Editor Scott Macaulay introduces the summer issue of Filmmaker featuring this year’s edition of what’s become the magazine’s flagship enterprise, “25 New Faces of Independent Film.” And without further ado, the profiles in alphabetical order:
- :: kogonada (great video essays).
- Ana Lily Amirpour (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night).
- Frances Bodomo (Boneshaker).
- Janicza Bravo (Gregory Go Boom).
- Bernardo Britto (Yearbook).
- Scott Cummings (Buffalo Juggalos).
- Jessica Dimmock and Christopher LaMarca (Brick).
- Zeek Earl and Chris Caldwell (Prospect).
- Joe Callander (Life After Death).
- Dustin Guy Defa (Person to Person).
- Robert Eggers (The Tell-Tale Heart).
- Charlotte Glynn (Rachel Is).
- Lily Henderson (About a Mountain).
- Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn (L for Leisure).
- Jodie Mack (Dusty Stacks of Mom: The Poster Project).
- Darius Clark Monroe (Evolution of a Criminal).
- Jamey Phillips (a forthcoming documentary on Bill Cosby).
- Sean Porter (cinematographer, Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter).
- Nicole Riegel (screenwriter, Dogfight).
- Annie Silverstein (Skunk).
- Matt Sobel (Take Me to the River, forthcoming).
- Gina Telaroli (Traveling Light).
- Rich Vreeland (composer, It Follows).
- Josef Wladyka and Alan Blanco (Manos Sucias).
MORE READING
David Bordwell suggests that studying Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom (2012) “can show us some interesting things about authorship in today’s film culture.”
Jonathan Rosenbaum‘s posted a longish piece that originally ran in the May-June 1994 issue of Film Comment: “The Problem with Poetry: Leos Carax.”
Luke McKernan recently watch Richard Linklater‘s Before trilogy and found himself intrigued by “the connection to the works of James Joyce. The first film, Before Sunrise (1994), takes place on June 16th (the date is specifically referenced in the film), which is the day on which Joyce’s novel Ulysses is set (‘Bloomsday’).” Further connections: The legendary Parisian bookstore Shakespeare and Company, Joyce’s short story “The Dead” by way of Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy and more. All in all, the trilogy “is more subtly and rewardingly Joycean than any literal transcription of his work to the screen.”
With Anton Corbijn’s A Most Wanted Man opening on Friday, John le Carré, writing for the New York Times, remembers the late Philip Seymour Hoffman: “Philip took vivid stock of everything, all the time. It was painful and exhausting work, and probably in the end his undoing. The world was too bright for him to handle.”
Woody Allen’s 1971 mockumentary Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story took on Richard Nixon
For Criterion, Glenn Kenny profiles Channing Pollock, the magician and actor who died in 2006 and who played the title role in Georges Franju’s Judex (1963), “not so much a proto-Batman as a shadowy quasi-hero with a lot of fancy equipment who’s almost never around to save the day.”
And the first review of Glenn Kenny’s new book, Robert De Niro: Anatomy of an Actor, out next week, comes from Chuck Bowen at the House Next Door: “Kenny brings De Niro down to earth as a working artist, which serves to somewhat ironically reawaken your awe for the actor and the profound emotional nakedness that he once achieved reliably in one performance after another. Reading this, one wonders, not why De Niro drifted toward less immersive a-job’s-a-job roles, but how he plumbed himself as deeply as long as he did.”
With Eyes Wide Shut turning 15, Vanity Fair‘s running a generous excerpt from Amy Nicholson‘s book from the same series, Tom Cruise: Anatomy of an Actor.
Michael Mann’s The Insider is also 15 this year and, at RogerEbert.com, Scout Tafoya draws parallels to Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo (1959).
Split Screen Korea: Shin Sang-Ok and Postwar Cinema “exemplifies a kind of necessary scholarly monograph that will never go out of style,” writes Clayton Dillard back at the House Next Door. “Instead of seeking to construct yet another fashionable revisionist history, Steven Chung writes fluidly and directly, establishing ‘film and nation’ as the basic binary from which his research emanates.”
“If a psychedelic, sado-masochistic, decomposed narrative of feminist self-actualisation against a macho hegemony, improvised around mid-20th-century atonal music compositional techniques, sounds a little dry to you, then you’d be fully justified in giving Eden and After (L’éden et après [1970]) a miss,” writes Vadim Kosmos for Electric Sheep. “But you’d be wrong.” For more on Alain Robbe-Grillet, and in particular, L’Immortelle (1963), Trans-Europ-Express (1967), see Philip French in this week’s Observer.
