Yesterday I took note of a lead item posted by Ray Pride at Movie City News: a Steven Soderbergh-authored piece for the Directors Guild Quarterly on the movement in the HD world to make 16:9 a default format for a theatrically released film when released on video. I saw the headline, meant to click back to it, but then the magazine’s site went down. Fortunately, I was forwarded a link to the cached version this morning. (You have to scroll down the page to get to the article.) Here’s Soderbergh on the crux of the issue: Television operators, the people […]
The IFP has announced its line up for the 31st annual Independent Film Week, taking place in NYC Sept. 19-24. In a release the organization has also announced the expansion of its strategic relationship with the Sundance Institute; and new partnerships with B-Side, the four-year-old tech company which runs websites that handle ticketing and mine audience response data for 250-plus fests in North America, and The Good Pitch, a forum produced by Channel 4 BRITDOC Foundation which brings together inspiring social-purpose film projects and a group of expert participants from charities, foundations, brands, government and media to form powerful alliances […]
The line up for the 47th New York Film Festival has been announced. The U.S. premiere of Alain Resnais‘s Wild Grass will open the fest and Pedro Almodóvar‘s Broken Embraces will close. NYFF will run Sept. 25 – Oct. 11. (Click here to watch our video coverage of last year’s fest by Jamie Stuart.) Full line up is below. OPENING NIGHTWild Grass / Les herbes follesAlain Resnais, France, 2009; 113mThe venerable Alan Resnais creates an exquisite human comedy of manners, mystery and romance with some of France’s – and our – favorite actors: Sabine Azéma, André Dussollier, Emmanuelle Devos and […]
Before there was Momma’s Man there was The GoodTimesKid. In Azazel Jacobs’s second feature you can see his style beginning to take form, meshing a punk-rock attitude with cinema influences as wide ranging from Chaplin to Jarmusch. In The GoodTimesKid Jacobs and Drama/Mex director Gerardo Naranjo both play men named Rodolfo Cano. Both men learns of the other when a congratulation letter of enlistment in the Army is sent to the wrong Rodolfo (Naranjo), leading to the other getting drunk and into fights while Rodolfo II gets better acquainted with Rodolfo I’s (Jacobs) girlfriend, Diaz (Sara Diaz). Spanning 24 hours […]
As my brief interview with Cherien Dabis in festival coverage of the Dubai International Film Festival (in our Spring, 2009 edition and which I’ve just posted online) noted, some of the financing for her debut feature Amreeka was found at the DIFF’s Dubai Film Connection, a CineMart-like financing market aimed at films from directors of Arab nationality or origin. Producers (who can be of any nationality) have until August 15 (that’s one week from now) to submit projects for this year’s edition. Here’s the official word: The DFC is open for documentary and feature film projects that are currently in […]
MAGGIE HATCHER, TILLY HATCHER AND ALEX KARPOVSKY IN WRITER-DIRECTOR ANDREW BUJALSKI’S BEESWAX. COURTESY CINEMA GUILD. Every film movement has its (sometimes reluctant) leader or trendsetter, and in the case of mumblecore, that person is Andrew Bujalski. The soft-spoken writer-director and sometime actor was born in 1977 in Boston, where both his parents worked in business. His mother had previously been an artist, and Bujalski seemed to inherit her more creative inclinations, which lead him to study film at Harvard’s Department of Visual and Environmental Studies. Bujalski was particularly fortunate to have the legendary Belgian filmmaker Chantal Ackerman as his thesis […]
More greatness:
Last year at Sundance producers Ted Hope and Christine Vachon shot a number of interview pieces for a web series associated with Film Catcher. Film Catcher has since changed direction, but the interviews are online and you can check them out on the site’s YouTube channel. Embedded below is the first part of Hope and Vachon’s interview with actors Paul Giamatti and Sam Rockwell, whose two philosophical science fiction films, Cold Souls and Moon, are in theaters right now. Head over to the channel’s page for the other clips as well as another set of interviews with Alan Cumming, Lee […]
In shocking news earlier today, Variety reports that director John Hughes died of a sudden heart attack while walking this morning in Manhattan. He was 59. The creator of some of the most iconic films of the 80s, Hughes has stayed out of the public eye for the last ten years, and even wrote many screenplays in the 2000s under the pseudonym Edmond Dantès. Along with producing and writing such films as the National Lampoon Vacation films, Pretty in Pink and the Home Alone films, Hughes kept the good ones to direct. This is Hughes’ COMPLETE list of directing credits […]
The lightness and ephemerality of Twitter is such that it feels less an application and more like part of our daily fabric. For a while this morning I thought I must have an internet connection problem but after an hour without Twitter I Googled and discovered that Twitter is indeed offline. In fact, according to the Twitter Status Blog, the microblogging service is defending against a malicious denial-of-service attack. Here’s hoping the opposing forces are soon successful in restoring order to our online world.