Search results for: Mark Lewis

Breaking out around the time where NYFF is on its last legs, Montreal's Festival du nouveau cinéma (October 12 to 23) kicks in with about four times the size in volume, and obviously more of an eclectic range. This year is the festival's big 40 - and for the occasion they've commissioned some of the names who've been a part of the festival to each contribute a short film in the context of what is being called the "Cartes Blanches" series. Denis Côté, Deco Dawson, Sophie Deraspe, Rodrigue Jean, Zacharias Kunuk, Marie Losier, Catherine Martin, Bruce McDonald, Théodore Ushev and Denis Villeneuve will each submit a four minute short.

With big names like Cronenberg and Polley already announced a couple of weeks ago, it came time this morning to announced the rest of the home team for the Toronto International Film Festival. This morning, they filled in some of the gaps in the Special Presentations, Vanguard, and Real to Reel sections, and at the same time presented the full line-ups for their Canada First! and Short Cuts programmes, the former highlighting feature debuts, and the latter comprised of a whopping 43 Canadian short films running anywhere from 4 to 28 minutes long.

They've got a pretty good director in Bennett Miller and I'm liking the casting (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Jonah Hill) they did for the film and though I think I might have preferred Soderbergh's version of the film, I'm still a fan of the Lewis novel and look forward in seeing how a sports dramedy might pan out.

Among some of the noteworthy items on the 2006 Black List that received the least number of votes (or wasn't read by enough prod co. insiders) we find Martin McDonagh's In Bruges which received 7 votes and picking up a pair of votes we have: Lewis Colick's The Fighter which I imagine is the same project as the one that is receiving it's Oscar bid release next week --- it has gone through many rewrites and writers. We also have the first screenplay version for Life of Pi which was penned by Jean-Pierre Jeunet & Guillame Laurent, Peter Morgan's Frost/Nixon which I imagine not many folks had the chance to read and Ron Harwood's Diving Bell & The Butterfly.

It received its world premiere back in Sundance, has a strong cast in Mark Ruffalo, Juliette Lewis, Orlando Bloom and Laura Linney and it received a Special Jury Prize for Directing for first time actor turned director - yet it took 10 months for Sympathy for Delicious to find a distributor. To be released next spring, the indie film has found an unlikely home with Maya Entertainment.