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That’s Quite a Cast of Characters
Zack Snyder assembles a cast of relative unknowns for Watchmen
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Dance with Films at this Week-Long Fest
The 11th annual Dances with Films, taking place at the Laemmle Sunset 5 Theatre in Los Angeles from July 24 - 31, is a truly independent film festival where what you do, not who you know, is what really matters. Talent trumps connections at Dances with Films; the rules mandate that films in competition involve no established directors, actors, writers or producers.
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The Doorman Opens Up
Wayne Price straddles the line between fact and fiction
“What is a doorman without a door?” That is the question that director Wayne Price explores in his new movie, The Doorman, a film that balances the line between fact and fiction. The movie is a faux documentary that focuses on exclusive club doorman Trevor W. (Lucas Akoskin) who tries to maintain the façade of his elite lifestyle after the loss of his job. Largely improvised, The Doorman features both actors and non-actors in an interesting (and sometimes comedic) look at the club lifestyle and what happens when one man loses his position of power within that world.
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Zeitgeist Captures the Films of Our Times
MoMA celebrates Zeitgeist Films' 20 years of cinema history
As part of the month-long retrospective “Zeitgeist: the Films of Our Times,” celebrating NY distributor Zeitgeist Films’ 20th anniversary, critically acclaimed moviemaker Atom Egoyan recently introduced a screening of his 1993 film Calendar, which was distributed by Zeitgeist, on Saturday July 12th at The Museum of Modern Art. Following the film, Egoyan conducted an interview with Zeitgeist founders Nancy Gerstman and Emily Russo.
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Shooting The Dark Knight
Christopher Nolan and DP Wally Pfister shed some light on their latest collaboration
Flashback: Christopher Nolan is at the 1999 Slamdance Film Festival for the premiere of Following, his first feature-length film. Though he served as the writer, director and cinematographer, Nolan wasn’t interested in pursuing a career as an auteur. At the same time, he saw The Hi-Line, which premiered at the nearby Sundance Film Festival. Maybe it was destiny calling. That film's cinematographer was Wally Pfister, ASC.
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Shakespeare on Film: The Animated Tales
Shakespeare gets the thumbs-up from the younger set in MM's eighth week of Shakespeare on Film
From 1990 - 94, Shakespeare—The Animated Tales exposed the younger set to 12 of Shakespeare's most famous plays. Adapter Leon Garfield scripted a dozen abridgments, which won three Emmy Awards and have screened in more than 50 countries. They merit collective rather than selective recognition, firstly because they provide an accessible introduction for young viewers and, secondly, because they triumphantly demonstrated to viewers of all ages that a medium too often associated solely with children’s stories could realize adult Shakespearean imagery and themes with as much imagination and poetry as live-action film.
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Christian Bale Returns to Brooding Batman in The Dark Knight
Back in 2005, Christian Bale might not have seemed the most likely choice to play the title role in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, the risky re-imagining of the classic comic book franchise. Yet, due to the first film’s critical and commercial success—and Bale’s stand-out performance—the Welsh actor is donning the black cape once again for the highly anticipated sequel, The Dark Knight.
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Meryl Streep and ABBA visit Greece with Mamma Mia!
Moviemakers overcome challenges to film the scenery of the Greek Islands
Greece: The birthplace of the Olympic Games, theater and western civilization. This historically rich country is also one of the most picturesque places in the world. When scouting in Greece, most moviemakers have veered toward the beautiful Greek Islands, which are scattered about the Aegean and Ionian Seas within the vast Mediterranean. In total, there are 6,000 of these islands, only 227 of which are inhabited. Popular destinations and filming locations include: Mykonos, a rocky island covered with blue and white buildings and signature windmills, and Santorini, which sits on a mountain 350 meters above sea level and is considered to be one of the best places in the world to watch the sunset.
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At the Height of Their Power
The 10 best, most popular and groundbreaking graphic novel adaptations
Say goodbye to those flowery adaptations of 19th-century British literature and Oprah’s Book Club bestsellers. Studio executives have unearthed a new moneymaking inspiration in comic books and graphic novels—and this summer is full of them. From Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk—the first two movies from newly-minted Marvel Studios—to Wanted and Hellboy II: The Golden Army, the season has already seen an unusual amount of these adaptations. This week audiences are eagerly awaiting another—arguably the most anticipated film this year, period—when The Dark Knight is released on Friday.
