Anniversary screenings include Park City hits Napoleon Dynamite, Mississippi Masala, The Babadook.
Sundance Film Festival has unveiled the 53 shorts as well as the eight films celebrating the festival’s 40th edition – a list which includes Park City hits Napoleon Dynamite, Mississippi Masala, and The Babadook.
The 40th edition celebration screenings and events are set for the second half of the festival from January 23-26, 2024, with a slate of retrospective programming that will bring alumni artists together for conversations and gatherings.
Sundance Film festival runs January 18-28, 2024, in person in Park City and Salt Lake City, with a selection of titles...
Sundance Film Festival has unveiled the 53 shorts as well as the eight films celebrating the festival’s 40th edition – a list which includes Park City hits Napoleon Dynamite, Mississippi Masala, and The Babadook.
The 40th edition celebration screenings and events are set for the second half of the festival from January 23-26, 2024, with a slate of retrospective programming that will bring alumni artists together for conversations and gatherings.
Sundance Film festival runs January 18-28, 2024, in person in Park City and Salt Lake City, with a selection of titles...
- 12/12/2023
- by Jeremy Kay
- ScreenDaily
After spending three years as Toronto International Film Festival’s executive director, Joana Vicente is leaving her post to join the Sundance Institute as its CEO.
She is succeeding long-time executive Keri Putnam, who stepped down earlier this year. In her new role, Vicente will oversee all areas of the Institute, including the annual Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.
She will report to Sundance’s board of directors and work with key stakeholders, including artists, funders and industry donors, as well as lead a cadre of 200 year-round employees and an additional 250 seasonal staffers. Vicente begins her position in early November, working between the Institute’s Park City, Los Angeles, and New York City offices.
“This was a very comprehensive search to find the right person who would continue to move us forward with a vision that aligns with the founding values of the Institute’s founder, Robert Redford,...
She is succeeding long-time executive Keri Putnam, who stepped down earlier this year. In her new role, Vicente will oversee all areas of the Institute, including the annual Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.
She will report to Sundance’s board of directors and work with key stakeholders, including artists, funders and industry donors, as well as lead a cadre of 200 year-round employees and an additional 250 seasonal staffers. Vicente begins her position in early November, working between the Institute’s Park City, Los Angeles, and New York City offices.
“This was a very comprehensive search to find the right person who would continue to move us forward with a vision that aligns with the founding values of the Institute’s founder, Robert Redford,...
- 9/29/2021
- by Rebecca Rubin
- Variety Film + TV
It’s the changing of the film festival guard as Toronto International Film Festival co-head and executive director Joana Vicente steps down from her TIFF role after three years to return to her roots in American independent film. She will take over as CEO of the Sundance Institute, succeeding influential CEO Keri Putnam, who exited earlier this year after 10 years. Vicente’s last day at TIFF will be October 31, and she will begin her role at the start of November, working between the Institute’s Park City, Los Angeles, and New York City offices.
The search for her replacement was led by Sundance Board of Trustees Chair Pat Mitchell and Chair-Elect Ebs Burnough. In a statement, the board said the hiring resulted from “a very comprehensive search to find the right person who would continue to move us forward with a vision that aligns with the founding values of the Institute’s founder,...
The search for her replacement was led by Sundance Board of Trustees Chair Pat Mitchell and Chair-Elect Ebs Burnough. In a statement, the board said the hiring resulted from “a very comprehensive search to find the right person who would continue to move us forward with a vision that aligns with the founding values of the Institute’s founder,...
- 9/29/2021
- by Anne Thompson
- Indiewire
It’s the changing of the film festival guard as Toronto International Film Festival co-head and executive director Joana Vicente steps down from her TIFF role after three years to return to her roots in American independent film. She will take over as CEO of the Sundance Institute, succeeding influential CEO Keri Putnam, who exited earlier this year after 10 years. Vicente’s last day at TIFF will be October 31, and she will begin her role at the start of November, working between the Institute’s Park City, Los Angeles, and New York City offices.
The search for her replacement was led by Sundance Board of Trustees Chair Pat Mitchell and Chair-Elect Ebs Burnough. In a statement, the board said the hiring resulted from “a very comprehensive search to find the right person who would continue to move us forward with a vision that aligns with the founding values of the Institute’s founder,...
The search for her replacement was led by Sundance Board of Trustees Chair Pat Mitchell and Chair-Elect Ebs Burnough. In a statement, the board said the hiring resulted from “a very comprehensive search to find the right person who would continue to move us forward with a vision that aligns with the founding values of the Institute’s founder,...
- 9/29/2021
- by Anne Thompson
- Thompson on Hollywood
Giant Pictures has secured the U.S. distribution rights to the Bruno de Almeida-helmed drama, Cabaret Maxime, starring Michael Imperioli, best known for his Emmy-winning role as Christopher Moltisanti on HBO’s The Sopranos. Cabaret Maxime is slated to open at the Metrograph in NYC on February 21 before its theatrical wide release March 3.
The film marks the third collaboration between Imperioli and de Almeida. The plot follows Bennie Gazza (Imperioli), the owner of Cabaret Maxime, a nightclub in an old, red-light district where a group of colorful characters perform musical numbers, as well as burlesque and striptease acts. Bennie runs the cabaret like a tight family, dealing with each artist’s unique personality while taking care of his performer wife, Stella, who suffers from manic depression. When the once-decadent neighborhood starts to become gentrified, Bennie struggles to keep his club afloat. As the residents are being bought up and pushed out,...
The film marks the third collaboration between Imperioli and de Almeida. The plot follows Bennie Gazza (Imperioli), the owner of Cabaret Maxime, a nightclub in an old, red-light district where a group of colorful characters perform musical numbers, as well as burlesque and striptease acts. Bennie runs the cabaret like a tight family, dealing with each artist’s unique personality while taking care of his performer wife, Stella, who suffers from manic depression. When the once-decadent neighborhood starts to become gentrified, Bennie struggles to keep his club afloat. As the residents are being bought up and pushed out,...
- 12/13/2019
- by Amanda N'Duka
- Deadline Film + TV
On a sweltering day in August, Joana Vicente notes the lack of a landline phone or much else in fellow Toronto International Film Festival co-head Cameron Bailey's calm and pared-down Bell Lightbox office. "He's minimalist," says Vicente, whose own office is almost equally spartan — but at least has a working phone.
Indie producer Vicente has made — together with her husband, Jason Kliot — more than 40 films, mostly low-budget art house fare from such directors as Jim Jarmusch, Hal Hartley and Steven Soderbergh. She was brought on at Tiff in November as part of ...
Indie producer Vicente has made — together with her husband, Jason Kliot — more than 40 films, mostly low-budget art house fare from such directors as Jim Jarmusch, Hal Hartley and Steven Soderbergh. She was brought on at Tiff in November as part of ...
On a sweltering day in August, Joana Vicente notes the lack of a landline phone or much else in fellow Toronto International Film Festival co-head Cameron Bailey's calm and pared-down Bell Lightbox office. "He's minimalist," says Vicente, whose own office is almost equally spartan — but at least has a working phone.
Indie producer Vicente has made — together with her husband, Jason Kliot — more than 40 films, mostly low-budget art house fare from such directors as Jim Jarmusch, Hal Hartley and Steven Soderbergh. She was brought on at Tiff in November as part of ...
Indie producer Vicente has made — together with her husband, Jason Kliot — more than 40 films, mostly low-budget art house fare from such directors as Jim Jarmusch, Hal Hartley and Steven Soderbergh. She was brought on at Tiff in November as part of ...
Capernaum (Capharnaüm) director Nadine Labaki on Zain al Rafeea: "He knows the violence of the streets, he knows abuse, he knows mistreatment." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
Nadine Labaki's Capernaum (Capharnaüm), Lebanon's Oscar entry and Cannes Film Festival winner of the Ecumenical and Jury Prize, and the Prix de la Citoyenneté, is executive produced by Susan Rockefeller and Joslyn Barnes (Lucrecia Martel's Zama), Joana Vicente and Jason Kliot, Candice Abela-Mikati (David Robert Mitchell's Under The Silver Lake), Danny Glover and others, with associate producer Anne-Dominique Toussaint.
Nadine Labaki on Yordanos Shifera as Rahil: "She had run away from her employer."
Capernaum, shot by Christopher Aoun, has a great performance from Zain al Rafeea with Yordanos Shiferaw, Boluwatife Treasure Bankole, Fadi Youssef, Kawthar al Haddad, Elias Khoury, Joseph Jimbazian, Haita 'Cedra' Izam, and Nadine Labaki as the lawyer for Zain.
Capernaum intercuts between Zain's (Zain al Rafeea) life on the streets and scenes in a courtroom,...
Nadine Labaki's Capernaum (Capharnaüm), Lebanon's Oscar entry and Cannes Film Festival winner of the Ecumenical and Jury Prize, and the Prix de la Citoyenneté, is executive produced by Susan Rockefeller and Joslyn Barnes (Lucrecia Martel's Zama), Joana Vicente and Jason Kliot, Candice Abela-Mikati (David Robert Mitchell's Under The Silver Lake), Danny Glover and others, with associate producer Anne-Dominique Toussaint.
Nadine Labaki on Yordanos Shifera as Rahil: "She had run away from her employer."
Capernaum, shot by Christopher Aoun, has a great performance from Zain al Rafeea with Yordanos Shiferaw, Boluwatife Treasure Bankole, Fadi Youssef, Kawthar al Haddad, Elias Khoury, Joseph Jimbazian, Haita 'Cedra' Izam, and Nadine Labaki as the lawyer for Zain.
Capernaum intercuts between Zain's (Zain al Rafeea) life on the streets and scenes in a courtroom,...
- 12/16/2018
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Doha Film Institute has hit on a winning formula says filmmakers and top industry experts.
Top industry professionals and emerging filmmakers attending the Doha Film Institute’s Qumra meeting last week have given the inaugural meeting the thumbs up.
The bespoke programme welcomed 29 Dfi-backed projects for six-days of inspirational master-classes, seminars, work-in-progress screenings and hands-on ones-on-ones with some of the world’s top filmmaking talent.
The some 100 industry professionals at Qumra included Toronto International Film Festival artistic director Cameron Bailey, Film and Music Entertainment F&Me CEO Mike Downey, Visit Films founder Ryan Kampe and Jason Kliot of Open City Films.
Kliot said: “I love this formula. I think it’s really successful. I’ve been to all the events - in Rotterdam, Berlin and in New York during independent film week - and I think they all have strengths and weaknesses but what I find here is that the creators have been incredibly intelligent in keeping...
Top industry professionals and emerging filmmakers attending the Doha Film Institute’s Qumra meeting last week have given the inaugural meeting the thumbs up.
The bespoke programme welcomed 29 Dfi-backed projects for six-days of inspirational master-classes, seminars, work-in-progress screenings and hands-on ones-on-ones with some of the world’s top filmmaking talent.
The some 100 industry professionals at Qumra included Toronto International Film Festival artistic director Cameron Bailey, Film and Music Entertainment F&Me CEO Mike Downey, Visit Films founder Ryan Kampe and Jason Kliot of Open City Films.
Kliot said: “I love this formula. I think it’s really successful. I’ve been to all the events - in Rotterdam, Berlin and in New York during independent film week - and I think they all have strengths and weaknesses but what I find here is that the creators have been incredibly intelligent in keeping...
- 3/12/2015
- ScreenDaily
Mexico City-set dark comedy Chicuarotes revolves around teenagers living on the edge of a tourist lake.
Mexican actor, director and producer Gael Garcia Bernal is hoping to shoot his second feature Chicuarotes early next year about a group of teenagers growing up by Xochimilco Lake in Mexico City.
Speaking to ScreenDaily, Bernal said: “The film will follow a group of kids - around 14, 15 years-old - who live by the lake. They’re economically poor but not miserable or unhappy, basically living in paradise.
“The narrative of the film follows their dreams of moving up economically and socially. They want to stop working and make lots of money. I can’t tell you now how they attempt to do this but it’s a comedy - a very dark comedy.”
Bernal spoke to Screen on the fringes of the Doha Film Institute’s inaugural Qumra meeting, aimed at nurturing projects by filmmakers in Qatar, across the Middle...
Mexican actor, director and producer Gael Garcia Bernal is hoping to shoot his second feature Chicuarotes early next year about a group of teenagers growing up by Xochimilco Lake in Mexico City.
Speaking to ScreenDaily, Bernal said: “The film will follow a group of kids - around 14, 15 years-old - who live by the lake. They’re economically poor but not miserable or unhappy, basically living in paradise.
“The narrative of the film follows their dreams of moving up economically and socially. They want to stop working and make lots of money. I can’t tell you now how they attempt to do this but it’s a comedy - a very dark comedy.”
Bernal spoke to Screen on the fringes of the Doha Film Institute’s inaugural Qumra meeting, aimed at nurturing projects by filmmakers in Qatar, across the Middle...
- 3/10/2015
- ScreenDaily
Mexico City-set dark comedy revolves around teenagers living on the edge of a tourist lake.
Mexican actor, director and producer Gael Garcia Bernal is hoping to shoot his second feature Chicuarotes early next year about a group of teenagers growing up by Xochimilco Lake in Mexico City.
Speaking to ScreenDaily, Bernal said: “The film will follow a group of kids - around 14, 15 years-old - who live by the lake. They’re economically poor but not miserable or unhappy, basically living in paradise.
“The narrative of the film follows their dreams of moving up economically and socially. They want to stop working and make lots of money. I can’t tell you now how they attempt to do this but it’s a comedy - a very dark comedy.”
Bernal spoke to Screen on the fringes of the Doha Film Institute’s inaugural Qumra meeting, aimed at nurturing projects by filmmakers in Qatar, across the Middle...
Mexican actor, director and producer Gael Garcia Bernal is hoping to shoot his second feature Chicuarotes early next year about a group of teenagers growing up by Xochimilco Lake in Mexico City.
Speaking to ScreenDaily, Bernal said: “The film will follow a group of kids - around 14, 15 years-old - who live by the lake. They’re economically poor but not miserable or unhappy, basically living in paradise.
“The narrative of the film follows their dreams of moving up economically and socially. They want to stop working and make lots of money. I can’t tell you now how they attempt to do this but it’s a comedy - a very dark comedy.”
Bernal spoke to Screen on the fringes of the Doha Film Institute’s inaugural Qumra meeting, aimed at nurturing projects by filmmakers in Qatar, across the Middle...
- 3/10/2015
- ScreenDaily
Thanks to the smartphones in our pockets, we are all filmmakers these days--or potential ones at least. In honor of that, it's time to set those phones free, people: the Original iPhone Film Festival is now accepting submissions for its 2014 festival. There's no fee to enter, and submissions can be made through November 30. The requirements are pretty straightforward: films can be up to five minutes long, and must be shot on any iOS device. There will be be four categories in this year's festival: Fiction, Non-Fiction, Music Video and a new Student Directors/Under 18 contest. This year's installment of the mobile-focused festival will be judged by industry bigwigs in both tech and film, including Yahoo! Tech's David Pogue, A+E Indiefilms's Molly Thompson, Macworld's Jason Snall, director Marcus Nispel and producer Jason Kliot. The full rules and information regarding submissions can be found on the Original iPhone Film Festival's website.
- 7/3/2014
- by Jacob Combs
- Thompson on Hollywood
No time for my Year End Roundup or even my Havana Film Festival Report because I am busy with writing a Report -For-Pay of the 1,000 Top Filmmakers, Location Managers and Influencers Worldwide for a particularly smart country’s film commissioner and I must deliver it by the year’s end.
As I compile it, I am struck by the names of the film companies I am looking at. German names are mundane and Irish are imaginative. I know the U.S. names so well that in contrast, the French names are so evocative.
Naming companies after their owners and the well known studio names are normal and mundane. Personal meaning names like Lava Bear or Wild West Picture Show are more interesting as they bring up imaginary pictures. Weed Road of Akiva Goldsman is very evocative – do its owners smoke weed? Virgin Produced – well that’s fairly obvious I think -- once you know Richard Branson owns it, Walden Media evokes Walden Pond. Village Roadshow always sounded good but it’s old school like the majors are by now, as is New Regency of former arms dealer Arnon Milchan now partner of 20th Century Fox and others with their longstanding studio deals. In the U.S. we have so many old studio or “studio deal” companies whose early origins have been obscured by the sands of time and which no longer elicit dreams of greatness or memories of private childhood games or haunts, names like Alcon, the company founded by FedEx's Fred Smith, Leonardo di Caprio's Appian Way (recalling the old Roman road), Mark Canton's Atmosphere Entertainment, Amram Bernstein's Beacon Pictures, Rob Reiner's Castle Rock Entertainment, Spring Creek which was so evocative of Paula Weinstein when she was with Mark Rosenberg, major Columbia Pictures, Weinstein offshoot Dimension Films, Spielberg's Dreamworks, Endgame Entertainment, James Schamus and David Linde's Focus Features now Universal's arthouse arm, major Fox 2000 and Fox Searchlight, Gold Circle Films of My Big Fat Greek Wedding fame, HBO – a perfect name of the time and place, HBO Latin America Group – a perfect revisionist name for the brand, Imagine Entertainment which still elicits the name of Brian Glazer ,Malpaso which still evokes Clint Eastwood, Mandalay Pictures which still recalls Peter Guber and those old Sony days of power plays, Legendary Pictures recalls Batman and Superman, Marvel Studios – the comicbook heroes, Lionsgate – gone corporate after their indie Canadian beginnings so long ago, , MGM, Moonstone, Morgan Creek Productions, Mutual Films, Myriad Pictures, New Line Cinema, New Regency, Pandemonium (we still love Bill Mechanic), Paramount Pictures, , Phoenix Pictures (we still love Mike Medavoy), Radar Pictures (Ted Fields), Red Om (Julie Roberts), Relativity Media (Ryan Cavanaugh), Revelations (hooray for Morgan Freeman), , Ritchie-Wigram, Screen Gems, Sidney Kimmel Entertainment to name a few, Tribeca Films, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal Pictures, Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros.
We have the usual names based on the company owners who are or perceive themselves to be brands in themselves like Apatow, Berlanti Prods, Bleiberg Entertainment, Blumhouse Prods. In which Jason Blum becomes horror branded, Bender Spenk, Bruce Cohen Prods., Callahan Filmworks, Chris Morgan Prods., Chuck Lorre Prods., De Line, de Passe Jones Entertainment, Di Novi, Francine Maisler & Associates, Freemantle, George Litto , Gerber, Gk Films, Hurwitz & Schlossberg Prods., , J.W. Prods., Josephson, KatzSmith, Lin Pictures, Stuber Pictures, Tdj Enterprises, Team Downey, The Weinstein Company.
