Instant remembrances flower online when strangers die. Twitter turns into an instantaneous altar, as if the site where a hero fell. And some writers are very good at devising a rapid remembrance of a long friendship or acquaintance into a succinct, maybe even final summation. After years of aggregating news headlines at Movie City News, linking to keenly observed obituaries daily, my impulse runs the other direction when I knew the deceased. I’m not ready that soon to thread the nuance of all that time into a tidy dispatch; I want to grip the fragments of soon-fading memory. I didn’t […]
by Ray Pride on Dec 31, 2013Finish off Friday with a free movie. Thanks to Magnolia and Lionsgate, we have five Blu-ray or DVD copies to give away of two of the most acclaimed movies of the year: Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder and Jeff Nichols’ Mud. To win copies of both before their release on August 6, all you have to do is email nick AT filmmakermagazine DOT com with the answer to the following question: Which two women worked on films directed by both Malick and Nichols in 2011? (Clue: one is an actress, the other a producer.)
by Filmmaker Staff on Aug 2, 2013Terrence Malick lends himself well to hyperbole. Few other filmmakers make the act of writing about movies feel like such a fool’s errand; no other is as hard to write about in a measured way. In one of the few interviews he’s given, the director says at one point, “When people express what is most important to them, it often comes out in clichés. That doesn’t make them laughable; it’s something tender about them — as though in struggling to reach what’s most personal about them they could only come up with what’s most public.” This may be the most […]
by Michael Nordine on Apr 10, 2013The optimist and the contrarian may find common ground in anticipation; to be a festivalgoer at the Toronto Film Festival is to be a bit of both. Particularly when preceded by negative reviews trickling out of earlier festivals in Cannes, Locarno, Venice and Berlin or less-than-enticing trailers, the debut of new work from filmmakers who have proven themselves capable of greatness can have cinephiles’ hearts in their throats. What if the hype is true, and your favorite living director is no longer creating essential work? Yet with reports of boos just might come a sneaking desire to go to that movie anyway. See […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Sep 4, 2012