There’s a great point/counterpoint going on over at The Onion’s A.V. Club Blog having to do with whether or not Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy and Andrew Bujalski’s Mutual Appreciation (pictured) are the future of independent cinema. Or, actually, whether we should be scolded for not ensuring that they are considered as such. First Scott Tobias’s original post, which is entitled “Mutual Appreciation, Old Joy and the Current State of American Independent Film.” An excerpt: …If you care at all about American independent films, you’re required to see these movies…. Watching these movies in short succession was a pretty bracing experience […]
Over on the main page Annie Nocenti interviews the directors of Jesus Camp,, the incredibly fascinating documentary that opened this weekend from Magnolia Pictures. In the piece, co-director Heidi Ewing discusses Magnolia’s strategy to position the film as something of interest to both Christian evangelical audiences and godless hipsters in the big city: Ewing: Eamonn wants to bring the film to Christian strongholds before it hits L.A. or New York. Colorado Springs, Kansas City — they get the movie first. Magnolia is withholding the film from the secular world for one or two weeks. The Evangelicals have time to embrace […]
If you’re in the habit of just bookmarking this blog page, check out the main page for two new online features of films opening this weekend: American Hardcore and Jesus Camp.
Halfway through Pusher, Nicolas Winding Refn’s first installment in what would ultimately become an epic trilogy, the director faced a predicament. Suddenly, the genre marked by guns and car chases held no interest. He abandoned the beatings and foot chases from the film’s early scenes, and went for a haunting, harrowing character study. “I realized I wasn’t interested in gangsters and crime,” the Danish filmmaker explains of his 1996 film. “I was really interested in the morality of the characters, and their emotional descents into hell.” That’s from KM Doughton’s feature on Nicholas Winding Refn’s Pusher trilogy which we’ve just […]
Director Nicolas Winding Refn on “The Pusher Trilogy” KIM BODNIA IN “PUSHER” Halfway through “Pusher,” Nicolas Winding Refn’s first installment in what would ultimately become an epic trilogy, the director faced a predicament. Suddenly, the genre marked by guns and car chases held no interest. He abandoned the beatings and foot chases from the film’s early scenes, and went for a haunting, harrowing character study. “I realized I wasn’t interested in gangsters and crime,” the Danish filmmaker explains of his 1996 film. “I was really interested in the morality of the characters, and their emotional descents into hell.” “The Pusher […]
I was up at the Creative Capital retreat this weekend where I saw a lot of great work by the organization’s ’04 and ’05 grantees. But if I was in town I probably would have been, along with $47 million of you, at the opening weekend of Talledega Nights. It reunites the Anchorman team of Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, and that’s enough for me. James Ponsoldt, who directed Off the Black (which I produced and which is coming out December 1 from Think Film) has just launched a MySpace page and he’s already got several blog entries up, including […]
I just got back from Miami Vice, and as a huge fan of Michael Mann’s work (including the show on which the movie was based), I was pretty disappointed. The first thirty minutes is fairly strong as Mann throws you smack into the middle of an undercover operation and shoots the various night-time clashes and assignations with a purposefully grainy and quite bold visual style — rooftop meetings against purple night skies, outrageous wheel mounts hovering inches above the Miami causeways, and the grain signifying a dirty reality miles removed from the TV show’s pastel-hued romantic nihilism. And indeed, while […]
The folks over at Filmcritic.com have compiled a highly debatable but still fun list: The Top 50 Movie Endings of All Time. Of course, it’s a calvacade of spoilers, but if you’re reasonably film literate you’ll have seen most of these and can see if your take on movie clilmaxes syncs up with the site’s editors. Here’s one I very much agree with (although Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant might have made my list too): King of New York (1990) – After facing the last (and oldest) cop of the four that stalked him, crime lord Christopher Walken sits in a cab, […]
Now that Caveh Zahedi’s I am a Sex Addict is out of New York, I need to keep reminding myself to continue to go to Zahedi’s blog, which he is keeping up with great posts on any number of topics. Here he is at the Wellington Film festival recounting his thoughts following a meeting with the great Iranian director Jafar Panahi: We are exactly the same age. His English isn’t very good, and my Persian is even worse, so we communicated by means of a translator (note to self: learn Persian). But it was fascinating to hear him talk about […]
Several years ago I selected for our annual “25 New Faces” feature filmmaker Jonathan Weiss, who had just finished a many-years-in-the-making adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s great novel The Atrocity Exhibition. The film is full of amazing sequences, has a truly unique and disquieting tone, and embodies a keen understanding of the ideas that course through Ballard’s most radical novel. (Yes, more radical than Crash.) I spoke to Weiss a few weeks ago and it seems like he’s looking for a U.S. video deal for the film. I hope he’s secured one by now, but in the meantime, here’s Tim Lucas […]