Authors — Scott Macaulay
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VOTE ONLINE FOR THE 2012 VIMEO AWARDS
We’re entering the final week of voting for the 2012 Vimeo Awards. Over at the Vimeo site are 12 videos each in categories ranging from Narrative to Documentary, Romance to Experimental, Lyrical to Captured. Voting is open until April 30, and you can vote once a day per category. “Each category will be evaluated by a mix of industry experts in that category and the category winner from the 2010 Awards, taking into account the community vote,” Vimeo says, so that means your vote will be mixed in with the opinions of judges like Philip Bloom, Lucy Walker, Ted Hope, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 20, 2012 -
FILMMAKER BEATS IRS, PROVES DOCUMENTARY FILM IS NOT A HOBBY
Independent documentary filmmaker Lee Storey has won her long battle with the Internal Revenue Service over deductions related to her film, Smile ’til it Hurts: The Up with People Story. The IRS’s case against Storey panicked the documentary community as it was poised to declare documentary filmmaking itself “a hobby” and not a professional, profit-seeking endeavor eligible for tax deductions. However, the same judge, Tax Court Judge Diane L. Kroupa, who said during a hearing, “By its very nature, a documentary to me means that it’s not for profit. You’re doing it to educate. You’re doing it to expose,” has […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 20, 2012 -
TRIBECA TRAILER: “THE FOURTH DIMENSION”
Here’s the trailer for The Fourth Dimension, the collaborative film by Harmony Korine, Alexey Fedorchenko and Jan Kwiecinski. (All trailers should be scored using Songify.) From the press release The Fourth Dimension stars U.S. actor Val Kilmer and is the first film to come from Golsch Film Words and VICE, and brings together a trilogy of directors from across the globe: Harmony Korine from the U.S., Russia’s Alexey Fedorchenko and Polish-born Jan Kwiecinski. Find out more at GrolschFilmWorks.com.
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 19, 2012 -
25 FILMS I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO AT THE TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL
At last year’s Tribeca Film Festival I discovered two of my favorite films of the year, Alma Har’el’s Bombay Beach and Panos Cosmatos’s Beyond the Black Rainbow. I’m hoping for at least as good a track record this year, and in surveying the schedule I see more than enough potential candidates. Assuming I can successfully surmount my usual Tribeca challenge — getting into a film-festival headspace while working at home in New York — here are 25 films I’m interested in checking out. As befitting the mission of this magazine, there’s a heavy American independent focus, and I’ve also avoided […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 19, 2012 -
YOUTUBE ALLOWS DIRECT KICKSTARTER, INDIEGOGO LINKING
Big news for crowdfunders — Google announced today that YouTube videos can now be directly linked to projects on Kickstarter and Indiegogo. (Actually, in Google speak, that’s “Using annotations to help fund your creative projects.”) Given the expansive reach of the user-generated video giant, this means that many more eyeballs will land on projects seeking coin on these platforms. From Google’s announcement: Over the past year, crowdsourced fundraising has exploded as great way to raise money for creative projects. We’ve seen lots of you using platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo to fund projects, and we want to make it easier […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 17, 2012 -
SXSW Film Festival
Among the many things SXSW is known for — barbecue, the Alamo Drafthouse and long lines, for example — one is breakout apps. Twitter and Foursquare both got enormous boosts from launches or promotions during previous editions of SXSW Interactive. Last year, the buzzword at the tech fest was contextual search and, indeed, you’re seeing that functionality being built into products this year from Apple, Google and others. In 2012, the buzzed-about app heading into the fest was Highlight, a sort of social version of Foursquare. Installed on your phone, it alerts you to other Highlight users nearby. “You can […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 17, 2012 -
Sundance Film Festival
The majestic chords of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet blasted through the doors of the New Frontiers exhibition space at Sundance this year, beckoning viewers into a dark room with a wall-size screen and, in a bin, those staples of the modern multiplex, 3D glasses. Donning the glasses, you were confronted with a looped, three-minute mash-up of history as seen through the lens of Hollywood cinema. Composited across the 3D canvas, like some kind of American Museum of Natural History diorama on acid, were the great characters who, by our repeated viewing, resonate as deeply in our consciousness as real historical […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 17, 2012 -
Into the Zone: On Geoff Dyer’s Critical Memoir about Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker
Originally appearing in our Spring, 2012 print issue, my short report on Zona, Geoff Dyer’s fascinating critical memoir on Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker is being reposted today timed to the film’s run at Lincoln Center and forthcoming release by Criterion. — SM My first Tarkovsky film, my gateway picture, was his penultimate, Nostalghia, at the Olympia Theater near Columbia University in Morningside Heights. The seats slanted one way, the screen slanted the other, and there was a leak in the ceiling. Water dripped from the roof into a bucket on the floor, blending into Tarkovsky’s typically excellent sound design of distant […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 17, 2012 -
Editor’s Letter
There was an interesting exchange of views on the Filmmaker blog afew weeks back about documentaries and the changing nature of story. The posts had to do with Doug Tirola’s documentary All In – The Poker Movie, which won the Best Documentary prize at CineVegas a few years back but was then re-shot and re-edited for theatrical release just this year. The reason for all that extensive work was “Black Friday.” After the film’s premiere the Feds shut down multiple online poker sites, thus fundamentally altering (and dating) the world depicted in the movie. The blog posts had to do […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 17, 2012 -
Decisive Moments
“All you need for a movie is a gun and girl,” Jean-Luc Godard famously wrote in one of his journals. But, of course, to make a good movie, you need others things too. An observant, imaginative eye helps, as does fresh context and a director’s understanding of the community containing that gun, that girl and, inevitably, the guy who stands behind — or in front of — the trigger. Restless City, the exciting dramatic feature debut of Nigerian-born photographer and music-video director Andrew Dosunmu, has all of these elements, and it mixes them into a hauntingly sensual take on the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 17, 2012
