Authors — Scott Macaulay

CLICKING TO UTOPIA

Peter Aspden has a provocative piece about the consciousness-changing aspects of the internet at the Financial Times today. Whereas many who discuss this issue come off as techno-Luddites, Aspden seems to both welcome and slightly fear the inevitable future. There’s a bit of Cronenberg’s “Long Live the New Flesh” here. An excerpt: The hyperlink syndrome, the way our minds copy the workings of the internet and flit sharply from one idea to another, means that we have become addicted to the breadth of everything rather than the depth of something. The contemporary mind needs to be elastic and happy to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 19, 2008
TED HOPE AT INDEPENDENT FILM WEEK

As the IFP’s Independent Film Week rolls along, there has been quite a lot of discussion around the streets of Chelsea of new paradigms, the role of the independent filmmaker, and creative strategies to reach audiences. I’ve been wearing my producer hat this week, taking meetings at the IFP’s No Borders program. I’ll write a bit more about this experience when it’s all over, but suffice to say for now that it’s been an excellent couple of days filled with energetic and surprising meetings that stand in stark contrast to the torrent of bad news coming from Wall Street and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 17, 2008
REMEMBERING DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

I started to write more about David Foster Wallace but scrapped it. For all of its celebrated intellectual brilliance, Wallace’s writing always resolved itself on the simplest, most human terms while still vigilantly guarding itself against the ever present threats of lazy thinking, sentimentality and, as he discusses in the Kenyon address linked to below, our “default thinking.” I can’t summon up anything profound or summarizing about him or the news that he killed himself. I simply direct you to his own writings. There is much on the web today about Wallace, including this round-up of links from GreenCine, that […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 14, 2008
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, 1962 – 2008

I was absolutely stunned to return home to New York tonight from a wedding in Massachusetts and read online that one of my favorite writers, David Foster Wallace, died this weekend in Claremont, California. Wallace’s novels include Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System, and he is the author of several excellent books of essays, including A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster. From the obituary in the L.A. Times: Times book editor David Ulin was in New York City for a National Book Critics Circle Board meeting Saturday. “What was a party is […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 14, 2008
POSTING ABLE DANGER

To conclude our series of blog posts from Paul Krik, writer/director of Able Danger, currently in theaters, here is his breakdown of how he posted his movie. Able Danger was shot on an Panasonic AG-HVX200 by accomplished Brooklyn-based cinematographer Charlie Libin. We shot HD using no tape. It was shot to P2 cards, basically RAM and then copied to a hard drive. It was edited on Avid mostly on a laptop in a basement and then on an Avid at Jump Editorial. It was edited in HD but at the Panasonic “native” file size of 1280 x 720. This is […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 12, 2008
THE COOL PEOPLE ARE IN HELL

Ted Hope alerted me to the very cool Trailers from Hell site, in which an amazing and erudite group of filmmakers — John Landis, Howard Rodman, Allison Anders, Michael Lehmann, Larry Cohen, Joe Dante and others — provide voiceover commentary to a series of trailers from great movies, most of which hail from B-movie or genre traditions. Personal favorites include Blast of Silence, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and, embedded below, Point Blank. Check this site out!
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 10, 2008
TORONTO: NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH

In the opening moments of Rod Lurie’s drama Nothing But the Truth, there’s an assassination attempt on the U.S. president and the government retaliates by bombing Caracas. In its final moments, the journalist who reported that the government knowingly went to war with the South American country on faulty intelligence meets her confidential source and.… Okay, I won’t spoil the ending, but let’s suffice to say that by the time we’ve reached the denouement of Lurie’s film this story of criminal foreign policy has shrunken to a depressingly conventional Hollywood tale of a mother’s idealism and sacrifice. Kate Beckinsale plays […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 10, 2008
CHE GOES TO IFC

Wow — this is a surprise. We, like many others, had heard that Magnolia would be releasing this film. According to this Indiewire report, Steven Soderbergh’s Che will open theatrically in December for a one-week Oscar qualifying run and then will play in January through IFC In Theaters, its day and date platform.
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 10, 2008
SHOOTING LOVELY, STILL

Nik Fackler’s Lovely, Still has garnered a bit of buzz up in Toronto. One of the most impressive elements of the film is its fantastic cinematography and production design. Fackler and his team create a gorgeous Christmas-world that dances just this side of a fairy tale. In this Filmmaker piece, the film’s d.p., Sean Kirby, discusses his approach to shooting the movie.
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 10, 2008
FILM IN FOCUS GETS A FACELIFT

The FilmInFocus site has just undergone what is in my opinion a very nice 2.0-ish facelift, with a much cleaner new design and better organization of articles. (I’m one of the editors of this site along with Peter Bowen and Nick Dawson.) Please check it out, and to give you a leg up, here’s some new stuff on the site that I recommend: Filmmaker‘s Jason Guerrasio explores the cult of The Big Lebowski in an interview with Will Russell and Scott Shuffitt, authors of I’m a Lebowski, You’re a Lebowski: Life, The Big Lebowski and What Have You. The “Five […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 10, 2008

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