The film, That, may just be a 39-minute “snowboarding epic,” but independent filmmakers should take note of it because, according to Variety, it’s the first piece of independently distributed media on the Apple iTunes Movie Store. The pic was produced by Forum Snowboards, and here’s the trade mag described its journey to iTunes: Forum first asked its DVD distrib to gets “That” onto iTunes. When it didn’t succeed, the company started talking to Apple directly. Though iTunes does sell some short films in its movies section for $1.99, they all come from established names such as Shorts Intl. and Sundance. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 1, 2007In 2004 Cinevegas and Sundance programmer Mike Plante wrote a piece for us titled “Confessions of a Short Film Programmer” in which he listed the ingredients that make a short film impress festival selection committees. Now he’s got a new website, “I Blame Society,” with both a photo blog as well as a blog tied to his film zine Cinemad. On his latest post, he references the Filmmaker article and adds an addendum, which I’ll repost here: One of the things I did not mention in the article: why do film schools try to teach students by showing them features […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 28, 2007Over at their MySpace page, the American Pavilion at the Cannes Film Festival is announcing the First Annual American Pavilion Student Filmmaker Program Short Film Contest (whew!). The deadline is March 9, and submitted films should tackle the question, “How will Cannes 07 change your life?” The prize? A trip to the Cannes Film Festival. For more info, click on the MySpace page above or visit the American Pavilion website.
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 27, 2007For those who only bookmark this one: Mike Plante interviews Cam Archer about his Wild Tigers I Have Known, which opens tomorrow at the IFC Center. And Justin Lowe on Rich Wong’s Gotham and Spirit-nominated Colma: The Musical.
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 27, 2007I’m usually annoyed that whenever the horror genre heats up, a bunch of indie filmmakers decide to capitalize on the trend and “make a horror movie.” Most of the time, these filmmakers don’t really like horror, don’t watch it, and don’t understand its specific rules and traditions. And then they wonder why people don’t find their scripts scary. So, this article in Variety by Archie Thomas is quite interesting. It reports on a new venture from the folks at the U.K. film production company Warp X. It’s called Darklight, and it’s a program intended to get horror newcomers — specifically, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 27, 2007For those of you who briefly scanned the recent headlines stating that Microsoft was fined $1.52 billion for infringing on two minor patents related to MP3 technology with only mild passing interest (or glee), Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly has a solid post explaining why this situation is more than a little screwed up. Here are the key graphs: So how about MP3, the ubiquitous music encoding standard? Who holds the patents on that? Answer: the MP3 standard was developed in the early 90s and the patent pool was originally controlled by Fraunhofer IIS. Microsoft paid Fraunhofer $16 million […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 25, 2007The Film Independent Spirit Awards were handed out yesterday in Santa Monica, California. Here are the winners. Best Feature: Little Miss Sunshine, Producers: Marc Turtletaub, David T. Friendly, Peter Saraf, Albert Berger & Ron Yerxa Best Director: Jonathon Dayton & Valerie Faris, Little Miss Sunshine Best Screenplay: Jason Reitman, Thank You For Smoking Best First Feature: Sweet Land. Director: Ali Selim. Producers: Alan Cumming, James Bigham, Ali Selim Best First Screenplay: Michael Arndt, Little Miss Sunshine John Cassavetes Award (For the Best Feature made for under $500,000):Quinceañera. Writer/Directors: Richard Glatzer & Wash Westmoreland. Producer: Anne Clements Best Supporting Female: Frances […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 25, 2007Both underseen and mythologized due to rights-holder issues, one of the great pieces of proto-independent cinema — and certainly one of the most provocative director launches ever — can now be seen on Google Video. Click here to view Todd Haynes’s Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story.
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 22, 2007If you’re in NYC this week, check out Michael Tully’s Cocaine Angel, which opened at the Pioneer for a weeklong run yesterday. Tully was one of our “25 New Faces” last year, and here’s what Matthew Ross had to say about the film: Filmmaker, musician, blogger and housepainter Michael Tully has been keeping himself busy the past year. It was only about 13 months ago that he and writer-star Damian Lahey finished tearing a festering little hole into the drug-addiction film subgenre with Cocaine Angel, a dime-bag-budgeted, grime-covered crawl through a Florida cokehead’s sunshineless state. With its claustrophobic apartments, torn […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 22, 2007After posting about the Coudal Partners Kubrick page, below, I received an email alerting me to this link, which isn’t collated on the Coudal site. It’s from Cinefile Video, and it’s a true Kubrick oddity. Here’s how the site describes it: Somewhere a few months ago, our fearful Cinefile leader Hadrian read the soundtrack album for Full Metal Jacket had on it a track where R. Lee Ermey did a boot camp rap over a cheesy ’80s backing beat. Of course we had to hear it right away… Turns out that it isn’t so much Ermey on the mic than […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 20, 2007