NOTE: Between the time I began reading Neu Sex and beginning this piece and the time I finished it, Sasha Grey publicly announced her official retirement from the adult video industry. If there is a certain bit of schizophrenia that follows below, this might account for that. I’ve noticed a recurring theme in the criticisms that have awaited the publication of porn star/legit actress Sasha Grey’s first book of photography, Neü Sex: this book would never have been published if she wasn’t a hardcore porn performer; she’s whoring her body to gain publicity; there are so many other talented young […]
The Tribeca Film Festival announced today the films selected for the Spotlight, Cinemania, Tribeca/ESPN Sports Film Festival and Special Screenings sections for their 10th edition, which takes place April 20 – May 1. Some of the highlights include Sundance favorites Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest, The Guard starring Don Cheadle and Brendan Gleeson, and Higher Ground which is starred and directed by Vera Farmiga. There’s also Revenge of the Electric Car, the follow-up to Chris Paine‘s doc Who Killed the Electric Car?, and Tribeca regular Alex Gibney returns with Catching Hell. Chosen as the […]
For a docu-phile, attending the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam — with its nearly 300 films to choose from — feels less like being a kid in a candy store and more like being stuck in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory for a week and a half. In addition to being Europe’s biggest fest for nonfiction flicks IDFA boasts round the clock events. (Literally — if you were still revved at three in the morning after IDFA Dance Night a program called “Docs Around The Clock” continued until 9AM, breakfast included.) In between screenings at the Pathe de Munt or the […]
The sixth edition of the Eurasia International Film Festival (Sept 21-25) in Kazakhstan was a showcase of films from Central Asian and Turkish-speaking countries, but what particularly stood out in its various programs was the strong output of Kazakh films, a result of increasing government and private backing in project development, production and post-production facilities. High above Kazakhstan’s former capital and current cultural center Almaty, construction crews were racing to finish buildings for the 2011 Asian Winter Games in the foothills of the majestic Tien Shan mountain range. A country larger than Europe, Kazakhstan spans the oil-rich coast of the […]
When officials at the state-controlled Film Bureau levelled a five-year filmmaking ban on Chinese writer-director Lou Ye (Purple Butterfly) in 2006—a harsh reprimand for unveiling his politically charged drama Summer Palace at Cannes that year without their approval—he did what any determined artist would under the circumstances: he went home and made another feature, right under the nose of the censors. It was a brave and headstrong move, considering Lou’s previous encounters with the bureau. His debut feature, Weekend Lover (1995), was banned for two years, and Suzhou River (2000), a moody, Shanghai-set twist on Vertigo that won top honors […]
I was shocked and tremendously saddened to read at Indiewire this morning the news that film critic Peter Brunette died today of a heart attack while attending the Taorima Film Festival in Italy. Eugene Hernandez’s obituary recalls Brunette’s many accomplishments, including his books on Michelangelo Antonioni, Wong Kar-wai and, most recently, Michael Haneke, as well as his work as director of film studies at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. From an excerpt from a Wake Forest publication quoted by Hernandez: “People should watch art films for the same reason they should read Virginia Woolf as well as Tom Clancy,” […]
It was the aughts, and I went to (and made a few) movies. I did it mostly for pleasure, sometimes for distraction, often to see what others thought of the wild world around us; by the end, I did it simply because it was the only way I saw fit to make a living (sort of). It was a bell curve of sorts, a graph of this burgeoning obsession, this ecstatic object of study, of debate, of joy. By the middle of the decade, I was watching somewhere between three hundred and fifty and four hundred movies, old and new, […]
JUSTIN RICE IN WRITER-DIRECTOR BOB BYINGTON’S HARMONY AND ME. COURTESY HARMONY AND ME, LLC. From Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez to Bryan Poyser and the Zellner brothers, Austin is a hotbed of gifted directors, and Bob Byington now emerges from there as another talent to be reckoned with. A native of Lincoln, Nebraska, Byington studied at UC-Santa Cruz before going to graduate school at the University of Texas, where he used his American Studies major to indulge his newfound love for the movies. In 1995, he cut his teeth as a production assistant on the indie hit The Last Supper, […]
FERNANDO TIELVE AND DÉBORAH FRANÇOIS IN WRITER-DIRECTOR ALEXIS DOS SANTOS’ UNMADE BEDS. COURTESY IFC FILMS. If there’s a restlessness to the filmmaking of Alexis Dos Santos, you only have to look at the background of the young Argentinian writer-director to understand why. Born in Buenos Aires, Dos Santos relocated with his family to a small village in Patagonia when he was eight. He returned to the capital city to study Architecture at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, then moved on to study acting, and finally settled on filmmaking as his vocation. After completing his undergraduate studies at the Universidad del […]
ERIC NDORUNKUNDIYE AND JOSEF “JEFF” RUTAGENGWA IN DIRECTOR LEE ISAAC CHUNG’S MUNYURANGABO. COURTESY FILM MOVEMENT. For Lee Isaac Chung, filmmaking is linked to tackling challenges and obstacles above and beyond those inherent to the cinematic process. The son of Korean immigrants, Chung was born in Denver in 1978 and grew up on a farm in rural Arkansas. He attended Yale and was studying biology, on track to become a doctor, when he discovered arthouse movies. Rather than continue on his path to a medical career, Chung took a filmmaking class given by Michael Roemer and went on to earn an […]