Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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The Blue Velvet Project, #94
Second #4418, 73:38 At Ben’s, at last. The woman, the doll, and the painting above them—framed by the green (velvet?) curtains—telegraph Frank’s entrance. They are a tightly composed grouping in an open frame, whose curtains anticipate the vaudeville show which is about to unfold, complete with Ben’s lip-synched performance of “In Dreams,” some stock violence, and a running gag that features Jeffrey as the butt of a joke he does not understand. Ben’s apartment is an anarchy of crossed signals and mental jump cuts. The year after Blue Velvet’s release, Robert Coover’s story collection A Night at the Movies, or, […]
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How to Create a Profitable VOD Strategy
This distribution case study of American: The Bill Hicks Story has been previously posted at Indiewire, and when it went up, I quickly scanned it and tweeted their link. But now I’ve actually had time to read it carefully, and it’s a very useful document that deserves its own place on the blog. A Powerpoint presentation prepared for a panel at this year’s SXSW moderated by Orly Ravid, the document walks you through the filmmaker’s DIY theatrical and various VOD and digital distribution deals. There are revenue numbers here, and not just for American, but also other movies released by […]
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UPDATES TO OUR CURATED KICKSTARTER PAGE
I just added several projects to Filmmaker‘s curated Kickstarter page. They include Galileo, a cool new device that adds remote control functionality to your iPhone; The Miracle Mile Paradox, an ARG (alternate reality game) set in both viritual space as well as L.A.’s museum strip; The Man’s Guide to Love, a fiction feature film developed from the filmmaker’s two-year old website containing short-form doc content on men in love; The First Hope, a UCLA film student’s short about a young boy’s romantic life beginning when he sees Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia kiss; Brendt Barbur’s The Commentator, a doc featuring […]
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Senate Passes JOBS Act with Modified Crowdfunding Rules
The JOBS (Jumpstart Our Small Businesses) Act, a collection of six bills intended to make it easy for small businesses to raise capital by relaxing various Securities and Exchange Commission requirements, including those related to crowdfunding, passed the Senate yesterday. It is now headed back to the House for reconciliation and could become law next week. While the House version of the bill passed swiftly with bipartisan backing, its passage through the Senate was rockier, with some Democrats and progressives warning that the bill would dilute necessary investor protections contained in the 2002, post-Enron Sarbanes Oxley Act. The bill exempts […]
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THE DILEMMA OF “ALL IN: THE POKER MOVIE”
In 2009, I attended the CineVegas Film Festival, where Doug Tirola’s documentary All In: The Poker Movie had its world premiere. While there, I briefly met the affable Tirola, and was pleased for him when, at the fest’s awards ceremony, the film was given the Best Documentary prize. However, a distribution deal — which seemed likely given the fact that poker’s popularity was at an all-time high in 2009 — did not materialize, and it has taken three years for All In to arrive in theaters, now released by Tirola’s company, 4th Row Films. When I saw All In on […]
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Lady Vengeance: A Genre Fan’s Guide to 2012 New Directors/New Films
New Directors/New Films is known for bringing some of the freshest, boldest films to light, and not necessarily just for New York audiences. Arthouse theaters around the country often make selections from this well-regarded festival’s programming. The relatively high-brow co-presentation of the The Museum of Modern Art and the The Film Society of Lincoln Center is not, however, generally considered a place to discover new genre film, despite its reputation for supporting ballsy young upstarts. Yet perhaps the increasing cultural and cinematic significance of sufficiently well-made genre films is now keeping them from being overlooked by the festival that saves […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #93
Second #4371, 72:51 As they speed towards Ben’s, Frank’s police radio suddenly bursts forth with sound and Hunter—in the passenger’s seat—picks it up excitedly and says, like a lunatic with a swamp accent, “Po-lice call! Po-lice call!” until Frank snatches the radio from him. It’s perhaps the most slapstick part of the movie, and for a moment there’s the possibility that Frank and his crew are too incompetent to hurt Jeffrey. This is the second time that Frank has uncoiled so quickly (the first happened when he suddenly grabbed Jeffrey in the hallway of Dorothy’s apartment) and within a split […]
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BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND “THE DEEP BLUE SEA”
Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz) appears to have everything. The 40-ish protagonist of Terence Davies’s new film, The Deep Blue Sea, set in London in 1949-50 and adapted by Davies from Terence Rattigan’s 1952 play, she is stunning, wealthy, cultured, intelligently opinionated, and articulate. But her inability to make the distinction between love and lust proves to be her downfall. Most of us learn to know the difference. Although it might be difficult for someone in 2012 to fathom, Hester is a creature of her times. This daughter of an Anglican vicar married according to class expectations. Her husband was a […]
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4:44 Last Day on Earth — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Abel Ferrara’s 4:44 Last Day on Earth premiered at the 68th Venice Film Festival. It’s being released theatrically by IFC Films on March 23, 2012.) A number of recent films have collectively suggested that the more global, or even cosmic, the crisis, the more intimate the response. This was done most recently in Perfect Sense but also last summer’s Another Earth and, to a lesser extent, The Tree of Life, about which it might be more accurate to say that the cosmic is crafted from the intimate. (Melancholia breaks from this trend somewhat, and its cold remove is part of what makes it so disconcerting a film.) This art-house apocalypse continues in […]
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FIRST TEASER UNVEILED FOR DAVID CRONENBERG’S “COSMOPOLIS”
Now that the film has come and gone, I seem to be in the minority of those who thought that David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Mind, with its viral take on the philosophy of psychology, was his most Cronenbergian film in years. But based on the just-released teaser, perhaps that crown may be more appropriately placed on his upcoming Don DeLillo adaptation, Cosmopolis. Even at only 30 seconds, many of them filled with title-cards, there’s a sense of brainy spectacle here that we haven’t seen in the director’s work in a while.
