March 10, 2004

Tremble's Guide to the NY Underground Film Festival

[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 to lights and color' 'Even my closest friends and family will have second thoughts about attending this film.'" and "'Vice Magazine presents:...' Be prepared to laugh the meanest, most self-righteous laughs possible for about six minutes, and then hate yourself...
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Posted by greg allen at 05:20 PM | Comments (0)

February 15, 2004

New York Film Festival(s)

[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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Posted by greg allen at 09:49 AM | Comments (0)

January 27, 2004

GreenCine to Film Festivals: Bring It On!

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 treatment....
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Posted by greg allen at 03:59 PM | Comments (0)

January 25, 2004

Sundance Winners at IndieWIRE and beyond

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 documentary, Super Size Me! and Josh Marston, whose Maria Full of Grace won the audience award for dramatic feature. Gowanus, Brooklyn, co-winner of the short film competition, is also by a New Yorker and Sundance vet, Ryan Fleck, who lives...
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Posted by greg allen at 09:26 AM | Comments (0)

January 21, 2004

TMI, or Overblogging Sundance

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 you should've gone, check out reports from the standby lines, bathroom lines, and coke lines as well: Weblogs, Inc. [portally]; Eric Snider [Utah-funny]; Dan Webster [Pf'ingH?]; Alastik [lots of waiting]; Peter Vonder Haar [lots of pics so far]; I'll keep...
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Posted by greg allen at 11:51 PM | Comments (0)

September 08, 2003

Toronto Film Festival: the SportsCenter Version

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 English, but you can't understand WTF it means. One thing I do understand, though is the mention of met-on-the-set couple, Christina Ricci and Adam Goldberg, who are premiering their film I Love Your Work, which was co-produced by Josh &...
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Posted by greg allen at 02:40 PM | Comments (0)

September 04, 2003

IndieWIRE, who loves ya, baby

[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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Posted by greg allen at 11:55 AM | Comments (0)

June 04, 2003

Film Festival Directors On Film Festivals and Directors

[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 festivals are constantly balancing the art and commercialism, pure love of cinema with selling out. How can festivals avoid falling into the trap of becoming just another stop along way for the Hollywood press junket? "Cultivate Internet critics," insisted [Toronto...
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Posted by greg allen at 11:10 PM | Comments (0)

May 21, 2003

The Guardian's Cannes-imatrix Freakout

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 to be suffering from serious alcohol-free delusion. The evidence is in the writing: Trapped in the (presumably dry) media lounge, Matt Keating is forced to piece a story together using only quotes from his partying fellow journos. The two main...
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Posted by greg allen at 07:45 PM | Comments (0)

May 20, 2003

Cannes' Cinema Quote of the Day, from Jenny Holzer

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 wall of the Palais des Festivals. You can follow along on the Festival's pretty info-packed official site. Holzer's Please Change Beliefs was the first great piece of web-based art, produced in collaboration with my friends at äda'web. There's tons of...
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Posted by greg allen at 11:01 PM | Comments (0)

March 18, 2003

Cannes Not, Cannes II

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 started a 9/11 blog and turned it into a warblog and... ahem: I've been writing the press kit for Souvenir (January 2003), my second short, which has been holding in a sort of DV-to-film transfer limbo. Also, I started dubbing...
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Posted by greg allen at 05:50 PM | Comments (0)

February 03, 2003

So Then Who Blew (Whom) At Sundance?

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 Maguire was taken ill. But the day the Times column appeared, The News quoted the actor's publicist as saying that although Mr. Maguire doubled over at one point, it was not he who vomited."...
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Posted by greg allen at 02:07 PM | Comments (0)

January 29, 2003

Strictly (Sundance) Business

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 the following roundups of Sundance deal-making and film performance. The takeaway (sorry, Holly Hunter): Wo unto those who maketh their films for buzz, for verily, they have their reward. Mary Glucksman takes a thorough and incisive look at indie film...
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Posted by greg allen at 04:41 PM | Comments (0)

January 23, 2003

Quick Sundance Notes

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 accidentally screened the film in the wrong order: after the mistake was determined, the audience voted passionately to continue watching and piece together the narrative in their heads. One happy viewer was rumored to comment, "It's just like watching Memento."...
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Posted by greg allen at 05:42 PM | Comments (0)

