The Sundance Film Festival has announced their films in competition for the 2008 edition. Leafing through the line-up you’ll notice there are many first-timers (including DP Ellen Kuras) in this year’s bunch. Though there are a few familiar names: Alex Gibney, Jonathan Levine, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. There’s also a doc on the great Hunter Thompson and an adaptation of Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk‘s novel, Choke. The full list titles are below. The festival will run Jan. 17-27. Documentary Competition AN AMERICAN SOLDIER (Director and Screenwriter: Edet Belzberg)Uncle Sam wants you! A compelling exploration of army recruitment in […]
As a filmmaker, Oscar winner Jessica Yu is smart, adventurous, and utterly fearless. You’d have to be to make a talking-head documentary inspired by the 5th century B.C. playwright Euripides (an idea proposed by the Carr Foundation) and then decide to outfit key scenes with wooden rod puppets speaking ancient Greek. But her new film, Protagonist, which was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival and gets a theatrical release November 30 from IFC Films, is not high-concept marionette theater, it’s a fascinating investigation of what drives passionate people to acts of radical self-negation—and of […]
IFP‘s 17th annual Gotham Awards were handed out last night at Brooklyn’s Steiner Studios with Sean Penn‘s Into The Wild winning the Best Feature prize. The other winners include Michael Moore‘s Sicko for Best Doc; Best Ensemble Cast went to two films, Sidney Lumet‘s Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, and Kasi Lemmons‘s Talk To Me; director Craig Zobel walked away with the Breakthough Director prize, his debut film The Great World of Sound received three Gotham Award nominations; Juno‘s Ellen Page won Breakthrough Actor and Ronald Bronstein‘s Frownland won The Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You […]
2008 Film Independent’s Spirit Awards were announced this morning with I’m Not There, Juno, The Savages and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly leading the way with four nominations including Best Feature. The full list of nominees are below. Awards will be handed out the day before the Oscars, Feb. 23. BEST FEATURE The Diving Bell and the ButterflyI’m Not ThereJunoA Mighty HeartParanoid Park BEST DIRECTORTodd Haynes, I’m Not ThereTamara Jenkins, The SavagesJason Reitman, JunoJulian Schnabel, The Diving Bell and the ButterflyGus Van Sant, Paranoid Park BEST MALE LEADPedro Castaneda, August EveningDon Cheadle, Talk To MePhilip Seymour Hoffman, The SavagesFrank […]
When I was a kid I remember going to see Apocalypse Now at D.C.’s incredible Uptown theater and being handled a program when I entered. It was a black-and-white book, about sixteen pages, with stills from the film and commentary about it. It was a cool thing to get at a movie and I still have it. So it was interesting to read over at Ray Pride’s Movie City Indie that the Weinstein Company are doing something similar for the release of Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There. Pride quotes the press release: The Weinstein Company is pleased to announce that […]
Here’s a collection of links to some things I’ve found interesting in the last week but which, because of the holiday, I wasn’t able to post here as their own separate entries. Filmmaker AJ Schnack has written an excellent post on the yearly disappointment that is the Academy Award doc shortlist. (For the complete list, click here). Typically, the Academy overlooked the most artistically risk-taking films, movies like Manda Bala and Billy the Kid, and went, mostly, for worthy films dealing with serious subjects that also happened to subscribe to long accepted methods of documentary practice. (Nominees included such strong […]
The Financial Times reports on a new anti-piracy and filesharing proposal being endorsed by President Nicholas Sarkozy. An excerpt from the piece by Ben Hall: Internet users in France who download music and films without paying for them could find their web access shut down by a government body, under a ground-breaking industry agreement backed by President Nicolas Sarkozy. The plan, which Mr Sarkozy is to endorse in a speech on Friday, will put France at the forefront of the battle against internet piracy with a three-strikes-and-you-are-out policy against repeat offenders. The proposed enforcement body would use information collected by […]
Everyone here at Filmmaker wishes our readers a happy and safe Thanksgiving. Thanks for reading us this past year and see you after the holiday.
STEVEN C. STEWART AND CARRIE SZLASA IN DIRECTOR CRISPIN HELLION GLOVER’S IT IS FINE! EVERYTHING IS FINE. Put simply, Crispin Glover is not from here: there is an otherworldly quality to the actor-turned-director’s appearance, manner and aesthetics that make even his friend and mentor David Lynch seem pretty normal. The son of actors Bruce and Marie Glover, he came to prominence in the mid-1980s with performances in Back to the Future (1985) and River’s Edge (1986). Very much treading his own path, he combined a career playing eccentrics on screen with painting, writing books, like Oak Mot (1991) and Rat […]
Mitchell Lichtenstein‘s wildly entertaining film Teeth will finally get a theatrical release in February after being one of the most talked about films (and scaring the hell out of ever male who saw it) at Sundance this past January. Here’s the trailer, which just surfaced on the net over the weekend. Learn more about the film here.