Filmmaking

FILM COMMENT’S 50 BEST — RELEASED AND UNRELEASED

Film Comment editor Gavin Smith is always kind enough to send me the ballot for the magazine’s annual “50 Best” rundown (actually, two rundowns — the “50 Best Released” and “Unreleased” Films of the Year), but as a reader of the magazine I’m always a bit intimidated by how much I don’t manage to see in a given year — especially this one, in which I spent about six months out of town, five of them in a arthouse-deprived place where Anchorman was my top viewing experience. So, I sit on the ballot rather than skew the results due to […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 22, 2004 Filmmaking
UNDERGROUND USA

I’m curious to see the New Museum’s new East Village USA exhibition, which memorializes the downtown art world of the early to mid 1980s, a time in which art, fashion, film, hip-hop, and rock all jostled and congealed into a movement that can now be encapuslated into something like, well, a museum exhibition. (That it was also a time when AIDS rampaged through the New York arts community gives the show its measure of sadness for those who lived in New York at the time and knew many of these people.) Writes curator Dan Cameron, “Imagine a village where everybody […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 11, 2004 Filmmaking
BACK IN THE DAYS

Kudos to Indiewire for nabbing the text of Dan Talbot’s engagingly long-winded speech at last week’s Gotham Awards. Personally, I found Talbot’s trip down memory lane kind of a blast, sitting as I was before the teleprompter which kept flashing “Please wrap it up!” Anyway, for notes on how it used to be in NYC art film exhibition, click on the above.

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 10, 2004 Filmmaking
MANOHLA TALKS BACK

I don’t know about you, but I’m enjoying tremendously Manohla Dargis’s film writing in the New York Times, particularly the more freewheeling attitude that runs through her pieces. Her Godard interview of a few weeks back was brilliantly edited. Leaving in his intellectual japes and her bemused ripostes — bits that might have been edited out in the hands of another Times critic — both made the piece entertaining and indicative of Godard’s entire enterprise. In today’s Times, Dargis steps in front of her byline to frankly answer questions from readers. (Registration required.) In response the various queries she raves […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 8, 2004 Filmmaking
SUPER CRITICAL

I haven’t seen The Incredibles yet, but when I do I’ll be parsing its politics like some sort of Frankfurt School flunky because of a number of conversations I’ve been drawn into recently about the film. My brother calls it the best animated movie he’s seen, but at my Gotham Awards table the other night, a publicist and editor attacked it for what they read as its regressive politics. For a sort of Incredibles study guide, check out this piece in The Guardian’s newsblog that deftly summarizes the various critiques of Brad Bird’s Pixar creation. The piece begins by evoking […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 8, 2004 Filmmaking
PAIN, SUFFERING AND THE AMERICAN WAY

Producer, screenwriter and co-president of Focus Features James Schamus penned this sharp essay in In These Times on one short-term goal progressive citizens can rally around during their post-election blues: oppose the nomination of White House Legal Counsel Alberto Gonzales to the position of Attorney General. Schamus explains: The mainstream media uses the word “torture” to describe those (hundreds of) documented cases of “isolated” incidents, performed by those “few bad apples” at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. When it comes to the pervasive use of torture at Guantánamo’s Camp X-Ray and scores of other secret military prisons around the globe, the […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 7, 2004 Filmmaking
IT’S ALL ABOUT THE WORK

I always admire those who are able to lay either their professional and personal lives out online for all to see. One person who does this when it comes to his independent film producing is Muse Production’s Chris Hanley, who has made an entertaining habit of posting on his website copies of business emails he’s received under the apt header of “Scathing Letters.” For a while the letters sections was filled with angry back-and-forths from folks like Vincent Gallo and Don Murphy over older Muse projects, but Hanley has updated the site recently with two choice bits of correspondence, both […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 6, 2004 Filmmaking
LUCKY STARS

Producer Matthew Greenfield, whose credits include Miguel Arteta’s features Star Maps, Chuck and Buck, The Good Girl and this year’s Sundance-bound The Motel recently became the Associate Director of the Feature Film Program at Sundance Institute, but he emailed the other day to tell us about his new non-film venture. He and writer Laurence Dumortier have launched Cloverfield Press, “a boutique publishing house dedicated to bringing new literary and artistic voices to a discerning public.” Graphic design is an important component of the press’s mission statement: “We hope to create books as visually beautiful as they are intellectually and emotionally […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 5, 2004 Filmmaking
THE THERAPY OF FILMMAKING

Essential NYC weblog The Gothamist has posted this interview with actor, former therapist and filmmaker Robert Margolis. It’s part of the site’s series of pieces on interesting New Yorkers who aren’t necessarily household names but whose life and work reflect deeply on the city we at Filmmaker live and work in. Margolis’s latest film is a “faux documentary following the trials and tribulations of the fictional Robert Margolis, an actor, a pretty bad one at that, living on the fringe, trying to balance the demands and practicalities of every day life with his dream of becoming a successful actor.” From […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 5, 2004 Filmmaking
CITY SLICKER

Chicago-based critic Ray Pride has appeared many times in Filmmaker‘s pages, but now readers can catch a daily — or, if the first week’s posts are any indication, near-hourly — dose of Pride in his new Movie City Indie blog up at the ever-growing web empire that is Movie City News. Pride’s links-scouting is already impeccable. So far he’s posted links regarding the firing of Buenos Aires Film Festival head Edgardo (Quintin) Antin, Robert Altman directing an opera based on The Wedding, Isabelle Huppert on making a new Cimino film based on an Andre Malraux novel, and Alexander Payne on […]

By Scott Macaulay on Dec 5, 2004 Filmmaking

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