Authors — Scott Macaulay

DEMO’ING THE RED EPIC AND SCARLET CAMERAS

Jamie Stuart passed me this video, which Ray Pride posted at Movie City Indie. Check out the small size of the forthcoming RED Epic camera. Here’s another RED report from NAB, courtesy of Engadget: Ted Interview (Part I) from Landmine Media on Vimeo.
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 16, 2010
GUY MADDIN’S “NIGHT MAYOR”

Guy Maddin’s hometown fantasia, My Winnipeg, is one of my favorite films of the last few years. Night Mayor is a recent short film that explores similar territory. It won a Short Film Jury Award for Experimental Short at this year’s SXSW, and is now available online at the National Film Board of Canada site (and embedded here). From the press release: Night Mayor tells the tale of Nihad Ademi, a Bosnian immigrant who serves as Winnipeg’s “night mayor.” Ademi somehow harnesses the multi-coloured waves of the Aurora Borealis and uses its power to broadcast images of his beloved adoptive […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 16, 2010
BAHMAN GHOBADI ON IMPROVISATION, “PERSIAN CATS,” AND KIAROSTAMI

I caught Bahman Ghobadi’s No One Knows about Persian Cats, opening tomorrow at the IFC Center, when it screened at the Doha Tribeca Film Festival. In the magazine, I wrote the following: The story told by the Iranian Kurdish filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi’s No One Knows about Persian Cats would have fit comfortably into an afternoon of mumblecore films at SXSW. A young couple tries to form a band and score an out-of-town gig. Because it’s set in Iran, however, the band is outlawed, money must be scraped together for the expensive exit visa, and the female musician is not even […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 15, 2010
STAR IN YOUR OWN “KICK-ASS”

Kick-Ass is Matthew Vaughn’s canny mainstream imagining of John Romita and Mark Millar’s Marvel Comic about a bunch of psychologically damaged homemade superheroes on self-empowerment rampage. Yes, I felt weird watching 11-year-old Chloe Moretz (she’s 13 now) take part in such violent shootouts. I also queasily admired Vaughn’s seemingly casual but ultimately quite calculated envelope-pushing. There’s some brutish B-movie splatter and the C-word too, but this is not transgressive filmmaking. (Indeed, while watching Kick-Ass I kept wishing I was watching the Takeshi Miike version.) Kinka Usher’s Mystery Men, adapted from Bob Burden’s comic, worked a similar concept over ten years […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 15, 2010
DISCUSSING “HORSES” WITH FILMMAKER LIZ MERMIN

I’m happy to welcome Mary Anderson Casavant to the blog. I’ll let her introduce herself below, and you can look forward to a series of posts from her on the documentary scene, focusing on the films featured at the Stranger than Fiction series unspooling at the IFC Center. First up is a conversation with filmmaker Liz Mermin. — SM I’d like to start by acknowledging that I am not a disinterested observer when it comes to Stranger Than Fiction. From 2005 – 2006, I worked as a freelance researcher for its founder and curator, Thom Powers, the current documentary programmer […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 14, 2010
“HOUSE” SEASON FINALE SHOT ON CANON 5D

If you think that DSLRs haven’t caught on for filmmakers in a big way yet, think again. Following up a series of Twitter posts by its director, the website Peta Pixel reports that the season finale of House has been shot on the Canon 5D. The site compiles director Greg Yaitanes’ tweets into an impromptu interview (a neat journalistic trick I will make a point to try sometime), including this summation of his experience: “i loved it and feel it’s the future. cameras that can give you these looks.” Check out Peta Pixel for the whole conversation. The episode airs […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 13, 2010
WHAT DO YOU THINK OF “TREME”?

Most of the TV reviewers who reviewed David Simon’s new HBO series Treme were shown the first three episodes. I only caught the first, last night, on its premiere. Directed by Agnieskza Holland, the post-Katrina series set in the world of New Orleans musicians was undeniably gorgeous to look at and listen to. It took the fairly bold approach of not kickstarting with any huge central incident but rather sketching a tableaux of characters defined, in part, by their attitude toward a city that has been irrevocably changed. If The Wire was about characters defined by either their resistance or […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 12, 2010
BETWEEN THOUGHT AND EXPRESSION LIES CONVERSATION

Before this post, a full disclosure: I have sat on numerous panels in the last year, including Woodstock, SXSW, the Conversation NYC, and the IFP’s Script to Screen. Many of these panels have had something to do with “new models” or “the future of independent film.” My panel at Script to Screen was different because it was simply a one-on-one with writer/director Terry George, and it gave me some of the best advice: when trying to write seriously, disconnect your internet router and pack it away. In my experience sometimes panels can be really stimulating and provocative, and sometimes they […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 12, 2010
STICKY SEATS AND THE ORIGINS OF NYC DIY

I got a kick out of Bette Gordon’s blog post “Remembering the Past, Segueing into the Future” over at Truly Free Film. Gordon remembers the 1983 premiere of her feature Variety, for which she and producer Renee Shafransky rented the now-demolished and condo-ized Variety cinema, a porn house, on 3rd Avenue and 13th St. I attended that premiere and one of my memories was of the woman who sat next to pulling out her New York Times and placing it underneath her as she sat down. So, of course, I laughed when I read this: In the 80’s, there was […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 10, 2010
CINEMA IS WHERE LIFE IS

Fassbinder and Herzog from Wim Wenders’ 1982 documentary on the future of cinema, Chambre 666.
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 10, 2010

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