News
Friday, May 18th, 2012
The French feminist collective known as La Barbe (French for “The Beard”) printed an open letter in France’s daily newspaper Le Monde earlier this week addressing the complete absence of films directed by women in the Competition section at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. La Barbe is made up of actress Fanny Cottençon, writer/director Virginie Despentes and director Coline Serreau, who have also set up an online petition which has been signed by numerous luminaries, including feminist icon Gloria Steinem and filmmakers such as Ry Russo-Young, Gillian Armstrong and Ava DuVernay.
The British newspaper The Guardian ran a translation of the open letter, which reads as follows:
“What has changed in cinema? Everything has changed!” exclaimed Gilles Jacob, president of the Cannes film festival, during the presentation of the 65th Cannes festival film nominations. Everything?! For one second, we trembled. But for no reason, it turned out, as the 22 officially selected movies – happy coincidence – were directed by 22 men. This 65th festival will end up giving the precious award to a male director for the 63rd time, defending the masculine values that give the seventh art its nobility.
Only once did the Cannes film festival lose heart. In 1993, the Palme d’Or was indeed awarded to Jane Campion. And last year, doubtless due to a lack of vigilance, four women somehow sneaked in among the 20 people nominated in the official competition. Thierry Frémeaux, the festival’s director general, correctly remarked: “It is the first time that there are so many women.” How weak! All the more unforgivable as in 2011, the Césars set an example by not selecting any women in the categories of best movie or best director.
Sirs, you came to your senses and we are glad. The Cannes film festival 2012 applauds Wes, Jacques, Leos, David, Lee, Andrew, Matteo, Michael, John, Hong, Im, Abbas, Ken, Serguei, Cristian, Yousry, Jeff, Alain, Carlos, Walter, Ulrich, Thomas, all of whom show us once again that “men are fond of depth in women, but only in their cleavage.”
This exemplary selection sends a powerful message to professionals and audiences
… Read the rest
Friday, May 18th, 2012
Here’s friends and fellow directors Paul Thomas Anderson and Robert Downey Sr. talking about Babo 73, one of the five early Downey features included on Criterion’s new box set from their no-frills Eclipse series, Up All Night with Robert Downey Sr., which comes out next week on DVD.
… Read the rest
Friday, May 18th, 2012
When discussing the lineup at the upcoming BAMcinemaFEST a while back, I noted that a new cut of Walk Away Renee, Jonathan Caouette’s long-awaited follow-up to Tarnation, would be playing as part of the festival on June 27. While that’s exciting news on its own, now comes word of a very savvy move by IFC to capitalize on the interest in the film by giving the film a simultaneous online premiere on SundanceNOW’s Doc Club, the SVOD (Subscriber Video-on-Demand) series curated by documentary maven Thom Powers.
“Walk Away Renee makes a perfect headliner for the June [Doc Club] theme of ‘Up Close and Personal,’” said Powers. “Jonathan Caouette directs with such intimacy that viewers feel like a member of his family. I was blown away by this film at Cannes last year and look forward to sharing it with a greater audience.”
“Walk Away Renee was developed from equal parts love, sweat, humility and pure happenstance,” added Caouette. “I am ecstatic that people will now be able to see what I consider the final version of this film.”
Look out for more on Walk Away Renee on the Filmmaker site as its premiere draws nearer.… Read the rest
Friday, May 18th, 2012
Wes Anderson, the cover star of the latest issue of Filmmaker, kicked off the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday with his new film, Moonrise Kingdom, which opens Stateside on next Friday. (The estimable David Hudson, now operating at Fandor, collects the critical consensus on the movie here.)
If you, like me, are not on the Croisette this year, you can still get your Anderson fix via the Cannes website, which takes a special look at Anderson’s body of work through the prism of his use of pop music, collecting together clips from a string of movies plus an interview with Anderson.
