THE PRISONER AT STRANGER THAN FICTION
Daniel Gold and Judith Helfand’s Everything’s Cool and Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein’s The Prisoner: Or, How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair will be playing as part of Thom Powers’ Stranger Than Fiction series later this month at IFC. I haven’t seen Everything’s Cool yet, but Mark an I both got a sneak […]
ROOFTOP SHORTS: KATHY HUANG’S NIGHT VISIONS
A short, melancholy portrait of Blake Roberts, an Iraq vet just back from the war. Honest and direct, he shared with Kathy tales of daily life in the barracks as well as intimate, tragic moments. Though Blake does not question the motives of the U.S. government in Iraq or the missions he completed, he nevertheless […]
SUNDANCE SHORTS: CARSON MELL’S BOBBY BIRD THE DEVIL IN DENIM
If I can find a picture without the balls blacked out, I’ll post that one. Until that point, you will have to go here to watch the uncensored video. For those wondering, Bobby Bird is NOT a real rocker. But Carson says that he is hoping to create a live-action Devil in Denim feature film, […]
SUNDANCE SHORTS: JOERG WAGNER’S MOTODROM
Ahhh…Motodrom. I loved this movie before I even saw it. From the moment I first read the description of Joerg Wagner’s experimental documentary about hellriders who travel from carnival ground to carnival ground with their giant wooden tower and their antique motorcycles and go carts I was anxious to track down the film. Luckily it […]
ROOFTOP SHORTS: MATTHEW POND’S THE NAKED COWBOY
Veteran Rooftop volunteer (from our Bushwick days) and all-around good guy Matthew Pond made this tremendously entertaining portrait of Times Square’s famously talentless Naked Cowboy. You can watch it HERE.
SUNDANCE SHORTS: ANDY BLUBAUGH’S SCAREDYCAT
We screened Andy Blubaugh‘s charming short Hello, Thanks last summer and we are really excited to see that he has continued working in a similar vein but seems to really be making strides as a video artist, or video diarist, or personal documentarian or whatever he decides to call himself. Scaredycat is really great and […]
FEMME HELMER STATS
Hollywood Reporter printed these stats yesterday, originally compiled by critic Carrie Rickey (all stats are 2006 only): 60% (3 of 5) of 2006 Oscar nominated documentary features are directed by women, 40% (2of 5) of 2006 Oscar nominated foreign-films are directed by women, 25% of Sundance 2007 features and shorts are directed by women, 0% […]
SUNDANCE SHORTS: IAN OLDS’ BOMB
Ian Olds has worked on several really great films over the years, including the Academy Award short-listed documentary feature, Occupation: Dreamland and the extraordinary (according to Mark) suburban tank documentary Cul de Sac, which is not yet available on DVD, unfortunately. Bomb is quite different from either of his doc films, but still quite an […]
RURAL MICROCINEMAS AND WHISKEY SMUGGLING
There is a nice little article in Filmmaker about indie director Jay Craven‘s DIY 100-Town-Tour. Disappointed that all of the theaters in Vermont were booked with more commercial fare (even in the boonies of backwoods Vermont), he decided to rent as many churches and union halls as he could (for as little money as possible) […]
SUNDANCE AWARDS AND THE BEST SHORTS
We are back from Sundance and had a great time. We won’t bore you with details of our social interactions, since there are more entertaining and complete Sundance blogs out there. I’ll just say that I didn’t get to meet Hammer, or Dakota Fanning, but our friend Casimir did. Some of our favorite features screening […]