Extra Criticum

Athena Film Festival opens Feb. 9

Thanks to our pals at Indiewire for drawing our attention to this inpsiring festival trailer. If you're going to be in Manhattan in February, head uptown to Barnard College for the Athena Film Festival - a celebration of women and leadership.

A Boy Who Really, Really Liked His Horse

So…War Horse.

It’s a juggernaut. It won six Oliviers. It won five Tonys. It won Best Play on both sides of the pond. It has been made into a giganto new movie by Steven Spielberg that was nominated for two Golden Globes. It didn’t win any, but hey, you can’t have everything.

“Jooooooooooooooeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!!!!”

Interview with Filmmaker Aimee Madsen

In the spring of 2010, a Google Alert mentioned a documentary in production about Paolo Soleri that wasn't A Life's Work. I was curious and reached out to the filmmaker, Aimee Madsen. We've communicated since about each others' work and supported each others' efforts the way filmmakers do, or at least should. I'm thrilled that she agreed to answer a few questions about her film, Before Form.

Tell me about your documentary, Before Form.

Shame: Haiku Review

A movie called Shame

Surface skimmed by director

He has no idea

Process: Editing a Bit of A Life's Work

In case you don't know, I'm making a documentary called A Life's Work. It's about people engaged in projects they may not complete in their lifetimes.

Before I get to the clip, some background. My first meeting with Bob Darden of the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project was in Chicago, August 2009. During our sit down interviews it became clear very quickly that I would have to go to Baylor University (Waco, TX) to shoot audio engineer Tony Tadey in action. And so I did. The footage with Bob and Tony was shot April 2010, the interview footage is from that Chicago meeting.

Here’s the clip.

The Deliciousness of Derailment

I saw a Russell Brand standup comedy show in a tiny LA theater (capacity: 150) last night. I'd seen him one other time in a similar scenario, so I knew what to expect: the scripted standup wouldn't be good, but I would just have to wait for Russell to get distracted and derailed, and then the real show would begin.

And true to form, Russell came out with a flipboard of newspaper headlines and notecards of factoids and statistics, none of which were terribly fascinating, revealing or funny. But they gave the guy - who I think is a charming, intelligent, and witty linguist - a springboard from which to launch into tangential diatribes and follies including rummaging through an audience member's purse and using another audience member's cell phone to call the psychics and sex workers who advertise in the back of the LA Weekly.

Achtung, Babies!

"I don't want a full house at the Winter Garden Theatre. I want 90 people who just came out of the worst rain storm in the city's history. These are people who are alive, on the planet. Until they dry off. I wish I had a theater that was only open when it rained." Bill Murray as the playwright Jeff Slater in Tootsie.

Documentary filmmaker Doug Block had an interesting post on his blog, Around the Block about how we're watching movies these days. Block conducted an informal test. As part of an assignment, he asked students in a film class (average age 25) to watch his documentary, 51 Birch Street, saying only that it was available on multiple formats. The next time the class met he surveyed them on format and viewing habit.

The David Licata Film School

Facebook told me Werner Herzog is someone I might know so naturally I clicked on Herr Herzog's link. It brought me to his page. Click on the image to read the text.

“I’ll Show You the Life of the Mind!”

One of the things that gives me fits while editing A Life’s Work is the establishing shot. (And this documentary will require a lot of them.) An establishing shot does what its name suggests: it tells the viewer, “You are here.” Let it be known far and wide: I hate establishing shots in film and television. In sitcoms they are unimaginative—

EXT: BOSTON STREET - DAY

Busy street, most prominent is a sign for a bar called Cheers.

Cut to—

INT: BAR*

Crazy, Stupid Product Placements

First of all, let me be clear about one thing. Crazy, Stupid Love is entertaining and funny. The acting is uniformly quite good, as is the direction and, with the exception of the awkwardly shoehorned product placements, the writing ain't half bad. But, really, this product placement thing is like a disease. And it's destroying entertainment as we know it. Here is an incomplete list drawn only from memory, of just some of the products incorporated awkwardly into the storyline. An asterisk (*) beside the product name indicates that it actually made it into the mouth of an actor in the form of dialogue.

A Visit To The Cherry Orchard, Live, Sort Of

This week I visited a cherry orchard to experience something I’ve been avoiding.  I discovered that it’s actually pretty good.

Five years ago the Metropolitan Opera, led by its new and intrepid General Manager Peter Gelb, pioneered simulcasts of operas to cinemas around the country.  (The Met calls it a “cinemacast.”)  Gelb’s bravura move was accompanied, in classic opera tradition, by a chorus of skepticism and prophesies of doom.  Guess what?  It’s been a success.  Mind you, not on the scale of LinkedIn’s IPO or Facebook, but these days any success in the performing arts counts as a big success.

If I Could Slow Down Time

Do you like watching actors at work? Then go to Lincoln Center before July 31 and sometime between 8:45pm and 11:30pm. Sit by the fountain and face south. You’ll see something magical: Portraits in Dramatic Time.

Artist David Michalek videotaped actors performing in mysterious scenes for somewhere between 5 and 12 seconds in ultra-high definition at a rate of 3,000 frames per second. That scene is then played back on an 85-x-45-foot screen in super-slow motion, so that the 5-12 seconds plays fluidly for 8 minutes or more. There is no recorded sound; the fountain and the city is the soundtrack.

“Everything about a movie … is who you are and where you are when you saw it.”

Cross-posted on alifesworkmovie.com/blog/

Robert K. Elder had a brilliant if somewhat sadistic idea: sit down with 30 filmmakers and ask them to name the ONE film that changed their lives. And hold them to it, interview them in a knowledgeable, professional and persistent way, let the filmmaker veer off momentarily, talk about how that film found its way into their work, but bring them back to that one film. (Elder lets two of the 30 choose two films, so clearly, he’s not a total fascist.)

A Bit of the Old Ultra-Violence

I’m reading The Film That Changed My Life: 30 Directors on Their Epiphanies in the Dark by Robert K. Elder. I’m enjoying it and I'll write a post about the whole book here soon. But I came across a passage I wanted to share. Here Elder and the fine director John Dahl (Red Rock West, The Last Seduction, Rounders, You Kill Me) discuss one aspect of the film that changed Dahl’s life, A Clockwork Orange.