“It’s a job.” –Arthur Martinez I had two features as a cinematographer under my belt by late June of 2015, both close and comfortable collaborations with a single director: Joel Potrykus (Buzzard, The Alchemist Cookbook). It seems fitting that he made the phone call I received only a week and a half before Actor Martinez began principal photography. Joel eagerly informed me that two directors, Nathan Silver (Stinking Heaven, Uncertain Terms) and Mike Ott (Lake Los Angeles, Littlerock), had contacted him asking about my nearly immediate availability. I didn’t know them personally, but I certainly had been aware of their […]...
- 3/28/2017
- by Adam J. Minnick
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
Welcome back to the Weekend Warrior, your weekly look at the new movies hitting theaters this weekend, as well as other cool events and things to check out….but mostly movies.
This Past Weekend:
It was absolutely no surprise that Hugh Jackman’s last Wolverine movie Logan would top the box office, but it actually ended up doing even better than my prediction when actual numbers came in, grossing $88.3 million over the weekend. That makes it the fourth highest X-Movie opening (including Deadpool) but also the biggest R-rated opening for March, defeating 300’s once-impressive $70 million opening. It’s also the fourth highest R-rated opening of all time after Deadpool, The Matrix Reloaded and American Sniper.
The bigger surprise was how well Jordan Peele’s thriller Get Out held up in its second weekend, not only because it was going up against Logan, but also because high-profile horror films tend...
This Past Weekend:
It was absolutely no surprise that Hugh Jackman’s last Wolverine movie Logan would top the box office, but it actually ended up doing even better than my prediction when actual numbers came in, grossing $88.3 million over the weekend. That makes it the fourth highest X-Movie opening (including Deadpool) but also the biggest R-rated opening for March, defeating 300’s once-impressive $70 million opening. It’s also the fourth highest R-rated opening of all time after Deadpool, The Matrix Reloaded and American Sniper.
The bigger surprise was how well Jordan Peele’s thriller Get Out held up in its second weekend, not only because it was going up against Logan, but also because high-profile horror films tend...
- 3/8/2017
- by Edward Douglas
- LRMonline.com
Arthur Martinez is a Denver computer technician who moonlights as an actor. He looks something like the late comics writer Harvey Pekar: schlubby and with sideburns, a heavy brow, and a mess of thinning hair. As the star of Actor Martinez, in which he plays himself, Arthur comes across as “a character”—not a Pekar-esque grouch, but a sweet and needy puppy with personal issues that he is unequipped to address. How much of this is real or a performance is unclear and maybe even irrelevant; besides, movies that play with the difference between being yourself and playing yourself work best when they can keep their exact recipes secret. Because what this funny, low-key head-scratcher presents, in pieces that viewers sometimes have to put together themselves, is a story about two indie filmmakers (Mike Ott and Nathan Silver, also the film’s real directors and also playing themselves) who...
- 3/8/2017
- by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
- avclub.com
“Actor Martinez” had its North American premiere at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival. Now, the comedy from acclaimed indie directors Mike Ott (“Lake Los Angeles”) and Nathan Silver (“Uncertain Terms,” “Stinking Heaven”) is set to debut in theaters March 10.
Read More: Mike Ott & Nathan Silver’s ‘Actor Martinez’ Is A Fascinating And Experimental Meta-Movie — Tribeca Review
“Actor Martinez” focuses on Arthur Martinez (played by the actor of the same name), a Denver-area performer who hires two indie filmmakers (Silver and Ott) to make a film with him as the lead. But instead, the filmmakers design a completely different project based on Arthur’s real-life persona, even casting him a girlfriend, actress Lindsay Burdge (“Mistress America,” “The Invitation”), to try to draw out any remaining emotions from Arthur about his ex-wife.
Inspired by Kiarostami’s distinctive style of combining conventional narrative with documentary filmmaking, Silver and Ott deliberately blur the line between fiction and nonfiction,...
Read More: Mike Ott & Nathan Silver’s ‘Actor Martinez’ Is A Fascinating And Experimental Meta-Movie — Tribeca Review
“Actor Martinez” focuses on Arthur Martinez (played by the actor of the same name), a Denver-area performer who hires two indie filmmakers (Silver and Ott) to make a film with him as the lead. But instead, the filmmakers design a completely different project based on Arthur’s real-life persona, even casting him a girlfriend, actress Lindsay Burdge (“Mistress America,” “The Invitation”), to try to draw out any remaining emotions from Arthur about his ex-wife.
Inspired by Kiarostami’s distinctive style of combining conventional narrative with documentary filmmaking, Silver and Ott deliberately blur the line between fiction and nonfiction,...
- 2/24/2017
- by Yoselin Acevedo
- Indiewire
Exclusive: Breaking Glass Pictures has secured North American distribution rights to the indie pic Actor Martinez from writers/director duo Mike Ott and Nathan Silver. The film, which premiered at Tribeca, will have a limited theatrical release in December before expanding in first quarter of 2017 along with a DVD and digital platform release. Starring Arthur Martinez, Lindsay Burdge, as well as Ott and Silver, the story follows a local Denver computer repairman and…...
- 10/27/2016
- Deadline
There are indie film scenes like the one chronicled in Actor Martinez everywhere, ones where those with a day job have ambitions that cannot and never will pay the rent. Surely, Actor Martinez is a little cruel to these micro industries of regional film bolstered by film clubs that support each other regardless of just how poor the acting, directing and cinematography can be.
