Another Sundance, ANOTHER EARTH

After Thursday night’s Library screening of Another Earth in Park City, lead-co-writer-co-producer Brit Marling and director-cinematographer-co-writer-co-producer Mike Cahill take questions. More reviews, including of this Fox Searchlight acquisition, Martha Marcy May Marlene, The Redemption of General Butt Naked, I Melt With You, and dozens of photographs, after the festival’s end: there’s so much to do, writing…

Picturing Sundance Day 4

David Carr Talks Times And “Going Toward Things”

THE AFTERNOON AFTER THE SUNDANCE 2011 PREMIERE OF Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times—where post-screening Tweeters were well-impressed that New York Times reporter David Carr was greeted at the Q&A afterwards with a “rock-star standing ovation”—director Andrew Rossi and Carr talked about media at a casual Bing Bar panel moderated by Anne…

Sundance Day 2: World-Premiering THE INTERRUPTERS

Until a magnificent movie in the middle of the evening, the highlight of a woozy first day of Sundance was the sight of Jeff Dowd, “The Dude,” pouring a sleeve of Emergen-C into his Sundance 11 Nalgene water bottle and advising his friends, “Zinc’s better.” A day late and sleep-deprived from the get-go, I had…

On Predicting Sundance Bests

Predicting film festival bests isn’t my game. But I am hopeful for surprises like a couple years back when, toward the end of Sundance, Robert Koehler is urgently telling me to run, don’t think, go directly to an end-of-festival presser for Man On Wire. (Thank you, Bob.) I’d gotten the same pleasure from being at…

Sundance Day 1: The Bear Went Up The Mountain…

A shuttle filled with Sundance-bound travelers. IPhones bing, tinggg, jing, bongggg. (Withstanding the text of time.) The sound-swarm is like a Brian Eno app on an iPad, like Bloom or Trope. It’s not until halfway up into the mountains, as the gray sky cracks blue over a crest up ahead, higher up, that a biz…

Pride: The Best Of 2010

THE TRUE MOVIE OF THE YEAR is a movie that is not a movie, that is not a script, that is not an idea, that is not even yet a flicker in the filmmaker’s mind, and that movie, of course, would be the one not yet imagined by Jafar Panahi, yet sensed by those who…

Interview: In Arm’s Way With Danny Boyle

In 127 Hours, Danny Boyle doesn’t present Aron Ralston as any kind of idealist of the great outdoors, or as a man surmounting the wilderness. Rather, the climbing enthusiast who was trapped for days in a Utah canyon by a fallen boulder is a blithe young man who may have reached the limits of his…

Interview: The Savory Sound of Fatih Akin’s Soul Kitchen

Music is both architecture and pulse in Fatih Akin’s tasty, generous farcical food-com, “Soul Kitchen.” Music’s there from the start of writing the script, he tells me, as well as confessing a nasty addiction to something called “vinyl.”

The Best of 2009

..MCN Weekend ..Movie City Indie I’m in awe of the film reviewers who readily arrive at their particular, peculiar way to array the experience of a movie-going year, wondering who works with index cards and who favors spreadsheets, who cuts-and-pastes or just has a memory that’s out of this world. Or who’s taking notes toward…

Weekend, 08 November 1997

IN: New Line is putting all its eggs in one movie, teaming Jackie Chan, Chris Tucker and The Full Monty co-star Tom Wilkinson (who played Gerald) in Rush Hour, to be directed by Money Talks director Brett Ratner. The storyline? The Chinese ambassador’s daughter is kidnapped in Los Angeles. Wilkinson plays the ambassador’s right-hand man….

WEEKEND PREVIEW

The big noise starts this weekend with Starship Troopers. Twenty-five million is my estimate. A big number, but doable. Even surpassable. With all the people going to genre movies (see slots three, five and seven), the stage is set for this one, by far the biggest, brashest entry in the category since Men In Black…

Thursday, 06 November 1997

The notoriously widescreen Marlon Brando has seduced notoriously picky novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez into allowing The Grandfather Godfather to adapt his novel, Autumn of the Patriarch, as a movie. In turn, Brando says that this film, which is centered around an aging Latin American dictator, will be his last. If the film does get made,…

Wednesday, 05 November 1997

Titanic finally set sail in Japan with a triumph for Jim Cameron and an even bigger one for Paramount and 20th Century Fox publicity. For Cameron, it was the wildly enthusiastic reaction of the crowd to the film. For the studios, it was their success in getting a handle on the estimates of overwhelming production…

Tuesday, 04 November 1997

Grease is the word at Paramount these days. Producer Alan Carr, the most popular caftan wearer ever, aside from our own Andy Jones, is back on the lot, prepping the Grease 20th Anniversary Star Wars-like re-launch, in which more than 1,500 screens will play the remastered version on the smash hit. Unlike Star Wars, there’s…

WEEKEND REVIEW

Ouch! I know you can’t see it in my photos, but I am bleeding profusely from the nose after getting tagged hard by Boogie Nights’ number four opening with just $5.1 million! I guess Middle America wasn’t ready for a film about porn that didn’t include porn. And I wish I could blame it on…

Weekend, 01 November 1997

Here’s a plotline: A movie producer learns a lesson about life after his child’s wish that he can’t litigate for two years comes true. Nah! Never’ll happen! Aaron Russo, who produced a half a dozen hits in the ’80s, is suing Imagine Entertainment for $25 million, claiming that producer Brian Grazer stole his idea for…

WEEKEND PREVIEW

BOO-gie Nights is here! (Happy Halloween, kids!) Go now, before you get distracted by Starship Troopers and The Little Mermaid, ’cause it’s gonna happen. I wish that I could say that Paul Thomas Anderson’s feel-good, feel-all epic will take Number One with $20 million, but $10 – $11 million seems a lot more likely. (We’ll…

COUNTDOWN TO BOOGIE NIGHTS: BOOGIE MINUS 1

Boogie Nights is ready to bring porn to a cable network near you. New Line is shopping a late-night series that would bring the antics of Dirk, Amber, Rollergirl and Buck into your house every week. HBO was the first cable net to produce original sitcoms with “Dream On,” the show that had almost every…

COUNTDOWN TO BOOGIE NIGHTS – DAY 2

Boogie Nights makes porn stars look far too pathetic according to ’70s artistes du penetration Bobby Astyr and Candida Royalle, as quoted in the New York Daily News. However, they say, the slick producers, bad dialogue and poor production values are right on target. So, the 19-year-old from Iowa who’s getting paid $1,000 by a…