Toronto & NY Film Festival 2011 anticipation

NY main slate -- psyched for Panahi and Kaurismaki:

http://www.filmlinc.com/blog/entry/49th-new-york-film-festival-the-main-slate

And Bela Tarr.

Yes, Kaurismaki is a standout for me. Possibly my favorite living filmmaker and at one point recently I was afraid he would never make anything again.

Weird that Pina has taken so long to reach the US, it was playing on regular screens in London when I was there at the beginning of this year.

Otherwise, the rest looks like business as usual, TBH. I don't usually watch "main slate" stuff at festivals

yeah those three look like the highlights. everyone seemed to love Once Upon A Time In Anatolia at cannes, also.

re: pina, yeah there are a few that have popped up elsewhere, here, cf a separation (which is v good, and not un-panahi-esque, not just in being iranian)

i think the american indie thing 'martha ...' whatever is meant to be good but i'm more tolerant of that kind of thing than some.

tidy & readable of the main slate stuff at toronto, btw:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/gallery/2011/aug/17/toronto-film-festival-2011-pictures

i think there's analyses of all of the side-strand stuff on mubi or somewhere

adam, it takes films 2-4 years to 'reach' the US sometimes; I'm waiting for Jerzy Skolimowski's Essential Killing to get a perfunctory theater run so "it counts" for this year.

I don't usually watch "main slate" stuff at festivals

[picture of puppy in american apparel t-short]

Essential Killing is quite good, despite the potential for LOLs

I have been spoiled for the past few years, most of this stuff I usually saw projected at school.

Vincent Gallo w/ his mouth shut is certainly not anything you're apt to see at festivals.

Oh but I saw it at the London Film Festival

so you see, you are

http://tiff.net/filmsandschedules/tiff/2011/sorryrabbi

(hi)

hey congrats s1ock! (fun fact: I was in a movie that screened in the Short Cuts competition a few years ago. we didn't win.)

I would go to TIFF this year except I'm already doing Telluride, for the first and probably only time.

Sorry Rabbi is great!

oh snap

some of my friends are in this movie:
http://www.torontointernationalfilmfestival.ca/filmsandschedules/tiff/2011/twentycigarettes

J Benning is back to putting people in his films?

There were people in Ruhr, his last film

thanks adam, i want you to see the real final version!

Well maybe we will show in the same festival sometime, I imagine your chances are far better than mine though!

oh pish-tosh young man.

love that this thread brought s1ocki back

this is a special promotional appearance only.

oh really? my recent appearances on ILX are courtesy of Nestlé Foods - Good Food, Good Life

oooooh, jealous!

s1ocki!!!

Wassup lamp

Will be glad to see the Kaurismaki and Tarr a few months before they come out, I guess, but this is the dullest looking NYFF in years.

Wassup lamp

not much!! will come to your movie tho if i can (congrats btw)

Haha, C0l1n, I swear you said that last year too

cuz it's true every year?

You started this thread

what else is there to do?

masturbate, eat chinese food, reorganize your tax documents from the last ten years, despair

I do those in the lobby of Alice Tully Hall

Do em in Toronto sometime!
Lamp please come to one of my screenings

I like Toronto

Do morbs' things in Toronto too!

SLOCKI COME BACK TO US

full time

Come to TIFF. All will be revealed there. All of your roles in this. This is so much bigger than you can ever imagine.

ok ok ok i will def come out esp if there are multiple screenings

Two iirc

I dont have things in Toronto -- do I?

I heard that The Student is dope.

Re: TIFF, the new Herzog looks atrocious.

oh, also Miss Bala!

http://criterioncast.com/2011/08/08/three-clips-from-werner-herzogs-into-the-abyss-hit/

like seriously? jesus

Haha, C0l1n, I swear you said that last year too

Haha, I probably did! Christ

ne1 know when the 'views from the avant-garde' 'strand' is?

It hasn't been announced yet

yeah. wondered if likely lincoln centre membres like morbs had some inside knowledge. think imma be in new york in october.

