Filmmaker Victoria Mahoney premiered her first feature,Yelling to the Sky, in Competition at the Berlin Film Festival this month, and arriving in the city with her was British graffiti artist Robbo. And by the time of the film’s premiere, the city was the richer for a wall-sized mural of the film’s lead character, Sweetness (Zoe Kravitz). Below, Mahoney writes about the process of finding a home for Robbo’s work. Her story has an ironic coda given Robbo’s recent street rivalry with Banksy. Read on. I always knew I’d be mounting a graffiti piece in tandem with the premiere of Yelling […]
Director Harmony Korine has shot the Spring, 2011 Urban Outfitters catalog. From The Fox is Back: “It’s a pretty crazy looking affair. Lots of analog photos that have been fucked up in some way or another. It seems to me like less of a fashion catalog and more of a collection of art, which I think is admirable for UO to be doing.” I can’t find these images on the Urban Outfitters site, but they appear to be all from a print-only piece that arrived in people’s mailboxes this week. Click on the link for scans of many of the […]
A couple of years ago filmmaker Mike Hedge did a great photo-compilation video out of SXSW and now he’s emailed his list with a new video that’s a diary of his 2010. I like this idea. Rather than my seldomly-updated journal something like this would actually make me want to revisit my own musings on the past. Watch “Every Day is Spectacular” here.
You couldn’t escape it if you tried. Where ever you went, whoever you talked to, and whenever you were on Twitter and/or Facebook for the last few weeks, The New Yorker piece on Paul Haggis and the inner workings of Scientology has been the topic of discussion. The USA Today asked Haggis about the story at a Vanity Fair Oscar party Tuesday night and the Oscar-winning director says he stands by it. Haggis, who was a member of the Church of Scientology for over 30 years, disbanded from the religion in 2009 after the church refused to publicly denounce Proposition […]
The IFP announced today the lineup for this year’s Script to Screen Conference. Taking place March 5, the event will take place at 92Y Tribeca in New York City. This year’s keynotes include Barry Levinson and Black Swan screenwriter Mark Heyman. There will also be a discussion on new platforms for writers with Onion News Network head writer Carol Kolb, a conversation with producer Ted Hope and the filmmakers behind Sundance hit Martha Marcy May Marlene talk about creative teamwork. To learn more about the conference and how to get tickets go to http://www.ifp.org/script-to-screen-conference/ Read the press release on Script […]
At the Chicago Sun-Times in a column entitled “The do-it-yourself auteurs,” Steven Boone writes about the city symphony film and ties it to Jamie Stuart’s recent Idiot with a Tripod. He puts Stuart in a category of “DDIY” (the extra “d” is for “digital”) filmmakers who are the “garage Kubricks” once prophesized by William Gibson. There’s also a video by Kevin B. Lee with text by Boone. Check it out below.
Not to pick on Anne Thompson again, a fine industry journalist certainly, but a blog entry she published this past Friday piqued my interest for all the wrong reasons. (See the post, the healthy comments thread, and also David Poland’s response.) Thompson took a critical stance on a new feature of the New York Times’ Carpetbagger section, where lead critics Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott will provide an in-depth answer to one reader’s question every month. Allowing the critics to choose a question to answer, and giving them some time to work on their response, as opposed (one presumes) to […]
Here are a few things in my Instapaper this week. In GQ, Mark Harris looks back at “The Day the Movies Died” and the preeminence of easy marketing over original ideas. An excerpt: Such an unrelenting focus on the sell rather than the goods may be why so many of the dispiritingly awful movies that studios throw at us look as if they were planned from the poster backward rather than from the good idea forward. Marketers revere the idea of brands, because a brand means that somebody, somewhere, once bought the thing they’re now trying to sell. YouTube has […]
As followers of my Twitter feed know, for me Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was the defining album of 2010. A new video directed by Hype Williams has just dropped for “All of the Lights,” featuring Rihanna and Kid Cudi. I hope something — a check, case of Cristal, or maybe just an autographed poster — is winging its way to Mr. Gaspar Noe. (Or, on second thought, there are a bunch of songs left on the album without videos. “Monster” is already taken, but what about “Hell of a Life”? I’d love to see what the great […]
Two of Filmmaker’s “25 New Faces” have excellent movies opening today that are worthy of your first weekend patronage. From Tariq Tapa, who made our list in 2008, is Zero Bridge. Here’s what I wrote about him back then: “Everything I used to make this movie, from soup to nuts, fit in one little backpack,” says Tariq Tapa, whose Zero Bridge, a neorealist tale of unexpected friendship and moral complication set in the Indian-occupied city of Srinagar, Kashmir, is set to explode on the festival circuit this year. Tapa, who not only directed this first feature but shot, edited and […]