With Google’s stock dropping 27% in the last ten days and Barron’s devoting their cover to “In the Drink,” a merciless dissection of the company’s growth prospects, true value and stock price (readable gratis this week as Barron’s offers a trial freebie to its pay site), I’m going to pile on to the search giant with this link to Cory Doctorow’s piece up at Boing Boing titled “Google Video DRM: Why is Hollywood more important than users?” In a great look at the digital rights management system Google has put in place to “secure” the downloadable media on its new […]
Movie City Indie maestro (and occasional Filmmaker contributing editor) Ray Pride posts a series of short docs entitled 12×5 which he directed with Amy Cargill over at Movie City News. Check out Ray’s deftly edited ruminations on personal futures as remembered from the past.
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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.)
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.