Tuesday, April 15, 2014
Loser's Crown [OFFICIAL TRAILER] from Colin Thompson on Vimeo.
Many young Vermonters leave their home state hoping to make their fortunes in LA or New York. What happens when they don't quite "make it" — and come back to face all the friends they left behind?
That's the premise of Loser's Crown, an indie film shot last January in the Burlington area by Colin Thompson. Thompson, a native Vermonter who lives in Los Angeles — yup, it's semi-autobiographical — is returning home once again to screen the movie at Merrill's Roxy Cinemas on Tuesday, April 22, at 7 p.m. ($10 tickets available here).
Thompson writes in an email that the movie
tells the story of the 30-year-old crisis; that time when a creative dream hasn't proved very lucrative and it seems like all your friends (be it back home or in front of you) have mortgages and 401k's and you ate only bananas and eggs for two weeks in December. ... We follow the main character, who is a Music Journalist in Los Angeles, back home to Vermont for Christmas. And he acts like a dick to his Old Man and friends from his past because he is grasping at existential straws, trying to figure out if there is an expiration date on his creative dream."Sometimes you just gotta come back this time of year to remember why you don't live here," the main character says of Vermont in the trailer. Burn!
Tags: loser's crown , colin thompson , Video , Web Only
Friday, April 11, 2014
This week in movies you missed: Want to know how to make an acclaimed indie flick on the cheap? Ask Laura Colella, faculty chair of the Vermont College of Fine Arts' MFA program in film.
Colella shot Breakfast With Curtis, her third feature, literally in her backyard. The cast members were her friends and neighbors — fellow residents of a three-story house in Providence, R.I., informally known as the Purple Citadel. Having missed a couple of sold-out screenings of Breakfast in Montpelier, I recently caught Colella's flick on Netflix Instant (it's also on Amazon Instant).
But first, a timely word about VCFA: If you love film, you don't have to be a student in the college's low-residency MFA program to reap its benefits. Twice a year, VCFA brings working filmmakers — including big names — to screen and discuss their work at the Savoy Theater in Montpelier.
These events are free and open to the public, but tickets go fast — or they certainly did when John Turturro visited last year. This year, you can catch a Skype session with Andrew Bujalski (Computer Chess) and meet Debra Granik, director of Winter's Bone, who gave teenage Jennifer Lawrence the showcase that made her a star. More info here.
Now, back to Colella's film.
What You Missed
Syd (Theo Green), a micro-publisher and all-around self-important, underemployed artsy fellow, has a fondness for red wine and a genius for alienating his neighbors. It starts when Syd threatens to murder 9-year-old Curtis (Gideon Parker) for allegedly tossing a stone at his cat, Dijon.
Tags: laura colella , vermont college of fine arts , vcfa , breakfast with curtis , Movies you missed , Image , Video , Web Only
Tuesday, April 8, 2014
One of the unexpected effects of the digital era is the blurred distinction between animation and live action. The technology required to produce digital animation is increasingly affordable and commonplace, and knowledge of its effects and how to create them are now in any filmmaker’s toolkit. As a consequence, more movies and television shows are augmented by digital animation of some kind.
This is true even of seemingly “all-natural” recent films such as The Help and Moneyball (both 2011): Those films' credits list, respectively, 22 and 68 digital-effects artists and technicians. While we might not consider, say, digital color-correction artists to be animators per se, the distinction between such technicians and “proper” animators is fairly arbitrary. Both use digital tools to create moving images.
But it was not always thus. Animation, still a highly labor-intensive practice, has come down tremendously in cost since the advent of digital tools. While the initial outlay for computers and software (and software development) can be large, a company can amortize those costs over several animated productions. Also, much of the animation occurs within the computers: preprogrammed algorithms, in which variables are simply altered, are now responsible for the bread and butter of many animated movies and shows.
To get a sense of how this works, check out the fascinating video below, which is a clip from a recent SIGGRAPH presentation by the animators of Disney’s film Frozen.
