The Slither one sheet.
It’s turned into a yearly tradition that I’ve posted early notice of the Philadelphia Film Festival’s “Danger After Dark” program. Programmed by Filmmaker contributor Travis Crawford, the program is inevitably an excellent primer for the past year’s best in cutting edge genre fare. This year, Crawford’s descriptions are briefer than usual — he promises to send more detailed copy soon — but it is good to hear that his catalog proofreader labelled this the “sickest Danger after Dark ever.” The Philadelphia Film Festival runs from March 30 until April 11. A BITTERSWEET LIFE (South Korea): This visually stunning tale of […]
Richard Prince (the Washington Post writer and editor of the Black College Review, not the novelist/screenwriter) reports in his column called “Journal-isms” for the Maynard Institute that former New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell has returned to journalism it was reported that he had accepted a development job at Columbia Pictures. Apparently, the Columbia gig, which interested every young indie director he had given a good review to, never fully panned out. From the piece: Elvis Mitchell returned to National Public Radio’s “Weekend Edition Saturday” this month for the first time in a year, since it was announced that […]
There’s a good feature up at The Guardian by David Rose, the British journalist who was the first person to interview the “Tipton Three” following the release of these British Muslims from Guantanamo Bay. Now he’s writing about the film by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitcross, The Road to Guantanmo and discussing its chances of being released in the U.S: To date, says producer Andrew Eaton, the film is set to be shown in 18 countries. But as yet, although there have been expressions of interest, there is no distribution deal for the one nation where it most urgently needs […]
Over at Movie City Indie, Ray Pride notes this Reel Chicago piece reporting that Chicago-based avant-gardist James Fotopoulos is about to embark on his first “commercial production,” a $2 million adaptation of Jay Bonansinga’s police novel The Sleep Police. Ray links to his own profile of Fotopolous, but two can play at that game — here’s Travis Crawford’s interview with Fotopolous appearing in Filmmaker.
The folks who comprise Human Giant have come up with a very funny short, below, that takes a Clerks-style approach to the indie music scene and which sets its story at my favorite music store, Other Music. My only quibble with the short is that its take on the Other Music clerks is fairly off — they’re actually pretty nice guys. On the other hand, I guess I’ve never asked for the Garden State soundtrack.
Mary Glucksman covered Jason Rosette’s Susan Hero in her “In Focus” column back in 2004, and now Rosette emails to say he is finishing his Santa Fe-shot film… in Cambodia. Rosette moved to Cambodia where he teaches video production at the Royal University in Phnom Penh. He’s got his film on 500 gigs of hard drive space, an occasionally updated blog up detailing his adventures in both Cambodia and in the trenches of film festival submissions, and a website where he aggregates all his filmmaking activities, including info on his previous film, Book Wars.
Via Filmmaker‘s MySpace page comes word from the folks at the Studio City-based Starway Pictures, who have created a new blog devoted to their films and also technical developments in indie filmmaking. Starway’s Robert Sanders writes, “We’ll try to post our thoughts and feelings about ‘the process’ of filmmaking and the industry. For the hard-core gear heads and geeks, we’ll also discuss digital filmmaking technology and our philosophies about digital cinema. And maybe a rant or two.” Already up are some evocative L.A. location photos for their upcoming shoot, The 23rd Letter, fundraising trailers for their horror pic Shadow Falls, […]
Holly Willis has a fascinating piece up at the L.A. Weekly about an internet-based new-media film entitled No Animals Were Hurt by Peter Brinson. Writes Willis: At the very moment I write this, Peter Brinson’s online biopic of inventor Alan Turing is 33 percent its proper length. That’s because since early January, when the site with the video was launched, there have been 17,044 viewers, each one unlocking and revealing a single frame in the video’s 5,000 frames. As the number of viewers grows closer to multiples of 5,000, the video images slow down, allowing the voice-over to complete the […]
Redford on this year’s Sundance on Yahoo: “It’s gotten to the point now — almost to a breaking point — where there’s a fever that has taken over the festival that creates an enormous amount of chaos and excitement and tension,” the 68-year-old actor said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. “It’s gotten a little bit harder on me… “The festival that we do is the same one as we did the first year,” he said. “We program it exactly the same every year, which is for new voices and more experimental films.” The difference now, Redford said, […]