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Vancouver Film School Fishes For YouTube Talent
Online video communities are emerging as ideal places for unknown and often untrained artists to display their work. The Vancouver Film School (VFS) took advantage of this pool of young talent by holding an online competition, in conjunction with YouTube, to award scholarships to three aspiring moviemakers. The winners—Christopher Harrell, Stefan Ramirez Pérez and Jorge Rolando Canedo Estrada—can look forward to a great year spent honing their skills under the direction of accomplished faculty at a school that prizes hands-on experience and produces artists who have the creative vision as well as the technical knowledge they need to gain a foothold in the industry.
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Spotlight on Aspiring Moviemakers at the Angelus Student Film Festival
Moviemakers with heart, take note: The Angelus Student Film Festival is awaiting your next film. The 2008 festival, which will be held Sept. 13 at the Directors Guild of America Theater in Hollywood, honors future moviemakers as they create works that respect the dignity and complexity of the human condition. And after 12 years honoring the inspiring works of student moviemakers, Angelus has expanded to include an accomplished jury for their documentary competition.
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For Bergman Fans, Film Is the Great Adventure
Late, world-renowned director’s legacy celebrated with “Ingmar Bergman: Film Is the Great Adventure”
A new retrospective on the late, legendary auteur, Ingmar Bergman, who passed away last year at the age of 89, will unspool weekends from July through December at the IFC Center in New York. Entitled “Ingmar Bergman: Film Is the Great Adventure,” the series includes twenty of Bergman’s best films, including Smiles of A Summer Night (1955), The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957), Virgin Spring (1960) and Scenes from A Marriage (1973).
A remarkably influential, prolific and creative moviemaker, Ingmar Bergman was born in Sweden in 1918. The son of a Lutheran minister, Bergman’s avid interest in film and theater, as well as his creativity, began early in his life when
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Shakespeare on Film: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
MM's seventh week of Shakespeare on Film explores the Bard's original comedy duo
Tom Stoppard originally sold the screen rights to Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, the stage comedy which made his name, soon after its 1967 premieres in the West End and on Broadway. He wrote a screenplay for MGM, then saw the project languish for twenty years until the rights were bought back and he rewrote the script and filmed it in what was then still Yugoslavia. With a cast featuring Tim Roth and Gary Oldman, Stoppard portrayed the events of Hamlet entirely from the point of view of the Prince’s doomed friends as they travel to Elsinore, kick their heels ‘off stage,’ and sail to England.
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It’s a 3D Revolution
Once the domain of schlocky 1950s horror movies, 3D movies will once again be leaping off the screen at a theater near you
An exciting resurgence in 3D moviemaking indicates that what was once a fad is now a growing trend. Over the past few years there has been a huge increase in the production of 3D films. More than a half-dozen live-action and a dozen computer animated 3D films are currently in the studio pipelines—with more to come.
One reason for this surge in development is the availability of state-of-the-art digital technology. “It was always possible to show 3D, but never possible to show it in a reliable manner,” says Eric Brevig, an Oscar-nominated visual effects artist and director of this summer’s Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D, the first live-action narrative feature to be shot and released in digital stereoscopic 3D. “It’s a convergence of technology,” he says. The problems of former 3D imaging simply no longer exist.
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Haris Zambarloukos Defies Tradition
As the director of photography on this week’s limited release Death Defying Acts and the anticipated summer movie Mamma Mia!, Haris Zambarloukos is having quite a month. Both films are just steps on the ladder to success that Zambarloukos has been climbing for a while now.
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Recalled: Kimberly Peirce Shows the Depths of War in STOP-LOSS
In a world where every cell phone has camera capabilities, the realities of the world are brought into our homes with relative ease. And for the first time ever this means the realities of war are brought along too. Soldiers, armed not only with guns but very often small, one-chip cameras are documenting their war-torn lives.
Everyone’s a moviemaker. But while these affecting stories are making their way beyond army barracks and war zones via email and other Internet tools, rarely do they reach the masses. Sometimes it takes a skilled hand and a known face to alert the public to a greater social purpose. In her second film, STOP-LOSS, writer-director Kimberly Peirce—along with the film's stars, Ryan Phillippe, Channing Tatum, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Abbie Cornish—has put a mirror to the government, asking that they see soldiers as more than numbers, but as human beings—with families—deeply and forever affected by their experiences at war.
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Warren Beatty Honored with AFI Life Achievement Award
On June 12, 2008, legendary Hollywood star Warren Beatty received the 36th AFI Life Achievement Award. The event will air on the USA Network, Tuesday, July 8th at 9 p.m. Guests including Beatty’s wife, Annette Bening, his sister Shirley MacLaine, Julie Christie, Robert Downey Jr., President Bill Clinton, Gene Hackman and old pal Jack Nicholson gathered to honor the multi-faceted moviemaker's contributions and lifetime commitment to cinema.
