Back in the day Filmmaker took note of Peter Christian Hall’s independent drama Delinquent, and more recently we’ve followed his move into fiction writing. Now, film and literature are combining for the promotion of his new novel, American Fever, a dystopic tale about avian flu. With book trailers a requirement for new books, Hall has decided to let fans create one for American Fever — and win $1,000 in the process. What’s cool is that filmmakers can read the book for free and score their trailer to original music by Gang of Four’s Andy Gill. From the site of Hall’s […]
Deeply shrouded in mystery, the election of the Pope is a strange amalgam of modern democracy and ancient ritual. It is also a circumstance that seems ripe for farce. At least Nanni Moretti, perhaps Italy’s most revered contemporary filmmaker, seems to think so. His newest film, We Have a Pope, which premiered last year in Cannes as Habemus Papam, is an often funny, sneakily moving investigation of the Vatican’s less-than-infallible process of choosing the divine, and one man’s rejection of his supposedly divine calling. Starring Michel Piccoli as a would-be Pope who disappears after his election and Moretti himself as […]
Filmmaker and Filmmaker contributor Alix Lambert directed the new Shearwater video, which just went online. It’s from their new Animal Joy album, and, appropriately, there is animal imagery. I asked Alix about the origins of the video’s concept, and she emailed back: When I first listened to the song, I just wrote down the lyrics that most jumped out at me. The bloody nose became a thread that I wanted to go through the film. Jonathan wanted to include Nicholas Kahn’s wonderful costumes, which I was thrilled about and from there I felt like there should be some kind of […]
The 2011 winner of the Filmmaker-sponsored Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You IFP Gotham Award, Grover Babcock and Blue Hadaegh’s Scenes of a Crime is a powerful social justice documentary that uses its feature-length format as its most powerful argument for the innocence of Adrian Thomas, a New York man currently inprisoned for the shaking death of his infant son. Over the course of the film’s 88 minutes, we go beyond the soundbite, watching long stretches of Thomas’s interview by two detectives — a grilling that resulted in a confession that specialists in police interrogation believe was […]
Second #4418, 73:38 At Ben’s, at last. The woman, the doll, and the painting above them—framed by the green (velvet?) curtains—telegraph Frank’s entrance. They are a tightly composed grouping in an open frame, whose curtains anticipate the vaudeville show which is about to unfold, complete with Ben’s lip-synched performance of “In Dreams,” some stock violence, and a running gag that features Jeffrey as the butt of a joke he does not understand. Ben’s apartment is an anarchy of crossed signals and mental jump cuts. The year after Blue Velvet’s release, Robert Coover’s story collection A Night at the Movies, or, […]
In 2009, I attended the CineVegas Film Festival, where Doug Tirola’s documentary All In: The Poker Movie had its world premiere. While there, I briefly met the affable Tirola, and was pleased for him when, at the fest’s awards ceremony, the film was given the Best Documentary prize. However, a distribution deal — which seemed likely given the fact that poker’s popularity was at an all-time high in 2009 — did not materialize, and it has taken three years for All In to arrive in theaters, now released by Tirola’s company, 4th Row Films. When I saw All In on […]
New Directors/New Films is known for bringing some of the freshest, boldest films to light, and not necessarily just for New York audiences. Arthouse theaters around the country often make selections from this well-regarded festival’s programming. The relatively high-brow co-presentation of the The Museum of Modern Art and the The Film Society of Lincoln Center is not, however, generally considered a place to discover new genre film, despite its reputation for supporting ballsy young upstarts. Yet perhaps the increasing cultural and cinematic significance of sufficiently well-made genre films is now keeping them from being overlooked by the festival that saves […]
One of the United Kingdom’s most lauded stylists, Terence Davies has carefully crafted a body of work that fits squarely into the class-conscious, post-neorealist tradition of British cinema, working without much fanfare or regard for the exigencies of commercial filmmaking that the age and his stature would seem to demand. Now in his mid-sixties, Davies has in the last 30 years quietly established himself as one of the finest British filmmakers of his generation. He is not a cinephile and his lugubrious, sublimely photographed and insidiously hard-hearted narratives — such as 1988’s Distant Voices, Still Lives, which will screen as […]
I am not cut out for big festivals…film or otherwise. Let’s take away the fact that large crowds disturb my calm, on top of that I am a person of extremes. I either jump in all the way, or abstain from the activity entirely. Take a person like that and just feed them beer and films…and you get the worn-out mess that is myself. Two days after the experience I’m still sick, tired, and working hard to gain a foothold on what the festival meant to me and what it means to our industry. Industry is a great place to […]
Becoming a good writer is not just about writing well — it’s about rewriting well. I know plenty of promising writers who positively fail at that essential skill. They are unable to move beyond their first drafts, to process feedback, and to shape their own raw material into production-worthy scripts. This summer a resource for the self-aware among this set is being offered by Columbia University. Columbia’s Film School chair Ira Deutchman recently announced the Screenplay Revision Workshop, which is open to all. From Ira’s blog at Tribeca: In all my years in the film business and my travels around […]