Over at Green Cine — yes the site also has a collection of great original material as well as its excellent daily collection of links — Thomas Logoreci interviews Jay and Mark Duplass, whose The Puffy Chair opens today in San Francisco, Austin, Berkeley, Boston, Portland and DC. In the piece, they talk a little bit about what they are doing next: Jay: We’re trying to do a relationship movie in a horror genre. We’re not sure that it’s going to work, but we’re going to make it anyway. Mark: There’s some trepidation, but we do feel very confident in […]
Capitalizing on the trend towards flat-screen and plasma TVs — and television as home design — Microcinema has announced a partnership with Colorcalm, “the best-selling producer of of ambient media and design-led programming,” that will result in a new label. Microambience will be “a dedicated distribution service and channel for ambient designers, producers, labels, and ambient moving image connoisseurs worldwide.” So far, the label ranges from video fireplaces to more interesting stuff like Colorcalm – By Design, a shorts compilation designed to play as a continuous loop which images by designers Peter Saville, Irma Boom and John Maeda and music […]
A story going around the N.Y. production community: When an Environmentally Aware Big Name Actor signed on his latest production, he asked that he be driven in a hybrid vehicle. Production informed him that there were no hybrids available to rent from their vendors. “But should we just drive you in a compact or mid-size instead?”, they asked, looking for a fuel-saving alternative. “No way!” he replied, and the production went ahead with the customary — and fuel guzzling — town car.
From Rob Nelson’s interview with Rick Linklater in this week’s Village Voice: If Linklater leaves the big questions of his movies to their audiences, how does he think they’ll respond when A Scanner Darkly opens in July and Fast Food Nation in the fall? “You can never prove or predict the cause and effect of anything, whatever its purpose,” he says. “When The Jungle was published a hundred years ago, they enacted the FDA. But in today’s world, we’re more likely to see legislation enacted to prevent us from criticizing the way things are. In Texas, it’s against the law […]
I’ve been blogging in circles around the whole “net neutrality” issue recently, generally sympathetic to the concept that the internet should remain an egalitarian mode of communication in which all types — or packets — of information are treated equally. However, I’ve been reticent to declare one of the six bills pending in the House of Representatives dealing with this issue my favorite because I don’t feel that I’m an expert on all the underlying technical and business issues that underlie this debate. So, that’s why I responded to this article by Michael Grebb in Wired. It’s by no means […]
That’s how long the standing ovation was at Cannes for Kevin Smith’s Clerks 2.
Variety reports that a new, final director’s cut of Ridley Scott’s science fiction classic Blade Runner will finally be released this fall by Warner Brothers. The release of a deluxe DVD edition to supplant the bare-bones, hastily made (or so Scott says) “director’s cut” now in the stores has been long awaited by tied up by the film’s famous rights problems; when it went over-budget, the bond company took over and made changes in the edit, including adding an infamous voiceover and happy ending, that Scott hated. He revised the film years later but claims he was rushed. The trade […]
Writer Dennis Cooper has a lively blog with well-composed daily postings and interaction with a community of over 50 active posters and respondents. Today Cooper does one of his periodic celebrations of great cultural figures with “Jacques Tati Day,” a collection of links to such items as the original trailer for Playtime, a Spanish-language dubbed scene from Mon Oncle, Tati’s amazing official website, an excerpt from Forza Bastia 1978 ou l’ile en fete, a controversial unfinished film purportedly by Tati, and much, much more. Further on down the blog page there’s a bunch of other film stuff, including a fascinating […]
Caveh Zahedi scores a scoop on his website with what could be the first footage of JT Leroy (aka Laura Albert) after the various newspaper and magazine exposes. He ran into Albert at the San Francisco premiere of The Puffy Chair, filming her from his camcorder as he was introduced to her. He says she asked him to stop filming but then changed her mind when Zahedi showed her the footage, which he has now posted to his site.
Filmmaker‘s Managing Editor Matt Ross has just written and directed a new short, Lola, and he’s got a MySpace page already and a website too. Dubbed “a short film about a long night,” the film stars Cordelia Reynolds, Daniel Sauli and Dean Wareham. Both sites contain clips — check them out.