DO THE YAM: ASTAIRE & ROGERS, THE COMPLETE WORKS |
By Livia Bloom

“I wanted to be a dancer,” says Fred Astaire, wheezing out a tune on a harmonica with his gangly frame draped casually over a medical couch. “Till I was psychologized.”

Astaire plays doctor—a shrink, of all things—in Mark Sandrich’s Carefree (1953), a little-known screwball comedy gem as antic and goofy as Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby (1938) with dance. And what dance! Accompanied by an Irving Berlin score, Astaire and Rogers are at the top of their game in the tale of a therapist (Astaire) who must find the root of the commitment phobia that plagues his new patient (Rogers). “She’s probably just another pampered, maladjusted female,” opines Astaire into his doctor’s recorder, prescribing her a good spanking. Until he meets her, that is. Then a playful game of one-upmanship, and eventually love, ensues.

In a dance number for the ages, Astaire first tries to impress his patient on the… Read the rest

INSIDE ENVISION: JENNIFER ARNOLD’S “A SMALL ACT” |
By Mike Plante

Presented by the IFP and UN, Envision is a daylong program dealing with the addressing of global issues through documentary. It takes place Saturday, July 10, and you can learn more here. Jennifer Arnold’s A Small Act is one of two features that will be screened at the event.

As an impoverished boy in Kenya, Chris Mburu received the fortune of one person’s small donation. When WWII-survivor Hilde Back anonymously sponsored an African child’s education, Chris not only went through school but also became a Harvard-educated human rights lawyer for the UN, all unbeknownst to Hilde. So inspired, Chris and his cousin Jane Wanjiru Muijai started the Hilde Back fund, their own scholarship fund to help Kenyan children pay to go to secondary school. In the vibrant documentary A Small Act, filmmaker Jennifer Arnold explores the world of “every dollar helps” and the incredible ripple effects… Read the rest

CONSIDERING “THE BIG LEBOWSKI: A XXX PARODY” |
By Lauren Wissot

In retrospect it seems inevitable that some enterprising pornographers in Hollywood’s shadow industry would look to the Coen brothers’ quintessential Venice Beach bum The Dude for inspiration. Not only is southern California the hub of the sex biz, The Dude is SoCal made flesh. And now a company called New Sensations has done just this with The Big Lebowski: A XXX Parody, a passionate, nearly shot-for-shot recreation that shows that cute porn is not an oxymoron. Sure, New Sensations has already tackled pop culture with 30 Rock: A XXX Parody and Seinfeld: A XXX Parody, but The Big Lebowski: A XXX Parody really does feel like something different. This isn’t some mainstream TV touchstone the company is tackling, but a cult film from bona fide indie auteurs. A few years back Lucas Entertainment was the darling of the GAYVN Awards with its serious porn remakes of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita… Read the rest

“SHIT YEAR” DIRECTOR CAM ARCHER AT CANNES |
By Scott Macaulay

It is both accurate and reductive to call Cam Archer’s Shit Year, which premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival in the Director’s Fortnight section, the story of a retiring actress grappling with the emotions produced by her move away from the Hollywood spotlight. Of course, on narrative terms, that is what it’s about. Ellen Barkin plays the actress, who has just given her final talk-show interview, moved to a cabin in the woods, and now spends her days avoiding her neighbors and flashing back to a brief affair she had with a younger actor (Luke Grimes) on the set of her last film. In an eerily composed performance, Barkin projects the steely emotional control of a woman determined not to descend into the full-blown sadness that seems just a beat away. It’s a performance that reminded me a bit of Tuesday Weld’s similarly dazed heroine in Frank Perry’s… Read the rest

DON HAHN, PETER SCHNEIDER OF “WAKING SLEEPING BEAUTY” |
By Scott Macaulay

As filmmakers, we are genetically programmed to look to the future. The next script, the next movie, the next deal. After all, the films — on DVD, on hard drives, in canisters stacked in our closets — are their own memories.

Except, of course, that a film only tells part of the story. They are the ends of their tales, not the beginnings, and they only tell their own stories, and not the dramas of their making. If at all, those stories that circle around a film are only sometimes relayed in magazine profiles or in books written by people who have had little connection to the times and people they chronicle.

