Over the last 23 years, composer Joe Kraemer has seen his fair share of stories. His resume is full of everything from short films to Hallmark Channel flicks to the biggest Summer blockbusters. But his latest might be the most complex project to date. The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then The Bigfoot really is a unique film. In a way, it’s literally the title and, yet nothing like; it sounds like a Troma film, or a Roger Corman movie, when it has more in common with what you’d get from Frank Darabont, or Robert Zemeckis, without it feeling like a throwback. We’re fans of the music Kraemer wrote for…
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G-S-T Review…Parkland
For those of us who weren’t alive in the 60s, the assassination of John F. Kennedy was a very, very, very bad thing for the United States of America, and for the entire world. So bad, in fact, that Peter Landesman took upon himself the task of dedicating an hour and a half’s worth of narrative solely to convey that exact idea. The result of his blunt-force artistry is Parkland, a movie that bursts with promise on the page but never manages to fully live up to its latent potential on the screen; branding the film a total failure would be dishonest, but so too would calling it anything above…
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G-S-T Review…Drinking Buddies
Drinking Buddies offers a refreshingly candid look at relationships from the perspective of the romantic comedy genre. While the film explores similar themes and questions around relationships and monogamy that we’ve seen from director Joe Swanberg’s films in the past, Drinking Buddies is something special. Arguably his best film yet, he accomplishes something rarely found in feature films today, that perfect mix of indie Art House feel and mass appeal. It’s not so obscure that it alienates the general audience, but it also avoids being formulaic. It’s the culmination of Swanberg’s mumblecore roots combined with a narrative structure (or lack there of) that works to create a story utterly authentic…
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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…
