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9 items from 2013

17 June 2013 1:30 PM, PDT | ScreenDaily | See recent ScreenDaily news »

The Weinstein Company (TWC) and Cary Woods Pictures have sealed an exclusive first-look production deal.

The parties are familiar as Woods produced seven titles for Miramax back in the day when Harvey and Bob Weinstein ran that company.

Those titles include Scream, Swingers [pictured] and Citizen Ruth. Woods’ credits include Kids and Gummo.

He began his career at the William Morris Agency before moving to Sony Pictures Entertainment where he served as vice-president, office of the chairman and segued into a production deal with the studio before launching Independent Pictures. »

- jeremykay67@gmail.com (Jeremy Kay)

17 June 2013 12:28 PM, PDT | Deadline New York | See recent Deadline New York news »

Exclusive Details: Signing an exclusive first look deal with The Weinstein Company, Cary Woods is making his way back. Back to the features game, back with Harvey Weinstein, and back from a near death experience that took almost two years of recovery. In the 1990s, Woods was a charming dealmaker with relentless optimism who was one of the producers on Godzilla (the disappointing 1998 version), and who launched a lot of new talent with Weinstein at Disney-owned Miramax. His films there included launching the Wes Craven-directed and Kevin Williamson-scripted Scream franchise, the Larry Clark-directed Harmony Korine-scripted Kids, Korine’s directing debut Gummo, Doug Liman’s Swingers, James Mangold’s Cop Land and Alexander Payne’s Citizen Ruth. They fell out over a deal extension that was as bruising as feuds with Weinstein tended to be back then. Woods calls that water under the bridge. It’s understandable »

- MIKE FLEMING JR

23 May 2013 12:55 PM, PDT | Huffington Post | See recent Huffington Post news »

Cannes, France — Shooting the Midwest in monochrome came naturally for Alexander Payne in his father-son road trip "Nebraska."

Payne premiered his black-and-white follow-up to "The Descendants" on Thursday at the Cannes Film Festival, where the gentle tale drew largely enthusiastic reviews for both its warmth and its colorless cinematography.

"It just seemed like the right thing to do for this film," Payne told reporters Thursday at the French Riviera festival. "I always wanted to make a film in black and white. It's such a beautiful form. It really left our cinema because of commercial, not artistic reasons."

"This modest, austere story seemed to lend itself to being made in black and white," he added.

"Nebraska" stars Bruce Dern as an aging father, whose son (Will Forte) drives him from Montana to Nebraska to placate his father's delusional belief that he's won $1 million from a mass mailing.

Particularly in black and white, »

- AP

13 May 2013 11:13 PM, PDT | Variety - Film News | See recent Variety - Film News news »

Ever since the Tribeca Film Festival physically departed Tribeca and more or less abandoned its uniquely over-specific 9/11 and “made in NYC” slants, it has become more reflective of national and/or global developments, tackled via a smorgasbord of genres, approaches and media.

Hence the arrival of a new subgenre, among others: the festival-friendly, narrator-free phenomenological documentary, as practiced by director Lucien Castaing-Taylor in the sheep-packed “Sweetgrass” (2009) and fish-crammed “Leviathan” (2012). Upholding the form at Tribeca was the similar but less ambitious turf-and-surf duo of “Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys” and “Raw Herring.”

Jessica Dreck’s “Aatsinki” spotlights a family of reindeer wranglers against spectacular icebound landscapes. Herding, butchering and notching the ears of reindeer, these “arctic cowboys” also serve as tour guides for reindeer sledders with commendable equanimity and a great deal of noise. “Raw Herring,” directed by Hetty Naaijkens-Retel Helmrich and Leonard Retel Helmrich, follows the shrinking Dutch herring fleet, »

