On a trip last weekend to Oklahoma, the IFP’s Amy Dotson attended the opening of the Womb Gallery, spearheaded by the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne. Her short report follows. When you think Oklahoma City, usually Bigfoot, giant balloon-filled walk-in vagina sculptures and samurai serving alcoholic snow-cones are not what come directly to mind. But thanks to Flaming Lips front-man Wayne Coyne and his collaborators, all that is about to change. With its psychedelic exterior from Brooklyn artist Maya Hayuk and featuring campy, graffiti inspired art by Bigfoot One, The Womb Gallery launched this weekend. Not even the 114 degree night […]
Second #94: Lynch had been thinking about Blue Velvet since at least as early as 1973, and while his previous two films (Dune and Elephant Man) had been based on well-known stories, Blue Velvet was a return to the trembling, inner-psychic terrain of Eraserhead. In an earlier version of the script, Jeffrey’s mom and his Aunt Barbara pick him up from the airport after he’s forced to leave college because of the financial burden of his stricken father’s medical bills. As they drive into town, there is this exchange: AUNT BARBARA: They tore down the A & P, Jeffrey. Did […]
“Oh no, the festival hasn’t changed at all in 20 years,” Judy Laster, founder and director of the Woods Hole Film Festival, says with a devilish twinkle in her eyes. Twenty years ago the first Woods Hole Film Festival was one-hour long with five short films. Today it’s eight-days long and over 100 films with panel discussions and workshops and some of the best social events on the festival circuit. “We could be much larger,” Judy adds, “if we wanted to be. But we don’t. You don’t have to be Sundance to have impact.” Small yet prestigious, community-anchored with national […]
As the riots in London continue, with statistics including 563 people arrested, one man shot, emergency services attacked and multiple police officers injured in the last three days, last night the Pias/Sony distribution center in Enfield, London was set on fire by looters (see video below). Hundreds of thousands of CDs and DVDs were destroyed. Reports say independent filmmakers and music producers will be hit the hardest as the building was Sony’s only depot for CDs and DVDs in Britain.
And so we begin our year-long journey through Blue Velvet, stopping every 47 seconds. Although released in the U.S. in September 1986, the film lingered at the dark edges of the imagination until the spring of the following year, when it was released on home video by Karl-Lorimar. The rapid ascendency of the VCR and the proliferation of rental stores (in 1980 there were only approximately 2,500 rental stores in the U.S.; by 1987 this had increased to over 27,000) meant that Blue Velvet found its way into the very same sort of leafy small towns as Lumberton. The titles […]
Has there ever been a more American idea than watching movies while sitting in your car? With the temperature hovering over one hundred and the humidity up there to match it, my thoughts go back to my childhood. I grew up in Washington D.C., with this kind of heat every summer. It always meant one thing to me: the drive-in movies. My babysitter used to put me and my two sisters in the back of her pick-up truck and head off to the drive-in. Parked and waiting for the sun to set, tiny fireflies would blink against the darkness. The […]
Last year, after becoming a fan of Nicholas Rombes’s “10/40/70” series at The Rumpus, I did a short interview with him for the blog. I asked about his approach to film criticism, which involves extrapolating larger meanings from a film’s isolated moments. (His “10/40/70” series critiqued films by looking at the scenes occurring at those precise minute marks). His reply: When I first started teaching film in the early 1990s, we’d screen them on via VHS tapes playing on VCRs hooked up to TV sets. Pausing a film for an extended period of time to look at the composition of […]
In our Winter issue Michael Tully sat down with David Gordon Green to discuss the arc of his career, which has gone from small-scale, Malick-inflected indies to big, ’80s-riffing studio comedies. His latest is The Sitter, starring Jonah Hill, and while it may seem like a raunchy take on Chris Columbus’s Adventures in Babysitting, Green said he had a different model in mind. Here’s an except from the interview: Filmmaker: You’ve just finished shooting. Are you watching movies? Do you watch movies that reflect the mood you’re in and the movie you’re making? Or is it the opposite? Do you […]
“This year’s program captures how eclectic and varied in genre and style Latin American cinema has become,” says the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Marcela Goglio, who, along with colleague Richard Pena, programs the films that play at the Walter Reade Theater during the 12th edition of Latin Beat (August 10-24). “In spite of ongoing financial struggle, good commercial films coexist with low-budget and more experimental ones.” Even though it is the oldest of all, Latin Beat has not received its just due in a community that hosts so many mediocre Latin American and Latino film festivals and exhibitions. (Check […]
(Gun Hill Road world premiered in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, which is when the original version of this review was first published at Hammer To Nail. It was picked up for distribution by Motion Film Group and opens theatrically in New York City on Friday, August 5, 2011, and Los Angeles on Friday, August 12th. Visit the film’s Facebook page and official website to learn more.) A late work by the Cuban director Tomas Gutierrez Alea called Strawberry And Chocolate is one of the few films I’ve ever seen to confront the strange relationship […]