ULRICH THOMSEN IN CHRISTOFFER BOE’S ALLEGRO. COURTESY INTERNATIONAL FILM CIRCUIT. Christoffer Boe likes Cannes. After graduating from the Danish Film School in 2001, his student film Anxiety played at the 2002 festival, where it won a prize from French critics, and then Boe returned to the Croisette the following year with his debut feature, Reconstruction. A dazzlingly inventive and playful film, Reconstruction‘s tale of love and parallel universes in Copenhagen beguiled critics and was awarded both the Camera D’Or and the Prix Regards Jeune. Boe was celebrated as international cinema’s most precocious wunderkind, and his film played all around the […]
Until such time as The Day the Clown Cried sees the light of day, we might just have to settle for… Georgia Rule.. Here’s John Anderson’s genius lede to his Variety review: No offense to either of them, but Georgia Rule suggests an Ingmar Bergman script as directed by Jerry Lewis. The subject matter is grim, the relationships are gnarled, the worldview is bleak, and, at any given moment, you suspect someone’s going to be hit with a pie.
Over at David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema, Bordwell has one of his great screen-grab filled comparative film essays, this time on the relationship between film framing and humor. “Can a shot be amusing in itself?” asks Bordwell before going on to talk about Tati, Barry Sonenfeld, and a sequence from Shaun of the Dead that features the two shots below: Writes Bordwell of the scene in which two groups of survivors meet in zombie-filled London, “The gag’s premise is that each survivor has a counterpart in the other line. There are two posers in brown leather jackets, two can-do girls, […]
It’s long, detailed and a must-read — Dennis McDougal’s piece in the L.A. Weekly, “Double Cross at the WGA,” on the guild’s collecting and non-payment of monies issued to member and non-member writers by foreign rights societies. The piece springboards off a class-action lawsuit filed by writer William Richert (Winter Kills) against the WGA as well as whistleblower activity by a now-terminated guild administrator into a discussion of American copyright law, studio business practices and the U.S.’s complicated relationship to the Berne Convention, the international copyright agreement spearheaded by author Victor Hugo. The upshot? If you wrote a screenplay for […]
Via Talking Points Memo comes news of Qube, the right-wing answer to the lefty, politically correct, and conservative censoring website that is… YouTube? From their front page mission statement: Bit by bit the site is coming together. Building QubeTV in the public eye has been a both a joy and a challenge, a real chance to bring the American conservative movement together in one place – with all of you watching! Coming next: a continuation of the ongoing (and not always visible to the eye) tech improvements such as embeds and (duh!) categories, the simple basics we know you are […]
IAN HOLM AND CHRIS EIGEMAN IN OREN RUDAVSKY’S THE TREATMENT. COURTESY NEW YORKER FILMS. After studying at Oberlin College and NYU Film School, director and cinematographer Oren Rudavsky carved out a niche for himself in filmmaking: if you have seen a documentary about Judaism made in the last 20 years, most likely Rudavsky was involved in it. He has made numerous documentaries for television, many of them Jewish-themed, and has recently graduated to making documentary features, with notable success. The highly-praised A Life Apart (1997), an examination of the Hasidic lifestyle in America co-directed by Rudavsky with Menachem Daum (and […]
Awards were handed out last night in Chinatown for the 6th annual Tribeca Film Festival. See list of winners below. The Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature – My Father My Lord (Hofshat Kaits), directed by David Volach (Israel). Best New Narrative Filmmaker – Two Embraces (Dos Abrazos), directed by Enrique Begne (Mexico). Best Actor in a Narrative Feature Film – Lofti Edbelli in Making Of (Akher film), directed by Nouri Bouzid (Tunisia, Morocco). Best Actress in a Narrative Feature Film – Marina Hands in LadyChatterley, directed by Pascale Ferran (France, Belgium). Best Screenplay – Making Of (Akher film), written […]
As the Tribeca Film Festival wraps up its 6th year this weekend its clear that as it expands throughout the city confusion mounts within the industry on what it actually is – a venue for high profile films or discovering new talent (I’ll go into greater detail about this in my Festival Wrap-Up in the Summer issue). But having attended every year there’s one thing I’m always impressed by: the documentaries. And this year is no exception. Two that I’ve enjoyed equally but are completely different in tone and style are Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Dark Side and Bruce […]
If you’ve picked up our Spring issue you may have read the sidebar in our “Option Overload” Line Item (“Cell Capture”) where Dutch filmmaker Cyrus Frisch describes how he made his latest film Why Didn’t Anybody Tell Me It Would Become This Bad In Afghanistan with a cell phone. Which as far as we know is a first. It goes without saying that this is a shooting format that’s probably a decade before its time (at the least), but after seeing the film at the Tribeca Film Festival (it made its World Premiere at Rotterdam) the other day, this extremely […]
Sad news that arrived shortly after this year’s SXSW Film Festival was the sudden death of actress Lily Wheelwright, who starred in Ry Russo-Young’s Orphans. Wheelwright gave a tough and honest performance in the film, which won a Special Jury Prize at the fest. Here’s what writer/director Andrew Bujalski had to say about the movie: “A sensitive & peculiar pastoral, Orphans manages to derive as much compelling energy from its locations & spaces (of the wide open & claustrophobic variety alike) as from its two terrific lead actresses, a rarity these digital days. The film will receive a special screening […]