What are Your Favorite Films?
For the 2015 Phoenix Film Festival we encourage you to Find YOUR New Favorite Movie! We have asked filmmakers who will be screening their films at this year’s festival about some of their favorite movies.
Kurt Kubicek is the director of 1/10 of a Second, a PFF 2015 Arizona Feature Film. He is currently writing a biography that he tells us is in the same vein as WOLF OF WALL STREET for a client, and he is also writing and developing a television mini-series.
- Favorite Comedy
TOMMY BOY ~ the 1995 road comedy film directed by Peter Segal.
- Favorite Drama
SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, Frank Darabont, director.
- Favorite Documentary YOU DON'T KNOW BO: THE LEGEND OF BO JACKSON, featured as an episode of ESPN Films' unprecedented documentary series 30 for 30.
- What film(s) are you looking forward to seeing at PFF 2015 (besides your own of course!!)?
I'm looking forward to seeing WHERE HOPE GROWS (Showcase Feature ~ A story about a self-destructive former pro ball player is given a serious lesson in living life with courage when he befriends a grocery store clerk with Down syndrome). I loved the trailer, and it looks like a powerful story.
- What is a favorite film that you think most people have never seen, but should?
One of my favorite pictures that I believe a lot of people haven't seen would have to be SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH, starring Paul Newman. Incredible story by Tennessee Williams, and Newman was spectacular.
- Do you have a favorite film poster?
Shawshank Redemption 1/10 OF A SECOND takes us through the tumultuous rise, fall and redemption of the country's oldest professional motorcycle racer ~ the enigma that is Johnny Rock Page.
After winning his first few races on the track as a young man, including a win at Daytona, Johnny ran out of money and his dream was stripped from him before it had even began. But Johnny would stop at nothing to one day become a Professional Superbike Racer, and compete with the best in the country.
By thirty-five years old, Johnny built a multi-million dollar company and had now set out to pursue his dream of racing. Little did he know that accomplishing what he wanted would end up costing him everything, including his family, his business, and his mind. Through the storm he finally finds his true purpose in the world.
Kurt will be attending both screenings of his film on Saturday and Tuesday.
https://m.facebook.com/onetenthofasecondthemovie
– Laurie Smith
Squid and the Whale. Starring Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney and Owen Kline, and based on the true childhood experiences of Noah Baumbach and his brother, The Squid and the Whale tells the touching story of two young boys dealing with their parents' divorce in Brooklyn in the 1980s. 
On Tuesday, March 31 at 7pm, we will be showing Kicking and Screaming starring Josh Hamilton, Eric Stoltz and Samuel Gould. After college graduation, Grover's girlfriend Jane tells him she's moving to Prague to study writing. Grover declines to accompany her, deciding instead to move in with several friends, all of whom can't quite work up the inertia to escape their university's pull. Nobody wants to make any big decisions that would radically alter his life, yet none of them wants to end up like Chet, the professional student who tends bar and is in his tenth year of university studies. 
Finally, our closing night film on Thursday, April 2 at 7pm is Baumbach's latest film While We're Young. Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts are Josh and Cornelia Srebnick, happily married middle-aged members of New York's creative class. They tried to start a family and were unable to and have decided they're okay with that. But as Josh labors over the umpteenth edit of his cerebral new film, it's plain that he has hit a dry patch and that something is still missing.
Enter Jamie (Adam Driver) and Darby (Amanda Seyfried), a free-spirited young couple, who are spontaneous and un-tethered, ready to drop everything in pursuit of their next passion retro board games one day, acquiring a pet chicken the next. For Josh, it's as if a door has opened back to his youth or a youth he wishes he once had. It's not long before the restless forty-somethings, Josh and Cornelia, throw aside friends their own age including Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz in a sly supporting role to trail after these young hipsters who seem so plugged in, so uninhibited, so Brooklyn cool. "Before we met," Josh admits to Jamie, "the only two feelings I had left were wistful and disdainful." But is this new inspiration enough to sustain collaboration and friendship with a couple twenty years their junior?
While We're Young is an openly funny cross-generational comedy of manners about aging, ambition and success, as well as a moving portrait of a marriage tested by the invading forces of youth. No film has better captured the weird, upended logic of urban sophisticates: the older ones embracing their iPads and Netflix, the young ones craving vinyl records and vintage VHS tapes. 
