Posted by editor@vimooz.com on September 20, 2009 under Uncategorized | 
On September 17, Amazon Watch hosted the Hollywood premiere of CRUDE, an inspiring film about Chevron’s $27 billion lawsuit in Ecuador by award-winning filmmaker, Joe Berlinger. Over 350 supporters attended the sold-out benefit.
Many attendees vowed to support efforts to compel Chevron to clean up its oil pollution in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The film is showing at the Nuart Theater in Los Angeles thru September 24 and opening soon in more than 40 cities nationwide.
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Posted by editor@vimooz.com on May 16, 2009 under Uncategorized |
“I Love You Phillip Morris,” starring Ewan McGregor and Jim Carrey, has been picked up for distribution by Consolidated Pictures Group.
Despite generating lots of buzz at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and the bankability of its stars, “Phillip Morris” failed to land a distribution deal. Some in the industry blamed this on what has been described as no-holds-barred gay love scenes between Carrey and McGregor.
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Posted by editor@vimooz.com on April 28, 2009 under Uncategorized |
First Independent Pictures has acquired the U.S. rights to 2009 Sundance film “Big Fan,” the directing debut of “The Wrestler” screenwriter Robert Siegel. The film is expected to be in theaters “late summer to early fall.”
The film stars Patton Oswalt in his first dramatic-lead performance, playing Paul Aufiero, an obsessive New York Giants fan whose chance encounter with his hero unexpectedly ends in violence. “Fan” also stars Kevin Corrigan and Michael Rapaport. [via] Read more of this article »
Posted by adam.s.ryan@vimooz.com on March 27, 2009 under Uncategorized |
The third and FINAL PART of our series considers the impact of Alexander Payne, Michael Moore, and Paul Thomas Anderson. (To check out Part One, click here. For Part Two, click here.)
Alexander Payne
Then
Citizen Ruth flew below the radar when it was released, and Payne received very little of the fanfare he deserved at least as much as his contemporaries. But it got his foot in the door, and he was able to score two high-profile leads for his follow-up, 1999’s era-defining Election. Put the two pictures together and you get a rarely seen but achingly honest portrait of American life at the close of the last millennium. It’s all there: mind-numbing, disingenuous culture wars; shadowy, destructive anxieties; pathos, bathos, Stamos. In other words, dynamite comedy material. And Payne was one of the rare filmmakers to make the jokes that so desperately needed making. Sometimes that meant getting Burt Reynolds to appear in an extended cameo as a pro-life guru, but more often it just meant pointing a camera at Middle America and letting it roll. The first shot of Election is of a sprinkler put-putting back and forth on the lawn of a high school in Nebraska, and it’s about as concise a visual statement as any American filmmaker made about life in the nineties.
Now
He’s good, maybe the best we have, but he’s not that prolific. His last feature came out five years ago, which would be bordering on incorrigible if the movie hadn’t been Sideways. And since he made About Schmidt before that, it’s more disappointing than anything else. He’s enjoyed a remarkable relationship with the studios that back his films, up to and including the virtually unrivaled authority of final cut. Given the quirky nature of his work, this is more than a little surprising, but a few auteurs are bound to slip through the cracks of the studio system. Maybe they like the prestige his films always garner, or the money they sometimes make. (Sideways was a smash hit by non-superhero movie standards.) Maybe, as Payne has himself suggested, his penchant for comedy over drama gives him a wider berth. Whatever it is, he’s not using it, which is frustrating for everyone from the jealous to the admiring. Because when he does work—like on his lump-in-the-throat short film contribution to the Paris Je T’aime omnibus feature—he’s one of the only people out there at the multiplex who can really earn the tears.
