The Sundance Film Festival is posting a series of “Meet the Artists” videos on its YouTube page in which ’10 filmmakers discuss the films they’ll be premiering there in three weeks. Here’s Hesher director Mark Ruffalo and screenwriter Christopher Thornton. Others up include Davis Guggenheim and Diane Bell.
To try to recall your favorite films from an entire decade (and then to limit them to only ten titles) is to immediately set yourself up for uncertainty and ridicule: first off because it’s hard enough to remember what you saw ten days ago, much less ten years ago, and secondly because to limit the list to ten is to leave hundreds of excellent films out, titles that you’ll undoubtedly get bludgeoned to death with through later feedback (“You blithering idiot~pretentious snob~Hollywood tool! How could you leave out Judd Apatow~Jean-Luc Godard~Abbas Kiarostami~McG,” read the heated responses to already posted lists). […]
Concluding a decade in which specialty film distribution boomed and busted, and in which the identity and composition of filmed entertainment itself was challenged, perhaps it’s not surprising that David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, the ultimate unstable cinematic text, wound up on top of Filmmaker Magazine’s Editor’s Poll of the Best American Independent Films of the ’00s. Begun as television pilot but finally assembled as a feature according to the unconscious urgings of its creator, Mulholland Drive is a dyspeptic musing on the cinematic dream machine, one that launched an actual movie star (Naomi Watts) while also serving notice that the […]
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, […]
Hollywood can compete, but the pirates are always fast on their heels….
Topping the Korean box office is no small feat for a first-time filmmaker, given the perennial offerings of sassy romantic comedies and vivid, attention-grabbing genre flicks from this nation’s impressive stable of film artists. It’s even more improbable when you’ve made a no-frills documentary (not so popular in South Korea) for less than $150,000 about the relationship between an elderly farmer and his aged ox. But a few months after it hit the market at the 2008 Pusan International Film Festival, where it won the best documentary award, Lee Chung-ryoul’s Old Partner became one of the most successful indies in […]
I and the Filmmaker blog received a nice holiday present with Ted Hope’s “21 Brave Thinkers of Truly Free Film 2009” list. But you’re already reading this blog, so you don’t need to know about me. Click on the link to check out the rest of the list. I am happy to be in such good company, which includes various forward thinking filmmakers, producers, new media distribution types, and even a few Filmmaker contributors. From Ted’s intro: Frankly though, I think anyone that commits to creating film, particularly independent film, and specifically artist driven truly free film, is truly brave… […]
Back in 2003 we selected Stefan Nadelman for our “25 New Faces” on the basis of his excellent short, Terminal Bar. I hadn’t kept up with Nadelman to see what he’s been doing since until I came across this recent video for the band Ramona Falls. Check in out — it has some of the same antique beauty as that earlier, amazing short.
Best wishes to all of our readers — hope you all have happy and safe holidays, and see you later on the weekend or early next week back here on the blog. Experience Mobile Mobile from James Théophane Jnr on Vimeo.
A couple of quick links here. First, congratulations to critic (and occasional Filmmaker contributor) Karina Longworth, who becomes the new film editor at the L.A. Weekly. I’ll miss seeing her here in New York City, but I’m happy that I’ll be able to read her regularly via the Weekly. She replaces Scott Foundas, who became the Associate Program Director at Lincoln Center. Second, a link to Filmmaker columnist Lance Weiler’s always essential the Workbook Project, which is just a little bit more essential this week with its “2009 in Tech and Entertainment” podcast. If you want a crash course on […]