OCTAVIO GÓMEZ IN STEVE BARRON’S CHOKING MAN. COURTESY INTERNATIONAL FILM CIRCUIT. Considering Steve Barron’s career, you can’t help wondering why he isn’t better known. Having grown up around films (because his mother, Zelda Barron, was a script supervisor, producer and director), Dublin-born Barron progressed from a clapper loader on movies like A Bridge Too Far and Ridley Scott’s debut The Duellists (both 1977) to one of the most influential pop promo directors of the 1980s. He was responsible for the videos for Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean, Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing and a-ha’s Take On Me. After making the cult […]
Filmgoers of course know Vincent Gallo from his features The Brown Bunny and Buffalo 66, but he’s also an accomplished painter and musician. Today, Pitchfork reports on Gallo’s latest, RRIICCEE, a new music group featuring him and Hole guitarist Eric Erlandson. The group will go on tour next month. RRIICCEE has a website that is promising more details soon, and Gallo had the following words in a press release: “Improvisation is not a good word for what we’re doing. It’s more a gesture of composing and performing at the same time, always hoping to avoid musical cliché or jamming. We’ve […]
Over at Film Comment, critic Amy Taubin visits the mumblecore party and finds that the keg has run dry. “Adieu, mumblecore, the indie movement that never was more than a flurry of festival hype and blogosphere branding,” she opens (and summarizes) with in a piece that challenges the proposition that these largely no-budget, DIY films constitute a valid aesthetic movement. Is that, however, a sufficient basis for a film movement? Obviously not in the grand sense of the French New Wave or the postwar American avant-garde. At most, one might think of mumblecore as an update of the “New Talkie,” […]
Steve Barron’s Choking Man, which won the Filmmaker-sponsored “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You” Gotham Award last year, is finally — and thankfully — in theaters. It opens this Friday at the Cinema Village and we highly recommend it. If you don’t know much about it, elsewhere on this site Nick Dawson interviews Steve Barron, the writer/director. Over at The Reeler, Stu Van Airsdale has a great feature up in which he talks with Barron and sorts through the film’s odd but ultimately touching mixture of social and magic realism. Go see it — and, if you’re […]
THE LATE, GREAT JOE STRUMMER IN JULIEN TEMPLE’S JOE STRUMMER: THE FUTURE IS UNWRITTEN. COURTESY IFC FIRST TAKE. For 30 years, Brit Julien Temple has combined his dual passions of film and music, and worked with greats in both fields along the way. He first came to prominence with The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle (1979), the Sex Pistols’ madcap cinematic offering, and from there went on to become an important figure in the fledgling pop video medium as well as pioneering the feature-length promo with the Human League’s spy-themed Mantrap (1983) and Mick Jagger’s Running Out of Luck (1987). […]
Steve Buscemi’s Interview, which Filmmaker featured on its cover last issue, opened in London this week and there’s been some U.K. press about the movie and its American shoot. And while I don’t consider myself a reflexive stars-and-stripes-forever rah-rah’er, I found the comments in this Guardian piece entitled “The Final Cut” by the slain Dutch director Theo Van Gogh’s “creative consultant” Doesjka van Hoogdalem about shooting in American both naive and annoying. Much of the piece is devoted to van Hoogdalem’s wide-eyed wonder at the wacky wastefulness of U.S. filmmaking. From the piece: However, maintaining the authenticity of the Van […]
MATTHEW SUNDERLAND AS KILLER DAVID GRAY IN DIRECTOR ROBERT SARKIES’ OUT OF THE BLUE. COURTESY IFC FIRST TAKE. Some people go through their whole lives searching for what they truly want to do, but those fortunate souls who find their vocation early in life can achieve incredible feats. New Zealander Robert Sarkies made his first film, Snap, Sizzle and Bang, when he was only 10, and by his early twenties his acclaimed shorts Dream Makers (1993), Flames from the Heart (1995) and Signing Off (1996) had played at film festivals around the world. Sarkies made his feature debut with Scarfies […]
Ed M. Koziarski in the Chicago Reader posts a piece about mumblecore auteur Joe Swanberg in the months following his breakthrough film Hannah Takes the Stairs. He goes with the hook of Swanberg still struggling financially despite his mini-stardom (“It hasn’t changed my life at all,” Swanberg says. “I’m still sitting in Chicago wondering how I’m going to buy groceries. I’m not getting phone calls from agents or studios saying, ‘What are you up to?’”), but there are other observations in the piece worth noting. Like this one: Hannah Takes the Stairs grossed a respectable $6,000 on one screen its […]
RYAN GOSLING DINES WITH PAUL SCHNEIDER, EMILY MORTIMER AND “BIANCA” IN CRAIG GILLESPIE’S LARS AND THE REAL GIRL. COURTESY MGM. Leading up to the Oscars on Feb. 24, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Nick Dawson interviewed Lars and the Real Girl director Craig Gillespie for our Director Interviews section of the Website. Lars and the Real Girl is nominated for Best Original Screenplay (Nancy Oliver). In one of the more unusual coincidences on this year’s movie release schedule, Craig Gillespie has seen his first […]
The following interview appeared originally in Filmmaker‘s Fall, 2007 print edition. We don’t cover enough screenwriters in Filmmaker, but that’s not entirely our fault. This magazine is devoted to independent film, and for many, the director is also the writer. Or the script has emerged from improvisation or some other nontraditional means. And while there is a new breed of independent-minded screenwriters today — Charlie Kaufman, Capote’s Dan Futterman and Juno’s Diablo Cody come immediately to mind — many of the “marquee screenwriters” still work almost exclusively in the studio world. By virtue of the unique niche that screenwriter Oren […]