This piece was originally printed in the Fall 2010 issue. 127 Hours is nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor (James Franco), Best Adapted Screenplay (Danny Boyle & Simon Beaufoy), Best Editing (Jon Harris), Best Original Score (A.R. Rahman) and Best Original Song. When Werner Herzog made his 1982 true-life inspired tale of a Peruvian capitalist transporting a giant steamer across dry land, Fitzcarraldo, he famously replicated the ordeal, lugging with his crew an even bigger ship across the Amazon jungle in one of the most strenuous and demanding movie shoots of all time. Before its release, Francis Ford Coppola said […]
The 11th Tokyo Filmex opened with Apitchatpong Weerasethakul’s beguiling Uncle Boonmee, Who Can Recall His Past Lives (pictured left). The opening film set the tenor of the week to come — experimental, personal, willing to take chances. At the opening ceremony festival director Kanako Hayashi gave a shout out to the man who pretty much put Japanese film on the Western critical map, Donald Richie. All eyes in the audience turned toward the frail, but unbowed, man who graciously acknowledged the accolades. Over the last year the 86-year old Richie has been conspicuously absent from the film scene that he […]
Filmmaker Victoria Mahoney premiered her first feature,Yelling to the Sky, in Competition at the Berlin Film Festival this month, and arriving in the city with her was British graffiti artist Robbo. And by the time of the film’s premiere, the city was the richer for a wall-sized mural of the film’s lead character, Sweetness (Zoe Kravitz). Below, Mahoney writes about the process of finding a home for Robbo’s work. Her story has an ironic coda given Robbo’s recent street rivalry with Banksy. Read on. I always knew I’d be mounting a graffiti piece in tandem with the premiere of Yelling […]
This piece was originally printed in the Fall 2010 issue. Black Swan is nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Darren Aronofsky), Best Actress (Natalie Portman), Best Cinematography (Matthew Libatique), Best Editing (Andrew Weisblum). Darren Aronofsky was developing a project based on Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1846 novella, The Double, when he happened to go to a production of another Russian work, Swan Lake, the 1875 ballet composed by Peter Tchaikovsky. Seeing the ballet’s White Swan and Black Swan played by the same ballerina, Aronofsky experienced what he called a “Eureka” moment, realizing that The Double’s themes of splintering identity and […]
Here Oscar-winner Robert Benton interviews Derek Cianfrance. The piece was originally printed in the Fall 2010 issue. Blue Valentine is nominated for Best Actress (Michelle Williams). As a child, Derek Cianfrance always worried his parents would divorce. When he was 20 his fears were realized. Both upset as well as curious about his own emotional antennae — how he somehow sensed discord in his parents’ relationship — Cianfrance decided to tackle the subject head-on with a movie. After gaining notice in the indie community with his debut feature, Brother Tied, in 1998, Cianfrance got to work on Blue Valentine, a […]
A native of Montreal, Dolan is a former child actor who wrote and directed his first film, I Killed My Mother, at age 20, after dropping out of university. That movie, a semi-autobiographical tale of coming out which debuted at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard sidebar, won three awards at the 2009 festival, including the Regards Jeune given to young filmmakers of great promise. A stylized depiction of hopelessly “imaginary” love, Xavier Dolan’s sophomore feature Heartbeats (which also premiered at Cannes) trails a pair of close friends—witty, Audrey Hepburn manqué Marie (Monia Chokri) and sweet-faced Francis (Dolan)—who simultaneously […]
The IFP announced today the lineup for this year’s Script to Screen Conference. Taking place March 5, the event will take place at 92Y Tribeca in New York City. This year’s keynotes include Barry Levinson and Black Swan screenwriter Mark Heyman. There will also be a discussion on new platforms for writers with Onion News Network head writer Carol Kolb, a conversation with producer Ted Hope and the filmmakers behind Sundance hit Martha Marcy May Marlene talk about creative teamwork. To learn more about the conference and how to get tickets go to http://www.ifp.org/script-to-screen-conference/ Read the press release on Script […]
Originally posted online on December 16, 2010. Rabbit Hole is nominated for Best Actress (Nicole Kidman). David Lindsay-Abaire’s Pulitzer Prize winning play Rabbit Hole might seem like an odd choice for helmer John Cameron Mitchell, a director whose reputation wasn’t gained built on tasteful, upper-middle-class family dramas. Perhaps he’s mellowed, and given the results, why not? The film’s story of parental grief, that of a Westchester County couple (Aaron Eckhart and Nicole Kidman) who, eight months later still lack the emotional wherewithal to deal with the accidental death of their young son, may seem like the stuff of so many […]
Radiohead’s The King of Limbs, announced for pre-order this week, is available one day early. If you bought it already, you can log in to the pre-order page with your password and download it. I’ve only given it one listen so far, but it’s more intimate, softer, prettier album than In Rainbows, sonically closer to Kid A but more open emotionally. I like it. Arriving with the album today is this amazing video for “Lotus Flower” featuring Thom Yorke, a bare stage, and a light. The video is directed by Garth Jennings and choreographed by Wayne McGregor. (Click on the […]
Palm Springs, jewel of the desert, playground of the Hollywood rich, not to mention thousands of prosperous retirees who enjoy golf, tennis, and dinner at five, is also the home of a pretty cool film festival, started by Sonny Bono in 1990. Once, it was a sleepy little affair where audiences could see multiple films in the same theater on the same ticket, and no one paid much attention to the results. Those days are emphatically over. Wrapping its 22nd year on January 17, the Festival broke its own attendance record in 2011, as more than 130,000 cinephiles crowded into […]