Us Magazine has a piece on their website about why Brad Renfro didn’t appear in the Oscar tribute last night to those who passed away in the preceding year. For the record, an Academy spokesperson chalks it up to “an editing decision.” There’s an active comment section following the article and most are outraged that the talented actor, who died of a heroin overdose on January 15 and who spent half his life working in the movies, wasn’t included.
The filmmakers behind From Here to Awesome have made this short video entitled “Why Film Festivals Don’t Work” to explain the thinking behind their new festival, which you can read more about at the link above. submit films | watch films | learn to make films | fest news | fest stream
.. over at the Director Interviews. An excerpt: Filmmaker: What was the process of casting like? It seems that who was playing the roles was integral to the movie’s success. Bahrani: I learned on Push Cart that the biggest job in learning to work with the actors is casting. We were relentless on the casting: we looked for months for the kids, we saw probably 2-3,000 kids, I put 625 interviews on tape. Usually the first step is Q&A: “Who are you? Where are you from?” After you get them comfortable and you get them talking, you start asking things […]
I’m not much on post-Oscar pontificating — there are plenty of others who do it much better than me. But, the show did seem awfully low-key this year. I guess the writer’s strike necessitated a slimmed down show overloaded with film clips and tributes. Anyway, I was happy to have interviewed three of the Oscar winners. For Filmmaker I interviewed Best Actress winner Marion Cotillard and the director of the Best Documentary, Alex Gibney. And for the FilmInFocus site I interviewed the winner of the Best Score Oscar for Atonement, Dario Marianelli. Also, here’s Lisa Garibay, who interviewed Best Original […]
I try to keep up with celebrity scandal just as much as the next guy, so I was taken aback at the Spirit Award after party when a producer friend said, shocked, “You haven’t heard about Edison Chen?” No, actually, I hadn’t, but a few moments later, after he gave me an excited outline of the salient points, I had. In short, while Western audiences have been crashing the New York magazine website to see the Lindsay Lohan as Marilyn shots, audiences in Hong Kong and throughout Asia have been riveted by an internet scandal featuring hardcore sex photos of […]
The cinematic year of the pregnant woman continued as Juno won Best Picture, Best Actress (Ellen Page, pictured), and Best First Screenplay at the Film Independent Spirit Awards this weekend while nominee Angelina Jolie, clad in a tight-fitting black dress, made gossip page news by premiering her own baby bump at the event’s red carpet. The Spirits have always managed the tricky business of blending authentic Hollywood glamour, cheeky awards-show irreverence, and sincere salute to independent film, and this year was no exception. Winners spanned the range from mega-hits like Juno to no-budget indies like Chop Shop, and the crowd […]
Juno was the big winner of the Spirit Awards, which just wrapped up on a soggy afternoon in Santa Monica, CA. The film walked away with Best Feature, Best Female Lead for Ellen Page and Best First Screenplay for Diablo Cody. The complete list of winners is below. BEST FEATUREJuno BEST DIRECTORJulian Schnabel, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly BEST MALE LEADPhilip Seymour Hoffman, The Savages BEST FEMALE LEADEllen Page, Juno BEST SUPPORTING MALEChiwetel Ejiofor, Talk To Me BEST SUPPORTING FEMALECate Blanchett, I’m Not There BEST SCREENPLAYTamara Jenkins, The Savages BEST FIRST SCREENPLAYDiablo Cody, Juno BEST DOCUMENTARYCrazy Love, Director: Dan […]
AUGUST DIEHL, KARL MARKOVICS, VEIT STÜBNER AND AUGUST ZIRNER IN DIRECTOR STEFAN RUZOWITZKY’S THE COUNTERFEITERS. COURTESY SONY PICTURES CLASSICS. It is the natural desire of critics to put films and their directors into neat categorizations, and yet there are some directors, such as Stefan Ruzowitzky, whose work simply cannot be summed up in a simple all-encompassing description. Born in Vienna, Austria, on Christmas Day 1961, Ruzowitzky stayed in his home city to study film, theater and history before pursuing a career in directing television shows, commercials, and pop promos for bands such as The Scorpions and Nsync. In 1996 he […]
On the heels of Toshiba’s announcement this past weekend that it will fall on its sword in the long-winded battle for hi-def DVD supremacy making Blu-ray the victor (guess I backed the wrong horse, anybody want Goodfellas on HD DVD?), David Pogue writes in the New York Times today that even though there’s more options to watch movies online, in the immediate future, DVDs are still your best choice as he gives a report card on the Internet movie boxes (Apple TV, TiVo/Amazon Unbox, Xbox 360 and Vudu). Pogue also makes a good point about the absent-minded thinking of the […]
Interesting trend article by Dan Frost in the New York Times about “co-working,” in which various freelancers all share a common office space while still doing their own projects. From the piece: While coworking has evolved since Mr. Neuberg’s epiphany in 2005, dozens of places around the country and increasingly around the world now offer such arrangements, where someone sets up an office and rents out desks, creating a community of people who have different jobs but who want to share ideas. “It’s nourishing on a fundamental level,” said John Vlahides, the executive editor of 71miles.com, a travel site covering […]