Editor’s Note: This interview took place at the 2012 Fantastic Fest in Austin, TX. It has been republished to coincide with the 2013 San Diego Comic Con where directors Cole Drumb and Jen Luk will be screening PostHuman. Action anime isn’t something that American animation studios make all that often. Inspired by Akira and a slew of other seminal sci-fi titles, Jen Luk and Cole Drumb set out to create a modern rendition of what Heavy Metal was back in the 80’s. The duo has crammed so much awesome content into a 6 minute short that once you see PostHuman you will want to see so much more, trust us.…
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[OCFF Interview]…’Drinking Buddies’ Director Joe Swanberg
Arguably his best film to date, prolific, independent filmmaker, Joe Swanberg, says he worked harder on Drinking Buddies than on any other film. Swanberg says it’s a movie he made with “a deep desire to connect with an audience, and that hasn’t been true of a lot of my movies.” “I’ve had a couple of big changes in the past couple of years in terms of how I make movies and what I want to put out into the world,” says Swanberg. Whose friend and fellow filmmaker, Madeleine Olnek, influenced some of these changes after sharing her philosophy on filmmakers and comedy. “She said to have the ability to make comedies and not…
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[OCFF Interview]….’Ain’t Them Bodies Saints’ Director David Lowery
This past weekend Dallas welcomed the 2nd Annual Oak Cliff Film Festival to the neighborhood, and with it, a special double feature event with local filmmaker David Lowery in attendance. Lowery introduced director Robert Altman’s Repertory film, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, followed by a “secret screening” that turned out to be Lowery’s latest feature film, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints. Go, See, Talk caught up with Lowery in the Press room and quickly chatted about the local film community, his experiences growing up attending film festivals, and his involvement in them now. Lowery, who grew up in Dallas and attended festivals like the USA Film Festival and the Dallas Video Fest when they were…
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[OCFF Interview]…'Medora' Directors Andrew Cohn & Davy Rothbart
This past weekend at the 2nd Annual Oak Cliff Film Festival, Andrew Cohn and Davy Rothbart’s documentary feature, Medora, about a small town in Indiana, won the Jury Award for Best Documentary Feature. The film, which premiered earlier this year at the South By Southwest Film Festival in Austin, follows the lives of the boys who make up the Medora Hornets, the local high school’s basketball team, as they attempt to end their three-year losing streak. The team serves as a symbol to the community, and their hope and determination parallels with that of the town itself, as it fights to stay alive. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Check out the Medora trailer from the film’s…
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[IFFBoston Review]…Some Girl(s)
If you’re only cursorily familiar with the work of Neil LaBute, you may find Some Girl(s) a bit surprising. Of course, he can only claim credit for Some Girl(s) on the page; here it’s Daisy Von Scherler Mayer, not LaBute, serving as the production’s architect, working off of his screenplay and adapting his stage play for the camera. But Some Girl(s) thoroughly feels like a LaBute film, and cuts through middling fare like Lakeview Terrace and Nurse Betty, not to mention utter fiascoes like The Wicker Man, taking us all the way back to 1997’s In the Company of Men, 1998’s Your Friends & Neighbors, and 2003’s The Shape of…
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[IFFBoston Review]…Willow Creek
Shakes the Clown, Sleeping Dogs Lie, World’s Greatest Dad, God Bless America…Willow Creek. One of these things is not like the other, but that’s what makes Bobcat Goldthwait an exciting filmmaker: he’s capable of stepping out of his comfort zone (which, ironically enough, encompasses uncomfortable pursuits and ideas) and trying his hand at something that’s totally atypical of his filmography. Why make a found footage picture about two people searching for the truth about Bigfoot? Why not? If the results of Bobcat’s foray into the gimmicky horror sub-genre don’t mesh with his other work, they still make for a great midnight movie and represent an interesting evolution in his directorial career. Of course,…
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[IFFBoston Review]…Much Ado About Nothing
There are two distinct halves to Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing: one is a modern rendition of what’s arguably Shakespeare’s wittiest comedy, and the other is, well, a Joss Whedon film. Diehard fans of the Avengers director and all-around geek god will naturally flock to it, and for them, the joy of the project may well come down to the endless delight they experience at every single appearance made by members of Whedon’s regular stable of performers- Clark Gregg, Amy Acker, Alexis Denisof, Nathan Fillion, Fran Kranz, Sean Maher, and others still. It’s fanboy nirvana- Fred and Wesley verbally spar while Mal Reynolds and Agent Coulson yuck it up…
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[IFFBoston Review]…V/H/S/2
Last year’s horror anthology V/H/S (our review from IFFBoston ’12) may only be half a good movie, but it wound up being an exciting experiment even though it didn’t live up to its full promise. Two hours of horror embodied in a succubus, a slasher, demonic possession, aliens, and killer lesbians sounds like a great concept for a midnight movie on paper, and it remains such even in practice; the problem with V/H/S was the utter lack of craft or thought put into several of its segments, which yielded an uneven movie that worked in fits and spurts but with no real consistency beyond how ugly the entire picture looked.…
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[IFFBoston Review]…The Way, Way Back
If there’s one problem with The Way, Way Back, it’s that it takes about twenty minutes to find its groove. In that span of time, we’re kept in the company of unpalatable characters ranging from mostly terrible adults to mostly petulant teens, while our anchor in the setting, the painfully awkward protagonist, Duncan (Liam James), remains staunchly introverted and passive toward the world around him. We should feel sorry for the kid right away, of course, except that he does nothing but mope and squint through the torment of being on summer vacation in Marshfield, MA with his mom, Pam, (Toni Colette) and her obnoxious boyfriend, Trent, (Steve Carell); he’s…
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[IFFBoston Review]…The Spectacular Now
If The Spectacular Now, director James Ponsoldt’s follow-up to his 2012 sophomore effort, Smashed, can be described in a word, it’s “candid”. Of course, there are many other words well-suited for conveying the film’s numerous positive qualities- sweet, funny, insightful, vital, bold, and even original- but contemporary coming-of-age dramedies usually don’t bother with being this frank about their subject matter. Ponsoldt, however, isn’t one to move sideways around his material and instead plows into it head-on, weaving a narrative that flows with ease between moments of tenderness, drunken juvenility, love, heartbreak, and straight-up shock without ever feeling inauthentic or forced. Teenage fare this genuine is a rare thing indeed. How…
