Category: film festivals

[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 for the remaining 54 minutes.”

[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.

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.

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 in Williamsburg. It’s the start of something big (ie., it was produced to raise money for the feature version, a direct contradiction of Filmmaker‘s rules of great short-making. The moral: If there is a rule, think about breaking it.
Bonus: a Film Threat interview with Spurlock, who conceived and made Super Size Me in less time than it takes at the drive-through window. My version of a doc about McDonald’s would be a road trip, a global search for unconventional pies.

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 adding them as they cross my path [thanks? GreenCine, Gawker, and email]
Filmmaker Magazine’s weblog, to their great credit, actually includes posts from the filmworld beyond the steamed-up windows of Park City.

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 & Co at Cyan Pictures. Josh and ILYW are getting some good buzz and press; and they’re posting festival updates on their production company weblog, cyanpictures.com.
Also, from BoingBoing, comes a Festival groupblog from the FilmNerds. Public screenings (and an enthusiastic, thoughtful audience base) are one of Toronto’s greatest strengths, and these four guys apparently have over six years of festival experience…between them. Hmm. If you’re looking for reviews with a sweeping historical context, I suggest not running those numbers. These are fresh, unjaded–and Canadian–perspectives. You’ve been warned.

[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.

[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 FF head Piers] Handling. “They are young, they are hip, they are different, they have a very different sensibility. And they are trying to discover young talent, new talent… they are not as fixated on Julia Roberts.”

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 themes of Fiachra Gibbons’ Cannes diary are old stories of old British actors’ penchant for bluedarting (hint: there’s a Badass Buddy icon for it.) and complaints about being barred from the bar at the Matrix Reloaded party.

The result? A crazytalk-filled, sobriety-induced revenge piece, “Taliban Thinking”, where he draws a bizarrely Stryker/Wolfowitzian conclusion about Animatrix. “As with the Terminator, which uses the same thin philosophical veil of man versus machine, the message is simple. If the rebellious robots had been stamped out straight away, Zion would now be safe. [italics added]

Then, Gibbons’ colleague, Andrew Pulver, also slams Animatrix but for another, wrong-end-of-the-telescope reason. “Attempting to dress up the fictional man/machine conflicts with images from contemporary political protest (The Million Machine March and the like) was not a good idea. African-Americans, Chinese democracy activists, liberal demonstrators – the implication is that they will enslave us all. [Italics=kooky theory #2]”
Am I high? Just check out Fiachra’s last report from France. Garcon, get these people a drink toute de suite.

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 a bunch of screener tapes, because there’s a world of film festivals out there waiting for a reflective look at ironing.

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.”

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 and distributor performance in 2002 in Filmmaker Magazine. Last year, only eight festival-bought independent films grossed more than $1 million. (The population of acquisition execs who passed on the non-festival My Big Fat Greek Wedding is enough to fill Park City. In fact, it just did…)

Glucksman picks apart seven 2002 Sundance deals to uncover the winners and losers, finding three-time Sundance vet Miguel Arteta’s The Good Girl to be the win-win deal of the year for all involved. Interestingly, Gary “win-win” Winnick’s Tadpole results in sweet deals for everyone but Miramax, who bought the film in a classic Sundance frenzy for $5 million (it only made $2.8 at the box office). [Harvey, if you’re overpayin’, I’m playin’. Give me a call.]
Filmmaker also has a handy Sundance Box Office 2002 Chart, which you can cut out and put next to your editing station, to remind you of the financial folly you’re undertaking.
In the Voice, Anthony Kaufman casts a (now understandably) sober eye at this year’s deals, calling bulls**t on both the supposed value of festival buzz and the overheated acquisitions it spawns. Or, in the words of Sony Pictures Classics prexy Michael Barker, “We’ve been burned before by the Sundance frenzy. In fact, we’ve had more success with films that we’ve revisited after the festival outside the context of sleep deprivation. And that’s what we’re going to do in the coming weeks.”

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.” [One hopeful filmmaker was rumored to comment, “Then offer me what you should’ve paid Chris Nolan, dude.”]

Buffalo on the Montana Plains, Albert Bierstadt
from the Collection of Ted Turner image:tfaoi.com
Just two things about emerging filmmaker Richard Linklater’s short film, Live from Shiva’s Dancefloor, about that megalomaniacal kook from that double-decker tour bus movie: If you want to put buffalo on Ground Zero, check with that far more impressive megalomaniac, Ted Turner; he’s got the biggest herd of in the world.

According to the National Bison Association, you’d probably max out at a rather sparse 2.2 head/acre, or 35 buffalo total, on the 16-acre WTC site. Not quite the inspiring herds we’ve been promised. Not that returning land to the wild is too far-fetched: the Buffalo Commons concept has been floating around the Great Plains since at least 1987.
In any case, if you’re gonna go there, try Michael Ableman’s farm idea, which he floated last month in the NY Times
Ted Turner bonus quote: “Just because you don’t hear him doesn’t mean he isn’t screaming,” says author Richard Hack.

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 butterfly effect.” Blob also did last year’s Sundance-ruling Karma Ghost. (If you haven’t changed your life yet, see it before it’s too late.) It’s stylin’ and simple, even if it doesn’t have quite the impact (so to speak) of KG, but the Flash bio that accompanies it is hi-larious.

One, directed by Stewart Hendler (image: phantompictures.com)
Best for last: Stewart Hendler‘s film, One, is a stunningly beautiful short about the painful last moments of a young couple’s relationship. The hauntingly lit cinematography and fragmented, melancholy-tinged memories are reminiscent of the flashback scenes DP John Toll did in Terrence Malick’s Thin Red Line, and I think we all know how things turned out for that guy… One was produced by Phantom Pictures; this was their first project. DP John Ealer, however, is a veteran by comparison. Watch this one full-screen.

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 DV filmmaking. Check Camworld’s discussion of the government’s policy’s potential blowback for Americans traveling abroad.