In its 12th year the Sarasota Film Festival has established itself as an important regional festival stop. Wedged between SXSW and Tribeca, Sarasota’s 10-day event is filled with festival circuit favorites, access to industry folk for the area filmmakers and lots of parties. [Full disclosure: I’m on the jury for the Independent Visions award this year.] Kicking off last night with Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini‘s The Extra Man, the film stars Kevin Klein and Paul Dano as unlikely roommates living in Manhattan, one an aging playboy (Klein) the other a dreamer trying to find his place in life […]
Fassbinder and Herzog from Wim Wenders’ 1982 documentary on the future of cinema, Chambre 666.
In a release sent out moments ago, the IFP has announced that B-Side, the recently shuttered Austin-based technology and distribution company that provided Web site services to film festivals, will be handing over it’s “Festival Genius” technology to IFP. Slated, a company that provides film and market research services to producers and distributors, has acquired B-Side’s intellectual property and will be licensing the service to IFP. According to the release, key members of the B-Side staff will be joining IFP while founder Chris Hyams and senior executives from the company will be joining Slated. As you read on the blog […]
Husband and wife producers Joke and Biagio have a highly useful post today up on their blog. (Useful, that is, if you own an iPad and are a screenwriter.) Titled “How To Write a Screenplay on the iPad,” it is the result of a bout of insomnia that has wound up adding functionality to the iPad’s Pages application. From their blog: If you have an iPad, chances are you’re going to buy Apple’s iWork app Pages sooner or later. At $9.99 it’s not a break-the-bank piece of software, and it’s sort of a must-have for iPad owners, anyway. The full, […]
I of course had read about the U.S. military video decrypted and released by WikiLeaks documenting a helicopter attack that killed two Reuters journalists as well as a number of other people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad, but I hadn’t watched it until tonight. Titled “Collateral Murder,” it is available in a 17-minute edited and titled version and then the unedited 38-minute tape. From the “Collateral Murder” page: Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, […]
When I posted the initially shocking “Scarface School Play” I was dubious about its authenticity while others were outraged. Now, Marc Klasfeld, the writer/director, explains the point behind it: “I have two children myself, and my wife and I guard our daughter from various television commercials about violence or sex, so I think there’s a message about that.” A rep from Share Group adds, “It’s very satiricial about viral videos… and by taking it to the next level, what Marc does well here is question the reality behind these videos. There’s a constructed reality, a perceived reality, and a real […]
This was was favorite film at Sundance this year — pretty much from the opening notes of the Richard Hawley song that adorns its opening credits. See it here. (Hat tip: Movie City Indie.)
George and Mike Kuchar are two of the great camp experimental filmmakers of all time. They represented a pastiche heavy, less self-serious strand of the New American Cinema’s downtown explosion in the early 1960s. Evangelized by Jonas Mekas in the pages of The Village Voice, their work spans over 700 short and feature films, almost all of the executed on the flimsiest of budgets, many of them made in an almost artisanal, fiercely individualistic mode. In a Critics’ Poll of the 100 best films of the 20th century, appearing originally in the January 4, 2000 edition of The Village Voice, […]
The Edit Center, the New York school that teaches beginning editors by having them edit actual films from outside filmmakers, is launching a class in music supervision and editing. Those looking to break into this business might want to check out this program. Deadline to enroll is April 16. From the press release: Learn the language of music in film in this creative and pragmatic 4-week seminar led by music editor Suzana Peric’ (Rachel Getting Married, The Illusionist, The Pianist) and music supervisor Sue Jacobs (Little Miss Sunshine, Everything is Illuminated, Capote). The class will cover what a music editor […]
We just went to press on the new issue of Filmmaker very late last night and as we were doing so we had some informal conversations on a possible iPad version of the magazine. (Check out the blog hopefully later today or tomorrow for my review of the device.) So far not many magazines have published iPad specific editions due to two reasons: iPads weren’t available for testing; and publishers, designers and editors are still in the process of rethinking their products for the iPad platform. Conde Nast is apparently going to be experimenting with several different approaches across all […]