Picking up right where we left off; Anna Rebek says nuts to embracing limitations; start sacrificing everything to make all the details important. One great thing about being micro is that no one but ourselves are breathing down our own necks, asking for results, and pushing the timeline. You often have as much time as you allow to problem-solve any limitations that you give yourself, so why would you cut corners and allow your film to be anything but what you realized at the script stage? Perhaps the best time to know how far you can push it is […]
Something of a national treasure in his native France, Joann Sfar (The Rabbi’s Cat) is the award–winning author of graphic novels, comics, and children’s books, including the New York Times bestseller Little Vampire Goes to School and a fresh re-imagining of Saint-Exupéry’s classic Le Petit Prince. Sfar was a serious student of philosophy at the University of Nice despite his strict religious upbringing (his mother is Ashkenazi and his father Sephardic), but decided to chase his youthful dream of publishing comics. He studied under painter Jean-François Debord at the School of Fine Arts in Paris (ADERF) and eventually became one […]
Second #517, 8:37 Peter Carew, who plays the coroner and who appears onscreen for just under twenty seconds, delivers perhaps the most tilted line in the movie: “We’ll check the morgue records but I don’t recall anything coming in minus an ear.” This either could be the punch line to the whole sordid blood-drenched twentieth century, or else a few words tossed off by a bald man who refuses to look at the characters on screen with him, as if he speaks to (into?) the ear and the ear alone. Blue Velvet was Carew’s first movie in twenty years. Previously, […]
Filmmaker readers know I’m a fan of BLDGBLOG, the speculative architecture and criticism site run by Geoff Manaugh. There’s a link on our home page, and I picked the BLDGBLOG Book as one of our “Super 8” selections several issues ago. So, I was happy when Manaugh contacted me to announce he’s moving from Los Angeles to New York to embark on a new project. Manaugh and partner Nicola Twilley are co-directors of Studio-X NYC, an “off-campus event space, gallery, classroom, and urban futures think tank, part of a global network run by Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and […]
There’s an excerpt from Haruki Murakami’s upcoming novel, IQ84, in this week’s New Yorker. At the magazine’s website there’s an accompanying short interview, which contains this interesting exchange about fiction and our wired world. Several times recently I’ve read scripts and had to comment that they’ve failed to acknowledge the ways in which we communicate and gather information these days. Throw a cell phone or internet connection into these tales and their plots collapse. Murakami dealt with this challenge by dispensing with it; his new book is set in 1984. In this excerpt from the interview, he discusses the effect […]
Mexico remains a heavily stratified society, despite the strides made over the past 50 years in bridging an enormous socio-economic gap. A non-centralized wave of films has been building there over the past decade, and cinema, the most accessible of art forms, reflects the divide. One could argue that the directors make a choice: poverty or the bourgeoisie. You can observe the schism for yourself in the excellent 10-film series GenMex: Recent Films from Mexico, running September 9-22 at New York’s Anthology Film Archives. The exhibition begins with a one-week run of Eugenio Polgovsky’s The Inheritors, September 9-15. The other titles each […]
In an important ruling today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston ruled in favor of a man suing the police for arresting him when he used his cell phone to record their actions in a drug arrest. The police claimed the arrest was proper due to a state law barring audio recordings without the consent of both parties. The court, however, disagreed… and video blogging played a part. Although some have argued that First Amendment protections in cases like this one should be restricted to professional journalists, the court felt differently. Here’s an excerpt from […]
WPIX Channel 11 had a reporter out during the early hours of Hurricane Irene and caught these familiar-seeming people checking out the Hudson. Here’s Josef from the Ukraine (or, in a Bloombergian nod to Tarkovsky’s Stalker, “Zone A”).
Mark Romanek’s KIA ad, which was debuted on last night’s MTV Video Music Awards, got a lot of online buzz today. Just caught up with it now, and it is somewhat… weird. From Entertainment Weekly: With the help of choreographers Rich & Tone, a group of “great dancers from the East and West coast” and computer animation, Romanek had the resources to bring the latest chapter of those jamming hamsters to the small screen. “The key was making the dance great,” said Romanek. Of course, they’d need a great song to dance to. Romanek explained that while there were a […]
Harmony Korine directed and Anthony Dod Mantle shot this ad for Mahindra, the Indian multinational conglomerate. According to Ad Age, it was shot at 1,000 fps with a Phantom camera.