With the Toronto Film Festival beginning tomorrow, we’ve just about concluded our Telluride coverage. Here are some highlights. You’ll find a full guide to our Telluride reportage, minus Friday’s upcoming all-Telluride episode of FilmCouch, after the jump.
“In Superbad, Michael Cera fantasizes about a world in which ‘girls weren’t weirded out by our boners, but actually wanted to look at them.’ Juno takes place in that world.” Karina reviews the Festival’s biggest buzz-getter, and Paul interviews director Jason Reitman.
We love People on Sunday. Paul says the 1929 silent film “contains the most seductive first kiss I’ve ever seen on film. No joke.” Karina looks at the historical context.
“It’s true that I was in a rather fragile, sleep-deprived state at the time, but even now, the morning after, as it were, I still love this film.” Kevin’s talking about I’m Not There. He also talked to that film’s director, Todd Haynes.
“When I was 20 years old, I moved from Chicago to San Francisco, and I did it for George Kuchar.” Karina offers some thoughts on the experimental legend/Telluride honoree.
This weekend in Telluride, I recorded an audio interview with experimental filmmaker George Kuchar. We talked about YouTube, the trickle down economics of DIY filmmaking, and Telluride’s history as a haven for criminals and whores. Somehow, someway, the audio file got corrupted and the interview is unusable. Which is really depressing, because this interview was kind of a big deal to me. When I was 20 years old, I moved from Chicago to San Francisco, and I did it for George Kuchar.
(That’s not entirely true, but it might as well be. Years later the other factors that led to the move–petty relationship problems, an intolerance for Midwest winters, a foolish youthful faith in the power of geographical change to correct deep-seated emotional issues–seem far less significant.)
I was already skipping classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to watch George Kuchar’s movies at the Video Data Bank. Shot first on Super 8mm, then 16mm, then prosumer video, sometimes aided by his brother Mike, the Kuchar films were cheap and intentionally schlocky, but the best of them were somehow funny, poignant, and even beautiful. They were exactly the kind of movies I wanted to make! The idea of finishing my final three semesters of art school in a sunny clime, where I would take classes with Kuchar and surely in no time convince him to take me under his wing–it was like an actionable fantasy.
Of course, the reality of it was nothing like I fantasized. …Read more
I got so excited about the news that of a George Kuchar program at Telluride that I immediately searched YouTube for his shorts. I found I couple that I had never seen, including A Reason to Live and Wild Night in El Reno (both of which, according to this essay, seem to predate The Weather Diaries, although El Reno is essentially a portrait of a storm set to a vintage bongo-heavy Kuchar score). But does anyone ever get tired of Hold Me When I’m Naked? I don’t. I’ve embedded the second half above, because it’s sexier; click here to watch the first part.
Yay! It’s here. First thing’s first: two of the three tributes will, indeed, be presented to Daniel Day-Lewis and Shyam Benega; the other will focus on composer Michel Legrand (awesome). Other highlights: special screenings of King Vidor’s The Big Parade, a documentary about Val Lewton directed by Martin Scorsese and Kent Jones, a program dedicated to George Kuchar, and the premiere of Gerald Peary’s doc FOR THE LOVE OF MOVIES: The Story of American Film Criticism – which, theoretically, I’m in. See the full schedule, cribbed from the press release, after the jump.
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.
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This weekend in Telluride, I recorded an audio interview with experimental filmmaker George Kuchar. We talked about YouTube, the trickle down economics of DIY filmmaking, and Telluride’s history as a haven for criminals and whores. Somehow, someway, the audio file got corrupted and the interview is unusable. Which is really depressing, because this interview was kind of a big deal to me. When I was 20 years old, I moved from Chicago to San Francisco, and I did it for George Kuchar.
