| Filmmaker Magazine

STEPPING UP

Filmmaker Joe Swanberg has got his short films streaming on iTunes, his web series Young American Bodies running on Nerve.com, and now he’s shooting a new movie with a great marketing hook. In Hannah Takes the Stairs, he’s cast folks like Mark Duplass, Andrew Bujalski, Todd Rohal, and Ry Russo-Young who are known for their own indie films (The Puffy Chair, Mutual Appreciation, The Guatemalan Handshake, and Orphans, respectively) as actors. The film has a MySpace site and on it’s own website, Swanberg is running a production journal/photo blog. On the site, he summarizes the film like this: “Hannah is […]

by Scott Macaulay on Aug 5, 2006

GRINDHOUSE POSTERS ONLINE

Over at Ain’t It Cool News there are three posters up for Grindhouse, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s double-bill homage to 60s and 70s era exploitation films. From what I understand, Rodriguez’s is some kind of zombie movie and Tarantino’s is a riff on Death Race 2000. Having been a big fan of Kill Bill, I am really looking forward to this… and all three posters are great. Here’s my favorite, which features Rose McGowan.

by Scott Macaulay on Aug 4, 2006

GRAINY PICTURES, PART TWO

I woke up this morning wondering if I was too harsh on the look of Miami Vice, so I’m going to kick up these comments from Jamie Stuart that are posted below. Stuart disagrees with my pan of the film’s visuals and finds its rough-hewn textures compelling, and he makes the point that by choosing to shoot the film on a Viper instead of a camera like Panavision’s Genesis, they were deliberately striving for the look they got. (He also makes some comments about my quotation of internet movie reviewer Chuck O’Leary, but I wasn’t holding him out as any […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jul 31, 2006

FINAL CALL FOR IFP ROUGH CUT LAB

Last year I ran a new program from the IFP called the Rough Cut Lab. Over a three-day seminar held during the IFP Market, I lectured along with a group of industry consultants on the process of finishing a feature film and bringing it to market or a festival. The lab covered everything from locking picture with a solid cut of a film, negotiating affordable music rights, festival strategy, creating publicity and marketing materials, selling a movie, and delivering a film to a distributor. Folks like music supervisor Tracy McKnight, composer George S. Clinton, BMI’s Doreeen Ringer-Ross, editor Alan Oxman, […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jul 31, 2006

THE GRAIN OVER MIAMI

I just got back from Miami Vice, and as a huge fan of Michael Mann’s work (including the show on which the movie was based), I was pretty disappointed. The first thirty minutes is fairly strong as Mann throws you smack into the middle of an undercover operation and shoots the various night-time clashes and assignations with a purposefully grainy and quite bold visual style — rooftop meetings against purple night skies, outrageous wheel mounts hovering inches above the Miami causeways, and the grain signifying a dirty reality miles removed from the TV show’s pastel-hued romantic nihilism. And indeed, while […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jul 30, 2006

THE BEST LAST MOVIE MINUTES

The folks over at Filmcritic.com have compiled a highly debatable but still fun list: The Top 50 Movie Endings of All Time. Of course, it’s a calvacade of spoilers, but if you’re reasonably film literate you’ll have seen most of these and can see if your take on movie clilmaxes syncs up with the site’s editors. Here’s one I very much agree with (although Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant might have made my list too): King of New York (1990) – After facing the last (and oldest) cop of the four that stalked him, crime lord Christopher Walken sits in a cab, […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jul 29, 2006

MIAMI VICE QUOTE OF THE DAY

I’ll probably see it tomorrow, but to tide me over, here’s Ray Pride’s unexpected summing up of the film: …The HD process is exploited mostly for a painterly scumble of vivid digital grain in the hardly illuminated night, but in simple summary, Miami Vice is Mann’s foreseeable triangulation of Friedrich Nietzsche, linen-edge designers like Ozwald Boateng and distinguished painters of geometric abstraction, like the great Richard Diebenkorn. Also, Green Cine asked Pride one of their summertime questions: “If you hadn’t become a film critic, what would you have done instead?” Here’s an excerpt from his response: “One night, young, I […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jul 29, 2006

"TOTALLY UNCOOL!"

Here’s a look at the work of one of three sets of brothers who appear in our upcoming Filmmaker “25 New Faces” feature. Matt Ross wrote about the Neistat Brothers, who are currently in the (Fox) News for punking the network and causing the on-air reporter to flip out. Guys, next time, work on the blood effects and make the reaction a bit more convincing.

by Scott Macaulay on Jul 29, 2006

SHORT STORY

I’m really excited about Brian De Palma’s upcoming adaptation of James Ellroy’s classic noir novel The Black Dahlia. I remember discovering Ellroy for the first time with this book, and the read was like a dark fever dream. If De Palma is truly on form, he stands a chance of getting some of Ellroy’s obsessional memory piece on screen with its perversities intact. It’s hard to tell from the trailer, but I have my hopes up.

by Scott Macaulay on Jul 27, 2006

THE CHECK IS NOT IN THE MAIL

Sharon Waxman in The New York Times has a piece up on another conflict arising about the film Crash — its lack of payments so far to its profit participants. As anyone who works in the film business knows, this is almost par for the course, but in the Crash case, the system’s inequities are highlighted by the film’s extraordinary success. In addition to winning the Academy Award, the $7.5 million film has “taken in” $180 million around the world. The movie’s co-writer and director, Paul Haggis, has so far made less than $300,000 on the film, a pittance by […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jul 26, 2006

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