There are those companies whose names evoke places like 22nd & Indiana, Arroyo Films, Broken Road Prods., Cross Creek, GreeneStreet Films, Cherry Road Films (not so new), Hyde Park , Lakeshore Entertainment (where Tom Rosenberg either lived or vacationed as a child), Langley Park, Olive Bridge Entertainment, Pearl Street, Spring Street, Barry Levinson's Baltimore, Kevin Spacey's Trigger Street, Thunder Road, Summit named after the street Patrick Wachsberger live(d) on in Beverly Hills.
The U.S. fanciful names like 3 Monkeys, Angle Films, Agregate Films, Polymorphic evoke something more private than public. Other companies evoking private signals to those who are in the know are 3 Monkeys, Aggregate Films (pretty hip for today), Angle Films, Barnstorm Pictures, Bold Films, Branded Films (a good capitalistic name for today), Captivate Entertainment, Carousel Prods., Cruel and Unusual, Everyman Pictures, Exclusive Media Group, Film 44, FilmDistrict, Global Produce, Green Hat Films, Groundswell , Gulfstream, Heyday, Illumination Entertainment, ImageMovers, Lava Bear Films – hats off to David Linde, Media Rights Capital, Mockingbird Pictures, Ninjas Runnin Wild, One Race Films, Open City (we love Jason Kliot and Joana Vicente), Original Films, Our Stories, Playtone, Polymorphic, Roserock Films, Saturn, , Atlantic Streamline, Shandaland – I love the Yiddish reference here , Strike Entertainment, Thousand Words.
For some reason, the French names sound more exotic or, if not exotic, then somehow more evocative of the unknown…Of course some are named after their owners, like Les Films d’Antoine…though even that sounds more exotic than Gk Films, Graham King’s company. There is an everyday familiarity with the U.S. that I definitely do not have with the French.
I feel a little like Proust in Names and Places, conjuring up unknown histories and deeper meanings to the French companies.
Ok, A.S.A.P. is American so that hardly counts, though it is a cool name for a film company. And Anna Lena, maybe is a person’s name. Avenue B, again is American as is Blue Monday and Local Film, though Charivari is Italian and Aurora is Latin. But the Cine names are great: Cine Nomine – what an intelligent play on words, in the name of g’d, or Cinema Defacto or Cine-Sud; all have great meaning behind them. Dharamsala is either an Indian God or food, Dolce Vita we know is a tribute to Fellini. Is Delante Films like Adelante? And Elzevir – again Proust enters with his fictionalized artist. Estrella and Gloria are names aiming for Greatness. But what is Kaleo?
La Vie est Belle gets me singing the song from South Pacific. Lazennec seems very old and venerable, aristocratic even, while Les Enrages is very 60s. Rezo is also an old and classic film company of France and Pathe and Gaumont are equivalent to our major studio names. Les Films de la Croisade – does it have a crusade as its mission? Les Films du Lendemain seems very laid back. Les Films du Poisson makes me wonder what does a fish have to do with the movies? And what is Veyrier? Les Productions Balthazar sound s great, though its founder’s name is Balthazar. And Les Films Pelleas sound grand and mythological. Mille et Une Films makes you know there are 1,001 stories to be told. Haut et Court elicits a picture which I cannot explain.
While MK2 is simply based upon the name of Marin Karmitz, I love his job title, “President du Conseil de Surveillance”, or President of the Surveillance Council, as he grants his son Nathanael his legacy.
Noodles is fun. Petit is descriptive, Sbs is boring – I thought it was a broadcaster but it’s just a name, however, the name Said Ben Said is not boring at all nor are his films, like Passion and Carnage. Sciapode is intriguing – it sounds like sci-fi and Sombrero makes me think the filmmaker leans toward the Latino. Stone Angels – English again, as is The French Connection – both conjure up images from real life fiction. Stone Angels that decorate tombs of old aristocrats; Pierre-Ange Le Pogam’s name also conjures up the Proustian Names of Old - Stone Angel the Pogam…what is a Pogam? Tempete Sous un Crane is also totally out there as a name…Storm Beneath a Crane? Maybe I don’t know French so well after all. But that is Julie Delpy’s company She’s already mostly American anyway. . I loved her last film 2 Days in New York. It would take me another lifetime to be as knowledgeable about the French as I am about the Americans. And I’m not very knowledgeable about them either nowadays. But the French names make me feel like Proust as they elicit wonderment and create stories in and of themselves.
As I compile it, I am struck by the names of the film companies I am looking at. German names are mundane and Irish are imaginative. I know the U.S. names so well that in contrast, the French names are so evocative.
Naming companies after their owners and the well known studio names are normal and mundane. Personal meaning names like Lava Bear or Wild West Picture Show are more interesting as they bring up imaginary pictures. Weed Road of Akiva Goldsman is very evocative – do its owners smoke weed? Virgin Produced – well that’s fairly obvious I think -- once you know Richard Branson owns it, Walden Media evokes Walden Pond. Village Roadshow always sounded good but it’s old school like the majors are by now, as is New Regency of former arms dealer Arnon Milchan now partner of 20th Century Fox and others with their longstanding studio deals. In the U.S. we have so many old studio or “studio deal” companies whose early origins have been obscured by the sands of time and which no longer elicit dreams of greatness or memories of private childhood games or haunts, names like Alcon, the company founded by FedEx's Fred Smith, Leonardo di Caprio's Appian Way (recalling the old Roman road), Mark Canton's Atmosphere Entertainment, Amram Bernstein's Beacon Pictures, Rob Reiner's Castle Rock Entertainment, Spring Creek which was so evocative of Paula Weinstein when she was with Mark Rosenberg, major Columbia Pictures, Weinstein offshoot Dimension Films, Spielberg's Dreamworks, Endgame Entertainment, James Schamus and David Linde's Focus Features now Universal's arthouse arm, major Fox 2000 and Fox Searchlight, Gold Circle Films of My Big Fat Greek Wedding fame, HBO – a perfect name of the time and place, HBO Latin America Group – a perfect revisionist name for the brand, Imagine Entertainment which still elicits the name of Brian Glazer ,Malpaso which still evokes Clint Eastwood, Mandalay Pictures which still recalls Peter Guber and those old Sony days of power plays, Legendary Pictures recalls Batman and Superman, Marvel Studios – the comicbook heroes, Lionsgate – gone corporate after their indie Canadian beginnings so long ago, , MGM, Moonstone, Morgan Creek Productions, Mutual Films, Myriad Pictures, New Line Cinema, New Regency, Pandemonium (we still love Bill Mechanic), Paramount Pictures, , Phoenix Pictures (we still love Mike Medavoy), Radar Pictures (Ted Fields), Red Om (Julie Roberts), Relativity Media (Ryan Cavanaugh), Revelations (hooray for Morgan Freeman), , Ritchie-Wigram, Screen Gems, Sidney Kimmel Entertainment to name a few, Tribeca Films, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal Pictures, Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros.
We have the usual names based on the company owners who are or perceive themselves to be brands in themselves like Apatow, Berlanti Prods, Bleiberg Entertainment, Blumhouse Prods. In which Jason Blum becomes horror branded, Bender Spenk, Bruce Cohen Prods., Callahan Filmworks, Chris Morgan Prods., Chuck Lorre Prods., De Line, de Passe Jones Entertainment, Di Novi, Francine Maisler & Associates, Freemantle, George Litto , Gerber, Gk Films, Hurwitz & Schlossberg Prods., , J.W. Prods., Josephson, KatzSmith, Lin Pictures, Stuber Pictures, Tdj Enterprises, Team Downey, The Weinstein Company.
There are those companies whose names evoke places like 22nd & Indiana, Arroyo Films, Broken Road Prods., Cross Creek, GreeneStreet Films, Cherry Road Films (not so new), Hyde Park , Lakeshore Entertainment (where Tom Rosenberg either lived or vacationed as a child), Langley Park, Olive Bridge Entertainment, Pearl Street, Spring Street, Barry Levinson's Baltimore, Kevin Spacey's Trigger Street, Thunder Road, Summit named after the street Patrick Wachsberger live(d) on in Beverly Hills.
The U.S. fanciful names like 3 Monkeys, Angle Films, Agregate Films, Polymorphic evoke something more private than public. Other companies evoking private signals to those who are in the know are 3 Monkeys, Aggregate Films (pretty hip for today), Angle Films, Barnstorm Pictures, Bold Films, Branded Films (a good capitalistic name for today), Captivate Entertainment, Carousel Prods., Cruel and Unusual, Everyman Pictures, Exclusive Media Group, Film 44, FilmDistrict, Global Produce, Green Hat Films, Groundswell , Gulfstream, Heyday, Illumination Entertainment, ImageMovers, Lava Bear Films – hats off to David Linde, Media Rights Capital, Mockingbird Pictures, Ninjas Runnin Wild, One Race Films, Open City (we love Jason Kliot and Joana Vicente), Original Films, Our Stories, Playtone, Polymorphic, Roserock Films, Saturn, , Atlantic Streamline, Shandaland – I love the Yiddish reference here , Strike Entertainment, Thousand Words.
For some reason, the French names sound more exotic or, if not exotic, then somehow more evocative of the unknown…Of course some are named after their owners, like Les Films d’Antoine…though even that sounds more exotic than Gk Films, Graham King’s company. There is an everyday familiarity with the U.S. that I definitely do not have with the French.
I feel a little like Proust in Names and Places, conjuring up unknown histories and deeper meanings to the French companies.
Ok, A.S.A.P. is American so that hardly counts, though it is a cool name for a film company. And Anna Lena, maybe is a person’s name. Avenue B, again is American as is Blue Monday and Local Film, though Charivari is Italian and Aurora is Latin. But the Cine names are great: Cine Nomine – what an intelligent play on words, in the name of g’d, or Cinema Defacto or Cine-Sud; all have great meaning behind them. Dharamsala is either an Indian God or food, Dolce Vita we know is a tribute to Fellini. Is Delante Films like Adelante? And Elzevir – again Proust enters with his fictionalized artist. Estrella and Gloria are names aiming for Greatness. But what is Kaleo?
La Vie est Belle gets me singing the song from South Pacific. Lazennec seems very old and venerable, aristocratic even, while Les Enrages is very 60s. Rezo is also an old and classic film company of France and Pathe and Gaumont are equivalent to our major studio names. Les Films de la Croisade – does it have a crusade as its mission? Les Films du Lendemain seems very laid back. Les Films du Poisson makes me wonder what does a fish have to do with the movies? And what is Veyrier? Les Productions Balthazar sound s great, though its founder’s name is Balthazar. And Les Films Pelleas sound grand and mythological. Mille et Une Films makes you know there are 1,001 stories to be told. Haut et Court elicits a picture which I cannot explain.
While MK2 is simply based upon the name of Marin Karmitz, I love his job title, “President du Conseil de Surveillance”, or President of the Surveillance Council, as he grants his son Nathanael his legacy.
Noodles is fun. Petit is descriptive, Sbs is boring – I thought it was a broadcaster but it’s just a name, however, the name Said Ben Said is not boring at all nor are his films, like Passion and Carnage. Sciapode is intriguing – it sounds like sci-fi and Sombrero makes me think the filmmaker leans toward the Latino. Stone Angels – English again, as is The French Connection – both conjure up images from real life fiction. Stone Angels that decorate tombs of old aristocrats; Pierre-Ange Le Pogam’s name also conjures up the Proustian Names of Old - Stone Angel the Pogam…what is a Pogam? Tempete Sous un Crane is also totally out there as a name…Storm Beneath a Crane? Maybe I don’t know French so well after all. But that is Julie Delpy’s company She’s already mostly American anyway. . I loved her last film 2 Days in New York. It would take me another lifetime to be as knowledgeable about the French as I am about the Americans. And I’m not very knowledgeable about them either nowadays. But the French names make me feel like Proust as they elicit wonderment and create stories in and of themselves.
- 1/1/2013
- by Sydney Levine
- Sydney's Buzz
Animal Kingdom, The Red Chapel, Restrepo, and Winter's Bone Earn Grand Jury Prizes
Audience Favorites Feature Contracorriente, happythankyoumoreplease, Waiting For Superman, and Wasteland
Park City, Ut-The Jury, Audience, Next, and other special award-winners of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival were announced tonight at the Festival's Awards Ceremony hosted by David Hyde Pierce (star of The Perfect Host which premiered in this year's Park City at Midnight section) in Park City, Utah. Highlights from the Awards Ceremony can be seen on the Festival website, www.sundance.org/festival.
Films receiving Jury Awards were selected from four categories: U.S. Dramatic Competition, U.S. Documentary Competition, World Cinema Dramatic Competition and World Cinema Documentary Competition. All films in competition were also eligible for Sundance Film Festival Audience Awards as selected by Festival audiences. The U.S. Audience Awards presented by Honda and World Cinema Audience Awards were announced by Louis C.K. Joseph Gordon Levitt...
Audience Favorites Feature Contracorriente, happythankyoumoreplease, Waiting For Superman, and Wasteland
Park City, Ut-The Jury, Audience, Next, and other special award-winners of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival were announced tonight at the Festival's Awards Ceremony hosted by David Hyde Pierce (star of The Perfect Host which premiered in this year's Park City at Midnight section) in Park City, Utah. Highlights from the Awards Ceremony can be seen on the Festival website, www.sundance.org/festival.
Films receiving Jury Awards were selected from four categories: U.S. Dramatic Competition, U.S. Documentary Competition, World Cinema Dramatic Competition and World Cinema Documentary Competition. All films in competition were also eligible for Sundance Film Festival Audience Awards as selected by Festival audiences. The U.S. Audience Awards presented by Honda and World Cinema Audience Awards were announced by Louis C.K. Joseph Gordon Levitt...
- 2/1/2010
- Makingof.com
Debra Granik's "Winter's Bone" was the big winner in Park City Saturday night, as it won both the dramatic competition grand jury prize and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. Earlier in the day, the gritty drama secured North American distribution through Roadside Attractions for release later this year.
The film, about an unflinching Ozark Mountain girl trudging through dangerous social terrain as she hunts down her missing father, was adapted from the Daniel Woodrell novel by Granik and Anne Rosellini. Granik's previous film, the 2004 Sundance entry "Down to the Bone," won her a dramatic directing award.
The rest of the awards were fairly well spread around at the Saturday night ceremony hosted by David Hyde Pierce, who starred in the Park City at Midnight entry "The Perfect Host" this year.
To kick off the evening, Pierce came on stage in knit cap rapping to...
The film, about an unflinching Ozark Mountain girl trudging through dangerous social terrain as she hunts down her missing father, was adapted from the Daniel Woodrell novel by Granik and Anne Rosellini. Granik's previous film, the 2004 Sundance entry "Down to the Bone," won her a dramatic directing award.
The rest of the awards were fairly well spread around at the Saturday night ceremony hosted by David Hyde Pierce, who starred in the Park City at Midnight entry "The Perfect Host" this year.
To kick off the evening, Pierce came on stage in knit cap rapping to...
- 1/30/2010
- by By Jay A. Fernandez and Gregg Goldstein
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Author Russell Banks, producer Jason Kliot, writer/director Karyn Kusama, actress Parker Posey and cinematography Robert Yeoman will make up the jury for the U.S. dramatic film competition at the Sundance Film Festival, which runs from Jan. 21-31 in Park City, Utah.
For the U.S. documentary competition, the jury will consist of filmmakers Greg Barker, Dayna Goldfine, Morgan Spurlock and Ondi Timoner and Wired senior editor Nancy Miller.
The world cinema documentary competition jurors are filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal, PBS "NewsHour" senior correspondent Jeffrey Brown, and Asako Fujioka, director of the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival.
The world cinema dramatic competition jurors are writer/director Alison Maclean, Entertainment Weekly film critic Lisa Schwarzbaum and producer and Palomar Pictures principal Joni Sighvatsson.
Judging the shorts competition are filmmaker Sterlin Harjo, author and screenwriter Brent Hoff and producer Christine Vachon.
The awards will be announced on Jan. 30 at the Sundance Film Festival Awards Ceremony,...
For the U.S. documentary competition, the jury will consist of filmmakers Greg Barker, Dayna Goldfine, Morgan Spurlock and Ondi Timoner and Wired senior editor Nancy Miller.
The world cinema documentary competition jurors are filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal, PBS "NewsHour" senior correspondent Jeffrey Brown, and Asako Fujioka, director of the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival.
The world cinema dramatic competition jurors are writer/director Alison Maclean, Entertainment Weekly film critic Lisa Schwarzbaum and producer and Palomar Pictures principal Joni Sighvatsson.
Judging the shorts competition are filmmaker Sterlin Harjo, author and screenwriter Brent Hoff and producer Christine Vachon.
The awards will be announced on Jan. 30 at the Sundance Film Festival Awards Ceremony,...
- 1/11/2010
- by By Gregg Kilday
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Sundance has announced the members on its five juries, the esteemed tastemakers who'll pick the prize-winners at the Awards Ceremony, hosted this year by David Hyde-Pierce (who'll be there in support of his dinner-party crime caper, The Perfect Host). Author Russell Banks, Jennifer's Body director Karyn Kusama, Sundance Queen Parker Posey, indie producer Jason Kliot and cinematographer Robert Yeoman head up the U.S. Dramatic Competition jury, while doc makers Morgan Spurlock and Ondi Timoner sit among the U.S. Documentary Jury. But do their opinions ultimately matter?...
- 1/11/2010
- Movieline
The Sundance Film Festival has announced the members of its five juries for 2010. U.S. Documentary Competition Jury: filmmakers Greg Barker, Dayna Goldfine, Morgan Spurlock and Ondi Timoner, and Wired senior editor Nancy Miller U.S. Dramatic Competition Jury: novelist Russell Banks, producer Jason Kliot, director Karyn Kusama, actress Parker Posey, cinematographer Robert Yeoman World Cinema Documentary Competition Jury: documentarian Jennifer Baichwal, PBS correspondent Jeffrey Brown, Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival director Asako Fujioka World Cinema Dramatic Competition Jury: writer/director Alison Maclean, Entertainment Weekly critic Lisa Schwarzbaum, producer Sigurjon Sighvatsson Shorts Competition Jury: filmmaker Sterlin Harjo, Wholphin DVD editor and cofounder Brent Hoff, Killer Films chief Christine Vachon The festival kicks off on Jan. 21. Source: indieWIRE...
- 1/11/2010
- by Anna Robinson
- Alt Film Guide
Sundance has announced the members for its five juries for 2010. The ten-day fest fest gets under way January 21. U.S. Documentary Competition Jury: filmmaker Greg Barker (Sergio), director/producer Dayna Goldfine (Ballet Russes), Wired senior editor Nancy Miller, documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) and filmmaker Ondi Timoner (We Live in Public). U.S. Dramatic Competition Jury: novelist Russell Banks (The Sweet Hereafter), producer Jason Kliot (Three Seasons), director Karyn Kusama (Jennifer’s Body), actress Parker Posey (Happy Tears), cinematographer Robert Yeoman (Whip It). World Cinema Documentary Competition Jury: documentarian Jennifer Baichwal (Manufactured Landscapes), PBS correspondent Jeffrey Brown, Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival director Asako Fujioka. World Cinema Dramatic Competition Jury: writer/director Alison Maclean (Jesus’s Son), Entertainment Weekly critic Lisa Schwarzbaum, producer Sigurjon “Joni” Sighvatsson (Arlington Road). …...