- Ronnie Scheib

15 April 2013 1:44 PM, PDT | Indiewire | See recent Indiewire news »

Scott Coffey has had a 30-year-long career as an actor, appearing in films such as "Mulholland Dr." and "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," as well as in his directorial debut "Ellie Parker" in 2005. This year Coffey adds a second film to his directing filmography with "Adult World," starring Emma Roberts as an aspiring poet who takes up a job in a sex shop, and John Cusack, as a punk poet. The film, which was inspired by the satirical tone of Alexander Payne's "Citizen Ruth," comments on the replacement of the American Dream with youth's current struggle for fame. What it's about: Amy Anderson graduates college convinced she's going to be a famous American poet. Unemployed and desperate for work, she takes a job in an adult book and video store. Meanwhile, she stalks her mentor, the famous punk poet Rat Billings. About the filmmaker: I was an actor in my »

- Indiewire

7 March 2013 6:31 AM, PST | Den of Geek | See recent Den of Geek news »

Feature James Peaty 8 Mar 2013 - 06:24

With Sundance London fast approaching, we've highlighted ten Sundance films you really should watch...

For nearly 30 years the Sundance Film Festival has been the pre-eminent North American independent film showcase. Helping to make the names and careers of filmmakers as diverse as Steven Soderbergh, Kevin Smith, Quentin Tarantino Bryan Singer and Christopher Nolan the festival's reach has now spread even further thanks to the inaugural Sundance London show in 2012.

But despite Sundance’s enviable influence at the top of the film tree not every movie – or even award winner – shown at the festival ends up becoming as ubiquitous as Sex, Lies and Videotape or Clerks.

Fast approaching is the Sundance London 2013 festival (full details on that are here), whose line-up is set to be announced on March 11th. The event runs from 25-28 April, and tickets go on sale at the end of next week. »

- simonbrew

8 February 2013 12:00 PM, PST | FilmExperience | See recent FilmExperience news »

Behold the first still released from Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac which will star Charlotte Gainsbourg (in her third collaboration with the director following Antichrist & Melancholia). These are the thoughts I had in actual chronological order...

• That's a really odd choice for a first still. It's a tremendously vague tease but better this than those movies which release "first looks!" that might as well be headshots of the actors, they're so generic.

• Remember when Laura Dern got high from inhaling glue in paper bags in Citizen Ruth? 

• If that were Michelle Pfeiffer and this were 1992, a bunch of cats could run into frame and resurrect this poor soul.

• Who is this poor soul? 

• This doesn't look as fun as the movie's title. Bleak it looks.

• If this movie is as good as The Idiots (1998), my vote for the single most underappreciated von Trier marvel, I will want to have sex with it. »

- NATHANIEL R

26 January 2013 4:07 PM, PST | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »

Sexual content was to the fore this year, including Daniel Radcliffe indulging in a gay kiss, Steve Coogan as Paul Raymond and James Franco in a leather bar

Sex sells. That's a maxim more commonly applied to glitzy Hollywood films than independent ones, but it is true even at the Sundance film festival, where audiences bundled up for the Utah winter have over the past 10 days been flocking to see famous people remove their clothes. This year's festival has boasted a bumper crop of onscreen flesh of all kinds, from straight porn addicts to gay leather bars to foxy moms sleeping with each other's sons to a lesbian who suffers a concussion and decides to become an escort.

All of this smut has got people talking. Local conservative groups in Utah made empty threats about boycotting the festival. The talent agency CAA threw an instantly infamous party featuring burlesque dancers on poles. »

- Katey Rich

15 January 2013 11:00 AM, PST | ioncinema | See recent ioncinema news »

Nebraska

Director: Alexander Payne

Writer(s): Bob Nelson

Producer(s): Bona Fide Productions’ Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa

U.S. Distributor: Paramount Pictures

Cast: Devin Ratray, Bruce Dern, Stacy Keach, Bob Odenkirk, Will Forte

Master of the comedic roadtrip movie (About Schmidt and Sideways), it’ll be nice to see Alexander Payne work on a project that has been on his personal radar for such a while, and with another Dern member – Laura was the lead in Citizen Ruth, and Bruce is the co-lead in this misadventure. Still fresh in our minds, is Payne’s equally-balanced The Descendants.

Gist: An aging, booze-addled father makes the trip from Montana to Nebraska with his estranged son in order to claim a million dollar Publisher’s Clearing House sweepstakes prize.

Release Date: Still in production, this will be ready in time for Telluride/Venice/Tiff.

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- Eric Lavallee

9 items from 2013