The nominees for the Gotham Awards‘ Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You will be screening Friday, Nov. 16 – Monday, Nov. 19 at The Museum of Modern Art. Here’s a look at this year’s nominees. The winner, selected by Filmmaker and MoMA‘s dept. of film, will be announced at the Gotham Awards Nov. 27. Click here for more on the screenings. Approximate running time: 5:10. Download here by right clicking and choosing Save Target or Save Link. To learn more about the films, go to their websites: Off The Grid: Like on the Mesa Frownland Mississippi Chicken […]
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 […]
The writing staff of The Office shot on the picket line this informative and funny YouTube piece explaining why they’re part of the WGA strike.
You may recall a few months ago a blog post by Benjamin Crossley-Marra on the 46-year-old Ann Arbor Film Festival‘s loss of state funding due to their non-compliance with state regulations. To continue the festival, AAFF must raise $75,000 in less than 3 months. Since that time they’ve asked for small donations and have conducted a Endangered fundraising campaign, where staff and volunteers perform creative bits (they’ve pegged them Acts of Audacity) on the streets of Ann Arbor, voted online by campaign donors. Their first, called “glam rock karaoke,” put them past their goal of $10,000 for that event. Now […]
Like I said, I’m behind in my blogging (and a little annoyed to be sitting here realizing that now “blogging” is yet another thing I can be late in doing), so here’s a quick round-up of some links I had meant to blog about on time. The Writers Strike. The WGA strike is the story of the moment, not least because of the obvious possibility that the finances of scores of entertainment industry workers could be severely impacted in the weeks ahead. But the strike is also forcing to the forefront complicated issues involving the future of digital delivery and […]
I’m a bit behind in my blogging and web coolhunting, so I missed this gorgeous short film Wong Kar-Wai made to promote the new Philips Aurea television. In case you missed it too you can see it on the Philips Aurea site, Seduced by Light or via YouTube, below.
According to Variety moments ago, the WGA announced that it will go on strike Monday.
THE LATE, GREAT JOE STRUMMER IN JULIEN TEMPLE’S JOE STRUMMER: THE FUTURE IS UNWRITTEN. COURTESY IFC FIRST TAKE. For 30 years, Brit Julien Temple has combined his dual passions of film and music, and worked with greats in both fields along the way. He first came to prominence with The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle (1979), the Sex Pistols’ madcap cinematic offering, and from there went on to become an important figure in the fledgling pop video medium as well as pioneering the feature-length promo with the Human League’s spy-themed Mantrap (1983) and Mick Jagger’s Running Out of Luck (1987). […]