Writing for Artforum, Howard Hampton riffs on an odd pairing, John Wayne in Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948) and Lee Marvin in John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967).
With Lav Diaz‘s Norte, the End of History now playing in the UK (and that entry’s been updated, by the way), the BFI presents an annotated list of “10 great really long films.” And another list: “The 10 best modern directors from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.”
The latest issue of Interiors maps a room in Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2001). Saturday was Chantal Akerman Day at DC’s. Carson Lund‘s posted another round of “Screening Notes.” And the writers at the Quietus write up their favorite dance scenes.
INTERVIEWS
Closed Curtain, the second film Jafar Panahi’s made since being slapped with a 20-year ban on filmmaking by Iranian authorities, this one in collaboration with Kambuzia Partovi, sees its last two days at New York’s Film Forum today and tomorrow. But it’s also playing in Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego and opens in four more cities on Friday.
James Kang has been gathering reviews at Critics Round Up (current score: 83/100) and here’s the thing. Even though that ban extends to giving interviews, Panahi’s been doing just that. At Filmmaker, Vadim Rizov first writes about the film (“I tried to stay bloodless and focused on the art, to the extent that it can be divorced from the circumstances surrounding it, and I failed”) before presenting his recent conversation. Naturally, he asks if there’s any news regarding his being allowed to make films legally again. “No, unfortunately nothing new.” Jamsheed Akrami talks with Panahi, too, for the Daily Beast. And subscribers to the Wall Street Journal can read Tobias Grey‘s interview as well.
Ryan Lattanzio introduces an interview at EatDrinkFilms: “Near-centenarian Norman Lloyd’s career has spanned over eight decades in film, television and theater. He has worked with the likes of Alfred Hitchcock—for whom he produced and directed episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents—Elia Kazan, Joseph Cotton, Jean Renoir, Charles Chaplin and, perhaps most notably of all, Orson Welles.”
There’s a bit of overlap between these next two. In 1987, The Last Emperor won nine Oscars. Now director Bernardo Bertolucci has a newish film out, Me and You, and at Vulture, Bilge Ebiri talks with him about being “back in the world”—as well as about past triumphs and trials.
For Vice, Oscar Rickett talks with independent British producer Jeremy Thomas, who not only produced The Last Emperor but has also worked with Nicolas Roeg, Terry Gilliam, Jim Jarmusch, David Cronenberg, Takeshi Kitano, Jonathan Glazer and Nagisa Oshima, among others. He’s currently working on Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of High-Rise: “I think J.G. Ballard is one of our greatest writers of recent history. A lot of his books are still ripe for adaptation.”
At Thompson on Hollywood, Susan Wloszczna asks Peter Biskind how he reacted to the anger expressed by his subjects—Robert Altman, Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola among them—when his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘N Roll Generation Saved Hollywood was published in 1998. “It was very upsetting for me…. I’ve said this a million times, but I might as well say it once more: I wrote about their personal lives because this was an era of personal filmmaking within the studio system.”
AND… ACTION!
“The man who reinvented the American action movie chuckles. ‘Ah,’ he says, ‘The Driver. You can’t outlive anything any more…'” So begins John Patterson‘s interview with Walter Hill for the Guardian. “His first six movies, from Hard Times in 1975 to 48 Hrs in 1982, pull a whole lot of conventions inside out, and offer a concentrated, high-octane dose of bracingly violent action-poetry, one after another; a glorious run for any young filmmaker. Hill is also the unofficial conservator of the never quite moribund western genre (who else you gonna call to direct the pilot episode of Deadwood?), perhaps because he considers all his movies to be westerns at heart.”
Trailer for Charlie McDowell’s The One I Love
Aaron Aradillas has launched a new blog and writes in his first entry: “During the summer of 1994, two movies signaled a shift in what audiences wanted in a hero: Jan de Bont’s booby-trapped hijack thriller Speed squared off against James Cameron’s over-the-top spy thriller True Lies for maximum action potency. True Lies was the immediate financial winner, but Speed was the movie with the lasting cultural impact, permanently altering what we look for in leading-man heroism.”
Cameron’s The Terminator turns 30 this year and, at EW, Joe McGovern presents an oral history.
IN OTHER NEWS
“The world premiere of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice will screen as the Centerpiece of the upcoming 52nd New York Film Festival,” announces the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Brian Brooks. Says NYFF director Kent Jones of PTA’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel featuring Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson and Benicio Del Toro: “Inherent Vice is a journey through the past, bringing the texture of the early ’70s SoCal drug culture back to full-blown life. It’s a wildly funny, deeply soulful, richly detailed, and altogether stunning movie.”