- 1/11/2010
- Thompson on Hollywood
Los Angeles – Parker Posey, author Russell Banks and filmmakers Karyn Kusama and Morgan Spurlock are among the jurors for this month's Sundance Film Festival.Actress Posey, whose films include past Sundance entries "The House of Yes" and "Broken English," will be one of five jurors judging the U.S. dramatic competition.Joining her are Banks, producer Jason Kliot, cinematographer Robert Yeoman and director Kusama, whose "Girlfight" shared the top prize at Sundance in 2000.Spurlock, who directed the Sundance hit "Super Size Me," is on the U.S. documentary jury, along with filmmakers Greg Barker, Dayna Goldfine and Ondi Timoner and entertainment journalist Nancy Miller.The festival for independent film runs Jan. 21-31 in Park City, Utah.Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
- 1/11/2010
- backstage.com
As the search for a new Ifp executive director continues, indie film producer Joana Vicente (who with her husband Jason Kliot have made independent movies with their labels, Open City Films, Blow Up Pictures and HDNet Films) has been named the interim head of the non-profit organization according to a release sent out today. Vicente, who is a member of the committee looking for a new head of the Ifp, will join Ifp next week to work on the transition with Michelle Byrd, who has lead the organization for the last 12 years and announced her departure back in June. The Ifp is the publisher of Filmmaker Magazine.
- 11/24/2009
- by Jason Guerrasio
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
Complete Dubai fest coverage
Dubai -- Independent international filmmaker? Want to break into the U.S. market? Start small, find your "tribe" and learn to think outside the Hollywood box. Oh, and don't even think about a theatrical deal. Think digital instead.
This was the advice from veteran indie filmmakers and distributors gathered from around the world Monday at the Dubai International Film Festival.
Hal Sadoff, chief of the indie division at Hollywood's Icm talent agency, said that flexibility is key. When he produced "Hotel Rwanda," he had an Italian priest squeezed into the script about genocide in Africa just so that the U.K.-South Africa co-production could tap Italian money.
"We're focused on films of $8 million and above that are mixing art and commerce," Sadoff said. "When you're going that route you have to consider the finances up front."
For those unwilling to compromise, focusing your passions on...
Dubai -- Independent international filmmaker? Want to break into the U.S. market? Start small, find your "tribe" and learn to think outside the Hollywood box. Oh, and don't even think about a theatrical deal. Think digital instead.
This was the advice from veteran indie filmmakers and distributors gathered from around the world Monday at the Dubai International Film Festival.
Hal Sadoff, chief of the indie division at Hollywood's Icm talent agency, said that flexibility is key. When he produced "Hotel Rwanda," he had an Italian priest squeezed into the script about genocide in Africa just so that the U.K.-South Africa co-production could tap Italian money.
"We're focused on films of $8 million and above that are mixing art and commerce," Sadoff said. "When you're going that route you have to consider the finances up front."
For those unwilling to compromise, focusing your passions on...
- 12/15/2008
- by By Jonathan Landreth
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Opens: Friday, June 13 (Magnolia Pictures).
Writer-director Carlos Brooks delves into a netherworld of fetishisms and handicap worship in his daring first feature, "Quid Pro Quo". The trouble is the movie isn't daring enough. Brooks tiptoes into territory Luis Bunuel would have frolicked in, but he does so without the master surrealist's desire to outrage and confound his viewers.
The question the movie poses is this: Why would an able-bodied person want to be handicapped? What compels a person to wish to be disabled? And damn if Brooks doesn't come up with an answer, or at least an answer insofar as his heroine is concerned. But wouldn't the mystery of this compulsion -- this eroticized worship of wheelchairs, braces, canes and a pair of "magic shoes" -- make a much more fascinating and daring movie than this ultimately conventional tale that demystifies the heroine's fixation?
The story is told by Isaac Knott, a New York Public Radio reporter. Played by Nick Stahl, Isaac is a kind of Ira Glass raconteur. He has been in a wheelchair since age 8, when his parents died in the car crash that crippled him. But the story is really about the mysterious Fiona, who approaches the reporter indirectly to do a story about people who want to paralyze or damage their bodies. She herself is a "wannabe," who insists she is a paralyzed person trapped inside an abled person's body.
Fiona is played by Vera Farmiga, who is quite simply one of the most fascinating, charismatic actresses working in American cinema today. You can't take your eyes off her. Her Fiona is strong and weak, erotic and enigmatic, provocative and pathetic. She can make the most baffling pronouncements sound completely reasonable -- until you realize what she has just said. She needs to be "special," and her fetishistic worship of wheelchairs and braces has a quality of transcendental spirituality.
Then Brooks spoils all this mysterious perversity by allowing a twist ending to explain away Fiona's erotic compulsions. Throw in a bad mother, and you have an ending that is more Freudian than Bunuelian.
The film is beautifully shot in earthen, rustic tones, and the compositions serve to eroticize the two main characters in uncanny ways. This is a startling and promising debut film by Brooks. You just wish he would trust his bent for the surreal more than he does.
Production: HDNet Films. Cast: Nick Stahl Vera Farmiga, Aimee Mullins. Screenwriter-Director: Carlos Brooks. Producers: Sarah Pillsbury, Midge Sanford. Executive Producers: Jason Kliot, Joana Vicente, Todd Wagner, Mark Cuban. Rated R, 82 minutes.
Writer-director Carlos Brooks delves into a netherworld of fetishisms and handicap worship in his daring first feature, "Quid Pro Quo". The trouble is the movie isn't daring enough. Brooks tiptoes into territory Luis Bunuel would have frolicked in, but he does so without the master surrealist's desire to outrage and confound his viewers.
The question the movie poses is this: Why would an able-bodied person want to be handicapped? What compels a person to wish to be disabled? And damn if Brooks doesn't come up with an answer, or at least an answer insofar as his heroine is concerned. But wouldn't the mystery of this compulsion -- this eroticized worship of wheelchairs, braces, canes and a pair of "magic shoes" -- make a much more fascinating and daring movie than this ultimately conventional tale that demystifies the heroine's fixation?
The story is told by Isaac Knott, a New York Public Radio reporter. Played by Nick Stahl, Isaac is a kind of Ira Glass raconteur. He has been in a wheelchair since age 8, when his parents died in the car crash that crippled him. But the story is really about the mysterious Fiona, who approaches the reporter indirectly to do a story about people who want to paralyze or damage their bodies. She herself is a "wannabe," who insists she is a paralyzed person trapped inside an abled person's body.
Fiona is played by Vera Farmiga, who is quite simply one of the most fascinating, charismatic actresses working in American cinema today. You can't take your eyes off her. Her Fiona is strong and weak, erotic and enigmatic, provocative and pathetic. She can make the most baffling pronouncements sound completely reasonable -- until you realize what she has just said. She needs to be "special," and her fetishistic worship of wheelchairs and braces has a quality of transcendental spirituality.
Then Brooks spoils all this mysterious perversity by allowing a twist ending to explain away Fiona's erotic compulsions. Throw in a bad mother, and you have an ending that is more Freudian than Bunuelian.
The film is beautifully shot in earthen, rustic tones, and the compositions serve to eroticize the two main characters in uncanny ways. This is a startling and promising debut film by Brooks. You just wish he would trust his bent for the surreal more than he does.
Production: HDNet Films. Cast: Nick Stahl Vera Farmiga, Aimee Mullins. Screenwriter-Director: Carlos Brooks. Producers: Sarah Pillsbury, Midge Sanford. Executive Producers: Jason Kliot, Joana Vicente, Todd Wagner, Mark Cuban. Rated R, 82 minutes.
- 6/12/2008
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Sundance Film Festival
PARK CITY -- A biographical documentary doesn't get any better than this. In "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson," director Alex Gibney smoothly brings together a strong visual strategy, astute talking heads, never-before-seen home movies, old interviews and archival footage both rare and familiar to pull off a three-dimensional portrait of a man who in life -- and most certainly death -- is extraordinarily hard to pin down. Gibney nails him.
For Thompson's readers and others intrigued by the mystique surrounding the man who invented "gonzo" journalism, this film will, of course, be a must-see. But the themes both Thompson's work and this film explore speak directly to America in 2008, a country in a quagmire of national self-doubt, the politics of rage and distrust, a baffled Administration and a war that has lost its purpose. In other words, all the things Thompson railed against when Nixon was his nemesis. So with careful marketing and a positive critical response, which the film should elicit, "Gonzo" may reach a much wider audience, both theatrically and on cable and DVD.
Thompson was a split personality. A man capable of enormous kindness and affection, he was also given to rage and chemical and alcohol-fueled depravity. He was acutely aware of these two sides but apparently not in complete control of either. It says something about the man's good side though that so many important people have come forward to pay heart-felt tribute to him in this film.
Gibney must be a great interviewer because the comments here not only from Thompson's two wives and close friends but such figures as Jimmy Carter, George McGovern, Pat Buchanan, Jimmy Buffett, Gary Hart and Thompson's long-time illustrator Ralph Steadman paint a picture that feels accurate and catches the moods of the country during Thompson's heyday as an author-cum-rock-star.
How fascinating to learn that Thompson taught himself how to write -- for want of a better phrase -- the literature of the outsider by typing over and over again F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby". How odd to see him in vintage black-and-white on the quiz show "To Tell the Truth" after penning his first best-seller on the Hell's Angels. What a nervous guy he was then and how he changed.
Indeed Thompson fit right into the freak show of the '60s in the Bay Area, the acid-dropping, hippie-dippy, anti-war, clothes-optional guerrilla theater that caused him to turn-on but NOT to drop out. Rather he engaged the power structure in America in a way no one else has ever done. Without the usual journalistic concerns over burning sources and currying favor, he reported everything, whether on or off the record, but also made stuff up. And the phony facts somehow got as close the truth as the real ones. One interviewer remarks that his coverage of the McGovern campaign was the most accurate and least factual of any journalist's.
Having access to hundreds of Thompson's photos and 200 hours of audiotapes, home movies and other documentary footage allows Gibney to find just the right visuals to illustrate the narration, which Johnny Depp, the man who paid for Thompson's spectacular funeral, delivers in a tone of irreverent seriousness. From a treasure trove of the era's music, Gibney always hits on just the right song for the moment. And Steadman's plaint-splattered, grotesquely exaggerated but deadly accurate illustrations bring everything all back.
Fellow journalists/authors Tom Wolfe and Timothy Crouse and Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner fill us in on the arc of Thompson's journalistic accomplishments, identifying key moments in his career and reactions to seminal works such as "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72." His wives, Anita Thompson and ex-wife Sandy Thompson, and son Juan fill us in on living with a coke-snorting, bourbon-swilling wild man with virtually no acrimony, only a kind of amazement.
The crash and burn that led to the suicide everyone, including Thompson, knew would be his end happens in slow motion. He screwed up a major assignment. He gave in more and more to what McGovern campaign manager Gary Hart identifies as his "infantile" side. And, yes, the Bush re-election seriously depressed him.
He felt trapped in a character he had created, a character that Garry Trudeau has immortalized as "Duke" in his long-running comic strip, "Doonesbury". He loved his guns, he knew he was washed-up ... and yet a piece he wrote in the aftermath of 9/11, which opens the film, shows he still had it in him to offer up prescient, shrewd commentary.
Gibney -- currently Oscar nominated for "Taxi to the Dark Side" and exec producer of another nominee, "No End in Sight" -- is undoubtedly one of our key social and political documentarians. "Gonzo" continues this vital work.
GONZO: THE LIFE AND WORK OF DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON
Magnolia Pictures
HDNet Films
Credits:
Director: Alex Gibney
Producers: Jason Kliot, Joana Vincente, Alison Ellwood, Eva Orner, Graydon Carter, Alex Gibney
Narration: Johnny Depp
Director of photography: Maryse Alberti
Music: David Schwartz
Editor: Alison Ellwood
Running time -- 121 minutes
No MPAA rating...
PARK CITY -- A biographical documentary doesn't get any better than this. In "Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson," director Alex Gibney smoothly brings together a strong visual strategy, astute talking heads, never-before-seen home movies, old interviews and archival footage both rare and familiar to pull off a three-dimensional portrait of a man who in life -- and most certainly death -- is extraordinarily hard to pin down. Gibney nails him.
For Thompson's readers and others intrigued by the mystique surrounding the man who invented "gonzo" journalism, this film will, of course, be a must-see. But the themes both Thompson's work and this film explore speak directly to America in 2008, a country in a quagmire of national self-doubt, the politics of rage and distrust, a baffled Administration and a war that has lost its purpose. In other words, all the things Thompson railed against when Nixon was his nemesis. So with careful marketing and a positive critical response, which the film should elicit, "Gonzo" may reach a much wider audience, both theatrically and on cable and DVD.
Thompson was a split personality. A man capable of enormous kindness and affection, he was also given to rage and chemical and alcohol-fueled depravity. He was acutely aware of these two sides but apparently not in complete control of either. It says something about the man's good side though that so many important people have come forward to pay heart-felt tribute to him in this film.
Gibney must be a great interviewer because the comments here not only from Thompson's two wives and close friends but such figures as Jimmy Carter, George McGovern, Pat Buchanan, Jimmy Buffett, Gary Hart and Thompson's long-time illustrator Ralph Steadman paint a picture that feels accurate and catches the moods of the country during Thompson's heyday as an author-cum-rock-star.
How fascinating to learn that Thompson taught himself how to write -- for want of a better phrase -- the literature of the outsider by typing over and over again F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby". How odd to see him in vintage black-and-white on the quiz show "To Tell the Truth" after penning his first best-seller on the Hell's Angels. What a nervous guy he was then and how he changed.
Indeed Thompson fit right into the freak show of the '60s in the Bay Area, the acid-dropping, hippie-dippy, anti-war, clothes-optional guerrilla theater that caused him to turn-on but NOT to drop out. Rather he engaged the power structure in America in a way no one else has ever done. Without the usual journalistic concerns over burning sources and currying favor, he reported everything, whether on or off the record, but also made stuff up. And the phony facts somehow got as close the truth as the real ones. One interviewer remarks that his coverage of the McGovern campaign was the most accurate and least factual of any journalist's.
Having access to hundreds of Thompson's photos and 200 hours of audiotapes, home movies and other documentary footage allows Gibney to find just the right visuals to illustrate the narration, which Johnny Depp, the man who paid for Thompson's spectacular funeral, delivers in a tone of irreverent seriousness. From a treasure trove of the era's music, Gibney always hits on just the right song for the moment. And Steadman's plaint-splattered, grotesquely exaggerated but deadly accurate illustrations bring everything all back.
Fellow journalists/authors Tom Wolfe and Timothy Crouse and Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner fill us in on the arc of Thompson's journalistic accomplishments, identifying key moments in his career and reactions to seminal works such as "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72." His wives, Anita Thompson and ex-wife Sandy Thompson, and son Juan fill us in on living with a coke-snorting, bourbon-swilling wild man with virtually no acrimony, only a kind of amazement.
The crash and burn that led to the suicide everyone, including Thompson, knew would be his end happens in slow motion. He screwed up a major assignment. He gave in more and more to what McGovern campaign manager Gary Hart identifies as his "infantile" side. And, yes, the Bush re-election seriously depressed him.
He felt trapped in a character he had created, a character that Garry Trudeau has immortalized as "Duke" in his long-running comic strip, "Doonesbury". He loved his guns, he knew he was washed-up ... and yet a piece he wrote in the aftermath of 9/11, which opens the film, shows he still had it in him to offer up prescient, shrewd commentary.
Gibney -- currently Oscar nominated for "Taxi to the Dark Side" and exec producer of another nominee, "No End in Sight" -- is undoubtedly one of our key social and political documentarians. "Gonzo" continues this vital work.
GONZO: THE LIFE AND WORK OF DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON
Magnolia Pictures
HDNet Films
Credits:
Director: Alex Gibney
Producers: Jason Kliot, Joana Vincente, Alison Ellwood, Eva Orner, Graydon Carter, Alex Gibney
Narration: Johnny Depp
Director of photography: Maryse Alberti
Music: David Schwartz
Editor: Alison Ellwood
Running time -- 121 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 1/26/2008
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
This review was written for the theatrical screening of "Awake".NEW YORK -- Sometimes in their urgency to prevent critics from seeing their dreck, film companies throw out the baby with the bathwater. Such is the case with this nifty little thriller that opened Friday without being screened in advance for the press.
Playing something like an extended episode of Rod Serling's classic "Night Gallery" television series, the film uses as its main element the horrifying condition known as "anesthetic awareness," in which a patient under surgery, though completely paralyzed, is aware of everything that he is experiencing, including the pain. Were it to gain wider exposure, this film would do for operations what "Jaws" did for the beach.
The central character is Clayton Beresford Jr. (Hayden Christensen), a rich, young Wall Street tycoon suffering from an inferiority complex and a bad heart. While trying to fill his late father's shoes in the business world, he also is waiting for a suitable donor heart for a desperately needed transplant.
Said operation is to be performed by his best friend Jack (Terrence Howard), a heart surgeon who previously saved Clayton's life. His domineering mother, Lilith (Lena Olin), opposes the choice, preferring the services of a longtime friend (Arliss Howard) who also happens to be pre-eminent in the field.
Further complicating matters is Clayton's secret romance with his mother's assistant, Samantha (Jessica Alba), resulting in a quickie marriage just before he is notified that a heart has become available.
Just as he's about go under the knife, Clayton realizes, to his horror, that he can still feel everything. During the ensuing operation -- depicted in graphic detail -- he learns that things are not quite what they seem.
Director Joby Harold's script has more than its share of credibility problems, not the least of which is its depiction of a major operation occurring in what seems to be a deserted hospital. But he also succeeds in creating a quietly ominous tone that never lets up, with this being the rare modern horror effort that relies on suspense rather than bloodshed.
Other pluses are the handsome widescreen photography by Russell Carpenter, who makes fine use of numerous New York locations, and the sterling cast.
Christensen delivers a low-key performance that is ultimately quite appealing, and he's well matched by the beautiful Alba. Olin brings unexpected depths to what could have been a stock role, and Terrence Howard uses his easy ability to project innate decency to excellent effect. And veteran character actors Christopher McDonald, Fisher Stevens and Arliss Howard deliver highly effective supporting turns.
Although admittedly marred by plot holes deep enough for a truck to fall into, "Awake" didn't deserve the big sleep.
