Knuckleball, the new documentary from Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, is about a small group of athletes who’ve gone against the grain. Just a handful of pitchers in the century-plus history of Major League Baseball have relied on the famously unpredictable knuckleball, a pitch that doesn’t spin yet darts every which way. Stern and Sundberg followed two of these guys—Tim Wakefield, of the Boston Red Sox, and the New York Mets’ R.A. Dickey (above)—for the duration of 2011 season. Significantly lighter than the Manhattan-based filmmakers’ previous documentaries—The Devil Came on Horseback was about the genocide in Sudan; The Trials of […]
I had a lunch meeting with two of my partners on an international co-production. We are planning a South Africa / Canada treaty co-production on a $15m film and planned to meet up at Strategic Partners. Today, we worked on our laptops, smartphones and iPads as we ate sushi on the beautiful Halifax waterfront. After an hour, we hit an obstacle in our work and were uncertain how to proceed. Then later, my Canadian partner started talking to a UK producer who is a good friend I made at TAP, and she had different thoughts. A German producer weighed in […]
Maybe I’m just a delusional film buff, but after a quarter-century of attending the Toronto International Film Festival – now affectionately called TIFF, a less compensatory moniker for Canadians with a complex than the laughably arrogant Toronto Festival of Festivals label of yore – I believe that the event and its component parts echo the unique demographic of this large North American city. The festival’s multiple ethnic and racial sections coexist snugly. More than any other big international film festival, TIFF – proudly uncommercial – is built upon a carefully balanced assortment of heterogeneous cinemas: national and generic, mainstream and esoteric, the spanking new and […]
Another week, another iPhone announcement. I remember when I used to hang on every word as a new iPhone was released. What were the features? When would it be available? When could I order it? I’ve even lined up – twice – just to get it on the first day. In retrospect, does it really make sense to stand in line for several hours waiting for a… phone? But now it’s the sixth “new” iPhone (Original, 3G, 3Gs, 4, 4s, 5) and I find I’m not so enraptured. I don’t need to know immediately whether the camera is any better (see footnote […]
The IFP’s Independent Film Week’s Filmmaker Conference kicked off today, beginning with a case study of Beasts of the Southern Wild and ending with a conversation, moderated by IFP Executive Director Joana Vicente, between producer and Killer Films head Christine Vachon and producer, screenwriter and Focus Features CEO James Schamus. Below are 12 tips from the latter event — advice aimed at producers and, in some cases, anybody else, from two veterans with deep, decades-long roots in the independent community. 1. Consider producing. Christine Vachon and James Schamus are producers, but they both remembered a time when they were not. […]
Start out with a seed of Back to the Future and end up with the atmospheric uneasiness of Memento or Pi. Perhaps it’s not a trajectory that one would normally project, but Easton’s Article fits the bill. Sub the Internet in for the Delorean and information rather than Marty McFly as the passenger, and you begin to pick up the path left by writer/director/producer Tim Connery. He states, “Think if you received an email from a ‘future you’. You could alter a lot of things by just reading one sentence. And in 1997 websites weren’t slick and efficient; the web was still weird and buggy […]
What master do you worship? Does your master have a name — God, Yahweh, Allah, Vishnu, Great Spirit, Creator, Father, Mother — or remain nameless? Is He/She/It an abstraction — love, light, power — or have you met? Has your master sat across a table from you and asked you to account for your transgressions? Did you stare your master in the eyes without blinking? The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson’s sixth feature film, is an epic, 70mm story of tiny details that plays out viscerally on the most complicated expanse imaginable: The human face. Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a snarling, […]
In the years since his death in 2000, the work of artist Mark Lombardi has seemed even more prescient and relevant than it had during his lifetime. Lombardi’s finely-etched drawings, filled with annotated lines, circles and squiggles, traced the flow of capital and political power between various government, private and underworld actors. His subjects were American foreign policy, crime, corruption and conspiracy, and his artwork consisted of not only his drawings but the investigative work required to create them. Lombardi’s drawings reference the drug wars, the BCCI scandal, Charles Keating and the savings and loan scandal, and Iran contra, but […]
Post Tenebras Lux, the film that won Mexican auteur Carlos Reygadas the Best Director award at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, has a story. But what it’s really about, first and foremost, isn’t narrative but texture: The grainy wetness of mud in an open field. The harsh bristle of matted dog fur. The wet steam of a tiled sauna. It’s also about sound, from the giggle of a boy being tickled by his father to the thunder of rugby cleats on a hard floor. Shot in a box-y 4:3 aspect ratio with intermittently hazy edges, Post Tenebras Lux (the title translates […]
Distribution veteran Paul Federbush has been named International Director, Feature Film Program, at the Sundance Institute. Through his work at a number of companies over the years, Federbush is well known in the independent community. Most recently, Federbush formed the distribution company Red Flag Releasing with Laura Kim, and previously he was Senior Vice President of Acquisitions and Production at Warner Independent, where he developed such projects as Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, and Hany Abu Assad’s Paradise Now. From the press release: In his new role, Federbush is responsible for the planning and execution of the international work of Sundance […]