New York Times ad for "Life on the Edge" on the first day of its week-long New York City run, June 19, 1992. No one is credited for the blurb. In 2016, I began a column on this blog called "New York Times Slights," in honor of filmmakers who were fortunate enough to see their …
Continue reading New York Times Slights, Part 2: “Life on the Edge” (1992)
You know when you've hit a conversational brick wall with director Larry Peerce--albeit a very kindly brick wall. There's a slight groan, an utterance of the phrase "My boy...," and a gentle bemusement as to why anyone would expect him to remember a 40-year-old film or incident (even though Peerce, 90 at the time of …
Sharisse Zeroonian, right, in a scene from "The Mouse in the Bread" (2018). Sharisse Zeroonian, a Boston-area filmmaker, writer and actress, has, at only 25, made two feature films ("Well Water" and "The Mouse in the Bread"; the latter ran for a brief time on Amazon Prime), a pilot for a semi-autobiographical online show ("One …
Writer/actor/producer Kevin Shinick is most known for his prominent voice work on the cult TV hit "Robot Chicken" and the cartoon series "Mad" (as in Mad Magazine), which he also created. He began his television career with a leading role on "Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego?" (1996-7), and performed both on and off-Broadway during …
Jordan Ellis has directed music videos for indie darlings Thee Oh Sees and Liars , as well as the profanely funny mockumentary web series The Alpine Village People. Sadly, the title polka band, depicted in the show as a hard-partying, constantly touring set of malcontents, broke up before Ellis could finish the series, but what's …
An earlier Hidden Films entry discussed "On the Make," a 1989 disco drama that had a brief theatrical run and then more or less disappeared. But that film's debuting co-writer and producer, Fred Carpenter, has stayed in the game ever since, eventually moving on to directing. He continuously shoots, on the cheap, in Long Island--where …
Continue reading Grudgingly Independent: An Interview with Long Island’s Own Fred Carpenter
"The Black Monk," a loose adaptation of Anton Chekhov's short story by Newark-based husband-and-wife filmmakers Marylou Tibaldo-Bongiorno and Jerome Bongiorno, is a beautifully shot, erudite, heartbreaking tale of misbegotten love. Set in Jerome's native Staten Island, the film is small in scale but consistently rich in themes. Chekhov's spartan 1894 work tells of a scholar …
"They Ought to Be on DVD" is a recurring Hidden Films series dedicated to movies that received a New York City theatrical run—and thus a New York Times review—but no subsequent release in ancillary markets. Through interviews with cast and crew, we attempt to answer why. "I'm the first filmmaker to make a movie about …
Continue reading They Ought to Be on DVD, Part 1: “On the Make” (1989)
I'm starting a new section on this blog called "New York Times Slights," honoring filmmakers whose movies--most of them small-scale--were unfairly given short shrift by the legendary paper. Bad reviews come and go, but vague bad reviews are another thing altogether. To date, the paper's most dismissive/snobbish reviews came from the late Vincent Canby, who …
Continue reading New York Times Slights, Part 1: Andrew Silver’s “Return” (1985)
by Sam Weisberg Growths. Contusions. Gaping head wounds. Pus. Mannequins with limbs missing. Neutral masks. Decaying masks (sometimes sketched in computer ink over the frame, sometimes sculpted in clay, sometimes worn by actors). Kangaroo masks. Gorilla masks. Drawings of centaurs, gargoyles, medieval torture chambers. Nipples. Conch shells that look like nipples. A man penetrating an …
Continue reading Masks, Melanoma, Mutilation: The Haunting Films of James Fotopoulos
Hidden Films 