Cinemascope

Thin ice… but done well, by the right person, and for a worthy cause.

The Great Schlep from The Great Schlep on Vimeo.

For the past two years Jamie Stuart’s odd little videos, chronicling his days at the New York Film Festival, and road he travels to and from Lincoln Center, have become the best thing in the festival. Now comes year number 3, and to judge by video number 1, the filmmaking has become more ambitious and the train-of-thought narrative more obscure. I love it.

Here is video number 1, featuring Lauren Cantet (”The Class”) and Kelly Reichardt (”Wendy and Lucy”). Both film, incidentally, will play the Haifa Film Festival in October.

via Filmmaker Magazine.

Last year the Israeli Academy of Motion Pictures chose “The Band’s Visit” as the country’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Oscar. But the film was disqualified by the AMPAS for having too much English dialogue. The runner-up, “Beaufort”, then became the first Israeli film to garner an Oscar nomination in 24 years. “Band” went on to become the highest grossing Israeli film in the US, and won its share at the European Film Awards.

This year, Israel’s pick is less controversial, but not less unique and outstanding. “Waltz With Bashir”, one of the most buzzed-about films internationally since its debut in Cannes, swept the Ophir Awards, Israel’s Academy Awards, this evening. The animated war film, tagged “an animated documentary” over here, won six awards tonight, including h awards for best Direction, Best screenplay and Best Film, all going to writer-producer-director Ari Folman, who based the movie on his real-life memories - or lack thereof - of the first Lebanon war in 1982. Local smash hit “Lost Islands” took four trophies. “Seven Days” took two. And “Lemon Tree” took one, for Hiam Abbas as best actress.
It is Folman’s second movie to win Israel’s Academy Award. The first was 1997’s “Saint Clara”, co-directed with Ori Sivan. In between Folman wrote and directed episodes in some of Israel’s most prestigious TV dramas, most noticeably for “In Treatment”, which was remade last year for HBO as a series staring Gabriel Byrne.

“Bashir” is the second movie made about the first Lebanon war, after last year’s Oscar nominated “Beaufort”. A third movie dealing with the same war, called “Lebanon”, is currently in post-production.

Sony Pictures Classics are releasing “Bashir” in the States, and are trying to push the film as this year’s “Persepolis” (which failed to get a Foreign Oscar Nomination but got one in the Animated Feature category - “Bashir” could do the same). “Bashir” played Telluride and Toronto and will be shown next at the New York and London Film Festivals.

The tragic death of novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace has brought to my attention this video of the 1996 interview on Charlie Rose. He mostly talked, with bright insights and a clear passion, about movies, and his non-interview with David Lynch.

But on minute 16 of the video below he fleetingly mentions “Up Close and Personal”, the teaming of Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer in a movie directed by then-producer-turned-director Jon Avnet. “It’s so bad it doesn’t even have charm. Some films are bad but you can still enjoy them, this was worst than that”, he said of the movie, based on a notoriously botched script. Flash forward 12 years: on Friday, the day of Wallace’s suicide, a new Jon Avnet was released in theaters. Amazingly this consistently bad director still gets work. This time he again fuses two legends into one movie - Al Pacino and Robert De Niro - and again brings out the worst in them in a movie stuck in limbo, bad enough to be dismissed, not bad enough to even become awful. Wallace’s words ring true. He’s gone, Avnet prevails. Sad.

Errol Morris, one of my favorite contemporary filmmakers, had me in tears by minute six in this 8 minute Stand Up To Cancer video:

Morris is a rare breed: a giant humanitarian, and an astounding analytical filmmaker. These two traits don’t always go together.

File under: Old News.
“Variety” ran an item yesterday about Natalie Portman’s upcoming directorial debut, to be shot in her native Israel and in Hebrew. Back in November 2007 this was the very first item I posted onto this very blog, in the days leading to its launch. Not bad for an Israeli movie blog, beating “Variety” to the headline by 10 months. Here’s my item reposted:

The hardships of working with Israeli auteur Amos Gitai (”Free Zone”) have not deterred Natalie Portman from coming back to her native Israel and taking an even more daunting task with another formidable Amos. This time it’s best selling novelist Amos Oz whose novel “A Tale of Love and Darkness” Portman will make into her directorial debut.
The film will shoot in Israel and in Hebrew in Summer 2008. JCS Studios in Israel will handle local production duties.