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L.M. Kit Carson and Lawrence Schiller's The American Dreamer (1971) is exclusively playing on Mubi through March 12, 2016.Photo by Lawrence SchillerWith a budget of $1 million, 1971's The Last Movie is the cheapest film ever to be considered a major folly. Tugging on his beard and watching a rough cut, Dennis Hopper prepares for his new project's inevitable critical disemboweling. He knows, after all, that among many delirious and noxious (though often brilliant) self-referential shenanigans it features a gigantic breast ejaculating milk onto Hopper's own receptive face. With self-aggrandizing irony (or is that ironic self-aggrandizement?), Hopper aspires to Orson Welles's career trajectory: "I can become Orson Welles, poor bastard." He declares his debut, 1969's Easy Rider, his Citizen Kane and The Last Movie his The Magnificent Ambersons. Nevertheless, the response to The Last Movie scared him away from directing for nearly a decade, rather than duplicating Welles's indomitable retreat to self-,...

 

We're on the verge of the SXSW Film Festival, so several area theaters will be turning into official venues by this time next week. Specialty screenings are still going on in the week ahead, but it definitely is about to slow down until after the festival has us all wiped out.

Austin Film Society has a Free Member Friday tonight at the Marchesa with Wes Anderson's Bottle Rocket. The group will be screening the movie along with the original short film that inspired it and it's free to all Afs members. Members can also go the Afs website to claim two free tickets to a special advance screening on Tuesday night at the Paramount of Alex Gibney's new documentary Going Clear, which examines the Church of Scientology. The film will debut on HBO later this month, but this special advance screening will feature Gibney and Texas author Lawrence Wright...

L.M. Kit Carson, the Texan film legend best known for David Holzman's Diary, has passed away at the age of 73. For Filmmaker Magazine, Vadim Rizov gathers some valuable insight from Fabrice Aragno, the cinematographer of Jean-Luc Godard's Adieu au langage. Eric Hynes provides an excellent and authentic New Yorker take on Gangs of New York for Reverse Shot's Martin Scorsese Symposium. Above: we're disappointed to hear that Paul Schrader's latest film has been essentially taken out of his hands—in response the filmmaker has disowned the picture. For Film Comment, Violet Lucca interviews Ruben Östlund about his acclaimed film, Force majeure:

 "Lucca: Like your previous work, Force Majeure is intended to foster a philosophical debate about what human behavior means or implies. Do you envision that being more of an internal process, or do you want people to talk it out?

ÖStlund: Yeah, in a group.

L.M. Kit Carson, the eclectic, fiercely independent Texas filmmaker best known for starring in the ahead-of-its-time cinéma vérité satire David Holzman's Diary, shaping the narrative arc of Paris, Texas, and helping launch the career of Wes Anderson, died Monday after a lengthy illness, his son Hunter announced on Facebook. He was 73. Born in Irving, Texas in 1941, Carson had a scattered youth: He spent six months in a Jesuit monastery and flitted in and out of various colleges before settling in New York to pursue a freelance work in magazine writing. In 1967 he teamed up with Jim McBride to star in the experimental,...

Actor, producer, screenwriter and director L.M. Kit Carson has passed away at the age of 73. Carson co-wrote and starred in David Holzman's Diary (1967), a landmark critique of cinema vérité. He'd team up with director Jim McBride again on a remake of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless in 1983 that starred Richard Gere and Valérie Kaprisky. He also helped complete the screenplay for Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984), which starred his son, Hunter Carson, whose mother is the late Karen Black. Carson's 1971 documentary The American Dreamer chronicled the making of Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie. And Carson was instrumental in the making of Wes Anderson's Bottle Rocket (1996). » - David Hudson...

Actor, producer, screenwriter and director L.M. Kit Carson has passed away at the age of 73. Carson co-wrote and starred in David Holzman's Diary (1967), a landmark critique of cinema vérité. He'd team up with director Jim McBride again on a remake of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless in 1983 that starred Richard Gere and Valérie Kaprisky. He also helped complete the screenplay for Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984), which starred his son, Hunter Carson, whose mother is the late Karen Black. Carson's 1971 documentary The American Dreamer chronicled the making of Dennis Hopper's The Last Movie. And Carson was instrumental in the making of Wes Anderson's Bottle Rocket (1996). » - David Hudson...

