Filmmaking

SPEAKING OF…

Jim Jarmusch has directed a video for The Raconteurs, a band featuring Jack White of the White Stripes and Brendon Benson. It’s in his grainy Year of the Horse mode and it can be found here.

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 20, 2006 Filmmaking
BADA BING!

Over at his blog, Matt Zoller Seitz asks the question that, consciously or not, is in Sopranos fan’s minds as we watch the last season of the HBO series: In this final season, is Chase truly revealing a sense of moral accountability that was often AWOL on “The Sopranos,” or just jerking our chain? In past seasons, the writers and producers responded to audience gripes about dangling plot threads by saying, in essence, “Some episodes of this show are not chapters in a novel, they’re the equivalent of self-contained short stories with recurring characters — we’re not about plot, so […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 20, 2006 Filmmaking
10% ON THE DOLLAR

Anne Thompson has another good “Risky Business” column up in which she answers something that I’ve been wondering. The focus of the column is on how the various “window-busting” theatrical/DVD release experiments, including Soderbergh’s Bubble, have panned out, and the second half talks about Ben Rekhi’s Waterborne, which I’ve written about before on this blog. I was interested in knowing how Rekhi’s film did in its premiere on the Google Video Store, and Thompson has the disappointing news. The film’s online premiere seemed like a minor success story, with 3,000 downloads, until the final accounting came in: But then Google […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 20, 2006 Filmmaking
AN IDEAL FOR LIVING

Novelist J.G. Ballard (Crash, Empire of the Sun) has penned one of his periodic pieces for The Guardian, a meditation on modernist architecture coinciding with a giant gallery exhbition at London’s V&A. Here, excerpted, are his thoughts on the relationship between modernism and its ideals and the horrors of the 20th century: Modernism’s attempt to build a better world with the aid of science and technology now seems almost heroic. Bertolt Brecht, no fan of modernism, remarked that the mud, blood and carnage of the first world war trenches left its survivors longing for a future that resembled a white-tiled […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 19, 2006 Filmmaking
GUN CRAZY

Did you know that there was an awards show devoted solely to trailers? And that it has a prize for the best trailer made without an accompanying feature film? Neither did I until I read this profile in the Gothamist of Veronica Varlow, model, retro fashion doyenne, and now actress. Along with photographer and director Burke Heffner (who shot the picture here of Varlow) she’s made a very slick trailer intended as a fundraising tool for a feature, Revolver (pictured below), which she describes in Gothamist as ““a romance in exile . . . rumbling down the lost 2 lane […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 19, 2006 Filmmaking
WHAT IS A DARKNET?

A bit of advocacy and image rehabilitation for underground file-sharing networks by mash-up editor JD Lasica can be found here.

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 19, 2006 Filmmaking
CRICKET’S CLUB

If you want to be your own film cricket, as Ray Pride would say, then check out Criticker, a new “personalized search engine” in which you record your numerical scores on a number of movies and then sit back as the site predicts what else you might like. The difference between this site and others seems to be a very healthy representation of independent and foreign films.

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 19, 2006 Filmmaking
A FAITH-BASED CINEMA?

Opus Zine links to this article by Barbara Nicolosi in Christianity Today in which the author discusses the advice she gives to young Christian artists who want to be “the next Mel Gibson.” The advice contained in the article, itself an adaptation of material from her book Behind the Screen: Hollywood Insiders on Faith, Film and Culture, is not what you’d expect. She disses A Walk to Remember (“…a banal, predictable story with underdeveloped characters, pedestrian acting, and saccharine dialogue”), praises In the Bedroom (which “deals with the spiritual and psychological urgency of forgiveness”) and offers — after answering the […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 18, 2006 Filmmaking
SO YOU WANT TO BE A PRODUCER?

The bloggers at Spin and Stir have been writing about the Bob Yari vs. the Producers Guild of America lawsuit and in this post offer perhaps a more nuanced account of the reality of the producing business today than the PGA’s more idealistic definition. The end of the post has a hilarious producer breakdown comparing a good independent film (Capote, 12 producers) and a bad studio film (Pink Panther, 3 producers), countering all those Variety reviews that love to count off producer credits as if a lot of producers is a bad thing. Here’s from the end of the piece: […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 17, 2006 Filmmaking
LINDE GOES TO UNIVERSAL

Both Indiewire and The Hollywood Reporter reported today that Focus Features co-president David Linde will become co-chairman of Universal Pictures, effective immediately, and Mark Schmuber has been appointed chairman. Shmuger has served as the studio’s vice chairman since 2000. Variety posted a longer article on the story later in the day that reports that the two jobs are equal in stature and that Shmuger received the “chairman” title due to his “longer tenure at Universal.” The two will work collaboratively and replace Stacey Snider, who recently announced her departure to become co-chair and CEO at Dreamworks. From the Hollywood Reporter: […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 16, 2006 Filmmaking

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