Cinekink co-founder and director Lisa Vandever emailed a short note with the press release announcing the film festival’s 2005 awards, which were handed out last week at the conclusion of the fest’s week-long run at the Anthology Film Archives. Last year, blogging the awards, I made a bit of fun out of Cinekink’s p.r. bannering of a special tribute award to At Home at the End of the World while the more provocative titles were chronicled well out of the lede. So this year, Vandever, who is profiled here in the New York Press by J.R. Taylor, makes note that […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 30, 2005Via GreenCine comes this link to a good new blog by Repo Man director Alex Cox. Click over to it and you’ll find Cox’s commentary on a forthcoming DVD “special edition” of his cult classic, news on possible new projects, and a bunch of interesting observations, from fancy L.A. hotels (“Hotels like this terrify my because they’re so fucking expensive. Even though my generous hosts paid for my bed and breakfast, every time you approach a door, some guy in a top hat opens it for you and you have to tip him ten bucks — whether you want to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 30, 2005Within the licentious world of popular entertainment, one film that has been hailed by folks of all stripes is March of the Penguins. However. for some the film is more than a dramatically shot nature documentary. The right has hailed the film as a parable of traditional values as well as an argument for “intelligent design,” the anti-evolution theory du jour. So, here’s director Luc Jacquet throwing some cold water on the Michael Medveds of the world in the Times Online: “‘If you want an example of monogamy, penguins are not a good choice,’ Luc Jacquet told The Times. ‘The […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 23, 2005I was reading GreenCine Daily and I noticed this link to a column at Kirkus reviews entitled “Adapt This,” which highlights hot film potential material from the month’s releases. Clicking to the column, I was happy to see that among this month’s four selections is Under the Bridge, the second book from former Filmmaker alumni Rebecca Godfrey. Here’s what Kirkus’s Chris Barsanti had to say about the book: “Although it initially has the feel of a story normally captured on film for, at best, a 15-minute piece in one of the weekly newsmagazine shows, Rebecca Godfrey’s haunting, true-life murder story […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 17, 2005Whether you’re on the left or the right, the most suspenseful narrative playing out right now is the Fitzgerald investigation into the Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson case. And one of the most passionate (and righteously sarcastic) bloggers covering this issue is movie producer Jane Hamsher, best known for her partnership with Don Murphy and producing of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers. Now based in Oregon and a contributer to the firedoglake blog, Hamsher brings the same punk sensibility to her political reporting as she did to her movie producing.
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 15, 2005Just below I linked to The Hollywood Reporter about the movie industry’s slow awakening to the impact on the Justice Department’s 2257 regulations on both studio and independent production. There’s a bunch of articles on the web this morning about H.R. 3132, the Children’s Safety Act, which passed the House and, if it gets through the Judiciary Committee and passes the Senate, will expand the onerous recordkeeping requirements of the 2257 in alarming ways. A number of the articles are on legal and cyber blogs. Here’s a piece on BoingBoing that details the consequences, and it includes PDF links to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 13, 2005When designer Tom Ford left Gucci a while back, he seemed to sink into a mid-life crisis with a series or morosely reflective interviews and then talked about going into the film business, becoming a director. It’s been a couple of years and no film is on the horizon, but Ford has just teamed with photographer Steven Klein, whose recent photos consciously draw upon the visual tropes of film narrative, to take off his clothes and do a W portfolio timed around the release of a makeup line for Estee Lauder. Style.com has a preview in which Ford, who, from […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 13, 2005Ray Pride posted this link to the new videoblog by the makers of the indie film Four-Eyed Monsters (which, given how hard I’ve been trying to get a screener DVD from the filmmakers, must be the hardest-to-see film of all this year’s hard-to-see pics without distribution). While I wait… and wait for a screener, I’ll content myself with the videoblog, the first clip of which is a totally charming ode to being a broke filmmaker without a deal.
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 12, 2005… about the article by Stephen Beachy in this week’s New York which argues that author and sometime Filmmaker contributor J.T. Leroy is actually not a young former teen hustler turned novelist but rather a 39-year-old mother from Brooklyn. To see what Leroy himself might have to say about the piece, I clicked over to his site and found the photograph, at right, on his homepage with the caption “The J.T. Leroy’s hard at work on the next novel.” An admission of truth or an ironic riposte? You decide…
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 12, 2005Back in July I posted this blog about the Federal Government’s new “2257” regulations and wondered why the independent film community, which can mobilize armies at the withdrawal of promotional screeners, has had so little to say about this bill which, while targeting the adult entertainment industry, looks to spread quite a bit of collateral damage. A week later I posted again after some readers added their own comments to the end of my original article. Now, today, finally, I read in The Hollywood Reporter a piece by Brooks Bollek which describes a ‘buried clause” in the regulation that could […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 12, 2005