Film scholar David Bordwell has a blog and it’s always worth checking out for his investigations into the art and industry of moviemaking. Here’s an excerpt from a piece on the Scorsese’s The Departed. After winding through a very interesting comparison of this film’s narrative resolution and the Hong Kong original’s, he discusses Scorsese’s editing style: The Departed has calmed Scorsese’s urge to track a bit, but that’s balanced by its over 3200 cuts. The result is an average shot length (ASL) of about 2.7 seconds. Not unusual for an action picture nowadays, but consider where Scorsese started by conning […]
Ben Fritz and Phil Gallo have an article in Variety this week titled “Biz’s share scares” that details the games the major entertainment congolomerates are beginning to enter into with the various media-sharing companies. In short, Universal Music has launched a copyright infringment lawsuit against Grouper Networks, which runs the media-sharing site Bolt.com. The two twists in the article are that Grouper is owned by Universal-rival Sony, which bought the network this summer, and that Universal Music recently signed a revenue-sharing deal with YouTube, the largest of the video-sharing sites. Here’s the key passage in the article: The two suits […]
Doug Block’s doc 51 Birch Street opens this week at the Cinema Village in New York. Here’s what Paul Harrill at Self-Reliant Film had to say about it: The film is being billed, not incorrectly, as a documentary mystery: Just a few months after Doug’s mother dies, Doug’s father suddenly announces that he’s engaged to his former secretary. It’s not long before Doug finds himself at their wedding, awkwardly toasting the new couple. At the reception his father, the groom, is a different man. What’s the story? Was his father unfaithful? Was his parents’ seemingly happy marriage a sham? Doug […]
An Andy Warhol Braniff Airlines commericial from the 1970s:
The latest configuration of the Cleveland rock band Pere Ubu has a new album out, Why I Hate Women, and here’s frontman David Thomas in this month’s The Wire on the real avant garde: “In the early 70s,” he says, “the evolution of rock was very, very, very obvious. Analogue synthesizers and concrete sound was entering into the music. Various people had various strategies, and it wasn’t one thing. It was stuido techniques and other things. All of it, to us, was coming to this juncture. And it was very obvious to us that this was what rock music was […]
Over at his blog Sit Down Man, You’re a Bloody Tragedy,, Owen Hatherley writes about Todd Haynes’s Safe and recognizes its foreshadowing of our contemporary urban situation: From it’s opening sex scene onwards- the grim treadmill behind the neon-lit Southern California cityscape of the generic erotic thriller- Todd Haynes’ Safe is a depiction of the most important city of the early 1990s. The edge of apocalypse you can hear in the synth whines of Dr Dre’s The Chronic, the fire and brimstone of Amerikkka’s Most Wanted, Mike Davis’ City of Quartz and of course the LA Riots: in all this […]
Nick Knight’s fantastic art/fashion/culture website SHOWstudio launched a new project today: a video diary by Asia Argento, updated three times daily. Titled “Don’t Bother to Knock,” the series is running with five entries so far in which the director and actress talks about travel (she is promoting a film), freaks (Todd Browning’s and others), burn care and more. From the site: As one of the Bal Masqué’s twelve muses –chosen by Maison Martin Margiela to model their silver flower dress at the grand event on the 24th October- controversial actress/director Asia Argento has kindly agreed to also lend her cinematic […]
There’s a film festival this weekend taking place at a decadent playground where the idle rich enact scenes of ritual perversion. And for those who won’t be heading out to the Hamptons Film Festival, there’s Cinekink, which bills itself as the “true alternative film festival.” The fest opens tonight at Bacchus with a live performance by the Wet Spots and then bases itself at the Anthology Film Archives for its screenings and panels. Highlights include a panel discussion on Saturday, October 21st at 4:30pm entitled “The State of Smut,” which features NYC filmmakers Audacia Ray/Waking Vixen Productions, Tony Comstock/Comstock Films, […]
Over at The Mutiny Company, Jamie Stuart has posted the fourth installement of his video diary/short film/online reports covering the New York Film Festival. David Lynch makes an appearance on this one discussing his Inland Empire, which, reportedly, he will be self-releasing in the near future.
I wrote a little bit about Jamie Stuart’s New York Film Festival video diaries at The Daily Reel. Now, Stuart emails to say that Episode Three is available. Apted. Almodovar. Beatty. Cruz. Check it out.