Over at the Wholphin blog, Mike Plante has started a great, occasional series entitled “Lost Pets.” It’s his rescue-by-blog of worthy films from the last ten years that have drifted out of the public and industry consciousness. In his most recent entry he discusses Jennifer Shainin and Randy Walker’s Apart from That: As I think about those accolades for past films, I think about APART FROM THAT from just last year. I think about it as great American cinema, made by enthusiastic filmmakers and actors and crew. I think about how it looks and sounds great, not about how much […]
I didn’t know Daniel Robert Epstein personally, but I read and admired the smart, cinephilic and always entertaining interviews he’d do with film directors over at the Suicide Girls site and would often link to them here. Now, Epstein is reportedly dead at 31. There are few details, but click on the link for some remembrances from Missy Suicide and, at current count, over 300 other posters. And here is another appreciation from Edward Douglas at Coming Soon. Here’s an excerpt from one of Epstein’s favorite interviews — Alejandro Jodorowsky: Epstein: El Topo became a seminal movie after its release […]
[ Filmmaker continues its exclusive look inside the Sundance Directors and Screenwriters Labs. Every Monday Filmmaker Braden King [pictured] will be posting a weekly story on his experience at the Labs until its conclusion on June 28. His project is titled Here, co-written by himself and Dani Valent, and follows an American mapmaker charting the Armenian countryside who’s traveling with an adventurous landscape photographer revisiting her homeland. King has directed music videos and short films for Sonic Youth, Will Oldham and Yo La Tengo. He co-directed the film Dutch Harbor: Where The Sea Breaks Its Back.] Sunday, June 17, 2007 It’s […]
Scott Kirsner just passed along a few links that aren’t yet up on his great CinemaTech blog. The three clips linked below are Kirsner’s interview with indie film consultant (and sometime Filmmaker contributor) Peter Broderick just after the Cannes Film Festival. In part one Broderick and Kirsner discuss film and new technology. In part two they talk about the changing world of film financing. And part three is all about marketing and audience building. Peter has always been a thoughtful, ahead-of-the-curve commentator on independent film distribution, so I suggest you check these out on Google Video.
Metafiction collided with the law in a New York court this week as Antidote Films, the production company of producer Jeff Levy-Hinte (Thirteen, Laurel Canyon), sued Laura Albert, the woman behind the fictitious author JT Leroy and the novel Sarah, for fraud. Reports Alan Feuer in The New York Times: This intricate game of hide-and-seek with its interlocking issues of identity, fame, money and the healing power of art has now leapt from the media to what is arguably the culture’s second most obsessive arena: the courts. A film production company has sued Ms. Albert for fraud, saying that a […]
The Paul Thomas Anderson fansite Cigarettes and Red Vines has just posted the first trailer for Anderson’s latest, There Will Be Blood. It looks completely stunning and just the kind of change-up I want to see from Anderson right now. Can’t wait till this is released.
JEMAINE CLEMENT AND LOREN HORSLEY IN TAIKA WAITITI’S EAGLE VS SHARK. COURTESY MIRAMAX FILMS. To describe Taika Waititi as simply a filmmaker would be to do him a disservice. Just watching him as he talks – fiddling with anything and everything within reach, getting up and walking around the room, constantly active – it’s apparent that his inherent energy and enthusiasm make it impossible for him to focus on just one thing. He first rose to prominence in his native New Zealand as part of the comedy duo Humourbeast (along with Eagle vs Shark‘s leading man, Jemaine Clement), and was […]
In the Village Voice, Robert Shuster reports on artist Christian Tomaszweski, who has spent three years creating a series of installations directly inspired by David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. According to the article, they remake “the movie’s spaces, props, and moods, including the hallways outside Isabella Rossellini’s apartment, a scale-model view from the closet where naked Kyle MacLachlan witnesses gas-sucking Dennis Hopper commit a brutal rape, and that notorious severed ear.” According to a press release issued by New York’s The Sculpture Center, which is exhibiting the work through July 29: Since 2004, Christian Tomaszewski has been plunging into the entrails […]
Over at Movie City News, Larry Gross posts one of his occasional and quite brilliant critical essays, this time on those eight seconds of black at the end of The Sopranos. And although Gross sees in Sopranos creator David Chase echos of Tolstoy and Balzac and not the Joyce or Kafka of The Prisoner creator Patrick McGoohan, it’s occurred to me that the conclusion of Chase’s series has inspired the same level of audience vexation that the famous final episode of The Prisoner caused back in the ’60s. Gross’s article is long and fascinating in its consideration of the aesthetic […]
IFP announced today the ten films selected to participate in its third annual Narrative Rough Cut Lab, a national program connecting mentors and projects by first-time feature filmmakers before they are submitted to festivals. Taking place in New York City June 12 – 15, this year’s Lab includes a number of new initiatives, such as: the formation of an Advisory Board, expansion of the program from three to four days, and moving the program from September to June, thereby ensuring that participants will have time after working with their mentors to submit their strongest work possible prior to the submission […]