HITLER RESPONDS TO THE iPAD

By Scott Macaulay

The extension of the Downfall meme to the iPad was inevitable, but, still, nearly a million views in two days?

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SUNDANCE SHORT FILM WINNERS

By Admin

Sundance awarded its prizes for short films yesterday……. (drum roll):

The Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking was awarded to Drunk History: Douglass & Lincoln (Director: Jeremy Konner; Screenwriter: Derek Waters) — On March 22nd, Jen Kirkman drank two bottles of wine and then discussed a historical event. Cast: Don Cheadle and Will Ferrell

The Jury Prize in International Short Filmmaking was given to The Six Dollar Fifty Man / New
Zealand (Directors and screenwriters: Mark Albiston and Louis Sutherland)— Andy, a gutsy eight year-old boy, is forced to break out of his make-believe superhero world to deal with playground bullies.

In addition, The Shorts Jury awarded Honorable Mentions in Short Filmmaking to:

Born Sweet / USA (Director: Cynthia Wade)—Arsenic-laced water has poisoned a 15-year-old-boy from a small, rural village in Cambodia, who fashions dreams for karaoke stardom.

Can We Talk? / United Kingdom (Director and screenwriter: Jim Owen)—Vince gets way more than he bargains for when he dumps his girlfriend. Again.

Dock Ellis & The LSD No-No / USA (Director: James Blagden)—In celebration of the greatest athletic achievement by a man on a psychedelic journey, here’s the animated tale of Dock Ellis’ legendary LSD no-hitter.

How I Met Your Father / Spain (Director and screenwriter: Álex Montoya)—Every couple has their story, some more romantic than others.

Quadrangle / USA (Director: Amy Grappell)—An unconventional look at two “conventional” couples that swapped partners and lived in a group marriage in the early 1970s, hoping to pioneer an alternative to divorce and the way people would live in the future.… Read the rest

CINEMATIC RUSH: MAKING SENSE OF THE SUNDANCE LOAD

By Admin

During an unexpected block of leisure today, I had the chance to figure out exactly how many movies I will have seen at the Sundance Film Festival by the time I head home. Once the awards ceremony rolls around on Saturday, I expect forty titles to be bouncing around my mind in an orgy of audiovisual experiences. That’s a lot of moving pictures, but nevertheless somewhat average for a festival where many people absorb five or six features on a daily basis for nearly two weeks. This type of intense cinematic immersion presents a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it allows for a rapid period of discovery, an ambitious race through the contemporary marketplace for independent film. But the race tends to turn the landscape into an indecipherable blur, endangering the qualitative character of individual movie experiences.

For example, a few days ago I sat through a double bill of the first-rate verite documentary 12th & Delaware, followed by Derek Cianfrance‘s evocative portrait of a broken marriage, Blue Valentine. The two movies have virtually nothing in common: Delaware, directed by the Jesus Camp duo Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, presents a remarkable nonfiction portrait of an abortion clinic in Fort Pierce, Florida located across the street from an anti-abortion crisis center where bible-thumpers constantly attempt to steal their neighbors’ clients. Valentine stars Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams as a married couple constantly at odds with one another, although the movie reminds us that they actually met cute courtesy of frequent flashbacks. In a pivotal scene, Williams nearly aborts a child from her earlier relationship, then decides instead to start a family and raise the kid with Gosling. It’s a tense moment, but I had a hard time looking past the clear-cut similarities between the abortion room in that scene and the one featured in Delaware. Noticing this unintentional connection hardly detracted from either experience, but it did elucidate the kind of loose association that can arise from constant cinematic exposure. Is there a danger to this type of psychological connectivity? With two days … Read the rest

THE VIEW FROM SLAMDANCE: CRITICAL DISPATCH #3

By Admin

IFP’S 2010 INDEPENDENT FILMMAKER LABS OPEN FOR SUBMISSIONS

By Admin

IFP has opened submissions for its Independent Filmmaker Labs, a fellowship that provides professional and creative guidance to aspiring filmmakers, and pushes directors to further develop the full potential of their talents and abilities.

The only program in the U.S. that supports debut directors of low-budget and independently produced films at the crucial beginning stages, the IFP Labs begin with a week-long intensive in New York, followed by being a part of IFP’s Independent Film Week in September. Twenty projects will be selected for this year’s program. Filmmakers at past Labs have had premieres at festivals like Berlin (Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell), Slamdance (The Guatemalan Handshake; The New Year Parade), Sundance (The Imperialists Are Still Alive!; Half-Life; Tibet In Song), SXSW (Jumping Off Bridges; Sorry, Thanks; St. Nick; Woodpecker), Toronto (The Real Shaolin), and Venice (Zero Bridge).

The deadline for documentaries is February 12, while the deadline for narratives is March 26. Apply at labs.ifp.org… Read the rest

HOW THE iPAD WILL AFFECT FILMMAKERS

By Scott Macaulay

I posted a vaguely impressed impression of the iPad yesterday just after the Apple press conference was over. Of course, 24 hours later, I’m thinking about the details, good and bad. The big downer is Apple’s reintroduction of the 4:3 format (1024×768). That means that watching a 16:9 movie on your iPad will give you big black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. Obviously, Apple had to make a choice regarding screen dimensions and they went with one that trades off in film and TV what it will gain with other forms of content. Nonetheless, it’s not the immediately great handheld device for watching movies I thought it might be. There’s no camera, so webchats are out, and no camera plus no GPS (well, there’s AGPS…) means that certain games and augmented reality applications aren’t appropriate either. And, no USB makes it hard to load your own media onto the device, which may be the point.

