Doug Dillaman
@dillamonster
American in Aotearoa New Zealand. Film editor, filmmaker (Gut Instinct [2024], Jake [2014], etc), musician (The Sea Plus), helpful guy.
Three films that look related by their posters but couldn't be more different. (The fourth is Conor Bowden's silent expressionist no-budget comedy THE UNGRATEFUL TENANT, which premiered on Thursday.)
So not sure if there will also be encore screenings, but there will be 17 or so *additional* films (to a schedule already so overstuffed that it's full of one-off screenings fighting each other) crammed into NZIFF in the week following the "end" of the festival, at least in Auckland.
Me: I need to buy no books this year @pipadam.bsky.social and @brannavan.bsky.social: Hi we are releasing new books Me: I need to buy two books this year
This morning, I did not know I would get to speak to Sir Ian Mune in front of a packed Hollywood Avondale crowd after SLEEPING DOGS as the finale to this week's Sam Neill tribute. A real privilege and a joy to hear Mune roll off one amusing anecdote after another.
Wasn't familiar with guitarist Chris Smith. If you like Neil Young's soundtrack to DEAD MAN, you'll be sympathetic to this.
People who have seen CHRONOVISOR: is "scary" a remotely relevant descriptor?
Picked this up for inspiration about a legendary polymath who I found inspirational in multiple fields, got a wrist-slittingly depressing portrait of the artist as a complete fucking mess, full of rage and ingratitude and self-destructiveness. Not a slight on Szwed, that's just who Smith was.
This movie is the gift that keeps on giving (to people with annoying reply guys that need mocking screenshots in their arsenal)
Watching THE CASE IS CLOSED: FORGET IT and paused because I needed to gift this to the people of Bluesky
Hysterically, this site shows that Claude thinks I made EXISTENCE. Meanwhile, Mistral thinks EXISTENCE director Juliet Bergh was in THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO.
Those who read the tea leaves for possible NZIFF titles might note a few titles listed as coming out "July 29" (aka opening day in Auckland) on Flicks' Coming Soon page. Glad we're apparently getting ROSE OF NEVADA after ENYS MEN was overlooked. And SILENT FRIEND! www.flicks.co.nz/coming-soon/...
My Letterboxd stats inadvertently showcase the four types of glasses-wearing directors: 1) I'm amiable! Cuddly! 2) I WILL CUT YOU 3) Take me very seriously. Please. 4) Staging mayhem is fun! (BTW I really like to fucking love all of these guys, not a dis track, but look at these head shots!)
Came home with an overwhelming pile of @deafcrocodile.bsky.social to watch (on top of the pile I already had, lol). Hard to know where to start (campaign for your favourite!), but I settled on the Barta shorts and so far they are a freaking delight.
Hmm, some of the theatres are listing it in Fandango as dubbed into English and some aren't. No idea if that's a data entry error or indicative of a full-English dub.
More seriously, I spent half a day at the Disney parks subconsciously assuming their coffee kiosks were a Game of Thrones tie-in before I realised how nuts that would be
Not sure why they have a dedicated cinema for Terrence Malick at Disney's Animal Kingdom but looking forward to some deep contemplation
Was fortunate to see an amazing exhibition of Varda's photography in Rome earlier this month which illuminated her life, her unproduced second film that was to be shot in Venice, and her fiercely flinty spirit that has to some degree been obscured by her cute active senior era. Happy birthday Agnès!
Briefly in Miami - Coconut Grove, to be precise - and I was unprepared for the ambient peacocks.
If I was a soft drink maker from Salò I would probably not make my soft drink this colour but maybe the film of the same name is not the first association that Italians have with that municipality. (Cedrata is really tasty, btw. Those Salòese are on to something!)
Today in film production history, Italian division, we found the location where Denzel Washington makes a cup of tea in EQUALIZER 3.
The most surprising intervention was the boatload of sand dumped on the rocky beach in Maiori. When I came back on a boat in the afternoon, it had been smoothed out.
I've stumbled onto two film shoots in the past week in Italy. THREE INCESTUOUS SISTERS in Stromboli (starring Mick Jagger and Dakota Johnson, directed by Alice Rohrwacher) and a Netflix movie called POSITANO in Maiori starring McConaughey and Zoe Saldaña (directed by the TUNER guy IIRC).