Archive for January, 2008
Monday, January 28th, 2008
RYAN GOSLING DINES WITH PAUL SCHNEIDER, EMILY MORTIMER AND “BIANCA” IN CRAIG GILLESPIE’S LARS AND THE REAL GIRL. COURTESY MGM.Leading up to the Oscars on Feb. 24, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Nick Dawson interviewed Lars and the Real Girl director Craig Gillespie for our Director Interviews section of the Website. Lars and the Real Girl is nominated for Best Original Screenplay (Nancy Oliver).
In one of the more unusual coincidences on this year’s movie release schedule, Craig Gillespie has seen his first two movies, Mr Woodcock and Lars and the Real Girl, released within a month of each other. Gillespie, an Australian who came to the U.S. to study at Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts and never left, worked at an ad agency for eight years, then moved on to directing commercials. After twelve years as one of the most successful directors in his field, Gillespie helmed his first feature, Mr Woodcock, a broad comedy starring Billy Bob Thornton, Susan Sarandon and Seann William Scott about the titular gym teacher from hell who returns to torment an old student. Gillespie, however, was not ideally suited to the film and failed to nail the tone the studio wanted, so Wedding Crashers‘ director David Dobkin was called in to take charge of (uncredited) reshoots.
Gillespie, though, says his second movie, Lars and the Real Girl, is exactly his kind of movie, and there is a restraint and quiet poise inherent in proceedings that suggest that he was much more in his element. click here to read full story… Read the rest
Monday, January 28th, 2008
Leading up to the Oscars on Feb. 24, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Lisa Y. Garibay interviewed Juno director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody for the Fall ’07 issue. Juno is nominated for Best Picture, Best Directing (Jason Reitman), Best Lead Actress (Ellen Page) and Best Original Screenplay (Diablo Cody).
The pairing of writer Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman was one of complete chance, like one of those cop-buddy movies where the grizzled vet is set up with a renegade newbie and against all odds the two wind up catching the bad guy with everybody rooting for them in the end. Although Juno is only Reitman’s second feature, he was born into the film business; as the son of Ivan Reitman, he’s been involved in the making of movies all his life. Reitman’s award-winning short films played the likes of Sundance, Seattle and the Los Angeles Film Festival; his feature debut Thank You for Smoking was lauded by the National Board of Review and Independent Spirit Awards.
Cody, on the other hand, arrived on the film scene out of seeming obscurity with a ready-made notoriety. Her blog Pussy Ranch, which detailed Cody’s exploits as a stripper and phone sex operator, attracted the attention of a bored ’net surfer who turned out to be manager Mason Novick. In 2004, Novick got Cody a book deal for her memoir Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper. On the heels of the book’s success, Novick suggested that Cody try to write a screenplay just to see what would happen. Cody (whose real name is Brook Busey-Hunt) hit a home run with her first shot at bat: Juno became the hot script around town and was first handed to Brad Siberling before ending in Reitman’s lap.
Reitman gathered a stellar cast that included Hard Candy’s Ellen Page as the pregnant teen who steals your heart and is as much a cheerleader to her family, friends and audience as they are … Read the rest
Monday, January 28th, 2008
Leading up to the Oscars on Feb. 24, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Nick Dawson interviewed The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford director Andrew Dominik for our Web Exclusives section of the Website. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is nominated for Best Supporting Actor (Casey Affleck) and Best Cinematography (Roger Deakins).
After making only two features, Andrew Dominik deserves to be recognized as one of the most exciting and talented writer-directors working today. Born in New Zealand, 39-year-old Dominik moved to Australia when he was two and studied at the respected Swinburne Film School in Melbourne, graduating in 1988. Rather than immediately pursuing a career in film, Dominik instead chose to ready himself by working in pop promos and commercials, fields in which he distinguished himself. In 2000, he made his feature debut, Chopper, a film about the famous Australian criminal, Mark Brandon “Chopper” Read, which featured Eric Bana (then a stand-up comedian) in an incendiary debut performance. Compelling, darkly funny and eminently stylish, Chopper amply demonstrated Dominik’s strong storytelling talent and visual flair and elevated him to international prominence. However, though there was talk of him adapting Alfred Bester’s 1950s sci-fi novel The Demolished Man, seven years have passed without Dominik releasing a new movie.
