By Jacob Mertens. As far as rallying cries go, I suppose you can do worse than “spring break forever.” Even so, as Spring Breakers’ enigmatic Alien (James Franco) intones the words over and over, each syllable clawing through the speakers in the character’s arresting drawl, the sentiment becomes more of […]
Interview with Jon Gartenberg, Tribeca Film Festival
By Gary M. Kramer. Jon Gartenberg had been curating experimental films for the Tribeca Film Festival since 2003. He previously curated film at MOMA. For this year’s program, Let There Be Light: The Cycle of Life, Gartenberg scoured hundreds of submissions and winnowed them down to 13 films from Canada, […]
Interview with Sharon Badal, Tribeca Film Festival
April 15, 2013
By Gary M. Kramer. Sharon Badal has curated another terrific program of shorts for the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival. Starting with 2,870 entries, she and her staff/screeners have selected 60 shorts, 30 of which are World Premieres. “I think that’s great to have this many new short films to introduce […]
Looking Backwards: Oblivion
By Cleaver Patterson. “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” Ecclesiastes chapter 1, verse 9, describes succinctly the new Tom Cruise blockbuster. Oblivion (2013), the sci-fi extravaganza written, directed and produced by Joseph Kosinski and based […]
Spying the Noir: Fritz Lang’s Ministry of Fear
By Matthew Sorrento. By 1959, when making cinema history via Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock was weary of male victims on the run. In North by Northwest, he delivered what screenwriter Ernest Lehman described as “the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures.” Essentially, it was the last great work by the […]
The Man Who Should be Legend (Onscreen): Brian Helgeland’s 42
By Matthew Sorrento. I can understand the resistance to film the story of Jackie Robinson since the man himself played the role in 1950. Robinson is a legend so grand that actors would struggle to approach the man behind the story. Onscreen, should Jackie be destined for greatness? Or just […]
Family Friendly Torture Porn
By Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. “Watch new blood on the eighteen inch screen The corpse is a new personality Watch new blood on the eighteen inch screen The corpse is a new personality.” (Gang of Four, “5:45,” from the album Entertainment! [1979]) Television shows such as I Was Impaled (2012-) and […]
I’m So Excited (Los amantes pasajeros, 2013)
By Gaël Schmidt-Cléach. In the opening scene of Pedro Almodóvar’s I’m So Excited, two ground crew members, played by Antonio Banderas and Penélope Cruz, get distracted while prepping a plane for take-off, triggering the events of the movie before disappearing, not to be seen again. The scene is reminiscent of […]
IFFR 2013: The Passion of the Everyman in Boy Eating the Bird’s Food (2012)
By Martin Kudláč. The descendants of Plato and Aristotle have done it again. Despite the mass of negative press focussed on the country’s ongoing financial crisis, Greek filmmakers have succeeded in attracting a good deal of attention. This rising modern generation of auteurs has proven to have all the necessary […]
New Narratives for the 21st Century
By Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. With the exhaustion of film narrative an accomplished fact, it would seem that new, “anti-narratives” might be an early clue to a new direction. Inspired by the famous comment by Jean-Luc Godard that a film should “have a beginning, a middle and […]