6.March.2012: Indiewire reports that Cinema Guild has picked up the rights for Neighboring Sounds, the highly touted debut film by former film critic Kleber Mendonça Filho which won the FIPRESCI award at last month’s International Film Festival Rotterdam.
Less than a year after releasing his album Crazy Clown Time, David Lynch doubles back towards the fine arts with a show of paintings and sculpture at New York’s Tilton Gallery opening tonight. From the Huffington Post: “The works combine Francis Bacon’s distorted forms with Man Ray’s mystical sensuality and Joan Miro’s youthful folly. Nursery rhymes like ‘All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth’ are juxtaposed with horrific doodles that look like they came from a demonic coloring book.”
Variety reports that 1940s Hollywood actress Martha Stewart died on February 25 at the age of 89. Memorable as the hat-check girl who recounts the plot of a novel for Humphrey Bogart’s screenwriter in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place, Stewart also played the best friend of Joan Crawford’s eponymous heroine in Otto Preminger’s Daisy Kenyon. Filmmaker‘s Scott Macaulay reports the sad news that production designer David Doernberg died on Friday after battling cancer. Doernberg worked as a production on designer on Kelly Reichardt’s River of Grass and Meek’s Cutoff, as well as several other notable indie titles including Harmony Korine’s batty Gummo. “Gummo, as you might expect, was a crazy production,” Macaulay writes, “and because we were shooting in so many real people’s homes, the production design job required not only a creative and keen eye for the details that would fit into Harmony’s worldview but an understanding of those people, the lives they lived, diplomacy and an ability to improvise. Dave brought these qualities to all his work, and he will be missed in our independent film community as well as by his many friends and family.”
The True/False Film Festival wrapped in Columbia, Missouri, on Sunday, and reports from the documentary showcase are coming over the wires. First up, Peter Knegt offers up six reasons why True/False is an exemplary small festival for Indiewire. At the Press Play blog, Christianne Benedict reports on the actual films in three parts (here, here, and here) as well as taking detours to interview movie poster designer Erik Buckham and give props to participating musicians playing before the films. In his first post on the festival for Filmmaker, Vadim Rizov focuses on Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Abedenland (“a staggeringly well-controlled…nighttime excursion…across the sick European continent”), Victor Kossakovsky’s 1993 film The Belovs (“the kind of hour it’s worth flying half a day for…[like] The Turin Horse as a comedy”), and Xun “Fish” Yu’s portrait of Chinese “grand gentrification,” The Vanishing Spring Light (“master-shot rigor done the right way”). Hundreds of documentaries are currently streaming on Fandor, including several other recent pictures of social unrest in China.
