Getty Images held a short film competition in which 50% of the material of each submitted film has to be material from the Getty archive. The 28 finalists are online, and viewers get to vote for the winner, who receives a $10,000 cash prize. (Annoyingly, you have to register with their site to stream the films, but registration is free.) Via Shortsville, which is picking up steam as a place to find cool short film and advertising links.
If you’re in London this week, check out artist Jenny Holzer’s public art work for the Beckett Centenary Festival. From the press release: As part of the Beckett Centenary Festival at the Barbican, American artist Jenny Holzer presents a series of light projections on the Barbican and buildings around London including City Hall and Somerset House. Writings from Beckett and a selection of works by celebrated poets, are cast onto well-known London landmarks, allowing light and text to flow over the cityscape, creating an extraordinary visual experience. Holzer rose to prominence with her text series Truisms (1977-79). In 1990 she […]
… in in this short FX extravanganza entitled The Call directed by Training Day director Antoine Fuqua for the Italian tire manufacturer Pirelli. John Malkovitch collects a payday as an exorcist.
An issue or so ago I put Scott Walker in our “Super 8” column, anticipating his new album, his first in ten years. Now it’s got a title — The Drift — and the musician Momus has an early review on his blog: Fuck me, this is terrifying! I’ve come by The Drift, the new Scott Walker album. Don’t ask me how. It’s on 4AD. I used to be on 4AD, but that’s by the by the by the by. But the thing is, this isn’t a pop record, it’s a nightmare. It’s a horror film, part Cocteau, part Jodorowsky. […]
This has been a good year so far for cool movie posters (I haven’t seen V for Vendetta yet but I loved the marketing campaign). And now comes these amazing new posters for Christoph Gans’s upcoming Silent Hill, which looks from the trailer like it might actually be good. (The one to the right is titled “The Nurses.”)
The U.S. red-band trailer for Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Lady Vengeance is here.
A few posts below I noted the death of Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem. Benjamin Walker has just posted a podcast devoted to Lem and his work.
The debate playing out at Caveh Zahedi’s blog over, specifically, Landmark’s backing out of screening his I Am a Sex Addict gets more and more fascinating as Zahedi and Mark Cuban go back and forth in a increasingly long series of blog entries. At the very least, it’s a more interesting and thorough debate of the whole “day and date” releasing strategy than we’ve seen in the trades as it deals with the inevitable conflicts that will arise between competing alliances of theater chains, cable providers and theatrical distributors. After a seemingly futile letter to Steven Soderbergh to intervene, Zahedi […]
I’ll be moderating an IFP-sponsored panel this coming Monday on the challenges of the current distribution environment for indies, focusing on filmmakers who have persisted despite initial adversity to see their films out in the marketplace. It’s linked to the New York opening of Caveh Zahedi’s I Am a Sex Addict and tickets cost ten bucks, but $8 of the ticket price goes back to the theater screening Caveh’s film and you get a voucher enabling you to see the movie during the first week. We’re doing it, obviously, to help Caveh’s grosses in the first week as these are […]
If you arrive at this blog through a bookmarked page, you’ll occasionally miss our various online-only features. Up now, for example, is Jason Guerrasio’s “Hammett Goes to High School,” a great interview with Brick writer-director Rian Johnson. Focus had an amazing opening for this film last week, grossing over $40,000 per screen, and from audience response it could be the next cult youth movie after Donnie Darko. From the piece: Filmmaker: You’ve said high school was a perfect setting because it took away from the noir world of fedoras and trench coats. Johnson: And saying that, I don’t mean to […]