I’ve been checking out a couple of new, much-buzzed about online apps and tools this week — RockMelt and Auditorium. I’ll post my thoughts on RockMelt after I play with it a bit more. As for Aweditorium,, which is free for the iPad, I need to spend more than 20 minutes with it. But my first reaction is that it is kind of cool and also noteworthy for trying to do something different in the music discovery space. In film, we talk a lot about discovery, but this mostly boils down to discussions of social network sharing, recommendation engines, etc. […]
The Nation Institute and the Fertel Foundation have partnered to launch the Ridenhour Documentary Film Prize, to be awarded to a film that embodies values of truth-telling, protecting the public interest, promoting social justice, or articulating the qualities of a more just society. The deadline is December 1, and the prize, which includes a $10,000 stipend, will be awarded this Fall. From the press release: October 8, New York City – The Nation Institute and The Fertel Foundation announced today the launch of the Ridenhour Documentary Film Prize. This new prize, which carries a $10,000 stipend, will be awarded alongside […]
One of the instant observations you take from spending time in Amazonas is the love this state in the rainforest has for the arts. It seems every month it’s kicking off a jazz, dance, opera or film festival. And most of them, including the film fest, admittance is free (the opera fest tix are $1.50). The State Council of Culture has spearheaded this movement not only in Amazonas’ capital city, Manaus, but throughout the state. Musicians, dancers and filmmakers travel to communities throughout the state year-round to perform and also give workshops only asking for room and board in return. […]
While introducing War Don Don at last night’s Stranger Than Fiction, SXSW programmer Janet Pierson said that while many great documentaries were submitted to last year’s festival, there were few with the “clarity” of Rebecca Richman Cohen’s directorial debut. It was a sentiment later echoed by Raphaela Neihausen, the executive director of Stranger than Fiction who praised Richman Cohen for her ability to “break down a complex issue” but still keep the “nuance.” Three years in the making, War Don Don follows the UN Special trial of Issa Sesay, one of the leaders of the RUF, an incredibly violent rebel […]
Acclaimed documentarian Ondi Timoner has a knack for picking wildly unpredictable subjects and then going all in, detailing the drama of self-destruction from an insider’s vantage point. Both Anton Newcombe, the fiery frontman of cult-rock mainstays The Brian Jonestown Massacre and Josh Harris, dotcom entrepreneur and Internet stunt artist, were brilliant, fascinating personalities dancing along the edge of personal and professional annihilation in Timoner’s previous Sundance Grand Jury Prize–winning films, Dig! (2004) and We Live in Public (2009). So one imagines the intrepid documentarian hunting around for another larger-than-life character to hitch her cameras to, a mad scientist, perhaps, who’s […]
The 7th annual Amazonas Film Festival Brazil opened last night with a mixture of culture and cinema in the heart of the Amazon Rainforest. The festival kicked off with a screening of Lucy Walker‘s Waste Land, which looks at Brazilian artist Vik Muniz who uses the garbage from a landfill in San Paulo to transform the lives of some of the people who work there. But for those of us who came over from the States it was the setting of the screening that was more eye catching: the Teatro Amazonas, where the opening scene from Fitzcarraldo was shot. One […]
So much depends upon… the position in which one reclines. Seated next to me in the elite section of a flight to Doha, Qatar, an Indian financial wizard with rings on each slim finger nodded and looked thoughtfully out the plane window. Across the aisle, Harvey Weinstein, an overstuffed teddy bear in Qatar Airways pajamas, turned another page of “My Week with Marilyn” and growled for the stewardess. Upon touchdown, a phalanx of young stewards ushered a group of remarkably well-rested travelers into private cars and whisked us away to the second annual Doha Tribeca Film Festival. Could any film […]
This blog post is part of the Requiem 102 experiment: on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, different writers are each looking at the film through the prism of specific frames, one from each minute of the film. I’ve been assigned minute four. Follow all the responses here. For me, the most memorable scene in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream is not in the movie but in the script. I had read it before the film’s pre-production, and the scene in which dealers line up for a new shipment of drugs after […]
Starring True Blood‘s Ryan Kwanten, Red Hill is a suspenseful modern-day Western that uses Australia’s dramatic and vast landscapes to stage a drama of frontier justice with an antagonist right out of Halloween-style horror film. Kwanten plays a city cop assigned to a small outback town where he intends to raise a baby with his very pregnant wife. But his move coincides with the escape of Jimmy Conway (Tom E. Lewis) from the local jail. The indigenous Jimmy was wronged years ago, and his brand of frontier justice consists of non-stop mayhem. In my conversation with Hughes, he spoke about […]
Damien Chazelle’s Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench is a throw back and perhaps a harbinger of things to come, a bebop tinged DIY mumblemusical that, despite its New Wavesque 16mm B&W aesthetic, is very much a movie of this time and moment. It concerns a relatively young, black and talented trumpet player named Guy and his would be, perhaps still his lover, a white grad student named Madeline (the oddly alluring Desiree Garcia). Played by real life Boston jazz scene leading light Jason Palmer, Guy engages in a series of pseudo-romances, bemoans the marginality of the relatively esoteric Jazz […]