Babelgum and Cinetic Rights Management have negotiated a deal in which Sally Potter’s latest feature, Rage, will be released in multiple international territories on Babelgum’s online service in webisode form as it concurrently rolls out in theatrical venues. The deal is reported in today’s Screen International by Jeremy Kay. The film will be streamed episodically on the web as well as on mobile platforms in the U.S., U.K. and Italy. The interesting thing here is the restructuring of a feature film to web-friendly webisode form, with each screening experience cross-marketing the other. Indiewire quotes the producers in a statement: “We […]
Spike Jonze and the whole team who made Where the Wild Things Are have launched a group blog titled We Love You So. It’s already kind of amazing, with a post about Miranda July, some comments on films that influenced WTWTA, which include Ratcatcher and Paperhouse (!), and the following first focus group for the Wild Things mask. Where The Wild Things Are Focus Group #1 from Lance Bangs on Vimeo.
Laura Miller’s essay in Salon on Willifred Gallagher’s Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life is a must read for anyone pondering with alternating degrees of fascination and worry the effect of internet communication and online media on our attention spans as well as our psyches. This is stuff I think about myself as I wonder why, for example, I’ve never rewatched Berlin Alexanderplatz, the beautiful Criterion edition of which sits right in front of me, while I did just watch Justin Timberlake’s Mother’s Day SNL spoof. It’s easy for some of us to joke about being ADD and for others […]
Back in November I linked to A Barber’s Tale, the first of a series of web shorts by director, writer and producer Nelson George. George, who has been doing a series of readings and events in conjunction with the release of his City Kid: A Writer’s Memoir of Ghetto Life and Post-Soul Success, has posted the second of these pieces, A Survivor’s Tale, as well as several short videos created around his book tour. You can see them both as well as other work by George on his Vimeo page, or watch the two clips I’ve pulled below. A Survivor’s […]
I’m a couple days late catching up with news on the blog, but congratulations to Trevor Groth, who was appointed this week as the Sundance Film Festival’s Director of Programming. He’s taking over the position from John Cooper, who, following Geoff Gilmore’s move to Tribeca, was appointed the festival’s director. From the press release: A 16-year veteran of the Festival, Groth had been a Senior Programmer handling both narrative and documentary feature selection and leading the Festival’s Short Film Section. In his new role Groth will head up the six person programming team that is responsible for curating the Festival’s […]
David Lynch has launched Interview Project, a “20,000 mile road trip over 70 days across and back the United States,” in which Lynch and his team interview ordinary people. “It’s something that’s human and you can’t stay away from it,” Lynch says on the promo teaser currently up on the site. It’s a simple idea, and from the teaser it seems very Straight Story, but I have to admit that the faces of the interviewees and the basic questions they pose to themselves will have me back at the site on June 1 when it formally launches. Click on the […]
This past week the effect of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act on educators, documentary filmmakers and remix artists was debated during one of the Copyright Office’s tri-annual hearings. Several bloggers and participants have written about the hearings, and one, Gordon Quinn, is the subject of an article by Lindsay Muscato on the Gapers Block blog. Her article offers a good overview of the issue. Her lede: This week in Washington, Chicago filmmaker Gordon Quinn and other advocates prepare for the next battle for filmmakers’ right to quote from their culture. Mass-produced DVDs often encrypt films so that they can’t be […]
POLICE MUGSHOTS OF POLITICIAN LARRY CRAIG AS FEATURED IN DIRECTOR KIRBY DICK’S OUTRAGE. COURTESY MAGNOLIA PICTURES. Whether his subjects have been small and personal or large and institutional, documentarian Kirby Dick has always dedicated himself to telling important and often provocative stories. Dick was born in Tucson, Arizona, in 1952, graduated from the Film and Video Program at the California Institute of the Arts and subsequently did postgraduate studies at the American Film Institute. He made his directorial debut in 1986 with Private Practices: The Story of a Sex Surrogate, but afterwards segued into television work, taking eleven years before […]
Over at Filmmaker Videos check out Damon Smith‘s interview with Tilda Swinton about her new film, Julia, which opens today, as well as other revealing thoughts about her career.
Perhaps best known for her Oscar-winning turn in Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton and the long, fruitful collaboration she enjoyed with the late Derek Jarman, Tilda Swinton has acted recently for David Fincher, Joel and Ethan Coen, Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr, and in Andrew Adamson’s Chronicles of Narnia franchise. Her flinty, fearless performance as an alcoholic outlaw in Erick Zonca’s cross-border thriller Julia, however, truly spotlights the impressive range and cool professionalism of this adventurous, one-of-a-kind screen actress. (She also appears in Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control, which opened last Friday.) We caught up with Swinton in New York to […]