News

Title: Littlerock Writer-director: Mike Ott Starring: Atsuko Okatsuka, Cory Zacharia, Rintaro Sawamoto, Roberto Sanchez, Brett L. Tinnes, Ryan Dillon A nicely photographed and initially intriguing character study of a road trip gone awry, and a sibling pair of foreign travelers waylaid in a land foreign to them, “Littlerock” quickly fumbles away any sense of delicate engagement, and ends up a collection of posed and meandering down-tempo moments in search of an inciting incident or clarifying signifier. Pleased with itself more than it ought to be, the movie seems to believe or feel that dawdling for dawdling’s sake is in the end its own kind of precious artistic statement, a fact only underscored...

"The sleeper hit of the 2010 film-festival and indie-awards circuit, Mike Ott's moody micro-budget Littlerock patiently observes the California road trip of college-aged Japanese siblings Atsuko (Atsuko Okatsuka, also the film's co-writer) and Rintaro (Rintaro Sawamoto)." Karina Longworth in the Voice: "En route to Manzanar (the filmmakers leave viewers to draw on their own knowledge, if any, of what that destination portends until the film's very end), their car breaks down in the tiny desert town of Littlerock, where they soon fall in with a local crowd of young layabouts."

"Amid the keggers and daytime bike rides is plenty of drug use, an overdue loan, and a menacing alpha-male bigot (Ryan Dillon)," notes Bill Weber in Slant, "but Ott uses the threat of violence as a mere layer of mood, keeping his focus on the mutable, and often unspoken, themes of identity and the nature of attempts to explore and redefine it…...

Hitting theaters in New York this Friday and expanding in September, Variance Films has premiered the trailer for Mike Ott's "Littlerock," which last December won the Gotham Award for "best film not playing at a theater near you." That's about to change. The second feature film from Ott, this heavily improvised film follows a Japanese brother (Rintaro Sawamoto) and sister (Atsuko Okatsuka, who also co-wrote the script) who find themselves ...

Littlerock gets it. An awful lot of writers treat the formative experiences of your teenage years (young love, self-discovery, all the rest of it) as life-changing moments that don't mean a thing in the long run. While that's grounded in truth - how many old girlfriends or college buddies are you still in touch with? - far too many of them turn this observation into something patronising. Don't worry, they say. I was young once. I thought I was something special. You'll get over it.Littlerock is different. Mike Ott's sophomore film tells the story of two Japanese teenagers, brother and sister Rintaro (Rintaro Sawamoto) and Atsuko (Atsuko Okatsuka). They've stopped off in the small town of the same name on their way to make a...

As a way of celebrating this year's nominees for the Spirit Awards in the weeks leading up to the ceremony, we reached out to as many as we could in an effort to better understand what went into their films, what they've gotten out of the experience, and where they've found their inspiration, both in regards to their work and other works of art that might've inspired them from the past year. Their answers will be published on a daily basis throughout February.

Honored already at the Gotham Awards as this awards cycle's "Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You," Mike Ott's sophomore feature will no longer bear that title after its win guaranteed a theatrical run in New York at the Cinema Village sometime in the immediate future. And as it turns out, that was merely a precursor to its win as this year's recipient of...

Best Documentary "Exit Through the Gift Shop" It's hard to know whether street artist Banksy's feature documentary is what it claims to be—a doc about an obsessive man who falls in love with the world of street art (where artists place their work in public, risking arrest for vandalism), fashioning himself as the most financially successful street artist in history—or is Banksy's best prank to date. The film follows the life of buffoonish French expatriate Thierry Guetta, a happy-go-lucky proprietor of an overpriced hipster-wear store in West Hollywood with the curious habit of videotaping everything that happens to him. Guetta persuades his cousin, a street artist known as Space Invader, to become the subject of a "documentary," which leads Guetta to other street artists like Obama icon-maker Shepard Fairey and ultimately to the white whale of street artists: the ultra-secretive Banksy (interviewed in silhouette, of course...

Atsuko (Atsuko Okatsuka) and her brother Rintaro (Rintaro Sawamoto) find themselves stranded in Littlerock (California, not Arkansas) -- a small, in the middle of nowhere, desert town along the Pear Blossom highway -- after their rental car breaks down. Visiting the United States from Japan for their first time, they are on their way to a visit to Manzanar, the Japanese interment camp, where their grandfather was imprisoned during World War II. Atsuko can neither speak nor understand English and Rintaro’s knowledge of English is shaky at best, barely enough to get them by. Language barriers, however, do not stop them from befriending the local crowd of slackers and hooligans -- you know the kind, bored young adults with nothing to do except drink beer and smoke pot and hang out and ride bicycles.