Over at Movie City Indie, Ray pride has scores of new posts and links up, three of which particularly caught my eye. First, he notes the forthcoming Rubber Johnny, a new short film and 40-page book by the greatest director in the world… er, I mean, the interesting U.K. music video director Chris Cunningham. The film will be scored by Cunningham’s frequent collaborator Aphex Twin. And then there’s an interesting article in the French-language Liberation about how French distribution great Marin Karmitz, citing economic reasons, has unilaterally made the decision to release Gregg Araki’s new film, Mysterious Skin on digital […]
Director Caveh Zahedi talks with braintrustdv.com about his latest feature I Am A Sex Addict, which screens next week at the Tribeca Film Festival: “The film is a portrait of a sex addict, and the women are seen through his eyes. “The film never pretends that what we are seeing is the truth about these women. If anything, it implies just the opposite. What’s clear in the film is that he is unable to see them clearly and projects his own needs onto them. We, as viewers, can see that his view of them is entirely delusional. In this sense, […]
My friend Bergen Swanson emailed about a film he recently produced in India with Plum Pictures — Rajapur, directed by New York-based Nanda Anand. Here’s more about the film on IFC Insider, including comments from fellow producer Celine Rattray as well as On the Road Production’s Dileep Singh Rathore. On the Road is an India-based service company specializing in bringing foreigners to shoot in India. Writes Andrea Meyer in the article: “Celine Rattray of Plum Pictures (Lonesome Jim), one of the producers of Rajapur, an indie that recently wrapped in Jaisalmer, a town in the Rajasthan Desert, says of the […]
NYU film student and short filmmaker Sam Goetz worked for a bit in my production office, and I got to watch his odd and original comedy shorts. He’s now working on his final film at NYU, Bruno, the story of a asthmatic, nihillstic bicyclist, Derke, and his polar opposite cousin Bruno, a gentle pianist. Goetz says he’s not sure if the piece is a comedy or a drama because it “changes constantly and radically.” To realize his vision, Goetz is raising money via the web. Check out his website for more about him and his films and for his rather […]
Feminist author and anti-porn crusader Andrea Dworkin died last Friday of complications from surgery. As author Susie Bright writes in her weblog, Dworkin was the first woman to take porn seriously. “She was the one who got us looking at porn with a critical eye,” Bright notes. “She made you feel like you could just stomp into the adult bookstore and seize everything for inspection and a bonfire. The funny thing that happened on the way to the X-Rated Sex Palace was that some of us came to different conclusions that Miss Dworkin. We saw the sexism of the porn […]
Check out Gawker today for a funny take on what makes Filmmaker different from some other magazine out there..
Our colleague Ray Pride got hit with a particularly lengthy bout of server outage over at this blog at Movie City News. After almost two months, though, he’s back with his typically exhaustive and thought-provoking series of links and postings. Welcome him back by busting his bandwith and clicking above..
Listen closely and you’ll hear cheers echoing the corridors of cyberspace. Entrepreneur Mark Cuban, owner of 2929, HDNet, Magnolia Pictures and the Dallas Mavericks, has announced on his blog that following a request from the Electronic Frontier Foundation he’ll be financing Grokster’s legal bills in MGM vs. Grokster, a case that winds up at the Supreme Court this Tuesday. The case revolves around the question of whether or not file-sharing services and peer-to-peer networks can be sued if their technology allows users to download or trade copywritten content. The entertainment industry is hoping to overturn a 1984 verdict in a […]
Interesting article by Anne Thompson in today’s Hollywood Reporter. Her lead: “You can laugh about it. Fantasize about it. Be punished or killed for it. But what you can’t do is take sex seriously at the movies.” She goes on to examine the box-office fate of a number of sexually provocative serious-minded films and gathers some thoughts by industry types on why eroticism seems to fail in the theatrical marketplace. From producer Peter Guber: “If you spell fun, it sells. Sex inside a comedy candy-coats sex and allows the audience to feel comfortable. Laughter covers up insecurity. Sex sells, but […]
I had no idea that in addition to pictures and profiles of charmingly tattooed and pierced young women who call themselves things like a “full-time artfag film student and part-time superbitch”, the Suicide Girls Web site features regular and rather interesting interviews, many with indie film personalities like Danny Boyle and Campbell Scott. From the current discussion with Chloe Sevigny, who talks about her work with Woody Allen in Melinda and Melinda and Lars von Trier in Dogville and the upcoming Manderlay: “Lars is very personal and he gets in your business and there’s a lot of chit chatting and […]