According to various postings on the web, free-music guitarist Derek Bailey died on Christmas Day. I’ve seen Bailey a few times, all of them a long time ago when he’d periodically put together in New York one of his “Company Weeks” of group improvisation. I saw him play with folks like Bill Laswell, John Zorn and George Lewis, and to several musician friends of mine, like Donald Miller from Borbetomagus, he was a god. Certainly the most radical guitarist of his generation due to the simple fact that much of what he played didn’t sound like guitar, he was a […]
As 2005 winds to a close, so too the boring parade of “Ten Best” lists. And now, with the last Sunday of the year gone, the newspaper columnists will move on to their “New in 2006!” pieces while the internet stragglers take up the rear with a more interesting bunch of kudos. GreenCine has been diligently covering the whole year-end shebang, and today the site has a bunch of interesting links to everything from DVDTalk and others ranging from Best Schlock of 2005 to Top 20 Adult DVDs, which feature lists from both male and female reviewers, to the most […]
A while back I linked to D.C.-based filmmaker Sujewa Ekanayake, whose blog, Filmmaking for the Poor, covers a range of no-budget film topics. Today GreenCine draws my attention to his site again with this link to a good post for the New Year: Ekanayake’s picks for “10 Filmmakers to Watch in 2006.” There are a few obvious choices here, talented filmmakers who he’s eager to see what they do next. Miranda July, Andrew Bujalski and Caveh Zahedi fit into this category. But then there are people I don’t know as well, like Amir Motiagh, Andrew Dickson, and Elizabeth Nord. And […]
The people over at Boing Boing have a piece up linking to this article on Fleshbot, this piece on SFist, and blogger Violet’s post on her Tiny Nibbles blog, all of which detail the decision by Tribe.com to apply Federal 2257 regulations to pages created by Tribe users. After December 20, all Tribe pages containing sexual content will be rendered “invisible” to the public at large. Comments Violet: “Now everyone is confused about whether or not they can put up a picture of their own boobies and not end up in federal prison. They’re confusing everyone, and kind of really […]
ABC News has a surprising story up about a debate in the French government that led to an unexpected victory for file-sharers. When the country’s cultural minister introduced legislation that would have dealt jail time and a fine to those convicted of file sharing copywritten material over the internet, lawmakers instead endorsed an amendment that would make file-sharing legal as long as monthly royalty payments of $8.50 were paid for the privilege. From the piece: “‘To legalize the downloading of our music, almost free of charge, is to kill our work,’ venerable rocker Johnny Hallyday said in a statement. The […]
It is hard to beat Ray Pride to the punch when passing along a relevant indie-film link. He’s the first to note that the Four-Eyed Monsters duo of Arin Crumley and Susan Buice have just posted Episode 3.5 of their popular video blog. Watch it and you’ll see why they’re not calling it Episode Four, as this week’s podcast deals with the burn-out at having to churn out these video blogs. More positively, they post on their My Space page links to some of their own favorite video blogs, including RocketBoom, Diggnation, and filmmaker Kevin Bewersdorf’s podcast for his film […]
Via GreenCine, which was unanimously hailed at the Indiewire blogger panel I sat on last Friday at the Apple store in Soho as the best film blog, comes this link to Tim R’s Mainly Movies blog in which he relays the not-so-surprising news out of today’s Variety that Terrence Malick is still editing The New World just days before it’s release in theaters. Malick is reportedly making 15 to 20 minutes of trims to the picture, although no sections are said to be being taken out. What is surprising, however, is that Malick plans to deliver this cut after the […]
I was a big, big fan of the TV show, and I actually don’t hate this. It’s just a teaser, of course, and the AICN talkbackers are having a field day with it, saying it looks like a Bacardi ad, but, Linkin Park music and all, the vibe seems right for a 2006 update of Miami Vice directed by Michael Mann. It’s weird, though, the dozens of hours I spent watching that show seem co-opted in my head by the considerably fewer I spent playing GTA: Vice City, and it’s those scenes that I’m flashing back to as Colin Farrell […]
Dennis Lim has a great appreciation in the Village Voice today about Claire Denis’s memorable and mysterious new film L’Intrus (or, The Intruder). Opening at the Quad in some kind of stealth release from Wellspring, the film continues the intuitive, searching and philosophical cinema that Denis has been pursuing since Beau Travail. It’s a cinema in which storyline, subtext, motivation and the unconcious are all interwoven as they collectively pursue a meaning that is as much in the viewer’s mind as it is in the celluloid. Writes Lim: “Allergic to the dictates of linear storytelling, her movies have grown increasingly […]
I’m sure I’m not the only New York producer trying to figure out what the NYC transit strike means to an already down-to-the-wire Sundance feature post schedule. Fortunately, the project I’m working on is picture-locked and all elements are to the appropriate vendors. My worry is with the vendors and their employees, hoping that the strike doesn’t slow them down. I started my day today by calling our neg cutter. Fortunately, she was on the job and had left her outside-of-NYC home at 4:00 a.m. so as not to get nailed by the driving restrictions. My morning meeting at the […]