The Slamdance Film Festival announced the titles for its 14th year. The festival will run alongside Sundance in Park City, Utah Jan. 17-25. This year’s Opening Night Film is Randall Cole‘s Real Time. The full list is below. Narrative Feature Competition FIX, (USA) Written/Directed by Tao Ruspoli This darkly comedic road movie journeys from Beverly Hills to Watts over the course of 12 hours, as documentary filmmakers Bella and Milo race to get Milo’s brother Leo from jail to rehab before 8 p.m. – or Leo goes to prison for three years. FROST, (USA) Written/Directed by Steve ClarkWhen a Manhattan […]
CHRISTIAN SLATER IN DIRECTOR FRANK CAPPELLO’S HE WAS A QUIET MAN. COURTESY MITROPOULOS FILMS. Whether he’s writing, directing, creating special effects, playing music, or simply recounting anecdotes, Frank Cappello seems to have a compulsive need to entertain. He honed his storytelling skills as a kid reading out his imagined motocross adventures to classmates, and then spent years writing spec scripts while working in special effects. Though the first script he sold, Suburban Commando (1991), became a derided Hulk Hogan vehicle, it was a launchpad for Cappello to direct two genre pictures. American Yakuza (1993) and No Way Back (1995) both […]
Harmony Korine’s latest feature, Mister Lonely, opened recently in England, will open France soon, and is due to arrive in U.S. theaters in the Spring from IFC Films. But Korine has also been filming some other work recently. Here’s a wonderful TV ad he just completed for the British department store chain Thornton’s.
When I was a kid I remember going to see Apocalypse Now at D.C.’s incredible Uptown theater and being handled a program when I entered. It was a black-and-white book, about sixteen pages, with stills from the film and commentary about it. It was a cool thing to get at a movie and I still have it. So it was interesting to read over at Ray Pride’s Movie City Indie that the Weinstein Company are doing something similar for the release of Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There. Pride quotes the press release: The Weinstein Company is pleased to announce that […]
NICOLE KIDMAN IN DIRECTOR NOAH BAUMBACH’S MARGOT AT THE WEDDING. COURTESY PARAMOUNT VANTAGE. If you believe what you read, Noah Baumbach’s films — sharp, witty, poignant and sometimes devastating — are drawn directly from his life. The son of Village Voice film critic Georgia Brown and novelist and film critic Jonathan Baumbach, Baumbach debuted as a writer-director in 1995 with his acclaimed Kicking and Screaming, the first of a number of films made during his twenties about New Yorkers in their twenties. After his second film, Mr Jealousy (1997), Baumbach admits that he got “derailed” and ended up making Highball […]
Bruce McDonald’s new film The Tracey Fragments played at the AFI Fest this week, but if you missed it, don’t worry — you can make your own version of the film. The film stars Ellen Page and is described as “a 21st century Catcher in the Rye told in a dizzying pop-art fashion.” The film is also edited in a multi-frame format, and the filmmakers have employed this aesthetic concept coupled with open-source generosity to come up with a unique promotional tool. As one of the three editors of the film, Matt Hannam, wrote in an email, “As the movie […]
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 […]