I am guessing it will almost certainly feature the new films from Ben Rivers, Lewis Klahr, and maybe Kevin Everson. I have no inside knowledge but call it a hunch

one day im going to dl all of the films olaf muller talks up in his festival reports and see if they're any good

OK

wavelengths (avant-garde tiff programming) just announced.

They haven't sent us any info on the NYFF sidebars yet, nrq. Probably within the week.

just approved the master - the movie is officially finished. whoohoo!

whaaat

"approved the master"

it's between this and hipster puppies for 'most significant cultural contribution' in this year's ilxies

oh wait I totally, obscurely misinterpreted that.

still, congrats, s1ock.

i approved the character of 'the master' from buffy the vampire slayer. he will now be appearing in my film, with my full approval.

Kevin Everson will probably not turn up in Views. :(

why not?

people keep throwing Buffy refs at me lately, which is odd wince I'm now watching it for the first time. (up to ep 3.5.)

*since

it's odd for me to MAKE a reference to buffy in the year of our lord 2011

exactly! (the master is my fave villain so far, also.)

Other random guesses for Views - James Benning, Ben Russell, Janie Geiser, Laure Provost, Laura Kraning, too soon for a Robert Breer tribute?

why not?

He's just not one of the regulars, though I wouldn't rule it out entirely. No way will Prouvost show up (though look for her films...elsewhere in NY this fall). Benning, Russell, Geiser all good guesses, though. How is Twenty Cigarettes, btw?

I haven't seen it.

...Is Prouvost going to be appearing with her films "elsewhere" in NY?

I can sit this part out, most of these names mean zilch to me

You are so marvelous at bringing the excitement on this "anticipation" thread YOU yourself started

you love pointing this out.

what can I say, I liked it more in the mid '80s when I went to 6 things that weren't being released a month later.

It's like you have thrown an elegant dinner party but refuse to come out of the bathroom

Probably not, Adam, but we'll see. The process is stalled out at the moment.

=(

I think she is rather fantastic. I hear she is crazy (in, like, the best possible way)

=) she's so great
http://www.eastinternational.net/east/artists/images/2009_images/provoust.jpg
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-y3YAYmjNWk0/TYSS7XVyVcI/AAAAAAAABHc/fQzE9INtY4k/OWT2.jpg
http://freeartlondon.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/laurep.png

Yeah, her recent videos are really exciting. And, like, all the experimental work that I end up liking the most, I hated it at first.

It might be worth trying to bring her out here if she had a West Coast engagement as well...

more on NY from Mubi:

http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/nyff-2011-lineup

Shit, I totally missed that the McQueen film is in. Would loooove to drag nrq to that.

Sounds like a fantastic idea but I'm not in too much of a position to do anything about it!

And I agree, I thought it was all a bit much when I first saw her stuff but gradually I realized she is pretty singular. A friend of mine was trying to show her work in London only a few years ago and at that time nobody was interested.

xp

Sleeping Sickness sounds like it could be exciting

NYFF special events (no Avant Garde info yet)... a Kael panel, Oliver Stone's history series:

http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/nyff-2011-special-events-preview

Helsinki, Forever is cool, wondering about this...:

Grant Gee's Patience (After Sebald).

Also I thought you didn't care about Views, Morbius

I am waiting to look at it so I can complain and feel miserable about it.

(although last year had some ok stuff from what little I'd seen)

I am down on film festivals in general right now though, so don't listen to me

Geez, I'd love to see that Kael panel. I did see Toback speak after Fingers about 20 years ago--what a guy.

the great news of the day is that Miss Bala will be released in October (!!!) via Fox International

adam, I live to serve others.

tiff schedules are up though the website is insane as usual.

im preeming on september 11.

Views listings are up: http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2011/pages/views-from-the-avant-garde/

Every one of Adam's guesses confirmed except for Laure Prouvost.

