Archive for June, 2009
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009
Premiering tomorrow at 7pm — and on the museum’s YouTube channel — is the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA)’s Chinatown Film project, a collection of short films by Miguel Arteta, Patty Chang, Jem Cohen, Cary Fukunaga, So Yong Kim & Bradley Rust Gray, Amir Naderi, Sam Pollard, Shelly Silver, Rose Troche, and Wayne Wang & Richard Wong on their unique visions of Chinatown, New York. (Advance registration required to attend the opening.) The museum is located at 215 Centre Street, and the exhibition continues both on YouTube and on the exhibition’s blog (appropriately in Chinese and English.) The exhibition also includes a user-generated component:
We want you to share your films, up to 7 minutes long, about your city’s Chinatown. We’re interested in large metropolitan Chinatowns as well as single strip mall Chinatowns! We want all formats, from camera phone video to Super 8mm film. This project is about re-seeing Chinatown through the eyes of filmmakers. And it’s about taking the art of filmmaking to Chinatowns the world over.
Accepted entries will be posted to the Museum’s YouTube channel.
The series curating producer is independent film producer Karin Chien (The Exploding Girl), and the exhibition will continue with more films, including shorts on all the world’s Chinatowns from a number of esteemed international directors. The trailer for the exhibition is below.
… Read the rest
Monday, June 29th, 2009
Ted Hope tweeted this Current TV indie film parody short this morning and it’s been getting a lot of comments. Yes, it’s silly, but too often accurate in parts. So, whaddaya say, let’s all vow to banish these indie cliches!
… Read the rest
Monday, June 29th, 2009
An eventful day in Los Angeles found the Los Angeles Film Festival announcing its award winners amidst gatherings of far different sorts. A massive Iranian march took over much of Westwood; impromptu rallies protesting the Honduran military coup sprung up across the city, and here and there were still pockets of moon-walking, white-gloved Michael Jackson mourners. But in the relative wine-sipping calm of an intimate Westwood locale, the festival hosted a small awards ceremony to announce the winners of this year’s competitions.
The Target Filmmaker Award, which rewards the finest narrative film in competition at the Festival (and comes with $50,000) went to the directing duo of Sam Fleischner and Ben Chace for their Brooklyn-by-way-of-Jamaica odyssey Wah Do Dem (What They Do) (pictured above). Following a endearingly goofy young hipster (nearly the whitest man in Brooklyn) as he staggers across the beaches, mountains, and cities of Jamaica in order to reunite with a cruise ship he barely enjoyed anyway, the film fashions its seemingly haphazard travelogues and accidental encounters into a very concise sense of narrative movement, one mixed with an embrace of the sheer pleasure of opening oneself to strangers, chance, and life itself. For the jury (comprised of producer Albert Berger, actress Rosemarie DeWitt, and film critic Elvis Mitchell), Wah Do Dem was ““a film that could feel anecdotal but through its musical shifts and tone, and its vision of the world as a newly optimistic place, Wah Do Dem (What They Do) creates a strong and profound emotional narrative.”
The Target Documentary Film Award, given to the finest documentary film in competition (and which also comes with a suitcase filled with $50k), went to Those Who Remain (Los Que se Quedan) (pictured right), by Juan Carlos Rulfo and Carlos Hagerman. The flipside to the multiple documentaries on Mexican immigrants in the USA, this poetic documentary instead unveils the lives of “those who remain” in Mexico; many have loved ones in the U.S., and see them only once every few years, while others steadfastly refuse to follow the economic trail north, … Read the rest
Sunday, June 28th, 2009
I was working with a young director who was very talented, but who was also prone to panic — causing her to lose her perspective and clarity (an issue I’ve had to deal with myself at times). So I wrote this ‘”cheat sheet” for the fellows to carry with them for when they felt lost. To be honest, I created it just as much for myself…
The Unofficial Sundance Shooting Cheat Sheet
You may never need this, but if you’re feeling a little lost, or out of control, or not sure, remember…
1. Breathe. Calm down. Fear and anxiety are the enemies of complex, open, creative thought. A calm leader inspires confidence. If you need a minute to clear your head, or decide what you want, take it. Everyone can wait.
2. Slow down — rushing is not the same as efficiency.
3. Remember what your scene is really about: Why is this scene in your film? What do you want the audience to feel or understand from it? What are you trying to achieve emotionally with your use of camera and image? What do each of the characters want in this scene? How are they trying to achieve it? Which character’s scene is it? What is their journey in this scene?
While all of the above SHOULD seem obvious, there isn’t a director alive who hasn’t lost sight of some or all of the above while they were shooting a difficult scene.
4. In both rehearsal and shooting — try giving your actors actions — things their character is trying to achieve in the scene, instead of emotional states to play. Get back to what the character WANTS.
