PARKER POSEY IN HAL HARTLEY’S FAY GRIM. COURTESY MAGNOLIA PICTURES. For a period in the 1990s, Hal Hartley was one of a group of directors, along with Jim Jarmusch and John Sayles, who really defined what American indie filmmaking was all about. Hartley’s Trust (1990), Simple Men (1992) and Amateur (1994), set in the suburbs of Long Island but seen from Hartley’s unique perspective, were idiosyncratic, literate films which set the bar high for other writer-directors aiming to portray contemporary American life. Since the mid-90s, though, Hartley has broadened his focus, both thematically and geographically: Flirt (1995) told love stories […]
Today Anthony Kaufman revives memories of Cannes past with the below clip of Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovsky being presented with prizes by Orson Welles: … which gives me an excuse to post an amazing Tarkovsky shot from The Mirror. And then this brilliant sequence from Bresson’s Pickpocket.
If you’re used to checking out this blog and not the main page, surf over there for Nick Dawson’s interview with Hal Hartley, whose Fay Grim opens today. An excerpt: I’m one of those people who doesn’t think the world has changed any at all since 9/11. It just seemed to be almost inevitable, something like that. That’s one of the reasons why the backstory of Fay Grim goes all the way back into the ’80s. I was trying to sketch out the continuity of all this hanky-panky between the security agencies of the world. I think you’re right in […]
As guitar player for the band Interpol, Carlos D must be prepping for the release of their third album, Our Love to Admire, in July. But, as Pitchfork reports, he is also seriously and quite publicly pursuing a career as a film composer. He’s got a separate site to promote his scoring skills where you can hear what he would have done had he scored The Devil Wears Prada and Ice Age 2. From the bio on the site: Carlos is an aspiring film and tv composer in addition to playing bass and keyboards in Interpol. His understanding of harmonic […]
Over at the main page check out Howard Feinstein’s just-posted interview with Wong Kar-wai about his My Blueberry Nights, the opening night film at Cannes.
Via Movie City News comes this fascinating story from BBC news: An Austrian filmmaker has come up with a novel way of avoiding the costs of creating a movie – by making her film entirely from images of real life captured by CCTV cameras. Called Faceless, the film is the project of London-based Manu Luksch, who is both the star and director and describes it as a “science fiction fairy tale”. By taking CCTV of herself and blocking out the faces of anyone else captured on it, she created a story set in the future, in the “faceless world” – […]
It’s a rainy mid-day in late August — the wetness welcome, following an intolerably hot week, even by New York City summer standards. At night during that unpleasant spell the postmodern auteur Wong Kar-wai — the master of lush visuals and unpredictable soundtracks, the absolute perfectionist concerned with memory, loss, loneliness, and the subjectivity of time — had been shooting scenes downtown on the West Side of Manhattan, on SoHo’s funky Grand Street, for My Blueberry Nights, his first movie in English and the out-of-competition opening night presentation at this year’s Cannes Film Festival (The Weinstein Company will release the […]
The long-running French film journal Cahiers du Cinema recently launched an online English-language edition. In the current issue there’s a provocative article by the editors entitled “12 Objectives for Cinema in France” that I’ve been meaning to comment on. Written before Sarkozy’s victory — a prospect Cahiers clearly considered when drafting the article — the piece is interesting for what it says to some of us American fans of French cinema as well as for its implications on our own American indie film. (For more on the possible repercussions of Sarko’s win and what his promised “break with the past” […]
Thanks to the folks over at Screengrab for the nice words about the new issue of Filmmaker. (And also for catching our over use of the phrase “a perfect storm” twice in one issue — honestly, we didn’t know it was going to be the title of George Tenet’s book.) There’s a bunch of good stuff over at Screengrab, including, for Mother’s Day, their list of the worst movie mothers in film history. Click on the link above to check it out.
Actress Evan Rachel Wood seems to be the go-to-girl for ambitious music videomakers. First there was her starring role in Green Day’s anti-war “Wake Me Up when September Ends” video: And now she joins reported new b.f. Marilyn Manson in “Heart Shaped Glasses,” an NSFW homage to David Lynch (plenty of red curtains), David Cronenberg and, perhaps, Hermann Nitsch. (Oh yeah, if you’re under 16 you’re not supposed to watch this.)