Archive for February, 2007
Thursday, February 22nd, 2007
COLMA: THE MUSICAL.
Accustomed as we are to lavish, star-studded productions like Dreamgirls, Chicago and Moulin Rouge, it’s rare to hear the words “low-budget” and “musical” uttered in the same sentence.
Contrary to high-priced expectations, however, Colma: The Musical is an upstart indie produced on a shoestring budget in the San Francisco Bay Area that has built a groundswell of support on the festival circuit over the last year, earning awards and prominent placement on year-end critics’ lists. Colma director Richard Wong received a Film Independent Spirit Award nomination in November for the IFC/Acura Someone to Watch Award, which “recognizes a talented filmmaker of singular vision who has not yet received appropriate recognition.” And it all began with a collection of original songs about Colma.
Small-town Colma, CA is located just south of San Francisco, but worlds away from the high profile of its cosmopolitan neighbor. Dominated by 17 cemeteries that serve the surrounding region and comprise most of the town itself, it’s often seen as a literal dead-end — not exactly the center of Bay Area cinema culture.
COLMA: THE MUSICAL DIRECTOR RICHARD WONG (CENTER) AND STAR JAKE MORENO (RIGHT).
Colma: The Musical tracks the exploits of three recent high school graduates facing uncertain futures in their hometown. Although they may prefer slacking, best friends Billy (Jake Moreno), Rodel (H.P. Mendoza) and Maribel (L.A. Renigen) are beginning to face adult realities. Billy has to take a thankless part-time job at the local mall to save money for college, but things look up when he’s cast in a local play and meets a new girl who helps him move past his prior unpleasant dating experience.
Although Rodel tries to earn his conservative single Dad’s confidence as the good kid in the family, his gay relationship with a close friend may force him out of the closet before he’s prepared to deal with the attendant complications. Meanwhile, Maribel enjoys a mild state of denial, preferring to focus on chasing the next party rather than her own future.
With original lyrics and music by H.P. Mendoza (who also wrote … Read the rest
Thursday, February 22nd, 2007
Both underseen and mythologized due to rights-holder issues, one of the great pieces of proto-independent cinema — and certainly one of the most provocative director launches ever — can now be seen on Google Video.
Click here to view Todd Haynes’s Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story.… Read the rest
Thursday, February 22nd, 2007
If you’re in NYC this week, check out Michael Tully’s Cocaine Angel, which opened at the Pioneer for a weeklong run yesterday. Tully was one of our “25 New Faces” last year, and here’s what Matthew Ross had to say about the film:
Filmmaker, musician, blogger and housepainter Michael Tully has been keeping himself busy the past year. It was only about 13 months ago that he and writer-star Damian Lahey finished tearing a festering little hole into the drug-addiction film subgenre with Cocaine Angel, a dime-bag-budgeted, grime-covered crawl through a Florida cokehead’s sunshineless state. With its claustrophobic apartments, torn carpets, drawn shades and teetering, visibly scarred supporting characters, the film looks like it wasn’t so much filmed in the Jacksonville drug culture as actually discovered there, stained into the floors, reeking like a week-old bender and oozing something nasty, so real was its grasp of place and aura.
And over at The Reeler, S.T. Van Airsdale has a good interview with Tully in which he discusses the film’s long journey to the screen.… Read the rest
Thursday, February 22nd, 2007
Yesterday the list of movies in this year’s New Directors / New Films season was announced. The season runs between March 21 and April 1 and there is a typically impressive line-up in MoMA and the Film Society of the Lincoln Center’s 36th annual showcase of the contributions from world cinema’s most promising emerging directors.
The two opening night films are Paul Auster’s The Inner Life of Martin Frost, and Glue, the first feature from Argentinian director Alexis Dos Santos which has picked up buzz at Toronto and Rotterdam. Auster’s second directorial effort – after the poorly-received/ill-fated Lulu on the Bridge (1988) – is centered on a peripheral character from his 2002 novel, The Book of Illusions.
