Declare Your Independents: Volume 2
Wendy Cohen here and welcome to another edition of Declare Your Independents, our new series highlighting the latest developments in the world of independent film.
This week… TIFF announces its festival lineup! Read early Oscar predictions from the festival’s slate here.
Just In: The Venice Film Festival reveals its 2013 slate, opening with the Sandra Bullock/George Clooney starrer Gravity.
Indiewire’s Top Grossing Indie Films of Summer ‘13
Spike Lee has a new Kickstarter project and Steven Soderbergh’s backing it.
The Women of Comic Con: How the Internet Killed the Studio Star
Jeff Bridges in “Fat City,” Ryan Gosling in “The United States of Leland” & More On VOD This Week
Once again, a reminder from last week’s post:
- Scott and I encourage any of you who go to see an independent movie to post your reactions to the film in these posts. Good, bad, indifferent, whatever. If there’s a film you want to recommend, do it. Use your words to inspire readers to transport themselves into a local cinema.
- When you go to the theater, why not whip out your cellphone and snap a shot of something that demonstrates you were there? A photo of the movie poster in the lobby. A shot of your ticket stubs. An image of the movie theater itself. You and your iconoclastic indie film freaks.
- For any conversations on Twitter re: this initiative, let’s use these two hashtags: #independents and #declareyourindependents
- While we’re at it, why not add our photos to CydM’s fantastic Pintrest page for everyone to enjoy?
- And if we come up with a nifty Declaration of Independents, we could try to make it go viral. If you were going to write a Declaration of Independents, what would you include? What if we made it a video manifesto?
We can’t make this work without your participation. Share your experiences with the community so we can open up readers to the fantastically diverse, exciting and evolving world of independent film. We’ll all be extremely grateful that you did!
INDIE SPOTLIGHT: MOVIES TO SEE IN THEATERS THIS WEEK
OPENING FRIDAY (7/26)
It’s 1993, and high-school valedictorian Brandy Klark (Aubrey Plaza) decides she needs to shed her uptight image before college. She puts together a list of all the activities — including sex — she missed in high school. When she soon realizes she is out of her depth, Brandy enlists the aid of her friends, older sister, and boss. Summer marches on, and members of the group realize that they will need plenty of imagination and open mindedness to complete her project before September.
Watch a video Q&A with writer/director Maggie Carey:
After her marriage to a wealthy businessman (Alec Baldwin) collapses, New York socialite Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) flees to San Francisco and the modest apartment of her sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins). Although she’s in a fragile emotional state and lacks job skills, Jasmine still manages to voice her disapproval of Ginger’s boyfriend, Chili (Bobby Cannavale). Jasmine begrudgingly takes a job in a dentist’s office, while Ginger begins dating a man (Louis C.K.) who’s a step up from Chili.
Louis C.K. on working with Woody Allen.
Daniel (Wes Bentley) is a painter whose works don’t sell, and whose marriage is failing. Self-absorbed to a fault, Daniel hesitantly accepts a lucrative commission from Warner (Frank Langella), a wealthy recluse with a hidden agenda. At first the job entails little more than capturing a sunset, or some children playing, on video. But as Daniel’s marriage continues to fall apart, he tries in vain to discern Warner’s true intentions.
Wes Bentley Talks About Shooting An Independent Thriller.
In the early 1980s, young computer geniuses take part in a tournament to see who can create a program that will enable a computer to beat a human player at chess.
The dark comedy, set at a provincial hotel that’s simultaneously hosting a chess programmer’s competition and a New Age therapy convention for couples, explores the awkward chemistry that comes into play as these two disparate groups struggle to find a common ground.
Read Flavorwire’s interview with director Andrew Bujalski here.
When the isolated U.S. military moonbase is bombarded by a rogue meteor storm, Colonel Gerard Brauchman (Christian Slater) and his small crew are cut off from Earth with their life support failing. Before long, the crew discovers the meteors harbored alien spores…and they’re replicating. Now a vicious, shape-shifting predatory life form is loose inside the crippled facility, picking off victims one by one. Locked in a desperate fight for survival, Brauchman and the terrified remaining astronauts have one final mission…keep the creature from escaping the moon and finding a new food supply on Earth.
With the bracingly honest, occasionally hilarious and ultimately moving First Comes Love, Nina Davenport examines husband-free parenthood. From hormone injections to post-natal chaos, Davenport chronicles her own pregnancy — including her conventional family’s reaction to it. She reflects upon a rapidly changing world, providing a wry and insightful play-by-play that keeps the viewer tuned in and transfixed by the topsy-turvy state of modern reproduction.
