FilmStew.com

No Room for a Drama Queen by Richard Horgan

6/17/2009 12:33:35 PM

The makers of the low-budget thriller The Red Queen held a bake sale to pay for the salaries of the three union actors in the cast (Valente Rodriquez, Estephenia LeBaron, Harley Jane Kozak). They also chose to pass out Rice Krispie treats to folks like Kozak before she was asked to smile for photographers at a recent red carpet premiere in Texas.

But such cinematic-slash-culinary artistry pales in comparison to the day on set when Kozak’s stunt double showed up to enact a climactic martial arts fight involving her character, gun-toting French speaking Church Lady. “Now, in a perfect world, a stunt double bears a passing resemblance to the actor he-she is doubling,” the veteran TV actress (pictured below) blogged good naturedly. “This being Low-Budgetville, mine was thirty years younger, six inches shorter, Latino and male. But gifted!”

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From the Boardroom to a Burger Palace by Richard Horgan

6/8/2009 12:32:39 PM

Long before Davis Guggenheim zeroed in on global warming with An Inconvenient Truth, he tried to warm the cockles of 1996 TV viewers with the ER episode “Homeless for the Holidays.” It was one of a half-dozen installments in which Kirsten Dunst appeared as Charlie Chiemingo, a drug-abusing teenage runaway, in this case being tended to during Christmas week by George Clooney’s character.

Now comes a feature film of the same name currently shoting in Indiana, and this Homeless for the Holidays is the kind of tale that appealed to Frank Capra during this country’s previous Great Depression. Written and directed by George A. Johnson (pictured below), it tells the story of Jack Baker (Matthew Moore), a corporate executive who must work at a fast food joint after he loses his high-paying job and grapple with the possibility that he and his family may be out on the street by Christmas.

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Defending the Almighty Dollar by Richard Horgan

5/21/2009 4:15:43 PM

Perhaps the only way the made-in-Winnipeg feature Among Thieves could have a stranger local pedigree is if it had been made by celebrated native son Guy Maddin. As it stands, it is the work of author and civil engineer Paul Boge and world premiered late last month at the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s Muriel Richardson Auditorium.

Budgeted at a paltry $15,000 Canadian, Among Thieves transformed the location of Winnipeg into Chicago for the story of three adult friends (Carey Smith, David Dick, Meghan Duffy) who, reunited after ten years, discover a secret document that exposes a very different reason for the Iraq War. Along with the New Testament derived title, debuting writer-director Boge throws in various Christian references and avoids such things as onscreen curse words in keeping with the tenets of the church where he worships (North Kildonan Mennonite Brethren). In Hollywood parlance, Among Thieves is Syriana meets Fireproof.

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A Drama Teacher Takes Aim by Richard Horgan

5/21/2009 4:04:12 PM

Back in 1982, Linda Hamilton and Robert Carradine kicked off the miniscule sub-genre of movies about the “Assassins” college campus game via Tag. More recently, the hunt-down-a-designated-opponent pastime (typically played with water or Nerf guns) has figured in the 2002 Tim Allen comedy Big Trouble and the 2007 British documentary The Assassins Guild.

While fans of Tag continue to clamor for a DVD release and-or remake, they can, in the interim, look forward to Spot Check. The low-budget indie comedy - filmed last year in and around Modesto, CA - was written, directed, produced and edited by Susan Romero, a drama teacher at Somerset Middle School since 2000.

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A Texas Family Affair by Richard Horgan

5/21/2009 3:55:26 PM

Aspiring actor-producer Brett Folmar is just getting started in the independent moviemaking business, which means he can work closely with his stepfather under the auspices of resourcefulness rather than nepotism. In the $10,000 recently wrapped period Western Texas and Me, based on a script by his dad Jay Riley, Riley plays a U.S. Marshal while Folmar stars as the Galveston newspaper reporter that he befriends.

Also in the narrative mix is the real-life character of celebrated 19th century cattle rancher Charles Goodnight (pictured below), who earned the nickname “Father of the Texas Panhandle.” It is when Riley’s U.S. Marshal joins Goodnight to fight Indians that the real trouble starts; when Riley returns home, he finds that his own ranch has been ransacked by Comanches and his wife and daughter apparently killed.