Christopher Zalla’s Padre Nuestro, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, is likely to be extremely popular, as will another big festival hit, Scottish director Andrea Arnold’s Red Road, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes last year. John Carney’s Once and Julia Loktev’s Day Night Day Night will also no doubt catch audiences’ imagination, however the line-up is strong throughout. From a personal point of view, I would recommend Reprise by Norway’s Joachim Trier, whose highly enjoyable and exciting debut employs literary conventions in a cinematic context in a way that is reminiscent of another Scandinavian gem of recent years, Christoffer Boe’s Reconstruction (2003); it is the kind of film that should have New York audiences salivating. For more info, go to the Film Society website.
The 26 features that have been selected are:
7 Years (Jean-Pascal Hattu, France, 2006)
The Art of Crying (Peter Schonau Fog, Denmark, 2006)
Audience of One (Michael Jacobs, US, 2006)
Congorama (Philippe Falardeau, Canada/Belgium/France, 2006)
Cowboy Angels (Kim Massee, France, 2007)
Day Night Day Night (Julia Loktev, US, 2006)
El Custodio (Rodrigo Moreno, Argentina, 2006)
Euphoria (Ivan Vyrypaev, Russia, 2006)
Glue (Alexis Dos Santos, Argentina/UK, 2006)
Gradually… (Maziar Miri, Iran, 2006)
The Great World of Sound (Craig Zobel, US, 2006)
The Inner Life of Martin Frost (Paul Auster, US, 2007)
Love for … Read the rest
Tuesday, February 20th, 2007
Today Gilles Jacob, director of the Cannes Film Festival, gave details of a series of short films commissioned to celebrate the festival’s 60th anniversary.
The list of directors who agreed to contribute is as follows:
Theo Angelopoulos, Olivier Assayas, Bille August, Jane Campion, Youssef Chahine, Chen Kaige, Michael Cimino, Ethan & Joel Coen, David Cronenberg, Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Manoel De Oliveira, Raymond Depardon, Atom Egoyan, Amos Gitai, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Aki Kaurismaki, Abbas Kiarostami, Takeshi Kitano, Andrei Konchalovsky, Claude Lelouch, Ken Loach, Nanni Moretti, Roman Polanski, Raoul Ruiz, Walter Salles, Elia Suleiman, Tsai Ming-liang, Gus Van Sant, Lars Von Trier, Wim Wenders, Wong Kar Wai and Zhang Yimou.
It’s a pretty awesome line-up of talent made up of the festival’s favorite sons (and daughters), and all of the above directors’ offerings will be shown together under the title To Each his Own Cinema. Jacob revealed that each short is to be about the director’s “current state of mind as inspired by the motion-picture theater”, however the sheer volume of participants (35, including two sets of brothers) dictated that the running time for a segment was only to be a meagre 3 minutes. Apparently some of the locations chosen by the auteurs in question have been particularly creative – Wenders shot his contribution in the Congo, and Cronenberg in his toilet (!) – but my suspicion is that watching the film as a whole will be pretty frustrating. Filmmakers do some of their best work rhapsodizing about the movies, but surely watching a film with 33 different sections will be a stop-start, unsatisfying experience.
That said, the portmanteau film has always provided odd, unbalanced viewing – New York Stories (1989), for example, has two great segments and one truly abysmal one – but the tendency towards roping in more and more directors for each film seems foolhardy. Is it because directors are too busy to offer more lengthy contributions, or is it because the feeling is that cinemagoers’ concentration span is growing ever shorter? Or is it simply that the people in charge of portmanteau films are getting … Read the rest
Tuesday, February 20th, 2007
IFP have posted some clips on Youtube of an interview with Alfonso Cuarón, who was honored along with his fellow Mexican directors Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu at the 2006 Gotham Awards. He talks about his close working relationship with Iñárritu and Guillermo Arriaga, Iñárritu’s regular writing partner, and the rationale between him moving from standard studio fare such as Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and current Oscar contender The Children of Men. For more on these subjects and more, see also our own interview with Cuarón.