The wait makes The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford all the more rewarding: it is the most beautiful film of 2007, with an inherent poetry both in the sumptuousness of its images and the lyricism of its language. It is not a western in the traditional sense, but instead examines the legend of the West by putting the story of one of its iconic figures, Jesse James (Brad Pitt), and his friend and nemesis, Robert Ford (Casey Affleck), under the microscope. Epic both in look and length, The Assassination of Jesse James… recalls Terrence Malick’s two masterpieces from the 70s, Badlands and Days of Heaven, and has at its core a good … Read the rest
Monday, January 28th, 2008
Over at Filmmaker Videos, Jamie Stuart‘s latest short from the Sundance Film Festival is up. Starring George A. Romero, Ellen Kuras and Stacy Peralta among others, Stuart shows us how ’08 Sundance looked through his eyes.… Read the rest
Sunday, January 27th, 2008
We’ve once again asked Jamie Stuart to cover the Sundance Film Festival with his unique brand of filmmaking and create a short that encompasses the people he meets, his creative eye and basically whatever pops up in his head. This year’s film includes George A. Romero, Ellen Kuras, Stacy Peralta and strange text messages.
Download the short here by right clicking and choosing Save Target or Save Link. (73M)
Please visit Jamie’s site at www.mutinycompany.com. … Read the rest
Sunday, January 27th, 2008
Tuesday at Sundance I saw two documentaries back to back that each deals with one of this country’s most pressing and complex political issues. Josh Tickell’s Fields of Fuel tackles America’s reliance on imported fossil fuels while Patrick Creadon in his follow-up to Wordplay, IOUSA, wrestles with the exploding United States budget deficit.
Both films employ what is now a familiar doc style of exploring political and social issue subject matter: quick editing, talking heads, a chapter-by-chapter structure, use of humorous archival material, and energetic source cue-driven montages. Of the two films, Fields of Fuel is the slicker. It segues from a first-person history of its maker, an Australian-born alternative fuel activist, through a history of the fossil fuel industry to an upbeat final section that demonstrates the feasibility of converting to alternative fuel sources, most notably, biodiesel fuel that can be manufactured from everything from vegetable oil to, one day, algae.
We’re first introduced to Tickell as he tools across the country in a biodiesel-fueled hippie van, filling up each night at a fast-food restaurant by siphoning used frying oil. After quickly interjecting a note of personal tragedy (his mother suffered nine miscarriages after she moved the family to “a cancer corridor” in Louisiana where illness rates have spiked due to oil industry pollutants), Tickell proceeds to hopscotch through a dizzying set of facts and histories. The invention of the diesel engine; the growth of the oil industry from Standard Oil to Exxon; global warming; the financial health of the US. auto industry; government tax subsidies to fuel-inefficient vehicles; hybrid cars; 9/11 and U.S. energy policy; the Iraq War; peak oil; ethanol; solar power; green start-ups — all are covered in Tickell ’s breathless montage. Like Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth, Fields of Fuel tempers its alarmism with a final emphasis on the positive and the possible. I knew little about biodiesel fuel going into this movie and I left impressed with how much has already been done in both the States and around the world to implement it and other practical new forms of energy. … Read the rest
Sunday, January 27th, 2008
Any festival you go to there’s going to be one film that most people don’t get and just spend their time discussing why they didn’t like it and question why it was ever made. Chusy (Anthony Haney-Jardine)‘s Anywhere, USA has become that film at Sundance ’08… but I’m in the minority. I thought it was one of the most fun viewing experiences I had there. Now, I won’t say that I got what Chusy’s three-part so-called autobiography was about because I don’t know if there’s anything to get. All I know is he has a bizarre imagination, gets great performances from amateur or non-actors and the man loves mustaches.