And if you’re in New York, you’ll be pleased to know that today marks the start of the Museum of the Moving Image’s Wes Anderson’s Worlds. The 10-day season will screen all of the director’s features, plus has a special showing of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, a film that was a clear influence on The Royal Tenenbaums and which will have a (video) introduction by Anderson himself.… Read the rest
Friday, May 18th, 2012
The following article about Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky’s documentary Indie Game was published during the Sundance Film Festival. The film opens today in Los Angeles, New York (at the IFC Center), San Francisco and Phoenix. For a complete list of venues and upcoming screenings, check out the website.
Independent film, depending on how you define it, has had many births. But for the purposes of this blog post, let’s consider the one in the 1980s, just before the launch of this magazine. She’s Gotta Have It, Parting Glances, Poison, True Love — these were narrative features made by lone filmmakers with a mixture of private money and, sometimes, foreign TV deals, and they were released into the marketplace after being acquired by independent distributors who catered to arthouse audiences. More films followed — Clerks, El Mariachi, The Blair Witch Project — and the idea that one could possibly be not just a filmmaker but an “independent filmmaker” was born.
Of course, things change, and I wonder if a new generation for whom media creation is simply part of life even cares about that self-definition. Is making a movie that special anymore? Maybe the ones who really care about the meaning of “independent” are in other fields, like video games. Case in point: the creators profiled in Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky’s Sundance documentary Indie Game, who evince all the blood, sweat and tears we like to claim as the hallmarks of the independent filmmaker. More importantly, they are creating games during a historical moment that feels both somewhat new and not unlike the rush that the filmmakers behind films like, say, The Blair Witch Project, must have felt when their homemade creations suddenly burst forth on 2,000 screens.
Pajot and Swirsky interviewed 25 game designers before narrowing their film’s focus to three. Braid creator Jonathan Blow (pictured above, at right, with Pajot and Swirsky at the Sundance Q&A) is the eminence grise, the obsessive elder statesman who revolutionized the indie game world with a work that was not only fun … Read the rest
Thursday, May 17th, 2012
NYU student Elena Parker has created an intriguing device called Walter (named for the legendary Walter Murch) which tackles editing in an innovative new way. Here’s the description from the university website’s about her “eye-ware kinetoscope”:
Walter watches your eyes as you watch a film, and every time that you blink, it edits the video.
Based on the theories of Walter Murch in In the Blink of An Eye, I’ve transformed the subliminal action of blinking into a method of interaction with the film. By cutting every time that you blink, Walter creates a customized narrative for you, without interrupting your absorption in the film. You are free to watch while your unconscious does the work.
All edited footage of the “scene” of the girl/boy/director in this video was edited using blinks and not manipulated in further post.
Walter was built using a hacked PS3 Eye camera. Based on instructions from the creators of Eye Writer, I attached an infrared LED in order to track the eye. I wrote a program in processing that looks for the infrared light in relationship to the pupil. Whenever your eye is closed, the reflection vanishes, and the program moves to the next in a sequence of images. So, blink by blink, you control the flow of the film — and are delivered a narrative customized to your interests and attention.
You can see Walter in action below…
… Read the rest
Thursday, May 17th, 2012
(Distributed by Cinema Conservancy and Factory 25, The Color Wheel opens theatrically in NYC at BAM on Friday, May 18, 2012. It world premiered at the 2011 Sarasota Film Festival and co-shared the Best Narrative award at the Chicago Underground Film Festival before screening at BAMcinemaFest and many, many more festivals throughout the world. Visit the film’s official website to learn more. NOTE: This review was first published on June 22, 2011.)
Full disclosure: I first met Alex Ross Perry in the autumn of 2010. We had attended a screening with a mutual friend and he mentioned to me that he was finishing a new film and offered me a look. As a film festival programmer, I was honored and we met for coffee, where he delivered me a DVD, which I promptly filed in my stack of screeners and didn’t get to watch for roughly three months. When I finally did watch The Color Wheel, I was galvanized by it and offered the film a slot at the Sarasota Film Festival, where it World Premiered this past April. I hope that my own thinking about the film, one that I very much admire, will shine through the perception of a possible conflict of interest and that you’ll take me at my word when I tell you that I don’t write about movies I don’t like, I don’t fancy myself a film critic and I don’t pretend to some ideal of objectivity. Instead, I think it is important to foster discussion about movies that I love, so I welcome your feedback and polite disagreements in the comments below.