Let’s say you’re doing a scene where one character wants to intimidate another.
If you tell the actor “yell” you may just get a general, obvious performance.
But if you give them something to DO (e.g. ‘try and scare the crap out of the other character’), you will allow them into the creative process, and they may find ways of achieving what you want that weren’t what you expecting, but that … Read the rest
Sunday, June 28th, 2009
Leaving the Sundance Lab is always a melancholy feeling. I’m happy and excited about seeing my wife, but not about re-entering the “real world” of Los Angeles, where the deal is the thing, and where projects are judged on potential economic return, not artistic merit.
The week is full of great memories, watching young filmmakers take steps — sometimes leaps — towards defining their voice and material.
Some bravely challenged their whole script, re-writing as they worked, and adding whole new scenes to their pieces that gave them more depth.
Others found ways to integrate their desire to create a specific cinematic style, with a way to maintain the emotion of the story.
Directors of pieces with divergent elements and styles made strides towards seamlessly integrating their scripts’ humor and sadness, so within one scene they could leap nimbly back and forth in mood.
One filmmaker learned that scenes she dismissed as ‘exposition’, could be very emotional and important if she approached them with passion.
Every filmmaker grew, stretched and challenged themselves. I think (I hope!) they all leave with a greater sense of clarity and confidence then when they started. I only wish we’d had even more time with them.
They’ve had so much thrown at them by so many people, they’ll be a lot of processing to do. And it will be fascinating to see what the films themselves are like when they actually get to make their features (a surprisingly large numbers of the fellows do, with Sundance’s help). That part is often delightful,
A few years back I worked with Miranda July on Me and You and Everyone We Know. I loved her script, but while I was at the lab — early in the process that summer — she was still struggling to deal with her actors and crew to get what she wanted, and to find a visual language that would capture the quirkiness of her script, without being self-conscious. It was a major thrill to see her final film in the theater, and realized how much she had triumphed to create something … Read the rest
Friday, June 26th, 2009
“When I see this picture, the chemistry between us is delightful still,” began Jon Voight as he and Dustin Hoffman took the stage late last night after a packed Los Angeles Film Festival screening of John Schlesinger’s 1969 classic Midnight Cowboy at the Hammer Museum’s Billy Wilder Theater. “It’s still a little bit of a miracle to see, when actors have such chemistry; when one of us starts moving, the other one does too.” Forty-some years after making the film, that chemistry was still on display during the two great actor’s conversation, hosted by LA Times critic Kenneth Turan. Exceedingly generous with their time and thoughtful responses, Voight and Hoffman entertained the audience with recollections of the film’s shooting, the director John Schlesinger and his working style, American filmmaking in the early Seventies, and, above all, their collaboration together. Seeing the film again (the two claimed to have sat in the audience for the final half hour), what’s clear is that Midnight Cowboy has lost none of its power over the decades. In fact, compared to many contemporary “independent visions” on display here, it’s probably gained power, its scaly gutter-level realism and humanist force only serving to highlight the relative lack of such filmmaking in today’s American independent cinema.
What follows is a loose transcription of highlights from a memorable evening….
ON (FINALLY) GETTING CAST IN MIDNIGHT COWBOY
DH: I was just going to go back to the stage after The Graduate (Hoffman’s first role, which made him an immediate star). As a New York actor working in theater and used to working with great works, film scripts were a bit “thin,” so I wasn’t getting anything interesting. But Midnight Cowboy had an amazing script (by Waldo Salt), and was based on a novel. The problem was that Schlesinger, as a serious “artist,” refused to see me, because of the success of The Graduate; he considered it, and me, too lightweight.
“When I finally got an audition, I got all dressed up in character, and had him meet me at around 3am around Times Square, in some … Read the rest
Friday, June 26th, 2009
TALENT SHOW CONTESTANT LIMA SAHAR IN DIRECTOR HAVANA MARKING’S AFGHAN STAR. COURTESY ZEITGEIST FILMS.Following in the footsteps of such filmmakers as James Marsh (Man on Wire), Stephen Walker (Young@Heart) and Parvez Sharma (A Jihad For Love), Havana Marking is the latest director of a British TV-funded documentary to find her film in the theatrical spotlight Stateside. The intrepid director went to school in Dorset, England, before studying Anthropology at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Subsequently, she began working in documentary television, progressing from researcher through to producer, on shows as disparate as Himalaya with Michael Palin, the Gordon Ramsay studio cooking show The F Word, and the environmental investigation What Would Jesus Drive?. She made her debut as a director in 2005 with The Great Relativity Show, a series of animated shorts explaining the Theory of Relativity which won a Pirelli Science Award. In 2007, she directed a half-hour documentary about disabled strippers, The Crippendales, which was made as part of Channel 4′s New Talent program. Marking currently runs the Redstart Media production company, and has also worked as a freelance journalist for the British newspapers The Guardian and The Observer.