Guided by a smooth talking narrator, we enter Chusy’s America with stunning shots of empty rooms that will shortly be inhabited with strange characters. Chapter one is PENANCE, here we come to a trailer park where at 2:00 in the afternoon Gene (Mike Ellis) walks into his trailer for his weekly beating by his wife, Tammy (Mary Griffin). It’s simple really, Gene overreacted and now Tammy gets to beat him with a tennis racket every Tuesday. What did he do? Well, he and his redneck R/C racing midget friend Ricky (Brian Fox) overreacted when they found a pistachio nut in between the couch cushions and came to the conclusion that Tammy was having an affair with an Arab man. Seeing the pistachio is the nut of the Middle East. What follows can only be described as plain weird. LOSS is the title of the second chapter. In it, Chusy’s daughter Perla Haney-Jardine (the only professional actor in the film) plays a seven year old girl who realizes there’s no tooth fairy and goes through a painful incident to realize there really isn’t one. Then there’s the third and final chapter: IGNORANCE. And it’s just that. At times bordering on inappropriate, without giving it away all I can say is a man (Ralph Brierley) who has reached to the heights of the financially elite, thanks in part to his well crafted beard, becomes … Read the rest
Saturday, January 26th, 2008
Below is the complete list of Sundance 2008 Winners:
Grand Jury Prize: Documentary
Trouble The Water — directed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal
Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic
Frozen River — directed by Courtney Hunt
World Cinema Jury Prize: Documentary
Man on Wire — directed by James Marsh
World Cinema Jury Prize: Dramatic
King of Ping Pong (Ping Pongkingen) — directed by Jens Jonsson
Audience Award: Documentary
Fields of Fuel — directed by Josh Tickell
Audience Award: Dramatic
The Wackness — directed by Jonathan Levine
World Cinema Audience Award: Documentary
Man on Wire — directed by James Marsh
World Cinema Audience Award: Dramatic
Captain Abu Raed — directed by Amin Matalqa
Directing Award: Documentary
Nanette Burstein for American Teen
Directing Award: Dramatic
Lance Hammer for Ballast
World Cinema Directing Award: Documentary
Nino Kirtadze for Durakovo: Village of Fools (Durakovo: Le Village Des Fous)
World Cinema Directing Award: Dramatic
Anna Melikyan for Mermaid (Rusalka)
World Cinema Screenwriting Award
Samuel Benchetrit for I Always Wanted To Be A Gangster (J’ai Toujours Reve D’Etre Un Gangster)
World Cinema Documentary Editing Award
Irena Dol for The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins
Excellence in Cinematography Award: Documentary
Phillip Hunt and Steven Sebring for Patti Smith: Dream of Life
Excellence in Cinematography Award: Dramatic
Lol Crawley for Ballast
World Cinema Cinematography Award: Documentary
al Massad for Recycle
World Cinema Cinematography Award: Dramatic
Askild Vik Edvardsen for King of King Pong (Ping Pongkingen)
Documentary Editing Award
Joe Bini for Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired
Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award
Alex Rivera and David Riker for Sleep Dealer
Special Jury Prizes
World Cinema Special Jury Prize: Dramatic
Blue Eyelids (Parpados Azules) — directed by Ernesto Contreas
Special Jury Prize: Documentary
Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo — directed by Lisa F. Jackson
Special Jury Prize: Dramatic, The Spirit of Independence
Anywhere, U.S.A. — directed by Chusy Haney-Jardine
Special Jury Prize: Dramatic, Work by an Ensemble Cast
Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston, Kelly MacDonald and Brad Henke for Choke
Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking
My Olympic Summer — … Read the rest
Saturday, January 26th, 2008
In addition to the competition, juried and audience prizes conferred during the festival, several Sundance co-sponsored special-category prizes are also awarded.
During a Jan. 26 invitation-only reception at the Sundance House in Park City, the $20,000 Alfred P. Sloan Prize was awarded to writer-director Alex Rivera for his debut feature, Sleep Dealer. The film is described in festival programming notes as a “fascinating and prescient work of science fiction.”
The prize, provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, recognizes a feature film depicting science or technology as a thematic focus, or a scientist, engineer or mathematician as a major character. Previous recipients have included Mark Decena’s Dopamine, Primer by Shane Carruth and Chen Shi-zheng’s Dark Matter.
