Reflections
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Talking About the Movies: Sigrid Nunez at the Cinema
When author Sigrid Nunez tells people that two of her recent novels, The Friend and What Are You Going Through, have been adapted into films, she’s amused by their inevitable reactions. “They say very somberly, ‘Are they faithful to the book? Have [you] been insulted?’” “It’s charming because it’s so naive,” she laughs. “You’d never want a transcription!” For a novelist who’s been publishing since 1995, that two strong adaptations suddenly exist—both auteurist affairs retaining their novels’ concerns and essential architecture—is quite remarkable. Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s The Friend is a warm, witty adaptation of Nunez’s 2018 National Book […]
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Careless People: Mark Asch on Gamification, Impunity and 2024 in Film
Juror #2, which I saw the night before the presidential election, concerns a man who looks at his phone while driving, hits and kills a fellow citizen, and keeps going. A year later, summoned to serve on a jury at the trial of the man wrongly accused of the crime, the driver scrambles to escape responsibility for his actions while still telling himself that he’s a good person. Clint Eastwood’s film, a Southern courtroom thriller in the John Grisham mode, has been called a throwback. For one thing, the juror’s car is a midsize SUV from Grisham’s mid-1990s heyday, not […]
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Play by Play: The Making of Hoop Dreams
In 1986, two recent college graduates in film from Southern Illinois University, Steve James and Fred (later Frederick) Marx, walked in the door. To them, Kartemquin was mecca. At the new, student-run Big Muddy Film Festival, Jerry Blumenthal had been an early presenter and judge alongside experimental filmmaker James Benning and Jim Jarmusch. He had shown Taylor Chain II and The Last Pullman Car. “I remember watching The Last Pullman Car and feeling, ‘Wow, this is really good!’” recalled James. “It lodged in my mind that Kartemquin was really interesting. And Jerry was very impressive—classic Jerry, thoughtful and funny and […]
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Once Upon a Time on the Lower East Side
In an excerpt from her new memoir, director Susan Seidelman reflects on the beginnings of her breakthrough 1982 feature Smithereens. bad girls (donna summer) I started to notice a certain type of girl hanging around the downtown club scene. I won’t call her a groupie, but she had elements of that. She was someone looking for excitement. Driven by a need to feel special, eager for recognition despite no discernible talent … and inclined to sleep with anyone in a band. Like me, she came from a place she wanted to escape. Bit by bit, I began to draw a […]
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Crosstown Connections: The Cinephilic Community Building of the Tallgrass Film Center
A group of about 20 people trickles back into the green-lit microcinema after intermission smoke breaks to witness burlesque artist Emerald Spectre perform a striptease. Spectre comes out dressed as Halloween’s Michael Myers, complete with a prop knife dipped in red glitter, and dances to Radiohead’s “Creep.” Over the next ten minutes, the killer’s taciturn visage morphs into that of a gorgeous pin-up wearing strappy lingerie whose pasties occasionally fall out of place, prompting demure attempts at modesty. When we return to our regular programming, 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection, the audience shouts, “Beat his ass, Busta!” I’ve been to my fair […]
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Take Two: Richard Shepard on Redoing The Linguini Incident
Back in 2005, I wrote an article for this magazine titled “Escape From Movie Jail” about my years-long effort to break out from under the career-killing shadow of my first film, the oddball comedy The Linguini Incident. The film was stacked to succeed when we shot it back in 1990—after all, it had David Bowie (!), Rosanna Arquette, Marlee Matlin, Eszter Balint, Buck Henry and Andre Gregory in the cast. Robert Yeoman was the DP; Thomas Newman did the score. I was all set to surf the golden wave of indie film adulation, but then the tide turned and I […]
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Martini Shots
Lithuania-born filmmaker Robertas Nevecka was making short animated pictures and working as an assistant director when, on a location shoot, he began to draw. It was 2019 and “It was really hard,” Nevecka remembers. “We were shooting in a small village, living in trucks, and, during the off time, I started drawing stuff about the things that happened during the day. That was the start.” Five years later, Nevecka’s film-shoot pastime has grown into a much larger endeavor, a small business that finds his witty visual accounts of set life on t-shirts, playing cards and, most recently, collected in a […]
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Authentic Spaces
On the first shoot day of the TV series Reservation Dogs, the call sheet had a banner announcement for a “Blessing Ceremony at Call.” At 8:00 a.m., the parking lot of our Tulsa location, a strip mall clinic we had turned into an Indian Health Services Center, was filled with the usual trappings of a film set: trailers, catering tents, frayed nerves. But the entire cast and crew (both on- and off-set personnel) was also gathered, arranged in a loose circle around a smaller band of Indigenous community leaders, elders and Sterlin Harjo, the creator and show runner. Wotko Long, […]
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The Art of Angling: The Making of Rose Troche’s Classic Microbudget Lesbian Love Story, Go Fish
1994’s Go Fish, Rose Troche’s smart, punked-out work of guerilla filmmaking, combined a playful take on lesbian dating with discursive dialogues around gender politics and the cultural history of gay female representation. Part of the late ’80s and early ’90s low-budget boom of what critic B. Ruby Rich dubbed New Queer Cinema—films such as Poison, Swoon, The Hours and Times, Born in Flames and The Watermelon Woman—the Chicago-set Go Fish finds hip college student Max (Guinevere Turner, also the film’s screenwriter and producer) in a romantic rut and set up by friends with a hippie-ish older lesbian, Ely (V.S. Brodie). […]
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The Future is Unwritten: Mark Asch on 2023 in Film
For what, and for whom, do workers work? One way to conceptualize the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes is as a fight for the right to refuse the demands of shareholder capitalists maximizing return on investment and tech-world futurists devising new forms of extraction, notably via a disrupted exhibition environment that siphons away profits once reserved for residuals and AI that treats words and likenesses as royalty-free intellectual property. As I embark on this year-in-review exercise, I am also conscious of the past few months of policed speech—on campuses, within political parties, at newspapers and in the film world. At […]
