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6 articles
Palm d'Oil
29 October 2009 7:45 AM, PDT
he first annual Tribeca Film Festival begins today in Doha, Qatar, the tiny, oil-rich Arabian monarchy on the Persian Gulf. A swank of celebrities—Robert de Niro, Ben Kingsley, Jeff Koons, Patricia Clarkson and directors Martin Scorsese, Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire) and R.J. Cutler (The September Issue) are attending the festivities, which will be headquartered at I.M. Pei's new Museum of Islamic Art. The event was cooked up by the Emir's daughter, Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, 27, after she worked as an intern for the Tribeca festival in the summer of 2006. (Her first job was picking up breakfast pastries.) It's the first time the Tribeca group has expanded its franchise globally, and the woman helming the four-day event is festival executive director Amanda Palmer, a veteran of CNN and Al Jazeera. We asked her what it's going to be like:
Alexandra L. Peers: Why a Tribeca Film Festival in Qatar? »
Extracurriculars
28 October 2009 5:50 AM, PDT
Antonio Campos's debut feature, Afterschool, takes place at an elite boarding school coping with the aftermath of the deaths of two popular sisters. Josh (Ezra Miller), an awkward underclassman who spends much of his time in his dorm room combing the internet for "little clips of things that seem real," is the first to find the aforementioned classmates, who overdose in a stairwell (his discovery is captured by the school's video-production club) and is subsequently tasked with putting together a memorial video in their honor. The film, which opens with a shot of Josh watching rough pornography online, is both a bleak coming-of-age story and an exploration of a generation of voyeurs. We talked to Campos about filmmaking in the age of Youtube: »
Portia Doubleday
26 October 2009 11:16 PM, PDT
The fact that it’s been nearly a year since Portia Doubleday wrapped production on Miguel Arteta’s new teen romance, Youth in Revolt, hasn’t prevented her from continuing to burrow into the psyche of her character in the film. Based on the beloved C.D. Payne novel of the same title, Youth in Revolt tells the story of naïve young high school freshman Nick Twisp (played by Michael Cera), who is encouraged by his friend Sheeni Saunders (Doubleday) to perform a series of rebellious, marginally illicit acts in return for the prospect of maybe, possibly, one day losing his virginity to her. Doubleday describes Sheeni as a “bad good girl” of sorts—albeit one with a brain and a manipulative streak a mile long. »
- By Kaleem Aftab Photography Sebastian Kim
Woody Harrelson
26 October 2009 11:08 PM, PDT
Woody Harrelson could so easily have remained the adorable goof behind America’s favorite bar forever. It’s hard to believe now, but for a while playing Woody Boyd on the sitcom Cheers seemed like the summit of Harrelson’s career. (Is there a quicker way for an actor to become typecast than to share a name with a character?) But the Texas-born yearling made quick work of landing choice film roles in Hollywood after the iconic Boston bar shut down operations in 1993. Harrelson went from starring in one of the most violent, experimental, and relentlessly criticized films of the 1990s (Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, 1994) to starring in one of the most violent, experimental, and universally praised films of the 2000s (the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, 2007), with an Oscar-nominated turn as Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt (in Milos Forman’s The People vs. Larry Flynt, »
- By Owen Wilson Photography Niko Tavernise
Jesse Eisenberg
26 October 2009 11:07 PM, PDT
There is a special place in American cinema reserved for a certain variety of self-doubting, sexually clumsy, hyperintellectual young man. Perhaps it was Woody Allen who first carved out a niche in film for men nursing this particular cocktail of neuroses. Whatever its origins, the archetype exists, and for a new generation of movie fans, actor Jesse Eisenberg appears to have taken awkward, unsteady hold of the baton. (Of course—these guys are never athletic.)
Born in Queens, New York, and raised in New Jersey, the 26-year-old Eisenberg began performing professionally as a teen, and even did a run on Broadway in a 1996 revival of the Tennessee Williams play Summer and Smoke. But it’s Eisenberg’s film work—punctuated by performances in Dylan Kidd’s Roger Dodger (2002), Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale (2005), and this year’s Adventureland (in which he co-starred alongside this issue’s cover girl, »
- By Woody Harrelson Photography Sebastian Kim
Wes Anderson
26 October 2009 3:15 PM, PDT
In the five films that Wes Anderson has directed, from his 1996 debut feature Bottle Rocket to 2007’s picaresque The Darjeeling Limited, he has managed to assemble a constellation of actors who might best be described as “Wes’s Gang.” This tragicomic fraternity includes Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, Anjelica Huston, Luke Wilson, and, of course, his college friend and longtime collaborator OwenWilson. Like Woody Allen before him, Anderson has constructed his own immediately identifiable cinematic landscape, one so distinct that certain clothes, music, expressions, and cleverly awkward situations in the real world can be dubbed as being “very Wes Anderson.” »
- By Arnaud Desplechin Photography SØlve SundsbØ
6 articles
