Green Cine notes that filmmaker Sujewa Ekanayake, who posts on his Filmmaking for the Poor website, has launched a new blog: Indie Features 06. The site allows several filmmakers who are all finishing films this year and screening them in festivals or theaters to post in a “group blog” format their experiences. Filmmakers include Ekanayake, the four Texas-based directors behind the anthology film Deadroom, Chris Hansen (The Care and Feeding of an American Messiah, and filmmaker Rick Schmidt, whose Feature Filmmaking at Used Car Prices was one of the first no-budget film books ever published.
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 15, 2006The folks who run Antville, the music site, have just launched Shortsville, a blog consisting solely of links to cool short films and commercial clips. Bookmark it now.
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 15, 2006With Google’s stock dropping 27% in the last ten days and Barron’s devoting their cover to “In the Drink,” a merciless dissection of the company’s growth prospects, true value and stock price (readable gratis this week as Barron’s offers a trial freebie to its pay site), I’m going to pile on to the search giant with this link to Cory Doctorow’s piece up at Boing Boing titled “Google Video DRM: Why is Hollywood more important than users?” In a great look at the digital rights management system Google has put in place to “secure” the downloadable media on its new […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 14, 2006Movie City Indie maestro (and occasional Filmmaker contributing editor) Ray Pride posts a series of short docs entitled 12×5 which he directed with Amy Cargill over at Movie City News. Check out Ray’s deftly edited ruminations on personal futures as remembered from the past.
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 14, 2006Adam Dawtry reports in Variety on the latest in artistic gamesmanship from Lars von Trier, who announces a “Statement of Revitality” on the eve of shooting his new film, The Boss of it All. Reacting against various elements of the financing and publicity machine for arthouse cinema, Von Trier has put the last film of his Brechtian America-set Dogville trilogy on hold and is searching, as he did when he created “Dogma 95,” for a new way of working. Here’s his statment: “In conjunction with the departure of Vibeke Windelov, who has been my producer for ten years, and the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 11, 2006I wrote a note to myself yesterday: “Get in in touch with Ben Rekhi to find out how Waterborne is doing on the Google Video Store.” (I posted a few weeks ago about director Ben Rekhi’s experiment streaming his video on the Google platform and then proceeding on to selling paid downloads and DVDs.) Well, Ann Thompson has beat me to it. From her Risky Business blog: “Google Video’s distribution experiment on the bio-terrorist thriller Waterborne appears to be a success. According to Google Video, the first independent feature film to be released through the new Google Video Store was […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 10, 2006Australian stuntman turned commercials and short-film director Nash Edgerton is making a name for himself with intense and expertly executed short films like Lucky. Check it out.
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 8, 2006In Europe, the domestic theatrical business is as perilous as it is in the States. After spending time with a number of foreign distributors while at the Cinemart in Rotterdam, I was struck by the topics of conversation: declining audiences, fewer young people going to the movies, the threat to conventional theatrical from DVD day-and-date, and worries over the impact of new distribution platforms, like first-run downloading of feature films direct to cell phones. (Apparently, this was tried with The Interpreter in Italy and theatrical bookers revolted, booting the film off a number of Italian screens during its first run […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 8, 2006The A.V. Club has a review up of the comic book adaptation of Darren Aronofsky’s forthcoming The Fountain. From Noel Murray’s review: “It’s difficult to read The Fountain without imagining how it’s going to look as a movie, or wondering what Aronofsky ultimately changed for the screen. But that’s actually part of what’s enjoyable about the book. Readers can treat it like an elaborate storyboard and see a movie in their minds. Given Aronofsky’s penchant for obscurity, the mind-Fountain may even end up being clearer than the finished version, even though it lacks the director’s gift for dynamic cinematic poetry. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 6, 2006I received two emails recently from filmmakers who are highlighting their work on newly launched websites. The first was from director and editor Jim Helton, whose Blue Coup D’Etat is, as he describes, a “docu-poetic video blog” where he’s posting “sometimes little silent movies of friends and family, sometimes sound movies, sometimes simple, sometimes complicated.” Helton is a world traveller, and many of these mini-movies capture brief flashes from journies to Bangkok, Koh Samui and other places. Other clips feature (and are birthday gifts to) his filmmaker friends Derek Cianfrance and Shannon Plumb. The second site is BorderLine Films, the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 6, 2006