Via Netribution, “The first Saudi Arabian film festival opened in the Red Sea city of Jeddah this week, in an ultra-conservative country where the silver screen is so controversial that the word ‘cinema’ does not even get a mention in the title. ‘The Jeddah Visual Show Festival’ started on Wednesday night screening two hours of home-grown short films.” The article goes on to talk about the slow birth of cinema in Saudi Arabia — namely, cartoons and the short films shown at this festival. From the piece: Public screenings of movies are taboo in Saudi Arabia, where religious scholars believe […]
Caroline Bermudez over at Pitchfork chats via email with Scott Crary whose Kill your Idols opens on July 7th at the Cinema Village in New York and comes to DVD this fall. The doc, which Crary says he made for $300 (okay, I know these bands aren’t the Rolling Stones, but I’d hope they got more than $3 each for their music rights) looks at the late ’70s/early ’80s New York No Wave — folks like Arto Lindsay and DNA, Glenn Branca, Sonic Youth, Lydia Lunch — and the current musicians (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Liars, A.R.E. Weapons, etc.) they have […]
Slate has a Summer Movies Week going, and this interesting feature is part of it: a survey as to which film various directors and actors watch the most. Here’s Neil LaBute’s reply: Outside of perennial holiday fare like The Wizard of Oz, It’s a Wonderful Life, or Salo, I think I’ve watched Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon more times than any other movie I can remember. (Warren Beatty’s Reds would give it a run for its money—I saw that 14 times in the theater!) For me, Barry Lyndon is the most distinctive and beautiful re-creation of period on film, bar none, […]
Filmmaker Michael Kang has taken up a novel and interesting approach to promoting his new film, The Motel. He’s started a blog featuring personal stories sharing the theme of his movie: Puberty Sucks. (Well, that’s not what I’d guess the theme of the movie is, because it’s really a quite winning coming-of-age tale, but then again, stories about people’s rotten childhoods are always entertaining…) Here’s from his first posting: Thanks for stopping by. I’m sorry the place is a bit sparse right now. I started this site not only because of my stunted emtional state but also because of the […]
Opening this week in New York is one of the boldest and most interesting of recent independent films, Room, written and directed by Kyle Henry. With a stunning lead performance by Cyndi Williams, Room uses the mental breakdown of a lower-class, struggling, unhappily-married-with-kids bingo parlor worker to look at the psychic mindscape of post 9/11 American life. Also opening is Michael Kang’s The Motel, an unusual and interesting coming-of-age tale centered around a 13-year-old Chinese-American boy living with his mother in a downscale Jersey hotel. Finally, in Who Killed the Electric Car, opening around the country from Sony Classics, director […]
Many filmmakers lately have been interested in blending documentary with drama, mixing real people and places into classically structured stories. Perhaps the best of these recent attempts is also the most timely and vital; Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’s The Road to Guantanamo, which tells the true story of three British Muslims who, traveling to Pakistan for a wedding, haplessly wind up captured by U.S. military and sent to Guantanamo Bay. Winterbottom and Whitecross shoot on DV and blend talking-head interviews with the real “Tipton Three” — who have since been released — with incredibly dramatic scenes with actors that […]
The lawyers at Paramount, who presumably are not fans of folks like Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and other appropriation-based artists, have launched a federal lawsuit against artist Christopher Moukarbel, who we blogged about recently. They are charging copyright infringement with regards to a 12-minute film he created and put up online which is based, apparently, on a copy of the screenplay for Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center. (Filmmaker‘s blog is cited in the Paramount filing.) The Smoking Gun has all the details, including links to screenplay excerpts, which have been filed as exhibits, as well as a side-by-side comparison of […]
With The Outsider, cinematic badboy James Toback gets in front of the camera for first-time filmmaker Nicholas Jarecki. “Who is James Toback?” That’s the question documentary filmmaker Nicholas Jarecki poses in The Outsider, a freewheeling and highly watchable portrait of the director of idiosyncratic films like Fingers and Black and White. Jarecki introduces his subject, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Bugsy, on the set of a 2004 film for which Toback had high hopes. When Will I Be Loved, which starred Neve Campbell as a young woman on the make, would, like many of Toback’s films, be a minor presence […]
Actor Sung Kang (pictured) stars in both Michael Kang’s indie The Motel, which opens in a couple of weeks and Justin Lin’s very big budget The Fast and Furious 3. Here’s a mash-up that unites the two movies entitled The Motel and the Furious.
Steve Gallagher emailed today to pass on news about the newly launched website of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation, “the world’s largest multi-media collection showcasing Ingmar Bergman’s professional career, dating back to 1938.” It’s one of the best single-director websites out there, an exhaustive catalogue of the great director’s work delivered, at times, in a surprisingly light-hearted tone. For example, here’s the opening of the page dealing with Bergman and the theme of Death. Bergman and Death have become the subject of parody, and a gentle (or otherwise) mockery of the art house cinema scene. The personification of Death in The […]