Filmmaking

MORRICONE IN THE ’70S

Let’s make it two Pitchfork links in the row. I went to buy this 2CD compilation of the great Italian film composer Ennio Morricone’s 1960s and ’70s work for a variety of crime and other genre movies this weekend, and it was sold out everywhere. So, my review will have to wait, but here’s Pitchfork’s Joe Tangari with his take on Ennio Morricone: Crime and Dissonance, the album compiled by Allan Bishop and Mike Patton. An excerpt: “More than setting the tone for Western scores for a generation, Morricone’s greatest legacy is perhaps the way he used sound elementally, largely […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 7, 2005 Filmmaking
THROBBING GRISTLE RETURNS

Many years ago I remember feeling queasy at a Throbbing Gristle event at the old Danceteria. While music from the proto-industrial group played, a series of medical autopsy films screened in the background. Now, of course, this stuff is de rigeur on CSI, but that night, it was fairly unsettling. Now, the British band has reformed, reports Pitchfork Media, and this time the film hook is a live score to Derek Jarman’s 1980 film In the Shadow of the Sun the band will perform in Berlin on January 2. The following month Mute Records will release the band’s first record […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 7, 2005 Filmmaking
ANTHOLOGY HITS 35

New York’s Anthology Film Archives has a fantastic program this weekend to celebrate its 35th anniversary. Three New York luminaries will present three nights of classic arthouse cinema. On Friday director Peter Bogdanovich will introduce a screening of Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game and Buster Keaton’s Neighbors. On Saturday, poet and rock star Patti Smith will introduce Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar preceded by Kenneth Anger’s Rabbit’s Moon. And on Sunday producer Christine Vachon will screen Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s Pull My Daisy as well as Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures. Thanks to Altoids, the screenings are free. Click […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 6, 2005 Filmmaking
FIGHTING MAN

David Poland has a nice appreciation up of Street Fight, the great doc about a down and dirty New Jersey mayoral campaign. He’s got the name of the filmmaker wrong — it’s Marshall Curry, not James Baxter — but his take on the film is dead on. Curry was one of our “25 New Faces” this year, and you should look for the film as it screens upcoming on P.O.V.

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 5, 2005 Filmmaking
THE BARNEY CHRONICLES

Paul Cullum has a great, out-of-nowhere piece in the New York Times on the unexpected collaboration between avant-garde publishing elder statesman Barney Rosset and Chicago-based filmmaker James Fotopoulos. Rosset ran for years Grove Press, publishing works by such authors as D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and William Burroughs, and then successfully defending these works from U.S. obscenity charges. When I was a teenager I picked up the Evergreen Review Reader, an anthology of works culled from his literary magazine, and it opened the door for me to a whole world of radical literature and theater. Cullum’s piece is one of those […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 4, 2005 Filmmaking
CHRISTMAS PRESENT

For months I’ve been hoping that the self-consciously heroic trailer for Terrence Malick’s upcoming The New World has been a colossal red herring. Now, I’m thrilled that that seems to the be the case. First, Fox’s Roger Friedman called the film “Pocahontas on acid,” and now comes Robbie Freeling at the Reverse Shot blog: “Then again, this is still a Malick film, as challenging as ever in its ambitions, even while perhaps functioning as his most accessible narrative. Less historical revisionism than resolutely personal, transcendentalist tone poem (not much of a surprise there), Malick’s fourth picture is adorned with almost […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 4, 2005 Filmmaking
ADDICTION AND RECOVERY

Leave it to Caveh Zahedi to win the hearts of indie filmmakers at the Gotham Awards when he accepted the Filmmaker-sponsored “Best Film Not Playing in a Theater Near You” prize. In his remarks he said that too many great indie films don’t make it to the theaters because, frankly, filmmakers are “too tired” after finishing their films and expect, unrealistically, distributors, who are struggling to get their own slates out there, to do all the heavy lifting. Zahedi said that after recuperating a bit after his own shoot and festival jaunt, he got on the phone and asked distributors […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 3, 2005 Filmmaking
WHAT ARE WE… CHOPPED LIVER?

The Apple-oriented rumor site Think Secret has a must-read piece up in which it claims that Apple will introduce a revised Mac mini at January’s Mac World Expo, a new home computer that will serve as the hub of a new digital delivery service with a new digital rights management system. From the piece: “In an effort to appease media companies wary of the security of digital rights management technology, Apple’s new technology will deliver content such that it never actually resides on the user’s hard drive. Content purchased will be automatically made available on a user’s iDisk, which Front […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 3, 2005 Filmmaking
APOCALYPSE JONZE

Spike Jonze’s genius new Gap commercial can be found here. Only Jonze could make a Gap ad that, until the last shot, might just as well be a piece of anti-globalization agit-prop. (Thanks to Boing Boing for the link.)

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 2, 2005 Filmmaking
DRIVE TIME

This Thanksgiving, I, like many of you, will be on the road, driving to see family and hoping to arrive at a socially acceptable interval before the turkey is carved. SeeingJean Baudrillard’s imperious visage peering out from the Sunday Times Magazine this past weekend (“France is a byproduct of American culture,” he said. “We are all in this; we are globalized.”) and thinking about that long drive reminded me of an old essay of his in Hal Foster’s The Anti-Aesthetic, which was kind of a po-mo bible during my college years. He writes about the automobile and the shift in […]

By Scott Macaulay on Nov 23, 2005 Filmmaking

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