Marking’s feature debut sees her capitalizing on her first-hand knowledge of the documentary genre’s populist offshoot, reality TV. Afghan Star focuses on the TV series of the same name, a talent show along the lines of American Idol which aims to find the newest and best singer in a country where – until the Taliban’s rule ended in 2001 – music, dancing and television were all banned. Marking’s movie follows four hopefuls from the final 10: handsome Rafi, a 19-year-old with real pop star charisma; gifted 20-year-old Hameed, a classically trained Hazara musician; Lima, a 25-year-old woman from ultra-conservative Kandahar who has to practice her music in secret; and rebellious 21-year-old Setara, who sees music as a vital part of her self-expression. Afghan Star, which won Best Director and the Audience Award in the World Documentary section at Sundance … Read the rest
Friday, June 26th, 2009
The trajectory of careers can be pretty fascinating. I remember when G.G. Allin was a Lower East Side punk rock performance freakshow, cutting himself on stage, fighting with audience members and threatening/promising to kill himself during one of his performances. Todd Phillips was attending NYU Film School at the time and while a junior there made his debut feature, a documentary portrait of the performer entitled Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies (1994). He also, with Andrew Gurland, founded the New York Underground Film Festival, would go on to make with Gurland the controversial college hazing doc Frat House (1998) and then, just two years later, would make the very successful comedy Road Trip. There was also Old School (2003) and now, of course, The Hangover, which is shaping up to be one of the summer’s biggest hits (and probably the most profitable one).
In an interview with Erin Broadley at Suicide Girls, Phillips discusses how the seeds of his filmmaking can be found in Hated.
EB: Well, you also talked about how with documentaries you almost have to create characters as well. What were some of the problems or strange rewards you found with the Murder Junkies crew, developing the characters within the bounds of this documentary?
TP:I think what I meant was that, to me it was never a big leap to go from documentaries to features. I think a good documentary has a beginning, middle and an end. A good documentary is storytelling and has character development so you know, in this film, in Hated it was the same thing, it was like, okay, you build your movie around your main character GG but you have this sort of circus that follows him around…like Unk the fan or the ex-guitarist who’s thrown out of the band. He’s sort of the antagonist of the film.
EB:Chicken John?
TP:Yeah, and you kind of just let stuff come out slowly just like you would a regular narrative film. I don’t think Hated does it flawlessly because there’s not too much of a narrative thread through
… Read the rest
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009
Here’s actor, writer and director Keith Gordon’s (pictured) second post from the Sundance Directors’ Lab. For his first post, click here.
OK, so the weather isn’t great so far (lots of rain), and the food is, well, it’s kinda like being at summer camp. (That’s why I always bring some cereal and cans of soup from home). And that’s all I can come up with to complain about. This place is magic, and I’m thrilled to be back in it’s grip.
I unpacked in my cozy little condo, and headed down to the Sunday reception for us “new folk.” I was very happy to see lots of old friends among the staff and my fellow advisors.
The next morning we saw the scenes from the first week (all of which show talent, but also the work left to be done), and got the update from Gyula, Michelle, and the wonderful Joan Darling who comes up every year before the production week’s start, to work with the fellows on acting, becomes an advisor for the first production week, and then stays to fill in the 2nd week advisors on what she’s seeing with each of the fellows and what she thinks they could use from us.
Joan is quite an amazing teacher — warm, loving, inspiring, and endlessly enthusiastic. She’s able to be critical when needed, but in a way that never could be misinterpreted as belittling or hurtful. Over a couple of weeks she becomes every fellow’s wise mother.
The scripts this year range from very good to VERY, VERY good. And no, I’m not saying which I think is which. All were written by their director, except one. In alphabetical project order;
All Fall Down – Jonathan Wysocki. (USA) Thank god I really liked this script, since Jonathan is good friends with a close friend of mine, and we live about two blocks from each other (in spread out LA, that’s like living in the same apartment building in NYC). It’s a bittersweet look at how 9/11 effects a family in a small town, the Halloween right after … Read the rest
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009
I’ve been slow on the blog and behind on posting my notes on day two of the Open Video Conference because we’re trying to finish the Summer issue and get it off to the printers before the July 4th holiday. It’s our annual “25 New Faces” issue, so it’s a tougher one to pull together than usual. Anyway, one person I won’t be writing about when I get that OVC Day Two post up is keynote speaker Clay Shirky — because he wasn’t there. Travel difficulties derailed his presentation but for those who want to hear him anyway, here’s his talk on open source, activism and creative practice delivered two days before at Upgrade New York. (Hat tip: The Change You Want To See.)
Upgrade NY: Clay Shirky on Forking, Failure, and Open Source (Part 1) from Not An Alternative on Vimeo.… Read the rest
