Humble Magi

U.S. DISTRIBUTORS ARE POPPING UP LIKE MUSHROOMS: WREKIN HILL

humblemagi — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 05:22:58 +0000

Key Newmarket executives Chris Ball left his position as co-chairman of Exclusive and President and co-founder of Newmarket Films and along with Newmarket’s COO Rene Cogan, COO and John Crye, President of Production and Acquisitions, left Nigel Sinclair’s Exclusive to form Wrekin Hill Entertainment, an independently financed production and distribution company. Lionsgate and Wrekin Hill Entertainment have entered into a home entertainment distribution deal including DVD, Blu-ray, digital delivery, and video on demand.

For more on this article: http://blogs.indiewire.com/sydneylevine/archives/u.s._distributors_are_popping_up_like_mushrooms_wrekin_hill/

GOLDEN GLOBES TO HONOR ROBERT DENIRO WITH CECIL B. DEMILLE AWARD

humblemagi — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 19:14:57 +0000

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association will award eight-time Golden Globe nominee Robert De Niro (who won for Raging Bull) with their Cecil B. De Mille award for lifetime achievement at the 68th Annual Golden Globe Awards show on NBC on Sunday, January 16, 2011, which will air live from 5 to 8 PM (PST) and 8-11 (EST) from the Beverly Hilton Hotel. The show is broadcast in 160 countries. De Niro’s long-time director Martin Scorsese won the award last year, following other winners Steven Spielberg, Al Pacino, and Barbra Streisand. Ricky Gervais returns as host.

For More on this article: http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/2010/11/09/golden_globes_to_honor_robert_de_niro_with_cecil_b._demille_award/

ROGER EBERT BRINGING “AT THE MOVIES” TO PBS IN JANUARY!

humblemagi — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 05:31:13 +0000

The Associated Press’ Christy Lemire and NPR’s Elvis Mitchell will be handing out the “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” on “Roger Ebert Presents At The Movies.”The movie-review show will launch in January on Chicago PBS station WTTW, birthplace of the first Gene Siskel-Roger Ebert review show “Opening Soon At A Theater Near You.”

Ebert, who lost his speaking voice to cancer a few years ago, will appear using a computer voice in a weekly segment called “Roger’s Office.”

For more on this article please visit: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/46474

TCM’S MOGULS AND MOVIE STARS: A HISTORY OF HOLLYWOOD

humblemagi — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 06:06:58 +0000

Portraits of Hollywood’s Founding Power Players

By MIKE HALE

Those of us who hold Turner Classic Movies dear — who consider it the one indispensable channel among the 200 or 500 or 1,000 snaking into our televisions — don’t necessarily watch it very often. It can be enough to know it’s there, commercial-free and aspect-ratio-conscious, showing a silent movie in the wee hours of every Monday morning or classing up Halloween with “The Leopard Man” and “Cat People” (Jacques Tourneur, 1942, as if you had to ask).

More About This Series

Overview
New York Times Review
November 1, 2010
Cast, Credits & Awards
Readers’ Reviews

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From left, G. W. Bitzer, called Billy, and D. W. Griffith in TCM’s series “Moguls & Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood.”

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The Warner brothers, seen in this seven-part documentary.

That may represent food for the soul, but it’s not much of a business model for TCM. So you really can’t complain when the channel does something a little different to drum up publicity, exploiting the finite resource of its movie library — as in the mostly dreary 31 Days of Oscar programming stunt each February — or creating its own content, like original documentaries about Chuck Jones or Clint Eastwood.

Or when it does something a whole lot different, like “Moguls & Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood,” a seven-week series (beginning Monday night) that represents the channel’s most ambitious venture yet into original programming.

For more on this article please visit: http://tv.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/arts/television/01moguls.html?_r=1&ref=movies

ALPFD IS NOMINATED FOR TEN AWARDS AT THE UPCOMING 2010 WILD ROSE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL!

humblemagi — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 19:59:39 +0000

For More Info: http://www.ariesworks.com/

SPIELBERG AND DREAMWORKS ENERGIZE THE MAGIC MACHINE ANEW

humblemagi — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 17:44:13 +0000

By MICHAEL CIEPLY and BROOKS BARNES

UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. — In the perfect little town of Paradise, Ohio, a pretty-faced new kid has a crush on the sweet blonde who is showing him around. By the way, the kid is also a space alien, on the run from some other aliens who are anything but pretty.

John Bramley/Dreamworks

Alex Pettyfer in “I Am Number Four,” which will be released next February. DreamWorks is grooming Mr. Pettyfer as a star.

Alex Berliner/DreamWorks

Steven Spielberg and Stacey Snider in 2007, the two partners in DreamWorks.

After two years in the throes of a financial restructuring, Steven Spielberg and his DreamWorks Studios are back with some typically Spielbergian stuff. And they are starting the next round with the sort of fanciful, scary, sometimes heartwarming movies they know best — and their new distribution ally, Walt Disney Studios, needs most.

Success for DreamWorks might quickly return Disney to its former status as a “full service” studio offering a wide range of action movies and dramas, after it had focused for years on animation and family fare that paid the bills but kept the company out of the Hollywood mainstream.

