Along with getting re-accustomed to watching movies at home, I’m also relearning the rhythms of having TV in my life on a regular basis, which hasn’t been the case for a good while. My preferred choice for some daily structure and accompanying info drip is local news via two easily streamable options, ABC and CBS. The former’s preferable because they almost never cut away to, or acknowledge, the daily presidential press conference. Anchor Bill Ritter was temporarily home with COVID-19 before returning to the studio, while weatherman Lee Goldberg was for a while doing the forecast from what looked like […]

The nice thing about Gregg Araki’s movies is that he genuinely believes that teen horniness is not a crime: not for him Larry Clark’s pseudo-alarmed prurience or a Lifetime movie’s worth of dire consequences trailing teen sexuality. White Bird in a Blizzard‘s narrator/not-quite-heroine Kat Connors (Shaleine Woodley) is in the midst of an inexplicably celibate stretch in a hormonally-drenched first sexual relationship with neighbor Phil (Shiloh Fernandez) when her mother Eve (Eva Green) mysteriously disappears. Kat’s sexuality contributes neither to unearned guilt or poor decisions, and her relationship with the older investigating detective Scieziesciez (Thomas Jane) is never a source […]

Here we have the first official trailer from Magnolia Pictures for Gregg Araki’s White Bird in a Blizzard, his first film since 2010’s old-school-wacky Kaboom. By all accounts White Bird is a return to the more somberly melodramatic terrain of teen sexuality and lingering trauma of his 2004 apex Mysterious Skin. The film film hits on demand/iTunes on September 25th, with theatrical release following on October 24th. You can also take this opportunity to catch up with Brandon Harris’ 2011 interview with Araki.

One of the key figures in the New Queer Cinema and ever youthful at 51 years of age, Gregg Araki is a director who is increasingly hard to pigeonhole. After the critical success of 2004’s Mysterious Skin, the film which confirmed that Joseph Gordon-Levitt was a movie-star and that Mr. Araki could direct delicate drama as well as exploitation and cult cinema, it seemed that the director of such indie LGBT classics as The Living End (1992) and The Doom Generation (1995) was moving on to a new, more conventionally respectable, middle-aged portion of his career. Now Mr. Araki is […]

On the night the latest edition of the Sundance Film Festival kicked off, I was approached by a man in a beat-up looking bubble coat and slacks three thousand miles away in a Crown Heights, Brooklyn laundromat. He extended his hand, in which he was holding six plastic sheets with DVDs in them, and tersely said, “Movies.” I looked down at the half-a-dozen bootleg discs in his hand, most of which were sequels to “urban” thrillers I had never heard of in the first place. “I’m good,” I brusquely whispered, causing him to saunter off into the fluorescent hum and […]

A quick, commentary-lite version… Joseph Conrad wrote a science-fiction novel. “Young and Restless Never Gets Old” — Dennis Lim in the Times on Gregg Araki. Big tech news this week: Google announces that it won’t support the H.264 codec and the HTML5 video tag in its Chrome browser in favor of its own WebM codec. It’s all very complicated and tech-y, but Google’s argument is that they’re supporting “open standards” by backing a codec without royalty issues. Problem is, Apple’s Safari and Microsoft’s IE both use the H.264 format and the short-term victor is likely to be Adobe, whose Flash […]

A number of cool things about our Fall, 1995 issue. First, the cover portrait of Tim Roth was an original by Nan Goldin, which was a pretty amazing coup for us at the time. Roth was one of the stars of Four Rooms, a now barely-remembered omnibus film all set in a hotel with segments helmed by Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Allison Anders and Alexandre Rockwell. Roth had shaved his head for a part when this photo was taken, so he was kind of unrecognizable, but we were still thrilled to have an original of Nan’s. L.M. Kit Carson did […]

Leading up to our 18th birthday, I’ll be revisiting on the blog one issue of Filmmaker a day. Below is Winter, 1993. In our second issue of Filmmaker, attorney Robert Siegel interviewed Steven Starr, former head of the motion picture department at William Morris who left the agency to produce Tom DeCillo’s Johnny Suede (the first motion picture to star Brad Pitt) and direct his first feature, Joey Breaker. (Subsequently, Starr launched the web video site Revver and produced the documentary FLOW.) Peter Broderick interviewed Alex Cox, and I wrote the cover story on Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, interviewing Ferrara, […]

The South of France will be filled with familiar faces for this year’s Cannes Film Festival as the line-up was announced overnight in Paris. As previously announced Ridley Scott‘s Robin Hood will open the festival. Notable names attending will include Woody Allen, Oliver Stone, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Jean Luc-Godard and Gregg Araki (full list of titles below). The one glaring omission is Terrence Malick‘s Tree of Life, though festival chief Thierry Fremaux says there more titles are expected to be announced as the festival approaches. The fest will take place May 12-23. IN COMPETITION: Tournee directed by Mathieu Almaric Des […]