Michael Moore
Then
The man who made documentaries fun again certainly paid his dues. Born and raised among auto workers in Flint, Michigan, he pulled off the nearly impossible trick of making a popular, socially relevant, personal movie without graduating from UCLA. Here was a novelty that shouldn’t have been a novelty: a working class American engaging with mainstream film culture on his own terms. Roger and Me was a watershed in American cinema nearly washed out by the top-down fury and bottom-up backlash it engendered. The right attacked him. The left, perpetually startled and confused animal that it is, didn’t know what to do with him. But he was impossible to ignore, and that’s something few of his contemporaries managed to achieve.
Now
His most famous movie to date is by far his weakest, which is a shame, because it occupied a privileged place in the culture. Fahrenheit 9/11 was like Pineapple Express: we all wanted it to be good so bad we tried to forget that it wasn’t. Since it was so high-profile and spoke for so many people, this was a major letdown for both movies and politics. But he’s still got the talent and the fame to make progressive political documentaries that actually get seen, like 2007’s razor-sharp Sicko. That’s a job that needs doing, or at least a job that’s very much in demand. So as long as he steers clear of the fiction genre (see 1995’s Canadian Bacon, but don’t actually see it), he seems likely to continue making funny, accessible, and subversive films for a while to come. Love him or hate him, we’re all going to have to get used to him.
Paul Thomas Anderson
Then
Nobody saw Hard Eight, but it was good enough a debut to convince people in the know that Anderson was a director to watch, young and inexperienced though he was. So they bankrolled a two-and-a-half hour porn epic called Boogie Nights, and a great career was launched nice and early. It doesn’t happen often that Hollywood makes movies the way Anderson makes them, but he’s certainly as talented as he is lucky: he’s delivered consistently unique and eye-catching pictures from his mid-twenties onward. Boogie Nights was assured, glossy, crammed with A-list talent, and smarter than the average fare. It was also cheap, with the 70s era-matching budget of $15 million. Considering the quality of the production values, that’s either an impressive artistic feat or a very well-executed business plan. Whatever it was, it carved out a little niche in Hollywood for Anderson to call his own. And he used it to make the quietly groundbreaking epic Magnolia, a film so touching and ambitious that it’s been a source of inspiration for emerging filmmakers ever since.
Now
He’s another one of those guys who’s puzzlingly infrequent with his films, but it seems to work for him. 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love is a marvelous movie: funny, sad, pretty in a way few films dare to be. At just over 90 minutes, it’s even concise, which is a nice treat from someone like Anderson. It’s poetic, sincere, and original – an easy movie to fall for. But it may well have been Anderson’s last personal movie, if trends continue. The much-lauded There Will Be Blood—searing but pompous, with an Altman-inspired self-consciousness—was catnip for critics, but didn’t feel like the PT Anderson his devotees have come to admire. It’s prestige filmmaking, and all the good reviews and Oscar nominations come with strings attached. Here’s hoping Anderson listens to himself more than the swooning chorus, or else this passionate cinematic soul may be relegated to the literary-adaptations-and-cocktail-parties set. But either way there’ll be a lot to talk about, because his is a voice that’s hard to ignore.
Posted by editor@vimooz.com on March 18, 2009 under Uncategorized |
- Natasha Richardson as Stella Raphael in “Asylum”
The latest on actress, Natasha Richardson.
The NY Post is now reporting that the family of Natasha Richardson have taken her off life support.
Richardson, 45, was surrounded by her famous acting family at Lenox Hill Hospital when the agonizing choice was made, now two days after she fell skiing near Montreal. Read more …
Posted by adam.s.ryan@vimooz.com on March 2, 2009 under Coming Soon, People, Uncategorized |
PART TWO of a three-part series considers the impact of Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, and Steven Soderbergh. (To check out the first part, click here.)
Robert Rodriguez
Then
El Mariachi was the stuff of legend for the VCR generation of filmmakers, one of the first and most dramatic examples of the new independent path to glory. Made for a reputed seven thousand dollars (partly raised through its indomitable director’s willingness to undergo medical experiments), this charming love story cloaked in shoot-em-up garb was dazzling enough to immediately secure a studio deal. From a business standpoint, Rodriguez’s became the story to beat, with its rags-to-riches doggedness setting a template for success as an indie filmmaker.
