Best Independent Films of 2013
Maintaining a blog keeps getting more and more difficult. With teaching and more academic writing – books, articles, chapters, conference papers, and lectures – it’s been an even harder struggle this past year. I’m one of the four editors of a new book series on screenwriting for Palgrave. Two books – Ian Macdonald's Screenwriting Poetics […]
Frances Ha
In Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha (2013), Greta Gerwig presents a version of a character she has played before. In Joe Swanberg’s Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007), she was an inadvertent heartbreaker, in Baumbach’s previous film, Greenberg (2010), she fell for a lunatic, while in Alison Bagnall’s The Dish & the Spoon (2012), she wound up […]
Spring Breakers
Harmony Korine has tried really hard to be America’s most vilified filmmaker. He wrote Kids (1995) for Larry Clark at age nineteen, which made $7 million at the box office and gave him credentials within the industry. With $1 million from Fine Line, his own debut feature, Gummo (1997), turned his hometown of Nashville (masquerading […]