And, after it opens Venice, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman will close NYFF 2014.
Venice itself has announced that will receive Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement during its 71st edition (August 27 through September 6).
“Is there a Criterion edition of Boyhood coming in the future?” asks Marco Cerritos at Hypable. Richard Linklater: “Yeah, we’ve got a ton of behind the scenes stuff.”
“Morten Tyldum’s Alan Turing drama The Imitation Game, with Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley, will open the 58th BFI London Film Festival on October 8th,” reports Variety‘s Nick Vivarelli.
The Sarajevo Film Festival has announced the lineup for its 20th edition (August 15 through 23).
At Indiewire, Eric Eidelstein has the list of the award-winners at Outfest.
GOINGS ON
New York. In the Times, Dave Itzkoff gets Museum of the Moving Image curators Barbara Miller and David Schwartz talking about some of the films featured in What’s Up, Doc? The Animation Art of Chuck Jones and about “Jones’s most wascally work.” Through January 19.
Chicago. As a tribute to the late Robert Gardner, the Nightingale will be screening a 16mm print of Dead Birds (1964) for free this evening. Via Ben Sachs in the Reader.
Cambridge. The Harvard Film Archive will be screening The Complete Fritz Lang through September 1.
London. Yvonne Rainer: Dance Works is on view at Raven Row through August 10.
IN THE WORKS
“Mark Romanek is in negotiations to helm Warner Bros.’ Overlook Hotel, a prequel to the Stanley Kubrick classic The Shining,” reports Variety‘s Justin Kroll.
Christopher Borrelli‘s had a good long chat with Joe Swanberg for the Chicago Tribune and notes in passing that in April, “he shot Digging for Fire, his largest film yet, with an Altman-esque sprawl of It-actors and indie regulars: [Jake] Johnson, [Anna] Kendrick, Orlando Bloom, Mike Birbiglia, Brie Larson, Sam Elliott, Sam Rockwell, Jenny Slate, Rosemarie DeWitt.”
For the New York Times, Cara Buckley talks with Amy Schumer about Trainwreck, which she’s written and stars in, “now shooting on the streets of New York.” Directed by Judd Apatow, the comedy also features Tilda Swinton, Bill Hader and Daniel Radcliffe.
Apatow, by the way, has written an episode for the forthcoming season of The Simpsons and, as the BBC reports, special guest voices in various episodes include Jane Fonda, Willem Dafoe, Nick Offerman and Sarah Silverman.
OBITS
“Panna Rittikrai, Thailand’s leading martial arts stuntman, choreographer and film director, died Sunday, age 53,” reports Patrick Frater for Variety. “His gritty style, which made little use of wire work and visual effects, appealed to hard core action fans and helped put Thailand on the map as a modern source of authentic martial arts and action pictures.” At Twitch, James Marsh adds: “Ritthikrai is probably best known for his work with action star Tony Jaa in films such as the Ong-Bak and Tom Yum Goong series, but he also directed a number of features including The Bodyguard and the fantastic olympian-actioner Born to Fight.” For more—much more—turn to Wise Kwai.
Outstanding Collaborative Performance: The Fly (1986) from Press Play Video Blog.
“Álex Angulo, star of films such as The Day of the Beast, Live Flesh, and Pan’s Labyrinth, has died in a traffic accident in his native Spain,” reports Shelagh M. Rowan-Legg at Twitch. “Likely best known to film audiences through his work with Álex de la Iglesia, this is a tremendous loss for Spanish cinema.”
“Writer/producer/director John Fasano, best known for his work in the horror genre, died in his sleep Saturday night at the age of 52,” reports Deadline. “Fasano was nominated for a Writers Guild Award in 1996 for writing the teleplay for The Hunchback for TNT. He also had a hand in more than 40 other film and TV projects, including writing the hit Tom Selleck TV movie Stone Cold, Iraq war TV docudramas Saving Jessica Lynch and The Hunt for Saddam, and films including Alien 3, Meggido: The Omega Code 2, Darkness Falls and Another 48 Hours.”
“Ace director Sasikumar, referred to as the first ‘hitmaker’ of the Malayalam film industry, passed away Thursday,” reports India Today. He was 86 and had made 141 films.
“Actress Skye McCole Bartusiak, who portrayed Mel Gibson’s young daughter in the 2000 film The Patriot, died in her Houston home,” reports the AP. She was only 21 and “made her film debut in the The Cider House Rules in 1999 and starred with Michael Douglas in Don’t Say a Word in 2001. Her most recent move was Sick Boy in 2012.”
ENDNOTES
