Search results matching tag 'Festivals'

Film Programming: A New Wilderness for Former Film Critics.

Anonymous — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:35:00 GMT

Only two days removed from the announcement that Newsweek's David Ansen would be taking over as the artistic director of the Los Angeles Film Festival, the L.A. Weekly's chief film critic Scott Foundas has taken the Associate Program Director gig at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, where he had previously served as part of the New York Film Festival's selection committee. Whether or not Foundas' position at the Weekly will actually be filled remains to be seen and all of this comes a week after Variety critic Robert Koehler completed his first turn as a programmer at Los Angeles' AFI Fest, which has been generally considered to be a success. (And whether this was on the mind of Foundas when he wrote a glowing cover story about Koehler's transition to programming the AFI Fest is equally questionable.) As Sarasota Film Festival director of programming Tom Hall aptly put it...

TCM, now a film festival.

Anonymous — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:36:00 GMT

There are over 700 film festivals worldwide, but only a few are devoted entirely to showing old movies -- which is odd, considering that these days, it's just as hard to see most older films in a theater as it is to see any of the new festival darlings. Those that do exist tend towards the obscure and specialized. MoMA's annual "To Save and Project" series (which is now in progress) alternates between the well-known (say, a new print of Cassavetes' "A Woman Under The Influence") and movies whose reputation is so specialized you basically have to attend on faith (say, 1964's "The Changing Village," from Ceylon). Arlington, VA's Slapsticon resurrects silent comedy; Bologna's Cinema Ritrovato digs up new prints of old films for your hardcore type who's ready for a marathon of long-thought-lost rarities and pre-code Capra. Also, you have to fly to Italy. Most of the major festivals...

"Metropolis," as it was meant to be seen! (For real, this time.)

Anonymous — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:42:00 GMT

Few movies are as incomplete yet overwhelmingly influential as Fritz Lang's 1927 "Metropolis." Any movie you've seen with enormous, gigantic architecture set in an ominous future or a mythical past -- "Brazil," "The Hudsucker Proxy," "The Fifth Element," even this year's "The International" -- stole some of its moves from Lang's skyscrapers and underground dens. Brutally cut upon release and restored and re-released an impossible amount of times since, "Metropolis" is finally whole again. A complete 16mm copy was discovered at Argentina's Museo del Cine last year, and the complete restoration will premiere February 10 at next year's Berlin International Film Festival. There's a condensed version of how the print was found here, though a better rendition, from September 2008's Sight & Sound, is sadly not online. Basically, it'd been sitting, forgotten, in the archives until museum director Paula Félix-Didier's ex-husband remembered hearing about how a horribly degraded, two-hour plus...

The academics are running the asylum.

Anonymous — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:12:38 GMT

On her way out at Spout, Karina Longworth noted a few days ago that the film blogosphere can feel like "hundreds of traffic-chasers, who are essentially blaring the same thing, at the same time, all day long." She doesn't like it one bit. And such was the attitude Focus Features CEO/Ang Lee's screenwriter James Schamus brought to his keynote speech at the London Film Festival. Noting he preferred to skip the usual topics of "the challenges of our digital future, new distribution models, the threat of piracy, etc. etc.," Schamus proceeded to deliver a solid hour of political deconstructionist theory about his wife, steeped in Derrida, entitled "My Wife is a Terrorist: Lessons in Storytelling from the Department of Homeland Security." This is a pretty outré thing to do at a film festival, where hushed vagaries on cross-platforming and (yes!) Our Digital Future are the order of the day. It's...

What's the matta with "Schmatta"?

Anonymous — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 19:40:00 GMT

Marc Levin is still finding pins under the floorboards of his loft in New York's Garment District. He ended up digging far deeper to find the hook for his latest doc about the economic crisis -- "Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags," a startlingly prescient history of the clothing industry from 7th Avenue to Bangladesh which airs on HBO on October 19th, having made its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September. Like a lot of American industries, the "schmatta" (Yiddish for "rags") business was once booming, but has diminished in the face of globalization, leading to the stunning statistic presented by Levin that now only five percent of all American clothing is produced domestically. As his documentary puts it, where the clothing business goes, so goes the economy. A year ago, Levin found himself at a Marc Jacobs show after hearing the news of Lehman Brothers' collapse....

