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Admin
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on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009Take a breath amidst the tornado of end-of-year best-of’s top 10′s lists to consider the persons and films highlighted by one of our favorite websites, Hammer to Nail. Their 2nd annual Golden Hammer Award goes to Larry Fessenden, truly one of the great contributors to contemporary independent film art and culture. Fessenden, whose films (including Wendigo, The Last Winter, Habit as writer/director and I Sell The Dead, House of the Devil, Wendy and Lucy, I Can See You as a producer), have long been made and released in the kind of low-budget, audience-targeted way that is starting to seem like the only way that makes sense. H2N contributor Mike S. Ryan makes the case for honoring Larry with an essay that cries hallelujah over the “death” of the status quo:
“…that period of indie film, marked by those go-go Sundance years, is gone. I say good riddance. I hope some of the ’stars’ of that period have returned to selling real estate, because it was their drive to make money that sidetracked the authentic indie film spirit. I’m glad their game has gone bust. In its wake will rise true independent visions, films made by people who have something to say, and all the soulless LA sub-companies of the Hollywood industrial entertainment mind-melt industry can go to blazes as they watch the future rise out of the gutter. It’s great that the ‘industry’ is dead because maybe now the crap that these companies forced onto the small screens will go away and true indie film companies like
Glass Eye Pix will rise to the foreground.”
The
Silver Nail Award is bestowed on cinematographer and director
Jody Lee Lipes, one of Filmmaker’s
25 New Faces of this year. His film
Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be The Same has a release planned by Factory25 this year, and the films he has shot, including Afterschool and
Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, are not to be missed. Expect more from Lipes this year, including a scripted adaptation of a Jerome Robbins ballet premiering on PBS,
NY Export: Opus Jazz.
H2N has also published their Top 13 Films of 2009, topped by Ramin Bahrani’s Goodbye Solo.
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