A committee of five film and science professionals selected Sleep Dealer for “its visionary and humane tale of a young man grappling with a technological future in which neural implants, telerobotics and ubiquitous computing serve a global economy rife with fundamental challenges and opportunities, and for its powerful and original storytelling and direction.”
Rivera had previously workshopped the film at the 2000 and 2001 Sundance Institute Feature Film Program Labs, and is a prior recipient of the Sundance/NHK award and an Annenberg Feature Film Fellowship. Acknowledging the ongoing support of Institute programs, Rivera noted that “Sundance has been at the side of this project for seven years.” Sleep Dealer debuted in the Dramatic Competition at this year’s festival.
The day before, the Sundance Institute and NHK, Japan’s largest broadcaster, presented the winners of the 2008 Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Awards, selected from a group of 12 finalists.
The four winners were Alejandro Fernandez Almendras (Chile) for Huacho, Braden King (USA) with Here, Radu Jude (Romania) — The Happiest Girl in the World — and Aiko Nagatsu (Japan) for Apoptosis. Nagatsu noted that “there are not any awards like this in Japan, so I’m inspired very much.”
The annual award was created in 1996 to honor visionary directors from four global regions (Europe, Latin America, the United States, and Japan) and support the development and production of their winning narrative … Read the rest
Saturday, January 26th, 2008
The curtain came down on the 14th Slamdance Film Festival last night with a ceremony to announce winners in fifteen categories. Tom Quinn’s standout The New Year’s Parade, a clear favorite among a pedestrian narrative field, walked away with the grand jury prize, while Greg Kohs’ Song Sung Blue won both the jury and audience awards for documentary. A full list of winners follows:
Grand Jury Award for Best Narrative Feature
Prize: $15,000 Credit at Filmworksfx
LP3 Pictures Grip, Electric, and Studio Package ($15,000 value)
$3,500 Credit on legal services from Pierce Law Group, LLP
Winner: “The New Year Parade” directed by Tom Quinn
Special Jury Honorable Mention for Narrative Feature
“How To Be” directed by Oliver Irving
Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary Feature
Prize: Panasonic HVX200 Camera
$10,000 Credit Filmworksfx
$3,500 Credit on legal services from Pierce Law Group, LLP
$500 Credit from Discmakers
Winner: “Song Sung Blue” directed by Greg Kohs
Special Jury Honorable Mention for Documentary Feature
Winner: “My Mother¹s Garden” directed by Cynthia Lester
Grand Jury Award for Best Animated Short
Prize: $2,500 Credit at Filmworks/FX
Winner: “Blood Will Tell” directed by Andrew McPhillips
Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary Short
Prize: $2,500 Credit at Filmworks/FX
Winner: “The Ladies” directed by C.A. Voros
Grand Jury Award for Best Experimental Short
Prize: $2,500 Credit at Filmworks/FX
Winner: “Doxology” directed by Michael Langan
Grand Jury Award for Best Narrative Short
Prize: $2,500 Credit at Filmworks/FX
Winner: “Son” directed by Daniel Mulloy
Special Jury Honorable Mention for Narrative Short
Winner: “4960” directed by Wing-Yee Wu
Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature
Prize: $4,000 Credit from Filmworksfx
Winner: “The Project” directed by Ryan Piotrowicz
Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature
Prize: $4,000 Credit from Filmworksfx
Winner: “Song Sung Blue” directed by Greg Kohs
Global Audience Award for Best Anarchy Film
Prize: $2,500 Credit from Filmworksfx
Winner: “Rock Garden” directed by Gloria Kim
Spirit of Slamdance Award*
Prize: Jagermeister Gift Basket
Winner: “Woman in Burka” directed by Jonathan Lisecki
*Awarded by the 2008 filmmakers, for exhibiting passion and talent as a filmmaker, commitment to the independent community, and enthusiastically … Read the rest
RYAN GOSLING DINES WITH PAUL SCHNEIDER, EMILY MORTIMER AND “BIANCA” IN CRAIG GILLESPIE’S LARS AND THE REAL GIRL. COURTESY MGM.
