The Reeler has a piece up today following up on the IFC press release blogged below regarding Kirby Dick’s upcoming Sundance doc This Film is not Yet Rated and its MPAA controversy. It’s all a bit more complicated than the release made it sound…
A year ago at Sundance Kirby Dick (Sick, Derrida, Twist of Faith) talked to me about his new documentary, promising that it would blow the lid off some very powerful forces within the film industry. He wouldn’t directly tell me what it was about, though. It was one of those “if I tell you I’ll have to kill you” things. Now, the film, This Film is Not Yet Rated, is headed for Sundance and then broadcast on IFC. And it’s about, yes, the MPAA. Over at Ain’t It Cool News Moriarty posts the press release detailing the film’s own twist […]
The ubiquitous but broke boyfriend-and-girlfriend filmmakers behind Four-Eyed Monsters get another jolt of publicity today as they become the poster children for Charles Lyons in his New York Times piece on the personal financial perils of indie-film financing. From the piece: “[Arin] Crumley and [Susan] Buice spoke about their 14-month ordeal making Four Eyed Monsters, which dramatizes how they met online, and in which they co-star. The movie was well received at its Slamdance Film Festival premiere in January and screened at 16 other festivals. But like so many independent labors of love, it has yet to attract a theatrical […]
Perhaps my favorite doc this year is Garrett Scott and Ian Olds’ Occupation Dreamland, which opened this weekend at the Cinema Village in New York along with screens in Portland, Boson, D.C., and Berkeley. It’s an essential piece of filmmaking for anyone wanting to learn more about the war in Iraq and its aftermath. Scott, who was one of our “25 New Faces” back in 2002, and Olds previously collaborated on Scott’s incredible short doc Cul de Sac. That earlier film used the story of one man’s mental breakdown (the tale of a San Diego man who stole a tank […]
Director David Gordon Green will appear this coming Monday night at the IFC Center to host screenings of two of his favorite ’70s films: Michael Cimino’s Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and Sidney Pollack’s Jeremiah Johnson. It’s the debut of the theater’s “Monday Night with…” series at which various artists will, says the press release, “acknowledge the brilliance of a timeless classic, to spotlight an unsung gem, or to defend a guilty pleasure.” Green comments on his choices: “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and Jeremiah Johnson serve as two examples in a period of American filmmaking when human nature often wrestled Mother Nature, and […]
On the opening weekend of the IFC’s new IFC Center (which a friend reported was packed out for the opening of Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know), the folks at Gothamist have posted an interview with our friend John Vanco, the chief programmer for the theater. Vanco talks a lot about film and outlines an exciting vision for the theater, and he also reveals a past life as a carpenter when asked about the theater’s construction delays: “My background as a carpenter is an awfully obscure fact and fading memory — that was a long time ago. […]
Anne Thompson’s column this week in the Hollywood Reporter is essential reading for anyone interested in the future of specialty film distribution. She interviews folks like IFC’s Jonathan Sehring and Picturehouse’s Dennis O’Connor about what she says is the inevitable collapse of the theatrical/home video/pay cable distribution window system. IFC’s Sehring, whose IFC Center opens this week in New York, is particularly forthright: “While he has no plans to ‘expand beyond one facility,’ says Sehring, he sees other changes ahead. ‘We’re going to alter our business plans over the next six to eight months. We feel strongly about video-on-demand as […]
Via Variety comes more details about the long-awaited June 17 opening of IFC Film Center in Manhattan at the site of the old Waverly Theaters. The IFC has assembled a high-powered advisory board to lend its clout to the venture. Writes Willa Paskin in the trade, “Helmers Steven Soderbergh, Alfonso Cuaron, Richard Linklater, Kevin Smith, Errol Morris, John Sayles, Rebecca Miller and Gary Winick will be among those serving on the center’s advisory board. Nonhelmers Noah Cowan, Cynthia Swartz and Dan Talbot also are members. “According to IFC prexy Jonathan Sehring, board members will mainly be involved with programming, ‘be […]
Below I posted some thoughts about the Xan Cassavetes doc Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession, and now this weekend IFC runs a Z-Channel marathon. Tune in all weekend and see films like the uncut Heaven ‘s Gate, Nick Roeg’s Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession, and the fairly obscure That Most Important Thing: Love..
You can read about Xan Cassavetes’ doc on L.A.’s art-film cable pioneer The Z Channel (linked her via Nerve.com), but you should really watch it while it plays this month on IFC. The story of Z Prez Jerry Harvey’s murderous and suicidal demise is a captivating one, but what makes the doc really great viewing is its conveyance of a very specific brand of cinephilia that almost doesn’t exist anymore. Pre-internet, pre-DVD, the Z Channel’s generous scrambling of Euro greats, American auteurs and Euro-softcore — a mix that included everything from Berlin Alexanderplatz to Laura Antonelli festivals — undoubtedly shaped […]