The lawyers at Paramount, who presumably are not fans of folks like Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and other appropriation-based artists, have launched a federal lawsuit against artist Christopher Moukarbel, who we blogged about recently. They are charging copyright infringement with regards to a 12-minute film he created and put up online which is based, apparently, on a copy of the screenplay for Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center. (Filmmaker‘s blog is cited in the Paramount filing.) The Smoking Gun has all the details, including links to screenplay excerpts, which have been filed as exhibits, as well as a side-by-side comparison of […]
Larry Clark’s Ken Park, from a script by Harmony Korine, is notoriously difficult to see in the States. According to Clark in this week’s Village Voice, that old nemesis, uncleared music rights, is the culprint. But for those who want to see the movie, Clark relays to writer Jessica Winter some consumer advice while he waits for the song situation to get worked out. In the meantime, Clark directs interested parties to the Internet. “You can go on eBay and get the DVD. The Russian DVD is good, the French DVD is good, the Dutch DVD is good. But don’t […]
Via Ray Pride at Movie City Indie: David Lynch is selling ringtones. $3.99 a pop.
Pitchfork Media has just put up one of their mammoth surveys, this time 100 Awesome Music Videos, complete with mini-critiques and, for each one, a link to the video itself. It stretches back to the beginning days of music video and seems to have most of the major clips covered. Check it out.
With The Outsider, cinematic badboy James Toback gets in front of the camera for first-time filmmaker Nicholas Jarecki. “Who is James Toback?” That’s the question documentary filmmaker Nicholas Jarecki poses in The Outsider, a freewheeling and highly watchable portrait of the director of idiosyncratic films like Fingers and Black and White. Jarecki introduces his subject, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Bugsy, on the set of a 2004 film for which Toback had high hopes. When Will I Be Loved, which starred Neve Campbell as a young woman on the make, would, like many of Toback’s films, be a minor presence […]
The director of Head-On investigates the rich musical culture of his homeland. DIRECTOR FATIH AKIN. The soundtrack and score of the critically acclaimed, adrenaline fueled doomed romance Head-On was a fusion of punk, European electronica, hip-hop, British new wave and traditional Turkish laments, so it’s no great surprise that the Turkish-German director Fatih Akin’s new movie is a documentary about the vibrant and diverse music community in Istanbul. It’s the city where Head-On music composer Alexander Hacke, better known as a member of the avant-garde band Einstuezende Neubauten, recorded a few songs for Head-On — and became fascinated by the […]
Over at Caveh Zahedi’s blog, Zahedi is talking about teaching at the European Graduate School in the Swiss Alps where he’s hanging out with and listening in on classes taught by Claire Denis, Jean-Luc Nancy, D.J. Spooky, the Quay Brothers and others.
Over at Suicide Girls, Daniel Robert Epstein interviews the great horror director Stuart Gordon and talks about the reissue of the fantastic 80s horror film From Beyond as well as an upcoming project — another episode in the Re-Animator series: DRE: I read that House of Re-Animator is going to set in the White House.SG: Yeah, we’re excited about that. We’re in the process of writing it, so that’s a little ways off.DRE: Are you definitely directing it?SG: Yes, we hope to start at the beginning of next year.DRE: What has brought you back to Re-Animator?SG: It was when George […]
Actor Sung Kang (pictured) stars in both Michael Kang’s indie The Motel, which opens in a couple of weeks and Justin Lin’s very big budget The Fast and Furious 3. Here’s a mash-up that unites the two movies entitled The Motel and the Furious.
The BBC runs a fascinating dialogue between MPAA President Dan Glickman and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s John Perry Barlow. Here’s a taste: JPB: These are aging industries run by aging men, and they’re up against 17-year-olds who have turned themselves into electronic Hezbollah because they resent the content industry for its proprietary practices. And I don’t have a question about who’s going to win that one eventually. There are a lot of kids out there copying and distributing movies not because they care about seeing the movies or sharing them with their friends but because they want to stick it […]