Summer, 1985: Casey Kasem is on the radio and mastering the moonwalk is a must. Radford “Rad” Miracle (Marcello Conte) has to go on family vacation with his patient mom (Lea Thompson), sneeringly cool goth sister Michelle (Helena May Seabrook), and cheapskate cop dad (John Hannah), who insists on driving to Ocean City, Maryland in his police car to save money. All Rad wants to do is play ping pong, get cooler, and get the girl, but the local rich kid bullies are an impediment. Can Rad up his ping pong craft enough to beat them? And what’s up with […]
“Kentucker Audley, the Richmond International Film Festival and A Checklist for Avoiding Bad Publicity,” by Lauren Wissot, an article based around contributing editor Wissot’s trip to the Richmond International Film Festival, drew the following response from Heather Waters, the festival’s founder and producer. Aside from editing out email signatures and footers, we are reprinting it in full. Dear Scott, When Lauren Wissot contacted us about covering the Richmond International Film Festival (RIFF) for your magazine, we were excited about the national press (“Kentucker Audley, the Richmond International Film Festival and A Checklist for Avoiding Bad Publicity,” published May 7). However, […]
Nestled in the industrial Ruhr region and dubbed “Germany’s Detroit” due to its distinction as the most debt-ridden city in the country, Oberhausen may not immediately sound like a great place to host an international film festival. Nevertheless, believe it or not, the 2014 Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen marked the festival’s 60th iteration. This year, Oberhausen featured 61 films from 35 countries in the International Competition, 21 films in the German competition, 12 video production in the North-Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) competition, a themed program curated by Mika Taanila (discussed at length later), four profiled filmmakers receiving one to three individual programs each, […]
Thanks to our friends at ABCKO Films, Filmmaker has a prize pack to give away tied to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Dance of Reality, the cult favorite’s first feature since 1990’s The Rainbow Thief. In this new film, Jodorowsky revisits his ’30s Chilean childhood while producing typically fantastical imagery. The prize pack includes an El Topo Blu-ray, The Holy Mountain Blu-ray, and the El Topo soundtrack on both CD and vinyl. To win, be the first to answer this question: what sci-fi novel did Jodorowsky try and ultimately fail to bring to the screen, as chronicled in a recently released documentary? […]
Combining taste, business savvy, and enduring idealism for the role cinema can play within the broader culture, legendary producer, distributor, director and exhibitor Marin Karmitz has helped shape the course of world cinema since launching his MK2 Films in the early 1970s. Beginning his career as an assistant director to, among others, Jean-Luc Godard and Agnes Varda, Karmitz went on to become one of the most distinguished producers of his generation, with such classics as Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy, Jean-Luc Godard’s Every Man for Himself and Claude Chabrol’s Ceremonie to his name. But his list of producing credits only tells […]
Kickstarter announced today major changes to its process for accepting applications, simplifying its guidelines for creators and allowing campaigns to “launch instantly” by bypassing the human approval process. Kickstarter’s new rules boil down, writes founder Yancey Strickler, to three points: Projects must create something to share with others. Projects must be honest and clearly presented. Projects cannot fundraise for charity, offer financial incentives, or involve prohibited items. (The rules in full can be read here.) In his post, Strickler emphasizes that “Launch Now” is just an option; creators will still be able to propose projects to Kickstarter’s Community Managers, who […]
English filmmaker John Boorman returned to Cannes this year with Queen and Country, his autobiographical sequel to Hope and Glory. At 81 years old, Boorman claims this is his very last movie, and after such an illustrious career — with films including Point Blank, Deliverance, Excalibur, and The Emerald Forest — he ends on a very high note. In 1952, young Bill Rohan (Callum Turner) must leave his idyllic countryside home on the River Thames for two years’ Army conscription. Rather than being shipped out to fight the Chinese in the Korean War, Bill is enlisted with his friend Percy (Caleb […]
The below is a guest essay by Jennine Lanouette, Founder and Chief Content Creator at Screentakes Digital Publishing, who is currently in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign for a line of media rich screenplay analysis ebooks. Lanouette has taught screenwriting and lectured on story structure and script analysis for over 20 years, and much of her wisdom can be found at her site. The new ebooks use text, video and interactive graphics to provide a new dimension to screenplay study. For more details, and to donate to the campign, visit its Kickstarter page. — SM It often seems to […]
Entering its final weekend, “Fassbinder: Romantic Anarchist” is part one of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s massive survey of the work of the late, great Rainer Werner Fassbinder — a madly prolific, protean figure of the German New Wave. Marrying social commentary with emotional melodrama and, sometimes, genre entertainment, Fassbinder cranked out four and five movies a year, drawing from a repertory group of actors, exploring themes of love and obsession, and building a sustained critique of post-war capitalism that still penetrates today. In 1997, the Museum of Modern Art programmed a Fassbinder retrospective, and we asked several directors […]
In Livia Di Paolis’ Emoticon ;), the actress-turned-first-time-writer/director plays Elena, a thirtysomething graduate student whose thesis revolves around “modern means of communication.” She’s dating Walter (Michael Christofer), a nearly AARP-eligible divorcee whose extravagant ex-wife Julia (Christine Ebersole) isn’t terribly involved with their kids. Perhaps Elena can be? Adopted teenagers Luke (Miles Chandler) and Mandy (Diane Guerrero) are closer in age to Elena than her new(ish) beau is. That doesn’t mean she’s any good at communicating with them though; they spend all their time on their computers and smart phones, staring into the electronic clouds of their devices, proving they aren’t going […]