Issues
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Bright Ideas
CosyMo’s Solar Cinema, a solar-powered, mobile movie theater that brings socially engaged art films to underserved communities, is the brainchild of Dutch filmmaker Maureen Prins, who, ironically, is based in Tilburg, Holland’s rainy southern city. Now in its seventh year, Prins’s sustainable cinema has traversed both Europe and Latin America, with the activist artist hoping to “conquer the world and create an international network of Ecocinemas that distribute and show films everywhere.” To that end, Prins has been screening films throughout Europe since 2010, partnering with such organizations as France’s Cine sin Fronteras, Croatia’s Pula Film Festival, Malta’s Cinemastik, Slovenia’s Marindol Children’s […]
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Bad Metrics
Even if you don’t know baseball, you probably know the term “batting average” (or BA), which is widely used as the best measure of a batter’s prowess. Defined as the number of hits divided by the number of times at bat, it’s reported as a decimal number (i.e., .300 refers to the praiseworthy remark “batting 300”). The three all-time BA leaders are Ty Cobb (.366), Roger Hornsby (.358) and Joe Jackson (.356). But some baseball insiders have criticized the metric because it doesn’t account for the quality of those “at bats.” For many, it’s a shortsighted statistic that elides the […]
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A Speck in the Ocean
At sea — we have all felt it, paradoxically unmoored even in our hyper-connected age. In only two pictures, that sense of disconnection, emotional confusion and fear is the metier of New York-based writer/director J.C. Chandor. His 2011 debut film, Margin Call, was a tightly focused drama about Wall Street traders fighting for their financial lives amidst the economic meltdown. Unfolding over 24 hours, Margin Call is a talky and claustrophobic movie plumbing the specific ethical quandaries of our current political moment. Assuredly directed and extremely well-acted, it would seem to have set Chandor up to make any number of […]
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Super 8
1. Elevision Currently in beta, the short film download site Elevision (elevision.com) is the brainchild of former Wholphin creative director Malcolm Pullinger and Vimeo founder Jake Lodwick. It has a highly curated slate, with quirky titles like Quentin Dupieux’s Wrong Cops: Chapter One and The Arm, co-written and co-directed by Brie Larson. There’s also an embarrassment of riches from “25 New Faces” alums, including Palimpsest (Michael Tyburski and Ben Nabors), Rougarouing (Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri), A Chjàna (Jonas Carpignano), Pioneer (David Lowery) and Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke (Jillian Mayer and Lucas Leyva). 2. Marmoset Portland’s indie […]
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Space Invaders
In September, LA Game Space finally loosed Experimental Game Pack 01 upon the world. Fifteen bucks to Kickstarter, and you’ll find yourself in possession of 23 strange, disturbing, funny, moving, sad and psychedelic games from some of the world’s best and most promising indie designers. Back-story: It’s 2008. Two guys meet at a conference. The guys are Daniel Rehn and Adam Robezzoli. They’re thinking, you know what the indie game world could use? A space. A real-world physical location for exhibits and events, a speaker series, a research lab and an artist residency. Institutions such as the Museum of the […]
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Venice International Film Festival 2013
To get to the Lido — the strip of beachy land upon which the Venice Film Festival is held every year — one must take the vaporetto (or water taxi) from the Marco Polo Airport. While waiting for the transport to arrive, one is stuffed into a rectangular holding pen that sways and jerks with the current, provoking a mild but unmistakable seasickness in the more sensitive among us. Little did I know I was to experience almost exactly the same feeling the following morning while watching festival opener Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón’s first since 2006’s Children of Men. It’s an […]
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Toronto International Film Festival 2013
The Toronto International Film Festival, where mainstream critics stick to premieres, freelance writers look for discoveries, programmers tend to their demographic and harried acquisition agents run from theater to theater. For all, time is key: getting to the show on time, standing in long lines for the latest indie blockbuster, rushing to grab something resembling food and sitting through mediocre films because there’s nothing else playing. Appropriately, several of this year’s films mirrored this emphasis on time and the demands it makes on the viewer. Many of the festival’s most daring films were in the Wavelengths section, which last year […]
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Toronto International Film Festival 2013
With 288 films unfolding over 11 days, the Toronto International Film Festival offers just about every type of viewing experience imaginable, with every viewer becoming their own curator, cherry-picking from within their favorite sections. Business types congregate around the big acquisition titles. Cineastes check out the greats of world cinema, arriving in Toronto after Cannes. Discoverers peruse the Vanguard section searching for new talent. But what’s less often commented upon are the viewing experiences a large festival like Toronto produces for viewers intending to sample from it all. Entering a theater involves, before the lights dim, a mental recalibration, an […]
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The Watergate Theory of Screenwriting
At the 2013 Screenwriting Research Network International Conference, Larry Gross discusses narrative, knowledge and Kurosawa’s Ikiru. I want to begin by expressing my sense of unworthiness at being offered the chance to give this keynote address, given the stature of some of those who proceeded me in performing the task, and I want to express briefly my personal admiration for three of these predecessors. Here in Madison, Wisconsin, I don’t have to explain the importance of David Bordwell as one of the world’s greatest film scholars. I only want to mention that I first became aware of his work in […]
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Too Much of a Good Thing?
Digital cinema has afforded independent filmmakers many benefits, one of which is the ability to achieve something previously only the province of big-budget films: very high shooting ratios. However, the resulting mass of footage can overrun the typical understaffed, underfunded, low-budget edit room. “You’re shooting more footage, and usually with two cameras,” says Paul Frank, editor of the recent Maggie Carey comedy The To Do List. While he notes that there are many pros to this way of shooting — it benefits performance, it allows for more improvisation and, ultimately, more options in the edit room — he also notes […]