Guilty lol at "Line Describing Your Mom"

See? I could program Views. THIS is great, btw:

BETZY BROMBERG
Saturday October 8 | 4:15pm | Francesca Beale Theater
Voluptuous Sleep
U.S., 2011, 95m

I'd also like to put in a special word for NYFF, it's so awesome when you pay $50 to submit and not only do they not tell you if you are not selected, they don't even confirm receipt of your screener! But I'm not bitter

For Views, or the larger NYFF? For all Views' faults, I have heard nothing but nice things about the submission process!

From what I hear, both. Maybe they hate West Coasters? ;)

All this aside, I have also dealt with some VERY nice festivals recently. I even had feedback on my film recently, which is something I have never had (or even expected, really) before!

Anyway, looking at Views again, there is definitely some interesting looking stuff in there, though I find it sort of overwhelming. I think I pretty much love Stephanie Barber, I wonder about the Ben Rivers feature, I wonder if this - Shadow, Seed, Spagyric David Baker, U.S., 2011, 5m 12s - is the same David Baker from Mercury Rev. I did hear that he studied with Tony Conrad so I guess it could well be him. But as usual, I feel like if I were to go, it would be unlikely that I would see anything that would truly confound my expectations (which sort of seems like it should be the point?), even if I would probably still enjoy a lot of it.

Yeah, I wouldn't bother. Save the money for Migrating Forms!

yeah...Why doesn't LA have a festival like that? it irks me. I would do it myself if I had any way to.

Another Views thought - seems like maybe there is a bigger split between super-short work and longform stuff than previous years. I kind of like how folks are making these feature-length projects but making quick, little pieces inbetween. Sometimes it seems to me like consistently churning out 5 minute works is the way to go, honestly.

Is it bad that I am a little tired of Ken Jacobs?

Only because it means that you're seeing as much of his recent work out there as we are here.

I like short work, but I don't really like any of the ways you can see it. Until someone has made enough it that they can get a dedicated program, it's only group shows, which typically only serves the loudest, brashest stuff. I'm not really sure what the solution would be. "Good programming" in this context seems to mean programs which find some pretty serious aesthetic continuity. This reflects well on the programmer I guess, but it often suffocates and flattens the films themselves.

I just don't think people have the patience for group shows with continuity. And yes, that kind of continuity can get a little cloying too. There has to be some kind of inbetween though, I hate to use the mixtape analogy but surely you can create an interesting tension and interplay between films without losing their individual strengths if they are short enough and caringly sequenced. I just don't know that many audiences are prepared to go there.

they should show em with non-avant-garde films like in the olden days

Save the money for Migrating Forms!

always sound advice, and yes, someone should do a west coast variant

Yeah, totally. But I'm not going to hold my breath. The NYFF would be the perfect place to start, though, since the stuff they actually show before the features is invariably dreadful, even by the usual standards of the narrative short, which I'm pretty sure is the lowest form of art.

x-post

they should show em with non-avant-garde films like in the olden days

Yep, totally agree with this. It's something I think about a lot, actually. Take the work off of its pedestal, already.

Believe me, if I had any kind of resources, I would love to start a festival here. Maybe next year...

Yep, totally agree with this. It's something I think about a lot, actually. Take the work off of its pedestal, already.

i have no experience of festival screenings, but this is really true i think; assuming it's the same as noise music shows, where the fact of fitting the genre supersedes quality control, it just seems to miss a trick in being able to put together a diverse bill of formally different work that you could enjoy the variety & quality of in an evening. it's perhaps slightly different with film screenings, being back to back, but a change in tone or in the way you see something doesn't have to be so disorientating as to render a pairing/a bill of films unworkable.

I don't want to minimize the boundless self-regard of the rhetoric around avant-garde film (like the fact that we have to call it that, for example), but I don't think it's really the avant-gardists rejecting the mainstream at this point, you know?

No, you're right. I sort of forget this at times or take it as a given, I guess!

there's the mainstream and the festival–art-house world tho, which is a business all the same but could try a bit harder i guess? idk what it's like in the US. i spose nyff having an evening dedicated to sony classics is... indicative.

the totally melodramatic 'scary' trailer:

http://vimeo.com/27666194

that looks awesome!

would see!

