Movie City Indie Archive for June, 2011
David Carr at Rossi/Thompson panel on PAGE ONE at Sundance
Saw Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times, finally, today. I felt like a 16-year-old, or more correctly, like the 16-year-old who wide-eyed the idea of journalism out in the wild before confronting journalism school. All the idealism… but also all the process. Will it be as thrilling to someone not so immersed in the minutiae of all this good, hopeful, pragmatic, panicked yet confident stuff? To use one of Carr’s recurrent words in Andrew Rossi’s fine film… Fuck! It’s very good. (I may have laughed during all the wrong places during the screening.) More later. [Photo: Ray Pride.]
Woman Reacts To TWILIGHT SAGA: BREAKING DAWN: PART 1 Trailer (7’54”)
OMG! OMG? OoooooooooMG!!!!!!
Best Commercial On MTV Movie Awards, Gasp, A Couple Weeks Old
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDPJ-o1leAw&feature=player_embedded
New Jersey Candidate Premieres Anti-Abortion Thriller At His Teaneck Hoboken Film Festival
The Hoboken International Film Festival Of Teaneck has a guiding spirit: “Kenneth Del Vecchio, a Republican candidate for New Jersey state Senate and a producer of conservative-themed films, is premiering a psychological thriller this weekend with a pro-life twist: Three pregnant women, who intend to have abortions, are kidnapped and forced to carry their pregnancies to term,” reports Talking Points Memo. “The movie, called The Life Zone, was produced by Del Vecchio’s “Justice For All Productions,” and is premiering Saturday at the Hoboken Film Festival in Teaneck, N.J. A press release describes the festival as “one of the nation’s largest film festivals, which Del Vecchio founded and chairs.”
And from The Jersey Journal: “Last June, Kenneth Del Vecchio resigned his North Arlington municipal judgeship to pursue his career as filmmaker and continue developing the Hoboken International Film Festival. The festival returns to Teaneck’s CedarLane Cinemas, launching with the premiere of Del Vecchio’s latest script, The Great Fight, starring last year’s lifetime achievement honoree, Robert Loggia, and Charles Durning, a festival stalwart who’s also on this year’s jury. While the festival provides an opportunity for up-and-coming filmmakers to find fame, funding and distribution, it’s also an opportunity for Del Vecchio, a self-proclaimed “bestselling author/critically acclaimed filmmaker” to showcase his own works: B-movies with a strong political bent. Del Vecchio has produced and written four of the feature films screening in this year’s festival including The Life Zone, about pregnant women kidnapped from abortion clinics and forced to give birth… and O.B.A.M.Nude, a film Del Vecchio premiered two years earlier suggesting the … president made a pact with Satan to destroy the Earth.”
4 Comments »Mike Mills Introduces
Chicago, 13 May 2001, AMC River East 21. [Photo: Ray Pride.]
“Manhattan In Motion”: NYC Living, Breathing In Fast Motion [UPDATED]
Koyaanisqatsiahatta!
The New Yorker on how it was made.
Silencio: David Lynch Designs A Nightclub UPDATED 6/14
From late May: Details from a Paris blog. And WWD. And from the Independent, it opens in September in Montmartre: “The private members’ club is at 142 Rue Montmartre, not far from the Paris Stock Exchange. The upper floors of the building previously housed left-leaning newspaper L’Aurore, whose most famous front page featured Émile Zola’s rabble-rousing letter “J’accuse…” in 1898. The building is also currently home to Social Club – the city’s hottest nightspot, which has hosted DJ sets by the new wave of French disco and techno acts like Cassius, Justice and SebastiAn.”
The first public showing of Silencio will be during Paris’ Designer Days, June 16-20. (Catalog entry, right.)
PLUS: The Guardian’x Xan Brooks gets in on the reblogging, cracking wise about dumpsters. And: IFC.com. Plus: ContactMusic doesn’t even offer a link to its source. More furniture at Hint.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rThBw4Vi1KA&feature=player_embedded
1 Comment »Situating Los Angeles In BEGINNERS: Mike Mills Footnotes His Swooning Love Letter
One of the quieter, yet fantastically winning things about Mike Mills’ Beginners is how it casually moves through Los Angeles. On the Focus on Film website, Mills illustrates nine locations with stills and footnotes them in the most loving way. He shows all the tenderness that’s in his movie toward a city that seems in movies so often a location, seldom a setting. A sample from one of the nine pages: “The Health House was commissioned by the Lovell family and built in 1927. It is one of Richard Neutra’s most famous houses. But that is not why we picked it [for the father’s house]. It is gorgeously situated and the natural light that comes through is just amazing. It made sense, character-wise, that you would have this art historian man living there––and that would be the family house. Also I wanted to shoot in all natural light. And Richard Neutra is like the best gaffer in the whole world, with the light that comes through those windows. He has these built in sconce lights, and they create this amazing soft light. I love modern 
American architecture, and I know all about Neutra, so when Chris [Miller], my locations manager, showed me the house, I was, “You can’t be showing me the Richard Neutra Lovell House—we can’t get in there.” But luckily the recession really helped us, in that we could afford something’s we couldn’t normally afford. The Topper family has lived in there for, I think, like 40 years. So the house has a real patina, a real accumulation of stuff, like a real family has. The checkered bedspread that is in one of the scenes—that is just the Toppers’ actual bedspread. All the stuff that is in the kitchen, along the shelves, that is just the Toppers’ stuff. I love going in to locations and treating them in a documentary way.”
Sam Fuller Auditions For THE GODFATHER PART II
[Via Trailers From Hell, Mr. Peel and Christa Fuller.]
1 Comment »Go-go Gagosian: “SASHA GREY – A Richard Phillips Film”
“For my film portrait of Sasha Grey, I wanted to focus on her expressive and psychological transformation into a cinematic actor, separate from the cues that have associated Sasha with her previous career as a performance artist working within the adult film world.” – Richard Phillips
“Shot on location at the John Lautner Chemosphere House off Mulholland Drive, the film showcases Sasha as a perpetually evolving figure. Costume designer Ellen Mirojnick (“Basic Instinct,” “Fatal Attraction,” “Wall Street,” “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps”) dressed Sasha for the part in an array of lingerie and military inspired garments to highlight the dual nature of her masculine / feminine persona. Looking over the roadside from the vantage point of one the most legendary residences in modern and cinematic history, Sasha reflects on her relationship to the San Fernando Valley landscape—the location of some of her most noted adult performances. Back inside the circular vortex of the Chemosphere, Sasha’s inner dialogue projects an equally diaristic and imaginary self-portrait that pushes beyond the extremes of her past filmography and into her new future. “Sasha Grey,” along with Phillip’s first short film, “Lindsay Lohan,” will be included in “Commercial Break,” presented by the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Venice, Italy, June 1 – 5, 2011, concurrent with the 54th international exhibition of the Venice Biennale.”
