For those who only bookmark this one: Mike Plante interviews Cam Archer about his Wild Tigers I Have Known, which opens tomorrow at the IFC Center. And Justin Lowe on Rich Wong’s Gotham and Spirit-nominated Colma: The Musical.
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 27, 2007I’m usually annoyed that whenever the horror genre heats up, a bunch of indie filmmakers decide to capitalize on the trend and “make a horror movie.” Most of the time, these filmmakers don’t really like horror, don’t watch it, and don’t understand its specific rules and traditions. And then they wonder why people don’t find their scripts scary. So, this article in Variety by Archie Thomas is quite interesting. It reports on a new venture from the folks at the U.K. film production company Warp X. It’s called Darklight, and it’s a program intended to get horror newcomers — specifically, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 27, 2007For those of you who briefly scanned the recent headlines stating that Microsoft was fined $1.52 billion for infringing on two minor patents related to MP3 technology with only mild passing interest (or glee), Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly has a solid post explaining why this situation is more than a little screwed up. Here are the key graphs: So how about MP3, the ubiquitous music encoding standard? Who holds the patents on that? Answer: the MP3 standard was developed in the early 90s and the patent pool was originally controlled by Fraunhofer IIS. Microsoft paid Fraunhofer $16 million […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 25, 2007The Film Independent Spirit Awards were handed out yesterday in Santa Monica, California. Here are the winners. Best Feature: Little Miss Sunshine, Producers: Marc Turtletaub, David T. Friendly, Peter Saraf, Albert Berger & Ron Yerxa Best Director: Jonathon Dayton & Valerie Faris, Little Miss Sunshine Best Screenplay: Jason Reitman, Thank You For Smoking Best First Feature: Sweet Land. Director: Ali Selim. Producers: Alan Cumming, James Bigham, Ali Selim Best First Screenplay: Michael Arndt, Little Miss Sunshine John Cassavetes Award (For the Best Feature made for under $500,000):Quinceañera. Writer/Directors: Richard Glatzer & Wash Westmoreland. Producer: Anne Clements Best Supporting Female: Frances […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 25, 2007Both underseen and mythologized due to rights-holder issues, one of the great pieces of proto-independent cinema — and certainly one of the most provocative director launches ever — can now be seen on Google Video. Click here to view Todd Haynes’s Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story.
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 22, 2007If you’re in NYC this week, check out Michael Tully’s Cocaine Angel, which opened at the Pioneer for a weeklong run yesterday. Tully was one of our “25 New Faces” last year, and here’s what Matthew Ross had to say about the film: Filmmaker, musician, blogger and housepainter Michael Tully has been keeping himself busy the past year. It was only about 13 months ago that he and writer-star Damian Lahey finished tearing a festering little hole into the drug-addiction film subgenre with Cocaine Angel, a dime-bag-budgeted, grime-covered crawl through a Florida cokehead’s sunshineless state. With its claustrophobic apartments, torn […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 22, 2007After posting about the Coudal Partners Kubrick page, below, I received an email alerting me to this link, which isn’t collated on the Coudal site. It’s from Cinefile Video, and it’s a true Kubrick oddity. Here’s how the site describes it: Somewhere a few months ago, our fearful Cinefile leader Hadrian read the soundtrack album for Full Metal Jacket had on it a track where R. Lee Ermey did a boot camp rap over a cheesy ’80s backing beat. Of course we had to hear it right away… Turns out that it isn’t so much Ermey on the mic than […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 20, 2007Stanley Kubrick has been an obsession for many, including the folks at Coudal Partners, who have a “Stuff about Stanley Kubrick” page that collates all of the site’s posts on the director. Included are links to articles about unrealized Kubrick Jim Thompson adaptations, a PDF of his Napoleon screenplay, news about “the greatest movie Kubrick never made” (The Flying Padre) and more.
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 19, 2007Alexa has added country rankings to their free internet traffic counter and, for reasons I can’t explain, they are claiming that Filmmaker is the 88th most visited website in Ethiopia. And we are in the top 2,000 in Ghana. I’m happy to see our stats up, of course, but I don’t know why our page view rate is several hundred times higher in Ethiopia than elsewhere. Speaking of internet traffic, Filmmaker coolly slipped over the 50,000 friends mark on our MySpace page, so if you’ve got a film to promote, join and post your banner or poster as a comment.
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 18, 2007While in Rotterdam I caught Container, the latest experiment from one my favorite filmmakers, Lukas Moodysson. The film, which premiered in Berlin last year, features black-and-white footage of a heavy-set crossdresser and a young Asian woman doing all sorts of strange things underneath a voiceover by actress Jena Malone. To be clear, it is Jena Malone on the soundtrack, and she identifies herself as “the American actress Jena Malone,” but it’s unclear if the non-diagetic voiceover is completely unrelated to the image or whether its the fantasy of one of the characters. In any case, Picturehouse supposedly has the film […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 17, 2007