Two newish, final (?) works by the late George Kuchar at NYFF:

http://www.filmlinc.com/films/on-sale/george-kuchar

I'm here. No time to see any actual movies till next week tho.

I keep reading around on coverage and of course most of it from a mainstream point of view is saying things about how we need a new Seth Rogen movie and that U2 are worth a documentary. Destroy them with your film.

It's weird, I am way less au courant with what's playing this year than I have been in years.

just got back from Telluride - my faves were Shame, We Need to Talk about Kevin and Pina.

Psyched for all those except Pina.

I had no expectation for that but I thought it was great + very touching. Also Wenders did a Symposium talk and was super cool.

also liked the new Cronenberg but literally everyone else I spoke with hated it so YMMV

Ya I missed a screening of that this morn. Feel like I might dig it.

gavin smith feeling the new cronenberg but he has weird taste.

how was shame?
i thought i might catch some of the NY stuff at this but probably won't; the panahi is the one i'm most psyched about, idk if it'll actually see release everywhere

anyone see anything?

I saw the Palin film last night. Kind of ordinary. Somebody during the Q&A seemed impressed that Broomfield had footage of Palin in her crazy church--that footage was everywhere during the 2008 campaign.

talked to someone who liked that, but haven't gotten any other sense.

just got 4 NYFF advance tix: Panahi, McQueen, Kaurismaki, the G.Kuchar videos.

missed free panahi screening... and kaurismaki, which played for like 2 days...

hoping to see the joachim trier, katsuhito ishii, maybe terence davies. missed nacho vigalondo too :(

I saw "Dark Horse", Todd Solondz. It was my least favourite of his movies but it doesn't matter, I'd still recommend/see again.

Apparently the McQueen is amazing?

slox i had a wedding this weekend and a party tonight did i miss your movie?

I saw "Dark Horse", Todd Solondz. It was my least favourite of his movies but it doesn't matter, I'd still recommend/see again.

:/
hearing people underwhelmed by this one has been really frustrating, i thought the set-up sounded pretty perfect. aside from some admirable moments of intensity i thought the last one was kinda diminishing returns/too solondz in general.

lamp: yes :(

@ schlump; Response to his movies has been 'underwhelmed' since "Happiness" but I don't think it means anything. I loved his last three movies, and in retrospect, prefer them to "Happiness". "Dark Horse" is good, but it is focused on a single character who didn't do that much for me-- he's an overweight 35-year old who lives with his parents and collects toys.

hope it went well s1ocki

xpost -- They already filmed the Rusty Brown comics?

I loved his last three movies, and in retrospect, prefer them to "Happiness".

yeah, i can leave a little room for this; i think part of what frustrates me is their direction, rather than the actual results.
between the cast and the kinda costanza-esque domestic setting i just had high hopes

i saw a be-a-utiful poster for slocki's movie online somewhere

How did it go, slocki?
I didn't even recognize H.B. in the trailer, ha

Owen: I loved the McQueen, personally, tho I didn't take it as a straight-up addiction tale (unlike most crits and, um, apparently McQueen himself.)

i loathed 'hunger' but am p amped for 'shame'

Ft. James Badge Dale as comic relief!

u are weird, nrq

(and obv anti-Irish)

enh. im anti-ira. also against rookie bollocks like the long conversation from a single angle.

An acquaintance of mine had drinks with Fassbender and apparently he said he hates Irish people. So there you go.

i didn't loathe hunger but yeah, the politics were via paul mccartney.

lol, cineastes really are as horrible as indie fuxxors

but here's hoping you like sophomore bollocks

actually i was a bit surprised how little pushback the politics of hunger got. was there any?

uh oh, someone had some attitude in their cheerios this morning!

i love love love michael fassbender ftr

heh, I just had Cheerios in fact. but the attitude in is my DNA like it's in yr cake. xp

I'm sure Fassbender is an asshole, with an ass like that he better be.

lool

nrq, are we meeting up at the NYFF? that wd be a laff for all.

haha i'd like to: haven't got round to actually booking the trip yet. as you can tell from my minimal ilx presence, im super busy. but i think it's going to happen! in like a month.

