Filmmaking

HAWK IS DYING MONEY BACK GUARANTEE

Ted Hope, who produced Julian Goldberger’s The Hawk is Dying with Jeff Levy-Hinte and Mary Jane Skalski, sent the below email out to his personal list regarding the film’s opening this Friday at the Cinema Village in New York. In it, he makes a bold and honest offer that he decided to open up to readers of this blog. I’m glad he did. In addition to his no-risk offer to see a provocative film that finds a new visual language to apply towards cinematic narrative, Hope makes a great argument. I especially was struck by his equation of today’s specialty […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 28, 2007 Filmmaking
RECURRING TRAUMA

In Philadelphia this weekend Lance Weiler is staging an innovative event based around his movie Head Trauma. Weiler describes it as a “collision of movies, music and gaming — a new cinematic experience.” After its premiere this Saturday, the event will travel to London, New York and other cities. More on the event: WHAT: Street parking and two parking garages in walking distance HOW MUCH:$14 for all seats – seating is on a first come first serve basis FOR MORE INFO:Show info and advance tickets and click here for more info on the movie. And for a little bit more […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 28, 2007 Filmmaking
ON THE MARK

In the current New Yorker, David Denby reviews Shooter and articulates a possible new action movie formula for the post-BushCo age: On the surface, the movie offers liberal ideological sentiments: it condemns covert overseas operations controlled by oil interests; it’s angry at the higher-ups who escaped blame for Abu Ghraib; it exhibits a clear distaste for the person and values of Dick Cheney. But it places these sentiments within a matrix of gun culture and lonely-man-of-honor myths. Swagger is the latest incarnation of Rambo, the anti-government crazy. The filmmakers may be trying to appeal both to liberals and to the […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 27, 2007 Filmmaking
BEFORE THE FALL

Over at Alternet, Joshua Holland interviews James Scurlock, director of Maxed Out, a documentary on debt and the debt industry in America. Completed in 2006 when it made the festival rounds and now available on Netflix, the pic is unfortunately all too timely given the current collapse of the sub-prime lending market. Here’s Scurlock from the interview: When I started the project a lot of people didn’t even know what bankruptcy reform was, but most do now. A few weeks ago, nobody knew what “subprime” meant and now because of this whole mortgage fiasco I think everyone knows what that […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 26, 2007 Filmmaking
VERHOEVEN FROM ACROSS THE COUCH

Hot off the servers, here’s Jamie Stuart’s not-to-be-missed newest creation which again blurs genres (here between the short film, the TV entertainment magazine show and the celebrity interview) to, this time, particularly mind-warping effect. Director Paul Verhoeven has fried a lot of brains in his cinematic lifetime, and his new film, Black Book, is being considered as one of his best. To interview him, Stuart put away his knit cap and one-ups the master of free-floating perversity by handing the reigns to a chirpy and obscenely animated E!-style news chick. Check it out by clicking here.

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 25, 2007 Filmmaking
BROWN BAGGING IT

The Times of London runs a sobering story from a Hollywood producer who can’t get a film made. In “Will I Ever Eat Lunch in This Town Again?” “Mr. X” discusses the travails of producing movies within the system. Here’s how he begins: Ostensibly, I produce movies for a living. The most recent movie I had a hand in producing won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Pretty heady stuff, to be sure. The reality, though, is slightly less fulfilling. We shot that film two years ago and, since then, I’ve produced nothing. Zilch. Not a frame of film, a […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 25, 2007 Filmmaking
DON’T JUDGE THE MOVIE BY ITS POSTER

After earning the ire of both the MPAA and alarmed motorists with its unapproved billboard campaign for the upcoming Elisha Cuthbert torture pic Captivity, After Dark Releasing is preparing to court further controversy with its campaign for Wristcutters, a very good film that deals, in part, with suicide. Here’s Gregg Goldstein in The Hollywood Reporter: Fifteen suicide prevention groups are dead set against After Dark Films’ proposed campaign for the comedy Wristcutters: A Love Story, which is set to bill itself with signs showing people killing themselves. After Dark Films co-owner Courtney Solomon said late Friday that while the film’s […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 25, 2007 Filmmaking
MORE GRINDHOUSE

Below, Nick Dawson tells us about 11 new Grindhouse clips online. While he was posting that, I was reading some of the early word on the film. Jeffrey Wells is mixed on the Rodriguez, but he really digs the Tarantino: Take away the car-chase finale and the Tarantino flick is almost all sublime, groovy-chick dialogue. This is Tarantino amblin’ country, all right — a place where very cool people (i.e., ’70s “street” archetypes) talk and talk and say it just right while sipping a Corona or smoking a Red Apple cigarette or eating a Big Kahuna burger. And yet Death […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 25, 2007 Filmmaking
SUNSHINE IN THE FALL

Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, a sci-fi epic starring Cillian Murphy and scripted by novelist and screenwriter Alex Garland (The Beach) doesn’t open here until the fall, but it premieres in the U.K. on April 7 and the early press has me really excited. Here’s Mark Kermode in The Guardian: Shot not in Hollywood but in the 3 Mills studios in London’s East End, Sunshine boasts extraordinary computer graphic imagery so luminescent you feel you could get sunburn just watching the film. As a sensory experience, it’s overwhelming. But perhaps more importantly, Sunshine also harks back to a time when sci-fi turned […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 25, 2007 Filmmaking
WE’RE NOT DRUG DEALERS

At his CinemaTech blog, Scott Kirsner reports on the speakers at yesterday’s Future of Film Conference in L.A. Along with various business types discussing new media platforms like Joost, the speakers included a director, Jason Kohn, who discussed his Sundance hit, Manda Bala: He wants to shoot movies on film, and have them seen in theaters. With his documentary, which focuses on corruption and kidnapping in Brazil, “I was reacting against the future of film. The future of film at the time was video, and I thought the future sucked. So I decided to change the future.” He said he […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 23, 2007 Filmmaking

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