Columns
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The Myth of the American Sleepover — A Hammer to Nail Review
It’s easy to be judgmental about the characters of David Robert Mitchell’s teen drama, The Myth of the American Sleepover, about the escapades of several adolescents on their last night of summer. You can judge one girl for betraying her friend for their shared object of affection; or one guy for stalking a pair of twins whom he once had a crush on. But to do so would be to sell the film and its characters short. The Myth of the American Sleepover isn’t about actions and events, but moments and gestures. Through the impressionable eyes of a handful of […]
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Foreign Correspondent: Going Dutch
Lauren Wissot’s report on arthouse viewing in Amsterdam inaugurates a new occasional, rotating column, “Foreign Correspondent.” In this space find reports on film cultures around the world, covering everything from production to distribution to exhibition. Bookmark this first edition for your next trip to Amsterdam. — Editor Besides the Dutch no-nonsense approach to everything from healthcare to vice, what I find most impressive about this Venice of the North is that there’s an actual cinema culture here — which is not the case in my hometown NYC, where there are only a handful of repertory screening rooms to serve a […]
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The Microbudget Conversation: What Is Regionalism?
Last summer, at about the same time I was shooting Orphaned, Columbia Pictures was shooting second-unit/chase scenes for Salt here in Albany, NY. Apparently we have a really dope set of off-ramps and bridges that made it necessary to shoot one scene in Upstate New York. They brought in all their own people and all their own gear. Many of the actors that worked on Orphaned got day-play extra roles and stand-in gigs, and downtown was a mess for a week. The film community of Albany was pissed and ecstatic all at the same time, and the experience acted as […]
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Convento — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Convento world premiered at the 2011 SXSW Film Festival. It has its New York City premiere on Saturday, July 16, 2011, as part of Rooftop Films. Visit the film’s official Tumblr page to learn more.) Built to house an abbot and 12 monks 400 years ago, the Portuguese monastery Sao Francisco had deteriorated into an unlivable state. But when the Zwanikken family relocated from Holland in 1980 to restore the beautiful but troubled structure, their hard work and dedication turned that once religious house into a happy home. Though their husband and father Kees is no longer with them, the […]
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Lady Vengeance: The Man Who Fell to Earth
It was only a matter of time before this trippy sci-fi film featuring a disarmingly strange but impossibly stylish early-1970s David Bowie as an alien navigating Earth would make the rounds once again. Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, a cult classic whose Criterion Collection DVD has been out of print for years, has just finished a near-entirely sold-out run at New York City’s Film Forum on a beautiful new 35mm print and will be touring the rest of the country in the coming months. While the film seems dated at times, downright incoherent at others, its reflection […]
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Project Nim — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Project Nim is being distributed theatrically by Roadside Attractions. It opens in theaters July 8, 2011. Visit the film’s official website to learn more.) In December of 1973, a two-week old chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky was taken from the arms of his mother and given to a human family in the hopes of settling a raging intellectual debate. In a famous study, the linguist (and now-famous political philosopher) Noam Chomsky had asserted that language acquisition was solely the domain of human beings, an innate quality existing within and discovered by humans through experience and exposure to language, which combined to […]
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The Microbudget Conversation: Social Change
In keeping with a bit of our theme from last week we tackle the subject of using our films to make a larger audience aware of a subject or group, and in turn gain a network of people we would have never come in contact with. If crowdsourcing is a way to gain a new following and engage an audience in the filmmaking process, then social change can do the same thing, but also give back to a community or group in more ways than just one narrative film can. It can also serve to engage a larger network in […]
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Lady Vengeance: America, America
The appearance of a fictional version of the President of the United States is a hallmark of many genre films, particularly of the earthly disaster variety, in which the impending destruction of the planet, or at least the country warrants a visit from our Commander-in-Chief. In some cases, the character is a way for the filmmaker to get into some mild politics, to take a sly jab at a particular administration through spoofing or lampoonery. In other cases the POTUS depiction has an element of wish fulfillment, in which the filmmaker projects his ideal leader in a crisis situation. Like […]
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Dark Days — A Hammer to Nail Review
(The 10th anniversary of Dark Days will be re-released through Oscilloscope Laboratories beginning Friday.) Things keep happening that make me feel old. No I don’t have any major age-related illnesses. I haven’t been getting copies of AARP magazine in the mail. “Are you even 30 yet?” is still a legitimate question to ask me upon any encounter. For the record, I’m not (yet) 30, but still I can’t help getting the creeping sense that, in the words of LCD Soundsystem, “I’m losing my edge.” Upon learning that the Cinema Village was going to open British documentarian Marc Singer’s seminal 2000 […]
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The Microbudget Conversation: Crowdsource… Not Outsource
I first met Jesse Borkowski back at RIT in 2002, and we became fast friends. His interest in experimental filmmaking mirrored my own, and soon we were the dynamic duo of cinematographer and assistant on over ten short films. Our verbal short hand and similar visual language made it easy for us to work together, but it wasn’t until now that we’ve collaborated on a project as co-directors; It was bound to happen. The film I’m referring to is Engram. This “epic” micro budget is an experiment in many things, one of those things being crowdsourcing. My last few attempts […]
