allison anders
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Grace of My Heart, Hard Eight and Mallrats: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
I’m a big fan of anything and everything written and directed by Allison Anders, but I’ve always been particularly fond of her 1996 musical Grace of My Heart. A magical blend of the kind of intimate behavior-driven filmmaking Anders is known for with the scale and resources of a big studio movie, it’s one of the most generous films I’ve ever seen in terms of how much it gives its characters (all of whom are presented with deep empathy and respect) and the audience. The heart of the picture is the richly detailed story of a singer-songwriter (a fantastic Illeana […]
by Jim Hemphill on Nov 6, 2020 -
A Little Romance, The Stalking Moon, and Things Behind the Sun: Jim Hemphill’s Home Viewing Recommendations – March 20, 2020
Director George Roy Hill (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting) has no shortage of mass appeal crowd pleasers on his resume, but I don’t think he ever made a more purely delightful or deeply moving film that 1979’s A Little Romance. A sort of prepubescent Before Sunrise, the movie follows two 13-year olds – French movie fanatic Daniel (Thelonious Bernard) and American bookworm Lauren (Diane Lane in her film debut) – who fall in love in Paris and try to make the most of their summer romance before Lauren is dragged back to the states. Perfectly calibrated on […]
by Jim Hemphill on Mar 20, 2020 -
SARAH JACOBSON GRANT APPLICATION DEADLINE NEXT WEEK
In the ’90s, Sarah Jacobson was a rising indie filmmaker. Beginning with her half-hour short film I Was A Teenage Serial Killer in 1993, she garnered enough underground critical success to make her feature debut, Mary Jane’s Not a Virgin Anymore, a coming-of-age tale about a teenage girl’s loss of virginity and her friends’ experiences with their first times. Jacobson was set to move on to bigger films, but she sadly passed away from endometrial cancer at age 32 in 2004. To carry on her life’s work and support for fellow filmmakers, Jacobson’s mother and film producer Ruth Jacobson and […]
by Melissa Silvestri on Nov 11, 2010