To read the rest of the article please visit: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/01/business/media/01dreamworks.html?_r=2&ref=movies

ALPFD WILL SCREEN SATURDAY, NOV.6TH @ 8:35PM AT THE WILD ROSE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL!

humblemagi — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 16:35:42 +0000

For More Info Please Visit: http://www.ariesworks.com/

GOTHAM INDEPENDENT FILM AWARDS NOMINEES ANNOUNCED

humblemagi — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 05:15:19 +0000

by Rebecca Pahle |

Award season has swung into gear with the Independent Filmmaker Project’s announcement of the 20th anniversary Gotham Independent Film Award nominees. The Gotham Awards celebrate American independent feature films, and in past years have drawn attention to films such as The Hurt Locker, Food, Inc. and Capote, all of which went on to gather major awards season buzz—and wins.

In addition to the six usual categories, 2010 marks the first year for the Festival Genius Audience Award; the winner will be decided by an online vote, and eligible films include those which have won an Audience Award within the past year. The recipient will be announced at the Gotham Awards ceremony on Monday, November 29th. Nominees for the Festival Genius Audience Award are to be announced in November.

The 2010 nominees are:
Best Feature
Black Swan
Blue Valentine
The Kids Are All Right
Let Me In
Winter’s Bone

Best Documentary
12th & Delaware
Inside Job
The Oath
Public Speaking
Sweetgrass

Best Ensemble Performance
The Kids Are All Right
Life During Wartime
Please Give
Tiny Furniture
Winter’s Bone

Breakthrough Director
John Wells, The Company Men
Kevin Asch, Holy Rollers
Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, I Love You Phillip Morris
Tanya Hamilton, Night Catches Us
Lena Dunham, Tiny Furniture

Breakthrough Actor
Prince Adu, Prince of Broadway
Ronald Bronstein, Daddy Longlegs
Greta Gerwig, Greenberg
Jennifer Lawrence, Winter’s Bone
John Ortiz, Jack Goes Boating

Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You
Kati with an i
Littlerock
On Coal River
Summer Pasture
The Wolf Knife

For more information visit: http://gotham.ifp.org.

SPIRIT AWARDS HEAD BACK TO THE BEACH IN 2011

humblemagi — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 18:00:11 +0000

by Brian Brooks

Photo by indieWIRE.

After a brief foray to downtown Los Angeles last year, Film Independent the non-profit arts organization that produces the Spirit Awards and the Los Angeles Film Festival, is returning the 2011 Spirit Awards to its traditional Saturday afternoon on February 26 at the beach in Santa Monica. Nominations for the next Spirit Awards will take place November 30, and all past Spirit Award winners and nominees will be eligible to vote for this year’s winners.

Last year, the annual awards show took place at L.A. LIVE adjacent to the Staple’s Center and also moved its other major annual event, the Los Angeles Film Festival, to the location in June. At the time, Film Independent called the move “reflective of the festival’s continued growth and its efforts to embrace the cultural diversity and energy of Los Angeles.” As announced recently, LAFF will take place downtown LA next June.

For more on this article: http://www.indiewire.com/article/spirit_awards_head_back_to_the_beach_in_2011/

FILM DOCUMENTARIES GET EVEN HARDER TO DEFINE

humblemagi — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 18:00:44 +0000

FILM DOCUMENTARIES (IN NAME ONLY) OF EVERY STRIPE

Wiley FosterParamount Vantage

Davis Guggenheim’s “Waiting for Superman.”

By A. O. SCOTT

“ALL I want is the truth. Just gimme some truth!” John Lennon sang. Lennon, who would have turned 70 last weekend, is the subject of Michael Epstein’s new documentary, “LENNONYC,” shown at the recently concluded New York Film Festival and slated for broadcast on PBS next month. Mr. Epstein’s film is part of a surge of documentaries, some shown on television, some released in theaters, that try to answer Lennon’s plea while demonstrating just how tricky the pursuit of cinematic truth can be.

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Toronto International Film Festival

Joyce McKinney is the subject of Errol Morris’s “Tabloid.”

Documentary seems, more than ever, like a catchall rubric, a label that can be affixed to heterogeneous, even contradictory products, ranging from the pranks of the elusive street artist Banksy (recorded in “Exit Through the Gift Shop”) to “Baseball: The Tenth Inning,” Ken Burns’s meditation on the recent history of baseball. Errol Morris’s “Tabloid” is obviously a documentary, but the term seems small and tidy next to the film itself, which may be visually restrained (Mr. Morris’s usual face-to-camera interviews, spiked by music and counterpointed with old still photographs and bits of stock footage), but is as wild as anything you can imagine. Cloned dogs! Mormon sex scandals! How can such things exist at all, much less coexist in a single movie?

And how can the same word usefully apply to “Jackass 3-D,” the latest anthology of perilous stunts from Johnny Knoxville and his masochistic pals, and to “Inside Job,” Charles Ferguson’s angry exposé of the roots of the current economic crisis? This is not just a question of tone or subject matter — “Jackass” and “Inside Job” contemplate ingenious and destructive acts of wanton stupidity, while Mr. Burns and Banksy are preoccupied with fame, money and deceit — but also a matter of formal rules and intellectual procedures.

Basic practical considerations — How much voice-over? How much vérité? To re-enact or not? — have a way of opening thorny ethical and philosophical problems. Is the documentarian’s job to show stuff happening or to listen to people talking? To disclose, faithfully and without overt artifice, the way the world is, or to try to explain why it is that way? Is the point of documentary, to cite an old Marxist slogan, not to explain the world, but to change it?

For the entire article please visit: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/movies/17scott.html?_r=2&ref=movies