AWAKE
MGM
A Weinstein Co., Deutsch/Open City and Greenstreet Films production
Credits:
Director-screenwriter: Joby Harold
Producers: Joana Vicente, Jason Kliot, John Penotti, Fisher Stevens
Executive producer: Donny Deutsch
Director of photography: Russell Carpenter
Production designer: Dina Goldman
Co-producers: Amy Kaufman, Tory Tunnell
Costume designer: Cynthia Flynt
Editor: Craig McKay
Cast:
Clayton Beresford Jr.: Hayden Christensen
Samantha Lockwood: Jessica Alba
Lilith Bereford: Lena Olin
Jack Harper: Terrence Howard
Larry Lupin: Christopher McDonald
Dr. Putnam: Fisher Stevens
Nurse Carver: Georgina Chapman
Clayton Beresford Sr.: Sam Robards
Dr. Neyer: Arliss Howard
Running time -- 84 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
Playing something like an extended episode of Rod Serling's classic "Night Gallery" television series, the film uses as its main element the horrifying condition known as "anesthetic awareness," in which a patient under surgery, though completely paralyzed, is aware of everything that he is experiencing, including the pain. Were it to gain wider exposure, this film would do for operations what "Jaws" did for the beach.
The central character is Clayton Beresford Jr. (Hayden Christensen), a rich, young Wall Street tycoon suffering from an inferiority complex and a bad heart. While trying to fill his late father's shoes in the business world, he also is waiting for a suitable donor heart for a desperately needed transplant.
Said operation is to be performed by his best friend Jack (Terrence Howard), a heart surgeon who previously saved Clayton's life. His domineering mother, Lilith (Lena Olin), opposes the choice, preferring the services of a longtime friend (Arliss Howard) who also happens to be pre-eminent in the field.
Further complicating matters is Clayton's secret romance with his mother's assistant, Samantha (Jessica Alba), resulting in a quickie marriage just before he is notified that a heart has become available.
Just as he's about go under the knife, Clayton realizes, to his horror, that he can still feel everything. During the ensuing operation -- depicted in graphic detail -- he learns that things are not quite what they seem.
Director Joby Harold's script has more than its share of credibility problems, not the least of which is its depiction of a major operation occurring in what seems to be a deserted hospital. But he also succeeds in creating a quietly ominous tone that never lets up, with this being the rare modern horror effort that relies on suspense rather than bloodshed.
Other pluses are the handsome widescreen photography by Russell Carpenter, who makes fine use of numerous New York locations, and the sterling cast.
Christensen delivers a low-key performance that is ultimately quite appealing, and he's well matched by the beautiful Alba. Olin brings unexpected depths to what could have been a stock role, and Terrence Howard uses his easy ability to project innate decency to excellent effect. And veteran character actors Christopher McDonald, Fisher Stevens and Arliss Howard deliver highly effective supporting turns.
Although admittedly marred by plot holes deep enough for a truck to fall into, "Awake" didn't deserve the big sleep.
AWAKE
MGM
A Weinstein Co., Deutsch/Open City and Greenstreet Films production
Credits:
Director-screenwriter: Joby Harold
Producers: Joana Vicente, Jason Kliot, John Penotti, Fisher Stevens
Executive producer: Donny Deutsch
Director of photography: Russell Carpenter
Production designer: Dina Goldman
Co-producers: Amy Kaufman, Tory Tunnell
Costume designer: Cynthia Flynt
Editor: Craig McKay
Cast:
Clayton Beresford Jr.: Hayden Christensen
Samantha Lockwood: Jessica Alba
Lilith Bereford: Lena Olin
Jack Harper: Terrence Howard
Larry Lupin: Christopher McDonald
Dr. Putnam: Fisher Stevens
Nurse Carver: Georgina Chapman
Clayton Beresford Sr.: Sam Robards
Dr. Neyer: Arliss Howard
Running time -- 84 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
- 12/3/2007
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
What all this nostalgia is about for 1970s Harlem drug lords is hard to say, but Universal will release American Gangster, a fictionalized portrait of heroin kingpin Frank Lucas, just days after Magnolia comes out with Mr. Untouchable, Marc Levin's documentary on the original black Godfather, Nicky Barnes, from that same era. Barnes himself, now in the Witness Protection Program, tells his story, assisted by a talking-heads squad of lawyers, DEA agents, informants, journalists, hustlers, his ex-wife and members of Barnes' drug council, whom he ratted out after he was sent to prison.
It's undeniably fascinating, but you might want to take a shower after hanging out with this unsavory bunch. Boxoffice looks weak, with possibly better results in DVD and cable.
The problem is that Levin provides no real point of view. Indeed, he seems much too taken with all the surface gloss and displays little interest in the socioeconomic background that gave the rise to this particularly odious Mr. Big. Levin perhaps can claim that he lets people hang themselves with their own words. And ironies like the '70s black youth who sees Barnes, not Yankees slugger Reggie Jackson, as his "hero" are duly noted, then the movie moves on.
The real irony is that it was not a cop, informer or DOJ attorney who tripped up Barnes but a magazine article. When the New York Times put Barnes on its magazine cover in 1977, dressed like a superstar, with the headline "Mister Untouchable", he was a sitting duck. President Carter himself ordered the all-out effort to change his wardrobe to prison stripes.
Barnes and his fellow gangsters all read Machiavelli's The Prince from cover to cover while serving prison stints in the late '60s and absorbed that system to power. It worked for a while, though the film is light on details. Eventually, Barnes -- an ex-junkie, as were many of his lieutenants -- wallowed in jewelry, clothes, women and champagne as heroin brought in $72 million annually. The Italian Mafia trained and trusted him. In turn, Barnes modeled his organization along traditional Mafia lines, creating his own black crime family known as the Council.
Levin shot interviews with Barnes for several days in an undisclosed location. (He has a $1 million contract out on his life.) His face is in shadows, and the camera mostly focuses on his hands, featuring a gold watch and one large diamond ring. On the table are props: champagne in one shot, a single bullet in another and a pile of money or (probably fake) heroin in others.
Those few members not incarcerated for life, which includes ex-wife Thelma Grant and Council member "Jazz" Hayden, tell their versions of the story of crime, punishment and revenge. The theme from "Superfly" and other appropriate music of the era plays in the background. Usage of archival footage is mostly unimaginative, and the repetition of photos further testifies to the film's visual dullness.
Key points pass by too quickly. That these gangsters called themselves Muslims is not further explored. Nor is Barnes' inability to answer whether he was a tool for white men. Jazz makes the outrageous claim that when the Barnes family handed out money or food to the community, "these guys cared about Harlem." What they cared about was enslaving the community to their drugs.
MR. UNTOUCHABLE
Magnolia Pictures
HDNet Films in association with Damon Dash Enterprises and Blowback Prods.
Credits:
Director: Marc Levin
Producers: Mary-Jane Robinson, Alex Gibney, Jason Kliot, Joanna Vicente
Executive producers: Todd Wagner, Mark Cuban
Director of photography: Henry Adebonojo
Music: Hi-Tek
Editors: Emir Lewis, Daniel Praid
Running time -- 90 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
It's undeniably fascinating, but you might want to take a shower after hanging out with this unsavory bunch. Boxoffice looks weak, with possibly better results in DVD and cable.
The problem is that Levin provides no real point of view. Indeed, he seems much too taken with all the surface gloss and displays little interest in the socioeconomic background that gave the rise to this particularly odious Mr. Big. Levin perhaps can claim that he lets people hang themselves with their own words. And ironies like the '70s black youth who sees Barnes, not Yankees slugger Reggie Jackson, as his "hero" are duly noted, then the movie moves on.
The real irony is that it was not a cop, informer or DOJ attorney who tripped up Barnes but a magazine article. When the New York Times put Barnes on its magazine cover in 1977, dressed like a superstar, with the headline "Mister Untouchable", he was a sitting duck. President Carter himself ordered the all-out effort to change his wardrobe to prison stripes.
Barnes and his fellow gangsters all read Machiavelli's The Prince from cover to cover while serving prison stints in the late '60s and absorbed that system to power. It worked for a while, though the film is light on details. Eventually, Barnes -- an ex-junkie, as were many of his lieutenants -- wallowed in jewelry, clothes, women and champagne as heroin brought in $72 million annually. The Italian Mafia trained and trusted him. In turn, Barnes modeled his organization along traditional Mafia lines, creating his own black crime family known as the Council.
Levin shot interviews with Barnes for several days in an undisclosed location. (He has a $1 million contract out on his life.) His face is in shadows, and the camera mostly focuses on his hands, featuring a gold watch and one large diamond ring. On the table are props: champagne in one shot, a single bullet in another and a pile of money or (probably fake) heroin in others.
Those few members not incarcerated for life, which includes ex-wife Thelma Grant and Council member "Jazz" Hayden, tell their versions of the story of crime, punishment and revenge. The theme from "Superfly" and other appropriate music of the era plays in the background. Usage of archival footage is mostly unimaginative, and the repetition of photos further testifies to the film's visual dullness.
Key points pass by too quickly. That these gangsters called themselves Muslims is not further explored. Nor is Barnes' inability to answer whether he was a tool for white men. Jazz makes the outrageous claim that when the Barnes family handed out money or food to the community, "these guys cared about Harlem." What they cared about was enslaving the community to their drugs.
MR. UNTOUCHABLE
Magnolia Pictures
HDNet Films in association with Damon Dash Enterprises and Blowback Prods.
Credits:
Director: Marc Levin
Producers: Mary-Jane Robinson, Alex Gibney, Jason Kliot, Joanna Vicente
Executive producers: Todd Wagner, Mark Cuban
Director of photography: Henry Adebonojo
Music: Hi-Tek
Editors: Emir Lewis, Daniel Praid
Running time -- 90 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
- 10/26/2007
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
TORONTO -- In a weekend that saw some high-profile changes in indie film, Netflix's Red Envelope entertainment head Bahman Naraghi and HDNet Films co-founders Jason Kliot and Joana Vicente are leaving their respective companies.
Naraghi confirmed Sunday evening that he was leaving Netflix on "very good terms" and that would be able to talk about his new job in a few weeks. It is expected that he will be leaving imminently to join another company involved in film downloads.
Naraghi helped found the Netflix division, which partners with theatrical and home video retail distributors to purchase titles for its online rental service.
Red Envelope is involved in deals on multiple titles at the Toronto International Film Festival, including the recently announced partnership with IFC to buy "Love Songs" (Les chansons d'amour). The company also said Sunday that they had partnered with Arthouse Films to distribute James Crump's documentary "Black White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Maplethorpe," which is scheduled to open in New York and Los Angeles by the end of the year.
Naraghi confirmed Sunday evening that he was leaving Netflix on "very good terms" and that would be able to talk about his new job in a few weeks. It is expected that he will be leaving imminently to join another company involved in film downloads.
Naraghi helped found the Netflix division, which partners with theatrical and home video retail distributors to purchase titles for its online rental service.
Red Envelope is involved in deals on multiple titles at the Toronto International Film Festival, including the recently announced partnership with IFC to buy "Love Songs" (Les chansons d'amour). The company also said Sunday that they had partnered with Arthouse Films to distribute James Crump's documentary "Black White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Maplethorpe," which is scheduled to open in New York and Los Angeles by the end of the year.
- 9/10/2007
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
This review was written for the festival screening of "Redacted".Venice International Film Festival
VENICE, Italy -- Veteran director Brian De Palma's filmmaking skills have seldom been as razor sharp as they are in his sensational new film about members of a U.S. Army squad who rape and murder a 15-year-old Iraqi girl and slay her family.
Made on HD video and employing images from digital cameras, video recorders, Internet uploads and old-fashioned film, De Palma's movie is a ferocious argument against the engagement in Iraq for what it is doing to everyone involved.
Made so expertly that it appears to be assembled from genuine footage, the film details the extraordinary psychological pressure suffered by young soldiers on checkpoint duty in occupied areas of Iraq, and then follows one unit as two of its members skew monstrously out of control.
De Palma's screenplay is outstanding, and he draws wonderfully naturalistic performances from his youthful cast. Sympathetic to the young men who lose their way in horrible circumstances but unflinching in its depiction of the horrors that can result, the film is harrowing, but it should find responsive audiences everywhere.
A fictional story based on real events, "Redacted" distills images from an array of sources to tell its story, beginning with those captured by Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz), a young soldier who hopes they will buy his way into film school. Clean-cut Lawyer McCoy (Rob Devaney) also wields a video camera, but Salazar goes to extremes making a daily record of almost everything he sees.
That includes conversations with the other guys in the unit: Reno Flake (Patrick Carroll), a doper whose name is apt; B.B. Rush Daniel Stewart Sherman), a blowhard with a lot of body fat; Gabe Blix (Kel O'Neill), who likes to read John O'Hara; and two sergeants, Sweet (Ty Jones) and Vazques (Mike Figueroa). They goof around for the camera off duty and Salazar even records them on duty so that when one of them is blown to pieces by a bomb left in roadside trash, he gets it all.
By then, footage from a French documentary about the unit has made clear how the monotony and constant fear of maintaining checkpoints grinds the men down. Constantly being told they have to remain on duty for a further tour, they are drained and on edge. The docu reports that over 24 months 2,000 Iraqis were killed at checkpoints with only 60 proven to be insurgents. In one such incident, a pregnant woman and her baby are killed when her brother, taking her to the hospital, races through the unit's checkpoint thinking he's been waved on.
Rush and Flake are especially vulnerable to demonizing an enemy that they don't recognize or understand. Their plan to rape the daughter of a Sunni man recently arrested comes up almost idly but then becomes one of deadly intent.
De Palma uses all his considerable talent to make clear what has happened to these young men and the performances, especially by Carroll as the callously indifferent Flake and Devaney as the conscience stricken McCoy, are first rate.
The director makes great use of Handel's "Sarabande" in the picture, the somber tones familiar as the main title music in Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon". It's a reminder that nothing depicted in this film is new and that it's a shame it needs to be told again.
REDACTED
Magnolia Pictures
Produced by HDNet Films
Director, writer: Brian De Palma
Producers: Mark Cuban, Jason Kliot, Simone Urdl, Joana Vicente, Todd Wagner, Jennifer Weiss
Director of photography: Jonathon Cliff
Production designer: Phillip Barker
Co-executive producer: Gretchen McGowan
Costume designer: Jamila Alleddin
Editor: Bill Pankow
Cast:
Angel Salazar: Izzy Diaz
Specialist B.B. Rush: Daniel Stewart Sherman
Reno Flake: Patrick Carroll
Lawyer McCoy: Rob Devaney
Sgt. Vazques: Mike Figueroa
Msgt. Jim Sweet: Ty Jones
Gabe Blix: Kel O'Neill
Running time -- 90 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
VENICE, Italy -- Veteran director Brian De Palma's filmmaking skills have seldom been as razor sharp as they are in his sensational new film about members of a U.S. Army squad who rape and murder a 15-year-old Iraqi girl and slay her family.
Made on HD video and employing images from digital cameras, video recorders, Internet uploads and old-fashioned film, De Palma's movie is a ferocious argument against the engagement in Iraq for what it is doing to everyone involved.
Made so expertly that it appears to be assembled from genuine footage, the film details the extraordinary psychological pressure suffered by young soldiers on checkpoint duty in occupied areas of Iraq, and then follows one unit as two of its members skew monstrously out of control.
De Palma's screenplay is outstanding, and he draws wonderfully naturalistic performances from his youthful cast. Sympathetic to the young men who lose their way in horrible circumstances but unflinching in its depiction of the horrors that can result, the film is harrowing, but it should find responsive audiences everywhere.
A fictional story based on real events, "Redacted" distills images from an array of sources to tell its story, beginning with those captured by Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz), a young soldier who hopes they will buy his way into film school. Clean-cut Lawyer McCoy (Rob Devaney) also wields a video camera, but Salazar goes to extremes making a daily record of almost everything he sees.
That includes conversations with the other guys in the unit: Reno Flake (Patrick Carroll), a doper whose name is apt; B.B. Rush Daniel Stewart Sherman), a blowhard with a lot of body fat; Gabe Blix (Kel O'Neill), who likes to read John O'Hara; and two sergeants, Sweet (Ty Jones) and Vazques (Mike Figueroa). They goof around for the camera off duty and Salazar even records them on duty so that when one of them is blown to pieces by a bomb left in roadside trash, he gets it all.
By then, footage from a French documentary about the unit has made clear how the monotony and constant fear of maintaining checkpoints grinds the men down. Constantly being told they have to remain on duty for a further tour, they are drained and on edge. The docu reports that over 24 months 2,000 Iraqis were killed at checkpoints with only 60 proven to be insurgents. In one such incident, a pregnant woman and her baby are killed when her brother, taking her to the hospital, races through the unit's checkpoint thinking he's been waved on.
Rush and Flake are especially vulnerable to demonizing an enemy that they don't recognize or understand. Their plan to rape the daughter of a Sunni man recently arrested comes up almost idly but then becomes one of deadly intent.
De Palma uses all his considerable talent to make clear what has happened to these young men and the performances, especially by Carroll as the callously indifferent Flake and Devaney as the conscience stricken McCoy, are first rate.
The director makes great use of Handel's "Sarabande" in the picture, the somber tones familiar as the main title music in Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon". It's a reminder that nothing depicted in this film is new and that it's a shame it needs to be told again.
REDACTED
Magnolia Pictures
Produced by HDNet Films
Director, writer: Brian De Palma
Producers: Mark Cuban, Jason Kliot, Simone Urdl, Joana Vicente, Todd Wagner, Jennifer Weiss
Director of photography: Jonathon Cliff
Production designer: Phillip Barker
Co-executive producer: Gretchen McGowan
Costume designer: Jamila Alleddin
Editor: Bill Pankow
Cast:
Angel Salazar: Izzy Diaz
Specialist B.B. Rush: Daniel Stewart Sherman
Reno Flake: Patrick Carroll
Lawyer McCoy: Rob Devaney
Sgt. Vazques: Mike Figueroa
Msgt. Jim Sweet: Ty Jones
Gabe Blix: Kel O'Neill
Running time -- 90 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
- 8/31/2007
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
This review was written for the festival screening of "Redacted".
Venice International Film Festival
VENICE, Italy -- Veteran director Brian De Palma's filmmaking skills have seldom been as razor sharp as they are in his sensational new film about members of a U.S. Army squad who rape and murder a 15-year-old Iraqi girl and slay her family.
Made on HD video and employing images from digital cameras, video recorders, Internet uploads and old-fashioned film, De Palma's movie is a ferocious argument against the engagement in Iraq for what it is doing to everyone involved.
Made so expertly that it appears to be assembled from genuine footage, the film details the extraordinary psychological pressure suffered by young soldiers on checkpoint duty in occupied areas of Iraq, and then follows one unit as two of its members skew monstrously out of control.
