A hit on last fall’s festival circuit was A Hijacking, writer/director Tobias Lindholm’s smart, gripping thriller about a Danish cargo ship captured by Somali pirates. (Writing about the movie in the previous issue of Filmmaker, Aaron Hillis called it “a tack-sharp, heart-in-the-throat Danish procedural,” while Adam Cook called it the best film he saw at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival.) The critical success of A Hijacking, released stateside by Magnolia on June 14, has brought some much-deserved international attention to Lindholm, who is a highly active and well-respected figure in Denmark. He made his feature debut in 2010 with the […]
In his breakout 1994 feature Cold Water, Olivier Assayas turned his eye on the adolescent scene in a provincial town not far from Paris in the early ’70s, focusing on a young man named Gilles and his troubled girlfriend, Christine. That film, notable for containing some of the director’s most self-consciously bravura camerawork and a more or less complete absence of the political machinations that defined the era, is a cousin of sorts to the 58-year-old Assayas’ newest work, Something in the Air. Returning to similar environs during the same period, he once again focuses on a young pair named […]
I’ve been reviewing the fourth installment of Gears of War recently, and it’s gotten me thinking about military games. Gears takes place on a planet called Sera and you fight big locusts, so it’s not exactly the U.S. Army, like, say, Call of Duty, but it’s the same basic idea — lots of weapons, lots of choices of weapons and lots of killing. Now, people are always talking about “violent video games” and the harm they do to young minds, and this drives me crazy for two reasons. The first is simple: video games aren’t violent. They deal in representations […]
During this year’s True/False Film Festival, I sat on a panel with four formidable colleagues to bat around the question of how, pray tell, critics should evaluate documentary films. Should we approach nonfiction films differently than we approach fiction films, or as part of the same continuum? Should we evaluate documentaries on a content curve, taking subject matter, political intent or real world impact into account, or should we see them as cinema, full stop? I’m not sure we made any great strides toward consensus on these questions, but I’m also not sure that consensus would be of any service […]
Tim League is not as much of an oddball as Alamo Drafthouse Cinema and its distribution arm, Drafthouse Films, might suggest. For all the cultish, film-geek quirkiness of those companies, the man behind them seems to know exactly what he’s doing. Since 1997, League, who studied engineering and art history at Rice University, has been cultivating a highly profitable brand that’s now proving scalable far beyond the confines of his hometown of Austin, Texas. Alamo is in the middle of a massive expansion of both company-owned and franchise locations, with openings set for New York City (including a seven-screen complex […]
Mars is a lonely, spiritually bereft place in Philip K. Dick’s science-fiction classic The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Colonists live inside, away from the planet’s harsh elements and unexpected predators, whiling away the hours by playing a hallucinatory role-playing game called Perky Pat. Using little figurines — avatars, really — and a psychoactive drug, they transport themselves into a consumer fantasy world back on Earth. I thought of Dick’s book as I walked past an exhibit at SXSW Interactive this year. A company was demonstrating its 3D-printing prowess by making little plastic figures based on your Facebook photo — […]
“A magician is an actor playing the part of a magician,” the 19th-century stage conjurer Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin once said. But if that’s true, then what about all those aspects of acting — such as figuring out character, backstory and motivation? Those are questions all professional magicians have to grapple with at some point early in their careers. Or, to put it another way: Where does a magician’s magic come from? A kid doing a magic trick can answer that question easily: it comes from a magic kit their father bought them. The amateur doesn’t need really need to answer […]
Independent filmmaker Brian Paul is a man who lives his films. In that spirit, he has taken DIY film distribution to a whole new level. Street level, that is. For the past two years, Paul has made a comfortable living by selling his hybrid film Cure for the Crash…The Art of Train Hoppin’ directly from art market street stalls in New Orleans. His unique distribution strategy has proved remarkably successful. Paul claims to have sold thousands of DVDs of Cure for the Crash by personally engaging more than 100,000 people face-to-face. “When I was a teenager in West Philly,” Paul […]
It’s a Friday morning, and David Gatten is very tired, having taught both Wednesday and Thursday evenings. Like many filmmakers, in addition to making movies, Gatten also teaches. Indeed, the experimental filmmaker boasts the title “Lecturing Fellow and Artist in Residence” at Duke University’s Arts of the Moving Image program, where he lectures during the spring semester, before returning to the old mining cabin in Colorado’s Four Mile Canyon where he lives with his wife — filmmaker, writer and editor Erin Espelie — for the rest of the year. His courses? AMI 101: Introduction to the Arts of the Moving […]
Black films don’t travel. It’s one of the oldest clichés in the movie business. And it may be as true today as it was 20 years ago when producer Andrew Vajna famously declared, “There are no black actors today [who] mean anything to the foreign marketplace.” Hollywood may have made some headway in overcoming the racial road-blocks that exist in overseas markets; the foreign box-office for Quentin Tarantino’s Jamie Foxx-starring Django Unchained, for example, has well surpassed domestic sales, as did, surprisingly, Martin Lawrence’s 2011 comedy Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son. But those films remain the exception, not the […]