Andrew Gurland and Huck Botko’s Mail Order Wife, covered in the current issue of Filmmaker, opened this weekend at the Angelika, and its first weekend performance will have a lot to do with how widely this perversely funny and disturbing mock doc plays around the country. We’d tell you all the reasons to see it, but Moriarty at Ain’t It Cool News presents a much more detailed and coherent argument that we’re able to muster this late at night….
Our friend Travis Crawford, who appears often in our pages, drops from view in the late winter and early spring when, as associate director of programming for the Philadelphia Film Festival he puts together his Danger After Dark program. And now, in what has become an annual tradition, he re-emerges with an e-mail in which he sneaks his program to his friends a few days in advance of the official announcement. If you are a devotee of outre genre films — and even if you don’t plan to attend the festival — check out Crawford’s program, below. His wonderfully descriptive […]
The New York Underground Film Festival has announced their lineup for the 2005 edition that runs from March 9 – 15 at the Anthology Film Archives. The festival is bookended by films you’ve read about in the magazine or on this blog by filmmakers we are big fans of. Asia Argento opens the festival with her J.T. Leroy adaptation, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, and the festival is closed with Crispin Hellion Glover’s What Is It?, which premiered at midnight at Sundance this year. Check out these movies and all the interesting stuff in between! .
A few years after its move to Potsdamer Platz, the old dead zone between East and West Berlin that’s now a somber (at least in rainy February) pedestrian mall lit by the logos of its surrounding corporate spires, the Berlin Film Festival represents a shrewdly intelligent answer to the questions surrounding film production, exhibition and distribution today. Whereas the success of most festivals boils down to the cruel calculus of distribution deals and premiering masterpieces, the Berlin Film Festival, through its accompanying Talent Campus and its various retrospective programs, embraces a kind of “film festival as film school” model. By […]
Saw back to back screenings in the Sundance “experimental” Frontier section to kick off my festival moviewatching this year. Frequently ignored by most industry, the Frontier section always contains a few real discoveries by filmmakers the fest tags as “experimental” but who will go on to make the mark in the indie scene. A few years ago J.T. Petty debuted his chillingly simple near-silent ghost story Soft for Digging in the section and last year Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation screened there as well. This year the Frontier “filmmaker to watch” may be Kyle Henry, whose Room is an excellently directed and […]
A little over a year ago Filmmaker ran a feature entitled “Who Inspires Us?” [Summer 2004] in which we asked filmmakers to list current inspirations on their own work. Manito director Eric Eason cited the Japanese author Haruki Murakami, who was actually a recommendation to him from our own Managing Editor Matt Ross. Anyway, I hadn’t read any of Murakami’s work but the citing stuck in my head and I wound up buying his The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle this fall at a time when I particularly needed something great to read. 600-plus pages later I’m a die-hard Murakami fan, and […]
Well done piece by Eddie Borges in the New York Observer about Blueprint, the new New York-based collaboration between Initial Entertainment’s Graham King and former Miramax exec Rick Schwartz, famous for his supporting role in Project Greenlight. Writes Borges, “And so, earlier this year, Blueprint opened its sparsely furnished offices in a second-story loft overlooking Mercer Street in Soho, marking the arrival of a new big fish in the small pond of Manhattan’s film world. For, despite the apparent frugality of its offices, as a subsidiary of Mr. King’s Santa Monica-based film sales company, Initial Entertainment Group, which just secured […]
Filmmaker readers should check out two essential articles in the Village Voice this week by friends and colleagues Anthony Kaufman and Ted Hope. Both deal with the relationship between our current political climate and the state of indie filmmaking today. Kaufman, who gives up his “NY Scene” column in our magazine this month due to his move to Chicago, asks the question, “Reagan-era callousness sparked an indie film renaissance. Will Bush 2 inspire another?” Kaufman’s piece winds its way through discussions with Christine Vachon, James Schamus and Jeff Levy-Hinte before concluding with a trenchant inquiry by HBO’s Colin Callendar: “Whether […]
I learned over the holidays that artist Gretchen Bender, whose intelligent, visually seductive work crossed lines between visual art and film, sculpture and video, died in New York on Sunday, December 18 of cancer. She was 53. Bender, who, early in her career exhibited at the East Village Nature Morte Gallery and later Metro Pictures, created conceptually concise and elegant work that often critiqued mainstream media and the power imbalances contained within its representations. And while many artists at this time were working with appropriation and engaging in similar sorts of critique, Bender’s work always cunningly embodied within itself a […]
“Adam and Eve” files, darknets, curries, topsites — no, I’m not referring to some kinky download website but rather the topics discussed in Wired Magazine’s essential January cover story by Jeff Howe referred to in the post below, which has just been posted online. It’s a look at how pirated material winds up on the web and for those who imagine it’s via teenagers sharing files with their friends, think again. The pirate internet distribution system is as rigidly controlled and hierarchical as the studio system except it boasts an entirely different group of players competing not for dollars but […]