De Palma's screenplay is outstanding, and he draws wonderfully naturalistic performances from his youthful cast. Sympathetic to the young men who lose their way in horrible circumstances but unflinching in its depiction of the horrors that can result, the film is harrowing, but it should find responsive audiences everywhere.
A fictional story based on real events, "Redacted" distills images from an array of sources to tell its story, beginning with those captured by Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz), a young soldier who hopes they will buy his way into film school. Clean-cut Lawyer McCoy (Rob Devaney) also wields a video camera, but Salazar goes to extremes making a daily record of almost everything he sees.
That includes conversations with the other guys in the unit: Reno Flake (Patrick Carroll), a doper whose name is apt; B.B. Rush Daniel Stewart Sherman), a blowhard with a lot of body fat; Gabe Blix (Kel O'Neill), who likes to read John O'Hara; and two sergeants, Sweet (Ty Jones) and Vazques (Mike Figueroa). They goof around for the camera off duty and Salazar even records them on duty so that when one of them is blown to pieces by a bomb left in roadside trash, he gets it all.
By then, footage from a French documentary about the unit has made clear how the monotony and constant fear of maintaining checkpoints grinds the men down. Constantly being told they have to remain on duty for a further tour, they are drained and on edge. The docu reports that over 24 months 2,000 Iraqis were killed at checkpoints with only 60 proven to be insurgents. In one such incident, a pregnant woman and her baby are killed when her brother, taking her to the hospital, races through the unit's checkpoint thinking he's been waved on.
Rush and Flake are especially vulnerable to demonizing an enemy that they don't recognize or understand. Their plan to rape the daughter of a Sunni man recently arrested comes up almost idly but then becomes one of deadly intent.
De Palma uses all his considerable talent to make clear what has happened to these young men and the performances, especially by Carroll as the callously indifferent Flake and Devaney as the conscience stricken McCoy, are first rate.
The director makes great use of Handel's "Sarabande" in the picture, the somber tones familiar as the main title music in Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon". It's a reminder that nothing depicted in this film is new and that it's a shame it needs to be told again.
REDACTED
Magnolia Pictures
Produced by HDNet Films
Director, writer: Brian De Palma
Producers: Mark Cuban, Jason Kliot, Simone Urdl, Joana Vicente, Todd Wagner, Jennifer Weiss
Director of photography: Jonathon Cliff
Production designer: Phillip Barker
Co-executive producer: Gretchen McGowan
Costume designer: Jamila Alleddin
Editor: Bill Pankow
Cast:
Angel Salazar: Izzy Diaz
Specialist B.B. Rush: Daniel Stewart Sherman
Reno Flake: Patrick Carroll
Lawyer McCoy: Rob Devaney
Sgt. Vazques: Mike Figueroa
Msgt. Jim Sweet: Ty Jones
Gabe Blix: Kel O'Neill
Running time -- 90 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
Venice International Film Festival
VENICE, Italy -- Veteran director Brian De Palma's filmmaking skills have seldom been as razor sharp as they are in his sensational new film about members of a U.S. Army squad who rape and murder a 15-year-old Iraqi girl and slay her family.
Made on HD video and employing images from digital cameras, video recorders, Internet uploads and old-fashioned film, De Palma's movie is a ferocious argument against the engagement in Iraq for what it is doing to everyone involved.
Made so expertly that it appears to be assembled from genuine footage, the film details the extraordinary psychological pressure suffered by young soldiers on checkpoint duty in occupied areas of Iraq, and then follows one unit as two of its members skew monstrously out of control.
De Palma's screenplay is outstanding, and he draws wonderfully naturalistic performances from his youthful cast. Sympathetic to the young men who lose their way in horrible circumstances but unflinching in its depiction of the horrors that can result, the film is harrowing, but it should find responsive audiences everywhere.
A fictional story based on real events, "Redacted" distills images from an array of sources to tell its story, beginning with those captured by Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz), a young soldier who hopes they will buy his way into film school. Clean-cut Lawyer McCoy (Rob Devaney) also wields a video camera, but Salazar goes to extremes making a daily record of almost everything he sees.
That includes conversations with the other guys in the unit: Reno Flake (Patrick Carroll), a doper whose name is apt; B.B. Rush Daniel Stewart Sherman), a blowhard with a lot of body fat; Gabe Blix (Kel O'Neill), who likes to read John O'Hara; and two sergeants, Sweet (Ty Jones) and Vazques (Mike Figueroa). They goof around for the camera off duty and Salazar even records them on duty so that when one of them is blown to pieces by a bomb left in roadside trash, he gets it all.
By then, footage from a French documentary about the unit has made clear how the monotony and constant fear of maintaining checkpoints grinds the men down. Constantly being told they have to remain on duty for a further tour, they are drained and on edge. The docu reports that over 24 months 2,000 Iraqis were killed at checkpoints with only 60 proven to be insurgents. In one such incident, a pregnant woman and her baby are killed when her brother, taking her to the hospital, races through the unit's checkpoint thinking he's been waved on.
Rush and Flake are especially vulnerable to demonizing an enemy that they don't recognize or understand. Their plan to rape the daughter of a Sunni man recently arrested comes up almost idly but then becomes one of deadly intent.
De Palma uses all his considerable talent to make clear what has happened to these young men and the performances, especially by Carroll as the callously indifferent Flake and Devaney as the conscience stricken McCoy, are first rate.
The director makes great use of Handel's "Sarabande" in the picture, the somber tones familiar as the main title music in Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon". It's a reminder that nothing depicted in this film is new and that it's a shame it needs to be told again.
REDACTED
Magnolia Pictures
Produced by HDNet Films
Director, writer: Brian De Palma
Producers: Mark Cuban, Jason Kliot, Simone Urdl, Joana Vicente, Todd Wagner, Jennifer Weiss
Director of photography: Jonathon Cliff
Production designer: Phillip Barker
Co-executive producer: Gretchen McGowan
Costume designer: Jamila Alleddin
Editor: Bill Pankow
Cast:
Angel Salazar: Izzy Diaz
Specialist B.B. Rush: Daniel Stewart Sherman
Reno Flake: Patrick Carroll
Lawyer McCoy: Rob Devaney
Sgt. Vazques: Mike Figueroa
Msgt. Jim Sweet: Ty Jones
Gabe Blix: Kel O'Neill
Running time -- 90 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
- 8/31/2007
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
This review was written for the theatrical release of "Broken English".
NEW YORK -- Parker Posey again proves her necessity to the indie film world with her complicated performance in Zoe Cassavetes' feature debut. Demonstrating that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, the screenwriter-director has delivered a well-observed film boasting highly realistic performances and dialogue, if not plot elements. But it's Posey's fascinating portrayal of a thirtysomething Manhattan single woman looking for love that lifts the film above its "Sex and the City" predictabilities.
Posey plays Nora Wilder, who smoothly handles customer relations at a posh boutique hotel catering to the rich, famous and difficult. Still single -- a fact that she is constantly reminded of by her nagging mother (Gena Rowlands) -- Nora looks on with admiration at the seemingly perfect marriage of her best friend, Audrey (Drea de Matteo), and her adoring director husband (Tim Guinee).
The difficulties of singlehood are well-demonstrated by a couple of episodes. In the first, Nora succumbs to the charm of a famous actor (Justin Theroux) only to discover that the self-obsessed lout is dating his current co-star. In the second, she goes on a blind date -- set up by her mother, no less -- that proves disastrous when the ex of the man (Josh Hamilton) suddenly shows up.
Ready to give up, Nora then meets a handsome and perfect Frenchman, Julien (Melvil Poupaud), who boasts a sexy accent to go along with his perfectly angled fedora. Just as the relationship is staring to jell, however, he goes back home to Paris, with Nora eventually following in an impulsive attempt to continue the relationship.
The film is ultimately more effective in isolated scenes than with its overall narrative, which becomes particularly ineffective with the Parisian interlude and the highly contrived ending. But those scenes, depicting the poignancy of someone desperately looking for emotional as well as physical connection, provide equal measures of emotion and humor, and Posey is superbly equipped to handle them. Her complicated performance provides the film with a depth not always present in the script.
BROKEN ENGLISH
Magnolia Pictures/HDNet Films
A Vox3 Films and Phantom Film Co. production
in association with Backup Films
Credits:
Director-screenwriter: Zoe Cassavetes
Producers: Andrew Fierberg, Jason Kliot, Joana Vicente
Executive producers: Todd Wagner, Mark Cuban
Director of photography: John Pirozzi
Production designer: Happy Massee
Music: Scratch Massive
Co-producer: Keisuke Konishi
Costume designer: Stacey Battat
Editor: Andrew Weisblum
Cast:
Nora Wilder: Parker Posey
Julien: Melvil Poupaud
Audrey Andrews: Drea de Matteo
Nick Gable: Justin Theroux
Vivien Wilder-Mann: Gena Rowlands
Mark: Tim Guinee
Running time -- 97 minutes
MPAA rating: PG-13...
NEW YORK -- Parker Posey again proves her necessity to the indie film world with her complicated performance in Zoe Cassavetes' feature debut. Demonstrating that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, the screenwriter-director has delivered a well-observed film boasting highly realistic performances and dialogue, if not plot elements. But it's Posey's fascinating portrayal of a thirtysomething Manhattan single woman looking for love that lifts the film above its "Sex and the City" predictabilities.
Posey plays Nora Wilder, who smoothly handles customer relations at a posh boutique hotel catering to the rich, famous and difficult. Still single -- a fact that she is constantly reminded of by her nagging mother (Gena Rowlands) -- Nora looks on with admiration at the seemingly perfect marriage of her best friend, Audrey (Drea de Matteo), and her adoring director husband (Tim Guinee).
The difficulties of singlehood are well-demonstrated by a couple of episodes. In the first, Nora succumbs to the charm of a famous actor (Justin Theroux) only to discover that the self-obsessed lout is dating his current co-star. In the second, she goes on a blind date -- set up by her mother, no less -- that proves disastrous when the ex of the man (Josh Hamilton) suddenly shows up.
Ready to give up, Nora then meets a handsome and perfect Frenchman, Julien (Melvil Poupaud), who boasts a sexy accent to go along with his perfectly angled fedora. Just as the relationship is staring to jell, however, he goes back home to Paris, with Nora eventually following in an impulsive attempt to continue the relationship.
The film is ultimately more effective in isolated scenes than with its overall narrative, which becomes particularly ineffective with the Parisian interlude and the highly contrived ending. But those scenes, depicting the poignancy of someone desperately looking for emotional as well as physical connection, provide equal measures of emotion and humor, and Posey is superbly equipped to handle them. Her complicated performance provides the film with a depth not always present in the script.
BROKEN ENGLISH
Magnolia Pictures/HDNet Films
A Vox3 Films and Phantom Film Co. production
in association with Backup Films
Credits:
Director-screenwriter: Zoe Cassavetes
Producers: Andrew Fierberg, Jason Kliot, Joana Vicente
Executive producers: Todd Wagner, Mark Cuban
Director of photography: John Pirozzi
Production designer: Happy Massee
Music: Scratch Massive
Co-producer: Keisuke Konishi
Costume designer: Stacey Battat
Editor: Andrew Weisblum
Cast:
Nora Wilder: Parker Posey
Julien: Melvil Poupaud
Audrey Andrews: Drea de Matteo
Nick Gable: Justin Theroux
Vivien Wilder-Mann: Gena Rowlands
Mark: Tim Guinee
Running time -- 97 minutes
MPAA rating: PG-13...
- 6/25/2007
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
You can smell the brine in "Diggers", a thoughtful, detailed, Polaroid snapshot circa 1976 of a tightly knit village of clam-diggers on Long Island's South Shore that's rich in evocative period touches.
Directed by Katherine Dieckmann from a script by actor Ken Marino, the bittersweet film does a good job in capturing a society on the cusp of change, though you wish they might have dug a little deeper in the storytelling department.
At the end of the day, this Magnolia Pictures release, which premieres on HDNet this Saturday ahead of its April 27 theatrical bow, feels more like an expertly drawn character sketch than a true moviegoing proposition.
Effectively anchoring the enterprise is Paul Rudd's performance as Hunt, a digger like his just-deceased father and grandfather before him, though one who has been noticing the telltale signs of a community beginning to crumble under the weight of corporate America.
A restless spirit to begin with, Hunt has been considering his options after laying his dad to rest, but it's going to be difficult leaving such a colorful group of family and friends behind, especially his divorced, plain-speaking (and "Hite Report"-reading) big sister, Gina (Maura Tierney).
Then there's his buddy Frankie Lozo (Marino), a bit of a Neanderthal father of five kids, and Frankie's long-suffering wife, Julie (Sarah Paulson); womanizing Jack (Ron Eldard); and Zen-embracing pot dealer Cons (Josh Hamilton).
But Hunt's eyes are also open to outside possibilities by the arrival of Zoe (Lauren Ambrose), a Manhattanite who thinks Hunt has real potential as a photographer.
There's nice work by all concerned, but after laying down the dramatic turf, Dieckmann and Marino seem to be affected by the same malaise that surrounds the entire town. There's a repetitiveness that ultimately strands the picture in that sea of good intentions.
Certainly much consideration has gone into nailing a very specific place and bicentennial time with smartly chosen TV clips, including Ford-Carter debate footage and memorable commercials of the day, while cinematographer Michael McDonough successfully evokes that unmistakable, somewhat brown around the edges, trademark '70s patina.
DIGGERS
Magnolia Pictures
An HDNet Films presentation in association with Dirty Rice Pictures
Credits:
Director: Katherine Dieckmann
Screenwriter: Ken Marino
Producers: Anne Chaisson, Jason Kliot, Joana Vicente, Ken Marino
Executive producers: Mark Cuban, Todd Wagner, David Wain
Director of photography: Michael McDonough
Production designer: Roshelle Berliner
Editors: Malcolm Jamieson, Sabine Hoffman
Costume designer: Catherine George
Music: David Mansfield
Cast:
Hunt: Paul Rudd
Zoey: Lauren Ambrose
Jack: Ron Eldard
Cons: Josh Hamilton
Julie: Sarah Paulson
Frankie Lozo: Ken Marino
Gina: Maura Tierney
Running time -- 89 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
Directed by Katherine Dieckmann from a script by actor Ken Marino, the bittersweet film does a good job in capturing a society on the cusp of change, though you wish they might have dug a little deeper in the storytelling department.
At the end of the day, this Magnolia Pictures release, which premieres on HDNet this Saturday ahead of its April 27 theatrical bow, feels more like an expertly drawn character sketch than a true moviegoing proposition.
Effectively anchoring the enterprise is Paul Rudd's performance as Hunt, a digger like his just-deceased father and grandfather before him, though one who has been noticing the telltale signs of a community beginning to crumble under the weight of corporate America.
A restless spirit to begin with, Hunt has been considering his options after laying his dad to rest, but it's going to be difficult leaving such a colorful group of family and friends behind, especially his divorced, plain-speaking (and "Hite Report"-reading) big sister, Gina (Maura Tierney).
Then there's his buddy Frankie Lozo (Marino), a bit of a Neanderthal father of five kids, and Frankie's long-suffering wife, Julie (Sarah Paulson); womanizing Jack (Ron Eldard); and Zen-embracing pot dealer Cons (Josh Hamilton).
But Hunt's eyes are also open to outside possibilities by the arrival of Zoe (Lauren Ambrose), a Manhattanite who thinks Hunt has real potential as a photographer.
There's nice work by all concerned, but after laying down the dramatic turf, Dieckmann and Marino seem to be affected by the same malaise that surrounds the entire town. There's a repetitiveness that ultimately strands the picture in that sea of good intentions.
Certainly much consideration has gone into nailing a very specific place and bicentennial time with smartly chosen TV clips, including Ford-Carter debate footage and memorable commercials of the day, while cinematographer Michael McDonough successfully evokes that unmistakable, somewhat brown around the edges, trademark '70s patina.
DIGGERS
Magnolia Pictures
An HDNet Films presentation in association with Dirty Rice Pictures
Credits:
Director: Katherine Dieckmann
Screenwriter: Ken Marino
Producers: Anne Chaisson, Jason Kliot, Joana Vicente, Ken Marino
Executive producers: Mark Cuban, Todd Wagner, David Wain
Director of photography: Michael McDonough
Production designer: Roshelle Berliner
Editors: Malcolm Jamieson, Sabine Hoffman
Costume designer: Catherine George
Music: David Mansfield
Cast:
Hunt: Paul Rudd
Zoey: Lauren Ambrose
Jack: Ron Eldard
Cons: Josh Hamilton
Julie: Sarah Paulson
Frankie Lozo: Ken Marino
Gina: Maura Tierney
Running time -- 89 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
This review was written for the theatrical release of "Diggers".You can smell the brine in "Diggers", a thoughtful, detailed, Polaroid snapshot circa 1976 of a tightly knit village of clam-diggers on Long Island's South Shore that's rich in evocative period touches.
Directed by Katherine Dieckmann from a script by actor Ken Marino, the bittersweet film does a good job in capturing a society on the cusp of change, though you wish they might have dug a little deeper in the storytelling department.
At the end of the day, this Magnolia Pictures release, which premieres on HDNet this Saturday ahead of its April 27 theatrical bow, feels more like an expertly drawn character sketch than a true moviegoing proposition.
Effectively anchoring the enterprise is Paul Rudd's performance as Hunt, a digger like his just-deceased father and grandfather before him, though one who has been noticing the telltale signs of a community beginning to crumble under the weight of corporate America.
A restless spirit to begin with, Hunt has been considering his options after laying his dad to rest, but it's going to be difficult leaving such a colorful group of family and friends behind, especially his divorced, plain-speaking (and "Hite Report"-reading) big sister, Gina (Maura Tierney).
Then there's his buddy Frankie Lozo (Marino), a bit of a Neanderthal father of five kids, and Frankie's long-suffering wife, Julie (Sarah Paulson); womanizing Jack (Ron Eldard); and Zen-embracing pot dealer Cons (Josh Hamilton).
But Hunt's eyes are also open to outside possibilities by the arrival of Zoe (Lauren Ambrose), a Manhattanite who thinks Hunt has real potential as a photographer.
There's nice work by all concerned, but after laying down the dramatic turf, Dieckmann and Marino seem to be affected by the same malaise that surrounds the entire town. There's a repetitiveness that ultimately strands the picture in that sea of good intentions.
Certainly much consideration has gone into nailing a very specific place and bicentennial time with smartly chosen TV clips, including Ford-Carter debate footage and memorable commercials of the day, while cinematographer Michael McDonough successfully evokes that unmistakable, somewhat brown around the edges, trademark '70s patina.
