Recently in Parties Category
On opening night, after the Texas Film Hall of Fame soiree, we headed back downtown for the SXSW Film Festival's opening night party at Buffalo Billiards. It's always a great night regardless of where it's help because like the opening of any other event where everyone's psyched to be there. Like the first night at summer camp, only with lots of booze.
See if you can spot the indieWIRE and SXSW staffers in this pic:
It's a great place to meet up with old friends as well as meet new ones, the ones you're going to be seeing at parties and screenings over the next 5 days. One of the films I really wanted to see but missed do to the influenza was Bi the Way, by Brittany Blockman and Josephine Decker, the latter of which I met at the party, along with her mom who was in town to support the film (and her daughter, natch). Maybe if I'm nice, they'll sent me a screener!
After Buffalo Billiards it was off to the PureVolume Ranch, one of the many non-official week-long parties that turn downtown Austin into an artistic, booze-addled pub crawl. Not that there's anything wrong with that...
More from opening night after the jump....
NOTE: This entry has been updated to clarify the beneficiary of the Texas Film Hall of Fame Awards and to complete a sentence I, uh, forgot to finish last night.
So I'm a little behind in my blogging... Well, I have an excuse or two. First of all, I have a new gig! That's right, the Rabbi has gone and gotten hisself some legitimate employment. Or at least some legitimate part time employment with a really cool start up. It's a company called Cinelan and we're a short film distribution and syndication company. Check out the website and you'll see what I mean. It's really cool!
The other reason is that I went and got myself sick with the influenza. That's right. The good money I paid for a flu shot this year did me diddly since I went and got sick, anyway. Not only that, but I got sick at the exact worst time. Smack dab in the middle of SXSW. Lovely. Thanks are due, however, to my angels of mercy Mike Tully and Agnes Varnum, who both came by with soup and medicines!
Add to that getting stuck overnight in Fort Worth on the way down due to snow in Dallas and this has been a rocky trip. (Stay tuned for pix of the rattlesnake cakes that SXSW Film Festival producer Matt Dentler and I ate, though!)
Not only that, I am trying to get my apartment in shape to be sold. HUGE job. So to paraphrase Crash Davis, I'm dealing with a lot of shit!
Due to the aforementioned snow, I missed what was apparently a pretty amazing party at Lance Armstrong's house. This, I was not happy about. It was a pre-party for the Texas Film Hall of Fame awards ceremony, which I was able to attend the following night and it was a dandy of a night. An annual benefit for the Austin Film Society (and not an official SXSW do), the cocktails, dinner, ceremony and auction are held each year at Austin Studios, a couple of miles north of the downtown Austin area. This year's honorees were ZZ Top, Morgan Fairchild, Mike Judge, Jayne Mansfield (accepted by her daughter, Mariska Hargitay) and Urban Cowboy (accepted by Deborah Winger) and the night was hosted by non other that former CBS anchor and new legend (and born/bred Texan) Dan Rather. He's way cool!
The evening went far more smoothly than most events of this size and it was actually pretty fun. Not only that, they served their pre-show cocktails in actual glassware, something some film companies should think about (I'm looking at you, Miramax!).
Here, John Person and Eugene Hernandez have a chat before the ceremony. That's variety.com managing editor Michael Jones' hand on the left.
Mariska Hargitay's speech in honor of her late mother was genuinely touching and towards the end she teared up pretty good. So did I.
More pix after the jump.
Every year, when I was a child, my mother would throw lavish New Year's Day parties at our house in East Hampton. They had pretty much stopped by the time I was old enough to really enjoy them, but for a few years it was a tradition and all of our friends would come over for caviar, homemade blinis, champagne, martinis and I assume, a fair amount of Bloody Marys.
Well, my mother passed away on January 9th, 2005 and my father died this past November 16th and I miss them both very much. I will be selling the apartment they (and I) lived in for much of the past 30 years and in part to honor them and in part because I consider New Year's Day a much more interesting holiday than New Year's Eve, I am preparing to host my first ever New Year's Day party.
In typical fashion, I have let my ambition and natural hosting tendencies take control over the part of the brain that controls reason (the neocortex, I believe...erm...Wikipedia believes....) So, as a result, I am attempting to serve the following during the day...I'll let you know, with pix and hopefully testemony, on what I succeeded in preparing:
Morning:
Bagels and lox, coffee and juice.
Lunch/dinner:
Bonac Clam Pie
Smoked Sausage and Black Eyed Peas
Maine Shrimp Boil
Chocolate Bourbon Pecan Pie
Saucisson sec w/cornicons and truffle butter
Assorted cheeses, blue, stinky and others!
Sage beer cheese bread
Oysters Rattray (A family recipe from old family friends from East Hampton. Alas, sorrel was nowhere to be found, so I will have to make due with baby spinach and lemon juice to approximate the taste of the sorrel.)
Half a freshly smoked and glazed ham
And, if we have the energy tomorrow, cookies.
Here's a few shots of the prelims:
"Before" shots of my living room, kitchen and fridge:
The first chocolate bourbon pecan pie (the stuff around the edges is the sugary, chocolaty, pecany overflow. It's the stuff of gods):
Apologies on the delay of getting some Denver fest reports up, but well, some personal and professional things have kept me busy. That said, I have oodles of pix, anecdotes and reviews coming, so stay tuned!
One of the things I have consistently harped up vis a vis the Denver Film Festival is the amazing hospitality and organization the festival has and applies to its guests. Kurt Cobain: About a Son filmmaker, this year's Denver panelist, blogger, juror and all around man about town A.J. Schnack concurs and we pretty much ranked Denver and Sarasota the two fests in the world that treat their guests the best and to be honest, may just be the two best regional fests, full stop. I know it'll take a natural or personal disaster to keep me from either for years to come.
