Archive for September, 2007
Tuesday, September 25th, 2007
Janus Films will be unveiling two new pristine prints of Albert Lamorisse’s endearing films The Red Balloon and The White Mane. An interesting figure of the 20th century, Lamorisse is probably best known for creating the board game Risk, although he was an avid photographer, documentarian and filmmaker. He would go on to win the Palm d’Or for The Red Balloon at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival. He died in a helicopter crash over Iran whilst shooting a documentary in 1970. Janus films will kick of a 30-city tour of the double feature at New York’s Film Forum on November 16th.
Here’s the schedule so far:
Nov 16 – 23 – NYC Film Forum (matinees only on the last weekend.)
Nov 23 – 29 – LALandmark Nuart
Nov 23 – San FranciscoLandmark
Nov 23 BerkeleyLandmark Shattuck
Nov 23 – 29 – ChicagoMusic Box
Nov 23 – BostonLandmark Kendall
Nov 23 - SeattleLandmark Varsity
Nov 23 – DC Landmark E Street
Nov 23 – Nov 25 – DetroitDetroit Inst. of Art
Dec 1-2 – Ithaca Cornell Cinema
Dec 21-27 – DenverStarz Film Center
Dec 22 – Jan 2 – Westchester Jacob Burns matinees
Dec 14 – NashvilleBelcourt
Dec 14 – AtlantaLandmark Midtown Art
Dec 14 – 20 – St. LouisLandmark Tivoli
Dec 16 – HonoluluAcademy of the Arts – One Day Only!
Dec 21 – 27 – HartfordReal Artways
Jan 4-6 HoustonMuseum of Fine Art
Jan 5-6 – Cleveland Cleveland Cinematheque
… Read the rest
Monday, September 24th, 2007
Wunderkind-auteur William Friedkin who stormed the Hollywood gates with The French Connection and The Exorcist in the 1970’s enters the21st century with, Bug, a film that depicts the maddening descent into self-destructive paranoia. Adapted from the stage play of the same name, written by Tracy Letts and starring Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon, Friedkin presents a noirish setting of a socially marginal characters inhabiting the outskirts of middle-America Oklahoma; which in this case is a lesbian bar and ramshackle roadside motel.
Shannon, who also starred in the stage play version, reprises his role as Peter Evans, an AWOL American soldier shows up at the motel run by Agnes White, played by Ashley Judd. Taking advantage of her rocky relationship with her abusive, ex-husband, Jerry (Harry Connick Jr.) and no doubt, the unbearable sense of loneliness in such a remote setting, the deceptively withdrawn, Evans seduces Agnes and convinces her that the American government planted a bug inside of him upon his return from the first Gulf War. What follows is the precipitous fall into psychotic breakdown, as Evans mutilates himself with the gullible connivance of Agnes, in order to purge himself of the “bug” as planted by his former paymaster.
Bug is largely an actor’s piece and the cast has plenty of material to chew on with tour-de-force performances by both leads. Shannon has the seductive guile of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula. He appears to be the all too kind, seemingly harmless man willing to listen to the problems of troubled Ashley Judd and only to sink his teeth into her neck and her conscience. The character arcs of the principals however is a springboard for the larger issue of human paranoia and the strain of conspiracy thinking that still have potency well into the 21st century. Friedkin’s Bug cannot be dismissed as merely the extreme paranoid regurgitations of two crank characters. One need only look at the scene in which Peter sits Agnes down on the bed and carefully explains to her how a group of powerful men, called the “Bilderburgers” decided … Read the rest
Sunday, September 23rd, 2007
Last week, during the 29th annual IFP Market, I had a chance to sit down with Documentary Spotlight programmer and director, Milton Tabbott. We talked about the state of nonfiction these days and IFP’s unwavering dedication to helping independent filmmakers develop their vision and craft, the market and conference being just one way in which the organization shepherds artists through the obstacle course of making, finishing, exhibiting and selling their film.
Filmmaker: How many years have you been culling through the nonfiction submissions that come into the market?
Tabbot: I started as a volunteer [for IFP] in ’95 and then I came on staff in ’96. So since ’96, I’ve been bringing in work, both narrative and documentary. Since 2004, we’ve separated the Documentary Spotlight into its own program.
Filmmaker: Why is that? These days, I’m noticing a lot of strongly narrative programs including full documentary strands in their programming.
Tabbot: We always had documentaries and we always had the same number of documentaries competing in the market. Up until, and through 2003, there was always a small portion of documentaries with producers who had a track record and such, included in No Borders. It became a little complicated because they were at different stages. On the narrative side, they were all at script stage. And on the documentary side, they were always in progress. And that was a time when there was growing interest in documentary, from both the industry and the public. So, the thought was to take those in-progress documentaries out of No Borders and give them targeted access to buyers who were looking for nonfiction. I think there was a concern, at the beginning, that buyers would be overwhelmed with the numbers because we have 60 works-in-progress, but it hasn’t turned out that way. And in 2004, we had the buyers requesting one-on-one meetings. We inform the industry right after we make our selections and we start churning out the publications. We’ve also added this compilation DVD of all the projects so that they can target what’s relevant to them.
