Juno was the big winner of the Spirit Awards, which just wrapped up on a soggy afternoon in Santa Monica, CA. The film walked away with Best Feature, Best Female Lead for Ellen Page and Best First Screenplay for Diablo Cody. The complete list of winners is below. BEST FEATUREJuno BEST DIRECTORJulian Schnabel, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly BEST MALE LEADPhilip Seymour Hoffman, The Savages BEST FEMALE LEADEllen Page, Juno BEST SUPPORTING MALEChiwetel Ejiofor, Talk To Me BEST SUPPORTING FEMALECate Blanchett, I’m Not There BEST SCREENPLAYTamara Jenkins, The Savages BEST FIRST SCREENPLAYDiablo Cody, Juno BEST DOCUMENTARYCrazy Love, Director: Dan […]
On the heels of Toshiba’s announcement this past weekend that it will fall on its sword in the long-winded battle for hi-def DVD supremacy making Blu-ray the victor (guess I backed the wrong horse, anybody want Goodfellas on HD DVD?), David Pogue writes in the New York Times today that even though there’s more options to watch movies online, in the immediate future, DVDs are still your best choice as he gives a report card on the Internet movie boxes (Apple TV, TiVo/Amazon Unbox, Xbox 360 and Vudu). Pogue also makes a good point about the absent-minded thinking of the […]
Interesting trend article by Dan Frost in the New York Times about “co-working,” in which various freelancers all share a common office space while still doing their own projects. From the piece: While coworking has evolved since Mr. Neuberg’s epiphany in 2005, dozens of places around the country and increasingly around the world now offer such arrangements, where someone sets up an office and rents out desks, creating a community of people who have different jobs but who want to share ideas. “It’s nourishing on a fundamental level,” said John Vlahides, the executive editor of 71miles.com, a travel site covering […]
The French writer and film director Alain Robbe-Grillet died on Monday in Normandy at the age of 85. GreenCine has a round-up of various news reports and commentary here. Robbe-Grillet was best known for his literary manifesto “For a New Novel,” his screenplay for Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, and his various novels — The Erasers, Jealousy, The Voyeur — that formed part of the Nouveau Roman movement. As a director, his films include L’Immortelle and Trans-Europe Express. La Belle Captive was recently released in the States by Koch Lorber. When I was in college, Robbe-Grillet’s early novels and […]
Over at his Cinema Echo Chamber, Brandon Harris has a go at Richard Corliss’s list for Time Magazine of the “25 Most Important Films about Race.” From Corliss’s intro: To celebrate Black History Month, we’ve chosen 25 movies to honor the artistry, appeal and determination of African Americans on and behind the screen. The films span nine decades, and reveal a legacy that was tragic before it was triumphant. At first, blacks were invisible; when they were allowed to be seen, it was mostly as derisive comic relief. The 1950s ushered in the age of the noble Negro, in the […]
Anne Thompson writes in Variety this week about the marketing challenge facing indies hoping to distribute their films online. In a piece headlined “Frustrated indies seek we distribution,” Thompson looks at all the unsold films out of Sundance this year and then talks with some of the current players in the online distribution space and wonders whether the needs of the former can be met by the current powers of the latter. A passage: The key question is, when will an alternative distribution outlet for indie films emerge — an outlet that can interest enough viewers to bring in meaningful […]
Since this seems to have been a blog day of embeds and videos, I’ll add one more: this link to Kate Stables’ piece in The Guardian providing links to six online videos all themed for Valentine’s Day. There’s work by Duane Hopkins, Anastasia Kirillova and others, and you’ll find the sweet and romantic as well as the brooding and unexpected. (Hat tip: GreenCine.)
Here’s the new red-band trailer for David Gordon Green’s Judd-Apatow-produced comedy Pineapple Express.
Sent “in the spirit of Valentine’s Day,” Filmmaker 2007 25 New Face filmmakers Brian Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky passed along this excerpt from The Patron Saints, their doc-in-progress about “faith, uncertainty and sainthood.” For more about their work and their project, visit their blog, Pigeon Droppings and their company website, Pigeon Projects.
Here’s “Flashing Lights,” a strange and violent video for the Kanye West song directed by West and Spike Jonze.