Partizan, the European video company that was a producer of Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep, has posted a video podcast that includes a sequence from the movie, due out later in the year from Warner Independent. As it’s called a “podcast,” I’m hoping that the subscription, now lodged in my iTunes, will reveal further clips and maybe some original short-form work for the podcast medium from this great filmmaker.
Sheerly Avni has an interview with Gore Vidal up on Truthdig.com in which the American author discusses Oscar-nominated films Brokeback Mountain and Capote (both of which he approves of, saying of the latter, “The movie is quite brave about showing somebody who did not have any redeeming characteristics, nor did they pretend he had”). Of Capote himself, Vidal has some choice memories: Oh, Capote. [Sighs.] I spent half a century trying to avoid him, in life, and now suddenly I’m surrounded by him. He was a pathological liar. He couldn’t tell the truth about anything, and he’d make it up […]
From Takashi Miike’s blog covering the production of his new film (helpfully translated and posted by the folks at Japan Film News): “So what’re ya shooting?” It’s a picture about a fierce battle between Aikawa Sho and a bunch of young boys.?So, half the actors are kids. “I’ve said this before but… is that really safe?” This is a wholesomely violent movie. You can revel in excitement that doesn’t fit within established genres, and after watching it I would like people to discuss human suffering with their mates over a few sakes at their local izakaya. Heh heh heh. Next […]
Anne Thompson has an interesting profile of Crash producer Cathy Schulman up on Reuters that covers the entirety of Schulman’s career, from her days working at Sundance to her ill-fated partnerships with Mike Ovitz and Bob Yari, and it discusses what’s up at her company, Bulls Eye, post the Oscar win.
The Washington Post runs its obligatory Sopranos story this week with David Segal’s “Death by Script,” a surprisingly entertaining look at the actors whose careers have taken a hit when their characters have been rubbed out on the show. Here’s actor John Fiore describing the events after he received the sad phone call from Sopranos creator David Chase: In an instant, Fiore knew he was a dead man. Well, his character was a dead man, and that meant his “Sopranos” gig was over, which for an actor is like getting whacked for real. Fiore did what anyone confronting a killer […]
The Flaherty/International Film Seminars sent out an email announcing an informal memorial for Garrett Scott, whose 2002 film Cul de Sac premiered at the 2002 Flaherty Seminar, this Saturday in New York. From their email: “The New York Underground Film Festival will honor him at an informal event from 12pm to 2pm this Saturday, March 11th at Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Ave. at 2nd Street, in the Maya Deren (downstairs) theater. All are invited. A more formal memorial will be held in the coming weeks. We mourn the loss of such a talented artist and warm person.”
Jack Boulware writes the first but certainly not the last profile of Laura Albert, the pen and voice behind the recently unmasked JT LeRoy. At the least, Boulware’s portrait should banish the term “40-year-old Brooklyn housewife” from articles about the literary hoax and hoaxer. The article traces Albert’s path from the NYC punk scene (she was interviewed for but not featured in Paul Rachman and Steven Blush’s American Hardcore) through her gigs as a cybererotica expert in San Francisco’s proto-dotcom days up through the success of “LeRoy” and his books.
“If Microsoft Redesigned the iPod.” Via Stereogum.
Multiple sources are reporting the sad news that pioneering black director and photojournalist Gordon Parks died today in New York. He was 93. In 1969, Parks completed his first film, The Learning Tree, based on his own novel about growing up in Kansas in the 1920s. In doing so, he became the first black American to write and direct a studio motion picture. Later he would go on to achieve commercial success with the seminal “blaxploitation” film Shaft. More recently he appeared in an HBO documentary on his work, Half Past Autumn: The Life and Works of Gordon Parks. His […]
Film Independent (formerly the IFP/Los Angeles) has launched their new website. Surf over there for news about the Spirit Awards, the upcoming L.A. Film Festival, and the organization’s other programs. Also up are a series of interviews by Lisa Garibay with folks like Michel Gondry and Capote producer Caroline Baron, winner of this year’s AMC/American Express Producer’s Award.