Still not sure what to get your comic-book-obsessed little brother? Forget to pick up something for mom that satisfies her cinematic blood lust? The following gifts are Lady Vengeance approved, and most arrive just in time for December 25th. For the Low-Brow Art Lover: Crazy4Cult: Cult Movie Art (Gallery 1988/Kevin Smith, $25) The currently out-of-fashion but undeniably hard-working Kevin Smith has teamed up with the LA-based Gallery 1988 to collect the best in good, pulpy, sometimes downright dirty artwork inspired by cult films. The aesthetic style and subject matter is fairly diverse, meaning there’s something for everyone. […]
Below is the press release announcing the projects for the Sundance January Screenwriters Lab. Los Angeles, CA — Sundance Institute has selected 12 projects for its annual January Screenwriters Lab, an immersive, five-day (January 13-18) writers’ workshop at the Sundance Resort in Utah. Participating independent screenwriters – drawn from around the world, including the United States, China, South Africa, and Europe – will have the opportunity to work intensely on their feature film scripts with the support of established writers in an environment that encourages innovation and creative risk-taking. Michelle Satter, Director of the Sundance Institute Feature Film Program, said, […]
A few years back, the Zurich Film Festival burst onto the map, but for all the wrong reasons. In 2009, Roman Polanski, en route to the festival to receive a lifetime achievement award, was apprehended shortly after landing on Swiss soil. He was never extradited to the United States to stand trial for his mid ’70s sexual escapades with the then underaged Samatha Geimer in Jack Nicholson’s Hollywood Hills home, and now he’s free, having returned for the seventh edition of Zurich’s increasingly important film festival. He screened his “film memoir,” which I simply loathed for its canned, staged quality, […]
Filmmaker (The Mark of Cain, Bayou Blue) and Filmmaker contributor Alix Lambert is in production on Mentor, a documentary about teen bullying and suicide in Mentor, Ohio. Here is the just-posted trailer. Mentor Trailer from Alix Lambert on Vimeo.
On Monday we published producer Karin Chien’s open letter to the Producers Guild of America about the exclusion of her feature, Circumstance, from awards eligibility due to it being filmed in the Farsi language. Here is their response Producers Guild of America response to Karin Chien’s open letter: We appreciate the passion and commitment behind responses such as Karin Chien’s, who has every reason to be proud of her work and the acclaim her film is receiving. Unfortunately, the Producers Guild has not recognized foreign language films as eligible for its awards because of the unique position the Guild holds […]
The rapid growth of methamphetamine use in rural America has been unabated for years now, but it has just now found its definitive cinematic dramatization in David Pomes’ bittersweet crime thriller Cook County. Contemplating the final weeks in the life of an east Texas drug din as its proprietor spins out of control, Pomes’ film details the dark underbelly of addiction within an entire community that silently affirms the control meth has taken over many of its citizen’s lives. Meditating on the particularly harsh affect the drug has had on a family through three generations, Cook County is at heart […]
As one of Filmmaker‘s “Best of 2011” posts, Dan Schoenbrun hailed Louie as one of the year’s best TV shows. And now, as the year closes, the comedian has launched one of the year’s best DIY distribution and marketing efforts. As John Biggs wrote at Techcrunch, Louis CK is offering his Live at the Beacon Theater concert film for $5 as a DRM-free download or stream. And while the Hollywood studios are currently fighting piracy by borrowing a page from the firewalls of authoritarian regimes (see the SOPA legislation currently before Congress), C.K. is taking a more human approach. He […]
The following is an open letter producer Karin Chien (Circumstance, The Exploding Girl) is addressing to the Producers Guild of America. An Open Letter to the Producers Guild of America. Recently, a film I produced with Melissa Lee and Maryam Keshavarz, CIRCUMSTANCE, was submitted for the Producer’s Guild of America’s awards consideration. CIRCUMSTANCE is a hard film to categorize: it’s a story of teenage love and personal freedom set in Iran, filmed in Beirut, edited in Chile, finished in France, and financed primarily by U.S. sources. And the film is in Farsi. We knew we were a long shot to […]
Jared Flesher is a self-taught filmmaker. He shot his first feature-length documentary, The Farmer and The Horse on a Canon consumer camcorder, shooting and editing the entire movie himself. With the success of that movie under his belt, he moved on to his second documentary, Sourlands, which he just finished shooting and hopes to complete by June of 2012. For this movie he decided to make the switch to a larger sensor camera, and chose the Panasonic GH2. In the first part of this interview, Jared talks about why he made the movie, and his experience making the switch to […]
Welcome to part two in a series highlighting some of the most innovative, groundbreaking TV of 2011. This installment’s focus is HBO’s wildly ambitious and equally expensive fantasy series, Game of Thrones. Booker Prize winning author Salmon Rushdie recently had some not so flattering words for Thrones. In a recent interview with Haaretz, he said: “Most novels published are bad novels, most plays put on are bad plays, most movies that come out are bad movies and that is also true of TV. Nineteen times out of 20 you fall asleep. There was a series called Game of Thrones which […]