Ry Russo-Young’s You Won’t Miss Me was one of our favorite films at Sundance this year. It is a free-wheeling, lyrical but sometimes jarring depiction of a few months in the life of young and struggling New York actress navigating both harsh auditions and her own chaotic emotional relationships. The film has a deceptively casual feel as it avoids obvious plot points and melodramatic narrative contrivances. By its conclusion, however, it feels full — an honest portrait of character we haven’t quite seen on screen before at a very specific moment in her life. Following its Sundance premiere, the film […]
Here are a few links that have caught my eye in the past week: Barack Obama is doing his small part to cut back on federal spending by regifting an AFI box set of the “25 Greatest American Films of all Time” to visiting British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. As The Guardian reports, the British press is up in arms by the chintzy perceived snub, noting that Brown previously gave Obama a pen carved from the sister ship the White House desk is made from and a first edition of a seven-volume Churchill biography. The gift has also turned political […]
There’s a superb interview with Michel Gondry by Nick Bradshaw up on The Guardian’s film page. It’s great because what starts off as a straightforward dialogue about Gondry’s judging of a short online film competition for Babelgum riffs off into a wide-ranging discourse on the problems with contests, censorship vs. self-censorship, the siren call of the web’s dark places, the challenges involved in music video creation, and why his short Rubik’s cube videos got him more props from Kevin Spacey than Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. An excerpt: I think you should be able to censor yourself. If you […]
CORNEL WEST IN DIRECTOR ASTRA TAYLOR’S EXAMINED LIFE. COURTESY ZEITGEIST FILMS. Still in her twenties, documentarian Astra Taylor has already brought a philosophical bent to non-fiction filmmaking and is looking to push the form in new and exciting directions. Taylor was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1979 and grew up in Athens, Georgia. She studied first at the University of Georgia and then got an MA in sociology, philosophy and cultural theory at the New School for Social Research in New York. In 2001, she co-produced and co-directed the 45-minute documentary Miracle Tree: Moringa Oleifera, about infant malnutrition in Senegal, […]
Okay, here’s a pull quote you won’t often get from me: this film is good for your soul. I’m referring to Astra Taylor’s Examined Life, which opens tomorrow at the IFC Center in New York and which is so engaging, hopeful and against-the-grain that it becomes a must-see cinematic tonic for these confusing times. Examined Life is Taylor’s documentary about the related acts of thinking and walking. Using the history of mobile thought as her springboard (for more on this, read Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust), Taylor (pictured) follows eight philosophers as they stroll through their hometown environments engaging in a series […]
Director Michel Gondry and singer-songrwiter David Ford have announced the winners of of the first ever Babelgum Music Video Awards. Babelgum viewers from over 100 countries participated, for the first time simultaneously from the Web and from Mobile phones. The 10 finalists rated highest by the public online were then viewed by Gondry and Ford, for their final selection of the overall winner. From the release: The Babelgum Music Video “Grand Prize” (a record development deal with Universal Music UK) went to Quio (Germany) for her “So Dazed”, produced by Christine Lang (Director) and Maria Schöpe (Production design). “I liked […]
IFP announced today that after a five year sabbatical they are bringing back their spring conference, “Script to Screen.” Taking place March 7 & 8 at the New York Film Academy, the conference returns to address the new landscape and opportunities facing content creators working across platforms in film, television and new technologies. The conference opens with a conversation between James Schamus, Focus Features CEO, and Scott Macaulay, Editor of Filmmaker Magazine. The conference closes with a conversation with filmmaker Lee Daniels, director of the recent Sundance Grand Jury Prize Winner Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire. Other featured […]
Via Scott Kirsner’s CinemaTech blog comes potentially important news for film and video makers interested in distributing their work online: YouTube is enabling paid downloads. From Kirsner: If you want to pull down a high-res, MP4 copy of a video from the site (which will play on an iPod), you can pay to do so. No word on what percentage of the revenue goes to the creator. But the one way to pay for videos is Google Checkout, Google’s own PayPal-like payment system. YouTube is currently only testing this with select partners. Wired News notes that the files aren’t DRM […]
CLIVE OWEN AND NAOMI WATTS IN DIRECTOR TOM TYKWER’S THE INTERNATIONAL. COURTESY COLUMBIA PICTURES. German writer-director Tom Tykwer, arguably one of the most exciting auteurs in world cinema, has been immersed in movies since he was a child and always seemed destined to become a director. Born in the town of Wuppertal in 1965, by the age of 11 Tykwer had picked up a Super 8 camera and begun making films. At the age of 14, he got a job at Cinema, the local arthouse theater, where he would stay after hours, repeatedly watching Blade Runner. After completing his compulsory […]
The line up for this year’s New Directors/New Films was announced moments ago. The opening film will be Cherien Dabis’s Amreeka and Lee Daniels’s Sundance Grand Jury Prize winning film Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire is the closing film. The full list of titles are below. ND/NF will be held at NYC’s Museum of Modern Art and The Film Society of Lincoln Center March 25 – April 5. OPENING NIGHT Amreeka Cherien Dabis, USA/Canada/Kuwait, 2009; 96m Cherien Dabis’s humanist miracle of a first film chronicles the bittersweet adjustment to a multicultural way of life after Muna, a single […]