When I was asked by The Huffington Post to comment on New York movies premiering in Sundance, the first film that popped into my mind was Josh and Bennie Safdie’s Daddy Longlegs. Now, as you may know, I’m a big fan of the Safdie brothers, selecting Josh for our 25 New Faces for the film he directed, The Pleasure of Being Robbed in 2008. That picture is a delightfully freewheeling romance of sorts involving a young woman, played with depth and originality by Eleonore Hendricks, who casually steals, not out of maliciousness or for greed but simply because of a […]
According to Mike Fleming at Deadline Hollywood and The Hollywood Reporter, Lisa Cholodenko‘s much buzzed about The Kids Are All Right has been nabbed by Focus Features. Quiet at Park City after acquiring Hamlet 2 in ’08, Focus paid under $5 million for Cholodenko’s (Laurel Canyon) portrait of a modern family starring Annette Bening, Julianne Moore, and Mark Ruffalo, beating out Summit Entertainment, Fox Searchlight, Sony Pictures Classics and The Weinstein Company. Read more about the backstage deal making at the Los Angeles Times blog.
Sundance documentaries have developed a strong track record. Hits out of recent festivals include Man on Wire, The Cove and We Live in Public, each of which captures an element of society and finds the human connection within. This year, however, the human connection in some of the more talked about nonfiction entries is highly suspect. At the center it all: Banksy. Exit Through the Gift Shop, the alleged directorial debut of the anonymous street British street artist, wound up with a surprise slot in the Spectrum section of the festival. Banksy’s enigmatic career and life beyond the film world […]
From Sundance’s YouTube page: Recently, Sundance Film Festival brought a group of independent film producers together for an informal discussion. This is what they talked about. Join Christine Vachon, Ted Hope, Thomas Woodrow, Liz Watts, and Jonathan Schwartz.
Ken Waldrop’s His & Hers is a documentary focusing on 70 women from the Irish Midlands, arranged chronologically from age 0 to 90, telling small stories about their lives. Irish Midlands women, being funny, sarcastic, charming and warm, are good subjects; Waldrop knew that because he grew up the son of one of very funny and sarcastic Irish Midlands mother. He constructed the film to mirror his own mother’s life; the women speak of their marriages in their twenties, their sons, and, finally, their husbands and these men’s deaths. Some of the interviews are about tiny things (who controls the […]
I took a break from Sundance coverage to follow the Apple iPad announcement on Twitter and to check out Engadget’s live stream. For all the talk about the iPad (which some consider to be an unfortunate name…) saving old media and print, the focus of Steve Jobs’s presentation was solidly on the device as a large-screen multi-media device. Games from Electronic Arts were unveiled, a YouTube HD native app was demo’d and new versions of iTunes and IWorks showed scaled-up, enhanced versions of those apps. (Filmmakers, take note of all of this…) And, yes, in the middle of the presentation […]
If you’ve been following the videos we’ve posted here in the New Breed series by Sabi Pictures, you’ve by now recognized that a rhetorical storyline around the issue of alternative distribution is being constructed. Here’s the latest, entitled “Seeking the Answers, Part 2.” Scroll back through the previous posts for the others in the series. The official word: SABI filmmakers Zak Forsman and Kevin K. Shah move away from identifying the questions toward some possible answers that may, in fact, lead to the solutions we seek. Insights from Linas Phillips (Bass Ackwards), Jon Reiss and Brian Newman are fleshed out […]
As a history lesson, Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith’s enthralling new documentary, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, is as solid as a textbook, stitching together old broadcast footage, first-person testimony, tart excerpts from the Nixon White House tapes, and noirish recreations into riveting, revelatory political drama. The name “Daniel Ellsberg” probably doesn’t trigger the same flurry of associations as Deep Throat, the shadowy antihero of the Watergate scandal, but it should: An ex-Marine, former assistant to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, and highly respected analyst at the Rand Corporation, Ellsberg leaked a […]
Galt Niederhoffer is no stranger to Sundance, having produced films that won awards there beginning in 1997, when Morgan J. Freeman’s Hurricane Streets won the Audience Award. As a founding member of Plum Pictures, one of New York’s most active independent film production companies, she has produced over a dozen films, including Grace is Gone, Dedication, Prozac Nation, Lonesome Jim, The Winning Season, The Baxter and After.Life. Niederhoffer grew up in New York, one of six daughters of a squash champion-turned-hedge fund maverick, in a rambling, eccentrically decorated house. In her first novel, A Taxonomy of Barnacles, Niederhoffer may have […]
Here’s the third of our New Breed videos on new distribution ideas and paradigms at the Sundance Film Festival. The intro: SABI filmmakers Zak Forsman and Kevin K. Shah move away from identifying the questions toward some possible answers that may, in fact, lead to the solutions we seek. Insights from Linas Phillips (Bass Ackwards), Habib Azar (Armless), Dan Mirvish, and Brian Newman are fleshed out with more thoughts from the pre-Filmmaker Summit roundtable. NEW BREED PARK CITY – Seeking the Answers, Part 1 from Sabi Pictures on Vimeo.