Our favorite NYC-based low-budget horror mega-studio, Glass Eye Pix, celebrates its 25th anniversary with a two-week retrospective series of screenings at reRun in New York that begins today. They include founder Larry Fessenden’s first picture, No Telling, his excellent and quite movie Wendigo, and films by its roster of artists including Ti West and James McKenney, whose Satan Hates You, says Fessenden in the New York Times video below, is an “oddly serene and pious Christian scare film.” In Fall, 2009, Filmmaker celebrated Glass Eye Pix’s 24th anniversary with an article and interview of Fessenden by Lauren Wissot. From her […]
In our Winter print edition, Alicia Van Couvering wrote five short case studies of films raising production financing in innovative ways. One was Kentucker Audley’s Open Five, and now the film is finished and premiering tonight as the Opening Film of the 13th Memphis Film Festival. In addition to premiering for the Memphis audience, the film will also be streaming free for a limited time at Audley’s site. (Loyal readers will also remember that Audley was one of our “25 New Faces” of 2007. From the press release: Open Five is described as a blend of “reality and fiction” and […]
This year the Museum of Modern Art’s Film Department launched a year long retrospective of a prominent octogenarian documentarian. On opening night of the series, with the filmmaker present, the curator of the series asked during a Q&A, “do you think you’ve mellowed a bit with age?” Frederick Wiseman responded, “why does one have to mellow?” In fact, at eighty, he hasn’t at all. Yes his films have grown a touch more lyrical and perhaps one could even say tender as he enters his sixth decade as our country and perhaps the world’s most vital documentarian. Since bursting on the […]
Have you ever thought that most movie trailers, with their portentous title cards and triumphant musical scores, could have been stamped out by a computer? Well, Steve Jobs and his software designers at Apple certainly did. But rather than whine about Hollywood’s formulaic marketing techniques, they monetized their critique. Brand new today is iMovie ’11 with a clever and soon to be supremely irritating new feature: movie trailers. Check out this iMovie demo to see what it’s all about. So, get ready for every holiday card to now feel like a Jerry Bruckheimer promo, with your friends’ sons and daughters […]
Two new pieces up here at Filmmaker. In the latest “Into the Splice” from Nicholas Rombes, he goes to a lonely multiplex on a Monday night to see Let Me In, stewing on the way to the theater over the sacrilege of its production: I went to see Let Me In with low expectations. Like so many, I had seen and been awed by the original Swedish version, Let the Right One In (directed by Tomas Alfredson), whose quiet pacing and lonely stretches of relative silence only made the horror more horrible when it came. An American version, surely, would […]
I went to see Let Me In with low expectations. Like so many, I had seen and been awed by the original Swedish version, Let the Right One In (directed by Tomas Alfredson), whose quiet pacing and lonely stretches of relative silence only made the horror more horrible when it came. An American version, surely, would speed up the pace and overload the naturalistic violence with CGI-generated hyper-energy. On the way to the theater I asked Lisa about this. “I don’t know,” she said, “give it a chance.” “But I don’t want to give it a chance. I want to […]
One of Europe’s preeminent film directors for more than three decades, Margarethe von Trotta (Rosa Luxemburg, The Promise) was born in Berlin 1942 and relocated to Düsseldorf with her mother after the war. In Paris, where she moved after high school, Von Trotta immersed herself in film culture and became a major fixture of the New German Cinema, acting in early films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Gods of the Plague, Beware of a Holy Whore) and collaborating closely with her ex-husband Volker Schlöndorff, with whom she co-directed the 1975 political drama The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, before helming […]
Marketing and publicity specialist Sheri Candler has a post up on her blog entitled “Five Ways to Fail at Crowdfunding” that is a good read for those thinking of kickstarting of gogo’ing their indie feature. She opens: I am prompted to write this post because I have been hit up many times lately about supporting, advising or donating to various crowdfunding initiatives. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t quite a complaint because I have been known to support many campaigns by doing any one of these things (ask anyone else offering their advice if they have done any of these […]
After Sam Green and Dave Cerf premiered their “live documentary” Utopia in Four Movements at Sundance, I wrote the below as part of a Sundance wrap-up at FilmInFocus. Also part of New Frontier was Sam Green and Dave Cerf’s Utopia in Four Movements. In what was billed as a “live documentary,” filmmaker Green, who previously helmed the doc, The Weather Underground, explores a precondition for revolution: a shared vision of utopia. The score was composed and played live by The Quavers (Catherine McCrae, Dennis Cronin, T. Griffin, and Cerf), and Green did live voiceover over film clips and slides. Recalling […]
Artist Banksy, whose Exit to the Gift Shop is one of the best films of the year, storyboarded and directed the opening “couch gag” sequence of tonight’s The Simpsons. It references the fact that much of the Simpsons animation is outsourced to South Korea. Check it out.