The Girlfriend Experience star Sasha Grey continues her march through the jungles of mainstream media with this Current TV piece in which she lists her five favorite movies. Hey, given that she’s using her promo time to promote Werner Herzog and Catherine Breillat, it’s totally cool with us. Read my interview with Grey here.
Having taken the train from Cannes early this morning to Paris, I’m now watching the closing night ceremony on television following a few stressful moments in which it appeared that our cable might be out. But, Canal + is on, the Steadicam follows Jan Kounen and his closing night film Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky star Anna Mouglalis into the Palais, and the awards begin…. Best Short goes to Joao Salaviza’s Arena. Isabelle Adjani presents the Camera d’Or, given to the Best First Feature, to Australian director Warwick Thornton’s Samson and Delilah. (A special mention was given to Ajami.) Andrea […]
A lack of wireless, fatigue, and my dislike of netbooks (particularly the kind in the American Pavilion) have curtailed my Cannes posting. I have no idea how Eric Kohn, Matt Dentler, Allison Willmore and the trade reviewers get their well considered reviews up so quickly after their screenings. That said, I’ll try to have my thoughts on the handful of films I saw up when I get back to Paris tomorrow. Very quickly, though, Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void is disquieting and dreamy, as much a psychologically charged immersive space as it is a conventional film narrative. Noe’s decadent Tokyo […]
Danish cinema currently has numerous talented fiction directors – everybody from Lars von Trier, Christopher Boe, Ole Bornedal, and Susanne Bier to Thomas Vinterberg, Kristian Levring, Nicolas Winding Refn and Lone Scherfig – and now Anders Østergaard is bringing attention to the country’s documentary output. Born in Copenhagen in 1965, Østergaard studied at the Danish School of Journalism, graduating in 1991, before deciding to eschew a career as a journalist to become a documentarian. Throughout his career, he has been concerned with the boundaries of non-fiction and with the idea of documentary itself. Østergaard’s debut film, Gensyn med Johannesburg (1996), […]
Just posted over on Festival Ambassador, Mike Plante highlights this year’s Off Plus Camera Film Festival in Karkow, Poland (he and Trevor Groth presented the “25 Years of Sundance” program at the festival). Off Plus Camera has not only begun to grab the attention of celebs like Anna Karina (pictured) but filmmakers who can vie for it’s Grand Prize of $100,000. And I don’t mean 100g’s worth of equipment and other prizes, I mean $100,000 in cold hard U.S. cash.
This year’s Cannes Film Festival was the occasion of the European premiere screening of films from One Dream Rush, a film series sponsored by 42 Below and the Beijing Film Studios in which 42 directors were commissioned to create 42-second short films dealing with and hailing from the world of dreams. What’s the difference between this series and any number of other sponsored film/multi-director internet plays? Short answer — the filmmakers chosen are great, their films are for the most part really, really good, and their extreme brevity gives each piece the quality of a memory half-remembered from a dream […]
Jonathan Fanton, President of the MacArthur Foundation, has posted a “President’s Essay” in which he discusses the ways in which digital media is transforming both our lives as well as the working methodologies and granting practices of the Foundation. I recommend the essay, and particularly noteworthy is the section on media grantmaking, in which Fanton says the Foundation will now seek to fund projects that take advantage of the new distribution tools as well as those from new sources of information and that stimulate and include audience interaction. An excerpt: With these changes, the challenge of providing individuals with diverse […]
A funny thing happened on the way to the publication of Chris Anderson’s upcoming Free. The newspaper business went into free fall, other content industries may soon follow suit, and at least a small group of media consumers are beginning to wonder what type of content will be lost if everything is delivered free to the consumer but enabled (and defined?) by its advertising and marketing support. Representing the resurgent tollkeeper model is the Financial Times in this article by Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson entitled “Media’s want to break free.” It concludes: Content owners are battling what Chris Anderson, author of The […]
Filmmaker Angelo Bell commented on the thread about Ted Hope’s “38 American Film Problems/Concerns,” calling it an “overexaggeration of the challenges” and responding to several of Ted’s points by saying that what is really happening now is not that business models are failing but that there is a “power shift” from studios/producers to individual filmmakers committed to exploring DIY approaches. As I said in my blog post, what Ted did was write an amazingly comprehensive list on which every filmmaker will find several points to agree with. That said, many of the points will be ignorable by each individual filmmaker […]
Stacy Peralta uses his knack for dissecting counter-cultures to highlight the two most violent gangs in America with Crips and Bloods: Made in America. Since his breakout Sundance hit Dogtown and Z-Boys, about the iconic skateboarders who revolutionized the sport (Peralta was one of the Z-Boys), Peralta has stayed in the alt-sport realm as his second doc, Riding Giants, looked at the history of surfing (it was also the opening film at 04’s Sundance). Now Peralta leaves his comfort zone to look at a world he’s not directly a part of. In telling the story of the Crips and Bloods, […]