Filmmaker: Do … Read the rest
Saturday, September 22nd, 2007
Here’s a Google link to a conversation that Scott Kirsner from CinemaTech had during the IFP Filmmaker Confernece with Brett Gaylor, a Montreal-based filmmaker who is exploring new modes of collaboration for documentary filmmaking. I’m also embedding below, but if you go to the Google page you can download the 12-minute piece in a format suitable for playing on your iPod or PSP.
… Read the rest
Friday, September 21st, 2007
VICTOR RASUK IN ALFREDO DE VILLA’S ADRIFT IN MANHATTAN. COURTESY SCREEN MEDIA FILMS.Though he is now living in Los Angeles, Alfredo De Villa can’t stop returning to New York City to make his movies. The 35-year-old writer-director was born and raised in Puebla, Mexico, but moved to the U.S. when he was in his teens. He began his film career with shorts, Joe’s Egg (1995) and Neto’s Run (1999), both of which went on to win him the DGA’s Best Latino Director Award. He studied Directing at Columbia University’s film program, after which he moved into advertising, and in 2002 he directed his first feature, Washington Heights, about an aspiring comicbook artist who is compelled to look after his ailing father and his bodega. The film won a special mention at the first Tribeca Film Festival, and De Villa followed it up last year with Yellow, a dance movie vehicle for actress Roselyn Sanchez.
Like Washington Heights, Adrift in Manhattan was co-scripted by De Villa, with his writing partner, Nat Moss. Another portrait of life in New York, the film presents a triptych of stories about characters isolated and unfulfilled: Simon (Victor Rasuk), a shy young photographer who has a dangerously intimate relationship with his mother; Rose (Heather Graham), an optometrist consumed by grief after the death her two-year-old son; and Tomasso (Dominic Chianese), a solitary, aging painter who is about to lose his sight. The stories interweave as the three lives bisect, sometimes surprisingly, offering the hope of salvation — or at least closure — for the protagonists. De Villa’s film takes a poetic and restrained approach to the material, often using the characters’ actions rather than their words to give us insight, and constructs a thoughtful, poignant and ultimately hopeful portrait of urban lives.
Filmmaker spoke to De Villa about his transition into filmmaking, his cinematic homages to William Friedkin and David O. Russell, and how Darth Vader changed his life.
ALFREDO DE VILLA WITH VICTOR RASUK ON THE SET OF ADRIFT IN MANHATTAN. COURTESY SCREEN MEDIA FILMS.Filmmaker: You left … Read the rest
Friday, September 21st, 2007
Over at his Docs that Inspire, Joel Heller has posted an MP3 download of Scott Kirsner’s IFP Filmmaker Conference panel on digital downloading for filmmakers.
Here’s what he has to say about the conference/podcast:
Kirsner is arguably the most engaging panel moderator on the new media scene, both because of his knowledge of emerging distribution platforms and the persistence he brings to asking panelists tough questions and keeping things moving along. Panels such as this one are a vital service to filmmakers, who are faced with an overwhelming array of online distribution possibilities in new media landscape that’s evolving at warp speed.
This podcast is a complete unedited one-hour audio recording of the panel discussion featuring Peter Broderick (Distribution Strategist at Paradigm Consulting), Kathleen Powell (Vice President, Worldwide Programming, Jaman), Jana Augsberger (Filmaka.com), and Kelly Devine (Manager, ReFrame Project). You can read more about this panel—along with Kirsner’s commentary on several other IFP panels—at his blog CinemaTech.
… Read the rest
Friday, September 21st, 2007
I’ve posted previously about Jonathan Lethem’s “Promiscuous Materials Project,” in which he allows filmmakers, songwriters and playwrights free adaptation rights to some of his short stories. Now, Lethem has a page on his blog in which he notes which artists have taken him up on his offer. An, in the cases of many of the songwriters, he posts streams of their work. Check it out. Among the film news: Blade Runner screenwriter Hampton Fancher is making a short fllm from Lethem’s story “Interview with a Crab.”
Related: Lethem also announced that he would give the film rights to his latest novel, You Don’t Love Me Yet, to the director with the best proposal for its adaptation. It would be a free option with money due only when the film received distribution. On the news page for the book Lethem announces that Greg Marcks, whose previous film was 11:14, was awarded the option. “Greg’s ideas for the film are really terrific, and I’m excited to see him try to make it,” Lethem writes.
