Over at his Cinema Echo Chamber, Brandon Harris has a go at Richard Corliss’s list for Time Magazine of the “25 Most Important Films about Race.” From Corliss’s intro: To celebrate Black History Month, we’ve chosen 25 movies to honor the artistry, appeal and determination of African Americans on and behind the screen. The films span nine decades, and reveal a legacy that was tragic before it was triumphant. At first, blacks were invisible; when they were allowed to be seen, it was mostly as derisive comic relief. The 1950s ushered in the age of the noble Negro, in the […]
With the passing yesterday of legendary horror auteur George Romero, we’re reposting Nick Dawson’s 2008 interview with the director on the release of the penultimate chapter of his zombie series, Diary of the Dead. R.I.P. George Romero. No matter how you look at it, George A. Romero will always be remembered as the godfather of the zombie movie. Born in 1940 in New York City, Romero graduated from Carnegie Mellon in the early 60s and stayed in Pittsburgh to set up a commercial production company. In 1968, he segued into features with his seminal debut, Night of the Living Dead, […]
Leading up to the Oscars on Feb. 24, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Ray Pride interviewed The Savages writer-director Tamara Jenkins for the Fall ’07 issue. The Savages is nominated for Best Lead Actress (Laura Linney) and Best Original Screenplay (Tamara Jenkins). Note-perfect, Tamara Jenkins’s The Savages was one of Sundance 2007’s stellar surprises. Where another unlikely gem from the festival, Once, was bittersweet in its simple romance, Jenkins’s long-in-coming sophomore directorial entry (after 1998’s Slums of Beverly Hills) is a complex mesh of […]
Leading up to the Oscars on Feb. 24, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Jason Guerrasio interviewed The Kite Runner director Marc Forster for our Web Exclusives section of the Website. The Kite Runner is nominated for Best Original Score (Alberto Iglesias). When Khaled Hosseini sat down to write his first novel he imagined a story that would shed light on the culture, beauty and history of his home country and have people see it in a different light than its usual portrayal on the […]
The New York-based film festival CineKink has announced their line-up for this year’s event, which runs from February 26 to March 2. From the press release: Billing itself as “the really alternative film festival,” the event will run February 26-March 2, 2008. Presented by CineKink, an organization dedicated to the recognition and encouragement of sex-positive and kink-friendly depictions in film and television, works presented at CineKink NYC will range from documentary to drama, mildly spicy to quite explicit – and everything in between. “It seems our programming theme for this year was ‘No mercy!’” says Lisa Vandever, CineKink’s co-founder and […]
Interesting news via Pitchfork Media: Beastie Boy Adam Yauch has launched Oscilloscope Pictures, a new independent distributor, with former Think Film V.P. David Fenkel and former Think employee Dan Berger. The Pitchfork article quotes this Reuters/Hollywood Reporter piece, which gives more details. From the Gregg Goldstein piece: Yauch and Fenkel plan to acquire narrative and documentary features from festivals for release in the U.S. and provide funds to complete and release unfinished films. The pair, who worked on Yauch’s Beastie Boys documentary “Awesome! I F***in’ Shot That!” at ThinkFilm, will oversee postproduction and marketing work at Oscilloscope Laboratories’ downtown Manhattan […]
The AP is reporting that four New York indie film companies — Greenestreet Films, This is That Corporation, Killer Films and Open City Films — have signed an interim agreement with the striking WGA, allowing them to go forward with WGA-scripted development projects and productions. From the piece as it runs on CNN.com: Jason Kliot and Joana Vicente, speaking for GreeneStreet, Open City and Killer films, credited the union with “thoughtfulness during the discussions.” This is that co-founders, Ted Hope and Anne Carey, said the united action by the companies to settle “clarifies our support for and solidarity with the […]
Who’s Afraid of Kathy Acker?, premiering here in Rotterdam, is Barbara Caspar’s thoughtful and creative film biography/essay on the late writer, whose formally inventive novels, published from the ’70s through the mid-90s, challenged assumptions about gender roles, sexuality, and the literary canon. A beguiling and intensely contradictory figure, Acker is best known for books which creatively appropriated texts from Great White Male writers, retelling them in an emotionally raw, sexually blunt, and politically questioning female voice. And with her appearance in several conceptual art videos in the ’70s, her close-cropped dyed blond hair, her tattoos and her piercings, Acker was […]
The following essay by Ray Carney on Aaron Katz’s Quiet City accompanies a 2-disc DVD release from Benten Films out this week of Quiet City and Katz’s first film, Dance Party, USA. Mainstream film is so much an art of the maximum – the biggest, the flashiest, the fastest, the most exaggerated – that it is easy to forget that the great films all go in the opposite direction. They are, almost without exception, triumphs of minimalism. They rely on subtlety, understatement, indirection, and simplification. In Stranger than Paradise, Down by Law, and Mystery Train, Jim Jarmusch sets long sections […]
Leading up to the Oscars on Feb. 24, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Lisa Y. Garibay interviewed Juno director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody for the Fall ’07 issue. Juno is nominated for Best Picture, Best Directing (Jason Reitman), Best Lead Actress (Ellen Page) and Best Original Screenplay (Diablo Cody). The pairing of writer Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman was one of complete chance, like one of those cop-buddy movies where the grizzled vet is set up with a renegade newbie and […]