Tag Archives: New York

News & UpdatesThe Movie

KEEP THE LIGHTS ON: Now On DVD/VOD/Digital Download by

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Keep the Lights On has received a lot of great end-of-year news, being named on many Top 10 lists, as well as receiving the Dorian Award for Best LGBT Film of the Year, and a GLAAD Media Award nomination for “Best Film in Limited Release”

Nominated for four Independent Spirit Awards, including Best Film and Best Actor (Thure Lindhardt), Keep the Lights On is now available for home viewing on DVD, BluRay, and on VOD/Digital Download. Included on the DVD are never-before-seen deleted scenes, the original audition videos from Thure Lindhardt and Zachary Booth, as well as In Search of Avery Willard, the film-within-the film which has found success on the festival circuit in its own right.

Here’s where you can find Keep the Lights On to view in the comfort of your own home:

Amazon – DVD, BluRay, Amazon Instant Video

Netflix – DVD, BluRay

iTunes – Digital Rental / Purchase

InDemand – Check you local cable provider

YouTube

Google Play

Vudu

Art & AutobiographyNews & Updates

Interview with Famke Janssen by

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BRINGING UP BOBBY, written and directed by Famke Janssen, opens in New York on Friday, September 28 at the Beekman Theatre. Janssen will be in attendance for Q&A at Friday and Saturday screenings.

Whether she’s an ensemble player in a big-budget genre film (Goldeneye, X-Men), or the lead in an Ameri-indie (Love & Sex, Turn the River), Famke Janssen carries an aura of admirable self-sufficiency. Her exotic looks means that she can hold your attention even when’s placed at the margins of the frame. Orgasming to the sounds of machine gun as an assassin who kills men with her thighs in Goldeneye, or giggling at the idiocy of lover Kenneth Branagh, Celebrity (1998), she always seems game – even when the movie may have forgotten what to do with her.

While her leading roles feel like concepts derived from diva worship, Janssen is winningly, refreshingly opaque. In Turn the River (2007), she plays a working-class pool-shark, determined to win back custody of her son. The movie sounds like boilerplate for a de-glammed actor vehicle, but Janssen doesn’t pry for empathy. Her coolness results in a physical and emotional awkwardness that is true to the character.

A Dutch-born former model and New Yorker since the 80’s, Janssen debuted on-screen in the mid 90’s. In a fickle industry, genre films tend to be the sanctuary to Euro-goddesses. But while Taken 2 (opening October 5) might pay the mortgage, Janssen has written and directed her first feature, Bringing Up Bobby. Ukranian- Olive (Milla Jovovich) is a con artist and single-mother raising her young son in Oklahoma. But when one of her schemes results in jail time, she has to decide whether to fight for her son, or let him try to live a normal life with a wealthy couple played by Marcia Cross and Bill Pullman.

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Art & Autobiography

May the Changes Keep Coming: An Interview with Peter Quinn by

Daniel and Peter

Peter Quinn was a speechwriter at Time Warner and also wrote for New York Governors Carey and Cuomo. Quinn is  an Irish-American historian, an expert on all things New York and an accomplished novelist. He also happens to be my father.

He and my mother were both born and raised in The Bronx and our family has deep artistic, political and personal ties to this city. I asked my father some questions in order to more clearly understand his relationship to New York and the city’s continuing evolution.
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News & UpdatesThe Movie

Interview with Script Supervisor Veronica Lupu by

Veronica Lupu

On Keep the Lights On, script supervisor Veronica Lupu played a crucial part in translating an elliptical script, set over ten years, into a movie that could be deciphered by an audience.

Lupu started working as a “script girl” in Romania in the early 70’s before moving to New York in the 1980’s. She worked with some of the top-Romanian directors at the time, including Radu Gabrea and Geo Saizescu, and it’s clear she has a a rich understanding of cinema history. Her American credits include We Own the Night (2007), Enchanted (2007), and previously with Ira Sachs on  Forty Shades of Blue (2005). She also serves on the board of the Local 161, a production union that includes script supervisors.

When we met, Veronica was in pre-production on the Katie Holmes-vehicle, Molly (this took place before it became her divorce/defection was publicized). Her pre-production binder is is one of the most incredibly organized I’ve ever seen.

What is a script supervisor?

Someone who is in charge of continuity of the movie. The movie is being done in little pieces – it’s not done in the consecutive order according to the script. So the script supervisor is the one who makes sure that when these pieces will be put together, everything has to match.

And it’s not just narrative, it’s also performance related.

Everything! Camera angles…the right dialogue…wardrobe, everything matches from the scene you shot previously two weeks ago and is continuous in the story.
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Gay New YorkNews & Updates

United in Anger: A History of ACT UP by

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United in Anger: A History of ACT UP is a unique feature-length documentary that combines startling archival footage that puts the audience on the ground with the activists and the remarkably insightful interviews from the ACT UP Oral History Project to explore ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) from a grassroots perspective – how a small group of men and women of all races and classes, came together to change the world and save each other’s lives.

Keep the Lights On spoke with director Jim Hubbard a few months ago, just before the premiere of United in Anger at the MOMA. Tomorrow, July 6, it will open at the Quad Cinema in Greenwich Village.