Marcks is currently working on The Gift, an international thriller set in Bolivia.… Read the rest
Thursday, September 20th, 2007
So the highlight for me here at IFP was the opportunity to meet so many filmmakers and other creative people. I’m at the HBO party right now in the Puck building… I’m sitting on a couch hanging out with these two really kewL sound designer/composer types originally from France but now NY based. Thierry and Frederic are definitely holdin it down on the creative tip.
One of the coolest projects I heard about was from Jason Smith from Chicago with his film “The Jack MacKey Project” I’m a closet hiphop_head so I loved the idea behind his film. An MC was challenged to create an entire album in 24 hours, the d00d did it and apparently it was quite mega_ILL. This is Jason and I hangin out by the IFP DIY couch.
Since this will be my last post from the IFP I’d like to thank everyone at the IFP and everyone at Filmmaker magazine for letting a professional weirdo like myself take part in the festivities. Fellow blogger Alicia attacked me physically and threatened further mental and emotional trauma if I did not include this hyper professional photo of us both. In my personal life I usually never do what women tell me to do but in my like… professional life I make exceptions.
I’ll speaking at the picnic conference in Amsterdam in Tuesday if anyone is going to be in the neighborhood and my film is playing in London on October 1st. If you want to see why I was invited here go pickup my DVD and allow your head to be exploded by le ultimate strange!!!… Read the rest
Thursday, September 20th, 2007
“What do you do for exercise?”
“Tiddlywinks. And an occasional anxiety attack.”
- Woody Allen, Melinda and Melinda
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About the Author:
Tze (pronounced “Z”) Chun is a writer/director working out of NY and LA. His short film Windowbreaker played at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. His feature film You’re A Big Girl Now is currently being produced by Jeremy Kipp Walker of Journeyman Films (Half Nelson, Maria Full of Grace). He was asked by this blog’s editors to send some dispatches from attending IFP’s International Co-finance market No Borders. He hopes he does a good job.
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Hey everyone, sorry about the lag time. Here’s a play-by-play of my experience at No Borders, IFP’s international co-finance market.
DAY 0: Saturday
Took three days off my job in LA and took the red-eye back to NY to present my project You’re A Big Girl Now at IFP’s international co-finance market No Borders. Spent a Saturday walking around Soho and Union Square with my girlfriend, then picked up the thirty-five pound box of scripts, lookbooks, and project overviews that William Morris messengered over to her office (I didn’t want to make her carry it… I’m a gentleman). My producer Jeremy Kipp Walker is in Arizona shooting Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s follow up to Half Nelson and can’t make it to IFP, so I’ve decided to go alone, but armed to the teeth.
Got a bad night’s sleep. Still jetlagged.
DAY 1: Sunday
Woke up late and groggy then overcompensated with caffeine. I know I’ve drunk too much coffee when my interior monologue starts sounding more and more like Patrick Bateman’s voice-over in American Psycho.
Today is orientation day! Feels like my first day at school. I even got hazed … Read the rest
Thursday, September 20th, 2007
If you are in New York this weekend, consider going to see Larry Fessenden’s Iceland-set, environmental/exisentialist horror movie The Last Winter, which is playing at the IFC Center. Manohla Dargis gave the film an amazing review in the New York Times.
She wrote, in part:
It’s amazing what you can do with a low budget, an expansive imagination and a smooth-moving camera. (A fine cast helps.) An heir to the Val Lewton school of elegantly restrained horror, wherein an atmosphere of dread counts far more than a bucket of blood and some slippery entrails, the director Larry Fessenden is among the most thoughtful Americans working on the lower-budget end of this oft-abused and mindlessly corrupted genre.
Apocalyptic in title and tone, “The Last Winter,” written by Robert Leaver and Mr. Fessenden, breathes fresh air into a stale setup (an isolated group gone stir crazy or something) by insisting that our everyday horrors aren’t a matter of arid news reports but of feverishly real, terrifying life.
And if you haven’t checked out the Filmmaker.com main page (which you really should, because there is a lot of new web-only content there), here’s a link to Damon Smith’s interview with Fessenden.
An excerpt:
Filmmaker: Do you find it hard writing for horror audiences considering that you’re not giving them the gory stuff most fans are clamoring for?
Fessenden: No. [Laughs] Costa-Gavras maybe, but all that is political. By chance, I’ve made two movies about environmental issues and I can honestly say that is quite rare. There is a tradition in some horror movies of the revenge of the beasts — with frogs and God knows what — but my model is much more traditional. I’m influenced by Scorsese’s movies and Roman Polanski, who has that subtle sense of dread in his films.
Filmmaker: How do you think people will respond to The Last Winter?
Fessenden: I’ve really carved a very strange place for myself — the pursuit of the uncanny. I really think the uncanny is what we live every day, and to express that
… Read the rest