DIGGERS
Magnolia Pictures
An HDNet Films presentation in association with Dirty Rice Pictures
Credits:
Director: Katherine Dieckmann
Screenwriter: Ken Marino
Producers: Anne Chaisson, Jason Kliot, Joana Vicente, Ken Marino
Executive producers: Mark Cuban, Todd Wagner, David Wain
Director of photography: Michael McDonough
Production designer: Roshelle Berliner
Editors: Malcolm Jamieson, Sabine Hoffman
Costume designer: Catherine George
Music: David Mansfield
Cast:
Hunt: Paul Rudd
Zoey: Lauren Ambrose
Jack: Ron Eldard
Cons: Josh Hamilton
Julie: Sarah Paulson
Frankie Lozo: Ken Marino
Gina: Maura Tierney
Running time -- 89 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
Directed by Katherine Dieckmann from a script by actor Ken Marino, the bittersweet film does a good job in capturing a society on the cusp of change, though you wish they might have dug a little deeper in the storytelling department.
At the end of the day, this Magnolia Pictures release, which premieres on HDNet this Saturday ahead of its April 27 theatrical bow, feels more like an expertly drawn character sketch than a true moviegoing proposition.
Effectively anchoring the enterprise is Paul Rudd's performance as Hunt, a digger like his just-deceased father and grandfather before him, though one who has been noticing the telltale signs of a community beginning to crumble under the weight of corporate America.
A restless spirit to begin with, Hunt has been considering his options after laying his dad to rest, but it's going to be difficult leaving such a colorful group of family and friends behind, especially his divorced, plain-speaking (and "Hite Report"-reading) big sister, Gina (Maura Tierney).
Then there's his buddy Frankie Lozo (Marino), a bit of a Neanderthal father of five kids, and Frankie's long-suffering wife, Julie (Sarah Paulson); womanizing Jack (Ron Eldard); and Zen-embracing pot dealer Cons (Josh Hamilton).
But Hunt's eyes are also open to outside possibilities by the arrival of Zoe (Lauren Ambrose), a Manhattanite who thinks Hunt has real potential as a photographer.
There's nice work by all concerned, but after laying down the dramatic turf, Dieckmann and Marino seem to be affected by the same malaise that surrounds the entire town. There's a repetitiveness that ultimately strands the picture in that sea of good intentions.
Certainly much consideration has gone into nailing a very specific place and bicentennial time with smartly chosen TV clips, including Ford-Carter debate footage and memorable commercials of the day, while cinematographer Michael McDonough successfully evokes that unmistakable, somewhat brown around the edges, trademark '70s patina.
DIGGERS
Magnolia Pictures
An HDNet Films presentation in association with Dirty Rice Pictures
Credits:
Director: Katherine Dieckmann
Screenwriter: Ken Marino
Producers: Anne Chaisson, Jason Kliot, Joana Vicente, Ken Marino
Executive producers: Mark Cuban, Todd Wagner, David Wain
Director of photography: Michael McDonough
Production designer: Roshelle Berliner
Editors: Malcolm Jamieson, Sabine Hoffman
Costume designer: Catherine George
Music: David Mansfield
Cast:
Hunt: Paul Rudd
Zoey: Lauren Ambrose
Jack: Ron Eldard
Cons: Josh Hamilton
Julie: Sarah Paulson
Frankie Lozo: Ken Marino
Gina: Maura Tierney
Running time -- 89 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
London-based indie distributor Optimum, now owned by Canal Plus, snared U.K. rights to Brian De Palma's Iraq War thriller Redacted from New York-based producer and broadcaster HDNet Films.
The Brit company also snaffled U.K. rights to Alex Gibney's documentary Hunter S. Thompson about the cult hero gonzo journalist.
De Palma's movie recounts the story of a group of American soldiers stationed in Iraq and is produced by HDNet Films co-presidents Jason Kliot and Joana Vicente, along with The Film Farm's Simone Urdl and Jennifer Weiss. The film is currently in pre-production and will start shooting in April, HDNet said.
Thompson is billed as the first documentary to examine the life of Thompson. Directed by Gibney ("Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room") and produced by HDNet Films Kliot and Vicente with Graydon Carter, the film aims to draw on over 200 hours of home movie and documentary footage that Thompson's family granted the filmmakers.
"Both films will give audiences an exciting new perspective on a talented artist," Optimum managing director Will Clarke said.
The Brit company also snaffled U.K. rights to Alex Gibney's documentary Hunter S. Thompson about the cult hero gonzo journalist.
De Palma's movie recounts the story of a group of American soldiers stationed in Iraq and is produced by HDNet Films co-presidents Jason Kliot and Joana Vicente, along with The Film Farm's Simone Urdl and Jennifer Weiss. The film is currently in pre-production and will start shooting in April, HDNet said.
Thompson is billed as the first documentary to examine the life of Thompson. Directed by Gibney ("Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room") and produced by HDNet Films Kliot and Vicente with Graydon Carter, the film aims to draw on over 200 hours of home movie and documentary footage that Thompson's family granted the filmmakers.
"Both films will give audiences an exciting new perspective on a talented artist," Optimum managing director Will Clarke said.
- 2/11/2007
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
- The top troupes at Magnolia Pictures are rallied up for one of the bigger projects on slate for the 07’ calender year. After years of studio projects, Brian De Palma’s next will be distribed by one of the indie studios. Magnolia Pictures will release the pic day-and-date next fall in theaters. The project that reminds me of Roberto Rossellini 1946’s Paisà (Paisan) is called Redacted. This will be a montage of stories about U.S. soldiers fighting in the conflict and this includes one that looks at the rape and murder of a 14-year old Iraqi girl, and the killing of three of her family members by four Us soldiers. The soldiers were sleep-deprived and living on energy drinks and sleeping pills in a situation where anyone outside the fence was considered the enemy. The killings have been the most provocative in a series of war crimes that have
- 1/29/2007
- IONCINEMA.com
This review was written for the festival screening of "Fay Grim".PARK CITY -- A story of literature, international intrigue and family loyalty, Hal Hartley's "Fay Grim" exists somewhere between The Marx Brothers and an espionage thriller. A sequel -- something rare in the indie world -- to his 1998 hit "Henry Fool", the film stars Parker Posey in the kind of strong and quirky role that has made her the darling of Sundance. This is definitely not a mainstream item, but it could attract an audience ready for something completely different.
A Hartley film is like an inside joke -- if you get it, it's funny; if not, you will probably come away scratching your head. His films are more about atmosphere, characters (usually eccentrics), snappy dialogue and outlandish plots. "Fay Grim" is no exception.
Since the first film eight years ago, Fay's idiot savant husband Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan) has been on the lam from the law; her brother, Simon (James Urbaniak), a Nobel Prize-winning garbage man/poet from Woodside, Queens, N.Y., is incarcerated for helping Henry escape; and her 14-year-old son Ned (Liam Aiken) has been expelled from school for bringing in pornography.
It turns out that Henry's handwritten confessional filling seven or eight notebooks, the subject of the first film, is really encoded revelations he wrote for the CIA. Threatening to unhinge the balance of power in the world, the notebooks become the subject of an international hunt ranging from New York to Paris to Istanbul and thrust Fay into the midst of terrorist activity.
Hartley obviously loves the Grim family and uses them as a prism to look at some of the mayhem in the world today. When CIA agent Fulbright (Jeff Goldblum) tricks Fay into going to Paris to retrieve Henry's papers, she learns quickly how to handle herself in dangerous situations. She is smart but unsophisticated -- a representative American -- and becomes the target for all sorts of feelings about the U.S. But much of the time, the characters seem more comical than threatening.
Among the people Fay encounters are a Russian flight attendant (Elina Lowensohn), who was Henry's lover, a beautiful British spy with a bum leg (Saffron Burrows) and a bumbling French operative (Harold Schrott). All roads lead to a real live Afghani terrorist (Anatole Taubman), Henry's best friend, who is keeping him in captivity, perhaps for his own good.
It doesn't all quite add up, and even Hartley admits there are some holes in the plot. He seems more interested in testing Fay in situations, watching her grow and teaching some life lessons along the way. Fortunately, Posey, who has worked with Hartley three times before, is an actress who can pull off this kind of material that borders on the absurd but has a deep reservoir of human emotion. In fact, the whole cast, headed by Goldblum, Urbaniak and Lowensohn, seems to be in on the joke.
Working in HD for the first time, Hartley brings some interesting off-kilter camera angles and stylistic touches to the film, like flashing words on the screen to spell out how Fay is putting ideas together in her head. On a small budget, cinematographer Sarah Cawley Cabiya makes international locations like the Bosphorous and Turkish streets look big.
"Fay Grim" is the kind of film you might not get at first (or ever), but the next morning you might find that something about it has embedded itself in your consciousness. That's Hartley's subversive sense of humor at work.
FAY GRIM
Magnolia Pictures
HDNet Films presents a Possible Films production in association with This Is That and Zero Fiction, with the support of Mediaboard Berlin Brandenburg
Credits:
Screenwriter-director-editor: Hal Hartley
Producers: Hal Hartley, Michael S. Ryan, Martin Hagemann, Jason Kliot, Joana Vicente
Executive producers: Ted Hope, Todd Wagner, Mark Cuban
Director of photography: Sarah Cawley Cabiya
Production designer: Richard Sylvarnes
Costume designers: Anette Guther, Daniela Selig
Cast:
Fay Grim: Parker Posey
Fulbright: Jeff Goldblum
Simon Grim: James Urbaniak
Juliet: Saffron Burrows
Ned Grim: Liam Aiken
Bebe: Elina Lowensohn
Carl Fogg: Leo Fitzpatrick
Angus James: Chuck Montgomery
Henry Fool: Thomas Jay Ryan
Running time -- 118 minutes
No MPAA rating...
A Hartley film is like an inside joke -- if you get it, it's funny; if not, you will probably come away scratching your head. His films are more about atmosphere, characters (usually eccentrics), snappy dialogue and outlandish plots. "Fay Grim" is no exception.
Since the first film eight years ago, Fay's idiot savant husband Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan) has been on the lam from the law; her brother, Simon (James Urbaniak), a Nobel Prize-winning garbage man/poet from Woodside, Queens, N.Y., is incarcerated for helping Henry escape; and her 14-year-old son Ned (Liam Aiken) has been expelled from school for bringing in pornography.
It turns out that Henry's handwritten confessional filling seven or eight notebooks, the subject of the first film, is really encoded revelations he wrote for the CIA. Threatening to unhinge the balance of power in the world, the notebooks become the subject of an international hunt ranging from New York to Paris to Istanbul and thrust Fay into the midst of terrorist activity.
Hartley obviously loves the Grim family and uses them as a prism to look at some of the mayhem in the world today. When CIA agent Fulbright (Jeff Goldblum) tricks Fay into going to Paris to retrieve Henry's papers, she learns quickly how to handle herself in dangerous situations. She is smart but unsophisticated -- a representative American -- and becomes the target for all sorts of feelings about the U.S. But much of the time, the characters seem more comical than threatening.
Among the people Fay encounters are a Russian flight attendant (Elina Lowensohn), who was Henry's lover, a beautiful British spy with a bum leg (Saffron Burrows) and a bumbling French operative (Harold Schrott). All roads lead to a real live Afghani terrorist (Anatole Taubman), Henry's best friend, who is keeping him in captivity, perhaps for his own good.
It doesn't all quite add up, and even Hartley admits there are some holes in the plot. He seems more interested in testing Fay in situations, watching her grow and teaching some life lessons along the way. Fortunately, Posey, who has worked with Hartley three times before, is an actress who can pull off this kind of material that borders on the absurd but has a deep reservoir of human emotion. In fact, the whole cast, headed by Goldblum, Urbaniak and Lowensohn, seems to be in on the joke.
Working in HD for the first time, Hartley brings some interesting off-kilter camera angles and stylistic touches to the film, like flashing words on the screen to spell out how Fay is putting ideas together in her head. On a small budget, cinematographer Sarah Cawley Cabiya makes international locations like the Bosphorous and Turkish streets look big.
"Fay Grim" is the kind of film you might not get at first (or ever), but the next morning you might find that something about it has embedded itself in your consciousness. That's Hartley's subversive sense of humor at work.
FAY GRIM
Magnolia Pictures
HDNet Films presents a Possible Films production in association with This Is That and Zero Fiction, with the support of Mediaboard Berlin Brandenburg
Credits:
Screenwriter-director-editor: Hal Hartley
Producers: Hal Hartley, Michael S. Ryan, Martin Hagemann, Jason Kliot, Joana Vicente
Executive producers: Ted Hope, Todd Wagner, Mark Cuban
Director of photography: Sarah Cawley Cabiya
Production designer: Richard Sylvarnes
Costume designers: Anette Guther, Daniela Selig
Cast:
Fay Grim: Parker Posey
Fulbright: Jeff Goldblum
Simon Grim: James Urbaniak
Juliet: Saffron Burrows
Ned Grim: Liam Aiken
Bebe: Elina Lowensohn
Carl Fogg: Leo Fitzpatrick
Angus James: Chuck Montgomery
Henry Fool: Thomas Jay Ryan
Running time -- 118 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 1/25/2007
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
PARK CITY -- A story of literature, international intrigue and family loyalty, Hal Hartley's "Fay Grim" exists somewhere between the Marx Brothers and an espionage thriller. A sequel -- something rare in the indie world -- to his 1998 hit "Henry Fool", the film stars Parker Posey in the kind of strong and quirky role that has made her the darling of Sundance. This is definitely not a mainstream item, but it could attract an audience ready for something completely different.
A Hartley film is like an inside joke -- if you get it, it's funny; if not, you will probably come away scratching your head. His films are more about atmosphere, characters (usually eccentrics), snappy dialogue and outlandish plots. "Fay Grim" is no exception.
Since the first film eight years ago, Fay's idiot savant husband Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan) has been on the lam from the law; her brother, Simon (James Urbaniak), a Nobel Prize-winning garbage man/poet from Woodside, Queens, N.Y., is incarcerated for helping Henry escape; and her 14-year-old son Ned (Liam Aiken) has been expelled from school for bringing in pornography.
It turns out that Henry's handwritten confessional filling seven or eight notebooks, the subject of the first film, is really encoded revelations he wrote for the CIA. Threatening to unhinge the balance of power in the world, the notebooks become the subject of an international hunt ranging from New York to Paris to Istanbul and thrust Fay into the midst of terrorist activity.
Hartley obviously loves the Grim family and uses them as a prism to look at some of the mayhem in the world today. When CIA agent Fulbright (Jeff Goldblum) tricks Fay into going to Paris to retrieve Henry's papers, she learns quickly how to handle herself in dangerous situations. She is smart but unsophisticated -- a representative American -- and becomes the target for all sorts of feelings about the U.S. But much of the time, the characters seem more comical than threatening.
Among the people Fay encounters are a Russian flight attendant (Elina Lowensohn), who was Henry's lover, a beautiful British spy with a bum leg (Saffron Burrows) and a bumbling French operative (Harold Schrott). All roads lead to a real live Afghani terrorist (Anatole Taubman), Henry's best friend, who is keeping him in captivity, perhaps for his own good.
It doesn't all quite add up, and even Hartley admits there are some holes in the plot. He seems more interested in testing Fay in situations, watching her grow and teaching some life lessons along the way. Fortunately, Posey, who has worked with Hartley three times before, is an actress who can pull off this kind of material that borders on the absurd but has a deep reservoir of human emotion. In fact, the whole cast, headed by Goldblum, Urbaniak and Lowensohn, seems to be in on the joke.
Working in HD for the first time, Hartley brings some interesting off-kilter camera angles and stylistic touches to the film, like flashing words on the screen to spell out how Fay is putting ideas together in her head. On a small budget, cinematographer Sarah Cawley Cabiya makes international locations like the Bosphorous and Turkish streets look big.
"Fay Grim" is the kind of film you might not get at first (or ever), but the next morning you might find that something about it has embedded itself in your consciousness. That's Hartley's subversive sense of humor at work.
FAY GRIM
Magnolia Pictures
HDNet Films presents a Possible Films production in association with This Is That and Zero Fiction, with the support of Mediaboard Berlin Brandenburg
Credits:
Screenwriter-director-editor: Hal Hartley
Producers: Hal Hartley, Michael S. Ryan, Martin Hagemann, Jason Kliot, Joana Vicente
Executive producers: Ted Hope, Todd Wagner, Mark Cuban
Director of photography: Sarah Cawley Cabiya
Production designer: Richard Sylvarnes
Costume designers: Anette Guther, Daniela Selig
Cast:
Fay Grim: Parker Posey
Fulbright: Jeff Goldblum
Simon Grim: James Urbaniak
Juliet: Saffron Burrows
Ned Grim: Liam Aiken
Bebe: Elina Lowensohn
Carl Fogg: Leo Fitzpatrick
Angus James: Chuck Montgomery
Henry Fool: Thomas Jay Ryan
Running time -- 118 minutes
No MPAA rating...
A Hartley film is like an inside joke -- if you get it, it's funny; if not, you will probably come away scratching your head. His films are more about atmosphere, characters (usually eccentrics), snappy dialogue and outlandish plots. "Fay Grim" is no exception.
Since the first film eight years ago, Fay's idiot savant husband Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan) has been on the lam from the law; her brother, Simon (James Urbaniak), a Nobel Prize-winning garbage man/poet from Woodside, Queens, N.Y., is incarcerated for helping Henry escape; and her 14-year-old son Ned (Liam Aiken) has been expelled from school for bringing in pornography.
It turns out that Henry's handwritten confessional filling seven or eight notebooks, the subject of the first film, is really encoded revelations he wrote for the CIA. Threatening to unhinge the balance of power in the world, the notebooks become the subject of an international hunt ranging from New York to Paris to Istanbul and thrust Fay into the midst of terrorist activity.
Hartley obviously loves the Grim family and uses them as a prism to look at some of the mayhem in the world today. When CIA agent Fulbright (Jeff Goldblum) tricks Fay into going to Paris to retrieve Henry's papers, she learns quickly how to handle herself in dangerous situations. She is smart but unsophisticated -- a representative American -- and becomes the target for all sorts of feelings about the U.S. But much of the time, the characters seem more comical than threatening.
Among the people Fay encounters are a Russian flight attendant (Elina Lowensohn), who was Henry's lover, a beautiful British spy with a bum leg (Saffron Burrows) and a bumbling French operative (Harold Schrott). All roads lead to a real live Afghani terrorist (Anatole Taubman), Henry's best friend, who is keeping him in captivity, perhaps for his own good.
It doesn't all quite add up, and even Hartley admits there are some holes in the plot. He seems more interested in testing Fay in situations, watching her grow and teaching some life lessons along the way. Fortunately, Posey, who has worked with Hartley three times before, is an actress who can pull off this kind of material that borders on the absurd but has a deep reservoir of human emotion. In fact, the whole cast, headed by Goldblum, Urbaniak and Lowensohn, seems to be in on the joke.
