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 […]
While at the Creative Capital retreat this summer I met the L.A.-based French artist Marie Sester, who does fascinating work dealing with technology and the interstice of the individual and the social. From her website: “I was trained as an architect, then chose the visual and multimedia fields to examine the way that a civilization originates and creates its forms. These forms are both tangible — such as signals, buildings, and cities — and intangible, such as the aspects of values, laws and culture. My work questions the perspective of the West, and the meta-state of a New World Order. […]
Via GreenCine comes this link to a good new blog by Repo Man director Alex Cox. Click over to it and you’ll find Cox’s commentary on a forthcoming DVD “special edition” of his cult classic, news on possible new projects, and a bunch of interesting observations, from fancy L.A. hotels (“Hotels like this terrify my because they’re so fucking expensive. Even though my generous hosts paid for my bed and breakfast, every time you approach a door, some guy in a top hat opens it for you and you have to tip him ten bucks — whether you want to […]
I haven’t been posting much recently due to an overall work crunch — the putting to bed of the new Fall issue of Filmmaker, and two new films my company is producing both going into production. Hopefully I’ll get back into the blogging swing of things in the next few days, but I couldn’t help posting this piece in Variety about Paul Dinello’s film Strangers with Candy. According to the trade, Warner Independent is not releasing the film, which was slated to open October 21, “out of concern that the producers didn’t secure all the needed rights, including for such […]
One of my favorite artist/photographer/music video directors, Floria Sigismondi, has massively updated her website with news of her forthcoming photography book, Immune (click through the opening image to get to photos from the book), as well as streamed versions of many of her videos, including her recent clip for The White Stripe’s “Blue Orchid.
Perhaps my favorite doc this year is Garrett Scott and Ian Olds’ Occupation Dreamland, which opened this weekend at the Cinema Village in New York along with screens in Portland, Boson, D.C., and Berkeley. It’s an essential piece of filmmaking for anyone wanting to learn more about the war in Iraq and its aftermath. Scott, who was one of our “25 New Faces” back in 2002, and Olds previously collaborated on Scott’s incredible short doc Cul de Sac. That earlier film used the story of one man’s mental breakdown (the tale of a San Diego man who stole a tank […]
Evan Rachel Wood, who I think will be the current teen star to have the most substantive film career, has the pretty terrible Pretty Persuasion opening this weekend, but if you’re a fan I’d head over to Crooks and Liars where they are hosting a Sammy Bayer/Green Day video, “Wake Me Up When September Ends”. With classic Aerosmith and Nirvana videos, Bayer has made a career of glossily capturing the American teen experience. Here he does it again with Wood and Jamie Bell playing out a drama that is a new reality for many of today’s kids..
I’ve only recently glommed on to The Reeler, a new blog hosted by Indiewire, and I have enjoyed editor S.T. VanAirsdale’s (really!) funny and sometimes combative take on our industry. So I was sorry not to bump into him at our Filmmaker “25 New Faces” launch party last week. In his blog he asks readers to email him if they actually spotted a real live filmmaker at the soiree since he didn’t see one there other than a few friends of his. Well, S.T., sorry you didn’t make it to the V.I.P. room, but I was back there chatting with […]
I don’t do much Monday-morning box-offiice opinion on this blog because too many others do it far better and far more obsessively than I’d ever be able to. That said, I’m pretty surprised that in its second week Hustle and Flow, which is our cover story this month in Filmmaker, fell out of the top ten with an estimated 50% drop to $4 million from its only okay opening of $8 million last weekend. Honestly, I had Hustle pegged as a crossover mainstream hit, and when I hung out a couple weeks ago with a studio exec friend, we made […]
A few years ago I had the good fortune to be offered an amazing trip by the Italian Trade Commission. A half a dozen producers were invited to tour the Umbria region of Italy as well as Rome over the course of a week. There were great sights, great food, great hotels, great people. At one stop we were interviewed by a local paper who wanted to know our thoughts on Italian film. I riffed off my (somewhat obvious) favorites: Antonioni, Fellini, Pasolini, Argento and Leone. The latter two caused the journalist to laugh at my low-brow tastes. I was […]