September 27, 2008
The documentary or at least the naturalistic mode seems to be all the rage this year at the NY Film Festival. I'm all for it, of course; since it's what I do. I just hope all that HD looks alright...
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10:19 PM
June 2, 2007
Open news conference at the Cannes Film Festival are such absurdist theatrical frenzy, I half wonder if movie publicists didn't cook them up as a job security measure. The event serves up celebrities for an intense, dadaist interrogation by the...
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5:14 PM
January 30, 2007
The constroversy over Peter Baxter's decision to pull Super Columbine Massacre RPG! from Slamdance's Guerilla Gamemakers Festival hit the New York Times this weekend, and Baxter has yet another explanation for his actions. This time, it's not complaints by a...
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10:40 AM
January 8, 2007
Ian at Water Cooler Games has been writing about an incident at Slamdance. Seems the founder of the alt-alt festival yanked Super Columbine Massacre, a charming -sounding RPG that tells the tale of some innocent, young, all-American scamps, from the...
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2:38 PM
March 9, 2006
You may know him from such blog entries about Sundance-winning short films as Gowanus, Brooklyn. Now director Ryan Fleck has made Half Nelson, a feature-length adaptation of Gowanus, which debuted at Sundance 06, where ThinkFilm picked it up. Half Nelson...
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4:18 AM
January 25, 2006
From the Observer report on how publicists are the "real Sundancers": As crowds exited a packed screening of Wrestling with Angelsóa staid, unthrilling film about Tony Kushner which emblemizes the idea that to be truly successful these days, not only...
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9:01 AM
January 18, 2006
Wow, it sucks to be Manohla Dargis. Or to be at Sundance. The festival is apparently the same every year, but different. And since that means that mediocre films and deals often hog the spotlight, and actual, honest-to-goodness finds are...
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10:15 AM
September 29, 2005
Despite the ravages of war and the censorship imposed by local religious authorities, a lovable young scamp in a rubble-strewn town finds solace, even hope, in the movies. If only there was a kindly old projectionist to take the...
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11:34 AM
May 22, 2005
Fear and self-loathing in Cannes [guardian] A step up from when they the Guardian crew would just complain about the shortage of open bars, Mark Lawson looks for the big themes in Cannes. The result: 1) guilt, 2) loser fathers....
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9:18 AM
February 2, 2005
"'We've been given the mandate to compete on a more aggressive level,' says [Paramount Classics co-pres David] Dinerstein, who also helped orchestrate the reported $2 million purchase of Mad Hot Ballroom, a Slamdance documentary widely described as Spellbound meets Strictly...
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7:57 AM
January 24, 2005
As people were rushing away from her or avoiding her while they were caught up in a bidding war at Sundance for the Craig Brewer-directed, John Singleton-produced Hustle and Flow:"The adrenalin is flowing," David Dinerstein, co-chairman of Paramount Classics, tossed...
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9:11 AM
December 16, 2004
In a bit of tail-eating snake-ism, The Arts Project at The Center for The Study of The Public Domain at Duke sponsored a contest as part of this year's Full Frame Documentary Festival [got all that?] for the best 2-minute...
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3:38 AM
December 3, 2004
Apologies for the scarce posts lately; I've been busy with offline writing and real work. Still, I don't know how I missed this: The US Film Festival is now called the Sundance Film Festival?? I guess since they added two...
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11:26 AM
October 13, 2004
These are the first color photographs released of Les Arenes de Chaillot. They'll be running this weekend in Le Monde. Supposedly, the staff of La Mexicaine de Perforation are dressed like this for the screening of Mister Freedom and Sgt...
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8:53 AM
October 12, 2004
If greg.org were a magazine, this would be the big sidebar. But you can call it what it is: whoring for traffic. Here, for the first time in the indexable media, are the programmes--complete with my poor translations of their...
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8:30 AM
October 10, 2004
While the discovery of an underground cinema in the center of Paris has been widely covered, little or no attention has been paid to what the films actually played there. Les Arenes de Chaillot (The Chaillot Arenas) was created...
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10:30 AM
October 4, 2004
That's one suggested translation of "La Mexicaine de Perforation," the amorphous group of urban explorers who built and operated a subterranean cinema in the center of Paris until it was discovered last month. The group's spokesman, Lazar Kunsman, originally explained...
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11:37 AM
September 22, 2004
2046 barely screened at Cannes, after the director hand-carried the not-quite-finished print to the rebooked theatre. Now it's being released in the UK, and it turns out Wong has actually re-edited it since May. Read Howard Feinstein's interview with WKW...
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12:25 PM
September 18, 2004
My apologies for mistakenly calling the explorateurs urbains of La Mexicaine de Perforation cataphiles. In an interview on NPR, filmmaker Lazar Kunsman, the group's spokesMexicain, explained that cataphiles are "more like nerds," who just wander around underground without doing anything....