Tags: roger ramjet , animation , television , flintstones , bobby bumps , bullwinkle , Video , Web Only
Friday, April 4, 2014
As we reported this week, Ken Burns' new documentary, The Address, made its theatrical premiere at the Latchis Theatre in Brattleboro on April 2. The Latchis, located near Burns' home in New Hampshire, has been the site of several premieres of his films. But for this particular documentary, the Vermont connections run much deeper.
The Address documents a unique annual competition at the Greenwood School, a small school in Putney for 11-to-17-year-old boys with learning differences. Each year, Greenwood students study and learn to recite the entirety of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and perform the speech at an end-of-year ceremony. Burns, a frequent judge at the competition, was inspired by the students' determination, which became the subject of his latest film.
Several members of the Greenwood community were kind enough to share with Seven Days their photos from the film's premiere.
Tags: the address , ken burns , greenwood , lincoln , gettysburg address , film , movie , latchis theatre , Image , Web Only
Wednesday, April 2, 2014
My in-laws visited recently for a short stay, so every day was pretty well packed with activities. In the evenings, we were all a little wiped out, but my wife’s 6-year-old nephew could generally be counted on to have a little energy in his reserve tank. On one of those evenings, we decided that a movie was in order, but that it had to be a “family-friendly” one. You know – for kids.
I have plenty of animated films in my DVD collection, but the kid has seen (and can recite dialogue, verbatim, from) most of them. Anyway, it always seems to me a bit of a slippage to simply consider animated films to be kids’ films: I’m a grown-ass man, and I like watching animated films. And most films in the digital era are, to some extent, animated films, anyway. I digress.
It was my wife who alighted on Sky High on the DVD shelves. This is a movie I’d seen many times but that was unknown to everyone else in the room. It may be carefully engineered by Disney market researchers to be family friendly and inoffensive, but damn if it isn’t clever and enjoyable all the same. Plus, it has Kurt Russell in it – always a boon, in my book.
Tags: sky high , what I'm watching , film , movie , genre , high school , kurt russell , superhero , Image , Web Only
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
The film stars Daniel (Harry Potter) Radcliffe as a young Allen Ginsberg, who, as a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, finds himself caught in a web of love, literary aspirations and murder. The film is based on actual events in Ginsberg's fascinating life.
Vachon is a figure of nearly unparalleled importance over the last 25 years of American independent film. She's produced films by such artists as Todd Solondz (Happiness, Storytelling); John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch); and Todd Haynes, for whom she has produced five features including his breakthrough, Poison, and Far From Heaven, Velvet Goldmine and Safe. Vachon is also behind numerous short films and other works. Her reputation as a cultivator of new cinematic talent is well deserved, and her films have won many awards.
Christine Vachon presents Kill Your Darlings on Sunday, April 13, 7:30 p.m. at Dana Auditorium, Middlebury College. The event is free and open to the public.
Tags: christine vachon , middlebury college , kill your darlings , daniel radcliffe , allen ginsberg , Image , Web Only
Monday, March 31, 2014
Kingdom County Productions, the independent filmmaking company headquartered in the Northeast Kingdom town of Barnet, has announced that it will commence shooting for the new film Peter and John in April. Principal photography will take place on Nantucket Island, Mass.
Based on the novel of the same name by Guy de Maupassant, Peter and John will feature, among other performers, Jacqueline Bisset. She's the latest in the series of well-known actors to appear in Kingdom County's films; others include Rip Torn in Where the Rivers Flow North and Kris Kristofferson in Disappearances.
The film is being produced through the Movies From Marlboro program: Kingdom County cofounder Jay Craven teaches at Marlboro College. This program affords 30 film students from various departments the chance to work on films with professional mentors.
Kingdom County has announced a Kickstarter campaign to raise $55,000 for the film's production.
