Randy Mack is in the final three days of his Kickstarter for his New Orleans-set Laundry Day, and with roughly three grand to go, he lets loose with an acerbic howl against the indignities of crowdfunding that, he hopes, might make you think and, perhaps…. donate. People are the worst, and there’s nothing more humiliating than pandering to them. You became an artist to push back against sheeple’s sacred cows and conventional wisdom, and now technology has risen to empower… them. Not you. The Popular Ones. The last people on Earth who need empowering. Popular people, remember them? The ones […]
From April 23-May 3, Hot Docs, North America’s largest documentary film festival spread its wings across the theaters of Toronto. Against that backdrop, the 16th Annual Hot Docs Forum and Conference Market featured another opportunity to glimpse the inner workings of documentary film funding and pitching. With 19 scheduled pitches (and one project picked out of a Mountie’s hat), I was once again given the chance to take the pulse of the documentary marketplace. Below are several thoughts culled from the front row at those pitch proceedings. 1. Get Your Trailer in Order So you’ve been chosen to be one […]
As the Eastern Oregon Film Festival runs this weekend in Le Grande, Oregon, the festival and filmmaker bring you another day of 24-hour online premieres. Below are Evamarie Shaller’s short, Die Wilder vom Montanon, and Brendan Colvin’s feature Sabbatical, starring Robert Longstreet as “a middle-aged Kierkegaard scholar.” Both are embedded below and are free to view for the next 24 hours only. Die Wilderin vom Montafon from Evamaria Schaller on Vimeo. DIE WILDERIN VOM MONTAFON (dir. Evamaria Shaller) Technical Info 2014 / Austria / 21min / Experimental Short Synopsis The Austrian mountains. Legend of itself. Powerful and wild. Dangerous and […]
Many on-set, behind the scenes videos alternate extremely mundane footage of the business of getting coverage with actors rotely reciting how amazing and wonderful everybody involved in this production is. Not so this casually intense assemblage of work on Mad Max: Fury Road, which begins with a car flipping over. What follows is not quite as routinely life-threatening, but it’s still incredibly physical filmmaking. $150 million, it seems, will buy you the budget to stand in the desert, sling a camera around on a very flexible boom, and have some guys swing around on poles.
As an actress, Helen Hunt has thrived in the entertainment industry for over four decades. She’s won an Oscar, Golden Globe Awards and Primetime Emmys. She has succeeded on a large scale as both a film and a television actress, which is no small feat considering that, until recently, film and television actors have been largely kept in distinct and relatively immutable categories. Hunt has been directing for years, too, from episodes of Mad About You to her first feature film in 2007, Then She Found Me. But not until her latest effort, Ride, has she taken it upon herself […]
In the mid-1980s, actor and comedian Robert Townsend had scored supporting roles in films like A Soldier’s Story and Streets of Fire, but was still limited in the opportunities available to him as a black performer. Frustrated by the lack of roles, Townsend created one for himself – and directed a landmark in American independent cinema in the process – by helming Hollywood Shuffle, a self-financed comedy about a young actor whose experiences mirrored Townsend’s own. Bobby Taylor (Townsend) is an aspiring thespian who dreams of playing superheroes and Shakespearean kings but mostly finds himself auditioning to play pimps and […]
Have you heard? The United Nations designated 2015 the “International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies,” and cinematography made the cut. But is IYL 2015 finally the year in which the dam burst of innovation subsides, and new digital cameras and techniques no longer threaten to drown us? Surveying the latest advances in large-sensor digital cinema cameras for Filmmaker’s fifth annual round-up — written, as always, on the eve of NAB — gives me pause to consider how far we’ve come in the five years since Sony’s F3 and FS100 were cutting-edge… since Panasonic’s AF100 stirred passions, ARRI’s Alexa represented a bold choice, and RED’s hand-assembled Epic-M […]
New York these days: There’s a chain store on every corner, Times Square is a paved-over pedestrian mall with $6 hot dogs and, if you want voyeuristic thrills, you peer into the bedrooms of the luxury condos flush against the beautifully manicured, elevated High Line that’s transformed the West Side. No one wants to reflexively cling to a misplaced nostalgia, but given the blanding of the city’s physical landscape it’s not hard to imagine that the number of urgently jaw-dropping stories in the Naked City is decreasing daily. Fortunately, for those of us who associate New York with subcultural energies, […]
Before the advent of streaming platforms, the festival circuit was practically the only option for distributing short form content. You’d ship your finished film off to Sundance and pray for that acceptance letter — and maybe even a feature deal made at the festival. But while some of today’s filmmakers still hold tight to that romantic ideal, others are capitalizing on the visibility and fan cultivation teased by the online sphere. They argue against festival submission fees and pricey DCP shipments and for the simplicity of an online premiere on Vimeo, YouTube, NoBudge, Fandor or another platform where audiences are […]
Argentinian director Matías Piñeiro’s last three films have started from a Shakespearean source text: As You Like It for Rosalinda, Twelfth Night for Viola, Love’s Labour’s Lost in The Princess of France. In all these structurally playful and formally rigorous works, troupes of actors are working on new productions, and the films are given further continuity by a recurring ensemble cast and crew including actress Augustina Muñoz and d.p. Fernando Lockett. In Piñeiro’s newest production, Hermia & Helena, a young woman (Muñoz) comes to New York on a fellowship for a new Spanish translation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, though […]