Indie film news, reviews, commentary, interviews, podcasts and more, updated throughout the week.
Voicing Celebrity Concerns
By Nick Schager on 11/20/2009
Movie stars sell movie tickets, but do they also sell video games? The latest title to put this question to the test is "Brütal Legend," a new action-adventure title set in a heavy-metal land of mythic creatures and crushing tunes that stars Tenacious D frontman and "School of Rock" maestro Jack Black as the voice (and likeness) of its head-banging hero Eddie Riggs. Developed by acclaimed designer Tim Schafer (of "Grim Fandango," "Psychonauts") with Black's creative input, "Brütal Legend" is a heavily hyped game that's invested a lot in the popularity of Black, who's not only touted in ads as... MORE »
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Bad Boys Grow Up
By Charles Taylor on 11/17/2009
Filed under: FeaturesLet's start with a few images: A psycho jive artist dancing around as he cuts a man's ear off. A retired bullfighter slumped in front of a television set, masturbating furiously to slasher movies. Scenes like those, from Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs" and Pedro Almodóvar's "Matador," pretty much secured the bad-boy reputations of their creators. Tarantino came to be regarded as a hyped-up pop culture junkie spritzing bloodshed and movie references in equal measure. And Almodóvar was thought of as something like the post-Franco John Waters, mixing '50s Hollywood-style melodrama with cheerful hedonism awash in sex and drugs. But at... MORE »
When Viral Marketing Goes Wrong
By Stephen Saito on 11/16/2009
Filed under: Features"2012" may have destroyed the box office this weekend, but it also did plenty of damage to NASA, who received thousands of letters and phone calls from concerned citizens that the world was going to end in just over two years -- so much so that NASA set up a site to specifically debunk their fears. Roland Emmerich's latest disaster flick would've inevitably inspired some to panic regardless, but these calls got an assist from Sony's viral marketing campaign for the film, which included a web site devoted to The Institute for Human Continuity that, among other things, offers visitors... MORE »
What the Success of "Precious" Means for Black Indie Cinema
By Anthony Kaufman on 11/11/2009
Filed under: FeaturesSerious African-American cinema scarcely exists. It arrives in fits and sputters, in the occasional legends (Melvin Van Peebles, Gordon Parks), outliers (Charles Burnett, Julie Dash) or mavericks (Spike Lee). But demanding cinema based around the black experience are largely absent from American screens, displaced by gangstas, guns and masquerading comedians in drag or fat suits (Tyler Perry, Eddie Murphy). The film industry has always loathed challenging movies, no matter the race, ethnicity or gender of their subject matter, but for black creators, making artistic cinema and getting it seen is a near insurmountable task. Can Lee Daniels' "Precious" change all... MORE »
The Sandbox: Breathing New Life Into Old Formulas
By Nick Schager on 11/06/2009
Filed under: FeaturesLike indie films, indie games are free to take chances that their mainstream competitors can't, but in exchange have to work with limited financial resources that put a crimp on grand stabs at novelty. Because of that, indie games tend to stake out a unique ground where convention and experimentation meet. As seen in "Braid" and the wealth of kick-ass downloads for the iPhone, they tend to take risks within the confines of recognizable genres, whether they're "Mario"-esque run-and-jumpers, puzzlers or combat-strategy games. Putting fresh twists on the familiar has seen some thrilling results from these under-the-radar works. That's definitely... MORE »
Your Holiday Indie Film Preview
By Stephen Saito on 11/03/2009
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Holiday Preview: Anywhere But a Movie Theater
By Stephen Saito on 11/03/2009
Filed under: FeaturesMore Holiday Preview: [Theatrical Calendar][Repertory Calendar] [Anywhere But a Movie Theater] On Demand IFC Films (with whom, full disclosure, we obviously share a parent company) will be delivering new films all holiday season to homes across the country through their Festival Direct and Sundance Selects labels. These include the cross-cultural romantic dramedy "I'll Come Running" (Nov. 4), Josiane Balasko's farce "A French Gigolo" (Nov. 6), the Inuit tribal drama "Necessities of Life" (Nov. 11), the Brit crime thriller "Adulthood" (Nov. 18), the Indian love story "Return to Rajapur" (Nov. 25), the Christopher Masterson-Bijou Phillips celibacy satire "Made for Each Other"... MORE »
Holiday Preview: A Repertory Calendar
By Stephen Saito on 11/03/2009
Filed under: FeaturesTim Burton invades New York, New Italian Cinema hits Los Angeles, Harold and Kumar spread holiday cheer in Austin and everywhere you look, they're celebrating All Tomorrow's Parties -- just some of the holiday film fun you can have this winter at your local repertory theater. More Holiday Preview: [Theatrical Calendar][Repertory Calendar] [Anywhere But a Movie Theater] New York 92YTribeca In November, the 92YTribeca Screening Room will have some special guests in the house when it hosts the already sold out "A Conversation with Wes Anderson and Jason Schwartzman" on November 10th, with the two longtime collaborators discussing their latest... MORE »
Speak of the Devil: The Many Faces of Cinematic Satanism
By Matt Singer on 10/30/2009
Filed under: FeaturesThe Bible says that Satan "masquerades as an angel of light. In popular culture, we tend to think of him as a big red dude with horns and a pitchfork, or as a talking snake, or as Al Pacino in an Armani suit. The devil, in other words, comes in many different forms. And his followers come in just as many. Unlike a lot of other horror movie staples, there's no visual archetype for satanists. We recognize a vampire when we see his fangs and a zombie by the rotting flesh, but a Satan-worshipper? Tougher to spot. In the new... MORE »
Can Sexual Provocation Still Sell?