Pedro Almodóvar holds bilingual court.

Anonymous — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 03:23:22 GMT

The latest film from Pedro Almodóvar, "Broken Embraces," closes the New York Film Festival after coasting in on a wave of mediocre advance word. The most common complaint has been that Almodóvar is blatantly recycling himself, throwing around the same motifs as always (mothers and sons, melodrama, intimations of abuse) to lesser effect. But whatever, with Almodóvar and star Penélope Cruz in attendance, this was the conference with the most star power; multiple TV crews were on stand-by. Speaking depending on his excitement level, alternately in Spanish and English, Almodóvar discussed the origins of his tale of a now-blind writer/director (Lluís Homar) and his torrid affair with Lena (Cruz), a muse struggling to get out of a relationship with an abusive business tycoon. It began with Almodóvar telling himself stories to amuse himself during frequent migraines; sitting in the dark, he came up with the blind director first. "At the...

Michael Haneke's abiding sadness.

Anonymous — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:55:00 GMT

Michael Haneke's fondness for scolding didacticism just don't work for some people, myself among them. But "The White Ribbon" is a whole other thing, a movie where anything dreadful that can happen will, just to prove that people are so terrible you can't even count on them not to turn into ***, or something like that. Set in a small German town in the year leading up to WWI, the movie doesn't let up from the first shot, in which a doctor breaks his arm when his horse trips over a maliciously strung wire. More evil pranks follow, perhaps enacted by a creepy group of blond kids, like an arthouse "Village of the Damned." The press corps assembled at Lincoln Center responded in surreal kind. Things started easily enough, with Haneke noting that he doesn't believe in rehearsing actors: "It's the first take that's the best. Either the first take...

One from the heart for Lee Daniels.

Anonymous — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 02:35:00 GMT

"Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire" is, in theory, the miserable story of the titular 300-pound teenage girl (Gabby Sidibe), who's raped into having two children by her dad and abused by her mother (Mo'Nique) until she meets an inspirational teacher (Paula Patton) who changes her life. In practice, the New York Film Festival's centerpiece film is a slickly effective melodrama -- the kind of movie where a dream sequence of someone having her ear kissed inevitably means a dog's actually licking it, but also a world where a little soul music and a few platitudes actually convey tremendous meaning. Without a doubt, the film comes from a well-meaning place. After hearing director Lee Daniels speak with palpable sincerity, it's almost impossible to credit him with bad faith. At the festival's press conference, Daniels explained what resonated with him when he first read performance poet Sapphire's novel: "When...

Harmony Korine's found footage film.

Anonymous — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:30:00 GMT

Whatever you think of art film's designated provocateur, it's hard to imagine anyone less famous than Harmony Korine getting a movie into major festivals that was conceived of only four months before, shot in two weeks, and consists mainly of dudes in old-person masks fellating tree branches, drinking wine bottles and -- yes, indeed -- humping trash. But such is "Trash Humpers," 74 plotless minutes that gain value from a dedication to the shoddiest of VHS aesthetics; the film was edited on anachronistic VCRs, and it shows in good, nostalgic ways. It's oddly painless, but provocative in a too easy way: Ugliness is truth, and truth ugliness. Korine was calm and unruffled when facing the press after the screening, and they in turn asked only respectful questions. He addressed his inspirations in order. "With this movie, what happened was I grew up really close to -- and live now close...

Keeping the barbarians at bay.

Anonymous — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:20:00 GMT

Every year someone makes a fuss over how snobbish/exclusionary/whatever the New York Film Festival is; this year's money quote came from Jeffrey Wells, who complained that the festival committee had become "a gathering of Trappist monks who've been slurping too much goat's milk with their granola." (I keep meaning to bring mine to the screenings and forgetting.) It's nothing new -- as Michael Guillen points out in his review of "Film Festival I: The Festival Circuit," a journal dedicated to, yes, film festivals -- those annual complaints haven't shifted one bit since the festival's founding in 1963. Rahul Hamid reports, in one of the journal's essays, that back in 1965, The New Republic's Stanley Kauffmann sniffed that the program descriptions were the product of a "limp mind and wrist," and that festivals were for selling movies, not art, that the good movies would make their way into the world anyway....