by admin
Feb 17, 2008
Brazil’s “The Elite Squad” picked up the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival
“The Elite Squad,” directed by Jose Padilha, won the Golden Bear award for the best movie at the 58th Berlin International Film Festival.
The movie, a hit in Brazil, is a realistic epic about police violence in Rio de Janeiro which looks at the violence and murder within a crack squad of Rio policemen battling armed drug dealers in the city slums.
Director Padilha said:
“This is a prize for Brazilian film, not just for me. This is a recognition I did not expect. It is an incentive to make new, critical films that are very important for our country.”
The film was selected from 21 films by a six-member international jury led by movie director Constantin Costa-Gavras (”Missing.”)
Academy Award nominee “There Will Be Blood,” which was among the 21 films in competition in Berin was expected to win the top prize, but ended up instead with 2 Silver Bears - one for Best Director (Paul Thomas Anderson) and the other for Best Sound (Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood.)
by admin
Feb 15, 2008
It takes more than headphones and a P.A. by your side to make you a director…
Madonna was in Germany with her directorial debut, “Filth and Wisdom” last night. And the reviews thus far have been horrific…. (watch the clip and you’ll see why..)
Hundreds of fans and autograph seekers kept her outside the film’s Berlin Film Festival premiere but inside, after the screening, there were only boos for the ‘Material Girl.’
The most prestigious German paper Der Speigel’s Daniel Sander wrote:
“The consensus before the first press screening was: Is the film just bad, or truly atrocious. Madonna’s first effort, about a comical three-person apartment in London, is not a masterpiece. It is, rather, the work of a beginner.”
However, Peter Bradshaw of the UK paper The Guardian’s wrote:
“Madonna has been a terrible actor in many, many films and now — fiercely aspirational as ever — she has graduated to being a terrible director. She has made a movie so incredibly bad that Berlin festivalgoers were staggering around yesterday in a state of clinical shock.”
Here’s Madge on Spiegel TV talking about her film and showing some clips of it…
by D B
Feb 8, 2008
Just read an interesting article by Columbia student Sarah McNeill in the Columbia University ‘zine THE EYE.
McNeill takes a look at the Sundance Film Festival from the film-school perspective. Columbia University, along with NYU and USC are now all permanent fixtures on the Sundance party circuit. Columbia even touts alumni “affiliated” with the production of such Sundance success stories as “Little Miss Sunshine” and “Half Nelson.”
Although McNeill gives a brilliant first-hand account of the festival in the article, even including key tips on how to prevent the ‘Sundance flu’ (I prefer to call this annual ailment ’BobYariAlpaca disease’), she fails to mention how she literally saved my life!
In perhaps one of the most harrowing scenes never captured on film, a house-full of partying people was nearly trapped atop Deer Valley’s snow-capped mountain at the Green Door Mansion and McNeill, her aunt and friend were kind enough to drive my friends and I down the hill in her aunt’s 4-wheel-drive Range Rover despite a closed road and a snowstorm. As we drove off into the snowstorm desperate people literally attacked the vehicle in a desperate hope to get a ride down….
(guess you had to be there…)
by admin
Feb 5, 2008
South By South West – the annual music/film/media conference when Austin, Texas briefly takes over for Williamsburg as the epicenter for bulimia-thin hipster thrift-store reek – has announced its complete line-up of features. Some highlights include the latest Harold & Kumar joint, doc “American Teen,” (which Paramount picked up for a cool mil at Sundance), “Battle in Seattle” starring Woody “Piss Monkey” Harrelson, Charlize Theron and the zitty guy from Goodfellas, Clark Gregg’s adaptation of the Palahniuk novel “Choke” (also picked up for a bunch of loot at Sundance), and “Dreams With Sharp Teeth,” the awesome doc about legendary speculative fiction author Harlan Ellison.
The complete line-up after the jump.
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