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Art & AutobiographyNews & Updates

Negative Joy: Keeping it Real by

Monica Cook's "Volley"

443 PAS is a NYC gallery that exhibits emerging and established artists in Kevin Asbec’s interior design firm. Recently they held an event called “Negative Joy”, screening video art portraying our sometimes dark lives in a humorous, ridiculous, and maddening light.

I originally went to the “Negative Joy” video art screening at 443 PAS because I saw Shana Moulton and Tim Davis on the list of artists. As often is the case, I was more engaged by the other artists than those whom I had come to see. Animated works by Rao Heidmets, Jacolby Satterwhite, and Monica Cook were the most grotesque, ridiculous and emotionally truthful animations I had ever seen. The videos’ humorous animations and absurd story lines (or lack of) juxtaposed with their underlying sense of fear and realism, reminded me of dreams I have when I’m sick. The hallucinatory, illogical worlds in these videos engulfed me enough for me to experience and relate to the otherwise nonsensical worlds. More…

News & UpdatesTell Your Story

Love in a Sweatshirt by

OWS

This past October my friend, Laura and I were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge along with seven hundred other Occupy protestors. Laura, who I’ve known since middle school, happens to be a Muslim American. She wears beautiful headscarves that show her beliefs and upbringing.

I stood in my jail cell with six older women, all of whom happened to be teachers. Laura walked along the row of cells with her Arresting Officer. My fellow jail mates cheered as she passed, just as they did for every other protestor. I was about to join in, but then my stomach dropped. My hand reached for my mouth and sharp tears burned my eyes. I’m used to seeing Laura in private without her headscarf, so it took me a moment to realize. They had stripped her of her headscarf, and with it, my apathy and sense of defeat. Outrage and humiliation rushed through me as she dragged her feet with her arms outstretched, her face in shock and her mouth and eyes wide. Her thick, glossy, dark Mediterranean hair was matted to her head from the long, laborious day on the bridge. It took my cellmates a few moments to recognize her without the clean, white satin framing her tan face and resting on her shoulders and upper back. More…

Our Man in Tribeca: A Fish Out Of Water

Tribeca Film Festival: The Importance of Being Silent by

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This is the first  dispatch from “Our Man in Tribeca” Ioannis Pappos, who is  covering the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival  (April 18-29).

In part, we owe the Tribeca Film Festival to Al Qaeda. After the 9/11 attacks, Robert De Niro co-founded the festival to raise the spirit and economy of Lower Manhattan. Ten years and five thousand screenings later, the festival’s Doha Tribeca spin-off is well established in Qatar. De Niro’s way of teaching fanatics a lesson in their own backyard? Or just another convenient symbiosis between super-rich Arabs and independent filmmakers?

I took my first stroll through Tribeca in the spring of 1993, soon after I moved to New York. I recall the neighborhood’s architecture resembling the trendy, then-gallery-packed Soho: the same textile cast-iron buildings. But the similarities stopped here. Once you crossed Canal Street, you relaxed. Tribeca was the quieter, less viable downtown. The conversion of buildings into condos had already begun, but the blocks retained an 80’s undiscovered artists-lofts feel. A sort of no-man’s land, where alienated walkers disappeared. Night-lights were few and far between. People went to Odeon, a restaurant as noir as its neighborhood, and to De Niro’s Tribeca Bar and Grill, a space as elusive as its famous owner, an actor notorious for his privacy. After two decades of hyper-invasive journalism, we still know very little about De Niro’s personal life. More…

News & UpdatesThe Movie

Keep The Lights On Is Coming Home! by

KEEP_THE_LIGHTS_ON_Thure_Lindhardt_Zachary_Booth_byJean-Christophe-Husson

Terrific news! The Tribeca Film Festival announced today that Keep The Lights On will have its official New York premiere in the fest’s exciting Spotlight program. After thrilling screenings at the Sundance Film Festival and the Berlinale, Ira Sachs’ Teddy award-winning new film about a troubled relationship will finally be screened in the city where it takes place! The Tribeca Film Festival takes place from April 18 – 29th. And on the other side of the world – if you happen to be in Hong Kong, KTLO will screen at the Hong Kong International Film Festival on March 25th, and April 8th. More festival screenings to be announced soon, so keep checking back!

Tell Your Story

My Hasidic Landlord by

I knew a guy in Brooklyn who had his rent paid for by his Hasidic landlord as long as he agreed to get paddled once or twice a month. His landlord was dyslexic and had 2 kids. One had cerebral palsy and his hands looked like chicken talons. His other kid wasn’t allowed to go outside. My friend said that right before he pulled him over his lap to give him his punishment, he would pray and beg for forgiveness so that he may be relieved of his surmounting urge to spank young men.

My landlord was Hasidic too. His name was sometimes Gino, but mainly Jay. When he shook my hand a small avalanche of white flakes would tumble down his shoulders from his ears and settle on his beard and the long sideburn tendrils. He came by to get the rent and always looked around the apartment as if he had crossed over to another world, maneuvering around with his hands stretched out like a blind prophet. He would pick up DVD’s from the record shelf and bring them close to his face. We always kept Natural Fucking Sluts on the top, because the color of the background perfectly matched the color of the walls. More…