January 21, 2003

Now Go Vote For This One

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. Murdock's comments on the still above: This is the first shot I created fof LOR. I had just purchased my new machine for home and I wanted to take it for a spin. I looked out window into the garden...
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Posted by greg allen at 04:31 PM | Comments (0)

January 20, 2003

The Broad from The Piano Starts Talking

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 do something about it. The result is in today's NY Times: the actress gives Elvis her thoughtful views on indie film marketing, audiences' different reactions to Sundance and Cannes, and translating fleeting Sundance buzz into actual box office success. "On...
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Posted by greg allen at 09:40 AM | Comments (0)

January 17, 2003

Sundance Online: Vote For My Favorites

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 S-11 is more powerfully and closely edited for musical and rhythmic effect, which enhances its criticism of the current administration's entire approach to the terrorist threat. From the Flash Filosopher, Billy Blob comes Bumble Being, the bee version of "the...
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Posted by greg allen at 01:46 PM | Comments (0)

September 29, 2002

State Department denies visa to Abbas Kiarostami to visit NY Film Festival

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, has its US premier tonight at the NY Film Festival. In the NY Times review, A.O. Scott called it "a work of inspired simplicity." Check the movie index for more discussions of Kiarostami, his previous films, and his perspective on...
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Posted by greg allen at 10:49 PM | Comments (0)

September 08, 2002

If only we'd ALL been at the Toronto Film Festival LAST year...

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 DOES seem to be in Toronto. And they're all making short films dealing with September 11th. Just look at the list of directors participating in 11'09"01, a collection of 11 shorts put together by a French director, Alain Brigand: Ken...
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Posted by greg allen at 08:33 PM | Comments (0)

September 04, 2002

On Film Festivals

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. Ahh, the memories. Cyan & Co. are editing for the 9/27 Sundance submission deadline. I'll be taking Diet Coke to their editing suite in the middle of the night. This article has an archetypical Canadian aura, basically about how the...
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Posted by greg allen at 01:53 PM | Comments (0)

July 27, 2002

Submitted to Slamdance. We're traveling

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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Posted by greg allen at 06:35 PM | Comments (0)

July 12, 2002

Poking around Slamdance's website to

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 animated shorts and celebrates "107 awards, four Grand Prizes, and a rather spooky cult following." There's a production journal, which looks good, if a little random. (Pot, Kettle. Kettle, Pot. I know.) Gotta keep the random quotient high to please...
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Posted by greg allen at 02:12 AM | Comments (0)

June 24, 2002

Festivals Update: Submitted Souvenir November

Festivals Update: Submitted Souvenir November 2001 to the Evora International Short Film Festival, held in November in Évora, Portugal. On hearing this, a Portuguese-Ohioan friend of mine praised the town effusively. (He just got back from a trip to the other homeland last week, so I was predisposed to send something to Portugal anyway.) NYC Flava: An easy dozen real estate underlings are milling around outside the window right now, including a couple of blondes with Lily Pulitzer dresses (aren't...
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Posted by greg allen at 07:24 PM | Comments (0)

June 04, 2002

I submitted applications Monday for

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 Film Festival, and the San Diego Film Festival. The one I almost resubmitted was Interfilm Berlin, probably because I had Berlin on the brain today. (Olafur, the artist I mentioned in the previous post, lives in Berlin, and I just...
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Posted by greg allen at 01:37 AM | Comments (0)

May 21, 2002

While surfing for Cannes reports,

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 was made during "location scouting," when he was still deciding whether to accept the UN's invitation to make a documentary. "But when I actually started using [the digital cameras] -- and when I realized its possibilities and what I could...
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Posted by greg allen at 10:04 AM | Comments (0)

May 15, 2002

Went to an IFP24 Market

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 to Souvenir: In the section Souvenir's entered, they'll select 15 shorts from probably 2-300 submitted. The major prospects for a short film are pretty clear, and the Market is useful for at least the first two (in order of priority...
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Posted by greg allen at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)

May 09, 2002

Today: Picked up my bulk

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 Valley Film Festival in the Bay Area. All these festivals are in Oct./Nov., after the NY Film Festival, the ideal/dream festival for Souvenir (November 2001). Also, because I've been remiss in my Steven Soderbergh references lately, I finally found out...
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Posted by greg allen at 02:46 PM | Comments (0)