By Anthony Kaufman on 10/28/2009
Filed under: FeaturesBarring some epic year-end bombshell, Lars von Trier's "Antichrist" is sure to walk away with the designation of year's most provocative movie -- with its sadomasochistic sex, penis smashing and spontaneous clitorectomy, it rivals Nagisa Oshima's 1976 cinema scandal "In the Realm of the Senses" in its efforts to shock and offend. It's a useful comparison. Over the years, international art cinema has often been inextricably tied to our most prurient desires. In the 1960s, foreign masterpieces were as much about championing auteurs as glimpsing a choice piece of European ass. Federico Fellini's "La Dolce Vita" was marketed with blonde... MORE »
The Sandbox: Five Rules for Making a Decent Video Game Adaptation
By Nick Schager on 10/23/2009
Filed under: FeaturesFor the past 20 years or so, Hollywood has seemed intent on proving that video games aren't fit to be cinematic source material. How else to explain the dismal quality of the average game-to-film adaptation? But games and movies aren't inherently incompatible, provided that directors use some common sense when heading down that treacherous adaptation path. Here's my list of five guidelines that, if followed to the letter, should help future filmmakers succeed where so many before them have stumbled. 1. Costume changes are okay. As with comics, video game heroes are often defined by their distinctive get-ups. And in... MORE »
Welcome to the Wild Card Oscars
By Anthony Kaufman on 10/12/2009
Filed under: FeaturesEvery year, critics come up with their lists of the top ten films of the past 12 months. Ideally an eclectic mix of arthouse fare, Hollywood auteurs and the occasional wild card (say, last year's appearance of Ben Stiller's "Tropic Thunder"), these decalogues of cinephilia tend to be capricious, political and painstakingly strategized for maximum effect, not to mention their impact on the final results of consensus-building critics' polls. Now think of that power in the hands of the more than 6,000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences as they choose this year's ten Best Picture... MORE »
The Sandbox: Racial Profiling
By Nick Schager on 10/09/2009
Filed under: FeaturesVideo games offer escapist fantasies in which we get to control, even virtually embody, an on-screen avatar. And most of the time, that avatar is a white guy. According to "The Virtual Census: Representations of Gender, Race and Age in Video Games," a new study published in the journal New Media & Society by UCLA researcher Dmitri Williams, in the top-selling video games from 2005-2006, nearly 85% of primary characters were white, and 90% of them were male. That's way beyond the make-up of the U.S. population (which is 49% male and 75% white) and, for that matter, the gaming... MORE »
No One Knows Anything
By Anthony Kaufman on 09/30/2009
Filed under: FeaturesLast week, America's indie film community took a long, hard look at its precarious state. After industry pros flew back home from the Toronto International Film Festival -- heads throbbing from too many drinks, not enough sleep and the lackluster marketplace, where few films were bought and sold -- many headed straight to the IFP's annual Independent Film Week and Conference, a 31-year-old event where people like Jim Jarmusch, the Coen brothers, Michael Moore, Whit Stillman, Todd Haynes and Todd Solondz first stepped through the industry's door. Capping off the run of whining and redefining was an "Indie Film Summit,"... MORE »
The Sandbox: When Corporations Collide
By Nick Schager on 09/25/2009
Filed under: FeaturesDisney's $4 billion purchase of Marvel last month has major entertainment biz reverberations, one of those being that the Mouse House now gets to produce games based on the comic book giant's fabled superhero universe. Media consolidation on this scale isn't unexpected, especially in light of what's been happening in the game industry. Plenty of media giants have been buying or merging with outside studios in order to have their own in-hour game division: Disney's also bought Chicago-based Wideload Games (a small company founded by Alexander Seropian, whose first outfit, Bungie, was behind Halo and later sold to Microsoft); Warner... MORE »
The Claustrophobic Cinema of Paul (W.S.) Anderson
By R. Emmet Sweeney on 09/24/2009
Filed under: FeaturesThe old Hollywood studio-hand W.S. Van Dyke -- who directed, amongst countless other things, "The Thin Man" -- once advised a young Orson Welles to "just keep it close, and keep it moving." And an unlikely inheritor of this wisdom is Paul W.S. Anderson, whose latest work to hit screens is this week's "Pandorum," which he executive produced, leaving the directing to German up-and-comer Christian Alvart. Rivaled only by Uwe Boll for the title of worst-reviewed director of the past decade, Anderson's also been one of the most resourceful. Working with the flimsiest material (video game adaptations and remakes) in... MORE »
The Mundane Fantastic
