Last week, when I interviewed Whit Stillman on the occasion of Metropolitan’s premiere on Hulu, I asked him what movies he’d recently seen and enjoyed, and though he said that “seeing the trailers puts me off many more films than makes me want to see,” he noted that he did enjoy Sex and the City, which was lensed by his own frequent cinematographer John Thomas. Then, this weekend, Stillman sent me an email:
I spaced badly when you asked about films I’d liked recently. I loved Godfrey Cheshire’s Moving Midway which I saw at New Directors and which is coming out Sept. 12th. I’m going back to my film sales agent days in helping Godfrey trying to find it releases abroad.
Midway, film critic Cheshire’s personal documentary about his cousin’s plan to physically move the family plantation, will be at the IFC Center for two weeks. More info here.
Siegel, who had been the house critic for ABC’s Good Morning America for the past 25 years, succumbed to colon cancer on Friday. He is remembered vividly by former college roommate Harry Shearer at the Huffington Post, who offers a few anecdotes in tribute to “the Joel Siegel that I knew: the pre-moustache Joel.” Siegel’s fellow cancer sufferer Roger Ebert quotes from an email in which Siegel admitted to actually appearing on camera with “a pouch in my right hand pumping chemo into a port in my chest.” Ebert also quotes Siegel’s wife, Ena Swansea who says her husband was “so sad that true film criticism was being replaced by ‘entertainment news,’ when they only get interviews if their review is laudatory, or they don’t review at all.
Just before taking off for the weekend on Friday afternoon, I saw a blog post claiming that a film critic had died from a heart attack suffered during a press screening of A Mighty Heart. Returning to the computer this morning, it’s clear that the story wasn’t just a bad joke: Anderson Jones, formerly of E! Online and most recently of FilmStew.com, did indeed pass away sometime last week whilst watching the Angelina Jolie film at the Arclight in Hollywood.
As former editor of RoughCut.com, Jones was responsible for turning David Poland into a blogger. As an editor at E! Online, he frequently shared his expertise on-camera in various installments of the E! True Hollywood Story. Tributes to Jones are flying in from all corners of the web, although as Jeff Wells notes, E! has yet to comment, or even post a news item about the passing of their former employee. This might owe to the fact that Jones’ association with the site didn’t exactly end well. As FilmStew’s Richard Horgan puts it, the “always outspoken, proudly gay and often infuriating” Jones
…cried wolf so many times with E! Online that when he finally really did have a humdinger of a dog-ate-my-homework-scenario
I talked to Bill for the first time since he returned from Telluride. He shared with me some of his favorites. Here they are for you. (And if you’re out there reading SpoutBlog and you went to Telluride 2006, give us a holler and let us know a few things you enjoyed most.)
- Chris Anderson (author of The Long Tail, which I’ve blogged about)
- Lisa Kennedy (film critic for the Denver Post)
- Kevin MacDonnald (director of The Last King of Scotland)
- Asger Leth (director of Ghosts of Cite Soleil)
3 favorite spots:
- Baked in Telluride (amazing cinnamon rolls)
- Siam (an amazing Thai restaurant)
- the gondola
2 memorable moments:
- the dinner at the Steinberg residence (being a sponsor gave us great access to directors and others)
- being told by a woman named Rosie that my Spout shirt was very cool and she had to have it, so in the interest of marketing I gave her the shirt off my back
1 way the festival changed you:
- I realized that good directors aren’t good necessarily because they’re the best storytellers. They’re good because they have many of the same qualities as good managers: they’re good leaders who are able to attract the best talent and then create an environment where they can do what they do best.
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
