Authors — Scott Macaulay
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HALF-LIFE LOVED IN THE BLOGOSPHERE
Jennifer Phang’s Sundance Frontier entry Half-Life received something of a critical honor recently when producer Mike Ryan, whose thoughtful and passionate reviews can be found at the new Hammer To Nail, cited the film as his favorite of the 34 he saw at this year’s festival. An excerpt: We often see an art film that may leap around in perspective, mostly for rhetorical or comic effect, but it is truly rare to be carried emotionally through a film that tells a multi-perspective story through a seamless integration of naturalistic action, animation and self consciously artificial CGI compositing. Half-Life exists on […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 31, 2008 -
FIENNES WINS ROTTERDAM’S CINEMART COMPETITION
On the 25th anniversary of the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Cinemart, the prize for the “best project” has gone to Sophie Fiennes’ The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, a follow-up to her The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema which also features philosopher Slajov Zizek. The award comes with a cash prize of 10,000 euros, which one guest at the party tonight quipped would be about equal to the film’s first clip license. Here’s Variety’s wrap-up of the event, and below is a clip from Fiennes’s previous collaboration with Zizek.
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 30, 2008 -
RAY CARNEY ON QUIET CITY
If you just bookmark this blog page and don’t check the main site, head over there so as not to miss professor and critic Ray Carney’s essay on Aaron Katz’s Quiet City, which hits DVD stores this week.
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 29, 2008 -
Rotterdam 2008: Who’s Afraid of Kathy Acker?
Who’s Afraid of Kathy Acker?, premiering here in Rotterdam, is Barbara Caspar’s thoughtful and creative film biography/essay on the late writer, whose formally inventive novels, published from the ’70s through the mid-90s, challenged assumptions about gender roles, sexuality, and the literary canon. A beguiling and intensely contradictory figure, Acker is best known for books which creatively appropriated texts from Great White Male writers, retelling them in an emotionally raw, sexually blunt, and politically questioning female voice. And with her appearance in several conceptual art videos in the ’70s, her close-cropped dyed blond hair, her tattoos and her piercings, Acker was […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 29, 2008 -
ARIN CRUMLEY WAS ROBBED!!!
The Four Eyed Monsters filmmaker is offering a handshake and a hug to the perpetrator if his stuff is returned.
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 29, 2008 -
THE THREE FACES OF INDIE
Over at her Thompson on Hollywood blog, Ann Thompson posts an email she received from indie producer and former distributor Jonathan Dana about “the surfeit of Sundance acquisition titles, many of which remain unsold at fest’s end.” He breaks the indie sphere down into three sections, from the studio specialty titles down to the out-of-nowhere surprises, and concentrates his commentary on the middle sphere, the professionally produced films with name actors that are financed by new money largely based on their presumed marketability. It’s worth a read.
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 29, 2008 -
SUNDANCE DOCS: FIELDS OF FUEL and IOUSA
Tuesday at Sundance I saw two documentaries back to back that each deals with one of this country’s most pressing and complex political issues. Josh Tickell’s Fields of Fuel tackles America’s reliance on imported fossil fuels while Patrick Creadon in his follow-up to Wordplay, IOUSA, wrestles with the exploding United States budget deficit. Both films employ what is now a familiar doc style of exploring political and social issue subject matter: quick editing, talking heads, a chapter-by-chapter structure, use of humorous archival material, and energetic source cue-driven montages. Of the two films, Fields of Fuel is the slicker. It segues […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 27, 2008 -
DUTCH TREATS
I’ve still got most of my Sundance commentary to get up and I’m on my way to the International Film Festival Rotterdam, where I’ll try to file some short reports on the fest and the concurrent Cinemart, which is a great financing conference that plans, this year, to begin a dialogue about how it can be reshaped for the future. (Full disclosure: I’m on the CineMart’s Advisory Board.) From the festival’s Tiger Daily: Eschewing conference and panel formats and instead deploying the tried and tested device of brainstorming towards a consensus, IFFR management and industry experts will sit down this […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 25, 2008 -
CONSIDERING ALL THINGS JAMIE STUART
While Jamie Stuart has been here at Sundance shooting the goings on, NPR has been shooting him for a short video segment that’s now up on their website. We have no idea what Jamie will turn in this year, although we do know that it won’t be all shot in the Albertson’s parking lot.
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 25, 2008 -
A GLIMPSE AT CHOKE
Here’s a short piece on Clark Gregg’s Choke, one of the few Sundance pics to have secured a deal mid-festival. (Hat tip: Hollywood Elsewhere.)
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 24, 2008