By Matt Zoller Seitz on 09/15/2009
Filed under: FeaturesIn this summer's most spectacular features -- from CGI-driven live-action movies to 3-D animated fare -- the real star has been the camera. It's as lively, confident and versatile as any lead actor, taking any opportunity to get into character for a particular shot or sequence, doing whatever it needs to do to sell a moment. Much of the epic run time of "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" is shot with a wobbly handheld camera, following its heroes through a series of burning, crumbling, exploding landscapes as giant robots scramble along in the background or duke it out like boxers;... MORE »
The Sandbox: Virtual Hypocrisy
By Nick Schager on 09/11/2009
Filed under: FeaturesChalk it up to fluke timing or the shifting pop culture landscape, but there's a trio of Hollywood films this fall that deal directly with gaming by way of virtual reality storylines. Headlined by last weekend's "Gamer" and soon to be followed by the Bruce Willis action flick "Surrogates" and December's insanely hyped James Cameron epic "Avatar," this trend suggests just how dominant gaming is becoming in the entertainment arena -- dominant enough to tsked at by movies that are also arguably trying to mimic its qualities. With stories centered on humans steering avatars through real-world settings, these three films... MORE »
The Sketchy History of Sketch Comedy Movies
By Aaron Hillis on 09/10/2009
Filed under: FeaturesMonty Python's 1983 film "The Meaning of Life" effortlessly set the gold standard in sketch comedy movies -- which, for clarification, we'll define here as feature-length anthologies of stand-alone comic bits that don't serve to push along any overarching storyline. But while the Pythons' greatest film (gauntlet thrown down!) omitted a plot, their skits were still tied together by the most timeless of through lines: the trials of human life, presented in chapters like "The Miracle of Birth," "Middle Age" and "Death." Furthermore, 1971's "And Now For Something Completely Different," a re-filmed compilation of greatest hits from the first two... MORE »
Sites Specific: Can Streaming Save Indie Film?
By Anthony Kaufman on 09/04/2009
Filed under: FeaturesThe way we watch movies is changing. And no one knows how, in the not so distant future, cinema's going to be consumed -- especially those independent and art films that are increasingly unloved by the Hollywood distribution system. Multiplexes may not be the place for defiantly indie cinema, but are iPods, Xboxes, laptops and flat-screens their next best hope? There are entrepreneurs who are betting on it, which has led to the recent spread of web sites dedicated to putting harder to find films online, from the documentary-centric SnagFilms to the highfalutin internet cinematheque The Auteurs. If there's one... MORE »
What "Inglourious Basterds" Owes to History
By Kim Morgan on 08/31/2009
Filed under: Features[Spoilers ahead for those who haven't seen "Inglourious Basterds."] There have been two moments in film this year that have moved me to my cine-loving core. Both involved individuals stirred by the power of image, art and mythology. And both illustrated a personal investment for each character (some, real-life characters), revealing a potent significance and identification -- something that ascended beyond mere fandom. Simple and yet complex, these moments were meaningful to these people. One, occurred in Michael Mann's "Public Enemies." Watching John Dillinger (played by Johnny Depp) fatefully sitting inside the Biograph watching Clark Gable as Blackie, essentially playing... MORE »
The Five Worst Films Based on Comedy Sketches
By Nick Schager on 08/31/2009
Filed under: FeaturesWhen it comes to the family of films based on comedy sketches, "Saturday Night Live" is Don Corleone, though in terms of quality, a more apt analogy might be Fredo, as the venerable late-night staple is responsible for some of the most inept cinematic yukfests of the past two decades. In the '90s alone, a slew of spin-offs helped expand the show's brand to movie theaters with negative results, with the movies often so awful that the show's once-unimpeachable status as a comedy innovator slowly gave way to a new reputation as a program dedicated to creating recurring characters fit... MORE »
The Five Best Films Based on Comedy Sketches
By Nick Schager on 08/31/2009
Filed under: FeaturesStretching a brief comedy sketch into an 80-plus minute feature is not a task for the timid, as the process of fleshing out quick, self-contained bits is rife with inherent risks -- the two main ones being that such an endeavor usually makes little sense and can spoil the original joke. Yet despite these pitfalls, a select few have succeeded where so many others fail, managing to retain the core aspects of their source material while creating developed narratives that expand upon their original conceits in ways that are smart and silly. While only two of the below five might... MORE »
