Summerhill documentary selected for Astra Film Festival
We were pleased to hear this morning that our feature documentary: Imagine a School… Summerhill has been accepted into the Astra Film Festival in Romania (International Documentary Film Festival). Not sure if I can make it over there, but I think my producing partner might be able to.
Write What You Don’t Know Takes Flight!
Another book picture. This one taken on the way to the Telluride Film Festival!
Hope it made the flight seem shorter
Write What You Don’t Know now available at the Writers Store
For those of you who know the wonderful Writers Store in Burbank or online you can now buy the book there. “Hoorah!” You yell. For those of you who have yet to make the Writers Store’s acquaintance, allow me to introduce you:
“Random Reader, Writers Store – Writers Store, Random Reader”
There now, who wants an amuse bouche? Have you tried the roasted garlic dipping sauce with ginger and tamari?
The Rules of Adaptation
Interestingly wry piece over at MovieMaker magazine by Rowan Joffe on adapting well known novels for the screen. Joffe took on the daunting task of adapting Graham Greene‘s famous Brighton Rock, which had already been made into a classic 1947 film starring Richard Attenborough as Pinkie Brown. I wish him luck…
Graham Leggat obituary
Graham Leggat, the Executive Director of the San Francisco Film Society and a former Contributing Editor at Filmmaker magazine died late last week from cancer. Highly respected and liked in the Bay Area and beyond, I have heard from a number of his well wishers amongst my friends and students since his passing. I thought it would be appropriate to offer a link on this blog to the obituary in Variety via Filmmaker.
Graham Leggat R.I.P.
Zero Film Festival
This might be of interest to all you low and no budgeters out there. Here’s their blurb ‘o’ joy:
Zero Film Festival is the first and only festival EXCLUSIVE to self financed filmmakers and the authentically independent films they create.
ZFF is a New York based independent not-for-profit organization firmly committed to supporting under-represented filmmakers and screening the world’s best self-financed films for cinema lovers everywhere. ZFF focuses on community, inclusivity and good times on planet Earth.
In the age where the majority of festivals are Hollywood marketing campaigns, and even indie and underground festivals screen financed films, we exist to offer something different. Each year Zero holds events in New York, Los Angeles, London and Toronto, providing exposure in key cities for authentically independent filmmakers.
Click here for the 2010 Festival Report
The Guard
A small review of a small movie – move along now
The Guard is a very small movie which benefits from being entirely comfortable in its very smallness. Indeed it is so small that it spends most of its time waving at the movies it could have been as they pass by on a lonely Connemara road. The chance to be a real gangster movie passes, followed by the chance to be a detailed character study. Both offer The Guard a lift as they come alongside but The Guard just smiles politely and wishes them on their way. No, no, this movie is saying, I wouldn’t want to trouble you with depth, besides it’s my day off and the whores I ordered from the big city are due on the next train.
The Guard offers Brendan Gleeson the chance to perfect his Galway accent and get his teeth into some tasty dialogue. It allows Don Cheadle to roll his eyes at Brendan’s uncouth manner until he realizes there is a first rate detective hiding under the liberal coat of bucolic Oirishness. It allows Mark Strong to be, well ‘Mark Strong’ and that’s always fun to watch. The supporting cast is universally entertaining and there are enough subplots to offer the hint of complexity without actually requiring us to think. Indeed these are also little more than hints at subplots, never developing far but just enough to make us feel there might be something interesting to be uncovered if we would ever be so impolite as to insist on their development.
But to do so would seem churlish. The Guard doesn’t impose upon us so why should we impose upon it? Instead this story of an eccentric but honorable rural cop dealing with drug smugglers and a visiting FBI agent potters along happily and effortlessly carries us with it. The fact that it doesn’t really go that far would matter more to us if we felt it mattered to the movie.
Another Write What You Don’t Know photo
I think Chester the dog can smell - BUNNIES!
PFA screening series The Outsiders: New Hollywood Cinema in the Seventies
September 2 – October 27
Our series presents a cross-section of this new wave, focusing on filmmakers who made their first film in this period, often with their own production company. A majority of the filmmakers represented are little known: they made just one, two, or a few films before opportunities closed down for boundary-pushing filmmaking. The series ranges from films by two of the few female filmmakers of the New Hollywood era, Barbara Loden and Elaine May, to the radical reflections of Robert Kramer and Haile Gerima and the biting visions of Hal Ashby and Larry Cohen. It also includes early films by well-known directors Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, and Terrence Malick. They changed the way movies were made.
