360|365FF10 REVIEW: The City of Your Final Destination [2010]

“How could any outsider understand this place?” A two and a half hour round trip to see a movie may appear crazy on the surface, but when it’s for opening night of something as well put together as the 360|365 George Eastman House Film Festival, all is completely sane. Attending the first screening wasn’t in my original plans; I was supposed to just arrive for the weekend. Thankfully, though, I decided to throw caution to the wind and drive up for director James Ivory and his newest work, The City…

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360|365 GEH Film Festival … Opening Night

The opening night of the newly named, and thus inaugural, 360 | 365 George Eastman House Film Festival has ended with a standing ovation. It was James Ivory’s first, at least to his recollection, and a wonderful testament to his extensive and successful body of work. His newest film, City of Your Final Destination, opened the festivities along with the acceptance of the title George Eastman Honorary Scholar with a lovely plaque denoting such. It was my first experience with a Merchant Ivory production and well worth the wait to…

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Keith Schofield … Music Videography

Keith Haverbrook, Eric Schoman & Jeff Mayfield make up the directing collective known as Keith Schofield. It’s an award-winning team from Los Angeles, CA that has been crafting very innovative music videos since 2004, almost all of which utilize some sort of camera trick, using the artifice of the medium to lend a unique visual quality. You could say they just take gimmicks such as depth perception illusions, multiple layering where the background is on a loop while the foreground continues forward, or a rigged focal point axis connected to…

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REVIEW: A Nightmare on Elm Street [2010]

“I haven’t even cut you yet” So this is what it has come to. Hollywood should really stop making ‘revisionings’ and just tack on another number to the end of the once sacred horror franchise they decide to desecrate. I’ll admit, the new A Nightmare on Elm Street isn’t that bad, at least as far as formulaic genre flicks reveling in blood and gore while leaving any sense of ambiguity out the window go. What truly made the original scary and still fresh when watched today—especially for newcomers unfamiliar with…

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BNFF10 REVIEW: I’m Not Here (and she’s not there) [2010]

“I just stare at blank canvas and watch it speak to me” Branching out from rock band documentaries under the Heavyrock Films umbrella, director Greg Kaplan and company’s first feature length fiction endeavor is making the rounds on the festival circuit. I’m Not Here (and she’s not there) made its way to the Buffalo Niagara Film Festival with its tale of a drug-addled, yet genius surrealist painter and his psychological spiral downward into his inner self, away from all the periphery players that have begun to crowd his existence. Known…

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