… Read the rest
Tuesday, February 20th, 2007
After posting about the Coudal Partners Kubrick page, below, I received an email alerting me to this link, which isn’t collated on the Coudal site. It’s from Cinefile Video, and it’s a true Kubrick oddity.
Here’s how the site describes it:
Somewhere a few months ago, our fearful Cinefile leader Hadrian read the soundtrack album for Full Metal Jacket had on it a track where R. Lee Ermey did a boot camp rap over a cheesy ’80s backing beat. Of course we had to hear it right away…
Turns out that it isn’t so much Ermey on the mic than it is dialogue clips from the film layed over said cheesy ’80s backing beat, with a shredding guitar solo in the middle. The music for the whole film is credited to “Abigail Mead”, which is a pseudonym for Vivian Kubrick, Stanley’s daughter. Nigel Goulding is just some studio musician hack, we guess.
In addition to being on the soundtrack album, this song was released on its own as a 12? single!
… Read the rest
Monday, February 19th, 2007
Stanley Kubrick has been an obsession for many, including the folks at Coudal Partners, who have a “Stuff about Stanley Kubrick” page that collates all of the site’s posts on the director. Included are links to articles about unrealized Kubrick Jim Thompson adaptations, a PDF of his Napoleon screenplay, news about “the greatest movie Kubrick never made” (The Flying Padre) and more.… Read the rest
Sunday, February 18th, 2007
Alexa has added country rankings to their free internet traffic counter and, for reasons I can’t explain, they are claiming that Filmmaker is the 88th most visited website in Ethiopia. And we are in the top 2,000 in Ghana.
I’m happy to see our stats up, of course, but I don’t know why our page view rate is several hundred times higher in Ethiopia than elsewhere.
Speaking of internet traffic, Filmmaker coolly slipped over the 50,000 friends mark on our MySpace page, so if you’ve got a film to promote, join and post your banner or poster as a comment.… Read the rest
Saturday, February 17th, 2007
While in Rotterdam I caught Container, the latest experiment from one my favorite filmmakers, Lukas Moodysson. The film, which premiered in Berlin last year, features black-and-white footage of a heavy-set crossdresser and a young Asian woman doing all sorts of strange things underneath a voiceover by actress Jena Malone. To be clear, it is Jena Malone on the soundtrack, and she identifies herself as “the American actress Jena Malone,” but it’s unclear if the non-diagetic voiceover is completely unrelated to the image or whether its the fantasy of one of the characters. In any case, Picturehouse supposedly has the film for U.S. release, but in the meantime, we can check out another experiment involving Malone. The young star of Donnie Darko has a MySpace page up and is streaming demos of her new band, Jena Malone and her Bloodstains. She’a also teamed up with NYC producers the Social Registry and is planning both an upcoming 7″ as well as shows at New York’s the Mercury Lounge, Union Hall and Joe’s Pub.
All of this music news is via Pitchfork. Posted on the site:
“Actor/actress-turned-musician”…is there any scarier phrase in the English language? (Yes, and it’s “reality-TV-star-turned-musician.”) From Keanu “Dogstar” Reeves and Russell “30 Odd Foot of Grunts” Crowe to Jennifer Love “BareNaked” Hewitt and Gina “I toured with Girls Against Boys” Gershon, history is littered with embarrassing accidents involving beautiful people and guitars.
So what makes Jena Malone different? Well, she’s not a huge movie star yet, for one thing– you might remember her from Donnie Darko, Saved, Pride and Prejudice, or, um, Stepmom. And she doesn’t have a team of assistants, stylists, marketers, and managers controlling her every move. It’s just her, “recording and producing all of my own music with the help of whatever musician is around at the time,” as she told Pitchfork in a recent email exchange.
So far, Malone has recorded two demos, Bloodstains for Sailors and A-NEWT; EMOTIONAL NUTRITION. A pair of tracks from each demo can be heard on Malone’s MySpace page. They’re pretty out-there– bedroom electronics, spaced-out keyboards,
… Read the rest
