Authors — Scott Macaulay

THE SECOND TIME, WITH MEANING

John August wants you to see his new movie, The Nines… twice. At his blog, he’s posted a downloadable commentary track which you can listen to on your iPod as the movie unspools. (It’s too distracting to do on your first viewing, he says.) He writes: One of my favorite moments of the Sundance premiere was listening as progressive waves of audience members realized that a story Hope Davis begins telling in Part One is, in fact, not a story at all. Hearing the little gasps, those who hadn’t yet caught on became more vigilant, wondering what they were missing. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 2, 2007
THINGS TO DO IN DENVER

One of my favorite websites, Boing Boing, has just undertaken a re-design. The site is a lot cleaner and easier on the eyes now, all the better to scope out eccentric pieces like this article in the Denver Westword News about the historical end date of the Mayan calendar, Freemason conspiracy theory, the New World Order… and the Denver airport? It’s all knitted together by a filmmaker — producer Nick Weidner, who, with his partner Sharron Rose, made 2012: The Odyssey. Westword’s Jared Jacang Maher, who writes about Weidner’s appearance on KHOW’s Coast to Coast, explains: Weidner, a filmmaker and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 1, 2007
ALL THERE

Over at his Hot Blog, David Poland has excited early words about Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There at Telluride. An excerpt: I also think this movie is a classic example of one where the first viewing is really just a toe in the water. If ever there was a movie made for the DVD era, this is it. (I wouldn’t bother to try to watch any longer clip than four minutes on an iPod… even the larger screen version due this Christmas.) Haynes & Moverman find a richness in this 10 year sliver of Dylan’s life – again, a conventional […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 1, 2007
SECURE POSITION

Women in Film and General Motors have launched Traction, a new website “for and ‘by’ women in the industry.” There’s already a ton of stuff on the site, including a great interview with Boys Don’t Cry director Kimberly Pierce by filmmaker Kirby Dick, a blog by the “Two Kids in the Balcony” (Jessica Silver-Greenberg and AJ Strasser), and a column entitled “The Virtual Mentor” which offers industry advice. In its debut, Film Finances Senior V.P. Marion Spiegelman discusses the process of bonding a picture.
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 1, 2007
TAGGED

Over at his increasingly essential Workbook Project, Lance weiler posts an audio podcast with Bomb It director Jon Reiss. I liked Reiss’s film, which starts off as a straightforward doc on the origins of urban graffitti art and then, as it globetrots to five countries, subtly morphs into a compelling essay on the changing nature of public space. Hear what Reiss has to say at the link above.
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 1, 2007
THE NBC/iTUNES SKIRMISH

Louis Hau has a solid piece in Forbes on the current skirmish between GE/NBC/Universal and Apple’s iTunes. If you’re not up on it, NBC has notified Aplle that it will no longer sell its television shows over the iTunes store. (It has also announced its own streaming and download site, Hulu.) Hau notes that NBC’s notice of termination occurs while negotiations are continuing and that, in the end, a deal may be worked out even as the network’s long-term strategy may be away from the pay-to-download model: Apple wants as much video content as it can get to continue driving […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 1, 2007
SMILE LIKE YOU MEAN IT

I want to thank David Lowery for contributing the great interview with Ronnie Bronstein that’s up on the main page right now. I love Bronstein’s film Frownland and am really happy to be hosting a special screening of it with director Lodge Kerrigan at the IFC Center next Wednesday at 7:30 pm. Lowery is right when he calls Frownland “one of the most confrontational and uncompromising visions to emerge from the American independent scene in recent memory,” and I hope that a lot of you come to this special edition of Filmmaker‘s series at the IFC. Here’s a taste of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 30, 2007
SOFT VOICES

For all the talk this past week about mumblecore — what it is and how these films are similar — it should also be noted how different the aesthetics of its various directors are. A case in point is this week’s opening at the IFC Center, Quiet City, directed by Aaron Katz, which boasts some of the trademarks of the genre — 20-something protagonists, a focus on transitory lifestates, relationship issues, an extreme naturalism — but which also has its own very distinct sensibility that’s quite different from some of the genre’s other filmmakers. As its title suggests, the film […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 29, 2007
SHIT HAPPENS

Police Beat writer Charles Mudede pens a curious ode to Stanley Kubrick in Seattle’s The Stranger. After opening by saying that Kubrick’s contempt for mankind was “deep,” he moves on to a fuller explication of his worldview: “I’m in a world of shit,” says Private Joker at the end of Kubrick’s unremittingly dark Vietnam War film, Full Metal Jacket. That is what Kubrick has to say about the state of everything: The world is shit, humans are shit in shit, life is worth shit, and there is nothing else that can be done about the situation. In Kubrick’s movies, progress, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 25, 2007
WHAT WOULD THE COMMUNITY THINK?

Over at his blog, filmmaker A. J. Schnack thinks about the whole mumblecore thing with tons of links to all of this week’s NYC press coverage and more (including the filmmaker’s own piece on Swanberg and DIY distribution in February, 2006). Schnack, a doc maker, considers the phenomenon and takes the right lessons away from it: And perhaps the biggest thing that we should learn from these filmmakers is that we can and should work together. And I mean that literally. Although the doc community is a pretty tight-knit bunch, we should continue to find ways of collaboration, on screen […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 24, 2007

Cookie	Duration	Description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional	11 months	The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
viewed_cookie_policy	11 months	The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.

Cookie	Duration	Description
cfmrk_cic		Used by Cloudflare to route user traffic for this Site.
sparrow_id		Installed by Cloudflare. Used to identify individual clients behind a shared IP address and apply security settings on a per-client basis. It does not store any personal identifiable information.

Cookie	Duration	Description
OAGEO		Installed by the Revive Ad Server. Used to cache geolocation (session, deleted when closing the browser)
OAID		Installed by the Revive Ad Server to distinguish users.