Out of all the films associated with The Film Movement Formerly Known as Mumblecore, Aaron Katz’s Quiet City was perhaps the most visually assured. There was a real poetry and sensitivity to light and locations in that film, and his follow-up, Cold Weather, looks to take his filmmaking to a new level. The film will premiere at SXSW ’10, and the trailer is below.
In a press release sent out this week, director Robinson Devor (Police Beat, Zoo, which scored on Filmmaker’s Top 25 of the Decade list) is currently underway in San Francisco on a documentary on Sara Jane Moore, who attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford in September 1975 outside the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. Written by Devor, Charles Mudede and shot by d.p. Sean Kirby, Moore (pictured), now 80 and currently on parole after thirty years in prison, returns to San Francisco for the first time since the assassination attempt to be interviewed. The film also chronicles the lead […]
Jon Reiss has an excellent two-parter up at Ted Hope’s Truly Free Film blog. Titled “25 Points to Consider in Approaching Your Festival Premiere,” it’s broken down in a list of things you should consider in general before arriving at, really, any festival with your film, and then those other things you should think about if you are planning to make the festival premiere some part of your distribution launch. The latter piece in particular hit home as I’ve spoken to a number of filmmakers recently who have asked for DIY distribution advice. They want to know who to partner […]
I found this link on Twitter (sorry, can’t find the original tweet to attribute to) and it read something like, “Why New York’s new location fees are a bad idea.” Of course, green screen backdrops are nothing new, and all of us probably see a lot more of them in films than we realize. But this demo reel from Stargate Studios points to how ubiquitous they may become. Stargate Studios Virtual Backlot Demo from Stargate Studios on Vimeo.
At Filmmaker, we’ve covered the new generation of DSLR cameras, like the Canon 5D and 7D and Nikon D90, quite a bit, and while there’s a huge amount of interest from the indie community about these cameras, there’s also criticism of them as substitutes for professional HD cameras. I came across this morning two blog posts that articulate both sides of the issue. On Philip Johnston’s HD Warrior blog, he’s penned a post titled, “Filming with an HD DSLR: The Things They Don’t Tell You.” Here is his intro: RED Digital Cinema are in the process of producing the worlds […]
Over at Huffington Post, Stewart Nusbaumer previews the upcoming Sundance Film Festival from the point of view of its New York visitors. Thelma Adams, Meira Blaustein, Karina Longworth, Mike Maggiore and I all pick some upcoming pre-favorites from the Sundance selection. Here’s me on Josh and Benny Safdie’s Daddy Long Legs, which, it was announced today at indieWIRE, will be available on VOD right after the festival via Rainbow Media’s Sundance Selects (run by IFC). “One New York film I’m especially keen on is Josh and Benny Safdie’s Daddy Long Legs, which stars Frownland director Ronald Bronstein as a hopeless, […]
An observational documentary that utterly transports you to a forgotten corner of the American West, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash’s Sweetgrass is billed as a glimpse at the final sheep drive the state of Montana ever hosted. Shot in muddy, early aughts DV, this often funny, occasionally terrifying and almost always beautifully composed film follows a pair of modern shepherds who travel mostly on foot with three thousand sheep over a two hundred mile Montana expanse that cuts across the seemingly unending Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains. Without the use of voiceover narration or title cards, the film allows you to soak in […]
According to South by Southwest’s Web site, Matthew Vaughn‘s upcoming fanboy comedy Kick-Ass will open the festival when it begins March 12. The movie follows average teen Dave (Aaron Johnson), a comic-book fanatic who becomes a real-life superhero. Lionsgate will open the film April 16. A few other titles were announced for the 2010 SXSW, including Aaron Katz‘s new feature, Cold Weather; a doc on Motörhead frontman Lemmy Kilmister; and a doc by James Franco that takes a behind the scenes look at creating an episode of Saturday Night Live. The festival will run from March 12-21.
Over at his Cinema Echo Chamber, Brandon Harris extolls on Kim Gok’s Exhausted, a comically desolate whatzit of South Korean underground cinema. Minimalist and bleak but with a certain repetitive humor, Gok’s film had its U.S. premiere at the Syracuse International Film Festival and went on to play Pusan and Rotterdam, where Harris and I both saw it, but has played in few other places. It is not out in the States, can’t be streamed, as Harris notes, and I never remember seeing it at Kim’s before they closed. From Harris, the plot: An unnamed pimp and prostitute/girlfriend live and […]
… in the form of an Islands music video. Here’s Cera, who stars this week in Miguel Arteta’s Youth in Revolt, in the clip directed by Derrick Beckles.