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Toshiba and New York Film Academy Name Competition Winner
As part of the ad campaign for its new REGZA brand of LCD TV’s, Toshiba partnered with the New York Film Academy to hold “The One to Watch” Film Competition. Students and alumni of NYFA were invited to create a 29-second film that showed why REGZA is “The One to Watch.” Each film had to tell a complete story and was evaluated by a panel of judges (with representatives from both Toshiba and NYFA) based upon humor, originality and relevance to the contest.
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Thirteen Movies To Celebrate on the Fourth
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Shakespeare on Film: Antony and Cleopatra
In MM's sixth week of Shakespeare on film, we examine why Charlton Heston's Antony and Cleopatra didn't fare too well.
After playing Marc Antony in the 1950 and 1970 Julius Caesars, Charlton Heston had become obsessed with adapting Antony and Cleopatra, which he considered Shakespeare’s finest work, but which had never previously been filmed at feature length. His love affair with character and play reached a rocky conclusion in this overlong epic.
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Will Smith in Action
Will Smith is the king of Hollywood—as named by Entertainment Weekly and Newsweek in their recent rankings—and the July 4th box office, which is why, with this weekend’s release of the movie Hancock, MM saw it fit to take a look at Will Smith in action.
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Jonathan Levine's Total Wackness
Lessons learned in landing one of the world's greatest actors for The Wackness
The prospect of meeting Ben Kingsley is a daunting one for any director, especially a man of such limited talent and eloquence as myself. So when I heard the news that Sir Ben had enjoyed my script for The Wackness and would like to meet me in Vancouver, my excitement was tempered by an immediate pang of terror.
I recalled the episode of “The Sopranos” in which Sir Ben attempts to blow off Christopher and his mob cohorts as they push their script onto him. Needless to say, I hoped my meeting would go a bit better than that...
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Pixar Introduces Wall-E
Previous to 1995, no animated feature had ever been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, but Pixar’s first movie (and the very first full-length computer animated film) changed all that. At the time of its release, Toy Story became the highest-grossing animated feature on record and put Pixar Studios on the map. The hardworking company followed its initial success with eight more feature films (including this weekend’s release, Wall-E), each one brimming with humor, ingenuity and technical prowess. With the release of Wall-E, MM takes a look at some of the Pixar films that have changed the face of animated movies and made the company into the well-loved household name it is today.
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A Wanted Man
Chicago location director Mark Mamalakis shares his process for setting the perfect scene
Having handled the locations for such films as Flags of Our Fathers, Ali and this summer’s action thriller Wanted, starring Angelina Jolie and James McAvoy, Mark Mamalakis has become one of the film industry’s leading contacts in the Windy City. As he tells it, managing locations is one of the most intricate and important parts of the moviemaking process.
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Shakespeare on Film: Romeo and Juliet
With Romeo and Juliet, Franco Zeffirelli interprets the language of young love in MM's fifth week of Shakespeare on Film.
With Romeo and Juliet, Franco Zeffirelli interprets the language of young love in MM's fifth week of Shakespeare on Film. Zeffirelli first sowed the seeds of this box-office triumph in 1960, when the Italian director-designer made his Shakespeare stage debut with Romeo and Juliet at London’s Old Vic. In 1967, he set out to replicate that Old Vic passion on film. He was confident of attracting a large international audience and, believing that “the kids in the story are like teenagers today,” took a gamble by casting actors almost as young as their characters: Leonard Whiting was seventeen, Olivia Hussey, chosen ahead of 350 other hopefuls, just fifteen.
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Atom Egoyan's Adoration in the Internet Age
The press alternately booed and applauded the Cannes premiere of Atom Egoyan's new film, Adoration, and few came to greet the director at his press conference. Granted the film, which tells of a boy who reinvents the mundane story of his parents' death as an international terrorist conspiracy only to face the truth at the end, falls as flat as the bomb that never went off on the plane.
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Peter Segal Gets Smart
How a decision made in college brought audiences one of this summer's most anticipated comedies
From the beginning, Peter Segal carved a niche for himself as the director of action-packed comedies. From his first feature Naked Gun 33 1/3 to the hijinks of his remake of The Longest Yard, he has managed to capture the disparate skills—pratfalls and natural comedic stylings among them—of the genre’s top players. Among his collaborators over the years, Segal has worked with Chris Farley, Eddie Murphy and Adam Sandler. His latest project, Get Smart, features the newest comedian to conquer the box office: Steve Carell.
