Pages tagged “we live in public”

• • Decrease
  • Reset
  • Increase
  resize
• print
• send

We Live in Public Review

Release Date: Fall 2009 Director: Ondi Timoner Starring: Josh Harris, Tanya Corrin Cinematographers: Max Heller, Vasco Nunes Studio/Run Time: Interloper Films, 90 mins. Cautionary documentary looks for social media lessons in the story of a dot-com “visionary” Ondi Timoner has a theory and a metaphor about broadcasting our lives online: it’s gradually driving us insane. All of this Twittering, blogging, using-of-Facebook-without-a-concise-verb-to-describe-our-actions, is leading to madness, and Timoner’s cautionary example is entrepreneur Josh Harris....  read more

SXSW Film 2009: Documentaries

The casual, celebratory South by Southwest festival has come to a close. My colleague Tim Basham and I have been posting reactions to films throughout the fest, and to help wrap this burrito I'm going to recap the films I saw, starting with the documentaries and moving to narrative features in the next post. Favorites at the top. 45365: This lovely, well-organized slice of small town life is as strong an aural montage as it is a visual one. Walking silently among the residents of Sidney, Ohio, population 20,211, filmmaker Bill Ross offers us recordings of church congregations singing, radio...  read more

Sundance 2009: Eleven Documentaries to Wrestle With

In a short video remembrance of Sundance that played before many of the screenings in Park City last week, filmmaker Davis Guggenheim says the "dirty little secret" of the festival is that the best films every year are the documentaries. That may be overstating the case a bit, but it's true that films like Man on Wire, In the Shadow of the Moon, Iraq in Fragments, Trouble the Water, The Short Life of José Antonio Gutierez, and Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired are among the most memorable films I've seen at the fest. This year, while I'm not sure I...  read more

Sundance 2009: Award Winners

Moments ago in Park City, Utah, the Sundance film festival announced the winners of its 2009 awards. While the noisiest competition at Sundance often seems to be the one among distributors vying for marketable films, or the one among filmmakers trying to drum up interest in their movies, Sundance also referees an official competition in which juries choose their favorites of the eligible films. Of the many prizes awarded by juries, the most prestigious are the two "grand jury prizes" for American dramatic and documentary films and the two "world cinema jury prizes" for foreign dramatic and documentary films. Each...  read more

Sundance 2009: Paul Giamatti, Michael Cera, and Living in Public

Here's what I learned about the stars at Sundance this year: Paul Giamatti literally gave up his soul for a little peace and to improve his performance as Chekov's Uncle Vanya. Michael Cera and Charlyne Yi gave up their privacy when they agreed to let a documentary crew follow them around on dates. And both of these things can lead to madness. Or at least that's the premise of two fictional films and a documentary playing at Sundance. Cold Souls and Paper Heart both incorporate the images and names of their stars into their fictional stories, and a third film,...  read more