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Former Filmmaker editor Chuck Stephens penned this engaging report from Soi Thonglor, the street he lives on “deep in the heart of Bangkok… where intellectual property rights aren’t exactly chief among local law enforcement’s concerns.” His “Ten Best” list (Number 1: Tropical Malady) includes a number of titles seen on bootleg DVDs Stephens picked up at his local grocery store. In the article, Stephens points out that apathetic distributors worldwide are causing dedicated cineates to rely on cheap black market DVDs just to keep up with the artform. Also great reading, although not on the web, unfortunately, is Wired‘s cover […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 29, 2004Susan Sontag, author, activist, and critic, died in New York today at 71. A tremendously influential figure in post-war American culture, and one of the last remaining people for whom the term “public intellectual” might apply, Sontag had a special relationship with cinema, occasionally directing experimental films but more often influencing films, filmmakers and other critics with her writing. Essays such as “Notes on Camp,” which found an alternative and politically transgressive means of valuing culture through gay aesthetics, “Against Interpretation,” which argued against the critical reduction of art to easily identifiable themes and messages, and “On Photography” which examined […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 28, 2004I’ve long been a fan of Dennis Cooper’s, the author of such formally audacious, heartbreakingly terrifying and sexually transgressive novels as Closer, Frisk and My Loose Thread. He has a new novel, God, Jr., a “PG-13” one, coming out this spring, but in the meantime Cooper has chosen the small Void Books to publish a “side project,” The Sluts, he considers too much for his regular publisher, Grove. Considering that Cooper has spent his entire literary career living outside the envelope, it does make me a little afraid to contemplate this new one. Says the press release: Set largely on […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 22, 2004Film Comment editor Gavin Smith is always kind enough to send me the ballot for the magazine’s annual “50 Best” rundown (actually, two rundowns — the “50 Best Released” and “Unreleased” Films of the Year), but as a reader of the magazine I’m always a bit intimidated by how much I don’t manage to see in a given year — especially this one, in which I spent about six months out of town, five of them in a arthouse-deprived place where Anchorman was my top viewing experience. So, I sit on the ballot rather than skew the results due to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 22, 2004I’m curious to see the New Museum’s new East Village USA exhibition, which memorializes the downtown art world of the early to mid 1980s, a time in which art, fashion, film, hip-hop, and rock all jostled and congealed into a movement that can now be encapuslated into something like, well, a museum exhibition. (That it was also a time when AIDS rampaged through the New York arts community gives the show its measure of sadness for those who lived in New York at the time and knew many of these people.) Writes curator Dan Cameron, “Imagine a village where everybody […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 11, 2004Kudos to Indiewire for nabbing the text of Dan Talbot’s engagingly long-winded speech at last week’s Gotham Awards. Personally, I found Talbot’s trip down memory lane kind of a blast, sitting as I was before the teleprompter which kept flashing “Please wrap it up!” Anyway, for notes on how it used to be in NYC art film exhibition, click on the above.
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 10, 2004I don’t know about you, but I’m enjoying tremendously Manohla Dargis’s film writing in the New York Times, particularly the more freewheeling attitude that runs through her pieces. Her Godard interview of a few weeks back was brilliantly edited. Leaving in his intellectual japes and her bemused ripostes — bits that might have been edited out in the hands of another Times critic — both made the piece entertaining and indicative of Godard’s entire enterprise. In today’s Times, Dargis steps in front of her byline to frankly answer questions from readers. (Registration required.) In response the various queries she raves […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 8, 2004I haven’t seen The Incredibles yet, but when I do I’ll be parsing its politics like some sort of Frankfurt School flunky because of a number of conversations I’ve been drawn into recently about the film. My brother calls it the best animated movie he’s seen, but at my Gotham Awards table the other night, a publicist and editor attacked it for what they read as its regressive politics. For a sort of Incredibles study guide, check out this piece in The Guardian’s newsblog that deftly summarizes the various critiques of Brad Bird’s Pixar creation. The piece begins by evoking […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 8, 2004Producer, screenwriter and co-president of Focus Features James Schamus penned this sharp essay in In These Times on one short-term goal progressive citizens can rally around during their post-election blues: oppose the nomination of White House Legal Counsel Alberto Gonzales to the position of Attorney General. Schamus explains: The mainstream media uses the word “torture” to describe those (hundreds of) documented cases of “isolated” incidents, performed by those “few bad apples” at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. When it comes to the pervasive use of torture at Guantánamo’s Camp X-Ray and scores of other secret military prisons around the globe, the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 7, 2004I always admire those who are able to lay either their professional and personal lives out online for all to see. One person who does this when it comes to his independent film producing is Muse Production’s Chris Hanley, who has made an entertaining habit of posting on his website copies of business emails he’s received under the apt header of “Scathing Letters.” For a while the letters sections was filled with angry back-and-forths from folks like Vincent Gallo and Don Murphy over older Muse projects, but Hanley has updated the site recently with two choice bits of correspondence, both […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 6, 2004