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One of the hits of this year’s SXSW was the 25-minute short, Glory at Sea. Set in a magically real, emotionally honest post-Katrina New Orleans, the film is something of a mini-epic, a grand tale of outsized, heartbreaking ambition set against both a devastated city and the boundlessness of the open waters. The story of Ben Zeitlin’s film, unfortunately, did not end with its triumphant Austin premiere. Zeitlin and members of his crew were injured in a serious car accident on the way to a screening. The uninsured Zeitlin broke his hip and pelvis and has two sprained ankles. So, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 23, 2008Over at Ain’t It Cool News, Quint calls the trailer for Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness “an okay trailer for a great movie” and “a little clunky.” At Hollywood Elsewhere, Jeffrey Wells thinks star Josh Peck “is basically Leo Gorcey” and is not likely to ever play “anything other than a what-up homie who sells tabs of ecstasy and dilaudid in Tompkins Square Park” while one of his readers, Hallick, calls the clip “the dullest trailer of 2008” and asks, “What the hell are they trying their hardest not to sell here?” Yep, the trailer’s underwhelming, but it does set you […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 22, 2008At his CinemaTech blog, Scott Kirsner follows up an earlier post announcing Cinetic Media’s hiring of Matt Dentler to its new digital rights division, Cinetic Rights Management, with a conversation with three of the company’s key players: Christopher Horton, COO Janet Brown, and Dentler. (If you haven’t heard, John Sloss’s Cinetic Media has set up a new company that will represent digital media rights for independent films. They are currently contacting many indie filmmakers and producers and signing for representation films that will presumably be leveraged into digital distribution platforms ranging from internet downloads to new delivery devices like mobile […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 22, 2008Phillip Van, who was one of our “25 New Faces” last year (and who is photographed here by Richard Koek), is taking part in the Tribeca All Access program and is interviewed by the Film Panel Notetaker. He discusses And She Stares Longingly at What She Has Lost, the short film he made as part of the Little Minx project. He talks about his TAA project Darkland, Carl Jung, Richard Nixon, and his short, High Maintenance. An excerpt: I made High Maintenance to touch upon behaviors that I see in excess today among friends and in society; things like rampant […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 22, 2008Over at his blog, Jonathan Taplin calls “Charlie Rose by Samuel Beckett” the “most creative video mash-up of the year.”
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 22, 2008The FilmInFocus series “Behind the Blog” continues this week with a new entry: Matt Zoller Seitz and his “The House Next Door.” An excerpt: HOW HAS YOUR LIFE CHANGED BECAUSE OF YOUR BLOG? HAS IT GONE IN ANY NEW DIRECTIONS BECAUSE OF YOUR NEWFOUND PROMINENCE? Throughout my career, I always took my work seriously, but I also had a skeptical or even cynical attitude about it — that it was just something people read at breakfast or on the bus to kill time. But since I started the blog I’ve been contacted by a lot of people who have been […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 22, 2008When Filmmaker last caught up with director and cultural impresario Michael Shamberg (pictured), he had just finished collecting the various New Order music videos he produced into a compilation. One of those videos, by Leos Carax, we wrote about separately and linked to not only the clip but also Shamberg’s Kinoteca website, which is now re-energized with several new pieces. All of this is to introduce Shamberg and his global artist “anarchic salon,” Turtle, which arrives in New York this weekend at The Tank. Running this Sunday, April 27, from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m., the event is described like […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 21, 2008Over at Videogum, Gabe anticipates Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely, which is Filmmaker‘s cover this issue, by rounding up his top five Michael Jackson impersonator clips. Here’s his intro: And now, I’m going to do the classic blogger trick of praising a movie and then completely missing the point (an introspective look into how people struggle with identity and the need for acceptance) by posting a superficially related Top 5 List of Michael Jackson Impersonators. I’ve posted below one of his top five, which he dubs “Midget Michael Jackson.”
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 21, 2008Benten Films has a splendid, newly redesigned website that has launched alongside its latest release — Todd Rohal’s wonderful Guatemalan Handshake. The release is top-shelf all the way — the two-disk set includes six of Rohal’s short films, an essay by David Gordon Green, and numerous other extras, like casting tapes and other behind-the-scenes material. Also on the Benten site: an interview with composer David Wingo, who has scored Green’s and Rohal’s films and who also plays in the band Ola Podrida. From the interview: How different is the creative process when lyrics are involved, such as your Ola Podrida […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 21, 2008Aided by a greater competence when it comes to grabbing and resizing web images (a competence I’ve appropriated here), Peter Martin at Cinematical links to my piece on the DVD box art of Joe Swanberg’s Hannah Takes the Stairs and asks: I agree that Hannah Takes the Stairs deserves a wider audience, but I’m not sure the DVD cover will make people want to pick it up and take a chance on renting or buying it. What do you think? To be honest, I don’t know. As a producer, I’ve long been inured to the design indignity that occurs when […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 21, 2008