie marketing, a font called Trajan rules. Watch this great clip for a glimpse at how unimaginative our movie marketing has become. (Hat tip: Ted Hope.)
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WATCHMEN STUDIO GRUDGE MATCH
Far away from the world of indie film one of the most dramatic show business stories is unfolding. As Nikki Finke and Variety are both reporting, a high-stakes showdown is occurring in court as Fox is suing Warner Brothers over the release of 300 director Zach Snyder’s upcoming The Watchmen. From Dave McNary and Tatiana Siegel’s piece: A judge has denied a Warner Bros. motion to dismiss 20th Century Fox’s lawsuit over Warners’ right to make a film based on the graphic novel Watchmen. Ruling is potentially a huge victory for Fox, which could wind up as a profit participant […]
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GOTHAM AWARDS TO HONOR CRUZ
The IFP announced today that Penelope Cruz will be presented with a Gotham Award Tribute at the 18th annual Gotham Awards on Dec. 2 at NYC’s Cipriani Wall Street. Cruz can recently be seen in Elegy opposite Ben Kingsley and Woody Allen‘s Vicky Cristina Barcelona (pictured right). Additional Tribute receipients will be named next week and nominees for this year’s Gothams will be announced on Oct. 20. To learn more about the event go to http://gotham.ifp.org.
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MANNY FARBER, 1917 – 2008
Celebrated and influential film critic Manny Farber died yesterday at the age of 91. At Movie City Indie Ray Pride has a lovely, well-linked remembrance, which opens like this: Manny Farber, painter, brilliant writer, indelible critic and all-round original whom some aped and few grazed, died in his sleep last night at the age of 91. He had retired from writing and teacher and devoted himself to painting and drawing. To cite Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve, which early Preston Sturges savant Farber would likely not frown upon, “What a life!” Glenn Kenny also has a long piece on […]
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METROPOLITAN AND THE DIGITAL RE-RELEASE
I’ve posted before about Chris Anderson’s dictum that everything in the digital world wants to be free. One type of merchandise that may prove Anderson’s theory is independent film hits from the 1980s and ’90s. Whit Stillman and Cinetic Media organized a blogosphere blitz this week with the free streaming release of his 1990 debut feature Metropolitan on Hulu.com. As Cinetic’s Matt Dentler blogs, Stillman did fresh interviews with Karina Longworth at Spout, Eugene Hernandez at Indiewire, and Stephen Saito at Indiewire. Noticing all the commotion, I emailed Dentler and asked him what prompted it. He wrote back, “Cinetic Rights […]
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EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS…
David Byrne and Brian Eno did it right when releasing their new Everything that Happens Will Happen Today, I think. Even though 20+ years have elapsed since their last collaboration, this one was announced and then made available to fans just three weeks later — no time for record industry leaks to pop up on the internet but enough time to score feature coverage like the piece in the Sunday New York Times. A free song was provided at the end of July in return for your email address. Today, the record’s release date, an email went out reminding you […]
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FISHING FOR FILM
Over on his blog These Are Those Things, Ted Hope tracks a correspondence between fishing and film that has taken 17 years to play out. In a post entitled “Rock & Roll & Film & Fishing & Tripping,” Hope traces the ripple of a stone thrown in the lake by John Lurie in his cable show Fishing with John and watches it turn into an afternoon in which Caveh Zahedi and Will Oldham trip on mushrooms and then, later, yet another fishing trip, this time shared by Dean Ween and the Butthole Surfers. Head to Ted’s blog for the links […]
