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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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…. […]
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 […]
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 […]