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AFI FEST 2009: THE LAST STATION, AFTER.LIFE

Helen Mirren, James McAvoy, Paul Giamatti in The Last Station

AFI FEST 2009, Sat., Nov. 7 at the Santa Monica Laemmle Theater 4 on 2nd Street in Santa Monica.
AFI FEST 2009 comes to a close with the following screenings:

Michael Hoffman’s The Last Station, which is set near the end of Leo Tolstoy’s life, has been getting lots of Oscar buzz for its stars: James McAvoy as Tolstoy’s assistant; Helen Mirren as Tolstoy’s wife; and Christopher Plummer as the verbose author of the never-ending War and Peace.
Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash’s Sweetgrass offers a look at sheepherding in Montana’s Absaroka-Beartooth mountain range. Apart from the sheep and the high peaks, there’s no connection to Brokeback Mountain.
Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar’s stop-motion [...]

AFI FEST 2009: POLICE, ADJECTIVE; TO DIE LIKE A MAN

To Die Like a Man by João Pedro Rodrigues (top); Police, Adjective by Corneliu Porumboiu (bottom)

AFI FEST 2009 continues in a more compact version on Friday and Saturday at the Santa Monica Laemmle Theater 4 on 2nd Street in Santa Monica. There’ll be only four screenings per day, with the last one starting at 5:00 p.m.
The screening films on Friday, Nov. 6, are:

Japanese filmmaker Sabu’s Kanikosen, described as "Sergei Eisenstein put into a blender with Busby Berkeley."
João Pedro Rodrigues‘ To Die Like a Man, a chronicle of a Lisbon drag queen who has been living as a woman for decades, but ends up meeting her maker as a man. Rodrigues is the director of the intriguing O Fantasma.
Jiri Barta’s stop-motion [...]

AFI FEST 2009: A SINGLE MAN, THE SINGULARITY

Colin Firth, Julianne Moore in A Single Man (top); Steve Evets, Eric Cantona in Looking for Eric (bottom)

AFI FEST 2009 highlights on Thursday, Nov. 5:

Robert Barry Ptolemy’s The Singularity sounds fascinating: Futurist Ray Kurzweil discusses the just-around-the-corner impact of human technology, which has been growing exponentially. Imagine a world without death, hunger, disease. (Well, I’m assuming all those great things will happen if humans don’t self-destruct first. After all, all lab studies indicate that human imbecility is growing even faster than the species’ technological advances — talk about a scientific paradox; someone should come up with a documentary about that.)
Directed by Tom Ford, A Single Man stars Venice 2009 winner Colin Firth, who’ll quite likely receive an Oscar nod come [...]

AFI FEST 2009: THE ROAD, EASIER WITH PRACTICE

Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee in The Road (top); Brian Geraghty in Easier with Practice (bottom)

Tonight, Wed., Nov. 4, at AFI FEST 2009 in Hollywood:

The Road has been getting a lot of Oscar buzz for star Viggo Mortensen, director John Hillcoat, and for the film itself, a futuristic father-son adventure drama set in a post-apocalyptic world.
In Eduardo Coutinho’s documentary Moscow, the director of a theater group in Brazil’s third largest city sets out to stage a production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters.
Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s Easier with Practice sounds like an unusual road movie, one in which a book author (Brian Geraghty) traveling with his brother (Kel O’Neill) becomes emotionally attached to a sexy voice on the phone. Could his brother have something [...]

AFI FEST 2009: SOMETHING’S GONNA LIVE, ABOUT ELLY, DOCTOR PARNASSUS

Heath Ledger in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (top); A Lake by Philippe Grandrieux (middle); Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest (bottom)

AFI FEST 2009 highlights, Nov. 2:

Daniel Raim’s documentary Something’s Gonna Live, which features interviews with several behind-the-scenes veterans, including Robert Boyle, Conrad Hall, and Haskell Wexler
Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which marks Heath Ledger’s last film appearance
Asghar Farhadi’s drama About Elly, winner of the Silver Bear for best director at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival
Andrea Arnold’s family drama Fish Tank, winner of the Jury Prize at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival
Bahman Ghobadi’s No One Knows About Persian Cats, about the obstacles faced by a couple of Iranian teenagers trying to form a rock band [...]

AFI FEST 2009: PRECIOUS, THE WHITE RIBBON, AJAMI

Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire by Lee Daniels (top); The White Ribbon by Michael Haneke (middle); Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Filippo Timi in Vincere by Marco Bellocchio (bottom)

Among the Sunday, Nov. 1, highlights at the AFI FEST 2009 at the Chinese Theater complex in Hollywood are:

Lu Chuan’s historical drama City of Life and Death, winner of the Golden Shell for best picture at the San Sebastian Film Festival
Claude Chabrol’s psychological mystery-drama Bellamy, his first collaboration with Gérard Depardieu
Lee Daniels‘ Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire, a strong possibility for the Oscar 2010 best picture shortlist and the Sundance 2009 US Narrative Jury Prize winner
Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or winner and potential Oscar 2010 contender [...]

