Authors — Scott Macaulay

HANGING ON THE TELEPHONE

Two issues ago Chris Campion profiled for Filmmaker the Dutch director Cyrus Frisch, who was in post on his latest feature at the time. Now, that film, Why Didn’t Anybody Tell Me it Would Become this Bad in Afghanistan?, has premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival, and Campion has written another piece on Frisch, this time in The Observer. The film, shot entirely with a mobile phone, is a first-person POV movie about a Dutch soldier returning from Afghanistan who finds his own daily life inflected with the violence he witnessed there. From Campion’s piece: A huge plume of black […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 6, 2007
GUATEMALAN IN THE NORTHWEST

One of the coolest and most original indies of the last year gets its theatrical debut this Friday in Seattle at the Northwest Film Forum. Todd Rohal’s The Guatemalan Handshake runs for a week in Seattle before moving on to Portland where it opens at the Hollywood Theater on February 17. Rohal, who will attend every screening along with producer Megan Griffiths, has organized a series of special events to go along with the screenings. There will be live performances by composer David Wingo (whose new album, recorded under the name Ola Podrida, is released on Plug Research) and Kimya […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 5, 2007
FASCINATING FASCINATION

Steve Loff and Prichard Smith, the filmmakers behind Mr. Fascination, a doc in post-production, have launched a MySpace page full of clips and info about their film, which tells the story of a man obsessed with a vintage boardwalk game. Here’s what they say about it: Mr. Fascination, a feature-length doc currently in post-production, tells the story of Randy Senna, a man obsessed with a dying boardwalk game called Fascination. The film follows him over the course of his 2006 season at Flipper’s Fascination in Wildwood, NJ, as he looks for new ways to make the game more appealing to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 5, 2007
“AN IMPRESSIVE DEPTH OF FIELD”

Ann Hornaday has a long overdue mainstream media piece on the aesthetic virtues of short-form web video in The Washington Post. It’s a must read as she quite thoughtfully provides some words of wisdom — “Your limitions are your strength,” “You’ve made us laugh, you’ve made us link, now make us think” are two examples — for aspiring web filmmakers. And, among her examples, Jamie Stuart’s White Plastic Flower, his impressionistic reportage from this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Here’s what she had to say about his podcast: But a foreshortened, small-box format doesn’t have to limit cinematographic ambition. In White […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 4, 2007
ONCE BOUGHT BY FOX SEARCHLIGHT

Ann Thompson is reporting that Fox Searchlight has bought Sundance audience fave Once. The no-budget Irish musical (it was made for a reported $100,000) features members of the band The Frames, which director John Carney played bass in in the early ’90s. From a Gregg Goldstein interview with Carney contained within Thompson’s piece: Carney, meanwhile, had music junkies in mind when he made his film Once. “I wanted to create a visual album, something you could watch over and over again,” he said. In the process, the filmmaker created one of the most unique musicals in recent memory, telling the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 2, 2007
THE ART OF FILM CRITICISM

One critic who you wont’ see linked on Rotten Tomatoes is Rick Trembles… and, at the least, that’s because his film reviews in the form of graphic art can’t be cut-and-web-pasted. Trembles is a filmmaker, writer and musician — his band, The American Devices, is called “Montreal’s longest-running post-punk band.” He maintains an oddball website that promotes his musical appearances, notes screenings of his short, Goopy Spasms (an “animated cartoon film ode to butt-play”), and runs bits of cultural news, like this memorial to Don Dohler, creator of the fanzine mascot Projunior. His site is also full of his funny, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 2, 2007
FRAME BY FRAME

Previously I linked to David Bordwell’s analysis of Scorsese’s The Departed, in which he traced the average shot length in the director’s films over the years. Now, Bordwell has posted even more fascinating piece on editing and shot length. In a post entitled “My Name is David and I’m a Frame Counter,” Bordwell discusses mathematical relationships within edited sequences: Directors have been counting frames for a long time. Experimental filmmakers like Brakhage did. Ozu had a special stopwatch built to register feet and frames during filming. Hitchcock cared about frame counting too. In Film Art’s chapter on editing (pp. 224-225 […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 2, 2007
DOGGED OUT

In the wake of the controversy involving Hounddog, the Sundance premiere which featured a brief scene in which the character played by young actress Dakota Fanning is raped, a North Carolina politician is proposing that the state Senate review and approve screenplays for films receiving the state filming tax incentive. From an article by Mark Schreiner in the Wilmington Star: Citing the controversy surrounding the Dakota Fanning film Hounddog, the leader of the state Senate Republicans says he wants the government to review scripts before cameras start rolling in North Carolina. That system, said state Sen. Phil Berger, R-Rockingham, would […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 27, 2007
NO SUNSHINE FOR BONA FIDE

Over at her Risky Business blog, Ann Thompson writes about the Academy ruling that producers Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa of Bona Fide Films will not be eligible to accept the Oscar if their film Little Miss Sunshine wins Best Picture. This seems to deeply suck. They are the guys who developed the material early on, championed the directors and brought it to financiers Big Beach. But because of the Academy’s “rule of three,” they have been nixed from eligiblity in favor of Mark Turtletaub, David Friendly and Peter Saraf. I’m not saying that any of the other producers should […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 27, 2007
STARING DOWN THE SNAKE

Over at the Sundance 2007 main page, Bob Fisher talks with d.p. Amy Vincent about Black Snake Moan.
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 25, 2007

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