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10:50 AM
September 13, 2004
What's with all the film festivals this time of year (Venice, Telluride, Toronto, NY, American Film Renaissance)? If you haven't heard of that last one, [Their slogan: "Doing films the right way"] for heaven's sake don't tell anyone; they'll know...
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8:15 AM
Tony Scott's first report from Toronto really gives you a feel for the festival's sprawl and cinematic frenzy, where you feel like you're missing movies more than watching them. Meanwhile, he only mentions one film, and he mentions the hell...
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6:18 AM
September 11, 2004
The Guardian's Jon Henley talks with members of La Mexicaine de Perforation, the urban explorers group who built and operated a cinema in a 4,000-sf uncharted quarry 60 feet under the Place de Chaillot in Paris. They called the cinema...
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1:25 AM
September 8, 2004
Holy Moley, damn, wow, whoa, this is possibly the coolest thing I've ever heard: a full-scale modern movie theater was discovered in an uncharted underground amphitheater carved out of the catacombs of Paris. It's near Trocadero, the Palais de Tokyo,...
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12:44 PM
May 24, 2004
And Kiarostami said editing was irrelevant. The Observer's Andrew Anthony calls Michael Moore "arguably the most ideological and emotive editor since Sergei Eisenstein," about as high as praise can get for a maker of agitprop. He points to Farenheit 9/11's...
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9:51 AM
May 23, 2004
bwahahahaha. I feel the same way about Michael Moore's masterful PR march to the Palme d'Or as Patrick Lang, ex-Pentagon Middle East intelligence chief feels about how Cheney & co were utterly duped by the Iranian intelligence agency and their...
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7:51 AM
May 19, 2004
From J. Hoberman's halftime report from Cannes comes this description of Abbas Kiarostami's latest film: "[the] remarkably austere Five (after the number of shots) is a DV landscape study that might have been produced by a talented epigone of American...
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9:19 AM
March 30, 2004
In the last couple of weeks, I've decided to shoot a fourth short film, which may be part of the Souvenir Series, or may not. We'll see. It was not in the original outline of the series, and it's out...
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12:09 PM
I'm co-chairman of this gig tonight at MoMA, An Evening With Sofia Coppola. I was going to write my speech, but in the spirit of the director, I'm going totally improv. Then I'm going to kiss every ass I can....
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4:01 AM
March 29, 2004
I saw Captive, the debut feature from Gaston Biraben, at New Directors/New Films last night; it's a subtly powerful movie that gripped the sellout audience at MoMA Gramercy. Captive is a fictionalized telling of real events, a surreal, politically charged...
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7:17 AM
March 10, 2004
[via Gawker] Todd Levin gets all excited, then he gets all real about the program notes for this year's New York Underground Film Festival. He has provided funny-because-it's-true guide to interpreting the program and selecting your screenings wisely. "'...an ode...
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5:20 AM
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February 15, 2004
[via Gawker] Manhattan User's Guide has compiled a list of film festivals in New York. At last count, there are 28, including six at Lincoln Center and four at Anthology. Start dubbing those screener tapes....
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9:49 AM
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January 27, 2004
Between Jonathan Marlow's voluminous Park City dispatches and David's Berlinale preview, you can basically sound like you've been to both all three festivals and figured out what was worth seeing and tracking. Can't wait for Rotterdam to get the GreenCine...
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3:59 AM
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January 25, 2004
Awards were handed out last night at Sundance. Check out the list of winners at IndieWIRE. Or, check out IndieWIRE's profiles of the first-timers in the competition, including New Yorkers Morgan Spurlock, who won the directing award for his masochistic...
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9:26 AM
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January 21, 2004
With daily reports from the frontlines filling the Festival site, IndieWIRE, Movie City News, the Times, the trades, , Sundance needs weblogging about as much as Bush's march to war did. Naturally, that's not stopping anyone. If you still think...
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11:51 AM
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September 8, 2003
The National Post has a nice highlights reel, with reports from the field (and locker rooms, apparently) at the Toronto Film Festival. Some of it's like listening to cricket scores on the BBC, though; you can recognize the language as...
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2:40 AM
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September 4, 2003
[via GreenCine] IndieWIRE surveys 20 acquisition executives from indie and mini-major studios to see what gets them out of bed in the morning (and to see what gets you into bed with them). Great stuff....
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11:55 AM
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June 4, 2003
[via GreenCine] David points to a GreenCine article last year where a table of film festival directors review the history and future of the festival. Some started as propaganda (Venice, Cannes, Berlin), some as flukes founded by freaks, but...
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11:10 AM
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May 21, 2003
1. Kudos to the Guardian for enlisting every film monkey who can type to produce their extensive Cannes coverage. (Granted, Brits::Cote d'Azur, fish::barrel, and it's not exactly a hardship post, either.) 2. Or maybe it is. The Guardian crew seems...
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7:45 AM
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May 20, 2003
The beginning of the war will be secret, Jenny Holzer balsa postcard from Printed Matter Every evening at dusk during the Cannes Film Festival, the artist Jenny Holzer is projecting cinema-related quotes from actors and filmmakers onto the ugly...