Working in HD for the first time, Hartley brings some interesting off-kilter camera angles and stylistic touches to the film, like flashing words on the screen to spell out how Fay is putting ideas together in her head. On a small budget, cinematographer Sarah Cawley Cabiya makes international locations like the Bosphorous and Turkish streets look big.
"Fay Grim" is the kind of film you might not get at first (or ever), but the next morning you might find that something about it has embedded itself in your consciousness. That's Hartley's subversive sense of humor at work.
FAY GRIM
Magnolia Pictures
HDNet Films presents a Possible Films production in association with This Is That and Zero Fiction, with the support of Mediaboard Berlin Brandenburg
Credits:
Screenwriter-director-editor: Hal Hartley
Producers: Hal Hartley, Michael S. Ryan, Martin Hagemann, Jason Kliot, Joana Vicente
Executive producers: Ted Hope, Todd Wagner, Mark Cuban
Director of photography: Sarah Cawley Cabiya
Production designer: Richard Sylvarnes
Costume designers: Anette Guther, Daniela Selig
Cast:
Fay Grim: Parker Posey
Fulbright: Jeff Goldblum
Simon Grim: James Urbaniak
Juliet: Saffron Burrows
Ned Grim: Liam Aiken
Bebe: Elina Lowensohn
Carl Fogg: Leo Fitzpatrick
Angus James: Chuck Montgomery
Henry Fool: Thomas Jay Ryan
Running time -- 118 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 1/25/2007
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
NEW YORK -- The Woodstock Film Festival, which runs Oct. 11-15, unveiled a program Monday boasting top indie films and industry heavyweights -- from the East Coast premiere of Douglas McGrath's Infamous to awards for IFC Entertainment president Jonathan Sehring and documentarian Barbara Kopple. Notable panelists at the upstate New York festival include Steven C. Beer, Arianna Bocco, Andrew P. Hurwitz, Timothy Hutton, Jason Kliot, Bingham Ray, John Sloss, David Strathairn, Lemore Syvan, Joana Vicente and Diane Weyermann. Infamous opens the fest along with Rachid Bouchareb's Days of Glory (Indigenes). Susanne Bier's After the Wedding takes the fest's centerpiece slot, and Kopple's documentary Dixie Chicks: Shut Up and Sing closes the event. Kopple will take home the Maverick Award for her decades of documentary filmmaking. Sehring will accept the Maverick Award for his part in founding the Independent Film Channel, IFC Prods., IFC Films and IFC First Take along with IFC's co-founding of the digital production company InDigEnt with partners Gary Winick and John Sloss.
- 9/18/2006
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
NEW YORK -- Parker Posey, Drea DeMatteo, Gena Rowlands, Jeanne Moreau, Justin Theroux and Josh Hamilton are set to star in writer-director Zoe Cassavetes feature debut, Broken English. It's the latest movie greenlighted by HDNet Films, which recently decided to raise its budget cap on future films from under $2 million to under $5 million if the right stars are attached. This under-$5 million project was packaged by Vox3 Films with most of the financing lined up from Japan's Phantom Film and France's Back Up Films before Vox3 approached HDNet. "With the cast assembled, they needed someone who could pull the trigger on production in three weeks," said HDNet co-president Jason Kliot, a producer on the project. "The great thing about our company is that we have in-house legal and all the financing from Mark Cuban) and Todd (Wagner), so we had all the papers signed and the film going within a week." Phantom, Back Up and HDNet are co-producing the project.
Mark Tusk has been named head of development at 2929 Entertainment's HDNet Films. Tusk joined Miramax Films as manager of acquisitions in 1988 and in 1996 moved to New Line Cinema, where he served as senior vp of production and also exec produced Hedwig and the Angry Inch. He has spent the past few years working as a photographer. He will report to co-presidents Jason Kliot and Joana Vicente, helping them acquire, develop and package upcoming features.
- 11/29/2005
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
NEW YORK -- "The War Within" is the first American feature to examine terrorism through the eyes of a Muslim terrorist. It concerns a Pakistani immigrant who's part of an Islamic terrorist cell in New York. While film does not -- and, of course, should not -- try to evoke any sympathy for the perverse aims of its protagonist, it does a fairly good job of laying out the basic political motives behind Islamic terrorism. Unfortunately, as a drama, it has its narrative peak in the middle and quickly runs out of story afterward.
Director Joseph Castelo's second feature likely will attract politically aware audiences in upscale urban venues. Boxoffice success will depend on whether reviewers find it a deep enough analysis of the subject. The film opens Sept. 30 in New York.
The story, from an idea by leading actor Ayad Aktar, which he co-scripted with Castelo and Tom Glynn, starts violently. Hassan (Aktar) is picked up in the streets of Paris and deported to Karachi because his dead brother was a terrorist. The mild-mannered young man is radicalized in Pakistan and relocates to New York as part of an Islamic terrorist cell planning to blow up Grand Central Station.
Hassan moves in with Pakistani friends who have no interest in his terrible agenda. The attack is called off because of increased security, and Hassan has a short time to hear contradictory views about his beliefs. But he has become too radicalized to change his mind and continues with his plan to suicide-bomb the station.
The first half of the film is good. Castelo cuts between brief scenes of Hassan's radicalization in Karachi and his underhand efforts to plan the crime in New York. Pacing and editing are crisp and propel the story along while laying the foundations for a psychological examination of the would-be mass murderer. But things fall apart at the midpoint.
When the attack is called off, the story suddenly has nowhere to go. Castelo does spend time allowing characters to voice opinions about Western imperialism. But any serious character analysis is dropped in favor of messy plotting involving a romance and plans for a new terrorist atrocity.
Castelo leaves the most interesting part of the story out of the film. Why seemingly nonviolent and relatively affluent young men decide to become suicide bombers is one of today's most pressing questions. Castelo never probes this psychology deeper than offering a few casual thoughts about American foreign policy. What drives Hassan to become a suicide bomber is insufficiently explored, and the motives that are offered will hardly be new to those with even a marginal knowledge of current affairs. A 1997 British film "My Son the Fanatic" offered a much better analysis of why and how young Muslim men become radicalized.
Considering the clear and present danger posed by Islamic terrorism, it's amazing that no independent American filmmakers have dared to make a feature examining it before. So, in spite of its narrative shortcomings, it's still refreshing that Castelo, backed by New York's HDNet Films, has decided to approach the subject directly.
THE WAR WITHIN
Magnolia Pictures
HDNet Films
Credits:
Director: Joseph Castelo
Screenwriters: Joseph Castelo, Ayad Aktar, Tom Glynn
Producers: Jason Kliot, Joana Vicente, Tom Glynn
Executive producers: Todd Wagner, Mark Cuban
Director of photography: Lisa Rinzler
Production designer: Stephanie Carroll
Music: David Holmes
Costumes: Sylvia Grieser
Editor: Malcolm Jamieson
Cast:
Hassan: Ayad Aktar
Sayeed: Firdous Bamji
Duri: Nandana Sen
Farida: Sarita Choudhury
Khalid: Charles Daniel Sandoval
Ali: Varun Sriram
Rasheeda: Anjeli Chapman
Abdul: Aasif Mandvi
Running time -- 100 minutes
No MPAA rating...
Director Joseph Castelo's second feature likely will attract politically aware audiences in upscale urban venues. Boxoffice success will depend on whether reviewers find it a deep enough analysis of the subject. The film opens Sept. 30 in New York.
The story, from an idea by leading actor Ayad Aktar, which he co-scripted with Castelo and Tom Glynn, starts violently. Hassan (Aktar) is picked up in the streets of Paris and deported to Karachi because his dead brother was a terrorist. The mild-mannered young man is radicalized in Pakistan and relocates to New York as part of an Islamic terrorist cell planning to blow up Grand Central Station.
Hassan moves in with Pakistani friends who have no interest in his terrible agenda. The attack is called off because of increased security, and Hassan has a short time to hear contradictory views about his beliefs. But he has become too radicalized to change his mind and continues with his plan to suicide-bomb the station.
The first half of the film is good. Castelo cuts between brief scenes of Hassan's radicalization in Karachi and his underhand efforts to plan the crime in New York. Pacing and editing are crisp and propel the story along while laying the foundations for a psychological examination of the would-be mass murderer. But things fall apart at the midpoint.
When the attack is called off, the story suddenly has nowhere to go. Castelo does spend time allowing characters to voice opinions about Western imperialism. But any serious character analysis is dropped in favor of messy plotting involving a romance and plans for a new terrorist atrocity.
Castelo leaves the most interesting part of the story out of the film. Why seemingly nonviolent and relatively affluent young men decide to become suicide bombers is one of today's most pressing questions. Castelo never probes this psychology deeper than offering a few casual thoughts about American foreign policy. What drives Hassan to become a suicide bomber is insufficiently explored, and the motives that are offered will hardly be new to those with even a marginal knowledge of current affairs. A 1997 British film "My Son the Fanatic" offered a much better analysis of why and how young Muslim men become radicalized.
Considering the clear and present danger posed by Islamic terrorism, it's amazing that no independent American filmmakers have dared to make a feature examining it before. So, in spite of its narrative shortcomings, it's still refreshing that Castelo, backed by New York's HDNet Films, has decided to approach the subject directly.
THE WAR WITHIN
Magnolia Pictures
HDNet Films
Credits:
Director: Joseph Castelo
Screenwriters: Joseph Castelo, Ayad Aktar, Tom Glynn
Producers: Jason Kliot, Joana Vicente, Tom Glynn
Executive producers: Todd Wagner, Mark Cuban
Director of photography: Lisa Rinzler
Production designer: Stephanie Carroll
Music: David Holmes
Costumes: Sylvia Grieser
Editor: Malcolm Jamieson
Cast:
Hassan: Ayad Aktar
Sayeed: Firdous Bamji
Duri: Nandana Sen
Farida: Sarita Choudhury
Khalid: Charles Daniel Sandoval
Ali: Varun Sriram
Rasheeda: Anjeli Chapman
Abdul: Aasif Mandvi
Running time -- 100 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 9/12/2005
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
NEW YORK -- Paul Rudd, Ken Marino, Ron Eldard, Josh Hamilton, Maura Tierney, Lauren Ambrose and Sarah Paulson have come aboard HDNet Films' Diggers, which is filming in New York under Katherine Dieckmann's direction. Magnolia Pictures -- which, like HDNet Films, is held by Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner's 2929 Entertainment -- will distribute the film, which will have a day-and-date TV premiere on the HDNet Movies Network. Marino wrote the film, which focuses on two generations of clam diggers and is being produced by HDNet Films' Jason Kliot and Joana Vicente, Dirty Rice's Anne Chaisson and Marino, with Wagner and Cuban as exec producers.
- 8/10/2005
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Cynthia Nixon will star in HDNet Films' One Last Thing ..., in which she'll play a mother whose son (Michael Angarano) is dealing with a terminal illness. Alex Steyermark, who most recently directed Prey for Rock & Roll, will helm the film from a screenplay by Barry Stringfellow. HDNet Films co-presidents Jason Kliot and Joana Vicente will produce the film along with Susan Stover. Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban, who head 2929 Entertainment, the parent company of HDNet Films, will executive produce. Last Thing involves an organization that grants last wishes to dying children, which is surprised when Nixon's son makes an unconventional request on national TV.
- 3/20/2005
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
In writer-director David Maquiling's "Too Much Sleep", a gun gets stolen from a hapless security guard, and he goes in search of the weapon. We might expect such a trail to lead us through a noirish underworld of crime and nefarious characters. Instead, Maquiling propels us through a trailer park, a bowling alley, parking lots, dull parties, even duller bars and a Chinese restaurant in the sleepy suburbs of New Jersey where our hero encounters a bunch of oddball nonentities.
Underwhelming in story line and a little too precious in its strategies, "Sleep" is art house in the extreme. Opening today in urban markets as part of Shooting Gallery's spring film series, "Sleep" should mirror its protagonist's underachiever status.
In the film's opening moments, Maquiling firmly establishes the relevance of the title to his main character. Jack Crawford (Marc Palmieri), a 24-year-old night watchman, sleeps most of his off-duty hours. Even awake, Jack is a passive, emotionally inert drone with no life and little ambition. The theft of his gun, which occurs on a bus when he gets distracted by a good-looking woman (Nicol Zanzarella), energizes him somewhat because he needs the revolver for his job. But he can't go to the police because he never bothered to register the firearm.
A buddy hooks him up with a retired city commissioner named Eddie (Pasquale Gaeta), who consults his police cronies. Eddie quickly tracks down the older woman Judy Sabo Podinker) who conned Jack on the bus. Initially, she refuses to acknowledge him. Then she sends him to another address where she says somebody may be able to help him.
Thus begins a series of encounters with local oddballs -- senior citizens, gabby partygoers, diffident matrons, uncaring bartenders and a nondescript movie house manager. Maquiling, making his feature debut after a series of award-winning shorts, tries to wring humor from these encounters through the deadpan acting and almost surreal manner in which all the self-absorbed characters drift so cluelessly through life.
Yet when everyone behaves the same way and each episode comes off more or less like the last -- or the next -- such a one-note sonata drones rather than builds. As a director, Maquiling accomplishes what he set out to do. A few will read this as acute satire. Many more will probably find the movie tedious.
Technically, the film goes in for some overexposed cinematography, drab interiors and a low-key, tuneful soundtrack that works well with the director's deliberately flat style. No production or costume designer is credited by the production companies. According to the director, he and co-producer Michele Medina performed those tasks.
TOO MUCH SLEEP
Shooting Gallery
Open City Films, Angelika Entertainment
Director-screenwriter: David Maquiling
Producers: Jason Kliot, Joana Vicente
Executive producer: Angelika Saleh, Barney Oldfield
Director of photography: Robert Mowen
Music: Mitchell Toomey
Co-producers: Michele Medina, David Maquiling
Editor: Jim Villone
Color/stereo
Cast:
Jack Crawford: Marc Palmieri
Eddie: Pasquale Gaeta
Kate: Nicol Zanzarella
Andrew: Philip Galinsky
Judy: Judy Sabo Podinker
Running time -- 83 minutes
No MPAA rating...
Underwhelming in story line and a little too precious in its strategies, "Sleep" is art house in the extreme. Opening today in urban markets as part of Shooting Gallery's spring film series, "Sleep" should mirror its protagonist's underachiever status.
In the film's opening moments, Maquiling firmly establishes the relevance of the title to his main character. Jack Crawford (Marc Palmieri), a 24-year-old night watchman, sleeps most of his off-duty hours. Even awake, Jack is a passive, emotionally inert drone with no life and little ambition. The theft of his gun, which occurs on a bus when he gets distracted by a good-looking woman (Nicol Zanzarella), energizes him somewhat because he needs the revolver for his job. But he can't go to the police because he never bothered to register the firearm.
A buddy hooks him up with a retired city commissioner named Eddie (Pasquale Gaeta), who consults his police cronies. Eddie quickly tracks down the older woman Judy Sabo Podinker) who conned Jack on the bus. Initially, she refuses to acknowledge him. Then she sends him to another address where she says somebody may be able to help him.
Thus begins a series of encounters with local oddballs -- senior citizens, gabby partygoers, diffident matrons, uncaring bartenders and a nondescript movie house manager. Maquiling, making his feature debut after a series of award-winning shorts, tries to wring humor from these encounters through the deadpan acting and almost surreal manner in which all the self-absorbed characters drift so cluelessly through life.
Yet when everyone behaves the same way and each episode comes off more or less like the last -- or the next -- such a one-note sonata drones rather than builds. As a director, Maquiling accomplishes what he set out to do. A few will read this as acute satire. Many more will probably find the movie tedious.
Technically, the film goes in for some overexposed cinematography, drab interiors and a low-key, tuneful soundtrack that works well with the director's deliberately flat style. No production or costume designer is credited by the production companies. According to the director, he and co-producer Michele Medina performed those tasks.
TOO MUCH SLEEP
Shooting Gallery
Open City Films, Angelika Entertainment
Director-screenwriter: David Maquiling
Producers: Jason Kliot, Joana Vicente
Executive producer: Angelika Saleh, Barney Oldfield
Director of photography: Robert Mowen
Music: Mitchell Toomey
Co-producers: Michele Medina, David Maquiling
Editor: Jim Villone
Color/stereo
Cast:
Jack Crawford: Marc Palmieri
Eddie: Pasquale Gaeta
Kate: Nicol Zanzarella
Andrew: Philip Galinsky
Judy: Judy Sabo Podinker
Running time -- 83 minutes
No MPAA rating...
NEW YORK -- Media moguls Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban's nascent HDNet Films -- the high-definition production unit of the duo's 2929 Entertainment -- has greenlighted a trio of features to be shot this year. HDNet Films heads Jason Kliot and Joana Vicente said Thursday that the company's first films will include helmer Carlos Brooks' Quid Pro Quo, Joseph Castelo's Over the Mountains and a new feature documentary by The Trials of Henry Kissinger director Alex Gibney called Black Magic. The slate ramp-up comes after indie vets Kliot and Vicente put their HDNet team in place this year, installing ICM agent Will Battersby as their head of development and upping Gretchen McGowan to head of production.
- 5/28/2004
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
NEW YORK -- Indie vets Jason Kliot and Joana Vicente have firmed up plans for the direction of their HDNet Films banner -- the high-definition production arm of media entrepreneurs Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner's cable and satellite network HDNet -- tapping ICM agent Will Battersby as head of development. The company, which launched in October, is expected to announce a handful of projects soon, with Battersby now on board heading development and producer Gretchen McGowan overseeing production. The company has plans to finance and produce as many as eight features per year, to be shot on high-definition digital video for budgets of as high as $2 million.
- 1/13/2004
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Veteran actor Michael Wincott has been added to the cast of the indie drama The Assassination of Richard Nixon for director Niels Mueller. Set during the 1970s, Nixon centers on the true story of Philadelphia furniture salesman Sam Byck (Sean Penn), who hatches a plot to kill Richard Nixon after Byck's attempts to live out the American dream are dashed. Byck had planned to hijack a commuter flight in Atlanta and crash the airliner into the White House. Wincott will star as the older brother of Penn's character. Naomi Watts and Don Cheadle round out the cast. Mueller and Kevin Kennedy penned the screenplay. The project is being produced through Jason Kliot and Joana Vicente's New York-based Open City Films banner, with Monsoon Entertainment -- headed by Alfonso Cuaron, Jorge Vergara and Arnaud Duteil -- financing. Wincott is repped by Brillstein-Grey's Danny Sussman and Jai Khanna. His other credits include The Count of Monte Cristo, Along Came a Spider, Before Night Falls, Hidden Agenda and Alien: Resurrection.
