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Screen Daily today runs a must-read edited excerpt of financier Ben Waisbren’s recent remarks in Berlin about film financing, the credit markets, slate deals, and the movie business overall. Here’s how they intro his piece: “In a prescient speech more than a month ago in Berlin, financier Ben Waisbren talked of impending calamity for the US wave of slate financing – banks won’t touch such mega-deals again until there is more transparency and a better alignment of investor and studio interests.”
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 21, 2008Asia Argento — the writer, director and actor — has been justly celebrated this week by Nathan Lee in the Village Voice on the occasion of her starring role in Olivier Assayas’s latest thriller, Boarding Gate. Lee calls her “not only the most fearless actor of her generation, but also one of the most intelligent and commanding,” an assessment with which I concur. His piece is hard to excerpt, so I suggest you simply go to the link and read the whole thing. Also look for Travis Crawford’s piece on Mother of Tears, her father Dario’s latest feature in which […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 20, 2008In her Deadline Hollywood Daily, Nikki Finke links to and comments on a Bloomberg.com report that states that the Sundance Channel is for sale and that Cablevision, which already owns the IFC, may be a potential buyer. From Andy Fixmer’s Bloomberg report: The Sundance Channel, the cable network built around Robert Redford’s annual film festival, is for sale and Cablevision Systems Corp. may be the eventual buyer, according to Pali Research. Owners General Electric Co., CBS Corp. and Redford are seeking $400 million to $500 million for the channel, which has 26 million subscribers, Richard Greenfield, an analyst at Pali […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 20, 2008I had a business meeting last week in which there was an honest discussion about whether the “Two Girls, One Cup” phenomenon was played out or not. I’ll say no more. Apparently, though, it has not, as the internet meme has crossed over into the old-media world of Esquire magazine. Karina Longworth reports over at SpoutBlog: I’m fairly certain Cary Grant was never asked by an interviewer to watch internet scat porn so that his word-for-word reaction could be printed in a major magazine, but poor George Clooney lives in a different time. Presumably because there’s very little new to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 20, 2008Over at his DIY Filmmaker blog, Sujewa Ekanayake posts a long interview with Barry Jenkins (pictured) about his Medicine for Melancholy, one of the real discoveries (and a film I very much liked) out of SXSW. He talks about Godard, being inspired by Claire Denis’s Vendredi Soir, and whether Medicine for Melancholy is, in Sujewa’s words, “the Barack Obama of indie films.” Here’s his response to the latter — specifically, whether or not his film can “cross over” from the typical “multi-ethnic but largely white” base of indie film to reach more diverse audiences. “The Barack Obama of indie films.” […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 19, 2008The Film Panel Notetaker has an interview up with filmmaker Leah Meyerhoff, who is bringing a retrospective of her short films to the Boston Underground Film Festival this weekend. She is also beginning work on her first feature, Unicorns, which she hopes to begin shooting this summer. Here’s Meyerhoff answering the question of what made her want to be a filmmaker: I originally thought I wanted to be a marine biologist, something totally not in the arts at all. Then I went school at Brown and started taking film classes. I started with film theory, kind of more on an […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 19, 2008I haven’t seen Doomsday yet, but I want to — I loved Neil Marshall’s Descent, and despite the 28 Days Later meets Resident Evil meets Road Warrior mix-and-match vibe of the trailer, I can’t believe this director doesn’t deliver something interesting with this new film. Filmmaker contributor Travis Crawford, who has seen the film and sent the below in an email, corroborates my feelings that Doomsday may offer more than people are giving it credit for. From Crawford: I felt that it was a very self-knowing, vintage Verhoeven-esque PARODY of the ultra-violent futuristic action thrillers from which it admittedly derives […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 18, 2008As David Hudson wrote at GreenCine, there’s a leisurely paced quality to SXSW that creates a general sense of conviviality among not just its filmmaker attendees but also its journalists. Like Hudson, I still have several films to write about, and I’ll to get these thoughts online sometime soon. But, in the meantime, there’s this really nice video by Mike Hedge that I post below. He’s created a hypnotic montage of his own festival moments, including some that I shared. SXSW 2008 from mikehedge on Vimeo.
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 18, 2008Over at the main page there are two new web-only pieces that both interview directors whose films open this week and who both quite consciously explore in them issues of borders and identity in a globalist age. One is a new director, Patricia Riggen (a Filmmaker 25 New Face discovery in 2005) and the other is a veteran, Olivier Assayas, and their films couldn’t be more different. Damon Smith interviews Riggen about her La Misma Luna, an emotional and affecting mother-son tale that draws from both the Mexican telenovela and the American indie road movie genres. And then there’s Olivier […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 18, 2008Last when I was a mentor for the IFP Rough Cuts labs, one of the most interesting projects was Alex Karpovsky’s Woodpecker, a doc-styled feature about those obsessed with the hunt for an ivory-billed woodpecker. I missed seeing the finished film at SXSW and hope to catch up with it very soon. In the meantime, at GreenCine David Hudson has rounded up some links, including this podcast conducted by Aaron Hillis, and has posted his own thoughts as well. Head over there to read more about Karpovsky’s fascinating film.
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 18, 2008