Cinekink, the festival that can lay claim to being truly alternative kicks, off tonight with an 8pm gala and fundraiser at the Kush Lounge, 191 Chrystie Street. Screening will be three shorts — Petra Joy’s Artcore, Chuck Renslow’s The Blue Rose, and Eva Midgley’s Erotic Moments. Tomorrow the fest moves over to the Anthology Film Archives with screenings of Daryl Wein’s doc Sex Positive and Robert Pratten’s erotic horror film MindFLESH. Other highlights include Barbara Bell and Anna Lorentzon’s Slamdance-premiering doc Graphic Sexual Horror, which looks at how the U.S. Patriot Act was used to shutter the extreme bondage website […]
New York filmmaker Patrick Daughters is one of my favorite music video directors, and his new clip for Depeche Mode’s “Wrong” has the queasy logic and panick-y vibe of a waking dream. See it below.
… that is, if your movie can cost $300. As reported by the Credit Matters Blog, the credit card company is offering select customers three c-notes if they’ll pay their cards off and close their accounts. For AmEx, the incentive serves to raise some cash and, undoubtedly, reduce on the books the amount of credit it needs to keep on reserve for each customer. With the company trying to shrink its rolls with such an undignified come-on, the AmEx of old, that tony symbol of having made it, may be gone. So, let’s revisit (in a remastered version) Jamie Stuart’s […]
Ted Hope has an impassioned editorial on the Tribeca Film site about the calamity that is the stalling out of the New York State Film and Television Tax Credit program. In the piece, which carefully details not only the economic but also creative disaster that will be caused by a cessation of the program, Hope raises a great question: All New York filmmakers—and those dependent on them—got a quick lesson two weeks ago, when we learned that the New York tax credits had run out of money. It hit everyone as a shock, but did it really need to? It […]
One of my favorite films at this year’s Sundance Film Festival was Ry Russo-Young’s New Frontiers selection You Won’t Miss Me, co-written by and starring Stella Schnabel. I’ve got a short conversation between Russo-Young and Lance Edmands, who cut the trailer with her, to run in our upcoming SXSW online coverage, but there’s one thing the director says in the interview that I want to quote here. As she discusses the intimacy she tries to create on-set with her actors, she says, “Well, I try to create an environment on set where people aren’t thinking about the film as a […]
Via Indiewire the very sad news that New Yorker Films, the storied art-film distribution company that released the films of Godard, Tarkovsky, Bertolucci, Resnais, Wenders, among others, shut its doors today. From an email sent by New Yorker’s Jose Lopez to filmmakers that was then forwarded to Indiewire: I have sad news.The parent company of New Yorker Films has defaulted on a loan. The assets of New Yorker were used as security on the loan. The lender has informed us that it intends to foreclose on these assets. New Yorker stopped doing business yesterday…We are in total shock that after […]
Film Independent‘s Spirit Awards just concluded in Santa Monica with Darren Aronofsky‘s The Wrestler walking away with Best Feature, Cinematography and Best Male Lead for Mickey Rourke, who did not disappoint when accepting the award (hopefully he kept some material for tomorrow night). Milk won Best Supporting Male (James Franco) and Best First Screenplay (Dustin Lance Black), Frozen River took home the Producer Award (Heather Rae) and Female Lead (Melissa Leo), Vicky Cristina Barcelona also took home two awards (Best Supporting Female for Penélope Cruz and Best Screenplay for Woody Allen) while Tom McCarthy received Best Director for The Visitor. […]
Our friends at Vice alerted us to this five-part series on Vice’s VBS.tv about the great doc filmmaker Albert Maysles. Check it out at the link, and the first episode is embedded below.
Taking note of the increasing number of our friends and fans on Twitter as well as the recent (and, I’m sure, orchestrated) barrage of mainstream coverage of the service, I set up a Filmmaker mag Twitter account (the Twitter ID is FilmmakerMag). Initially I thought I’d simply import the blog stream into the Twitter feed so followers would get a tweet with the URL every time the blog was updated. But then I started reading around and it seems that this kind of usage is a faux pas in the Twitter world. I’m of course well aware that numerous companies […]