AFI FEST 2009: Phone Sex Gets EASIER WITH PRACTICE

Brian Geraghty in Easier with Practice

Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s feature-film debut Easier with Practice, CineVegas Grand Jury Award winner and Best International Feature at the Edinburgh Film Festival, will screen at the AFI FEST 2009 on Wed., November 4, at 10 p.m.
Easier with Practice tells the story of a writer (Brian Geraghty of The Hurt Locker) who, in a desperate attempt to promote his still-unpublished novel, hits the road with his younger brother (Kel O’Neill) on a self-planned book tour. Things don’t go very well at first, but when out of the blue a sexy female voice calls the writer at his ordinary motel room — to ask what he’s wearing, no less — everything changes. The phoning couple [...]

Sophie Okonedo in SKIN: Black Daughter of White Parents

Sophie Okonedo in Skin

Winner of four audience awards, including at the AFI Dallas and Santa Barbara film festivals, Skin tells the factually inspired (and quite curious) story of Sandra Laing (Hotel Rwanda’s Academy Award nominee Sophie Okonedo as an adult; Ella Ramangwane as child), the "black" daughter of "white" Afrikaner parents (veterans Sam Neill and Alice Krige), who until then — South Africa in the 1950s — had been unaware that they must have had some black ancestors.
Though raised as a white girl by her parents, Sandra soon discovers the importance of her skin color after she’s officially reclassified as black and is expelled from her school. Her parents then fight a judicial battle to have their [...]

Johnny Mercer Centennial Tribute

Johnny Mercer (top); Mercer, Donald O’Connor, Hoagy Carmichael at the 1951 Academy Awards ceremony (bottom)

Johnny Mercer’s musical legacy will be celebrated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with a gala centennial tribute featuring film clips of many of Mercer’s classic songs, in addition to performances and appearances by friends and colleagues, on Thursday, November 5, at 8 p.m. at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills.
Note: This event is sold-out, but standby tickets may become available.
Program host Michael Feinstein and Monica Mancini (daughter of Mercer’s longtime friend, Henry Mancini) will perform some of Mercer’s best-known songs, while Oscar-winning songwriter-composer Alan Bergman, Oscar-nominated songwriter Arthur Hamilton, [...]

Four Angry Young Men: Richard Burton, Albert Finney, Richard Harris, Tom Courtenay

Albert Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Photo: Bryanston Films Ltd./Photofest

"Four Angry Young Men" is the title of a four-film series to take place on two consecutive Saturdays, Nov. 14 and 21, at the Getty Center’s Harold M. Williams Auditorium. Note: The screenings are free, but a separate reservation is required for each film.
The Four Angry Young Men in question — no actorish Marlon Brando-James Dean types, they — are Richard Burton (Look Back in Anger), Albert Finney (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning), Richard Harris (This Sporting Life), and Tom Courtenay (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner). Good-looking, (mostly) working-class blokes with the chance of happiness and success at their fingertips if only … Well, if only life [...]

DAVID MCCULLOUGH, GLASS: A PORTRAIT OF PHILIP Screening

David McCullough: Painting with Words (top); Philip Glass in GLASS: a portrait of Philip in twelve parts (bottom)

David McCullough: Painting with Words and GLASS: a portrait of Philip in twelve parts will be screened as part of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ 28th annual “Contemporary Documentaries” series on Wednesday, November 4, at 7 p.m. at the Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood. Admission is free.
Directed by Mark Herzog and produced by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman, David McCullough: Painting with Words takes a look at the career of Pulitzer Prize-winning author David McCullough (Truman, John Adams). Herzog will be present to take questions from the audience following the screening.
Shot on [...]

AFI FEST 2009: SOMETHING’S GONNA LIVE, NORTH BY NORTHWEST

Cary Grant in North by Northwest

Among the highlights of AFI FEST 2009 is the Nov. 2 screening of AFI Conservatory Alumnus Daniel Raim’s documentary Something’s Gonna Live, which profiles several behind-the-scenes Hollywood veterans — most of whom have already passed away — including production designers Robert Boyle (who turned 100 this past Oct. 10), Henry Bumstead (To Kill a Mockingbird, The Sting), Harold Michelson (Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Mommie Dearest, Dick Tracy), and Albert Nozaki (When Worlds Collide, The War of the Worlds, The Ten Commandments), in addition to cinematographers Conrad L. Hall (In Cold Blood, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Road to Perdition) and Haskell Wexler (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, In the Heat of [...]

