Film
In 2004, Cooley wrote and directed his first film, Pol Pot's Birthday, a short satirical comedy which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, won numerous Best Film awards at festivals worldwide, and is included in the Sundance Collection at the New York Museum of Modern Art. The film was also featured in American Cinematographer magazine for its evocative use of digital video. The film's style of awkward comedy has often been compared to the BBC television series "The Office".
In 2005, Cooley directed a stylized short documentary, Dimmer, about a gang of blind teenagers who roam the streets of the bleak industrial neighborhoods of Buffalo, New York. Featuring a score by the band Interpol, Dimmer premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, was a finalist for the Academy Award for Best Short Documentary, and won numerous international Best Film awards as well as being exhibited at the New York Museum of Modern Art and included in its Sundance Collection.
Cooley's first feature film was the comedy Patriotville (renamed Taking Chances by Lions Gate Entertainment), featuring Justin Long, Rob Corddry, Nick Offerman, Keir O'Donnell and Emmanuelle Chriqui. The film, a satirical take on greed and corruption in small town America, was shot in South Carolina and West Virginia and was released by Lions Gate Entertainment in 2009. Critical reception was extremely negative. Taking Chances scored 12% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 650 user ratings. Cooley's films have won over 20 Best Film and other honors, and he has been profiled in a number of magazines, such as The Fader, Create, and RES Magazine. He was selected for the "RES Magazine 10 Top Talents" issue in 2006.
Read more about this topic: Talmage Cooley
Famous quotes containing the word film:
“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.”
—Ingmar Bergman (b. 1918)
“Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or despatched as microfilm into the sidereal void.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“The woman’s world ... is shown as a series of limited spaces, with the woman struggling to get free of them. The struggle is what the film is about; what is struggled against is the limited space itself. Consequently, to make its point, the film has to deny itself and suggest it was the struggle that was wrong, not the space.”
—Jeanine Basinger (b. 1936)