Filmmaking

REVITALIZED VON TRIER

Adam Dawtry reports in Variety on the latest in artistic gamesmanship from Lars von Trier, who announces a “Statement of Revitality” on the eve of shooting his new film, The Boss of it All. Reacting against various elements of the financing and publicity machine for arthouse cinema, Von Trier has put the last film of his Brechtian America-set Dogville trilogy on hold and is searching, as he did when he created “Dogma 95,” for a new way of working. Here’s his statment: “In conjunction with the departure of Vibeke Windelov, who has been my producer for ten years, and the […]

By Scott Macaulay on Feb 11, 2006 Filmmaking
HEAVY WATER

I wrote a note to myself yesterday: “Get in in touch with Ben Rekhi to find out how Waterborne is doing on the Google Video Store.” (I posted a few weeks ago about director Ben Rekhi’s experiment streaming his video on the Google platform and then proceeding on to selling paid downloads and DVDs.) Well, Ann Thompson has beat me to it. From her Risky Business blog: “Google Video’s distribution experiment on the bio-terrorist thriller Waterborne appears to be a success. According to Google Video, the first independent feature film to be released through the new Google Video Store was […]

By Scott Macaulay on Feb 10, 2006 Filmmaking
DEATH AT 100MPH

Australian stuntman turned commercials and short-film director Nash Edgerton is making a name for himself with intense and expertly executed short films like Lucky. Check it out.

By Scott Macaulay on Feb 8, 2006 Filmmaking
THE COAT TAILS OF THE PENGUINS

In Europe, the domestic theatrical business is as perilous as it is in the States. After spending time with a number of foreign distributors while at the Cinemart in Rotterdam, I was struck by the topics of conversation: declining audiences, fewer young people going to the movies, the threat to conventional theatrical from DVD day-and-date, and worries over the impact of new distribution platforms, like first-run downloading of feature films direct to cell phones. (Apparently, this was tried with The Interpreter in Italy and theatrical bookers revolted, booting the film off a number of Italian screens during its first run […]

By Scott Macaulay on Feb 8, 2006 Filmmaking
FOUNTAIN SPURTS

The A.V. Club has a review up of the comic book adaptation of Darren Aronofsky’s forthcoming The Fountain. From Noel Murray’s review: “It’s difficult to read The Fountain without imagining how it’s going to look as a movie, or wondering what Aronofsky ultimately changed for the screen. But that’s actually part of what’s enjoyable about the book. Readers can treat it like an elaborate storyboard and see a movie in their minds. Given Aronofsky’s penchant for obscurity, the mind-Fountain may even end up being clearer than the finished version, even though it lacks the director’s gift for dynamic cinematic poetry. […]

By Scott Macaulay on Feb 6, 2006 Filmmaking
NEW NEW YORK FILMMAKERS ON THE WEB

I received two emails recently from filmmakers who are highlighting their work on newly launched websites. The first was from director and editor Jim Helton, whose Blue Coup D’Etat is, as he describes, a “docu-poetic video blog” where he’s posting “sometimes little silent movies of friends and family, sometimes sound movies, sometimes simple, sometimes complicated.” Helton is a world traveller, and many of these mini-movies capture brief flashes from journies to Bangkok, Koh Samui and other places. Other clips feature (and are birthday gifts to) his filmmaker friends Derek Cianfrance and Shannon Plumb. The second site is BorderLine Films, the […]

By Scott Macaulay on Feb 6, 2006 Filmmaking
RACY VIDEO

Harmony Korine has directed a new Cat Power video, “Living Proof.” There’s a short piece and a comments page over at Antville. (His previous clip for Bonnie “Prince Billy,” aka Will Oldham, star of Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, is here.)

By Scott Macaulay on Feb 5, 2006 Filmmaking
FRESH REVIEWS

Ann Thompson has a good “Risky Business” column up at The Hollywood Reporter that tracks the growth of Rotten Tomatoes, the movie review aggregator. Along with Metacritic, the site is part of a shift by which now 90% of a younger demographic finds their movie reviews online. Thompson describes how Rotten Tomatoes survived the Internet bust and is now a thriving go-to advertising destination for distributors confident of the critical appeal of their films.

By Scott Macaulay on Feb 5, 2006 Filmmaking
PIRACY, SWARMING AND THE PARADIGM SHIFT OF BATTLESTAR GALACTICA

Producer Ted Hope emailed me about this essential three-part series by Mark Pesce entitled “Piracy is Good? How Battlestar Galactica Killed Broadcast TV.” It’s from May, 2005, but it’s still an utterly relevant essay on how television producers can successfully adapt to a BitTorrent world in which audiences are in control of the process of distribution. Pesce’s predictions are provocative — he believes, for example, that the broadcast networks are soon to morph into high-powered ad agencies as opposed to content distributors — and I’m not sure I agree with all of his advice to producers regarding the content of […]

By Scott Macaulay on Feb 5, 2006 Filmmaking
SEXIER THAN PARIS HILTON

Good article in The Guardian about Al Gore’s trip to Sundance with the documentary An Inconvenient Truth. From the piece: “What can a film that has helped make Al Gore sexier than Paris Hilton possibly be about? A partial list of its contents would include the greenhouse gas effect, the proliferation of carbon dioxide, the convection energy of hurricanes, the paradoxical flood-drought syndrome, melting methane in Siberia, the history of the Ice Age and the physics of solar ray absorption. It becomes no clearer why this film is having such an impact when you learn that it largely takes the […]

By Scott Macaulay on Feb 5, 2006 Filmmaking

Cookie	Duration	Description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional	11 months	The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
viewed_cookie_policy	11 months	The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.

Cookie	Duration	Description
cfmrk_cic		Used by Cloudflare to route user traffic for this Site.
sparrow_id		Installed by Cloudflare. Used to identify individual clients behind a shared IP address and apply security settings on a per-client basis. It does not store any personal identifiable information.

Cookie	Duration	Description
OAGEO		Installed by the Revive Ad Server. Used to cache geolocation (session, deleted when closing the browser)
OAID		Installed by the Revive Ad Server to distinguish users.