AFI FEST 2009: Christopher Plummer, Viggo Mortensen Tributes

James McAvoy, Christopher Plummer in The Last Station (top); Viggo Mortensen in A History of Violence (bottom)

AFI FEST 2009 has selected Christopher Plummer, who’ll turn 80 next December, and Viggo Mortensen, 51, as this year’s tribute honorees.
Sponsored by the Skirball Cultural Center, Plummer’s tribute will precede the screening of The Last Station, in which he plays Leo Tolstoy, on Tuesday, Nov. 3. Mortensen’s tribute will precede the US premiere of John Hillcoat’s futuristic drama The Road on Wednesday, Nov. 4. Both tributes will take place at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.
A stage, film, and television and television veteran, during the course of his 50-plus-year career Plummer has won two Tony Awards (for Cyrano [...]

AFI FEST 2009: A SINGLE MAN – Closing Night Gala

Colin Firth, Matthew Goode in A Single Man

AFI FEST 2009’s Closing Night Gala presentation, the US premiere of Tom Ford’s A Single Man, will take place at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood on Thursday, November 5. (The festival, with screenings in Santa Monica, actually ends on Nov. 7.)
Based on a Christopher Isherwood novel, A Single Man chronicles a day — possibly the last one — in the life of a gay British college professor (Venice 2009 best actor Colin Firth) in the Los Angeles of the mid-’60s, as he seriously considers suicide following the unexpected death of his partner (Matthew Goode).
Written by Ford and David Scearce, A Single Man also features Julianne Moore (a likely best supporting actress [...]

AFI FEST 2009: Heath Ledger, PRECIOUS, FANTASTIC MR. FOX

Fantastic Mr. Fox by Wes Anderson (top); Gabourey Sidibe in Precious (middle); Heath Ledger in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (bottom)

AFI FEST 2009, the AFI Los Angeles International Film Festival, kicks off next Friday, Oct. 30, with a screening of Wes Anderson’s animated feature Fantastic Mr. Fox, featuring the voices of George Clooney, Meryl Streep, and Owen Wilson, among others.
Other gala presentations include Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, starring Christopher Plummer — who’ll be the recipient of this year’s AFI FEST Lifetime Achievement Award — and featuring Heath Ledger’s last performance; Kirk Jones‘ Everybody’s Fine, starring Robert De Niro in this remake of Giuseppe Tornatore’s melodrama about a widower on his way to meet his family; and Sundance [...]

Audrey Hepburn Film Series: CHARADE, MY FAIR LADY

Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn in Love in the Afternoon

Audrey Hepburn LACMA Series: ROMAN HOLIDAY, SABRINA
Love in the Afternoon
October 30 | 9:35 pm
Love in the Afternoon, Wilder’s long awaited tribute to his idol Ernst Lubitsch, is based on a French novel and tells the story of Ariane, an innocent young cello student in Paris whose father is a detective, played by Chevalier, the star of four Lubitsch musicals. In order to spark the romantic interest of Frank, an American millionaire and notorious playboy ensconced at the Ritz, Ariane assumes the guise of a sophisticated woman of affairs; but when Frank hires Ariane’s father to investigate the mysterious girl who only visits him in the afternoon, complications arise. [...]

Audrey Hepburn LACMA Series: ROMAN HOLIDAY, SABRINA

Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s

“Audrey Hepburn: Then, Now and Forever” Intro
Screening schedule and synopses from LACMA’s press release:
Roman Holiday
October 23 | 7:30 pm | Introduction by Peter Bogdanovich
Cloistered in a Roman palace on a brief state visit and yearning for a taste of la dolce vita, a young princess from an unnamed European country breaks curfew and hits the town, where too much champagne propels her straight into the arms of an accommodating American—a reporter who knows an exclusive story when it wakes up in his apartment, needing coffee and a new outfit for the scooter. Love blossoms when they set off on a magical mystery tour of the great monuments of the Eternal City; but as [...]

Audrey Hepburn: Then, Now and Forever

Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s

"Audrey Hepburn: Then, Now and Forever" is the title of the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art film series that kicks off this evening with a double bill: Roman Holiday (1953, right), the film that both made Audrey Hepburn a star — in her first leading role — and earned the actress her only Academy Award, and Peter Bogdanovich’s little-seen They All Laughed (1981), Hepburn’s last starring role in a feature film. Bogdanovich will introduce the screening.
Classy without being aloof; alluring without being vulgar; sophisticated without being snotty. That pretty much would summarize Audrey Hepburn’s screen presence. She could be hilarious, e.g., doing her best to seduce Cary Grant in Charade (1963); she [...]