Enter Nathan Silver and Mike Ott, filmmakers that seem obsessed with the freedom such non-traditional, off-the-map filmmaking offers. Who knows, a masterpiece may exist somewhere in Denver’s amateur film community, kept from us by John Cooper and Janet Pierson. Actor Martinez, like Nathan Silver’s previous feature Stinking Heaven, also feels like an artifact, documenting the process of a process: here the every day life of Arthur Martinez, an professional computer repairman by day and actor/film producer by night.
The result is a comedy...
Enter Nathan Silver and Mike Ott, filmmakers that seem obsessed with the freedom such non-traditional, off-the-map filmmaking offers. Who knows, a masterpiece may exist somewhere in Denver’s amateur film community, kept from us by John Cooper and Janet Pierson. Actor Martinez, like Nathan Silver’s previous feature Stinking Heaven, also feels like an artifact, documenting the process of a process: here the every day life of Arthur Martinez, an professional computer repairman by day and actor/film producer by night.
The result is a comedy...
- 5/4/2016
- by John Fink
- The Film Stage
Prolific indie filmmakers Mike Ott and Nathan Silver team up for the experimental and meta “Actor Martinez,” an exploration into the oftentimes difficult process of unearthing the honesty in acting. They take an interesting route to the truth, deliberately obfuscating the line between fiction and nonfiction in a film within a film, lulling the audience into one reality and then abruptly jarring you out of one scenario and into another. It’s a process that mirrors the psychological journey of the subject/protagonist, Arthur Martinez. The premise is that Ott and Silver are making a semi-autobiographical film about Martinez, who is a Denver-area actor/local film promoter/computer repairman. The film nested inside “Actor Martinez” follows the life and routine of Martinez, until Ott and Silver decide to push their performer by casting him a girlfriend, in order to draw out any residual emotions about his ex-wife. They land on Lindsay Burdge (“Mistress America,...
- 4/23/2016
- by Katie Walsh
- The Playlist
After a man opens his life up to a pair of indie filmmakers, Actor Martinez cunningly navigates between documentary and narrative to question its star’s true nature, as well as the concept of self-presentation in life as well as film. Arthur Martinez first appears in Nathan Silver and Mike Ott’s new film as the subject, but through the co-directors’ persistent manipulation, Arthur seems increasingly at the whim of this fascinating, perplexing film experiment.
From the opening frame, co-directors Ott and Silver appear on-screen to interrogate Arthur. They’re out of focus and their voices are laid on top of the opening shot in a way that alludes to their influence on the rest of this film; though Ott and Silver won’t always be visible, their presence adds a layer of subjectivity to any character’s portrayal. Mostly, that character is Arthur.
Designed to fudge the gaps between fiction and reality,...
From the opening frame, co-directors Ott and Silver appear on-screen to interrogate Arthur. They’re out of focus and their voices are laid on top of the opening shot in a way that alludes to their influence on the rest of this film; though Ott and Silver won’t always be visible, their presence adds a layer of subjectivity to any character’s portrayal. Mostly, that character is Arthur.
Designed to fudge the gaps between fiction and reality,...
- 4/23/2016
- by Zachary Shevich
- We Got This Covered
The major retrospective of the 2016 International Film Festival Rotterdam is dedicated to the Barcelona school of filmmaking in the 1960s and 1970s, with Catalonian master Pere Portabella’s body of work—and his new film—serving as a figurehead. Nearly completely unknown in the United States—where critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has been a beacon of support and revelation—insomuch as Portabella is known in the film community it is for his film Vampir-Cuadecuc, which hijacks the production of Christopher Lee and Jesús Franco’s Count Dracula (1970) for its own ends and exhilaratingly exposes this documentarian’s acute analysis of and play with the subject of his films. (I will note here that Mubi has shown a great deal of Portabella’s work in the past, including this 1970 horror film.) This is hardly a lone accomplishment; in 1961 he helped produce Luis Buñuel's masterpiece Viridiana, and the director has been a strident voice in documentary,...
- 2/1/2016
- by Daniel Kasman
- MUBI
Nathan Silver and Mike Ott are two of the most prolific indie filmmakers working today — and these guys are the real deal. They each have about five features each under their belts, and continue to make boundary-pushing cinema that exemplifies the independent spirit. We’re fans of each director’s work, particularly Ott's “Lake Los Angeles,” and Silver's “Uncertain Terms.” So it makes perfect sense that the two would eventually cross paths, and now, they’ve started collaborating too. The result is “Actor Martinez,” which looks to be a delightfully meta film, about Arthur Martinez, a Denver-based actor who hires two independent filmmakers to make a film starring him. Read More: The 25 Biggest Directors To Break Out Of Sundance We’ve had quite a week of mainstream indie fare bowing at Sundance, but today, the Rotterdam Film Festival starts up, where “Actor Martinez” is due to unveil tomorrow, preceded by one of Silver's short films,...
- 1/27/2016
- by Katie Walsh
- The Playlist
Michael Eisner has been elected to Iac’s board of directors, the New York-based Internet and media company announced on Tuesday. Diller, the former Disney chief, takes a seat on the board alongside Barry Diller, who stepped down as Iac’s CEO in December, but retained his board seat. With the addition of Eisner, Iac’s board is now comprised of 13 members: Eisner, Diller, Greg Blatt, Edgar Bronfman, Jr., Victor Kaufman, Don Keough, Bryan Lourd, Arthur Martinez, David Rosenblatt, Alan Spoon, Alexander von Furstenberg, Richard Zannino and Michael Zeisser. Iac owns dozens of websites, including...
- 3/15/2011
- by Dylan Stableford
- The Wrap
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