I was absolutely stunned to return home to New York tonight from a wedding in Massachusetts and read online that one of my favorite writers, David Foster Wallace, died this weekend in Claremont, California. Wallace’s novels include Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System, and he is the author of several excellent books of essays, including A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster. From the obituary in the L.A. Times: Times book editor David Ulin was in New York City for a National Book Critics Circle Board meeting Saturday. “What was a party is […]
There are many paths to cinematic success, some of them direct, some of them not, and it is fair to say that Irena Salina has taken a more meandering route than some to reach her current position. Born in Paris in the wake of May ’68, she grew up in a theatrical family (her uncle was the late, great French actor Philippe Noiret) and initially aspired to becoming an actress. When her adolescence was disrupted by her parents’ divorce, she chose to drop out of school and became a radio reporter at the age of just 15. After a stint […]
To conclude our series of blog posts from Paul Krik, writer/director of Able Danger, currently in theaters, here is his breakdown of how he posted his movie. Able Danger was shot on an Panasonic AG-HVX200 by accomplished Brooklyn-based cinematographer Charlie Libin. We shot HD using no tape. It was shot to P2 cards, basically RAM and then copied to a hard drive. It was edited on Avid mostly on a laptop in a basement and then on an Avid at Jump Editorial. It was edited in HD but at the Panasonic “native” file size of 1280 x 720. This is […]
Beginning today over at Filmmaker Videos is a series of interviews from Toronto provided by Filmcatcher.com. Up now is Jeffrey-Levy Hinte‘s much talked about documentary Soul Power, about the 1974 Zaire music festival. Keep checking the page daily as we’ll be posting interviews through next week.
Ted Hope alerted me to the very cool Trailers from Hell site, in which an amazing and erudite group of filmmakers — John Landis, Howard Rodman, Allison Anders, Michael Lehmann, Larry Cohen, Joe Dante and others — provide voiceover commentary to a series of trailers from great movies, most of which hail from B-movie or genre traditions. Personal favorites include Blast of Silence, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and, embedded below, Point Blank. Check this site out!
In the opening moments of Rod Lurie’s drama Nothing But the Truth, there’s an assassination attempt on the U.S. president and the government retaliates by bombing Caracas. In its final moments, the journalist who reported that the government knowingly went to war with the South American country on faulty intelligence meets her confidential source and.… Okay, I won’t spoil the ending, but let’s suffice to say that by the time we’ve reached the denouement of Lurie’s film this story of criminal foreign policy has shrunken to a depressingly conventional Hollywood tale of a mother’s idealism and sacrifice. Kate Beckinsale plays […]
IFP announced today that Gus Van Sant will be presented with a Gotham Awards Tribute at the 18th Annual Gotham Awards on Tuesday, December 2nd in New York. Van Sant’s next project is the bio pic, Milk, about the first openly gay man elected to major public office in the United States, Harvey Milk. Starring Sean Penn as Milk along with Emile Hirsch, Josh Brolin, Diego Luna and James Franco, the film will be released by Focus Features in select cities on Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 and then expand in December. IFP also announced that they will be teaming with […]
Wow — this is a surprise. We, like many others, had heard that Magnolia would be releasing this film. According to this Indiewire report, Steven Soderbergh’s Che will open theatrically in December for a one-week Oscar qualifying run and then will play in January through IFC In Theaters, its day and date platform.
New York-based film critic Godfrey Cheshire was attending a Christmas gathering with his family in North Carolina when he received some surprising news from his cousin Charlie. Midway Plantation, the ancestral home of their extended family since the 1840s, was to be transplanted to a new location. In the name of progress, the city of Raleigh was expanding a highway and strip malls. If the plantation house and its surrounding buildings were not moved, the deterioration of the surrounding environment would be so drastic, future generations would not want to live there. Charlie’s decision sparked controversy within the family, with […]
Nik Fackler’s Lovely, Still has garnered a bit of buzz up in Toronto. One of the most impressive elements of the film is its fantastic cinematography and production design. Fackler and his team create a gorgeous Christmas-world that dances just this side of a fairy tale. In this Filmmaker piece, the film’s d.p., Sean Kirby, discusses his approach to shooting the movie.