A few weeks ago, I inquired as to the name of my Denver hotel and wouldn't you know it? The fest's guest relations guru, Crystal Hamrick had in her infinite wisdom, put me at the Residence Inn by Marriott. I'm here for 10 nights, so a kitchen makes sense. Not only that, but the hotel has free wifi and they do my grocery shopping. Rocks. Oh, did I mention they have a coin laundry and a 24 hour outdoor hottub? Word. They also have a cow i the lobby:
After checking in I had a quick shower and headed off to the opening night party which to be honest, much like many other opening nights, in that it's large and mostly for the locals. It's sort of like first meal on the first day at summer camp, when all you want to do is find all your friends from the year before and catch up, so it's spent running around looking for people. That said, this year's opening night had a killer DJ set up (and the DJ herself wasn't bad):
There are parties and there are parties. There are premieres and there are premieres. The key to a fun evening is the adroit combination of both and Miramax had them in spades last Sunday night in Hollywood for the LA premiere of Joel and Ethan Coen's masterpiece No Country For Old Men. (Dammit. That's the 2nd masterpiece of the year.) The screening was a low-key affair at the El Capitan Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard and I was all the more thankful for it. Absent was the usual clusterfuck of paparazzi, autograph seekers and rude security. Don't get me wrong, the shutterbugs were there, as were the fans, but it just all seemed more sedate and manageable than usual and the security and Miramax staff couldn't have been nicer and in better moods.
Here's where I confess to being an inveterate starfucker. While I'm not a stalker and almost never ask for autographs or pictures, when there's an actor, writer or director who I am a fan of I have been known to babble to myself and those around me. When you put together a film as accomplished as No Country, you hope that the people that come to your premiere and party are people who would appreciate the film and yet add some star power to the event and the Miramax folks pulled that off with a deft hand.
When my indieWIRE co-founder and I Eugene Hernandez made our way into the El Capitan, Eug pointed out Casey Affleck, 2007's actor "most likely to get shafted by a major studio" for his astonishing performance in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. On occasion I am a huge pussy, so I didn't talk to him and I am an idiot for that. Not just because I loved Jesse James, but because I went to and worked at the same summer camp (Camp Thoreau in Vermont) that his brother Ben went to. Ben is a nice guy, but was kind of a prick as a 14 year-old, a fact I am sure Casey (then 11) would have agreed to. Not that I would have opened with: "Your brother was a dick when he was 14," but you get the point. Shortly before sitting down, John Sloss introduced Eugene and I to Jake Kasdan and I forgot to mention how much I loved his vastly underrated Zero Effect. Love that movie. Didn't run into him (or John) at the party. So John, if you're reading this, thanks for your concern! (He'll know what it means.)
Saturday marked the first AFI Fest screening of upcoming IFC First Take release 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days by Romanian director Cristian Mungiu. The 2007 Cannes Palm d'Or winner (and prohibitive favorite for a best foreign language Oscar nod) has been getting rave reviews and since I missed it at the New York Film Festival last month, I decided I had to catch it here (and did so on Monday). I wish I'd seen it before the dinner so I could have told Mungiu what an extraordinary film he's made, but I suspect I'd not have been the first. More on this moving and delicate film in another post but as for the dinner, despite a few more attendees than planned for (extra tables were the order of the evening) the dinner was a pleasant gathering of friends new and old. The wine flowed and my head hurt the next morning.
Photos top to bottom: SXSW Film Festival producer Matt Dentler; editors in chief of indieWIRE.com and Screen International (l to R) Eugene Hernandez and Colin Brown...(Colin is not a giant and Eugene is not tiny. It's just a little forced perspective in action); The poster for the film.
This post from old friend Mike Jones over at Variety's festival blog The Circuit reminded me of the following, slightly redacted version of an email I recently received from two of the more creative, mischevious, deviant, stellar-of-character and stand-up individuals that I know:
Dear Uncle Monty,
If indeed you believe, as your site states, that "young girls and gin may be the cure", then you are in for some serious trouble at the Late Night Lounge this year. We have secured Bombay Sapphire as the headliner and peppered the remaining shelf space with such gems as *yummy booze, here*. As far as the young lasses go, we're having them imported from the area's more devious centers of low morale and high heel. Get your liver and other vitals in gear, ol' sport. We mean to do you harm.
Yours in christ,
*redacted* & *redacted*
LNL goons
I think the phrase "Be afraid. Be very afraid" is quite apt. I know. I've been there:
Starz Denver Film Festival: Ah, The Late Night Lounge - Pt.1 of 27,405
Denver Fest Kicks Off: Big Kitchens, Bananas Foster & Drunken Reprobates
• My absolutely favorite picture of the night. A beautiful woman, lost in thought, oblivious to all around her.
• Hi, Dana.
• Tom says it's time to go to bed, Holly looks like she's still got some mischief up her sleeve and Jessica proves that tired can indeed be bautiful.
• Our dapper host.
jusqu'à l'année prochaine.....
These four shots were taken by Dana O'Keefe in 30 seconds, total.
No, I don't have an obsession with David Kwok. I just thought this pic was interesting when cropped in several different ways.
Last Friday was the opening night of the New York Film Festival and a great party it was, followed by the traditional after party at New York restaurant Village. Last year I started my own tradition by taking snaps in black & white. This year I did the same, albeit with a real camera. This is the first of several posts with pix from the night. No captions, just photos.
Once again, it was a Black and White night....
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