Now
Success is easier to come by when you give people what they want, and from the beginning Rodriguez has shown himself to be at least as good a showman as he is an artist. He remade El Mariachi with a much bigger budget at the behest of his financiers, and went on to accept offers in television, paint-by-numbers mass-market horror (The Faculty), and glossy kids’ movies (Spy Kids and its sequel). Even at their worst and most vacuous these are a lot of fun, and his most recent films, Planet Terror and Sin City, are exemplary of the gloriously silly action-packed confections we all know and love. He makes movie blood candy, and fortunately for him, there are a lot of movie vampires out there buying tickets.
Quentin Tarantino
Then
Nobody in 90s cinema got made the way Tarantino got made with Pulp Fiction. His near-miraculous success as a distinct authorial voice within mainstream American film culture seemed to transcend the usually prohibitive divide between studio and indie. It was the kind of bandwagon everyone seemed willing to jump on, and it set the standard for cultural event movies. The fact that it was about as geeked out as any movie has ever been made it all the more amazing. Who knew video store clerk juvenilia would catch on like wildfire? I missed the days when bad kung fu movies and obsessive pop culture referencing were for losers, but I may have been the only one.
Now
The rest is pretty much history. Tarantino reveled in his shocking success and made no-strings-attached major studio movies at a snail’s pace. Jackie Brown was a safe, well-made picture, right in his zone; the much-later Kill Bill was an ambitious, entertaining, unnecessary encyclopedia of rightly forgotten film lore and gore. Audiences are still going there with him, all the way there, and given his charismatic off-screen presence, his stature as post-modern screen stylist is written in stone. He has a new movie coming out soon, a remake of a footnoted Italian war film from the seventies. He’s got Brad Pitt doling out the ultra-violence this time, so the next logical step may be for Almighty God to cameo as a fast-talking henchman with a samurai sword.
Steven Soderbergh
Then
Soderbergh came out of nowhere to win a Palme d’Or for sex, lies, and videotape at 26, becoming the youngest person to do so. But it was a hard slog after that: he wasn’t able to establish himself as a marketable presence until he made the minor hit Out of Sight years later, and much of that was due to the presence of rising superstars George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez. The trouble might have been that Soderbergh, although emblematic of the new generation of self-made directors, wasn’t a fully branded auteur. Not that he can’t write: he’s always been a full collaborator on the scripts he films. He just didn’t enter the scene with as fully realized an imprint as many of the other rags-to-riches 90s filmmakers. From the beginning, it was clear that he was another kind of talent entirely, and it took a while to figure out how he fit in.
Now
It’s now clear that he’s among the most technically sophisticated, formally creative, and outright daring filmmakers working today. But he did it the old-fashioned way: by the sheer force of his energy, enthusiasm, and passion for movies. He’s pretty much as hard-working as directors get outside of the 1940s studio system. Indeed, in interviews conducted for his minor but interesting tribute film The Good German, he opined that he’d be much more comfortable working in the factory-like environment of Hollywood yesteryear. He’s a proud workaholic, and in today’s film world of routine development hell, that’s a hard drug to score. But that kind of devotion, coupled with his outsized talent and willingness to take huge chances, can and does pay off big. He’s made a few risky pictures that were positively thrilling, like his haunting remake of Solaris and his recent balls out masterpiece, Che. Real thrills are hard to come by at the multiplex these days, so we should all thank our luck stars that Steven Soderbergh has found a way to get the job done.
Tags: Che, el mariachi, jackie brown, kill bill, planet terror, pulp fiction, Quentin Tarantino, robert rodriguez, sex lies and videotape, sin city, solaris, spy kids, Steven Soderbergh, the faculty, the good german
Posted by adam.s.ryan@vimooz.com on February 17, 2009 under Box Office, Industry, Uncategorized |
No one can say for sure how the recession is going to alter the landscape of independent filmmaking, but it already seems clear that the change will be dramatic. If the sun-soaked major studios are getting lost in the fog, what chance do the fly-by-night operations have of finding the shore?