With Waking Sleeping Beauty, director Don Hahn and producer Peter Schneider accomplished what every filmmaker must dream of at one point in their career: revisiting their earlier successes — the revitalization of Disney animation — and entering… Read the rest

THOUGHTS ON PAUL GREENGRASS’S “GREEN ZONE” |
By Scott Macaulay

The genius of the Jason Bourne movies is their welding of existentialist inquiry with the demands of the thriller in a globalist age. Adapted from Robert Ludlum’s series, Doug Liman and screenwriters Tony Gilroy and W. Blake Herron established the template with The Bourne Identity, locating their film’s MacGuffin not in the outside world but under the skin of its hero. As ex-intelligence operative Jason Bourne skips from city to city, pursuing clue after clue, he is ultimately investigating not a case but his own identity. What kind of man was — is — he?

For my money, the first Bourne movie is the best (maybe just because it’s the first, and the fresh concept is so satisfying), but Paul Greengrass’s agitated camerawork and sophisticated editing made the next two more than sequels. As a director, Greengrass organizes physical space with the relentlessness of a search engine, mirroring the panoptical… Read the rest

THE DOCUMENTARY CHALLENGE’S FIVE-DAY WORK WEEK |
By Stewart Nusbaumer

Are you addicted to large oil drums of coffee? Feel alive only when you’re a sleep-deprived stumbling zombie? Relish your emotions ripping from ice berg to flame thrower? Then you are made for the International Documentary Challenge.

Started in 2006, the International Documentary Challenge is a timed filmmaking competition — this year beginning on March 4 — where filmmakers have five days to craft a five-to-seven minute non-fiction film. In the last four years, more than 500 participating filmmakers — more than 125 each year — from some 20 countries chose to forgo sleep and sanity for this the ultimate in filmmaking madness.

“The Doc Challenge is an event for both novice and professional filmmakers,” director Doug Whyte says while relaxing in a soft chair in the Filmmakers Lounge at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. “Novice filmmakers have the opportunity to go through the whole filmmaking process in… Read the rest

VIEWING ZEITGEISTS AND THE BEST U.S. INDIES OF THE DECADE |
By Jason Sanders

To try to recall your favorite films from an entire decade (and then to limit them to only ten titles) is to immediately set yourself up for uncertainty and ridicule: first off because it’s hard enough to remember what you saw ten days ago, much less ten years ago, and secondly because to limit the list to ten is to leave hundreds of excellent films out, titles that you’ll undoubtedly get bludgeoned to death with through later feedback (“You blithering idiot~pretentious snob~Hollywood tool! How could you leave out Judd Apatow~Jean-Luc Godard~Abbas Kiarostami~McG,” read the heated responses to already posted lists). To create a list of a “the best” of a year (or a decade) is to confront what makes a person “love” a film in general: sometimes your response depends not just on personal taste, but timing, audience, and mood; you may have seen The Dark Knight or… Read the rest

IT WAS THE AUGHTS, AND I WENT TO THE MOVIES |
By Brandon Harris

It was the aughts, and I went to (and made a few) movies. I did it mostly for pleasure, sometimes for distraction, often to see what others thought of the wild world around us; by the end, I did it simply because it was the only way I saw fit to make a living (sort of). It was a bell curve of sorts, a graph of this burgeoning obsession, this ecstatic object of study, of debate, of joy. By the middle of the decade, I was watching somewhere between three hundred and fifty and four hundred movies, old and new, each year, often alone on big energy eating screens, my carbon footprint be damned. I see a little more than half that number these days and surely saw about half that number back in 2000. When I reflect on it now, on this decade “from hell” as Time Magazine… Read the rest

INDIE FILM INK PIRATED, FILMMAKERS PLEASED
By Mike Johnston

When I attended the Future of Music Conference this year I heard a lot of talk about all of the opportunities that exist today for indie musicians to create and distribute their products via digital media on the web. Later, at the Flyway Film Festival I heard former Tribeca CEO Brian Newman speak on similar topics in relation to indie filmmakers. The central theme to all of it is that indie artists can be successful without a major label contract or major studio distribution.

In the end though talk is cheap and what looks good on paper doesn’t always translate easily into the real world. I wanted to test the waters firsthand so I created a video podcast featuring live performances by indie musicians. The show runs roughly a half hour and I have been shooting a new episode every week for the past three weeks. In… Read the rest