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Daryn Okada Is on Top of the ASC
Celebrated DP wins third term as ASC President
Membership in the American Society of Cinematographers (attainable by invitation only) is itself an honor; to be elected president a higher honor still. Accomplished cinematographer Daryn Okada has just been elected to serve as ASC president for a third term and is well aware of the magnitude of his position, “I feel privileged to be a part of this extraordinary group of dedicated filmmakers,” he acknowledges.
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Shakespeare on Film: Kiss Me Kate
Shakespeare to music? Yep. MovieMaker continues its summer of Shakespeare on Film with George Sidney's Kiss Me Kate
MM's fourth week of Shakespeare on Film looks back at 1953's Kiss Me Kate, an updated, musical version of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Produced in garishly colored 3-D, five years after the original stage musical became a Broadway smash, George Sidney’s Kiss Me Kate combines Cole Porter’s songwriting genius with energetic backstage comedy.
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Win $1,500 Making SHORTSNONSTOP
Burgeoning moviemakers take note: iThentic and The Canadian Film Centre’s Worldwide Short Film Festival recently announced the renewal of the SHORTSNONSTOP mobile movie festival, presented by TELUS. SHORTSNONSTOP is an innovative, year-round online film festival which movie buffs can experience “Anytime. Anyplace.”
SHORTSNONSTOP, which can be accessed at http://www.shortsnonstop.com, is currently accepting short film submissions for a July 15th deadline. A cash prize of $1,5000 will be awarded to the best entry each quarter throughout the year. SHORTSNONSTOP submissions must run under three minutes long and be in either English or with no dialogue. According to Catherine Tait, CEO of iThentic, “Audiences will have the opportunity to see [the] winning films on the big screen at the Worldwide Short Film Festival.”
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M. Night Shyamalan Happens
After the disaster that was Lady in the Water, seems like M. Night Shyamalan's backers have got another marketing trick up their sleeve as they release his latest film, The Happening: Promote the hell out of the fact that it's the director's first R-rated movie. It's probably not enough of an incentive to outdo The Incredible Hulk as the summer season box office continues to heat up, but the reviews so far have been on Shyamalan's side. As the sci-fi auteur awaits the final tallies, MM takes a look at the roller coaster ride Shyamalan has his taken critics and audiences on since The Sixth Sense.
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Zak Penn's Incredible Journey
Sure Zak Penn can write you a surefire blockbuster. He has proven that time and again with X-Men, Elektra, Fantastic Four. But that's not all he can do. The Grand, an improvisational comedy set in the world of competitive poker that he wrote and directed, contains neither a superhero nor a highfalutin special effect, and is on DVD now. And with his long-awaited adaptation of The Hulk in theaters now, MM asked the in-demand scribe to share the "things he's learned" in the business.
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School of Visual Arts Announces MFA Program in Social Documentary Film
Is there value in creating art that is socially aware? The educators at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) certainly think so as they’ve recently announced a new MFA program in Social Documentary Film to begin in Fall 2009. “It’s our goal that graduates leave this program with films which engage larger issues, and perhaps even impact public policy,” says accomplished moviemaker and chair of the program, Maro Chermayeff.
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Shakespeare on Film: Julius Caesar
MM's third week of Shakespeare on Film looks back at 1953's Julius Caesar.
MM's third week of Shakespeare on Film looks back at 1953's Julius Caesar. In 1952, MGM coupled its substantial $1.7 million investment in Shakespeare with one of the most inspired casting decisions in Hollywood history. A year after stunning audiences as macho, mumbling Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, Marlon Brando was to play the “wise and valiant” Marc Antony. Columnists expressed astonishment, TV comedians impersonated Kowalski’s rendition of “Friends, Romans, countrymen,” but the star, declaring himself “sick to death of being thought of as a blue-jeaned slobbermouth,” had decided that Julius Caesar must kill his Streetcar image.
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Bill Maher Finds Religion
Or at least finds Religulous
Particularly in an election year, religion is a hot-button topic. So leave it to writer-producer-actor-comedian and all-around opinion-maker Bill Maher to choose this fall to release Religulous. Directed by Larry Charles, who created controversy with Borat just a few years back, the film is being marketed as "an uproarious nonfiction film about the greatest fiction ever told." Who better to help give a sneak peek at the film than Maher himself.
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Doorpost Awards $300,000 to “Undiscovered” Moviemakers
The Doorpost Film Project, a “contest aimed at discovering and developing moviemakers capable of producing films that inspire and influence rather than simply entertain,” just finished round one and is now left with 15 finalists who are described by Nathan Elliott, the Project's director, as “a globally, ethnically and racially diverse group of filmmakers that have one important thing in common: They're enormously talented."
Posted 07.23.08 | News/Commentary | No comments yet...
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