I may be at Sundance, but it’s still cool to be able to embed Grant Gee’s Joy Division doc for you here, courtesy of Pitchfork. It’s live for one week.
Wake up, edit a few pieces for our standalone festival page, and then head to the registration office where I get my badge in about one minute’s time. Walk over to a press screening where I enter just as the movie is starting and get a seat. Later, meet some friends and snag a table for six on Main Street for dinner. Another press screening — this time I stroll in during the opening credits and easily score a good seat. Am I at Sundance? Yes, it is quieter this year. It feels like a lot less people are here. […]
Just a couple of days after I noted SAG’s response to the question of whether or not studios could acquire films made under their Guaranteed Completion Contracts, the guild has now decided to stop issuing these waivers to indie films entirely. Dave McNary reports in Variety: With a SAG strike becoming less likely, the Screen Actors Guild has announced it’s pulled the plug on offering waivers to indie film producers that would allow production to continue if there’s a work stoppage. SAG made the brief announcement Friday evening, suspending a program that’s covered over 800 productions in about a year. […]
I wrote for the FilmInFocus site a piece on Cary Fukunaga’s journey from Sundance (the festival in 2005 and Labs in 2006) to Sundance (this year’s Dramatic Competition with his film, Sin Nombre). Fukunaga was one of our “25 New Faces,” and we are big fans of his. In the piece, I recount his work at the Labs and hear from the actors about the way in which they worked with on the set.
Though little known outside her home country, Doris Dörrie is arguably one of the most important cultural voices in Germany, both in film and across several other cultural forms. Born in Hanover in 1955, she spent two years in the U.S. in the mid 70s studying drama, philosophy and psychology at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, and the New School in NYC. She then returned to Germany to attend the School of Television and Film in Munich, during which time she also worked as a film critic. Dörrie directed a series of shorts and worked on television […]
Mike Plante wrote about the DVD release of Chameleon Street in our Load & Play section in 2007. The film will screen at this year’s Sundance Film Festival in its Sundance Collection section. In Chameleon Street, the enigmatic Doug Street goes through a series of cons, sometimes to make money, sometimes to prove he can do more than what the world expects of him. In short time he goes from a simple extortion plot to complex impersonations, including as a reporter from Time, a Yale student, a lawyer and even a surgeon. Yes, a surgeon – who performed 36 successful […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 11:59 pm — Egyptian Theatre, Park City] The factor affecting cinema today most relevant to Grace is the prevalence of the filmmaking community’s faith in the shortcut. There’s an idea that we can make movies by checklist, that the way to write a successful script is by formula, and the way to make a successful film is by gimmickry or spectacle — that we just need to get in front of a camera and our computers will figure out the rest later. With Grace, we resisted that and put total faith in footwork. We just […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 9:30 pm — Temple Theatre, Park City] With Reporter (and my other films), I have done my best to ignore and avoid the modern forces that encourage the shrinking (and consequent speeding up) of cinematic storytelling. I just don’t see the good in trying to satiate the racing human mind and its desperate and diminishing attention span. I try instead to suffuse my films with the qualities of life and art that I most cherish but seem increasingly endangered: subtlety, silence, stillness, tenderness, sincerity and a spaciousness that allows the viewer (hopefully) to experience some […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 9:00 pm — Screening Room, Sundance Resort] Due to the daunting forces affecting independent cinema today, the tragedy that has become specialty distributors’ monumental struggle to find audiences, my instinct while directing Lymelife was to constantly push the envelope in every single scene we shot. If that meant tossing my written words out the window, so be it. I was determined to deliver a brutally honest and unsentimental depiction of an American family going through crisis in the late ’70s, a time of emotional and economic change which turns out to be relevant today. I […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 9:15 pm — Holiday Village Cinema IV, Park City] I think a lot about the small, small screens getting attention these days: iPods, cell phones, YouTube and MySpace. I spend an embarrassing amount of time thinking about the many strangers around the world, sitting in front of their Web cams, reaching out through their video yelps. I’m amazed by the matter-of-fact placement of their bodies in front of their computers, squarely there, waiting, presenting themselves, as if in front of a firing squad of voyeuristic strangers that may love them or shoot them. I obsess […]