The Sandbox: The Case for Remaking Games
By Nick Schager on 08/28/2009
Filed under: FeaturesAs a kid, point-and-click PC adventure games were my be-all and end-all. Sierra, in particular, with their almost uniformly awesome "Quest" titles ("King's Quest," "Space Quest," "Police Quest"), and their bawdy "Leisure Suit Larry" series, held a prime spot in my heart. I awaited their every new release with baited breath and consumed them with a fervor that led me, on more than one occasion, to secretly spend my parents' hard-earned cash on Sierra's 1-900 automated hint lines. Sierra's genre adventures were the standard by which I judged all other games, but in 1990, that benchmark was not only met... MORE »
The Look of Being Lost
By Anthony Kaufman on 08/21/2009
Filed under: FeaturesLucrecia Martel's hallucinatory new film "The Headless Woman" could just as well be called "The Hazy Woman." While the film's protagonist, the middle-aged Vero, appears headless, literally, in several images -- with the frame cutting her off at the neck -- she's also shown walking around in a daze, with blurry cinematography providing a visual metaphor for her shell-shocked state. The routines of her existence -- car rides, sitting at home, getting tests at a hospital -- become a fuzzy, alien landscape through which she floats like a drifting astronaut. That effect, created with a long lens on the camera,... MORE »
The Pleasures of Putting a Team Together
By Matt Singer on 08/18/2009
Filed under: FeaturesIt's the first line of the last trailer for Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds": "I'm putting together a special team," Brad Pitt's Lt. Aldo Raine says. Most of Tarantino's movies pay homage to particular strains of genre cinema, from kung fu flicks to heist thrillers to grindhouse slashers, and with that pronouncement, Tarantino puts "Inglourious Basterds" in that cinematic tradition of pictures about the recruitment and implementation of a specialized squad of badasses. "Putting a Team Together" is more a structural motif that crosses into different genres than a genre unto itself. There are musicals -- "The Blues Brothers," for instance,... MORE »
The Sandbox: The Trouble with Cutscenes
By Nick Schager on 08/14/2009
Filed under: FeaturesVideo games aren't movies, but they sure can be intent on acting like them, most prominently through the scripted sequences known as cutscenes, those insufferable CG-animated interludes that propel stories forward while you wait... and wait... and wait to resume playing. Cutscenes have been around, in at least some rudimentary form, since the dawn of games, and they're not all bad -- the quick between-level vignettes of the NES' "Ninja Gaiden," for example, were so thrilling to me as a kid that just thinking about them elicits a pang of sweet nostalgia. But as graphics have improved and games have... MORE »
"It's a twister! It's a twister!": Rating movie tornadoes
By Keith Cecere on 08/13/2009
Filed under: FeaturesCreating a tornado in a film has always been a test of the limits of special effects, but most people, luckily, haven't gotten up close and personal with enough of them to spot the differences. Keith Cecere and Rich Ruggiero, both active storm chasers (and co-stars in IFC's storm-chasing mockumentary "Funnel of Darkness"), have. That's why they've offered their judgments on five movies known for their wicked weather sequences, which they've rated (both for the effects and the acting -- hey, everyone's a critic) on the Fujita scale, a scale for rating tornado intensity, from f1 (weakest) to f5 (strongest).... MORE »
Fall Preview: Ten Breakout Stars... and the Indies You Can See Them In Now
By Matt Singer on 08/05/2009
Filed under: FeaturesTons of movies come out every week (as our Fall Film Preview duly demonstrates), and it can be hard keeping up with them all. No one wants to be caught flat-footed or empty-headed when a movie blasts onto the pop cultural landscape and its young star becomes the next big thing. To avert said potential conversational disaster, here's our picks for the ten most likely candidates to be the breakout stars of the fall, along with an older film for each to check out right now. This way, you'll be ready when that all-important question strikes: "What have I seen... MORE »
Fall Preview: Anywhere But a Movie Theater
By Stephen Saito on 08/05/2009
Filed under: FeaturesWith a new film from Sally Potter arriving online and John Boorman and Peter Greenaway's latest work exclusively hitting DVD shelves, enjoying a night at the movies no longer necessarily means at your local theater (though we've got the lowdown of what's playing there as well). From August to October, one doesn't need to move from the couch to see a Val Kilmer double bill, a James Franco-Sienna Miller romantic comedy and the last performance from the late, great Natasha Richardson, not to mention Robert Pattinson and Jet Li imports and a host of foreign films and documentaries well worth... MORE »
