Powered by 
Brandon Harris, who blogs at Cinema Echo Chamber, covered the Aspen ShortsFest for us and contributes here a round-up in advance of his more detailed coverage in the Summer issue: One of the premier showcases for emerging directorial talent in North America, the Aspen ShortsFest concluded its 16th addition this past weekend. The Academy Award qualifying festival looks abroad for a majority of its programming, with over seventy-five percent of its fifty-nine competition films originating from outside the United States. With crowds made up largely of local film fans, zero sales activity and industry involvement at a minimum, this quaint […]
JUDY GREER, DAVID DUCHOVNY AND WILLIE GARSON IN JAKE KASDAN’S THE TV SET. COURTESY THINKFILM. Writer-director Jake Kasdan comes from a filmmaking family: his father is Hollywood heavyweight Lawrence Kasdan, director of Body Heat (1981), The Big Chill (1983) and Grand Canyon (1991), and his younger brother Jonathan has just written and directed his first film, In the Land of Women. Jake’s own debut came in 1998, when he wrote and directed the quirky private detective movie Zero Effect, which he followed up in 2002 with Orange County. In between, Kasdan directed several episodes of two high-quality but short-lived Judd […]
There’s an eccentric tale of gentrification, “Revenge of the Mouse Coffins,” in this week’s Village Voice involving… Michel Gondry’s apartment. Here’s the lede: Filmmaker Michel Gondry—director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep—has taken over my old East Village apartment. I’m talking about the large, run-down Avenue B loft we got kicked out of last year after a long, expensive legal battle. The one my husband and his brother took turns living in for 15 years. The one we mistakenly believed was rent-stabilized, that we’d live in forever. The piece, by Sari Botton, edges towards […]
The 8th Annual IFP Independent Producers Conference will be on April 21st, 9:00-5:00 pm at Minneapolis Community & Technical College in Minneapolis. Guest panelists include Christine Vachon, Jeff Lipsky, Scott Z. Burns, and Lance Weiller. Titled, this year, “From Business Plan to Box Office,” the event is a day-long conference ending with a mentoring session. From the press release: A successful independent film producer knows the important elements of the business of filmmaking and how to utilize them to their full advantage. In financing a film, the producer must show potential investors that there is a strong producing team in […]
The folks at Axium, one of the leading film payroll companies, recently sent an email updating its mailing list of changes and new developments in the various state film rebate programs. With their kind permission, here it is: COLORADO is planning to again fund its incentive, originally called the “Defense against Canada Act.” Details will be available soon. FLORIDA’s legislature is evauating proposed major changes to its incentives, which will switch from a rebate to a transferable credit of 15% or 20%, with $75 million available over the next three years. Details to follow. IDAHO is considering a bill which […]
Director Matt Manahan, who is finishing up post-production on his feature The Book of Caleb, recently attended the Head Trauma screening/concert/experience in Philadelphia I blogged about last week and sent this report. I went to see Head Trauma finally in Philadelphia. I can be pretty cynical when it comes to some indi films, but Lance is doing something genuinely cool, innovative and different. It was the first screening I’ve ever been to where the director of the film reminds you before the show to keep your phones turned ON, as you would need them to call a number that would […]
If you were in Times Square last weekend and thought of sitting down in one of those red sofas that signify a Kleenex ad, you might have found yourself in a Greenpeace campaign. From Gothamist:: Perhaps you’ve seen the Kleenex commercials where an actor playing a therapist sits with a red couch in a busy public space, ready for people to share their thoughts and feelings – and maybe have a good cry. Well, the Kleenex “Let It Out” campaign was in Times Square over the weekend, where cameras were rolling for passers-by to add their experiences to the reel. […]
The marriage ceremony in Danish director Susanne Bier’s haunting After the Wedding, penned by frequent collaborator Anders Thomas Jensen and one of this year’s five nominees for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, greatly alters more lives than those of the young heiress bride, Anna (Stine Fischer Christensen), and her betrothed. Indeed, the film could be entitled Before, During, and After the Wedding. Anna’s father, burly, big-bucks exec Jorgen (Rolf Lassgard), invites Jacob (Mads Mikkelsen), an expat Dane whose energy is totally tied up with the orphanage for street children he works at in Bombay, but who is reluctantly in […]
JOSEPH GORDON-LEVITT AND JEFF DANIELS IN SCOTT FRANK’S THE LOOKOUT. COURTESY MIRAMAX FILMS. Scott Frank is one of Hollywood’s most respected scriptwriters, and now one of its most promising directors. Frank’s first produced script was high school comedy thriller Plain Clothes (1988), but his breakthrough came in 1991 when his original scripts for both Dead Again and Little Man Tate came to the screen. Since then, he has shown great talent at adapting novels: he was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on Out of Sight (1998), having already turned another Elmore Leonard novel, Get Shorty (1995), into […]
On the main page: Nick Dawson’s interview with The Lookout‘s Scott Frank and Howard Feinstein’s talk with Susanne Bier, director of After the Wedding. Both films open today.