Fests and events, 12/14.

"At the International Film Festival Summit in Vegas on Monday, Variety's Anne Thompson sat down with Sundance senior programmer Trevor Groth and Telluride co-director Gary Meyer for a panel titled 'The Art and Philosophy of Curating a Film Festival.'" Michael Jones shares his notes.

More from Basil Tsiokos in indieWIRE: "The three-day event drew festival organizers from all over the US, as well as a few international colleagues as a professional forum to discuss a wide range of issues relevant to this small but specialized subset of the film industry, from practical considerations of sponsorship, marketing, ticketing, board development, and programming, to more far-reaching philosophical explorations of the role of film festivals for audiences and for the film industry as a whole."

Dispatches at indieWIRE: Brian Brooks from the Dubai International Film Festival and Jason Guerrasio from the Bahamas International Film Festival.

"During the Q&A at the end of Tom Wolfe's 40th-anniversary discussion of his gonzoid Merry Pranksters travelogue The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Wolfe was asked about his opinion of Gus Van Sant's forthcoming film adaptation," writes Andrew Hultkrans for Artforum. "Wolfe replied, 'Films that try to capture trips - hallucinations - always fail miserably.' As counterexamples raced through my mind - David Cronenberg's Videodrome, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, hell, the Monkees' Head - I found myself thinking, 'Polite, laudatory conversations for the NPR set at Symphony Space aren't exactly a freezer bag of 'shrooms, either.'"

The Firemen's Ball screens off and on at BAM through December; for Vulture, Bilge Ebiri talks with Milos Forman.

As part of the Rouben Mamoulian season at BFI Southbank, his 1931 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde screens through January 1. The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw finds it to be a "gripping revival." More from Philip French (Observer) and Tom Huddleston (Time Out).

Posted by dwhudson at December 14, 2008 8:59 AM