Quasi-independent production company Lionsgate Entertainment recently announced its underperformance in the closing months of 2008, a record that caused much hand-wringing and second-guessing among executives. The Los Angeles Times quoted the Vice-Chairman of Lionsgate: “It speaks not only to the underperformance of our film business, but to our use of forecasting assumptions that in retrospect clearly have proven to be unrealistic.” For those of us who are trying to advance the medium, the news that action sequels Transporter 3 and Punisher: War Zone were being deemed unrealistic may come off as just a little chilling.
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Posted by adam.s.ryan@vimooz.com on February 15, 2009 under Box Office, Film Festival, People, Uncategorized |
PART ONE of a three-part series considers the impact of Richard Linklater, Kevin Smith, and Wes Anderson.
It’s been almost a generation since a few spunky young directors inaugurated a new era for the American independent film. Given the circumstances, it seemed inevitable that something had to give, at least from an artistic standpoint. The democratization of the medium through video technology, together with the broad demographic changes associated with the baby boom phenomenon, set healthy preconditions for a little renaissance. Generation X was coming of age, and some of them had had enough of the studio-dominated film market.
The analogous moment in 70s cinema actually drew blood, by which I mean the studio system faced a real challenge to its survival. The failure of that little insurrection cast a pall over the next attempt, and it’s safe to say the VHS filmmakers never really expected to change the landscape as dramatically as their parents’ generation had hoped to do with movies like Easy Rider and Nashville.
But these modest ambitions belie the far-reaching influence of their art, an influence that seems likely to grow when the form takes its next leap forward—as it now seems poised to do. If the YouTube generation manages to succeed where its parents and grandparents failed, the filmmakers who set the tone for that revolution will occupy a special place in cinematic history. This may have been as far and as free as the American middle class could get with analog movies.
Since the fate of these Clinton-era pioneers is so critical to understanding how movies get made these days—especially by people with bigger dreams than pocketbooks—it’s worth taking stock of what they did, and what they’re doing now.
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Posted by adam.s.ryan@vimooz.com on February 8, 2009 under Academy award, Awards, Documentary, Foreign Film, People, Theatrical Release, Uncategorized |
“Human life does not appear to be sustainable,” we are convincingly reminded by Werner Herzog in his 53rd film—the first to be nominated for an Oscar. The slyly named Encounters at the End of the World finds Herzog taking the death panic of the species for a ride through the Antarctic tundra. The company, as fans of his movies would expect, is as cold and as beautiful as the view.
If you haven’t seen a Herzog movie, it’s hard to pinpoint why exactly you should see one. They are strange, stubbornly esoteric little artifacts of cinema, filled with a dark, rebellious spirit that is by turns compelling and overwrought. “I didn’t want to make a film about fluffy penguins,” he narrates at the opening of the Antarctica film, and for a moment we feel like we’re caught one-on-one with some hip, brooding German art student at a party. He’s pretty sure of himself, and he seems interesting enough, but it’s hard to ignore that nagging little voice in our heads telling us how full of shit he is. Non-commercial filmmaking, existential void, apocalypse soon. We get it.
That’s his off-camera reputation working against him, I suppose, but it’s not like he tries to hide it. His eccentricity—a gentler word than the probably more accurate ‘megalomania’—is easily as well known as his work. Very often, film students find out that he put lives in danger to haul a ship over a mountain, or that he once pulled a gun on his movie’s star to prevent him from deserting a set, long before they’ve seen Fitzcarraldo or Aguirre: The Wrath of God. It may be that he’s better at being a filmmaker than he is at making films.
