Tiny Furniture director Lena Dunham, one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of 2009,” will write, direct the pilot for, and co-executive produce a new HBO series exec produced by Judd Apatow and Jenni Konner, reports Nellie Andreeva at Deadline Hollywood. The piece says the series “is expected to feature autobiographical elements” From Deadline: “Lena has a unique, truthful comic voice,” Apatow said. “I am excited to work with her and learn from her.” Konner said she was “obsessed with working with Lena” since HBO’s entertainment president Sue Naegle gave her a copy of Tiny Furniture. “She has a staggeringly […]
Ten years ago, François Ozon’s dark, Hitchcock-tinged melodrama See the Sea caught the attention of American film critics. The New York Times’ Janet Maslin marked him as “an impressive new filmmaker with a flair for implicit mayhem.” In the 12 features since then, Ozon has expressed his mayhem in various genres (musicals, fairy tales, magical realism, period romances, etc.), with different cinematic influences (Chabrol, Fassbinder, Renoir, Pasolini, etc.) and in a range of production scales. But central to all his films is a deep sense of the essentially conflicted nature of emotional relations, be it the comic sadomasochism of Water […]
Here are a few articles, links and videos that caught my eye this week: The shape of documentaries to come may be revealed by Prison Valley, which won the second FRANCE24-Radio France International Web Documentary Award last week. From France 24’s article about the new media doc by David Dufresne and Philippe Brault: Created by David Dufresne and Philippe Brault, the striking multimedia production takes viewers to the heart of Canon City, “a distant place that is home to 36,000 souls and 13 prisons.” Produced by the French company Upian and distributed by Arte.tv, Prison Valley, is an interactive journey […]
I loved Jeff Mizushima’s delicate, entirely charming, and vaguely emo-ish Etienne! when I saw it last year after its CineVegas premiere. I wound up putting Jeff in our “25 New Faces” simply because the film’s sensibility seemed so different to me. I also loved its formally-bold second-half narrative shift and director Caveh Zahedi’s last-reel appearance in a scene that could have been taken from a Peter Handke novel. The film receives its East Coast premiere at the Brooklyn gastropub theater reRun beginning tomorrow for a one-week run. You can reserve tickets here. Here’s what I wrote last year: Writer-director Jeff […]
Not many first-time independent filmmakers land a coveted spot in the Sunday arts section of The New York Times and an interview on The Leonard Lopate Show. But 33-year-old Lixin Fan, a Chinese-born Canadian immigrant who splits his time between Montreal and Beijing, has generated a lot of interest among editors at major dailies and business publications alike for his documentary Last Train Home, a film about the annual New Year’s pilgrimage of 130 million migrant workers from Guangzhou province to their homes and seldom-seen families in the rural provinces. China’s status as an economic powerhouse regularly makes front-page […]
Producer Gavin Polone’s presumably ex- current assistant has made one of those Xtranormal videos where you submit text and use the service to make a robotically-voiced animated short. This was sent to me this week by a friend who attested to its validity, and now, Nikki Finke gets confirmation from Polone (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Zombieland) himself. He is quoted, “Sadly, it isn’t altogether untrue. People seem to like it. Maybe it will inspire an HBO series about me?” Some enterprising curator should assemble the best of these Xtranormal videos. They’d make an oddly compelling full-evening show.
“I wanted to be a dancer,” says Fred Astaire, wheezing out a tune on a harmonica with his gangly frame draped casually over a medical couch. “Till I was psychologized.” Astaire plays doctor—a shrink, of all things—in Mark Sandrich’s Carefree (1953), a little-known screwball comedy gem as antic and goofy as Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby (1938) with dance. And what dance! Accompanied by an Irving Berlin score, Astaire and Rogers are at the top of their game in the tale of a therapist (Astaire) who must find the root of the commitment phobia that plagues his new patient (Rogers). […]
Here are some links that caught my eye this week. The Workbook Project has a new Transmedia Talk Podcast. Topics include “The Web is Dead,” Foursquare, and the Transmedia panels at SXSW 2011. Also at the Workbook Project, Mark Harris on why he shot his forthcoming The Lost Children fiction feature as a doc. Sarah Kessler at Mashable: “New Neutrality — Seven Worst-Case Scenarios.” There’s been a lot of interest in NYC writer Tao Lin over at The Rumpus. I haven’t read him, so I can’t comment. But here’s an intro at Salon that also discusses the new ways he’s […]
Al Pacino, Robert Young, Joe Berlinger & Bruce Sinofsky, Cheryl Dunye, Curtis Charm, Nina Menkes, Alexander Payne, Steve Buscemi, Eric Bogosian and Nick Cassavetes were all featured in our Fall, 1996 issue, an edition that was dominated by one feature: our “50 Most Important Independent Films.” What makes one film more “important” than another? Here’s a portion of my intro: When we sent a letter out to several dozen critics, curators, distributors, and producers asking them to pick the most important American independent films of all time, we received a slew of responses ranging from the excited to the confused. […]
Here is part two of Rachel Libert’s diaries from the Sundance Labs. Read part one here. The busloads of people arriving at the Sundance Resort for the Creative Producing Summit signaled the end of the Creative Producing Lab. Twenty narrative producers, twenty documentary producers and dozens of high-level industry representatives are sequestered in the privacy of the Wasatch Mountains. We’re participating in an information marathon. We are a think tank in which our collective brainpower evaluates the industry and its future. For the Documentary Creative Producing Lab fellows there’s a palpable shift from our tight knit group discussions about the […]