Cold Weather
Aaron Katz’s Dance Party USA (2006) and Quiet City (2007) established his career as one of the best young independent American directors. Quiet City abandoned a written screenplay in favor of structured improvisation, allowing his actors – Cris Lankenau and Jamie Fisher – to improvise their scenes to the point where they shared screenwriting credit […]
Face
Andy Warhol’s many silent Screen Tests provide examples of his predilection for the close-up, as do some of his other films, such as Blow Job (1964), Henry Geldzahler (1964), and Outer and Inner Space (1965). Made during his collaborative period with Chuck Wein, Face (1965) has recently been preserved, along with The Velvet Underground in […]
Meek's Cutoff
As a filmmaker, Kelly Reichardt is obviously on a roll. Following the critical successes of Old Joy (2006) and Wendy and Lucy (2008), expectations were enormously high for her latest film Meek’s Cutoff (2010), a period piece shot on 35mm with a budget much larger than usual. The film played at Venice, Toronto and twice […]
Life During Wartime
Since Todd Solondz’s breakout second feature Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) grossed nearly $4.8 million, the trajectory of his career has been decidedly downward, with each new film grossing half of the previous box office, culminating in Palindromes (2004), which promptly put his once promising career in limbo. As a result, the script for Life […]
Winter's Bone
It’s not been a particularly great summer for movies, but it’s reassuring that there have been three exceptionally strong films by women directors: Nicole Holofcener’s Please Give, Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right, and Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, which has been playing at the Sundance Cinemas here for the past three weeks. Winter’s Bone […]
The Kids Are All Right
It seems an accepted truism that family secrets need to be explored, especially if it involves children tracking down biological or estranged parents. No one ever considers that there might be negative consequences – a proverbial monster lurking in the closet, so to speak. In Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right, fifteen-year-old Laser (Josh […]
Journal of Screenwriting #2
In the most recent issue of The Journal of Screenwriting (which unfortunately isn’t available online), Kathryn Millard has written a really terrific review of Paul Wells's screenwriting book Basic Animation: Scripting. In her review, she also cites my book Me and You and Memento and Fargo. Kathryn Millard is a noted filmmaker, writer, scholar, and […]
Notes on Marie Menken
As a child I lived only a block from Marie Menken, so that might explain why I always have had a tender spot in my heart for this major pioneer of American avant-garde cinema. Marie and her husband Willard Maas lived in a penthouse apartment at 62 Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights. Menken is the […]