The press release came in Friday afternoon, but I had already abandoned the computer for Tribeca screenings, so I’m just looking at it in depth now: BAMcinematek has announced the lineup for BAMcinemaFEST, the summer event that replaces what was formerly known as Sundance and BAM –– and, it would seem, builds on it substantially. A sampling of the program’s highlights:
On July 1, “An Evening with Arnaud Desplechin,” in which the director of A Christmas Tale “presents two personal favorites: Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) followed by a conversation with film critic Kent Jones; and then Desplechin will introduce the next screening, François Truffaut’s Mississippi Mermaid.” I had planned to be out of the country that night, but this sounds almost good enough to change my plans.
A screening of Metropolis with “live performance of original score by Irish ambient rock collective 3epkano.”
A retrospective sidebar featuring films by Visconti, Jarmusch and a special 20th anniversary screening of Do the Right Thing.
Parties! Including the after party for opening night film Don’t Let me Drown, and an all-night movie marathon.
A hit at the most recent Rotterdam Film Festival, Paul Krik’s feature debut Able Danger is a Flatbush, Brooklyn set post 9/11 conspiracy tale that hinges its low budget thrills directly to a studied pastiche of classic film noir and a healthy cynicism of our government’s possible role in the events of 9/11 and the subsequent dive into a state of perpetual middle eastern war in the name of defending freedom. Krik, who occasionally goes by the name Dave Herman, has the hip threads and thousand yard stare that are par for the course for Brooklyn conspiracy theorists, but he also has sure handed feel for cinema. With deftness he milks paranoia out of his crisp, hi-def B&W images and creates an altogether plausible conspiracy that barely name checks the controlled demolition theory, but nonetheless synthesizes large quantities of suspicious information from that sunny tuesday morning seven years ago. On the eve of his film’s NYC release at the Pioneer later this week, we caught up with Paul to talk about––what else?–– Entourage, Atlas Shrugged, the desire to work with Cate Blanchett and Greek versus German philosophy.
If you read a lot of film blogs, you might have noticed a virus going around called Dentler Takes the Stairs. It’s all the brainchild of Matt Dentler, who is like the P.T. Barnum of the SXSW Film Festival, and who, by being the first person to program movies like Kissing on the Mouth and Dance Party, USA, has played a huge role in legitimizing this wave of no-budget American indie filmmaking over the past few years. Dentler conducted interviews with the major players in Hannah Takes the Stairs (the Joe Swanberg drama starring Greta Gerwig and filmmakers Mark Duplass, Andrew Bujalski, Kent Osbourne, Ry Russo-Young and Todd Rohal), and asked a number of us film bloggers to each broadcast one of these interviews on our blogs.
Matt asked me to carry the interview with Mark Duplass, and of course, I complied. I reviewed The Duplass Brothers’ The Puffy Chair, which Mark starred in and co-wrote, in 2005 after seeing the film both at SXSW and the Chicago International Film Festival. At the time I said this:
It’s amazing how [The Puffy Chair] nails the mealy-mouthed way people my age have of saying what we mean by dressing the same words, over and over again, in different kinds of inflection. Between Rhett and Josh, the word “dude” has a thousand meanings; Emily isn’t satisfied being referred to by any of them. Fleshing out that tension, between what is being said and what it obviously means, is where The Puffy Chair really succeeds.
After the jump, I turn it over to Matt and Mark, who talk about Hannah’s Atari-fueled set, Andrew Bujalski’s boxers, and what Duplass did to get the film’s mythic stairs cut out of the picture. …Read more
Hannah Takes the Stairs director Joe Swanberg recently married Kris Williams, his girlfriend of 7-plus years, who has appeared in/collaborated on most of Joe’s projects, and who is a filmmaker in her own right. Kent Osbourne, who occupies one corner of the love triangle that forms the meat of Hannah, has produced a video in three parts documenting the festivities. If you’re familiar with this whole “mumblecore” crowd, you’ll see a lot of familiar faces: Greta Gerwig, Kevin Bewersdorf, Ry Russo-Young, etc. SXSW impressario Matt Dentler posted just the third part on his blog; I’ll post the second part here, because the drawing of Kris and Joe captioned “this is the only relationship that should ever exist” is so cute that it brought tears to my eyes. Also, I love the stuff with the ducks.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
filmcouch-114
The press release came in Friday afternoon, but I had already abandoned the computer for Tribeca screenings, so I’m just looking at it in depth now: 
A hit at the most recent Rotterdam Film Festival, Paul Krik’s feature debut Able Danger is a Flatbush, Brooklyn set post 9/11 conspiracy tale that hinges its low budget thrills directly to a studied pastiche of classic film noir and a healthy cynicism of our government’s possible role in the events of 9/11 and the subsequent dive into a state of perpetual middle eastern war in the name of defending freedom. Krik, who occasionally goes by the name Dave Herman, has the hip threads and thousand yard stare that are par for the course for Brooklyn conspiracy theorists, but he also has sure handed feel for cinema. With deftness he milks paranoia out of his crisp, hi-def B&W images and creates an altogether plausible conspiracy that barely name checks the controlled demolition theory, but nonetheless synthesizes large quantities of suspicious information from that sunny tuesday morning seven years ago. On the eve of his film’s NYC release at the Pioneer later this week, we caught up with Paul to talk about––what else?–– Entourage, Atlas Shrugged, the desire to work with Cate Blanchett and Greek versus German philosophy.
