Over at the main page check out Howard Feinstein’s just-posted interview with Wong Kar-wai about his My Blueberry Nights, the opening night film at Cannes.
by Scott Macaulay on May 16, 2007Via Movie City News comes this fascinating story from BBC news: An Austrian filmmaker has come up with a novel way of avoiding the costs of creating a movie – by making her film entirely from images of real life captured by CCTV cameras. Called Faceless, the film is the project of London-based Manu Luksch, who is both the star and director and describes it as a “science fiction fairy tale”. By taking CCTV of herself and blocking out the faces of anyone else captured on it, she created a story set in the future, in the “faceless world” – […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 15, 2007The long-running French film journal Cahiers du Cinema recently launched an online English-language edition. In the current issue there’s a provocative article by the editors entitled “12 Objectives for Cinema in France” that I’ve been meaning to comment on. Written before Sarkozy’s victory — a prospect Cahiers clearly considered when drafting the article — the piece is interesting for what it says to some of us American fans of French cinema as well as for its implications on our own American indie film. (For more on the possible repercussions of Sarko’s win and what his promised “break with the past” […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 14, 2007Thanks to the folks over at Screengrab for the nice words about the new issue of Filmmaker. (And also for catching our over use of the phrase “a perfect storm” twice in one issue — honestly, we didn’t know it was going to be the title of George Tenet’s book.) There’s a bunch of good stuff over at Screengrab, including, for Mother’s Day, their list of the worst movie mothers in film history. Click on the link above to check it out.
by Scott Macaulay on May 13, 2007Actress Evan Rachel Wood seems to be the go-to-girl for ambitious music videomakers. First there was her starring role in Green Day’s anti-war “Wake Me Up when September Ends” video: And now she joins reported new b.f. Marilyn Manson in “Heart Shaped Glasses,” an NSFW homage to David Lynch (plenty of red curtains), David Cronenberg and, perhaps, Hermann Nitsch. (Oh yeah, if you’re under 16 you’re not supposed to watch this.)
by Scott Macaulay on May 12, 2007Below I blogged about the L.A. Weekly piece, “Double Cross at the WGA,” which was an explosive account of the Writer’s Guild of America’s policy of collecting and not always paying foreign levies on behalf of member and non-member writers. It’s a complicated story but well worth following for several reasons, not the least of which is what it says about our current and possibly future system of copyright. Now there’s more on the story. Stefan Avalos has written a long and nuanced piece about the scandal at Fade In Online. (The story begins on the website’s front page and […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 12, 2007If you’re in New York you’ve got a few days left to catch Guy Maddin’s Brand upon the Brain, the director’s spectacular staging of his latest movie with a live chamber orchestra, castrato, three live foley artists and an assortment of guest narrators like Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson and Isabella Rossellini. Like all of Maddin’s work, the film immerses itself in the poetics of early cinema, applying the style this time to a storyline that seems a mix of Dickens and gothic horror. But what makes it a must-see is its rare event quality. When the musicians start, the foley […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 12, 2007Until such time as The Day the Clown Cried sees the light of day, we might just have to settle for… Georgia Rule.. Here’s John Anderson’s genius lede to his Variety review: No offense to either of them, but Georgia Rule suggests an Ingmar Bergman script as directed by Jerry Lewis. The subject matter is grim, the relationships are gnarled, the worldview is bleak, and, at any given moment, you suspect someone’s going to be hit with a pie.
by Scott Macaulay on May 8, 2007Over at David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema, Bordwell has one of his great screen-grab filled comparative film essays, this time on the relationship between film framing and humor. “Can a shot be amusing in itself?” asks Bordwell before going on to talk about Tati, Barry Sonenfeld, and a sequence from Shaun of the Dead that features the two shots below: Writes Bordwell of the scene in which two groups of survivors meet in zombie-filled London, “The gag’s premise is that each survivor has a counterpart in the other line. There are two posers in brown leather jackets, two can-do girls, […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 6, 2007It’s long, detailed and a must-read — Dennis McDougal’s piece in the L.A. Weekly, “Double Cross at the WGA,” on the guild’s collecting and non-payment of monies issued to member and non-member writers by foreign rights societies. The piece springboards off a class-action lawsuit filed by writer William Richert (Winter Kills) against the WGA as well as whistleblower activity by a now-terminated guild administrator into a discussion of American copyright law, studio business practices and the U.S.’s complicated relationship to the Berne Convention, the international copyright agreement spearheaded by author Victor Hugo. The upshot? If you wrote a screenplay for […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 6, 2007