On the other hand, this version of the iPad is definitely a transitional device, and, as I noted yesterday, there’s a lot that filmmakers can do with the new apps made possible by the iPad screen size. At Fresh DV, filmmaker Ryan Bilsbarrow-Koo, one of our 25 New Faces who blogs at NoFilmSchool, has come up with seven ways the iPad will affect filmmakers, and app potential is one of them. He says it way better than me:

It’s a book, it’s a movie, it’s… an app

Anthony Zuiker (CSI) released a “digi-novel” last year, wherein a printed book contained a URL every 20 pages; readers could enter the URL into a browser and watch a related online video. In a lot of ways transmedia storytelling to date has been mostly about promotion (The Dark Knight, for example, used an Alternate Reality Game to promote its theatrical release), but the iPad offers a different set of possibilities: instead of these experiences existing as separate, promotional entrypoints, they can all be brought together on one platform. This is not to say that a project can’t have a live component that

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“DADDY LONGLEGS”‘ JOSH AND BENNY SAFDIE | By Scott Macaulay

When I was asked by The Huffington Post to comment on New York movies premiering in Sundance, the first film that popped into my mind was Josh and Bennie Safdie’s Daddy Longlegs. Now, as you may know, I’m a big fan of the Safdie brothers, selecting Josh for our 25 New Faces for the film he directed, The Pleasure of Being Robbed in 2008. That picture is a delightfully freewheeling romance of sorts involving a young woman, played with depth and originality by Eleonore Hendricks, who casually steals, not out of maliciousness or for greed but simply because of a worldview that sees the world as hers.

This second film, Daddy Longlegs, directed with his brother Bennie, extends the Safdies’ emotional range further. It’s the story of Lenny, a projectionist and divorced dad, and it’s set during the summertime two weeks he has custody of his two young sons. Lenny’s lifestyle is both perpetually frazzled and compulsively bohemian, and his take on parenthood is somewhere between unaffected love and a call to child services. Lenny is based on the Safdies’ own dad, and their ability to weave their complicated emotions about him into a work that is alternately shocking, free-spirited and joyful is testament to their extraordinary emotional intelligence as directors. Much credit goes to Frownland director Ronnie Bronstein, who plays Lenny in his acting debut. There’s some of Bronstein’s naturally searching loquaciousness in Lenny, but there’s also the keen intelligence of an actor firmly aware of the implications of his choices.

Daddy Longlegs (previously titled Go Get Some Rosemary when it world premiered at the Cannes Film Festival’s Director’s Fortnight) screens tonight, January 28, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of Sundance USA. Whereas other films from the festival are headed out to cities around the country, Sundance has appropriately sent the Safdies back to their hometown. Kids and irresponsible dads exist everywhere, but there’s a particularly Gotham flavor to the brothers’ filmmaking, a capturing of the people and textures of this city that will thrill all of its cineastes. If you miss tonight’s screening, … Read the rest

FOCUS LOCKS DOWN THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT

By Jason Guerrasio

According to Mike Fleming at Deadline Hollywood and The Hollywood Reporter, Lisa Cholodenko‘s much buzzed about The Kids Are All Right has been nabbed by Focus Features.

Quiet at Park City after acquiring Hamlet 2 in ’08, Focus paid under $5 million for Cholodenko’s (Laurel Canyon) portrait of a modern family starring Annette Bening, Julianne Moore, and Mark Ruffalo, beating out Summit Entertainment, Fox Searchlight, Sony Pictures Classics and The Weinstein Company.

Read more about the backstage deal making at the Los Angeles Times blog.… Read the rest

BANKSY REVEALED? PARSING A SUNDANCE MYSTERY

By Admin

Sundance documentaries have developed a strong track record. Hits out of recent festivals include Man on Wire, The Cove and We Live in Public, each of which captures an element of society and finds the human connection within. This year, however, the human connection in some of the more talked about nonfiction entries is highly suspect. At the center it all: Banksy.

Exit Through the Gift Shop, the alleged directorial debut of the anonymous street British street artist, wound up with a surprise slot in the Spectrum section of the festival. Banksy’s enigmatic career and life beyond the film world created an immediate and intense anticipation for his project when word of its presence at Sundance came out just before the festival began. The news skyrocketed to the top of the Entertainment section of Google News and instigated chatter all across Main Street. What capacity does Banksy have to make a movie? What story could he tell? And most tantalizing of all: Would the masked man finally reveal his face?

While Exit Through the Gift Shop has now screened at Sundance three times, none of those questions have been fully answered. The movie, ostensibly a portrait of street artists around the world and the lucrative industry that has embraced their work, shows Banksy in silhouette and masks the sound of his voice. Beyond that basic disguise, however, lies evidence of an even greater ruse: The lingering doubt that Bansky — whoever that is — actually made this movie at all, and whether or not its supposed documentary content has any foundation in reality.

First things first: Even if Gift Shop lacks any fragments of truth to it, the underlying ideas about vanity and narcissism in the modern art world ring true. The star of the story is Thierry Guetta, a quirky Frenchman whose penchant for filming street artists around the world leads to his close relationship with Banksy. Catching him in the heat of his clandestine practice (while only filming him from behind) ultimately leads Guetta to embark on an art career of his own, essentially … Read the rest

HOPE AND VACHON LEAD PRODUCING TALK AT SUNDANCE

By Scott Macaulay

From Sundance’s YouTube page:

Recently, Sundance Film Festival brought a group of independent film producers together for an informal discussion. This is what they talked about. Join Christine Vachon, Ted Hope, Thomas Woodrow, Liz Watts, and Jonathan Schwartz.

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