James Franco's ongoing experimentation with the limits of his own celebrity are like little else popular culture has produced of late. While his hijinks within academia and beyond are well documented (he's working on a Film Mfa at Nyu and an English PhD from Yale, while being a movie star, reediting "My Own Private Idaho," writing essays for N+1 and occasionally doing some performance art with Laurel Nakadate), they come to a startling head in his "Francophrenia (Or: Don't Kill Me, I Know Where The Baby Is)," a daringly oddball collaboration with lauded documentarian Ian Olds, whose "The Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi" was a hit in Rotterdam in 2009.

Lensed over the course of a seemingly one night shoot, the film essentially follows Franco around the set of ABC's "General Hospital" as he leers at people, engages in mind numbing conversations, watches as mediocrity begets more mediocrity (what...

Happy Friday, little darlings! It's been a long week, so let's all take a trust fall back into the marshmallowy softness of Ae Movie Club.

This week I'm starting things off with a Reviewlet of the new real-time indie horror flick Silent House, which then kickstarts a discussion of other "parlor trick" movies that successfully used sleight-of-hand to create a unique and engaging filmgoing experience.

It Came From Instant Queue looks under the fur of one of our most beloved playtime pals, our Movie Confessional asks which movies have gotten you out of your seat and out the door before the credits rolled, and of course we've got the usual heapin' helpins of Vintage Beefcake, new posters and trailers, and more movie talk that you can stuff in Jiminy Glick's underpants.

5 ... 4 ... 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...Start!

Elizabeth "Don't Call Me Mary Kate and/or Ashley" Olsen

Reviewlet: Silent House

This week a horror...

Too bad the critical symposium in the new, Winter 2012 issue of Cineaste isn't online. Participants evidently include Gianni Amelio, Olivier Assayas, Costa-Gavras, Robert Greenwald, and Sally Potter, "among others," but until we get our hands on the print edition, we'll have to make do with what is online, which, after all, is plenty: Patrick Z McGavin on Dave Kehr's When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade, Richard James Havis on Kyung Hyun Kim's Virtual Hallyu: Korean Cinema of the Global Era, Andrew Horton on New Zealand Film: An Illustrated History and Henry K Miller on Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema and The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe. And that's just the book reviews.

Besides the interviews with Mona Achache and Charlotte Rampling and festival reports (Locarno, Toronto and Montreal), the 15 reviews include David Sterritt on Kubrick's The Killing (1956), Joseph Luzzi on Raffaello Matarazzo,...

Reviewer: Philip Tatler IV

Rating (out of five): ***1/2

Until I watched Kino’s new DVD special edition of David Holzman's Diary, I was only familiar with its significance as a hatch-mark on a film history timeline. Diary is often cited as one of the earliest mockumentaries, prefiguring (among others) Christopher Guest’s skewering of self-serious musicians, dog show denizens, community theater actors, etc.

In this case, director Jim McBride aims his satirical guns at a particular type of pseudo-intellectual, the eponymous Holzman (L.M. Kit Carson, who co-wrote the film with McBride). Holzman is a recently unemployed cinema obsessive who decides to film himself over the course of a week in July 1967. He cites Godard’s oft-repeated axiom that “film is truth 24 frames per second” as his mantra. As the film unfolds, it becomes abundantly clear that Holzman is a budding sociopath, documenting his own devolution. Holzman makes for insufferable company,...

Many genres that Hollywood used to rely on for lots of hits have long since fallen by the wayside. Zoe finds out what happened to them…

Hollywood, the world's entertainment factory, has, for the past one hundred years, been producing films that have been enjoyed by audiences around the world. And in that time, a lot has changed, society, technology, fashions, tastes, and lifestyles, all of which Hollywood has continued to accommodate.

It's come a long way from its humble beginnings in the days of melodramatic, black and white, silent films with somewhat crude production methods. Hollywood has evolved into something more sophisticated and streamlined. But with so much change in such a fast paced industry, have some genres fallen behind? Or is it the case that these too have simply evolved into something more sophisticated and subtle?

Musical

The musical is arguably the most uplifting and escapist genre to...

