With The Outsider, cinematic badboy James Toback gets in front of the camera for first-time filmmaker Nicholas Jarecki. “Who is James Toback?” That’s the question documentary filmmaker Nicholas Jarecki poses in The Outsider, a freewheeling and highly watchable portrait of the director of idiosyncratic films like Fingers and Black and White. Jarecki introduces his subject, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Bugsy, on the set of a 2004 film for which Toback had high hopes. When Will I Be Loved, which starred Neve Campbell as a young woman on the make, would, like many of Toback’s films, be a minor presence […]
The director of Head-On investigates the rich musical culture of his homeland. DIRECTOR FATIH AKIN. The soundtrack and score of the critically acclaimed, adrenaline fueled doomed romance Head-On was a fusion of punk, European electronica, hip-hop, British new wave and traditional Turkish laments, so it’s no great surprise that the Turkish-German director Fatih Akin’s new movie is a documentary about the vibrant and diverse music community in Istanbul. It’s the city where Head-On music composer Alexander Hacke, better known as a member of the avant-garde band Einstuezende Neubauten, recorded a few songs for Head-On — and became fascinated by the […]
Over at Caveh Zahedi’s blog, Zahedi is talking about teaching at the European Graduate School in the Swiss Alps where he’s hanging out with and listening in on classes taught by Claire Denis, Jean-Luc Nancy, D.J. Spooky, the Quay Brothers and others.
Over at Suicide Girls, Daniel Robert Epstein interviews the great horror director Stuart Gordon and talks about the reissue of the fantastic 80s horror film From Beyond as well as an upcoming project — another episode in the Re-Animator series: DRE: I read that House of Re-Animator is going to set in the White House.SG: Yeah, we’re excited about that. We’re in the process of writing it, so that’s a little ways off.DRE: Are you definitely directing it?SG: Yes, we hope to start at the beginning of next year.DRE: What has brought you back to Re-Animator?SG: It was when George […]
Actor Sung Kang (pictured) stars in both Michael Kang’s indie The Motel, which opens in a couple of weeks and Justin Lin’s very big budget The Fast and Furious 3. Here’s a mash-up that unites the two movies entitled The Motel and the Furious.
The BBC runs a fascinating dialogue between MPAA President Dan Glickman and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s John Perry Barlow. Here’s a taste: JPB: These are aging industries run by aging men, and they’re up against 17-year-olds who have turned themselves into electronic Hezbollah because they resent the content industry for its proprietary practices. And I don’t have a question about who’s going to win that one eventually. There are a lot of kids out there copying and distributing movies not because they care about seeing the movies or sharing them with their friends but because they want to stick it […]
Over at GreenCine, David Hudson compares and contrasts the work of Joe Swanberg and Andrew Bujalski. Bujalski, of course, is the director of Mutual Appreciation and Funny Ha Ha. Swanberg made Kissing on the Mouth and LOL and also helms a web series called Young American Bodies (pictured) over at Nerve.com. Typically, Hudson’s analysis is full of tons of links, and observations like this one: First, I have no idea how much of an inspiration Bujalski might be for Joe, but that’s ultimately beside the point. I’d argue that each gives us something in his films the other doesn’t. There […]
Over at his blog Self Reliant Filmmaking, filmmaker Paul Harrill is beginning a two-part series discussing books on productivity and their effectiveness for artists. He starts with David Allen’s Getting Things Done, which is the bible-of-the-moment for productivity seekers. It has even spawned a website, 43 Folders, which applies its principles to computer organizational systems and various lifehacks. Harrill starts by summarizing some of the key points of Allen’s simple system: Something comes across your desk. What now? First, you process it: If you can’t act on it, you trash it, file it away for later, or you save it […]
Below Matt Ross points you to the iTunes Music Store and Chase Palmer’s short, “Neo Noir.” I just clicked over there and found another one of our “25 New Faces” up on the site. For $1.99 you can download Cary Fukunaga’s incredible Victoria para Chino, a tremendously shocking and moving look at a horrific scenario concerning illegal immigration.
Cinematic sinners are accustomed to squawking when the MPAA threatens an NC-17 on a guns-blazing, sex-filled entertainment. But Matt Drudge links today to a report from the Scripps Howard News Service which describes a complaint by a group of Christian moviemakers behind a movied called Facing the Giants who say that the MPAA has given them a PG rating (instead of a G) because their film is “too evangelistic.” From the piece: The MPAA, noted [Provident Films v.p. of marketing Kris] Fuhr, tends to offer cryptic explanations for its ratings. In this case, she was told that it “decided that […]