Beginning today over at Filmmaker Videos is a series of interviews from Toronto provided by Filmcatcher.com. Up now is Jeffrey-Levy Hinte‘s much talked about documentary Soul Power, about the 1974 Zaire music festival. Keep checking the page daily as we’ll be posting interviews through next week.
Ted Hope alerted me to the very cool Trailers from Hell site, in which an amazing and erudite group of filmmakers — John Landis, Howard Rodman, Allison Anders, Michael Lehmann, Larry Cohen, Joe Dante and others — provide voiceover commentary to a series of trailers from great movies, most of which hail from B-movie or genre traditions. Personal favorites include Blast of Silence, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and, embedded below, Point Blank. Check this site out!
In the opening moments of Rod Lurie’s drama Nothing But the Truth, there’s an assassination attempt on the U.S. president and the government retaliates by bombing Caracas. In its final moments, the journalist who reported that the government knowingly went to war with the South American country on faulty intelligence meets her confidential source and.… Okay, I won’t spoil the ending, but let’s suffice to say that by the time we’ve reached the denouement of Lurie’s film this story of criminal foreign policy has shrunken to a depressingly conventional Hollywood tale of a mother’s idealism and sacrifice. Kate Beckinsale plays […]
IFP announced today that Gus Van Sant will be presented with a Gotham Awards Tribute at the 18th Annual Gotham Awards on Tuesday, December 2nd in New York. Van Sant’s next project is the bio pic, Milk, about the first openly gay man elected to major public office in the United States, Harvey Milk. Starring Sean Penn as Milk along with Emile Hirsch, Josh Brolin, Diego Luna and James Franco, the film will be released by Focus Features in select cities on Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 and then expand in December. IFP also announced that they will be teaming with […]
Wow — this is a surprise. We, like many others, had heard that Magnolia would be releasing this film. According to this Indiewire report, Steven Soderbergh’s Che will open theatrically in December for a one-week Oscar qualifying run and then will play in January through IFC In Theaters, its day and date platform.
New York-based film critic Godfrey Cheshire was attending a Christmas gathering with his family in North Carolina when he received some surprising news from his cousin Charlie. Midway Plantation, the ancestral home of their extended family since the 1840s, was to be transplanted to a new location. In the name of progress, the city of Raleigh was expanding a highway and strip malls. If the plantation house and its surrounding buildings were not moved, the deterioration of the surrounding environment would be so drastic, future generations would not want to live there. Charlie’s decision sparked controversy within the family, with […]
Nik Fackler’s Lovely, Still has garnered a bit of buzz up in Toronto. One of the most impressive elements of the film is its fantastic cinematography and production design. Fackler and his team create a gorgeous Christmas-world that dances just this side of a fairy tale. In this Filmmaker piece, the film’s d.p., Sean Kirby, discusses his approach to shooting the movie.
The FilmInFocus site has just undergone what is in my opinion a very nice 2.0-ish facelift, with a much cleaner new design and better organization of articles. (I’m one of the editors of this site along with Peter Bowen and Nick Dawson.) Please check it out, and to give you a leg up, here’s some new stuff on the site that I recommend: Filmmaker‘s Jason Guerrasio explores the cult of The Big Lebowski in an interview with Will Russell and Scott Shuffitt, authors of I’m a Lebowski, You’re a Lebowski: Life, The Big Lebowski and What Have You. The “Five […]
Paul Krik, whose Able Danger opens tomorrow in theaters in four cities, including New York’s Pioneer Theater, gave us a list of his favorite conspiracy films. Two days ago we ran his list of Hollywood conspiracy thrillers. Here is his list of independent 9/11 films. Mohammed Atta and the Venice Flying Circus – Reporter Daniel Hopsicker is on the ground in Venice, Florida, where the terrorists all trained – gumshoeing, knocking on doors, asking questions, turning over stones. His interview with Mohammed Atta’s girlfriend and the time he humped her feet while she slept is absolutely mind-blowing. To say nothing […]
The director known as blackANDwhite gives a rare and revealing glimpse into the mind and working habits of David Lynch. Sometimes funny, sometimes bizarre but always entertaining, the film is as experimental and abstract as the filmmaker it covers. For those who are disappointed never to really get a sense of how Lynch works from the limited extras in his DVD releases, Lynch goes beyond the trademark chain smoking and weird hairdo to show an outgoing, pleasant human being with an insatiable creative drive and a love for Bastille Day. (It will make sense when you see it.) Shot in […]