One of the most brilliantly out-there shorts of recent years, Jillian Mayer and Lucas Leyva’s Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke has finally made it online, and you’d be a fool not to check it out. It’s the film that put the pair on the map when it played at the festival circuit in 2012, and then later justified their inclusion our “25 New Faces” list last year. Calling the film “both very smart and gleefully nuts,” this is what Scott wrote on Life and Freaky Times of Uncle Luke in his profile of Mayer and Leyva for the […]
by Nick Dawson on May 29, 2013It’s been five years since Ari Folman came out with the Academy Award-nominated Waltz with Bashir, an animated personal combat story. He’s back with an incredibly ambitious project, The Congress, that blends real life with fantasy in an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s celebrated book. The movie opens with actress Robin Wright being scolded by her agent, played by Harvey Keitel, for all the poor choices she’s made throughout her career. Faced with a sick child and no job prospects, she meets with Jeff, the studio head of Miramount, a daunting figure played impeccably by Danny Huston. Jeff is sick of […]
by Ariston Anderson on May 28, 2013Like the offspring of any revered icon, Brandon Cronenberg’s last name grabs hold of your attention. Indeed, the 33-year-old Canadian filmmaker is the son of David Cronenberg, genre cinema’s great auteur of psychodrama and body horror. And like his father, Brandon expresses a strong interest in the inextricable brain-body link, not to mention the dark crevices of society’s underbelly. Antiviral, Brandon’s feature debut as writer and director, is a sci-fi satire with a sharp conceit worthy of that unmistakable surname, and a stylistic strength that promises more compelling work from its maker. Uniquely skewering our ever-evolving (or devolving) obsessions with […]
by R. Kurt Osenlund on Apr 12, 2013Microbudget film doesn’t venture into the expensive world of science fiction too often, and certainly not the brand that features hordes of orcs and other fantasy creatures. But that’s exactly where Emmy-winning director Kohl Glass, whose short film Der Ostwind played at Sundance in 2007, wanted to go with his debut feature, Orc Wars. The film, which has wrapped and is currently gathering its finishing funds on Kickstarter, features ex-Marine John Norton (Rusty Joiner) who buys an isolated western ranch that turns out to contain a portal to another world; when orcs use it to threaten an elf princess (Masiela Lusha) […]
by Randy Astle on Mar 15, 2013At the beginning of the year, Filmmaker’s Scott Macaulay pointed out again — like many others have as well — that features are no longer the default format-of-choice for indie filmmakers. And as forms like the web series mature, we’re seeing more of the kinks getting worked out and more filmmakers and others finding innovative ways to release and promote new work. Take Netflix’s high-profile series House of Cards, which was just released all at once instead of in spaced-out (i.e. weekly) increments; we’ve yet to see the show’s long tail, but its initial viewer data (that is, its engagement […]
by Randy Astle on Feb 14, 2013Imagining a future in which celebrity worship has become the new world order hardly strains the brain, but first-time filmmaker Brandon Cronenberg’s Antiviral creates this scenario with such casual logic and vivid detail that very little imagination is required to make the leap from current reality to future absurdity. In this world, we no longer want to hear, as a society, that stars are just like us, we want them to be other, god-like. There is also a yearning to be close to them; the ritualistic collection of autographs or buying Kim Kardashian’s used hair dryer on eBay has morphed […]
by Farihah Zaman on Feb 8, 2013Dan Ouellette has had a long career in the New York independent film community, starting with his work as a production designer for Hal Hartley in 1990 with Trust and then, in 1992, with Simple Men. He’s also an accomplished visual artist (examples of which can be seen at his Neurotica Divine site) and has directed stylish music videos for the bands Android Lust and The Birthday Massacre. Dan is also, full disclosure, an old friend who I’ve also worked with professionally many times. (Films he’s production designed that Robin O’Hara and I produced include What Happened Was…, Saving Face, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 10, 2012During the writing of this article, Ray Bradbury, one of the great founding fathers of sci-fi dystopia, passed away. With his seminal book, Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Bradbury gained recognition as an important figure not only in the science fiction community but the literary world in general. Recently, The New Yorker published a touching essay by the author in which he shared the origin of his love for science fiction. It is a beautiful ode to childhood and the discovery of one’s true passion. The essay will prove to future generations that, even in his last days, Bradbury’s ability to move […]
by Byron Camacho on Jun 6, 2012Telling the origin story of the creature that terrified us in Alien over three decades ago, Ridley Scott’s Prometheus is one of this summer’s most hotly anticipated films. But somewhat surprisingly, the origins of the screenplay came as much from a screenwriter’s general meeting as the story material developed for that original movie. At a meeting in the offices of Scott’s production company, Scott Free, screenwriter Jon Spaihts was asked to riff on the possibilities of a film that would revisit the Alien universe. What resulted is Prometheus, with a script credited to Spaihts and Damon Lindelof. Below I ask […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 4, 2012The story of Laika, the Soviet dog sent to space with the knowledge that she would not return alive, is one of adventure and sorrow. She was simultaneously the first animal to orbit the earth and the first to die in orbit. One can’t help but anthropomorphize her and everything she must have experienced. Animator Nick Criscuolo has illustrated Laika’s journey in the music video he made for the song “I Can’t Breathe,” by Sharon Van Etten. He explains his own attraction to the Laika tale: “It’s a story that’s close to my heart because I love science; it […]
by Alix Lambert on Apr 21, 2012