Authors — Scott Macaulay

INDIE FILMMAKING, IRAQ STYLE

Anybody else check out the ABC News Nightline tonight? I’m watching as I’m blogging here about Ted Koppel’s interview with Cyrus Kar, an American documentary filmmaker who was held in an American detention center in Iraq for 55 days after the cab he was riding in was pulled over. When U.S. soldiers found a collection of washing machine timers in the cab’s trunk, suddenly his camera equipment, microphone wires and the cab driver’s timers all seemed elements of potential Improvised Explosive Devices. Kar was held briefly at Abu Ghuraib before being transferred to a prison near the airport that also […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 24, 2005
MARKETING THUMBS UP

Most movie marketing sucks, so when a campaign for a new film catches my eye and causes me to surf to the site and learn more about it, it’s worth throwing some props towards the filmmaker and marketing team. I first noticed the sweetly ironic posters for Mike Mill’s Thumbsucker last weekend in the East Village, and now the website is up. Check it out and you’ll find some of the usual materials (cast bios, a trailer, etc.) but also a lot of other stuff that seems personal and direct from the filmmaker. There’s a page devoted to the Humane […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 24, 2005
BRICK BY BRICK

I was on the international jury this year at Toronto’s Hot Docs, and one of the best and most original docs I saw there, Simone Bittan’s Wall, is receiving its U.S. premiere this Friday at the Quad in New York. Paris-based Bittan, who is both an Israeli and French citizen, was born in Morocco and considers herself an Arab Jew. Employing her hybrid identity as something of a structuring device, Wall documents the construction of the “security fence” that is separating Israel from Palestine, creating a portrait not only of a region divided but of a world in which the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 22, 2005
BALLARD ON POWELL: “REALISM HAS FAILED US…”

I was a big J.G. Ballard fan in my late teens and 20s when I pretty much devoured works like Terminal Beach, The Atrocity Exhibition (made into an independent feature by Jonathan Weiss, linked to here), The Crystal World, and Myths of the Near Future. I’ve been interested then to see the dystopian science fiction writer pop up several times in The Guardian in just the past couple of weeks. I quoted him below in a blog entry on a new Helmut Newton book, and here he is again in The Guardian discussing the great director Michael Powell in a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 22, 2005
MYOPIAWOOD

I have an informal ban on the word “Indiewood” in Filmmaker. It’s just too cutesy for me. But maybe I’ll pick up Bill Mechanic’s “Myopiawood,” coined in this opinion piece posted over at the Movie City News site. In “Welcome to Myopiawood,” the producer and former Fox head criticizes suggestions floating out there by folks like Mark Cuban that the various “windows” separating theatrical exhibition of films from their release on home video and pay television formats should be collapsed or even eliminated. And for those of you who think this is an esoteric argument, well, the folks at CNN […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 20, 2005
DIVIDED IMAGES

James Seo, whose Lossless Blog covers music, film, and, generally, all things Wong Kar-Wai, has created a new blog, Split Screen. It’s “dedicated to the art of the split screen and multi-layered visuals, as seen in movies, music videos, commercials and other media based on moving images.” Along with various art pieces, music videos (like ones from the Pixies and the B-52s), and links to clips from TV’s primary split-screen narrative, 24, the site highlights makers and projects like artist and designer Brendan Dawes and his Cinema Redux. Some quotes from Dawes’s site: “Using eight of my favourite films from […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 20, 2005
NOT QUITE A TOP TEN

There’s a fun piece in The Guardian today by John Patterson in which he lays out his ten films that made today’s cinema. It’s not a “ten best” list but instead a “ten most influential,” and not in a fussy, highbrow sort of way either. For example, here’s Patterson on his numbers four and five: “4. The Brady Bunch Movie (Betty Thomas, 1995) and 5. Scream (Wes Craven, 1996). Released within six months of each other, these were the first smart-ass stepchildren of the self-referential post-Pulp Fiction effect. The only refreshing way to rehash the blandly inoffensive 70s Bradys was […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 19, 2005
AKERMAN REDUX

Our friends over at the essential GreenCine Daily linked to this 1995 interview between media programmer Chris Dercon and filmmaker and artist Chantal Akerman, and that gives me a chance to link back to this blog I wrote a few weeks ago about Akerman’s current gallery installation at the Marian Goodman gallery. At the time I posted it, there were no press images available of the exhibition, but now there’s one, posted here, which captures the double-screen setup onto which Akerman’s quite powerful family history is projected. And here’s Akerman from the interview: “Anyway, I don’t really believe in the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 18, 2005
TEENAGE WASTELAND

Evan Rachel Wood, who I think will be the current teen star to have the most substantive film career, has the pretty terrible Pretty Persuasion opening this weekend, but if you’re a fan I’d head over to Crooks and Liars where they are hosting a Sammy Bayer/Green Day video, “Wake Me Up When September Ends”. With classic Aerosmith and Nirvana videos, Bayer has made a career of glossily capturing the American teen experience. Here he does it again with Wood and Jamie Bell playing out a drama that is a new reality for many of today’s kids..
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 13, 2005
GREEN HEADS BACK TO THE ’70S

Director David Gordon Green will appear this coming Monday night at the IFC Center to host screenings of two of his favorite ’70s films: Michael Cimino’s Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and Sidney Pollack’s Jeremiah Johnson. It’s the debut of the theater’s “Monday Night with…” series at which various artists will, says the press release, “acknowledge the brilliance of a timeless classic, to spotlight an unsung gem, or to defend a guilty pleasure.” Green comments on his choices: “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and Jeremiah Johnson serve as two examples in a period of American filmmaking when human nature often wrestled Mother Nature, and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 12, 2005

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