Manufacturing just fifty grams of meth in China will earn you a death sentence, and Timmy Choi (Louis Koo) has manufactured tons of it. After a violent lab accident, he’s in the custody of Captain Zhang (Sun Honglei), and now he has only one chance to avoid execution: turn informant and help Zhang’s undercover team take down the powerful cartel he’s been cooking for. But as the uneasy allies are forced to compress months of police work into just 72 sleepless hours, the increasingly desperate police are quickly stretched past their limits. As things spin wildly out of control, the line between duty and recklessness is blurred, and it becomes unclear whether the cop or the criminal truly has the upper hand.
In the waning days of World War II, a battalion of Russian soldiers find themselves lost in enemy territory. Stumbling upon a village decimated by an unseen terror, they discover that a mad scientist (HELLBOY’s Karel Roden) conducts experiments to fuse flesh and steel, creating an unstoppable army of undead soldiers. Leaderless and faced with dissention amongst their dwindling ranks, they must find the courage to face down an altogether new menace — or die trying.
Battered, bruised and under arrest, Harvey Denton sits in a police interview room facing interrogation. Clutching a stack of eyewitness statements, Detective Inspector West has no doubt as to Harvey’s part in a foiled robbery and his subsequent attempted murder of local businessman Steven Roper. Denying nothing, Harvey agrees to tell his version of events in full. As the story unfolds, we discover that a malevolent and unjust act perpetrated by Roper put Harvey in prison and now he has a score to settle. What unfolds is a tense and exhilarating heist of unexpected proportions.
Read Indiewire’s Q&A with director Rowan Athale here.
While fishing in the sea near their home island of Linosa, Sicily, aging fisherman Ernesto (Mimmo Cuticchio) and his 20-year-old grandson Filippo (Filippo Pucillo) spot a dinghy packed to the gills with illegal immigrants in transit from North Africa. Afraid that some of the men and women on the floundering raft will drown, Ernesto offers help, and ultimately welcomes a young Ethiopian boy and his pregnant mother back to his home — at the risk of being found out and arrested by the police.
NOW PLAYING IN THEATERS
A biopic of influential German-Jewish philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt. Arendt’s reporting on the 1961 trial of ex-Nazi Adolf Eichmann in The New Yorker — controversial both for her portrayal of Eichmann and the Jewish councils — introduced her now-famous concept of the “Banality of Evil.” As the high-profile trial gets underway, Hannah’s astute observations on both Eichmann and the Jewish councils prove to be highly thought-provoking, and deeply controversial.
Dr. Amin Jaafari (Ali Suliman) is a respected Palestinian surgeon who lives in Tel Aviv. When a terrorist bombing strikes a nearby hospital, Dr. Jaafari races to save those injured in the blast. His comfortable world is turned upside down later that night, however, when police summon him to identify the body of the bomber: his wife Sihem. Sihem’s guilt is confirmed when her husband receives a posthumous letter from her claiming full responsibility for the atrocity, and he finds himself unable to return to his comfortable life in Tel Aviv, instead focusing his energy on finding the people who brought his wife into the dark world of extremism. Later, in the course of Jaafari’s tense investigation, he is forced to face some difficult questions regarding his own identity and the complex decisions he’s had to make while living in a region dominated by religious strife.
With a similar storyline to the upcoming U.S. release CAPTAIN PHILLIPS, Tobias Lindholm’s absorbing thriller tells the tragic tale of the cargo ship MV Rozen, headed for harbor when it is hijacked by Somali pirates in the Indian Ocean. Amongst the men on board are the ship’s cook Mikkel (Pilou Asbaek) and the engineer Jan (Roland Moller), who along with the rest of the seamen are taken hostage in a cynical game of life and death. With the demand for a ransom of millions of dollars a psychological drama unfolds between the CEO of the shipping company (Soren Malling) and the Somali pirates.
In the new comedy by Pedro Almodóvar, a very mixed group of travelers are in a life-threatening situation on board a plane flying to Mexico City. A technical failure has endangered the lives of the people on board Peninsula Flight 2549. The pilots are striving, along with their colleagues in the Control Center, to find a solution. The flight attendants and the chief steward are atypical, baroque characters who, in the face of danger, try to forget their own personal problems and devote themselves body and soul to the task of making the flight as enjoyable as possible for the passengers, while they wait for a solution. Life in the clouds is as complicated as it is at ground level, and for the same reasons, which could be summarized in two: sex and death.
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