Over at the main page check out Howard Feinstein’s just-posted interview with Wong Kar-wai about his My Blueberry Nights, the opening night film at Cannes.
Via Movie City News comes this fascinating story from BBC news: An Austrian filmmaker has come up with a novel way of avoiding the costs of creating a movie – by making her film entirely from images of real life captured by CCTV cameras. Called Faceless, the film is the project of London-based Manu Luksch, who is both the star and director and describes it as a “science fiction fairy tale”. By taking CCTV of herself and blocking out the faces of anyone else captured on it, she created a story set in the future, in the “faceless world” – […]
It’s a rainy mid-day in late August — the wetness welcome, following an intolerably hot week, even by New York City summer standards. At night during that unpleasant spell the postmodern auteur Wong Kar-wai — the master of lush visuals and unpredictable soundtracks, the absolute perfectionist concerned with memory, loss, loneliness, and the subjectivity of time — had been shooting scenes downtown on the West Side of Manhattan, on SoHo’s funky Grand Street, for My Blueberry Nights, his first movie in English and the out-of-competition opening night presentation at this year’s Cannes Film Festival (The Weinstein Company will release the […]
The long-running French film journal Cahiers du Cinema recently launched an online English-language edition. In the current issue there’s a provocative article by the editors entitled “12 Objectives for Cinema in France” that I’ve been meaning to comment on. Written before Sarkozy’s victory — a prospect Cahiers clearly considered when drafting the article — the piece is interesting for what it says to some of us American fans of French cinema as well as for its implications on our own American indie film. (For more on the possible repercussions of Sarko’s win and what his promised “break with the past” […]
Thanks to the folks over at Screengrab for the nice words about the new issue of Filmmaker. (And also for catching our over use of the phrase “a perfect storm” twice in one issue — honestly, we didn’t know it was going to be the title of George Tenet’s book.) There’s a bunch of good stuff over at Screengrab, including, for Mother’s Day, their list of the worst movie mothers in film history. Click on the link above to check it out.
Actress Evan Rachel Wood seems to be the go-to-girl for ambitious music videomakers. First there was her starring role in Green Day’s anti-war “Wake Me Up when September Ends” video: And now she joins reported new b.f. Marilyn Manson in “Heart Shaped Glasses,” an NSFW homage to David Lynch (plenty of red curtains), David Cronenberg and, perhaps, Hermann Nitsch. (Oh yeah, if you’re under 16 you’re not supposed to watch this.)
Below I blogged about the L.A. Weekly piece, “Double Cross at the WGA,” which was an explosive account of the Writer’s Guild of America’s policy of collecting and not always paying foreign levies on behalf of member and non-member writers. It’s a complicated story but well worth following for several reasons, not the least of which is what it says about our current and possibly future system of copyright. Now there’s more on the story. Stefan Avalos has written a long and nuanced piece about the scandal at Fade In Online. (The story begins on the website’s front page and […]
If you’re in New York you’ve got a few days left to catch Guy Maddin’s Brand upon the Brain, the director’s spectacular staging of his latest movie with a live chamber orchestra, castrato, three live foley artists and an assortment of guest narrators like Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson and Isabella Rossellini. Like all of Maddin’s work, the film immerses itself in the poetics of early cinema, applying the style this time to a storyline that seems a mix of Dickens and gothic horror. But what makes it a must-see is its rare event quality. When the musicians start, the foley […]
Until such time as The Day the Clown Cried sees the light of day, we might just have to settle for… Georgia Rule.. Here’s John Anderson’s genius lede to his Variety review: No offense to either of them, but Georgia Rule suggests an Ingmar Bergman script as directed by Jerry Lewis. The subject matter is grim, the relationships are gnarled, the worldview is bleak, and, at any given moment, you suspect someone’s going to be hit with a pie.
Over at David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema, Bordwell has one of his great screen-grab filled comparative film essays, this time on the relationship between film framing and humor. “Can a shot be amusing in itself?” asks Bordwell before going on to talk about Tati, Barry Sonenfeld, and a sequence from Shaun of the Dead that features the two shots below: Writes Bordwell of the scene in which two groups of survivors meet in zombie-filled London, “The gag’s premise is that each survivor has a counterpart in the other line. There are two posers in brown leather jackets, two can-do girls, […]