Filmmaking

THE POWER OF NARRATIVE

Green Cine notes this interesting piece by Andrew Tracy in Cinema Scope about the new director’s cut DVD of James Gray’s The Yards. He’s got a great opener, a provocative discussion of what he sees as the diminished respect given classical movie narrative today that winds up as a preamble for his discussion of Gray’s ’70s-inspired gangster pic. From the piece: As a means of telling us about our world, classical narrative cinema—that is, American narrative cinema—has been steadily losing ground. James Agee’s faith in the scenario seems somewhat quaint in the midst of our fascination with hybridity. Documentary, whether […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 22, 2006 Filmmaking
FRIENDS IN NEED

The Association of Independent Film and Videomakers is one of the country’s oldest media arts groups as well as publisher of The Independent. It recently announced a reinvention due to a financial crisis and is calling on members and supporters in the indie community to help. Click on the links above and let the organization itself tell you how they are reorganizing and how you can aid them in this pressing time of need, or listen to filmmakers like Paul Harrill, who, on his blog, spells out the reasons why he’s sending them $100 and is urging you to do […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 21, 2006 Filmmaking
TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT

Over at his Video Watchblog, Tim Lucas self-analyzes his compulsive DVD collecting, tracing it back to an incident in his youth: When I was six or seven years old, my mother married a man who, a week or two into their short-lived marriage, sold every toy and comic book I owned in a yard sale and used the money to get drunk. When I was sixteen years old, I made the decision to leave home and, for various reasons, I could take with me only what I could carry. Aside from clothes and other essentials I could fit into two […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 21, 2006 Filmmaking
LEGENDS OF DIY

Caveh Zahedi has a blog up promoting his new film, I am a Sex Addict, which is opening from IFC Films next month. So far there’s been a lot of talk about porn star Rebecca Lord’s nipple (which would be pictured, but Blogger’s been having a problem uploading pictures, which is why photo placement on this blog is kind of erratic), but the blog is also prompting discussion of the efficacy of sef-distribution today. Zahedi, you’ll remember, was prepared to go the DIY route with his new I am a Sex Addict until IFC picked up the film following its […]

By Scott Macaulay on Mar 21, 2006 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

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