Filmmaking

FUR FLIES

If you link to this blog and bypass the main page, I just want to point you to Peter Bowen’s excellent interview with director Steve Shainberg, whose Fur opens today. An excerpt: Filmmaker: You didn’t want to make the film look like Arbus’s work, but you also cast Nicole Kidman, who doesn’t look like Arbus. Why Kidman? Shainberg: Whenever I see a biopic, no matter how much the person looks like the person they are playing, it just looks like a bad high school play to me. There is no way that Will Smith is going to look like Muhammad […]

By Scott Macaulay on Nov 10, 2006 Filmmaking
REMEMBERING ROSSELLINI

Here’s an early holiday gift for all you Roberto Rossellini fans. Beginning next Wednesday and running through Dec. 22 the Museum of Modern Art will be holding a Rossellini retrospective that will include his work in film, TV and a parallel exhibition on his film posters (retrospective also has dates set in LA and London). Manohla Dargis wrote up a little retro of her own in today’s New York Times and points out the lack of recognition the auteur has in the States. “One can’t live without Rossellini,” a character declares in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1964 film “Before the Revolution.” Yet, […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Nov 10, 2006 Filmmaking
CLIPS 4 SALE

If your browser is working correctly, you’ve got Travis Bickle reciting his famous “Are you talking to me” speech from Taxi Driver on the screen below. And have I lifted his copywritten content off of YouTube to add some zest to the blog? No, using the Screenbites Channel of the Grouper website I’ve legally placed this clip — and an ad for the film’s DVD — on the blog along with a feature that allows you to upload your own rendition of the DeNiro monologue. Scott Kirsner (who picked the far friendlier Groundhogs Day for his own demo) explains over […]

By Scott Macaulay on Nov 9, 2006 Filmmaking
Taxi Driver: Are You Talking To Me?

Taxi Driver: Are You Talking To Me? View on Grouper.com Add to Blogger Blog Add a video comment to this video

By Scott Macaulay on Nov 9, 2006 Filmmaking
THE WAY WE WERE

In a post entitled “It Was All So Simple Then,” Mark K-Punk explores “the reality of nostaliga” in a typically wide-ranging essay that skips from Tarkovsky’s Solaris to Freud, Thomas Hardy, Gladys Knight and the Pips, The Way We Were, Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia, Roxy Music, Marvin Hamlisch, Blade Runner, Samuel Beckett, the Wu Tang Clan and Charlie Kaufman. From the opening: The reality of nostalgia is nowhere better invoked than at the end of Tarkovsky’s Solaris. When the camera pans away from Kelvin embracing his father on the rain-soaked steps of his dacha, we realise that the scene is yet another […]

By Scott Macaulay on Nov 9, 2006 Filmmaking
CAMP CLOSED

On the heels of evangelist Ted Haggard’s troubles (which Scott blogged about yesterday), reports have surfaced that the summer camp featured in Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s Jesus Camp is being discontinued due to “negative reaction sparked by the film and recent vandalism at the camp site,” according to a Reuters story.

By Jason Guerrasio on Nov 9, 2006 Filmmaking
HOLLYWOOD 2.0

Like we do with our 25 New Faces feature, which spotlights very emerging writing, directing, acting and below-the-line talent, the Hollywood Reporter has just come out with its own list, a survey of industry execs moving up the Hollywood ladder. (These round-ups are always fun pieces that people actually take very, very seriously. I once met a Hollywood exec who half-boasted, half-apologized that he was one of only two people in some magazine’s years ago profile of up-and-coming folks who didn’t go on to run a studio or agency.) Anyway, the editors at THR have picked 35 people for their […]

By Scott Macaulay on Nov 8, 2006 Filmmaking
MR. RAY GOES TO HOLLYWOOD

David Carr has an interesting piece in today’s New York Times on Shattered Glass writer-director Billy Ray who had some refreshing things to say while at a Writers Guild seminar during AFM. Carr writes: Mr. Ray said during the panel that the movie business was akin to Prada and Dior’s hitting the runway with the same fashions year after year and expecting to wow the people sitting there. But he remains stuck on the idea of people sitting in the dark, sharing a communal “dream state,” as he calls it. He pointed out that in a business where no one […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Nov 8, 2006 Filmmaking
YOUTUBE, VIRAL VIDEO, AND THE ELECTIONS

Over at The Daily Reel, which has become a go-to site for the latest in viral video as well as occasional media-related political commentary (disclosure: I’m a writer for the site), there are a couple of postings up about yesterday’s election. Anthony Kaufman looks at election day improprieties, centering on YouTube clips highlighting the inadequacies of the Diebold voting machines. And Alexandra DeLyle looks at the effect of YouTube on the elections, highlighting the George Allen/”Macaca” clip and the Claire McCaskill/Michael J. Fox ad.

By Scott Macaulay on Nov 8, 2006 Filmmaking
COME AS YOU ARE

Over at Nerve, Daniel Nemet-Nejat interviews A.J. Schnack,, whose Kurt Cobain Without a Son recently played at the AFI Festival. Constructed around a series of audio recordings of Cobain conducted by journalist Michael Azerrad, the doc is a surprisingly poetic and non-didactic portrait of a reluctant rock star’s interior life. Here’s Schnack on his approach towards constructing the film: I tried to pay attention to Michael’s desires that it be unusual, not the typical cut-and-paste piece about a band. Immediately I thought what would be interesting to me is if the tapes would be the single source for the narrative, […]

By Scott Macaulay on Nov 8, 2006 Filmmaking

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