- 7/11/2003
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
She is not a crook! Variety reports that Naomi Watts has joined Sean Penn and Don Cheadle in Niels Mueller's The Assassination of Richard Nixon for Monsoon Entertainment. Based on real life events, Assassination is set in 1974 and centers on a businessman (Penn) who decides to take extreme measures to achieve his American dream. Kevin Kennedy wrote the script, which is being produced by Jason Kliot and Joana Vicente.
- 4/23/2003
- IMDbPro News
In writer-director David Maquiling's "Too Much Sleep", a gun gets stolen from a hapless security guard, and he goes in search of the weapon. We might expect such a trail to lead us through a noirish underworld of crime and nefarious characters. Instead, Maquiling propels us through a trailer park, a bowling alley, parking lots, dull parties, even duller bars and a Chinese restaurant in the sleepy suburbs of New Jersey where our hero encounters a bunch of oddball nonentities.
Underwhelming in story line and a little too precious in its strategies, "Sleep" is art house in the extreme. Opening today in urban markets as part of Shooting Gallery's spring film series, "Sleep" should mirror its protagonist's underachiever status.
In the film's opening moments, Maquiling firmly establishes the relevance of the title to his main character. Jack Crawford (Marc Palmieri), a 24-year-old night watchman, sleeps most of his off-duty hours. Even awake, Jack is a passive, emotionally inert drone with no life and little ambition. The theft of his gun, which occurs on a bus when he gets distracted by a good-looking woman (Nicol Zanzarella), energizes him somewhat because he needs the revolver for his job. But he can't go to the police because he never bothered to register the firearm.
A buddy hooks him up with a retired city commissioner named Eddie (Pasquale Gaeta), who consults his police cronies. Eddie quickly tracks down the older woman Judy Sabo Podinker) who conned Jack on the bus. Initially, she refuses to acknowledge him. Then she sends him to another address where she says somebody may be able to help him.
Thus begins a series of encounters with local oddballs -- senior citizens, gabby partygoers, diffident matrons, uncaring bartenders and a nondescript movie house manager. Maquiling, making his feature debut after a series of award-winning shorts, tries to wring humor from these encounters through the deadpan acting and almost surreal manner in which all the self-absorbed characters drift so cluelessly through life.
Yet when everyone behaves the same way and each episode comes off more or less like the last -- or the next -- such a one-note sonata drones rather than builds. As a director, Maquiling accomplishes what he set out to do. A few will read this as acute satire. Many more will probably find the movie tedious.
Technically, the film goes in for some overexposed cinematography, drab interiors and a low-key, tuneful soundtrack that works well with the director's deliberately flat style. No production or costume designer is credited by the production companies. According to the director, he and co-producer Michele Medina performed those tasks.
TOO MUCH SLEEP
Shooting Gallery
Open City Films, Angelika Entertainment
Director-screenwriter: David Maquiling
Producers: Jason Kliot, Joana Vicente
Executive producer: Angelika Saleh, Barney Oldfield
Director of photography: Robert Mowen
Music: Mitchell Toomey
Co-producers: Michele Medina, David Maquiling
Editor: Jim Villone
Color/stereo
Cast:
Jack Crawford: Marc Palmieri
Eddie: Pasquale Gaeta
Kate: Nicol Zanzarella
Andrew: Philip Galinsky
Judy: Judy Sabo Podinker
Running time -- 83 minutes
No MPAA rating...
Underwhelming in story line and a little too precious in its strategies, "Sleep" is art house in the extreme. Opening today in urban markets as part of Shooting Gallery's spring film series, "Sleep" should mirror its protagonist's underachiever status.
In the film's opening moments, Maquiling firmly establishes the relevance of the title to his main character. Jack Crawford (Marc Palmieri), a 24-year-old night watchman, sleeps most of his off-duty hours. Even awake, Jack is a passive, emotionally inert drone with no life and little ambition. The theft of his gun, which occurs on a bus when he gets distracted by a good-looking woman (Nicol Zanzarella), energizes him somewhat because he needs the revolver for his job. But he can't go to the police because he never bothered to register the firearm.
A buddy hooks him up with a retired city commissioner named Eddie (Pasquale Gaeta), who consults his police cronies. Eddie quickly tracks down the older woman Judy Sabo Podinker) who conned Jack on the bus. Initially, she refuses to acknowledge him. Then she sends him to another address where she says somebody may be able to help him.
Thus begins a series of encounters with local oddballs -- senior citizens, gabby partygoers, diffident matrons, uncaring bartenders and a nondescript movie house manager. Maquiling, making his feature debut after a series of award-winning shorts, tries to wring humor from these encounters through the deadpan acting and almost surreal manner in which all the self-absorbed characters drift so cluelessly through life.
Yet when everyone behaves the same way and each episode comes off more or less like the last -- or the next -- such a one-note sonata drones rather than builds. As a director, Maquiling accomplishes what he set out to do. A few will read this as acute satire. Many more will probably find the movie tedious.
Technically, the film goes in for some overexposed cinematography, drab interiors and a low-key, tuneful soundtrack that works well with the director's deliberately flat style. No production or costume designer is credited by the production companies. According to the director, he and co-producer Michele Medina performed those tasks.
TOO MUCH SLEEP
Shooting Gallery
Open City Films, Angelika Entertainment
Director-screenwriter: David Maquiling
Producers: Jason Kliot, Joana Vicente
Executive producer: Angelika Saleh, Barney Oldfield
Director of photography: Robert Mowen
Music: Mitchell Toomey
Co-producers: Michele Medina, David Maquiling
Editor: Jim Villone
Color/stereo
Cast:
Jack Crawford: Marc Palmieri
Eddie: Pasquale Gaeta
Kate: Nicol Zanzarella
Andrew: Philip Galinsky
Judy: Judy Sabo Podinker
Running time -- 83 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 3/23/2001
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
There's an idea for a movie in Miguel Arteta's "Chuck & Buck," but it remains just that -- an idea. A theme is established and characters are introduced, but nothing compelling ever materializes. The film is so stripped down to bare essentials with a handful of actors and locations -- all shot in digital video -- that it feels more like a test video created in a filmmaking lab by a director struggling to develop a project.
A dramatic-competition entry at this year's Sundance Film Festival, where it had admirers and detractors, "Chuck & Buck" is a tough marketing challenge for Artisan thanks to its unsympathetic characters and a static story line. Look for spotty boxoffice at best.
The screenplay by television writer-producer Mike White throws together two diametrically opposite personalities. All that links these men is the friendship they shared as very young boys. Otherwise, the infantile and emotionally needy Buck O'Brien (played by White) and the successful, stylish music company executive Charlie Sitter (Chris Weitz) have nothing in common.
Reunited briefly with his childhood pal at his mom's funeral in an unnamed small town, Buck fixates on Chuck -- Charlie's long-discarded nickname. Buck becomes so obsessed with reviving their long-dormant palship that he withdraws $10,000 from his savings and moves to Los Angeles, where he all but stalks the perplexed Charlie and his fiancee, Carlyn (Beth Colt).
Neither White nor Arteta ever quite determines whether the lollipop-licking Buck is a kid who, in Peter Pan fashion, never grew up, or if he is mentally handicapped. Regardless, he is such a singularly repellent individual that you can't blame Charlie, jerk that he is, for giving Buck the brushoff.
Then, in a fairly unbelievable twist, Buck suddenly writes a play about himself and Charlie, hiring a theater and its manager, Beverly (Lupe Ontiveros), to stage his drama. Buck casts talentless actor Sam (Paul Weitz, brother of Chris) on the sole basis of his resemblance to Charlie.
For some reason, Charlie and Carlyn agree to attend the play, which naturally upsets Charlie. This brings about a final confrontation between the two ex-buddies and an unlikely resolution of Buck's pursuit of Chuck.
White has given the character dynamics an odd twist by making Buck gay. Thus, his pursuit of love and human connection has a sexual urgency that distorts White's themes of friendship and innocence. This also plays havoc with the third act, which seems more like sexual wish fulfillment than a healthy reckoning with one's past.
Arteta, whose "Star Maps" was one of the discoveries of the 1997 Sundance Film Festival, creates further problems for himself by casting nonactors in the major roles. White does a surprisingly not-bad job of making the weird, off-putting Buck credible. But neither as a writer nor as an actor does White ever explore the inner life of this strange individual.
The Weitz brothers, who produced and directed the hit comedy "American Pie", really should stick to what they do best. Chris is too stiff to play Mr. Smooth Guy; you're never quite sure what his intent is in his scenes. And while brother Paul is appropriately shallow as the superficial and socially inept actor, that isn't exactly a compliment.
Colt plays the ill-defined role of the fiancee better than it deserves, and Ontiveros gives the film's liveliest performance as the maternal theater manager.
Technically, the movie suffers from the tape-to-film transfer, with occasional overripe flesh tones and a generally scruffy look.
n
CHUCK & BUCK
Artisan Entertainment
Artistan Entertainment and Blow Up Pictures present a Flan De Coco production
Producer: Matthew Greenfield
Director: Miguel Arteta
Screenwriter: Mike White
Executive producers: Jason Kliot, Joana Vicente
Director of photography: Chuy Chavez
Production designer: Renee Davenport
Music: Joey Waronker, Tony Maxwell, Smokey Hormel
Co-executive producer: Thomas Brown, Charles J. Rusbasan
Costume designer: Elaine Montalvo
Editor: Jeff Betancourt
Color/stereo
Cast:
Buck: Mike White
Chuck: Chris Weitz
Beverly: Lupe Ontiveros
Carlyn: Beth Colt
Sam: Paul Weitz
Running time -- 95 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
A dramatic-competition entry at this year's Sundance Film Festival, where it had admirers and detractors, "Chuck & Buck" is a tough marketing challenge for Artisan thanks to its unsympathetic characters and a static story line. Look for spotty boxoffice at best.
The screenplay by television writer-producer Mike White throws together two diametrically opposite personalities. All that links these men is the friendship they shared as very young boys. Otherwise, the infantile and emotionally needy Buck O'Brien (played by White) and the successful, stylish music company executive Charlie Sitter (Chris Weitz) have nothing in common.
Reunited briefly with his childhood pal at his mom's funeral in an unnamed small town, Buck fixates on Chuck -- Charlie's long-discarded nickname. Buck becomes so obsessed with reviving their long-dormant palship that he withdraws $10,000 from his savings and moves to Los Angeles, where he all but stalks the perplexed Charlie and his fiancee, Carlyn (Beth Colt).
Neither White nor Arteta ever quite determines whether the lollipop-licking Buck is a kid who, in Peter Pan fashion, never grew up, or if he is mentally handicapped. Regardless, he is such a singularly repellent individual that you can't blame Charlie, jerk that he is, for giving Buck the brushoff.
Then, in a fairly unbelievable twist, Buck suddenly writes a play about himself and Charlie, hiring a theater and its manager, Beverly (Lupe Ontiveros), to stage his drama. Buck casts talentless actor Sam (Paul Weitz, brother of Chris) on the sole basis of his resemblance to Charlie.
For some reason, Charlie and Carlyn agree to attend the play, which naturally upsets Charlie. This brings about a final confrontation between the two ex-buddies and an unlikely resolution of Buck's pursuit of Chuck.
White has given the character dynamics an odd twist by making Buck gay. Thus, his pursuit of love and human connection has a sexual urgency that distorts White's themes of friendship and innocence. This also plays havoc with the third act, which seems more like sexual wish fulfillment than a healthy reckoning with one's past.
Arteta, whose "Star Maps" was one of the discoveries of the 1997 Sundance Film Festival, creates further problems for himself by casting nonactors in the major roles. White does a surprisingly not-bad job of making the weird, off-putting Buck credible. But neither as a writer nor as an actor does White ever explore the inner life of this strange individual.
The Weitz brothers, who produced and directed the hit comedy "American Pie", really should stick to what they do best. Chris is too stiff to play Mr. Smooth Guy; you're never quite sure what his intent is in his scenes. And while brother Paul is appropriately shallow as the superficial and socially inept actor, that isn't exactly a compliment.
Colt plays the ill-defined role of the fiancee better than it deserves, and Ontiveros gives the film's liveliest performance as the maternal theater manager.
Technically, the movie suffers from the tape-to-film transfer, with occasional overripe flesh tones and a generally scruffy look.
n
CHUCK & BUCK
Artisan Entertainment
Artistan Entertainment and Blow Up Pictures present a Flan De Coco production
Producer: Matthew Greenfield
Director: Miguel Arteta
Screenwriter: Mike White
Executive producers: Jason Kliot, Joana Vicente
Director of photography: Chuy Chavez
Production designer: Renee Davenport
Music: Joey Waronker, Tony Maxwell, Smokey Hormel
Co-executive producer: Thomas Brown, Charles J. Rusbasan
Costume designer: Elaine Montalvo
Editor: Jeff Betancourt
Color/stereo
Cast:
Buck: Mike White
Chuck: Chris Weitz
Beverly: Lupe Ontiveros
Carlyn: Beth Colt
Sam: Paul Weitz
Running time -- 95 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
- 7/13/2000
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
PARK CITY, Utah -- "Three Seasons" is a luminous, delicate and powerful saga of modern-day Saigon. The winner of both the Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, the film moved audiences throughout the fest and should be a hit on both the festival and select-site circuit for October Films.
A narrative pastiche weaving four separate stories in present-day Vietnam, "Three Seasons" is an eloquent depiction of life in that tumultuous country. Filmmaker Tony Bui, who directed and co-wrote, has painted a provocative picture of the hard life that many Saigon residents face.
Reminiscent of Italian neo-realism, Bui focuses on those who are barely scraping by, including a cyclo driver, a prostitute, a young man who hustles trinkets on the streets and a girl who has been hired to be a personal assistant to a reclusive spiritual master.
Winding between these unconnected, but ultimately inclusive stories, Bui's storytelling is packed with hard city images. Indeed, "Three Seasons" is most eloquent and powerful in its visuals: the kaleidoscope of the scurrying chaos of big-city Saigon is both frightening and dignified.
Unfortunately, the dialogue and writing is often of an expositional nature and occasionally "Three Seasons" is over-arching in making its thematic points. During these junctures, the storytelling takes on a somewhat glossy, "National Geographic" patina.
Overall, "Three Seasons" is an exceptional film, capturing the roiling nature of a country that's torn by its past and gyrating between the old ways and the new. The acting is special as the well-chosen cast members embody their character's everyday essences.
Particularly noteworthy is Ngoc Hiep, whose radiant and fragile nature literally blossoms as she comes to gain strength and uncommon insights in her routine work with a religious master. Don Duong is also noteworthy for his engaging performance as a love-smitten cyclo driver. Harvey Keitel, who also executive produces, is solid as an American G.I. searching for the daughter he left behind during his Vietnam war days.
It's in its technical aspects that "Three Seasons" is most bountiful. Cinematographer Lisa Rinzler deservedly won the festival's Cinematography Award for her masterful lensing, eloquently and touching and conveying the heart and soul of the fractured city. In addition, composer Keith Reamer's full-bodied music, with its dissonant as well as mellifluous tones, also captures the vibrant qualities of Vietnamese life.
THREE SEASONS
A Film by Tony Bui
Producers: Jason Kliot, Joana Vicente, Tony Bui
Screenwriter-director: Tony Bui
Executive producer: Harvey Keitel
Co-executive producer: Charles Rosen
Co-producer: Timothy Linh Bui
Story: Tony Bui, Timothy Linh Bui
Director of photography: Lisa Rinzler
Production designer: Wing Lee
Costume designer: Ghia Ci Fam
Editor: Keith Reamer
Music: Richard Horowitz
Vietnamese songs by: Vy Nhat Tao
Line producer: Trish Hofmann
Casting director: Quan Lelan
Sound: Curtis Choy, Brian Miksis
Color/Stereo
Hai: Don Duong
Kien An Nguyen: Ngoc Hiep
Teacher Dao: Tran Manh Cuong
James Hager: Harvey Keitel
Lan: Zoe Bui
Woody: Nguyen Huu Duco
Truck Driver: Minh Ngoc
Huy: Hoang Phat Trieu
Running time -- 113 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13...
A narrative pastiche weaving four separate stories in present-day Vietnam, "Three Seasons" is an eloquent depiction of life in that tumultuous country. Filmmaker Tony Bui, who directed and co-wrote, has painted a provocative picture of the hard life that many Saigon residents face.
Reminiscent of Italian neo-realism, Bui focuses on those who are barely scraping by, including a cyclo driver, a prostitute, a young man who hustles trinkets on the streets and a girl who has been hired to be a personal assistant to a reclusive spiritual master.
Winding between these unconnected, but ultimately inclusive stories, Bui's storytelling is packed with hard city images. Indeed, "Three Seasons" is most eloquent and powerful in its visuals: the kaleidoscope of the scurrying chaos of big-city Saigon is both frightening and dignified.
Unfortunately, the dialogue and writing is often of an expositional nature and occasionally "Three Seasons" is over-arching in making its thematic points. During these junctures, the storytelling takes on a somewhat glossy, "National Geographic" patina.
Overall, "Three Seasons" is an exceptional film, capturing the roiling nature of a country that's torn by its past and gyrating between the old ways and the new. The acting is special as the well-chosen cast members embody their character's everyday essences.
Particularly noteworthy is Ngoc Hiep, whose radiant and fragile nature literally blossoms as she comes to gain strength and uncommon insights in her routine work with a religious master. Don Duong is also noteworthy for his engaging performance as a love-smitten cyclo driver. Harvey Keitel, who also executive produces, is solid as an American G.I. searching for the daughter he left behind during his Vietnam war days.
It's in its technical aspects that "Three Seasons" is most bountiful. Cinematographer Lisa Rinzler deservedly won the festival's Cinematography Award for her masterful lensing, eloquently and touching and conveying the heart and soul of the fractured city. In addition, composer Keith Reamer's full-bodied music, with its dissonant as well as mellifluous tones, also captures the vibrant qualities of Vietnamese life.
THREE SEASONS
A Film by Tony Bui
Producers: Jason Kliot, Joana Vicente, Tony Bui
Screenwriter-director: Tony Bui
Executive producer: Harvey Keitel
Co-executive producer: Charles Rosen
Co-producer: Timothy Linh Bui
Story: Tony Bui, Timothy Linh Bui
Director of photography: Lisa Rinzler
Production designer: Wing Lee
Costume designer: Ghia Ci Fam
Editor: Keith Reamer
Music: Richard Horowitz
Vietnamese songs by: Vy Nhat Tao
Line producer: Trish Hofmann
Casting director: Quan Lelan
Sound: Curtis Choy, Brian Miksis
Color/Stereo
Hai: Don Duong
Kien An Nguyen: Ngoc Hiep
Teacher Dao: Tran Manh Cuong
James Hager: Harvey Keitel
Lan: Zoe Bui
Woody: Nguyen Huu Duco
Truck Driver: Minh Ngoc
Huy: Hoang Phat Trieu
Running time -- 113 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13...
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