How did it go, slocki?
I didn't even recognize H.B. in the trailer, ha

― fear itself (Ówen P.), Tuesday, September 13, 2011 11:33 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark

it went really well! full houses both screenings, good reactions, a little press. it's been a really crazy week, i did this thing called "talent lab" for the first few days, basically small intensive seminars with directors like brian de palma, frederick wiseman, jennifer baichwal, gus van sant... amazing. and yesterday i did THIS:

http://www.gettyimages.ca/detail/124878051/Getty-Images-Entertainment

congrats, sir!

congrats slocks! i liked the trailer! and the talent lab is kind of a big deal afaict.

my friend did it a couple of years ago (i wrote his application for him because he has this paralysis in response to "write about yourself" stuff). i get the impression it's totally changed his career in terms of "access". he's in toronto now -- he had so much fun/learnt so much he finds an excuse to go back every year now.

are you submitting the short elsewhere or doing anything else re: distribution?

way to go, s1ocki

thanks d00ds!

we are playing in halifax next week and then calgary, and we still have some apps out. we are going to apply to sundance, berlin, etc. try and get it out there as much as possible. and then there are a billion jewish film festivals.

as far as distro goes, we are talking with one distributor, though i'm a little uncertain about the whole "short film distribution" biz. we are also showing on bravo next year as they are a major financer.

rad. good luck! come back here and post if you get into berlin.

and yesterday i did THIS:

http://www.gettyimages.ca/detail/124878051/Getty-Images-Entertainment

take this img to the dapper suits thread

aw thanks ;)

i made this for the talent lab thing, it was supposed to be a self-portrait less than 5 mins and shot on a cellphone. now that the program's over i can share it with y'all

http://vimeo.com/29298543

Who's yer tailor s1ocki.

No like seriously, who is your tailor? Are they a Canadian?

lol @ that video

slocki are you able to give any update on that fruit hunters movie?? i have read the book and am psyched

i dont have a tailor! the suit i wore at my pitch i bought for my brother's wedding last year at a fancy canadian store called harry rosen, and the tan suit i bought on sale at brooks bros.

fruit hunters is currently in production. shooting all through october. won't be really see-able for at least, at LEAST another year tho. documentaries imo

i will stay psyched

maintain psychitude plz

btw - joachim trier's OSLO AUGUST 31 - best film i saw at the fest (i didnt see many tho)

'TWIXT was the weirdest

Thought Le Havre was really lovely, maybe Kaurismaki's best since Ariel (tho I've missed a few).

"Work-in-progress" screening Monday eve by a "master filmmaker" -- wonder if he rhymes with Tealberg or Beastwood?

wonder if Ratner has finished all the Post for Tower Heist

ugh, Shame. The deadening emotional life of the serial fucker. Somebody should've told McQueen that "as empty experiences go, it's one of the best."

heard it is this year's Somewhere

I had a pretty visceral personal response to it, but then again I am v. guilt-ridden and kind of a shitty sibling, so YMMV

Mulligan's role was really thankless, the albatross sibling who has to Make Him See the Light.

have seen neither but was really into richard brody's post on sex on screen: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2011/10/behind-before-above-between-below.html

personal film festival related note: i have never seen any nathaniel dorsky films.

so anyone making it to Hugo?

what like in the back row
of a CHILDRENS MOVIE

what like in the back row
of a CHILDRENS MOVIE

i have never seen any nathaniel dorsky films.

I wouldn't worry, they're not half as good as everyone would have you believe.

ha, okay; was surprised i couldn't even find clips online, the photography looked nice, from stills. was it you who was enthusing about devotional cinema in a thread on here, somewhere? someone was. i started reading some of it online & am going to pick up a copy up soon and put it in my bathroom.

so annoyed i fucked up my hugo joke by double posting. apparently the film was okay.

Yeah I like "Devotional Cinema"

That's not to say I don't like his films, I just find the cult of Dorsky a bit much. I suppose it's not his fault!

rush tix for the Panahi film at 6pm btw