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3 articles from 2009

1 hour ago | cinemablend.com | See recent Cinema Blend news »

Steven Soderbergh may struggle to get his artier films seen and may get kicked off a project or two, but there's one place he'll always be welcome: Park City, Utah. His sex, lies and videotape pretty much defined the Sundance Film Festival in the early years, and lately he's been lending his support to the scrappier cousin Slamdance, which occurs simultaneously with the more mainstream Sundance. This year will be no different. Variety is reporting that Soderbergh's documentary And Everything Is Going Fine, about the storyteller and performer Spalding Gray, will premiere at Slamdance in January, where Soderbergh will also participate in the Slamdance Filmmaker Summit. Gray, who committed suicide by jumping off the Staten Island Ferry in 2004, wrote and acted a series of autobiographical stories, such as the National Book Award- winning Swimming to Cambodia. No telling what Soderbergh's documentary will focus on, but the combination of a fascinating »

12 September 2009 9:45 AM, PDT | firstshowing.net | See recent FirstShowing.net news »

I just finished an interview with Steven Soderbergh, one of my personal favorite directors, up in Toronto today. It's a fascinating interview that covers The Informant and his directing career, but at the end I asked him for a brief update on all of his projects in the works, since he has quite a few. I asked him for an update on the Spalding Gray documentary he's been working on and the good news is that it's ready to go. "Yea, I just finished it," Soderbergh said. "Yea, we're going to go to Slamdance [with it]." Gray, for those who don't know, is a writer and actor best known for his monologues, like the one seen in Swimming to Cambodia. "Yea, I'm happy with it, it took a long time. That was another example where... It sort of, for a while, was really defined by what I didn't want it to ... »

- Alex Billington

12 May 2009 10:34 PM, PDT | Spout.com | See recent Spout news »

Last night, Stranger Than Fiction and the Woodstock Film Festival co-presented a screening of Swimming to Cambodia, Jonathan Demme's 1987 performance document of Spalding Gray's monologue ruminating on sex, drugs, genocide, "perfect moments" and "invisible clouds of evil." Inspired by Gray's real-life experience playing a small role in Roland Jaffe's The Killing Fields ("I'm not making up any of these stories I'm telling you tonight," he swears. "Except for the fact that the banana sticks to wall when it hits. Everything else is true."), Swimming, the first of three films based on Gray's monologues, easily eclipses Jaffe's film in contemporary freshness and replayability. Gray's stream-of-consciousness style of deeply personal social documentary has never been equalled on as mainstream a scale. Gray may have been great at self-documentation, but it's the subtle sinematic shaping employed by Demme, cinematographer John Bailey</ ... »

- Karina Longworth

3 articles from 2009