Filmmaking

SWANBERG vs. BUJALSKI

Over at GreenCine, David Hudson compares and contrasts the work of Joe Swanberg and Andrew Bujalski. Bujalski, of course, is the director of Mutual Appreciation and Funny Ha Ha. Swanberg made Kissing on the Mouth and LOL and also helms a web series called Young American Bodies (pictured) over at Nerve.com. Typically, Hudson’s analysis is full of tons of links, and observations like this one: First, I have no idea how much of an inspiration Bujalski might be for Joe, but that’s ultimately beside the point. I’d argue that each gives us something in his films the other doesn’t. There […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jun 11, 2006 Filmmaking
MIND LIKE WATER

Over at his blog Self Reliant Filmmaking, filmmaker Paul Harrill is beginning a two-part series discussing books on productivity and their effectiveness for artists. He starts with David Allen’s Getting Things Done, which is the bible-of-the-moment for productivity seekers. It has even spawned a website, 43 Folders, which applies its principles to computer organizational systems and various lifehacks. Harrill starts by summarizing some of the key points of Allen’s simple system: Something comes across your desk. What now? First, you process it: If you can’t act on it, you trash it, file it away for later, or you save it […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jun 11, 2006 Filmmaking
ONE MORE AT iTUNES

Below Matt Ross points you to the iTunes Music Store and Chase Palmer’s short, “Neo Noir.” I just clicked over there and found another one of our “25 New Faces” up on the site. For $1.99 you can download Cary Fukunaga’s incredible Victoria para Chino, a tremendously shocking and moving look at a horrific scenario concerning illegal immigration.

By Scott Macaulay on Jun 9, 2006 Filmmaking
TOO MUCH FAITH

Cinematic sinners are accustomed to squawking when the MPAA threatens an NC-17 on a guns-blazing, sex-filled entertainment. But Matt Drudge links today to a report from the Scripps Howard News Service which describes a complaint by a group of Christian moviemakers behind a movied called Facing the Giants who say that the MPAA has given them a PG rating (instead of a G) because their film is “too evangelistic.” From the piece: The MPAA, noted [Provident Films v.p. of marketing Kris] Fuhr, tends to offer cryptic explanations for its ratings. In this case, she was told that it “decided that […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jun 7, 2006 Filmmaking
THE FIVE STAGES OF GLOBAL WARMING

Taking a cue from Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, Al Gore discusses the five stages of coming to terms with global warming in this long interview with Ray Pride (pictured with Gore) about the excellent documentary An Inconvenient Truth. From the interview: GORE: First of all, David Guggenheim, in my opinion, has done a spectacular job of making a really entertaining movie out of a slide show! [laughs] It was his idea to use the short biographical pieces, not mine. He convinced me that on film it’s important to provide a basis for the audience to connect personally to a character or characters…. […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jun 5, 2006 Filmmaking
DEMONIC DIRECTING

Steve Gallagher emailed today to pass on news about the newly launched website of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation, “the world’s largest multi-media collection showcasing Ingmar Bergman’s professional career, dating back to 1938.” It’s one of the best single-director websites out there, an exhaustive catalogue of the great director’s work delivered, at times, in a surprisingly light-hearted tone. For example, here’s the opening of the page dealing with Bergman and the theme of Death. Bergman and Death have become the subject of parody, and a gentle (or otherwise) mockery of the art house cinema scene. The personification of Death in The […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jun 5, 2006 Filmmaking
BRIGHT PICTURES

Over at Ain’t It Cool News, Elston Gunn interviews producer Lily Bright, discussing her productions of M Blash’s recent Lying, which premiered at the Cannes Director’s Fortnight, and Asia Argento’s The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things. Particularly, she discusses being in roll-up to the release of Argento’s film when the news that author J.T. LeRoy, who wrote the underlying work, was a literary hoax: Well, we’ll never really know, but I do think it was very unfair and unintelligent for critics to say a film of a story based on a hoax is pointless. Asia was inspired by the […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jun 4, 2006 Filmmaking
ADVANCE COPY

Below Peter Bowen blogs about the crossover between film production and criticism, namely the emergence of internet-distributed mash-ups and “web cinematic essays” as a new form of dialogue about the movies. So far, most of these pieces have been about films that have already been released. Now, though, the artist Chris Moukarbel has gone the mash-up editors one better by pre-empting Oliver Stone’s forthcoming World Trade Center with an twelve-minute web-distributed art project based on a bootlegged copy of Stone’s screenplay. From the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art: Moukarbel makes site-specific video and installations, often using found media […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jun 3, 2006 Filmmaking
GREY AREAS

In her Risky Business blog, Ann Thompson links to John DeFore’s “Bootleg Movies,” a piece appearing in Slate detailing “the strange films you find in the back alleys of the internet.” From the piece: These businesses, outgrowths of the kind of tape-trading scenes familiar to Grateful Dead fans, are run by enthusiasts out to finance their own hobbies, not to make a killing. (Traditional bootleggers charge a premium, but most offerings here are half the price of ordinary releases.) They sell everything from forgotten silents to auteurist curiosities to spaghetti westerns—usually on discs mastered from an old VHS release or […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jun 2, 2006 Filmmaking
"COULDN’T YOU HAVE USED RWANDA?"

I don’t know if it’s the editing of the interview or the thought processes of the director, but Jenifer Merin’s interview with Omen director John Moore in New York Press seems quite bizarre: From the piece: MERIN: The Omen’s the first feature to use 9/11 World Trade Center towers footage in a story other than the story of 9/11. And, you’ve included images from Katrina and other disasters. Why? MOORE: To contextualize the story. I want to make films that comment on what’s going on in the world, but not be ugly, stupid and raw about it by making dumb-ass […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jun 2, 2006 Filmmaking

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