Sundance film festival

If you’ve seen writer-director Kenneth Lonergan’s work before — the handful of films and half-dozen one-acts and plays he’s penned to date — you understand why he’s racked up numerous theater awards, Oscar nods and a Pulitzer nomination. And if you’re lucky enough to meet Lonergan, you’ll understand where that singular voice comes from. Sitting in a crowded Sundance Film Festival lodge off of Main Street, the shaggy, bespectacled 53-year-old director of You Can Count on Me and Margaret acts like a Kenneth Lonergan character.acts like a Kenneth Lonergan character. Within seconds of meeting an interviewer, he’ll jokingly call him an asshole and then affectionately pat him on the arm. He stumbles through answers only to suddenly, passionately verve into eloquence and righteousness. He comes off as simultaneously happy, Eeyorish-ly sad, and constantly radiating a deep sense of empathy. Most of all, he seems genuinely surprised to hear … [Read more...] about ‘Manchester by the Sea’: The Story Behind Sundance 2016’s Best Movie

The dance-off over Leaving Neverland is far far from over. Less than a month after HBO lost an attempt to get the multimillion-dollar lawsuit from the estate of Michael Jackson against the Emmy-winning documentary tossed out, and saw a federal judge shift the whole matter towards arbitration, the AT&T-owned premium cabler kicked back Monday. In a short filing, HBO’s lawyers from Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP and O’Melveny & Myers LLP notified the court that they intend to take the matter upstairs, so to speak. “Please take notice that Defendant Home Box Office, Inc. hereby appeals to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit from this Court’s order granting Plaintiffs’ Motion to Compel Arbitration (the “Order”),” Theodore J. Boutrous Jr. and Daniel Petrocelli wrote the court today in a move to dispense of Judge George Wu’s ruling of September 20 against their anti-SLAPP motion in the highly charged case. … [Read more...] about Michael Jackson Estate Moonwalks Over HBO’s ‘Leaving Neverland’ Appeal, Calls Move “Bogus” & “Desperate”

It’s a typical story, one that legions of independent filmmakers have experienced since the dawn of Sundance. You pore your energies into making your debut movie – in Barry Jenkins’ case, it was Medicine for Melancholy, his 2008 lo-fi romantic comedy in which a San Francisco bike messenger and a boho young woman spend a day hanging out. Your film travels the festival circuit, you win an award or two, and after the victory lap, you start thinking about what comes next. You go to Hollywood, where you work on a project that teaches you the studio ropes but leaves you with little to show for your efforts. You adapt a memoir that you have the rights to, and that goes nowhere as well. Time marches on. You wonder if your moment has permanently passed. 
 “Around year five of this period,” the 36-year-old director says, “I just sort of threw in the towel. I thought, I should just go home. Maybe I’ll teach.” Even though he’s recounting … [Read more...] about ‘Moonlight’: How an Indie Filmmaker Made the Best Movie of 2016

For a quarter of a century, cinematographer Kirsten Johnson has hauled her camera through global danger zones, abortion-clinic doctor’s offices and the District of Columbia. She’s filmed graveyards in Sarajevo, boxers in Brooklyn and her own mother lost in the haze of Alzheimer’s disease. You may not know her name, but if you’ve watched a documentary in the past 25 years — Citizenfour, Fahrenheit 9/11, The Oath, Derrida — you’ve definitely seen her work. And as this cinememoir, described by Johnson as a collection of “images that have marked me and leave me wondering still,” can attest, all those tours as a vérité eye-for-hire reflects a deep sympathy for her fellow human beings and left her scarred. There’s little to no information about Johnson herself, how she fell into this line of work or why she took these gigs; other than occasional glimpses of her twins, her nonprofessional life is left on the cutting-room … [Read more...] about ‘Cameraperson’ Review: Docu-Memoir on Life Lived Through a Lens Darkly

A column chronicling events and conversations on the awards circuit. Final voting for this year’s Emmy Awards — which start with Creative Emmy ceremonies on September 14 and 15, followed by Fox’s Primetime Emmy broadcast on September 22 — has been going in earnest since Thursday and will continue until 10 p.m. PT August 29. If you think campaign events and gimmicks have slowed down in the meantime since what appears to be all-time record spending in Phase 1, think again. Netflix, HBO, Amazon, FX and many others have ratcheted up the events intended to draw voting members, which now number around 24,000 including this columnist, to give them one last pitch to actually watch the endless amount of content nominated by the Television Academy this year. It is daunting to say the least. Related Story Primetime Emmys Will Go Without Host This Year On Fox To try to set themselves apart, a couple of networks — streamer and broadcast — … [Read more...] about Notes On The Season: End Of Emmy Race Morphing Into Beginning Of Oscars With Busy August Campaigning On Both Fronts