I know cat videos and the internet go hand in hand. But for years I’ve resisted. Until now. Because it’s amazing. Here, a cat being given a bath. (Click on the headline if you don’t see the video.)
The Australian-born critic Shane Danielsen wrote an amusing piece for Indiewire about this year’s Berlin Film Festival. He compared the smell outside some of the screening rooms to that of sperm. I remember it being stinky, but not that particular odor. Shane is, however, a reliable source. One of two things at Cannes that really gets on my nerves is the smell inside the press screenings, especially those that take place at 8:30 a.m. The 5000-seat theater is packed. No pun intended, but these projections are the pits, the lower depths of hygiene. Maybe it’s time constraints or perhaps cultural practices, but you […]
Less than one year after Sean Durkin’s short, Mary Last Seen, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival comes this new trailer for the feature that resulted from it. (Click on the headline if you don’t see the video.) Durkin was one of our “25 New Faces” of 2010, and now his feature, which premiered at Sundance, has its international premiere at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard section. From Jason Guerrasio’s interview with Durkin: I made Mary Last Seen to have something to send out with the feature script,” Durkin admits. But after taking a second pass at the edit […]
From an email from director, actress and producer Amy Seimetz: I am making my next feature– Sun Don’t Shine. I have started a ChipIn site for it. 10% of the funds raised will be donated to a shelter for abused women and children in Florida, which I volunteered at in high school. Feel free to donate what you can or pass it along. You can read more about the film and donate here. …And yes– our donation to the shelter is a hint to the plot. Here’s more from the film’s website, which contains a blog with updates on the […]
(Lord Byron opens on Friday, May 6, 2011, at the reRun Gastropub in Dumbo. Read Zack Godshall’s “Revolution and Apocalypse: The Lord Byron Manifesto” if you haven’t already, then visit the film’s official website to learn more.) Zack Godshall’s Lord Byron was not shot on the Canon 5D (aka, the everybody’s-using-it-so-you-should-too-consumer-grade-Digital-SLR-camera-of-the-very-moment !). Instead, Godshall used a Sony Z1U that he purchased all the way back in 2005 (the horror!). This means that the movie’s images were captured at a 29.97 frame rate, as opposed to the more cinematic 23.98. Which is to say that this 2011 narrative feature has a […]
“Matthew, don’t allow yourself to ask “Why is he doing this to me?” Wonder why is he doing this to himself.” The blown-to-hell chaos of productions like Apocalypse Now, Fitzcarraldo and Jaws are often evoked as legendary examples of disasters turned into classic motion pictures, but after reading Matthew Modine’s Full Metal Jacket Diary, I get the feeling that was par for Stanley Kubrick. It’s one thing to hear stray anecdotes about life on his films, but it’s something quite different to swim through a first-person account of an entire project — an account that isn’t even a memoir but […]
The eponymous prior evening of Massy Tadjedin’s Last Night takes the form of an out-of-town business trip between handsome, somewhat taciturn and very married Michael (Sam Worthington) and Laura, his sexy and very interested coworker (Eva Mendes). Or, you could view it, the “last night” is the clandestine evening spent between Sam’s beautiful author wife, Joanna (Keira Knightley) and her still-charming ex, Alex (Guillaume Canet), while Sam is away. But most accurately — and no matter what your gender or point-of-view on modern relationships is — the film’s “last night” is best considered from its morning after, when whatever rash […]
As Vladan Nikolic’s Zenith continues its slow roll-out — finishing its U.S. screenings while premiering on Amazon and iTunes — I thought I’d post on the blog this piece on the film that originally ran in slightly different form in our Winter, 2011 issue. “What is Zenith?” was the question posed on About Top Secret and other conspiracy-related websites last Spring. Paranoid-minded posters jumped in and followed a breadcrumb-trail of online clues relating to everything from the Bavarian Illuminati and fluoridated drinking water to biochemistry and the New World Order. They clicked through a maze of 50 other websites (priestoftruth.com, […]
Out of all the 25 New Faces we’ve done in my time at the magazine one of my favorites is M dot Strange. The DIY whiz behind the animated feature We Are The Strange, M dot has been laying low the last four years. So I was ecstatic when he emailed me the first teaser for his next feature, Heart String Marionette. (He also sent an exclusive still from the film, which is above.) M dot hasn’t gone into detail about what the film is about, but watching this it looks like many of his trademarks are returning — demented […]
The Good Life is not about the good life, but the bad life. Mother Mette and daughter Anne lived a life of wealth and privilege, and then the husband-father died and the inherence dwindled, and finally the money ran out. Today the two survive on the mother’s minuscule pension in a small apartment in Portugal. While the mother seems resigned to her impoverished fate, the daughter is anything but resigned. She views life without wealth and servants as terribly unfair to her. At the age of 56, daughter Anne has never held a job — not one! “Work is still […]