Day: July 26, 2013

On 7.25 Indiewire contributor Matthew Hammett Knott posted a piece called “Heroines of Cinema: The 10 Most Exciting Young Female Directors in the World Today.” Actually not that young — most of the women mentioned are their mid to late 30s. Anyway, in addition to Sally El-Hosaini (My Brother The Devil), Miranda July (The Future), Celine Sciamma (Tomboy), Lucia Puenzo (Wakolda), Dee Rees (Pariah), Mia Hansen (The Father Of My Children), Lena Dunham (Girls), Haifaa Al-Mansour (Wadjda), Sarah Polley (Take This Waltz, Stories We Tell) and Ava Duvernay (Middle of Nowhere, the forthcoming Selma), I would add Shannah Laumeister, director of the elegant and admirably ballsy Bert Stern: Original Madman, Circumstance director Maryam Keshavarz and Sam Taylor-Johnson (a.k.a., Sam Taylor-Wood), director of the forthcoming 50 Shades of Grey.

Stories rise and fall so quickly these days that print media almost always seems to be trailing. John Cuneo’s New Yorker cover portraying the ghastly death of Anthony Weiner‘s mayoral campaign is one of the rare instances in which a dead-tree publication seems right on top of it. I mean, not even a day or two late.

With James Ponsoldt‘s teenage-boozer flick The Spectacular Now opening next Friday (8.2), it’s time to re-post a bitch rant from last January: “Few things make me more irate than driving-and-talking scenes in which the driver primarily looks at the person riding shotgun (usually a woman) and only glances at the road sporadically. Five or six seconds of eye-contact for every one or two seconds of road-watching. It never works that way in reality, even in the case of sloppy reckless drunks. I never, ever look at a passenger except when we’re at a stop light or stalled in traffic.

Shailene Woodley, Miles Teller in James Ponsoldt’s The Spectacular Now

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Among the less costly ways of getting to the Telluride Film Festival is to fly to Durango and then rent a car or pay for a limo shuttle. Both ways cost over $300. I’ll be arriving in Durango on Wednesday afternoon, 8.28, and renting wheels and driving the 100 minutes to Telluride and then returning to Durango sometime on Monday, 9.2. I’m looking for one or two folks who’d like to tag along, and all I want is gas. I’ve got the rental — you fill up the tank and keep it filled. At most that’ll cost you….what, $70 or $80 bucks round-trip? Cheap deal.

The fact that Robert Luketic directed The Ugly Truth, 21, Monster-in-Law and Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! should warn you away from Paranoia (Relativity, 8.16). The trailer suggests it’s a formulaic, second-tier programmer. Mediocrity tip-off #1 is Gary Oldman playing Gordon Gekko by way of Al Pacino‘s Devil’s Advocate character. Tip-off #2 is Liam Hemsworth‘s character talking about wanting to take care of his father who worked hard all his life “with nothing to show for it.” Tip-off #3 is Harrison Ford looking like he’s had chemotherapy. (He has one of those heads that needs hair — I know this because I have one of those heads.) A friend believes that Liam is hotter than his older brother Chris. Maybe so, but Liam having costarred in two Hunger Games films plus The Expendables 2 plus Paranoia tells me he’s probably not a long-distance runner.