But he is pretty darn good at making films. Grizzly Man, his last documentary, was a knockout. Blending interviews and insightful, meandering narration with the subject’s own footage, the film recounts the odd life and tragic death of Timothy Treadwell, a naturalist who lived with grizzly bears. Herzog’s penetrating, deeply empathetic gaze reveals the beauty of his subject, which is the best you can say about a documentary treatment. It also reveals Herzog, and his themes are nothing if not consistent: here is another example of human folly, of the cruel limitations of nature, of the core of uncertainty that bla bla bla bla bla. Life is indeed absurd, and so indeed is Herzog.
Antarctica, as it turns out, is a great place to discover both of these things. The surroundings, like the offbeat characters who find themselves there, are well-suited to a bit of sententiousness. There’s the banker from Oregon turned Peace Corps worker in Guatemala turned bus driver in Antarctica; the graduate student in linguistics now living in the only place on earth without a native language; the self-described professional dreamer. “The universe dreams through us,” he says about humanity, and it’s startling to be reminded how hard some of us try to carry out that dream.
With awe we watch the divers of this tundra cutting a hole in the ice and swimming around underneath. It’s a place so quiet, so beautiful, populated by such marvelous creatures, that it earns its nickname ‘The Cathedral’ even without the gothic chanting we hear on the soundtrack. The colorful, translucent jellyfish we observe with fascination emit strange sounds, we find out from a scientist who studies them. We get to hear those sounds at a few places in the film. They’re not quite right somehow. The scientist mentions that they don’t even sound organic, and she’s right. They sound like laser beams, or electronica. They sound absurd.
Somebody makes the joke at one point that all the people who aren’t tied down wind up at the bottom of the earth. This is a place that most of us never see or even think about, a world of desolation and loneliness, where all points converge, and where warmth is the exception, not the rule. It’s the place we’re usually trying to pretend doesn’t exist, which is the absurd part. It’s the end of the world.
Herzog’s voice is never very far from this film, so we hear a lot of editorializing. In his dry, German-accented English, he expresses his contempt for ATM machines in the tundra, new age philosophy, and blockbusters about fluffy penguins. He lingers with unrestrained schadenfreude on a hapless group of trainees with buckets on their heads trying to learn how to survive a whiteout in Antarctica. He films scientists watching bad disaster movies from the fifties, intones on the unending series of catastrophes that make up natural history, and with practiced disinterest, informs us that “we seem to be next”. He shows us a wooden sign for all the divers out there with the hand-carved phrase “To sink into bliss.” It’s all pretty absurd, but it’s all pretty beautiful too, which is a good way of describing this life. And maybe it’s beautiful precisely because it’s so absurd.
Posted by adam.s.ryan@vimooz.com on January 27, 2009 under Coming Soon, New Release, People, Politics, Uncategorized |
Benicio Del Toro as Che Guevara in Steven Soderbergh's biopic.
Che Guevara’s story has been told so many times in so many ways, from late-night dorm room canonizations to vitriolic blogosphere condemnations, that it would be hard to imagine anything like a definitive film biopic. More than just a polarizing figure, Guevara serves for many of us the world over as a fundamental challenge to our worldview, and a movie dramatizing his life can’t help but pose some open-ended questions, not just about our political values, but about the way we as a culture experience art. Put another way: Can you really make a Che movie that gets us anywhere?
Well, if you can, it would have to be an independent film, wouldn’t it? The studio system isn’t geared towards treading on uneven ground like this, even if the subject matter, as we all know from the t-shirts and the tote bags, has tremendous mass appeal. (Tellingly, the financing for the film, which is helmed by an American director and stars bona fide Hollywood movie star Benicio Del Toro, came entirely from foreign sources.)
As it turns out, fate has brought to Che’s legacy a director who straddles the great filmmaking divide with more purpose and success than perhaps any other. Steven Soderbergh, who inaugurated the nineties independent film era with his Palme d’Or-winning sex, lies, and videotape, has also proved himself to be a reliable studio filmmaker, helming such star-powered vehicles as Out of Sight and the Ocean’s 11 franchise.
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