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Making Sense of To the Wonder
Terrence Malick lends himself well to hyperbole. Few other filmmakers make the act of writing about movies feel like such a fool’s errand; no other is as hard to write about in a measured way. In one of the few interviews he’s given, the director says at one point, “When people express what is most important to them, it often comes out in clichés. That doesn’t make them laughable; it’s something tender about them — as though in struggling to reach what’s most personal about them they could only come up with what’s most public.” This may be the most […]
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Win a Prize Pack for The Place Beyond the Pines
The follow-up to his breakout hit Blue Valentine, writer/director Derek Cianfrance’s excellent epic crime drama The Place Beyond the Pines comes out next Friday, March 29, and one Filmmaker reader can win themselves an extra special viewing experience, thanks to a prize pack being offered by the film’s distributor, Focus Features. The lucky winner will get a $25 Visa Gift card to see the film in theaters, a T-shirt, the official soundtrack (featuring the original score by Mike Patton, plus tracks by Arvo Pärt, Bon Iver and Ennio Morricone) and a poster for the film. To win this prize pack, send an email to […]
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Mark Rappaport Fires Back at Ray Carney
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Win This is 40 Combo Packs
One of the funniest films of last year was Judd Apatow’s quasi-sequel to Knocked Up, the pre-midlife crisis comedy This is 40. (I like to think of the film as a comic precursor/companion piece to Michael Haneke’s Oscar-winning Amour, which could easily have been titled This is 80.) Apatow’s movie is out on DVD in a couple of weeks, but you can bag yourself a copy early thanks to the generosity of our friends at Universal, who are offering three DVD/Blu-ray combo packs of the release to Filmmaker readers. All you need to do to win is to be one of the first three people to […]
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Win Barry Levinson’s The Bay on DVD
Barry Levinson’s found-footage chiller The Bay, which played at Toronto and New York Film Festivals last year, is available to buy on DVD tomorrow, March 5, but you can get your hands on it for free thanks to our friends at Lionsgate. Here’s a quick rundown of the film: Two million fish washed ashore. One thousand blackbirds dropped from the sky. On July 4, 2009 a deadly menace swept through the quaint seaside town of Claridge, Maryland, but the harrowing story of what happened that Independence Day has never been told – until now. The authorities believed they had buried […]
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Call for Entries: IFP Labs
If you are a first-time filmmaker and have a narrative or documentary project in the final stages of post-production, here’s a heads up that the deadline for submission to the Independent Filmmaker Labs is upcoming. Run by IFP, which publishes Filmmaker, the labs help movies with a budget under $1 million, providing each film’s team with in-depth assistance on everything from editing to marketing to festival strategy. The IFP Labs select 10 documentary and 10 narrative projects, assembling filmmakers for three separate sessions throughout the year, during which the individuals are helped to discern the best way for their movies to stand […]
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Baltasar Kormákur on His New Christian Bale Film, Everest
In late 2012, I interviewed Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur, whose excellent new film The Deep is upcoming this spring through Focus World. He is also currently in post on the Mark Wahlberg/Denzel Washington thriller 2 Guns, but was already talking about his next project, Everest. He described the (then-unnamed) lead who he was in talks with as “an actor who is known for… put[ting] himself through hell.” That strongly implied that the star in question was Christian Bale, and now it’s been reported that Bale is indeed attached to the project, with Universal and Working Title producing. Here’s what Kormákur told me about Everest when we spoke: […]
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Mark Rappaport’s Latest Letter to Boston University on the Carney Affair
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Django Unchained Review
We expect a lot from Quentin Tarantino. A generation ago, we lined up in the cold and fought for tickets to behold the next Kubrick opus or the latest Star Wars episode. Today we do it for QT. This time, he unleashes Django Unchained. It’s an historical shoot-em-up drama set in the antebellum era of the American South. Django (Jamie Foxx) is a slave-turned-bounty hunter who sets out to rescue his wife (Kerry Washington) from a sadistic plantation owner (Leonard DiCaprio). At his side is his mentor, a German bounty hunter named Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz who brilliantly played […]
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The Queen of A Doll’s House: Toneelgroep Amsterdam Stages Ibsen’s Nora
For the past few years I’ve been covering IDFA for Filmmaker, and whenever I’m in the city of canals I make sure to find time to catch the latest from Toneelgroep Amsterdam, which presents English sur-titled productions (often frustratingly projected too high above the action – please, directors, my neck!) on Thursday nights. Under the artistic leadership of internationally acclaimed Belgian director Ivo van Hove – known mostly to NYC audiences through his longtime relationship with New York Theatre Workshop – the Netherlands’ largest repertory company is shaking up the stage in ways I could only wish the Dutch filmmaking […]