Lon Chaney’s THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA Halloween Screening

The 1925 silent classic The Phantom of the Opera, starring Lon Chaney (above) in the title role, will be screened on Sunday, Oct. 25, at 2:30 pm at the San Gabriel Mission Playhouse. This Halloween Special presentation by the Los Angeles Theatre Organ Society will feature live musical accompaniment on a Wurlitzer theatre organ restored with the support of the Peter Lloyd Crotty Charitable Fund.
Directed by Rupert Julian, The Phantom of the Opera is perhaps Lon Chaney’s best-known movie role. At about that time, Chaney became a contract player at MGM, where he would star in a number of highly successful productions, some of which have popped up on Turner Classic Movies.
Based on Gaston [...]

The Sound behind the Image III: Real Horrorshow

Forbidden Planet lobby card (top); Lon Chaney in the 1925 version of Phantom of the Opera (middle); Heather Donahue in The Blair Witch Project (bottom)

"The Sound behind the Image III: Real Horrorshow!" sounds like an ideal pre-Halloween night out for horror movie fans. An Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presentation, "The Sound behind the Image III" will explore the art and technology of sound in movies, especially in horror films, on Thursday, October 29, at 7:30 p.m. at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills.
Organized by the Academy’s Science and Technology Council, the event will be hosted by Oscar-winning supervising sound editor David E. Stone, and will feature [...]

THE END OF POVERTY? US Release

Philippe Diaz’s documentary The End of Poverty?, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival’s Critics’ Week sidebar and has been screened at more than two dozen international film festivals, will be released nationwide by Cinema Libre starting in New York City on November 13 (at the Village East Cinema), followed by Los Angeles on November 25 (at the Laemmle Sunset 5 and Culver Plaza Theaters), with a platform release to follow including runs in Seattle, Portland, and Austin, and later in Boston, San Francisco, Washington DC, Philadelphia, and Atlanta.
"Most of the experts interviewed in the film had predicted the current economic crisis more than two years ago, when we started to film, explaining that a system based on a [...]

THE GLASS HOUSE, BANKING ON HEAVEN Screening

Two new documentaries to be screened at the American Cinematheque:
The Glass House (above) with director Hamid Rahmanian In Person
Wednesday, October 28, 2009 at the Aero Theatre
Banking of Heaven with writer-producer Laurie Allen In Person
An Unflinching Look at the Controversial Latter-Day Saint Community
Thursday, October 29, 2009  at the Egyptian Theatre
The Glass House, which was screened at Sundance 2009, is "an intimate portrait of the never-before-seen plight of underclass Iranian women," while Banking of Heaven is " an unflinching look at a controversial Latter-Day Saints community" that is described as "home to a culture that routinely practices child rape, welfare fraud and systematic mind control."
Wednesday, October 28 – 7:30 PM at the Aero Theatre
THE GLASS HOUSE, 2009, 92 min. [...]

AFI FEST 2009: THE WHITE RIBBON / THE PROPHET Swap

AFI FEST 2009 presented by Audi has announced that Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or winner and Oscar contender The White Ribbon will replace Jacques Audiard’s Cannes Grand Prix winner A Prophet in the festival’s line-up. Reason for the AFI FEST swap: "a recent change in the release date for A Prophet." Both films are being distributed in the US by Sony Pictures Classics.
The White Ribbon is set in a German farming village disturbed by inexplicable acts of cruelty just before the start of World War I. The film is due for release in the US on December 30. The film will screen on Sunday, November 1, at 7:00 PM.
Good that The White Ribbon will be screened; bad that A Prophet [...]

Karl Dane Biographer Interview

Allan Ellenberger interviews biographer Laura Petersen Balogh, whose book on silent-film comedian Karl Dane has just been published by McFarland.
Here’s a brief snippet:
Why Karl Dane? What is it about him and his story that moved you to write a biography?
I had always known who Karl Dane was, being a silent film buff my whole life, but he never really made that much of an impression on me. I had read different Hollywood scandal books which said his voice was not suited to the talkies, but pretty much thought that was the end of the story. It wasn’t until December 2005, when my husband Dan and I were watching the 1933 early sound serial The Whispering [...]

American Film Market 2009: Seminars and Conferences Schedule

PRESS RELEASE
The 2009 American Film Market today announced its schedule of seminars and conferences to be held between Nov. 4 and 11. Celebrating its 30th year, the AFM will showcase panels on film financing opportunities, local and international distribution trends, marketing strategies and digital technologies. The sessions will include film executives, producers, writers, directors, distributors, financiers and attorneys.
This year’s seminars and conferences will include the annual “AFM Finance Conference” on Friday, Nov. 6; “Pitch Me!” on Saturday, Nov. 7; “No Direction Home – Changing Indie Distribution Strategies” on Sunday, Nov. 8; “Writing for the Genre World” on Monday, Nov. 9; “Case Study: How to Package and Finance Your Independent [...]

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