Here’s episode three of Todd Sklar and his Range Life Entertainment’s tour diary documenting the highs and lows the group’s current DIY traveling film fest. Click on the link for upcoming tour dates.
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 13, 2008Okay, I’m a week or two late to the party, but I just came across MTV Music, a new website, in beta, from MTV that streams music videos. For younger readers, a music video — formerly called, in the pre-music-video days, a “promo,” or a “clip” — is a short film or staged musical performance set to a pop song and usually featuring as performers the singer and musicians of that song. MTV used to show them, and for those of us who remember the launch of the channel, music videos once seemed new, interesting, and even culturally relevant. Creative […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 11, 2008Director and producer Jim McKay (Everyday People, Our Song) sent the following email about Jonathan Demme’s latest feature, Rachel Getting Married, to his personal list. It’s a great acclamation of the film, and it nicely addresses and puts into context some of the movie’s bolder editorial choices. With permission, I’m posting it here. If you’re thinking about taking a pass on the new Jonathan Demme film, Rachel Getting Married, because it has a weird title and because his last two fiction films, The Truth about Charlie and The Manchurian Candidate, were remakes and didn’t have the oomph that his movies […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 10, 2008Adam Yamaguchi and David Casey offer a fascinating, strangely upbeat yet ultimately disquieting look at climate change in I Heart Global Warming, which premieres on Current TV on Wednesday, November 12, at 10 p.m. Check out the trailer.
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 10, 2008Opening today in New York from City Lights at the Village East is Damian Harris’s engrossing, heartbreaking drama Gardens of the Night. The story of abuse, its aftermath and the theme of lost childhood in general, Gardens of the Night is a tale of two children who are abducted by a pair of pedophiles (one played with troubling subtlety by an excellent Tom Arnold) and who then, years later, find their bonds together as homeless street hustlers. It sounds dark and bleak, but the film is beautifully directed and acted (particularly by Arnold, Gillian Jacobs, Evan Ross and John Malkovitch), […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 7, 2008Mabrouk El Mechri’s very entertaining genre-buster JCVD opens today, and here we flash you back to the interview with El Mechri that appeared on our site via Filmcatcher during the Toronto Film Festival. To see the interview click here.
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 7, 2008A commenter in the thread on Obama and the 181 film tax incentives, below, alerted me to this post on the Art Sake site titled “Obama and the Arts.” Funnily, as someone who works in the arts, Obama’s policy on the arts barely entered my consciousness during the election campaign. There has been so much more to be concerned about. So, after the election, it’s nice to know some details about the ways in which an Obama administration might be good for the arts. Check out the post, which contains a number of good links to related articles and statements […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 7, 2008Writer, director and producer Nelson George is launching a series of web shorts, and the first, A Barber’s Tale, is completed and posted below. It stars Reg E. Cathey from The Wire and is a beautiful split-screen piece of first-person storytelling.
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 7, 2008Repo: The Genetic Opera may not have a huge ad budget, but it did score a joke on David Letterman last night. (Something about Paris Hilton and organ harvesting…) Over in our Web Exclusives section, Andre Salas interviews director Darren Lynn Bousman about the film’s marketing challenges, casting Sarah Brightman, shooting on the Genesis, and the benefits of cardboard and plastic sets.
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 7, 2008Roger Ebert has published on his blog a letter from Jamie Stuart about Martin Scorsese and Stuart’s ambivalence towards him. An excerpt: As well, I tended to prefer filmmakers whom I believed had solved the problems laid out for themselves in making their movies. There was always an unmistakable confidence of execution in the work of Coppola or Spielberg or later the Coens. With Scorsese, however, I always saw insecurity: For all their labor, his movies felt fussy like they were never quite finished. You could see the agonizing conflict of decision-making in his craft (something that many people claim […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 6, 2008