Posted on Monday, February 28th, 2011 by Angie Han
Tim Burton isn’t the only notable director whose promise showed from early on — we have here a student film by fellow California Institute of the Arts alumnus Pete Docter, titled Winter. Docter, of course, is one of Pixar’s most prominent staff members and is best known for directing Monsters, Inc. and Up. He has also done screenwriting and animation work on Toy Story, Wall-E and various other Pixar films.
In Docter’s short film, a young child gets excited when he notices falling snow, only to find that once he’s gotten into his winter clothes, he’s so bundled up that he’s unable to actually enjoy the snow. At just one minute and 36 seconds, Winter has probably the highest joy to time ratios you’ll encounter all day. Watch it after the jump.
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NBA All Star Weekend has just concluded and besides the All Star Game, 3-Point Shootout and Slam Dunk Contest, one of the biggest happenings in the world of the basketball was a new film by Robert Rodriguez. The director of Sin City and Spy Kids teamed up with Nike and Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant, along with Bruce Willis, Danny Trejo and Kanye West, for a basketball-influenced grindhouse short action film called The Black Mamba. We showed you the poster and a few trailers for the 6 minute movie earlier this month and now, we’ve got the full film embedded after the jump. Read More »
Last year, we featured a beautiful zombie short film titled I Love Sarah Jane. If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out right now. It was screened at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, and many regional film festivals around the world. And aside from being awesome, it is notable for featuring Mia Wasikowska, who later became Alice in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.
Writer/director Spencer Susser has been working in commercials and music videos , but has finally completed his first feature film, an indie dramedy titled Hesher starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Rainn Wilson, and Natalie Portman, which premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival (more here, review here).
This week our friends at FilmSchoolRejects posted a short film Susser wrote and directed in July 2005 titled A Love Story, which I had never seen before. The tagline is “love hurts” and this film is the literal example of that famous saying. The one and a half minute short stars Branden Williams & Amy Smart. Watch it now, embedded after the jump.
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Sin City/Planet Terror/From Dusk Till Dawn helmer Robert Rodriguez recently directed a music video for fellow Austin-based musician Bob Schneider‘s “40 Dogs (Like Romeo and Juliet),” the first single off Schneider’s latest album “Lovely Creatures.” The video stars Kat Dennings, who is probably best known from Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist and her small role in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, but she previously worked with Robert on his family film Shorts. The video was shot over a weekend around the streets of Austin. Watch the video now embedded after the jump thanks to IFC.
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After a premiere at Sundance and several themed screenings around the UK, Spike Jonze‘ roboromance I’m Here has now arrived online for viewing in its bittersweet entirety. You’ll have to set aside 30 minutes for this one, so sneaking a peek in the office while the boss isn’t looking might prove a little harder than with Ow! Charlie Bit Me or David After Dentist.
Unfortunately, the film’s sponsor/financier Absolut is strictly limiting the amount of screenings per day. As we checked, there were 700 or so available and just publishing this post will take a big bite out of that number. If you’re too late, however, I’d definitely recommend bookmarking and checking back on the morrow and maybe checking out the trailer in the meantime.
There’s two new music promos of note for film enthusiasts, one from a music video director who branched into movies and the other, vice versa.
You can see both Michel Gondry‘s promo clip for Mia Doi Todd and David Lynch‘s introduction clip for Ariana Delawari‘s album Lion of Panjsheer embedded below the break. There’s no way you’d get them mixed up: these works fall quite comfortably inside the expected output of their respective creators. But bear in mind that it’s a post Inland Empire digital sketch-artist Lynch we’re dealing with here, not the more painterly artist of his previous works.
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We haven’t posted a Big Director Small Films column in quite some time. This has happened for a variety of reasons, but mainly due to the fact that we ran through most of the available short films of the big Hollywood directors. I’m hoping to bring the column back with more of a focus on younger filmmakers, some of which you might recognize, others of which you might not, but all of whom have, at very least, directed a feature film. So yeah, the “Big Directors” part of the column title is not completely accurate anymore, but lets move on…
Mike Mills is a famous New York graphic artist who designed promotional material and album covers for such acts as Beastie Boys, Beck, Sonic Youth, and Ol’ Dirty Bastard. He moved on to directing music videos for such artists as Moby, Yoko Ono and Air, and became a very successful commercial director.
Mills made his feature directorial debut in 2005 with a big screen adaptation of Thumbsucker, a novel by Walter Kirn (also the author of Jason Reitman’s upcoming film adaptation Up in the Air). The film starred Lou Tayloy Pucci, Tilda Swinton, Vincent D’Onofrio, Kelli Garner, Keanu Reeves, and Vince Vaughn, and premiered at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. Mike received the 2005 Guardian New Directors award at the Edinburgh International film festival. The film was met with moderately positive reviews, but was considered a disappointment by those who had been following Mills’ short films.
Today I would like to share with you Mills’ first short film, Architecture of Reassurance, which tells the story of a young girl who is dissatisfied with life at home, and decides to travel through other residences in her suburban neighborhood. It is a voyeuristic look at the utopian concept of suburban America. The 1999 short features Kelly Garner, Bob Stephenson and Sarah Hagan (before Buffy and Freaks and Geeks). The Architecture of Reassurance played in the 1999 Sundance Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Oberhausen short film festival, and The New York Museum of Modern Art’s New Directors New Films.
Watch the short film Architecture of Reassurance embedded after the jump.
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When George Romero walked on stage at the Paramount theatre for the introduction to his latest zombie film Survival of the Dead, over 1,000 Fantastic Festers gave the filmmaker not just one, but two standing ovations. If there is any crowd thankful of Romero’s contributions to cinema, it has to be the film fanatics at the Alamo Drafthouse-run genre festival.
And don’t get me wrong, I’m also very grateful of Romero’s body of work, and I’m not going to claim he doesn’t deserve a standing ovation for his past achievements. But I’m getting tired of celebrating Romero’s recent lackluster additions to the Zombie horror subgenre. Romero hasn’t made a good movie since 1985 when the original Day of the Dead was released.
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