HOME MOVIE comes home
We at C-U Blogfidential have been longing to get our hands on this sick and twisted puppy for some time, so there’s no time like the present to discuss HOME MOVIE. No, this isn’t the Chris Smith documentary from a few years ago or the animated series rescued by the Cartoon Network, but a taut exercise in incidental vérité a la THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and DIARY OF THE DEAD finally released to the retail market yesterday, Tuesday, December 8, courtesy of IFC Films (which had previously issued it to VOD and Blockbuster-only DVD) and Chicago‘s MPI Media Group. Starring Adrian Padsar and Cady McClain, the Modernciné production depicts through “found footage” the downward spiral suffered by an upstate New York family, the Poes, when their twin children (Amber Joy Williams and Austin Williams) develop a deadly mean streak.
This is one of the rare times on CUBlog when we’ll feature a movie not produced in MICRO-FILM Country since it was written and directed by our friend (and your future fellow alumnus, University of Illinois students) Christopher Denham, who played the lead in Modernciné’s first feature, HEADSPACE. As a theater undergraduate at UIUC, he continuously wrote and produced original plays such as In Film and Rapist James while collaborating in the wryly-named Dependent Films with Peter James Zielinski. Quickly moving on from Champaign-Urbana to Chicago (via the Steppenwolf Theatre Company) and then New York City, Denham has since hit the stage regularly while landing roles in films by Martin Scorsese (SHUTTER ISLAND), Mike Nichols (CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR), and “mumblecore” champion (and Southern Illinois University-Carbondale product) Joe Swanberg (ALEXANDER THE LAST).
In the near future, we plan to give you the lowdown on the HOME MOVIE disc over at the MICRO-FILM News Blog. Also look for an exclusive interview with Denham to appear in the Magazine of Personal Cinema in Action’s return to pulp diction, MICRO-FILM 2000, coming in early 2010!
~ Jason Pankoke