Tags: kingdom county , kingdom county productions , jay craven , peter and john , kickstarter , jacqueline bisset , Image , Web Only
Friday, March 28, 2014
This week in movies you missed: The Netflix blurb for this one hooked me: "An idealistic teen from a devout Mormon family believes that she's been impregnated by listening to music and travels to Las Vegas to find the father."
I figured Electrick Children would play this bizarre premise for cheap laughs ("Oh, aren't naïve Mormons who believe in immaculate conception funny?"). Wrong. Rebecca Thomas' directorial debut is very much in earnest.
What You Missed
Fifteen-year-old Rachel (Julia Garner) lives in a fundamentalist Mormon compound in rural Utah. The man she knows as her father is the sect's prophet (Billy Zane). But her mom (Cynthia Watros) tells mysterious stories of meeting a "red Mustang" in the desert that suggest Rachel may have had a less holy origin.
Curious about forbidden technology, Rachel finds a rickety old tape recorder in her basement and plays the first cassette that comes to hand — a cover of "Hanging on the Telephone" by the Nerves. She finds the raw sound so powerful that, when she discovers months later that she's pregnant, she believes the unknown singer has done the deed with divine assistance.
Tags: electrick children , rebecca thomas , julia garner , billy zane , mormon , flds , Movies you missed , Image , Video , Web Only
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
Without knowing it, I commemorated the 20th anniversary of the release of Jan de Bont's 1994 action film Speed by watching it for the first time in years. I suppose it will date me to admit this, but when I watched the film a little while ago (probably about the 10th or 12th time I've seen it), it was the first time that I had seen it via any sort of digital medium. I saw it in 35mm in more than one Connecticut movie theater during its initial release, and, thereafter, if you can believe it, most of my viewings of Speed were courtesy of my old LaserDisc copy of the film. This time, I watched it on the two-disc "Five Star Collection" DVD, which is itself over a decade old. Gracious, how did I get so old?
While I have nothing against digital formats, I do have sort of a soft spot for LaserDiscs, a format whose time never really came. I still have my old battleship of a Pioneer LD player hooked up to the home stereo system ... though the hundreds of LaserDiscs in my possession are currently in boxes in the basement. Can't say as I watch 'em very often, but I hang on to them for some reason, maybe because of my students' wide-eyed puzzlement when I show them what looks like an LP-sized CD. (Three outdated technologies for the price of one!)
It's worth noting that the video images carried by LaserDiscs are not digital. Their information is not recorded as a series of ones and zeroes, but as a series of etched "pits" whose length and shape actually plays a part in determining the nature of the image. By definition, this is an analog process. (Wikipedia has a pretty good explanation of this subject.) Some LDs do indeed include digital soundtracks, but the technology is itself fundamentally analog.
Tags: speed , action movie , laserdisc , keanu reeves , sandra bullock , dennis hopper , die hard , Image , Web Only
Monday, March 24, 2014
I'm pretty new to Vermont, so, though I've reported on the Green Mountain Film Festival in print and on television now, I hadn't actually attended it until yesterday, when I drove down to Montpelier to catch a screening of A Field in England. The film, which screened in the cozy basement of the Savoy Theater, was on my short list of titles to see in this year's fest, so I'm glad I was able to catch it.
The film's director, Ben Wheatley, had a film in last year's fest, too: the dark comedy Sightseers, which apparently has the ability to divide audiences pretty sharply. So, I would imagine, does A Field in England, which is a very odd movie, indeed. Check out the trailer below.
Set in 17th-century England, the film has an admirably simple premise: Four characters wander through the titular field in an attempt to escape a raging battle; when they meet a fifth, their fortunes change, as this man takes charge and puts the other four to work for him searching for buried treasure. Oh, and, along the way, the main character, Whitehead, eats a ton of psychedelic mushrooms and starts hallucinating the emergence of swirling black planets. That admirable simplicity quickly spins out of control, as even the most mindless tasks (digging a hole, walking in a straight line, even defecating) become more and more difficult as the characters very likely go insane.
Tags: green mountain film festival , a field in england , film , movie , savoy , ben wheatley , Image , Video , Web Only