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 […]
Tiny Furniture
A move toward the autobiographical has been one of the more interesting developments to surface in recent indie cinema. Azazel Jacobs’s Momma Man (2008) and Josh and Benny Safdie’s Daddy Longlegs (2010) can serve as reference points. Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture (2010), the second feature written and directed by the twenty-four-year-old filmmaker, represents the most […]
For Callie Angell (1948”“2010)
I learned the news about the passing of Callie Angell the other day. It made me sad, a feeling that has stayed with me days later. I knew Callie Angell from when I lived in NYC in the ’70s. I didn’t know her well, but we hung around in the same circles and I often […]