Filmmaking

JANE, YOU IGNORANT SLUT!

There’s a great point/counterpoint going on over at The Onion’s A.V. Club Blog having to do with whether or not Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy and Andrew Bujalski’s Mutual Appreciation (pictured) are the future of independent cinema. Or, actually, whether we should be scolded for not ensuring that they are considered as such. First Scott Tobias’s original post, which is entitled “Mutual Appreciation, Old Joy and the Current State of American Independent Film.” An excerpt: …If you care at all about American independent films, you’re required to see these movies…. Watching these movies in short succession was a pretty bracing experience […]

By Scott Macaulay on Sep 25, 2006 Filmmaking
MUST SEE TV

Here at Crooks and Liars is the Fox News Bill Clinton clip, which Ray Pride says this about: Why does Fox News’ Chris Wallace hate America? (Rhetorical question.) Every writer who’s been on a beat for years or decades has a few tropes, fixations and straw men they fall back upon on a morning with a touch of the flu: pudding-headed political commentators love to describe dark turns in a pol’s career as “Shakespearean,” which, unless it’s coming from a studied, articulate, passionate former theater critic like Frank Rich, is usually so much bumf drawn from a dip into the […]

By Scott Macaulay on Sep 24, 2006 Filmmaking
THE WORD OF GOD

Over on the main page Annie Nocenti interviews the directors of Jesus Camp,, the incredibly fascinating documentary that opened this weekend from Magnolia Pictures. In the piece, co-director Heidi Ewing discusses Magnolia’s strategy to position the film as something of interest to both Christian evangelical audiences and godless hipsters in the big city: Ewing: Eamonn wants to bring the film to Christian strongholds before it hits L.A. or New York. Colorado Springs, Kansas City — they get the movie first. Magnolia is withholding the film from the secular world for one or two weeks. The Evangelicals have time to embrace […]

By Scott Macaulay on Sep 24, 2006 Filmmaking
"ARE YOU TALKIN’ TO ME?"

Over at Ticklebooth Ajit Anthony Prem gets ready for Martin Scorsese’s The Departed by trolling YouTube for homemade renditions of Robert DeNiro’s classic scene from Taxi Driver. From Prem’s post: There are were many impersonations of De Niro on Youtube, mostly of the notorious “You talking to me?” scene. The scene was largely improvised by De Niro who clearly was “living the role.” The scene is not as powerful as it once used to be. When Taxi Driver was first released, films resisted getting into its character’s head, to spend alone-time with someone. Before Taxi Driver, scenes were clearly part […]

By Scott Macaulay on Sep 24, 2006 Filmmaking
IFP MARKET WINNERS

At a luncheon celebrating the end of the IFP Market and Filmmaker Conference at NoHo’s Chinatown restaurant this Thursday, a number of awards were given to films and filmmakers who were part of the IFP’s various programs. The winners are: The Fledgling Fund Award for Emerging Latino Filmmakers ($10,000): Vivian Lesnik Weisman. IFP Market Emerging Narrative Screenplay Award ($5,000, presented by Artists Public Domain): I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, Scott Teems. IFP Market Documentary Completion Award ($5,000, presented by Artists Public Domain, and $25,000 in-kind support from Alpha Cine, Analog Digital International, Mercer Media, Showbiz Software/Media […]

By Scott Macaulay on Sep 23, 2006 Filmmaking
ON THE MAIN PAGE…

If you’re in the habit of just bookmarking this blog page, check out the main page for two new online features of films opening this weekend: American Hardcore and Jesus Camp.

By Scott Macaulay on Sep 23, 2006 Filmmaking
Fast, Cheap and Out of Control

Director Paul Rachman retraces the history of punk rock. Paul Rachman’s American Hardcore is a salute to the U.S. underground punk scene that exploded in 1980. Inspired by Steven Blush’s 2001 book American Hardcore: A Tribal History (Feral House), Rachman’s blunt documentary was culled from over 120 hours of interview footage, as well as a stack of archival concert videos compiled from closets, shoeboxes and fan memorabilia stashes. The film also documents a phenomenon that Rachman and Blush observed firsthand, before the scene fizzled in the mid-’80s. “The scene burned out before anybody came to capitalize on it, so it’s […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Sep 22, 2006 Filmmaking
Holy War

The team behind the award-winning documentary Boys of Baraka are back with a new film that focuses on Evangelical children training to be “soldiers in God’s Army.” Early on in Jesus Camp, Pentecostal minister Becky Fischer asks an auditorium full of children and parents: “Do you believe God can do anything?” A young mother grabs her child’s arm and raises it. LEVI IN HEIDI EWING AND RACHEL GRADY’S JESUS CAMP. This is just one of many provocative moments that give Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing’s latest documentary its haunting power. As enthralling as the religious rallies it reveals, Jesus Camp […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Sep 21, 2006 Directing
GONDRY IN THE PHOTOBOOTH

Filmmaker Jamie Stuart, who is working on an article upcoming for Filmmaker, met Michel Gondry recently at New York’s Regency Hotel. The picture at left is the result of that meeting, which Stuart explains below: “I thought this was one of those ideas so obvious and so attuned to the subject that I became paranoid somebody was going to beat me to it. Photo Booth is basically gimmick software that comes with all new Macs — and it seems everybody plays around with it for maybe 5 minutes, then they forget about it. When I met Michel recently to discuss […]

By Scott Macaulay on Sep 17, 2006 Filmmaking
A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME

Over at The Daily Reel I’ve been following the online mystery of Lonelygirl15. Today, Virginia Heffernan of the New York Times has near the final word on the subject. Homeschooler Bree is actually a “twentyish” actress named Jessica Rose and “the masterminds of the Lonelygirl15 videos are Ramesh Flinders, a screenwriter and filmmaker from Marin County, Calif., and Miles Beckett, a doctor turned filmmaker.” The real mystery now is whether Bree’s fanatical cyber audience will love her as much as she morphs into a purely fictional character in whatever future projects her creators have planned for her.

By Scott Macaulay on Sep 13, 2006 Filmmaking

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