Authors — Scott Macaulay

BLOGGING TORONTO

The Toronto Film Festival doesn’t start until later this week, but already its new doc blog is off to a great start. It’s both an online destination to update yourself on festival news as well as a place for Festival filmmakers to write about everything from the making of their films to other films at the festival they’ve been compelled by. There are a bunch of great pieces already up. Here, for example, is Sophie Fiennes on her Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, a three-part documentary in which Slavoj Zizek analyzes films by such favorite directors as Hitchcock, Lynch and Tarkovsky: […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 4, 2006
SECOND DATES

Sujewa Ekanayake emailed with a couple of good links. The first is Alison Wilmore’s piece on IFC.com detailing three filmmakers — Ekanayake plus Andrew Bujalski (Mutual Appreciation) and Lance Weiler (Head Trauma — who have gone the self-distribution route. “September may be the month self-distribution comes into its own,” she writes. And then there’s Ekanayake’s interview with Michael Tully on the eve of his Cocaine Angels New York premiere. Check them out and support these filmmakers as their films get released this month.
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 3, 2006
DRIFTING

The album of the year — Scott Walker’s The Drift — now has an amazing, sepulchral music video to go along with it. It’s late, I’m tired, so I’m just going to quote from Pitchfork: Animator/Tomato-associate Graham Wood has assembled an appropriately eerie, nightmarish mindfuck of a video for Scott Walker’s “Jesse”, from this year’s Best New Music’d The Drift. The piece, which recalls both Stanley Donwood’s work with Radiohead circa OK Computer and the storied 4AD aesthetic, features familiar symbols and pictograms (smiley face, generic man and woman, cross) a-Drift in a kaleidoscope of dissolving lines, patterns, and textures. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 31, 2006
BLOG ROUNDUP

The fourth Tuesday of every month Nicole Rafter, author of Shots in the Mirror: Crime Films and Society, contributes a column on crime films to the Oxford University Press blog. In her latest column she takes on my favorite whipping boy from one of my favorite directors, this summer’s Miami Vice: It may be that crime films in general are running out of gas today after the revival and boom of the late 20th-century that began in 1967 with the release of Bonnie and Clyde and went into high gear in 1971, when Dirty Harry introduced the new genre of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 27, 2006
HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS

Over at Movie City Indie, Ray Pride tips this L.A. Times piece by James Ellroy in which the noir author ruminates on his flight from and return to Los Angeles, the city that has inspired so many of his novels. With Brian DePalma’s adaptation of The Black Dahlia (pictured) just a few weeks away, Ellroy sketches the psychic landscape of the city while discussing emotional and mental breakdowns, literary mania, and general sleeplessness. From the piece: L.A. bids pundits to spin epigrams. W.H. Auden called L.A. “The Great Wrong Place.” I’ll ascribe intent. Auden saw L.A. as a lodestone for […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 27, 2006
SLOW TRAIN COMING

Over at Hollywood Elsewhere, Jeffrey Wells thinks that the trailer for Todd Field’s Little Children is the best trailer of the year. As he explains in the story linked to above, Fields didn’t want the trailer to have “music, dialogue or story.” The trailer New Line, Field and the trailer company came up with uses prominent sound design — a foreboding train horn — and shots of the actors to succinctly capture the film’s marital implosions. The trailer is good, and it’s all the more striking for its avoidance of today’s typical trailer cliches and conventions. It was cut by […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 27, 2006
TONI, TONI, TONI

I’ve been a fan of New Zealand stuntman-turned-director Nash Edgerton for a little while now, and I just came across this lovely music video for Toni Collette. (Yes, Toni Collette sings.) It takes a little while for one of Edgerton’s twists to arrive, but the one-take video is quite gorgeous and worth checking out. For more of Edgerton’s work, check out his website. I’m sure he’ll be moving into features very soon.
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 26, 2006
HOLDING DOWN THE FORT

If you want to read some great and diverse film writing, I really recommend you check out Stu Van Airsdale’s The Reeler this week. While Stu travels to L.A., he’s asked a great group of New York film people to guest-blog, and so far, each writer has really risen to the challenge. Check out Stu’s blog and read: Andrew Wagner posting from the editing room of his new feature; James Ponsoldt on MOMA’s Dada show and the art movement’s relationship to contemporary comedy; author Lauren Wissot on Roman Polanski’s foot fetish; AMMI curator David Schwartz on Jacques Rivette; Eric Kohn […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 26, 2006
NEW BEGINNING

Rian Johnson, who wrote and directed the recently released Brick, has helmed a music video for Mountain Goats, which you can see below.
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 18, 2006
WAITING FOR THE MAN

Halfway through Pusher, Nicolas Winding Refn’s first installment in what would ultimately become an epic trilogy, the director faced a predicament. Suddenly, the genre marked by guns and car chases held no interest. He abandoned the beatings and foot chases from the film’s early scenes, and went for a haunting, harrowing character study. “I realized I wasn’t interested in gangsters and crime,” the Danish filmmaker explains of his 1996 film. “I was really interested in the morality of the characters, and their emotional descents into hell.” That’s from KM Doughton’s feature on Nicholas Winding Refn’s Pusher trilogy which we’ve just […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 16, 2006

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