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Issue #73 [Winter 2008]
Festival Beat
By MovieMaker Staff
From big to small, longform to short and online to nonline, MM takes a look at some 2007's best and brightest film festivals including Dominican International, Starz Denver, Austin and BendFilm.
Ted Braun Discusses Darfur Now
By Paul Tukey
The impact of his first big-screen documentary may not be fully appreciated for years. Even with Don Cheadle and George Clooney as principle characters in the 2007 film Darfur Now, it’s not easy to get moviegoers flooding to a flick about African genocide. That director Ted Braun even got the movie made, however, provides moviemakers everywhere with a lesson for the ages: Every solution begins with a conversation.
Lights! Camera! Geritol!
by Christian Toto
Today’s stars keep themselves in better shape than ever before, and audiences seem to like that. In fact, box office receipts for recent flicks featuring some of our favorite aging action heroes are so encouraging that studio execs are practically rubbing their hands together in anticipation of the new Harrison Ford (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) and Sylvester Stallone (Rambo) vehicles. Stallone certainly didn’t hurt himself when his more famous screen persona—Rocky Balboa—earned critical acclaim and a respectable $70 million in last year’s titular blockbuster, chasing doubts that the actor-director was simply giving himself a starring role in order to slow a career slide.
Paul Giamatti Takes 10
By Mallory Potosky
Sooner or later, when cruising late-night television, you’re going to catch a glimpse of a no-name character actor who looks an awful lot like the famous thespian, Paul Giamatti. That’s because before he became famous, Giamatti made his living playing parts like “Heckler #2” and “Kissing Man.” Characters with no names. But along came a romp through California’s wine country in Sideways and the Sundance hit American Splendor and suddenly the one-time bit player was a leading man and Oscar nominee.
Michael Haneke Plays Funny Games With Naomi Watts
By David Fear
A family is traveling to their country vacation home. As they drive, the parents take turns playing “guess the classical composer” (Schubert? Brahms?) with the CD player. Their son laughs approvingly in the back seat. The scene couldn’t be more bucolic or benign, until Mom slips in a new musical selection—and over the soundtrack, we hear a loud, jarring skitter-metal tune from avant-garde musician John Zorn. The happy trio looks peaceful and content; viewers, meanwhile, try to recalibrate their central nervous systems.
That opening of Michael Haneke’s 1997 meta-thriller Funny Games was the first indication that the German director’s pitch-black examination of screen violence wasn’t planning on playing by the rules. It’s such an effective sneak preview of the horrors that lie on the horizon in this house invasion tale that it’s not surprising Haneke repeats the sequence in Funny Games U.S., a remake of his breakthrough movie. If it wasn’t for the fact that the original’s Austrian leads have been replaced by Tim Roth and Naomi Watts, you’d swear the projectionist had thrown on the first version by mistake: The scene is replicated with such scrupulous fidelity that it’s almost a carbon copy. As is the next scene. And the next. And the next…
Gus Van Sant Gets Paranoid
By David Sterritt
Gus Van Sant is the perfect picture of an American independent moviemaker. He grew up on both coasts—in Portland, Oregon and Darien, Connecticut—before earning a degree at the Rhode Island School of Design, and then settled in Portland, where he still lives and works. He made his first big impression in 1985 with Mala Noche, the slyly subversive story of a gay man with a crush on a Mexican immigrant who’s wrong for him in just about every way.
David Gordon Green Makes Snow Angels
by David Gordon Green
When i began working with Kate Beckinsale on Snow Angels, we were trying to find elements rooted in reality that could give her character of Annie anchors of emotion—humor, frustration, aggression and sympathy. I knew that once cameras were rolling, we wanted a high degree of improvisation, particularly when it came to confrontational scenes with her estranged husband, Glenn (played by Sam Rockwell). So we needed to design as much background for her as time would allow.
Top 10 Movie Cities 2008
By Jennifer M. Wood
From Austin to Albuquerque and plenty of places in between, MovieMaker's eighth annual countdown of the 10 best places to live, work and make movies in the U.S.
Marjane Satrapi’s Comic Relief
By Nancy Rosenbaum
Paris-based cartoonist Marjane Satrapi says she never set out to make movies. Satrapi is the author and illustrator of the beloved graphic novels Persepolis I and II, which, together comprise a funny, moving memoir chronicling Satrapi’s life growing up in Tehran and Vienna during the rise of the Islamic revolution. The books offer a glimpse into “Marji’s” experiences as a curious, outspoken girl who suddenly finds herself living in a fundamentalist society where she has to wear a veil and punk rock music is verboten.
Rawson Marshall Thurber Unravels The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
by Rawson Marshall Thurber
Four years after proving his comedic chops—and box office potential—with the comedy Dodgeball, writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber is going in a completely different direction. With Michael Chabon's blessing, he's adapted the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelists first book, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, into a feature film starring Jon Foster, Sienna Miller, Peter Sarsgaard and Nick Nolte.
Ellen Page's Not So Still Life
By Joe Leydon
Don’t misunderstand: It’s not like Ellen Page is hiding out or lying low. But even as the Oscar-hype machinery is revving up to push her toward a well-deserved nomination for her star-making performance in Jason Reitman’s Juno—well, she’d simply prefer to be on the other side of the continent, far away from Hollywood, on this particular October afternoon.
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