L.M. Kit Carson, the legend, the man, returns to discuss his recent encounter with greatness, Jan Harlan, Mr. Kubrick's producer.Read L.M. Kit Carson's last guest post for us on David Holzman's Diary Here. What you can find out from some semi-private time with Stanley Kubrick’s multi-movie (The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, Eyes Wide Shut) final producer Jan Harlan is… …you can find out--how totally susceptible Kubrick was to the story-power of music. A special memory kept by Harlan is seeing Kubrick struggling with how to work his movie-making-evoking of the Mystery of the Universe for 2001: A Space Odyssey –…...

Updated.

"In the crawlspace between the mockumentary and the documentary, there exists a group of movies that can tentatively be described as 'false cinema,'" suggests Jaime N Christley in Slant. "They look exactly like fly-on-the-wall documentaries, but they are, from the ground up, total fabrications. Recent examples can include Catfish and (as it has been suggested) Exit Through the Gift Shop, though the real point of origin is either Peter Watkins's The War Game (which won the documentary Oscar for 1967) or Luis Buñuel's Land Without Bread, depending on where you draw the fault lines. The group, which also can be said to include The Blair Witch Project, most of Watkins's other films (up to and including La Commune (Paris, 1871)), and a handful of others, is barely large enough to form a cohesive unit, yet a few distinct tendencies bind them together. They favor a cinéma vérité, you-are-there approach and,...

I moved to NYC almost three decades ago, but the coolest and most forward thinking movie then had gotten here almost a decade earlier. David Holzman's Diary is often described as America's answer to Godard--and they are talking his early films when they say that. It's such a fun, smart, provocative film that we needed to wait forty years for history to catch up to it. Not only do we now have a chance to catch up to it, the technology and it's various partners have provided us with many ways to appreciate it, but for me it is a…...

Online movie streaming site Fandor is looking to bring new releases to the living room at the same time films go to theaters.  But don't count on this happening to mega blockbuster releases as they are in the test phases with some independent distributors.  For example, they are looking to release a 1967 David Holzman's Diary when it re-releases in New York at the Museum of Modern Art on June 15th.

Of course this isn't anything new.  On Demand has done this with bigger releases such as Paranormal Activity 2 which was a much more highly anticipated film.

This modern-day tale of deception, which purports to be a documentary, is one of the year's most intriguing pictures

The most highly regarded American film in a year that has seen the fifth anniversary of YouTube is also the most topical: The Social Network, the story of the creation of Facebook. But just as widely discussed and altogether more controversial is the low-budget movie Catfish, which purports to be a documentary about an encounter involving Facebook between people from very different social backgrounds. It cost something like $30,000 to make, and on a limited release has taken $3m at the box office, which makes it a phenomenon of Blair Witch Project dimensions.

At the centre of Catfish is Yaniv Schulman, known as Nev, a young, New York-based photographer specialising in pictures of dancers. He receives an email from Angela Faccio, a housewife in smalltown Michigan, sending him a naive but rather...

So sooner had the last Oscars been given out when a plethora of announcements from all over the distro globe came out about new theatrical acquisitions and releases.  So, here's a recap:

Lorber Films has acquired the Us rights to the all-time cinema classic David Holzman's Diary by Jim McBride. This landmark work from 1967 blends fiction and reality, and made a deep impression on an entire generation of filmmakers in the 1970s.  This staged documentary chronicles the character David Holzman's efforts to make a film about himself. The film was one of ...

There's no need to focus all your attention on new releases, particularly not when spring is studded with enough fantastic repertory scheduling to fill your every evening. Here's a look at what's been planned in New York and L.A.

New York:

Anthology Film Archives

Catalan filmmaker Albert Serra returns to the Anthology Film Archives from Feb. 25-March 3 to present his latest film, "Birdsong," an atmospheric retelling of biblical Three Wise Men story with an eye towards the desert landscape they were traveling [pictured left], in addition to Mark Peranson's experimental making-of "Birdsong" doc, "Waiting for Sancho," which will show on Feb. 28 and March 1... On March 4, '60s underground filmmaker Jose Rodriguez Soltero will get a double feature of two newly restored prints of his 1965 exploration of narcissism, "Jerovi," and the 1966 celebration of Mexican Hollywood star Lupe Velez, "Lupe."... From March 5 through 15, one of America's finest character actors gets a retrospective...