***ED. NOTE: A NOT OVERT BUT SOMEWHAT CLEAR SPOILER IS CONTAINED WITHIN PARAGRAPH FOUR. PROCEED WITH CAUTION IF YOU HAVEN’T YET SEEN THE FILM!***
In The Color Wheel, writer/director/star Alex Ross Perry’s second film, J.R. (co-writer Carlen Altman) and Colin (Perry) are siblings living in the cloistered world of their own making; J.R. dreams (and only dreams) of making it as a broadcast news personality while Colin, afraid of his own dreams of becoming an author, … Read the rest
Wednesday, May 16th, 2012
With less than twenty-four hours to reach my set goal on my Indiegogo campaign, it seems that every passing minute without a tiny donation is a strike against my project and a personal slap to my face. It’s hard not to take personally the fact that your idea is most likely a failure that generated little to no interest with the public. At the time of writing this, I have only acquired $140 dollars of my $1,000 final goal and it is quickly becoming evident that my project will end up under-funded, unless, of course, some patron from the heavens randomly decides that it would be in their best interest to donate the remaining funds necessary in order for me to feel like a success and move on without funding the project out of my empty pockets. While many people, and I mean the reasonable ones, of course, would throw their hands up in the air, consider their project a failure, curse out the Gods before praying for a miracle, and down a pint of whiskey to wallow in their self-pity, I, on the other hand, view this situation as just another, slightly expected, hurdle in my career of being an independent filmmaker. Though, I must admit, I am sipping a whiskey right now.
The campaign was/is for a film festival that a few months earlier I decided to launch with my dear friends Reverend Jen (pictured here with me), Robert Prichard, and Tom Tenney called Assdance Film Festival. Now, before I go any further, let me briefly explain myself, as I know what you’re thinking:
“Of course you’re not gonna make any money on something called Assdance, Courtney! How could you be so stupid into believing you would?”
To be honest, I knew I couldn’t. Yet, I have never steered away from pursuing even the craziest of my ideas; and believe me, I have quite a few of them. Also, don’t let the title fool you; this is not nor was it intended to be a porn film festival! The “Ass” in “Assdance” is actually an acronym for “Art Star … Read the rest
Wednesday, May 16th, 2012
At NAB this year, ARRI revealed that, at least for the coming year, they’ll be concentrating on anamorphic imaging and the dynamic range of the Alexa rather than trying to compete with high frame rates or 4K.
But they did have some interesting new additions to the product line, particularly if you want to get the camera closer to the action. The Alexa M, which will start shipping this month, is essentially an Alexa that’s been cut in two. You have a 12.1 lb body connected to a 6.4 lb head by a cable up to 20 feet long. That cable can be even longer if you aren’t sending power to the head from the body.
At $100,000 the Alexa M is probably outside the budget of many independent filmmakers, but ARRI has posted a great video on their website showing the Alexa M being used in a variety of different ways. And the interesting thing is, it looks a lot like shooting with a DSLR – and I mean that in a positive way. Now you can do things with the Alexa that you used to do with a DSLR.
Don’t have the budget for the Alexa M? Well you can still use that DSLR in the same way that they used the Alexa M, and this video has some really interesting ideas for getting a camera closer to the action. I was particularly intrigued by the methods used in the ice hockey sequence, the skateboarding, and the attachment of the camera to the sword. And remember, you can always try doing something similar using a GoPro and Duct Tape like Ricki Bedenbaugh did in this video:
The ARRI video — ALEXA M – The Specialist is still worth checking out:
Camera attached to sword (cable runs under sword and down the leg of the soldier)
ARRI: Alexa M… Read the rest
Tuesday, May 15th, 2012
Focus Features is celebrating its tenth-year anniversary, and the distributor has just placed on its site a suite of videos in which Focus CEO James Schamus discusses the company’s history through its films. After an intro detailing the transition from Good Machine to Focus, Schamus gives us the back story on Focus titles like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Pianist and The Constant Gardner, among others. For the individual videos in the series, visit the 10-year anniversary page here and watch the overview video below.
… Read the rest
