The folks who comprise Human Giant have come up with a very funny short, below, that takes a Clerks-style approach to the indie music scene and which sets its story at my favorite music store, Other Music. My only quibble with the short is that its take on the Other Music clerks is fairly off — they’re actually pretty nice guys. On the other hand, I guess I’ve never asked for the Garden State soundtrack.
Mary Glucksman covered Jason Rosette’s Susan Hero in her “In Focus” column back in 2004, and now Rosette emails to say he is finishing his Santa Fe-shot film… in Cambodia. Rosette moved to Cambodia where he teaches video production at the Royal University in Phnom Penh. He’s got his film on 500 gigs of hard drive space, an occasionally updated blog up detailing his adventures in both Cambodia and in the trenches of film festival submissions, and a website where he aggregates all his filmmaking activities, including info on his previous film, Book Wars.
Via Filmmaker‘s MySpace page comes word from the folks at the Studio City-based Starway Pictures, who have created a new blog devoted to their films and also technical developments in indie filmmaking. Starway’s Robert Sanders writes, “We’ll try to post our thoughts and feelings about ‘the process’ of filmmaking and the industry. For the hard-core gear heads and geeks, we’ll also discuss digital filmmaking technology and our philosophies about digital cinema. And maybe a rant or two.” Already up are some evocative L.A. location photos for their upcoming shoot, The 23rd Letter, fundraising trailers for their horror pic Shadow Falls, […]
Holly Willis has a fascinating piece up at the L.A. Weekly about an internet-based new-media film entitled No Animals Were Hurt by Peter Brinson. Writes Willis: At the very moment I write this, Peter Brinson’s online biopic of inventor Alan Turing is 33 percent its proper length. That’s because since early January, when the site with the video was launched, there have been 17,044 viewers, each one unlocking and revealing a single frame in the video’s 5,000 frames. As the number of viewers grows closer to multiples of 5,000, the video images slow down, allowing the voice-over to complete the […]
Redford on this year’s Sundance on Yahoo: “It’s gotten to the point now — almost to a breaking point — where there’s a fever that has taken over the festival that creates an enormous amount of chaos and excitement and tension,” the 68-year-old actor said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. “It’s gotten a little bit harder on me… “The festival that we do is the same one as we did the first year,” he said. “We program it exactly the same every year, which is for new voices and more experimental films.” The difference now, Redford said, […]
There’s an eccentric tracking of life and movies through ticket stubs posted by Mike over at Botsko.net. Having collected all his movie ticket stubs for six years, he puts their data in a spreadsheet and analyzes his moviegoing habits through dating, Fandango, ticket price increases, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the birth of his child. One of his conclusions: he wound up paying more for movies he liked: What’s interesting though is that the average price I paid per ticket reflects my opinion of the movie. The better I rated the movie, the more I paid on average […]
Twitch, which is a great site covering what it calls “strange little films from around the world” (with a heavy emphasis on Asian art and genre films) links to Handcranked Films, a collective of filmmakers who include War (pictured) director Jake Mahaffy, one of Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces of 2005. What I didn’t realize until Twitch’s piece is that Handcranked includes a number of other filmmakers, including Daniel Sousa and Jeff Slas, and that all of their work is featured on the site. Here’s what Todd at Twitch has to say about them: “Handcranked is a collective of film makers […]
The Reeler has a good piece up on Marshall Curry, whose Street Fight opened today at New York’s IFC Center. From the piece: “While viewing Curry’s riveting film last week, it occurred to me that this could absolutely be the dark horse nominee come March 5. In chronicling Newark’s 2002 mayoral race between relative newcomer Cory Booker and Jersey’s reigning machine-politics king Sharpe James, Curry captures a system imploded by racism, corruption, lies and at least a few physical altercations. Perhaps more shockingly, Street Fight reflects the assured work of a first-time feature filmmaker–a guy who quit his job, bought […]
I ran into a colleague on the street a few hours ago who caught me up on some depresing industry buzz that had been circulating in Berlin: that Genius, the parent company of theatrical distributor Wellspring which is majority-owned by the Weinstein Company, is effectively shuttering the classy specialty distributor that has released so many great foreign and independent films. And now, Eugene Hernandez has the details in Indiewire. Going forward, the Wellspring name will become a home-video brand, and the Weinstein Company says they’ll release Wellspring’s upcoming theatrical titles. About ten people in Wellspring’s theatrical division will lose their […]
Josh Horowitz has a good conversation with writer/director Whit Stillman up on his Better than Fudge blog. His transcribed phone call works as a solid “part two” to Anthony Kaufman’s piece in the current Filmmaker which discussed the making of Metropolitan on the release of the film’s new Criterion release. Here’s the end of the piece, but click on the link above to read the whole thing: “JH: What do you miss most about making films?WS: Number one, an income. Number two, director’s guild health insurance. Number three I just miss the extroverted production life, being around technicians and being […]