Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Silverdocs, June 18, 2008

Best things I've see (together with Opening Night) at Silverdocs so far:
In the Family


Lots of google-links to Joanna Rudnick
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This brave filmmaker wants his film out there - the only reason I don't have qualms about putting up Pt. 1 of the complete film on YouTube. I wonder how many people in Belarus see YouTube. Yuri Chashchevatsky is circulating this in Belarus as a samizdat
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Seaview

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Béla Fleck and Cheick Hamala Diabaté at Silverdocs June 17, 2008



Just as I ended yesterday with a great musical documentary experience with "All Together Now," tonight I ended the day with "Throw Down Your Heart," a film of Bela Fleck's tour of 4 countries in Africa to meet and play with musicians in those countries. The extra treat was a few minutes of Bela playing with a master musician from Mali. You can see a couple of Cheick Hamala Diabaté's concerts online at Kennedy Center's Millenium Stage.
Gotta go now; need a few hours sleep before heading back down to Silver Spring.

Roman de Gare, Silverdocs

First see my friend Tom Warner's entry on Roman de Gare on Accelerated Decrepitude (this is my comment - I don't want to catch any flack from M. Pinon, should I meet him in a Rive Gauce cafe, or in some dark alley):

First of all, I don't think I called Dominique Pinon ugly, only that he had an interesting face ala Michael Pollard, who should be cast in the US remake, if he's still working and not too decrepit.

Lots of interesting comments on Rendezvous at Amazon - , especially
esp:
9 Minutes of Mayhem, May 12, 2006
By Comet Zipper (Texas) - See all my reviews

On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris. The film was limited for technical reasons to 10 minutes; the course was from Porte Dauphine, through the Louvre, to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur.

No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit.
The driver completed the course in about 9 minutes, reaching nearly 140 MPH in some stretches. The footage reveals him running real red lights, nearly hitting real pedestrians, and driving the wrong way up real one-way streets.

Upon showing the film in public for the first time, Lelouch was arrested. He has never revealed the identity of the driver, and the film went underground until this DVD release.
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Find it hard to believe that the folks at Cannes wouldn't have seen through Lelouch's "nom de movie" pretty quickly as he used variations on his "Rendezvous" shot throughout Roman de Guerre, and I'm pretty sure that he's used it in other films - I seem to remmember a cop film , where he had the camera mounted on the handlebars of a motorcycle(probably Cat and Mouse - 1975).


My apolgies for recycling my post to Tom, but don't want to think anybody who may actually look at this blog think I'm totally asleep.

Hope to post something on the great Silverocs fest in Silver Spring. I'll be down there all this week (better get some sleep soon, so I can get down there this morning - it is 4AM already!) Got back at midnight from the opening night film and party. The doc, All Together Now, made me want to listen to the whole Beatles catalog, see their films again, and hop on a plane to Las Vegas to see the Cirque du Soleil production of LOVE, about the making of its' Beatles show.

Ran into fellow Baltimore filmgoer Jay Berg and Silver Spring filmmaker Jeff Krulik at the party.You can see a lot of Jeff's really neat films on his YouTube page.
Somehow I got my friend Cheryl safely back to her car in Baltimore (almost missing a couple exits and red lights on the way back - seems I'm having trouble driving and talking enthusiastically about film at the same time!