All articles by Colin Brown – Page 7
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News
Sex doll horror adds to ContentFilm slate
After just eight months in operation New York's ContentFilm, run by indie stalwarts Ed Pressman and John Schmidt, has announced its fifth fully-financed film to go into production, a sexually-twisted psychological horror called Love Object.Said to combine elements of Demon Seed and Chucky with those of Roman Polanski's early classics, ...
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Thin Red Line producer Roberdeau dies, age 48
JohnRoberdeau, nominated with his long-time partner Robert Michael Geisler for anAcademy Award for Best Picture as producers of Terrence Malick's TheThin Red Line (1998), died onMonday, May 6th at Manhattan's Cabrini Medical Center of aheart attack. He was 48.Inpartnership with Geisler since 1979, Roberdeau had recently announced thepair's acquisition of ...
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Universal buys Good Machine and merges it with USA Films
The independent filmmakingworld has been shrunk yet again as Universal Studios announced it is acquiringGood Machine with immediate plans to elevate the sassy New York production and saleshothouse into an autonomous Miramax-style specialty film unit that will absorball the existing assets of USA Films. To be called Focus, theautonomous operation ...
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Reviews
Hollywood Ending
Dir: Woody Allen. US.2002. 112 mins.Woody Allen's HollywoodEnding follows more in thevein of his recent run of pleasurable but throwaway comedies than it does thefar more emotionally affecting Purple Rose Of Cairo, his other film to deal specifically with cinema itself. With an emphasis on visual humour, both literal and ...
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Cinerenta offspring forges own path in LA
Michael Ohoven, scionof the family behind Germany's long-established Cinerenta productionfund, is striking out on his own as a Los Angeles-based producer. His InfinityInternational Entertainment will now start entertaining production ties withother European film funds while at the same time retaining its umbilical links to Cinerenta.Ohoven (pictured here) says he isrelocating ...
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IFP Market to zero in on filmmakers-in-progress
Downtown Manhattan's IFP Markethas undergone a radical face-lift that will see the week-long US indie filmbazaar transformed from years of being a large and somewhat haphazardclearing-house for completed features into a much more selective showcase whosenarrative focus will fall exclusively on works-in-development and scripts fromemerging filmmakers. With the demise of ...
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US statistics offer hope for international markets
The current health of the North American distribution and exhibition market is generally assumed to be an indicator of the aches and pains that can be expected to occur in many international territories. If so, then the industry can allow itself a cautious sigh of relief.Here is a breakdown of ...
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Shanghai noon for Hollywood as China opens up
China became the unexpected focusof attention on the first day of this year's ShoWest convention in LasVegas, with news that Beijing authorities are prepared to relax film importrestrictions for its planned digital cinema circuit and the announcement byWarner Bros International Theatres of a ground-breaking nine-screen multiplexin Shanghai. To cap it ...
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TV doldrums dampen AFM sales business
Some 46 years ago, a budding rights-trader pursued the German television rights to Federico Fellini's La Strada, borrowing 25,000 Deutschmarks from his wife in order to complete the acquisition and kick-start what would much later become one of Europe's pivotal media empires. Today, the $6bn debt albatross that now hangs ...
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AFM may be just a brief encounter warn indies
Buyers attending rights-trading bazaars since last year's AFM could have had their theoretical pick of the following multiple Oscar-nominees: Capitol Films' Gosford Park, Good Machine International's In The Bedroom, UGC's Amelie, Intermedia's Iris and, of course, New Line's The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring, the biggest ...
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Reviews
The Kid Stays In The Picture
Dirs: Brett Morgen & Nanette Burstein. US. 2001. 93 mins.As an irresistible portrait of Hollywood narcissism, this documentary adaptation of Robert Evan's memoirs as a studio mogul is a guilty pleasure of the most complicit kind. Shedding their cinema verite backgrounds, the film-making duo of Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein ...
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Reviews
Personal Velocity
Dir: Rebecca Miller. US. 2001. 85minsThere's a muscular punch to Rebecca Miller's Personal Velocity, the winner of this year's Grand Jury Prize for best dramatic feature at Sundance, that propels her triptych of female portraits way above the soapy women-in-peril melodramas that have become stereotypical of so many trashy TV ...
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Reviews
Bloody Sunday
Dir: Paul Greengrass. 2002. UK/Ireland. 107 mins The end of this month marks the precise thirtieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the name given to that sickening, catalytic chapter in Anglo-Irish history in which 14 unarmed civilians were slaughtered by trigger-happy British paratroopers who had been ostensibly brought in to control ...
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Personal Velocity speeds to victory at Sundance
Low-budget digital video films came out the big winners at this year's Sundance Film Festival with Rebecca Miller's female-slanted triptych Personal Velocity winning the Grand Jury Prize and Gary Winick's first love comedy Tadpole starring Sigourney Weaver cited for best direction in the dramatic competition. Both films were made under ...
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Reviews
Hysterical Blindness
Dir: Mira Nair. US. 2002. 98mins Despite securing the prized "centrepiece" premiere slot at this year's Sundance, Mira Nair's immediate follow-up to her Venice-winning Monsoon Wedding succumbs to some of the perils involved in adapting stage plays to the big screen - should this made-for-cable film, about the struggles of ...
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Reviews
Tadpole
Dir: Gary Winick. US. 2002. 78minsA comic delight that features one of the painfully funniest restaurant scenes in recent memory, Gary Winick's Tadpole became an audience favourite the moment it screened in Sundance this year and an immediate target for studio distributors who saw the potential for a theatrical breakout ...
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Miramax goes Tadpole fishing at Sundance
The Sundance Film Festival has once again witness an aggressive bidding war as Miramax Films outgunned Fox Searchlight Pictures to grab worldwide rights to Gary Winick's shoestring-budgetTadpole for around $6m. At the same timeas many as five leading distributors continue in hot pursuit of Miguel Arteta's The Good Girl.But bragging ...
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Redford launches all-documentary US channel
Sensing a new-found hunger fortruth in light of everything that has happened in the world since September11th, Robert Redford is stepping up his involvement in the non-fiction sphereby launching both a new US documentary network and also assuming control of afund that has until now seeded as many 50 international ...
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PGA nominations throw Oscar race wide open
All bets are off again in this year's Oscar race following the inclusion of both Shrek and Harry Potter And The Scorcerer's Stone among the five motion picture nominees for this year's Producers Guild of America Awards. They compete against A Beautiful Mind, Moulin Rouge and The Lord Of The ...
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Sundance line-up: 'much darker' than usual
Sundance's reputation as a capricious marketplace has led several sales agents this year to downplay the commercial prospects of the films they will represent in Park City. Manufactured hype has a history here of being hurled back at producers' faces faster than they can say snow-ball.Every year the Sundance Film ...