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11:01 AM
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March 18, 2003
For the diehard greg.org fan, who's not related to me and/or not chased away by my recent forays into my perspective on current events which keep relating back to the themes of my first movie, otherwise I'd have just...
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5:50 AM
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February 3, 2003
From yesterday's NYTimes:Editors' Note, Sunday Styles The Age of Dissonance column last Sunday, about cozying up to celebrities, mentioned a report in The Daily News that guests at the Sundance film festival "had their shoes spattered" when the actor Tobey...
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2:07 AM
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January 29, 2003
First, rather than just say, "Called it!" (which I did, thank you), let me congratulate director Stewart Hendler and company (including DP John Ealer) for winning Sundance's Online Film Festival with their short, One. Second, third and fourth, check out...
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4:41 AM
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January 23, 2003
From Indiewire.com's excellent Sundance coverage comes the story of the screening of Open Hearts, by Danish director and Dogme groupie Susanne Bier:In the middle of this witty, winning Dogme 95-sanctioned melodrama about infidelity and mourning, the Park City projectionist...
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5:42 AM
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January 21, 2003
This beautiful, entertaining Sundace Online entry, Lots of Robots is, amazingly, the product of one guy, animator Andy Murdock. Read about it at Wired. I love it, and not just because he has a website all about the making-of....
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4:31 AM
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January 20, 2003
SCENE: A Park City Mill-about ELVIS MITCHELL scans the lobby, sees HOLLY HUNTER standing, quiet and alone. He says to himself, "What the [expletive deleted, Utah S.C. 1999-104.2.1] is this, The Piano? Why ain't that broad talking?", and determines to...
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9:40 AM
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January 17, 2003
Breakbeat meets media hacking in Stephen Marshall's S-11, which was made for GNN, Guerilla News Network. Where Norman Cowie's Scenes from an endless war (which screened last month before Souvenir (November 2001)) used FoxNews sampling to underline media complicity, Marshall's...
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1:46 AM
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September 29, 2002
According to this wire report, the US State Department has refused to process a visa for the director Abbas Kiarostami, the godfather of Iranian cinema and one of the most highly acclaimed filmmakers in the world. His latest work, Ten,...
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10:49 AM
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September 8, 2002
Of course, I don't mean the whole world; just all New Yorkers. The terrorists' message would have gotten an auto-reply saying, "Sorry, you missed us. We're all in Toronto, eh?" Alas, it was not to be. This year, however, everyone...
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8:33 AM
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September 4, 2002
The guys at Cyan Pictures are back from their location in Kentucky and have some hi-larious and endearing accounts of the shoot. Check it out, and compare it to the folies we had in France during the shooting of Souvenir....
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1:53 AM
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July 27, 2002
Submitted to Slamdance. We're traveling to UT and AZ for the weekend, location scouting for the Sundance/Slamdance season. Yeah, that's it, location scouting....
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6:35 AM
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July 12, 2002
Poking around Slamdance's website to get my submission stuff ready. It's HI-larious, obviously made by someone who pokes around dry film festival websites for a living. That led me to Bitter Films, where Don Hertzfeldt flogs and writes about his...
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2:12 AM
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June 24, 2002
Festivals Update: Submitted Souvenir November 2001 to the Evora International Short Film Festival, held in November in vora, Portugal. On hearing this, a Portuguese-Ohioan friend of mine praised the town effusively. (He just got back from a trip to the...
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7:24 AM
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June 4, 2002
I submitted applications Monday for three festivals, and almost submitted to a fourth, when I belatedly realized I'd already sent them a tape two+ weeks ago. Festivals submitted today: Tehran (Iran) International Short Film Festival, the Winterthur (Switzerland) International Short...
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1:37 AM
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May 21, 2002
While surfing for Cannes reports, I found this great Indiewire interview with Abbas Kiarostami from the 2001 Double Take Documentary Film Festival, timed to the premiere of ABC Africa, his doc about AIDS in, well, Africa. Some highlights: The film...
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10:04 AM
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May 15, 2002
Went to an IFP24 Market orientation meeting tonight. This doesn't mean Souvenir's been selected for the market yet; it was a Q&A session for filmmakers hoping to participate in the Market. Here are the bullet points, primarily as they relate...
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11:30 AM
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May 9, 2002
Today: Picked up my bulk order of 20-minute VHS tapes Started duping screening copies of the movie (eight and counting, so far) Prepped entry packets for the Int'l Short Film Festival Berlin, the AFI Fest in LA, and the Mill...
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2:46 AM
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April 24, 2002
Sure enough. Here is the list of short films selected for Cannes. Two US films, including one by Bruce Terris, who was Pete Jones' 1st Assistant Director on Stolen Summer/Project Greenlight. Watching Terris' constant pushing/complaining about the importance of shot...
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12:58 PM