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An Academy Award Winner’s Swan Song by Richard Horgan

5/12/2009 12:24:31 AM

More than sixty years after Celeste Holm won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Gentleman’s Agreement, the 92-year-old New York City has brought her onscreen career to a close this spring in the Midwest. She plays the role of a grandmother in writer-director Aaron Warr’ s comedy My Guaranteed Student Loan, which filmed in and around Peoria, Illinois as well as Manhattan last month.

But that’s not the only Hollywood royalty taking part in Warr’ s latest effort, in which he plays a Manhattan acting student forced by financial constraints to return home. Per an interview the filmmaker gave to hometown newspaper the Journal Star, the movie will also feature Richard Pryor Jr. and Katharine Luckinbill, the granddaughter of Lucille Ball.

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Roman Polanski’s Foot Fetish by Richard Horgan

5/11/2009 11:45:52 PM

How long does it take to make a case that famed auteur Roman Polanski has a thing for women’s – and men’s - feet? A lot less, apparently, than it does to suggest that some questionable legal shenanigans helped seal the filmmaker’s flight from the U.S. back in 1977.

Ninety-four minutes shorter than Marina Zenovich’s acclaimed HBO documentary Wanted and Desired, the five-minute meditation Un Piede Di Roman Polanski (a.k.a. The Foot) has an award of its own to crow about – a Best Experimental Short citation from the recently concluded CineKink NYC. Though CineKink ain’t exactly AMPAS, the nature of the event and the fact that Piede screened as part of a “Twisted Knickers” sidebar would seem to strike at the very heart of Polanski’s cheeky sensibilities.

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Where There's a Will, There's Away by Richard Horgan

5/11/2009 11:23:25 PM

Although Tom Huckabee was abruptly (and somewhat inexplicably) fired from his post as Artistic Director of Fort Worth’s Lone Star International Film Festival at the beginning of 2008, that didn’t stop him from attending the second annual staging of the event last fall. Which is a good thing, because after watching the vampire comedy Nightcrawlers there, he went ahead and enlisted one of the movie’s actors and much of its crew for his own filmmaking endeavor.

Based on a script that Huckabee wrote in the early 1990s, Carried Away stars Nightcrawlers’ Gabriel Horn as a man who, dissatisfied with the care arranged for his grandmother by his father, kidnaps her from a Texas nursing home and sets off for California. Soon enough, dad and the other sons are in hot pursuit, leading to an eventual meeting of the dysfunctional family minds.

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Film Pro on the Fairways by Richard Horgan

4/29/2009 3:39:27 PM

Los Angeles film industry veteran Jon Fitzgerald figures it could take up to ten years for him to accomplish his mid-life sideline career goal of becoming a professional golfer. Along the way, he is doing more than just filling out scorecards; the 42-year-old is capturing his progress in the form of several documentaries, the first of which premiered this past weekend at the 2009 Newport Beach Film Festival.

The Back Nine charts Fitzgerald’s efforts over the last few years as he works with various experts to lower his handicap and qualify for the Golf Channel’s Amateur Tour. Among those helping him is top-ranked mental game coach Dr. Joe Parent, author of the bestselling book Zen Golf.

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The Waning Days of Segregation by Richard Horgan

4/24/2009 10:48:46 PM

Screenwriter Angelo Pizzo is as meticulous as he is specialized, focusing once per decade on an improbable yet factual sports team story. In 1986, he wrote the Oscar nominated basketball drama Hoosiers; in 1992, it was the football crowd-pleaser Rudy; and in 2005 came the U .S. soccer stunner The Game of Their Lives.

These days, Pizzo is concerned with a momentous high school basketball game that took place at the turn of the 1970s in Gallatin, Tennessee. On February 18th of that year, for the first and only time, the all-white school of Gallatin met the all-black school of Union, placing lifelong friends Eddie Sherlin and Bill Ligon (pictured below) on opposite sides of the hardwood.

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