At the Chicago Sun-Times in a column entitled “The do-it-yourself auteurs,” Steven Boone writes about the city symphony film and ties it to Jamie Stuart’s recent Idiot with a Tripod. He puts Stuart in a category of “DDIY” (the extra “d” is for “digital”) filmmakers who are the “garage Kubricks” once prophesized by William Gibson. There’s also a video by Kevin B. Lee with text by Boone. Check it out below.
Originally posted online on June 23, 2010. Restrepo is nominated for Best Documentary. Most documentary filmmakers attempt to see the world through the lens of the subjects they’re shooting, but few put their lives on the line to do so. That perhaps is what most separates first-time directors Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington from a few of their colleagues who didn’t take home the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Their award-winning Restrepo is the result of a near yearlong embedment with the Second Platoon, Battle Company in eastern Afghanistan’s deadly Korengal Valley, […]
Not to pick on Anne Thompson again, a fine industry journalist certainly, but a blog entry she published this past Friday piqued my interest for all the wrong reasons. (See the post, the healthy comments thread, and also David Poland’s response.) Thompson took a critical stance on a new feature of the New York Times’ Carpetbagger section, where lead critics Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott will provide an in-depth answer to one reader’s question every month. Allowing the critics to choose a question to answer, and giving them some time to work on their response, as opposed (one presumes) to […]
Here are a few things in my Instapaper this week. In GQ, Mark Harris looks back at “The Day the Movies Died” and the preeminence of easy marketing over original ideas. An excerpt: Such an unrelenting focus on the sell rather than the goods may be why so many of the dispiritingly awful movies that studios throw at us look as if they were planned from the poster backward rather than from the good idea forward. Marketers revere the idea of brands, because a brand means that somebody, somewhere, once bought the thing they’re now trying to sell. YouTube has […]
As followers of my Twitter feed know, for me Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was the defining album of 2010. A new video directed by Hype Williams has just dropped for “All of the Lights,” featuring Rihanna and Kid Cudi. I hope something — a check, case of Cristal, or maybe just an autographed poster — is winging its way to Mr. Gaspar Noe. (Or, on second thought, there are a bunch of songs left on the album without videos. “Monster” is already taken, but what about “Hell of a Life”? I’d love to see what the great […]
Two of Filmmaker’s “25 New Faces” have excellent movies opening today that are worthy of your first weekend patronage. From Tariq Tapa, who made our list in 2008, is Zero Bridge. Here’s what I wrote about him back then: “Everything I used to make this movie, from soup to nuts, fit in one little backpack,” says Tariq Tapa, whose Zero Bridge, a neorealist tale of unexpected friendship and moral complication set in the Indian-occupied city of Srinagar, Kashmir, is set to explode on the festival circuit this year. Tapa, who not only directed this first feature but shot, edited and […]
At the Los Angeles New Music Seminar yesterday Ian Rogers from the fulfillment service Topspin gave a talk titled “Getting Practical: a Step-by-Step Sales Plan to Building an Online Sales Plan That Works.” Topspin has posted the PowerPoint slides on its website. The specific plan is oriented towards musicians, but Topspin services filmmakers too, and there’s relevant info here for those looking to build an online business. It’s all about converting casual listeners to fans and followers, getting them to throw down for the swanky merch and not just the buck downloads, and there are recommendations here for maintaining a […]
Radiohead’s The King of Limbs, announced for pre-order this week, is available one day early. If you bought it already, you can log in to the pre-order page with your password and download it. I’ve only given it one listen so far, but it’s more intimate, softer, prettier album than In Rainbows, sonically closer to Kid A but more open emotionally. I like it. Arriving with the album today is this amazing video for “Lotus Flower” featuring Thom Yorke, a bare stage, and a light. The video is directed by Garth Jennings and choreographed by Wayne McGregor. (Click on the […]
There are two barely related images that repeatedly come back to me as I begin to write about Port of Memory (2010) by Kamal Aljafari. One is a house cat languishing on top of a television set, in a family’s living room. The TV is playing a dramatization of the life of Jesus. At first the cat appears inert; the viewer is unsure whether it is an odd piece of bric-a-brac or a living but particularly lethargic mammal. The camera lingers long enough to confirm the latter. The second is a short stretch of Jaffa streets. An Israeli man singing […]
Palm Springs, jewel of the desert, playground of the Hollywood rich, not to mention thousands of prosperous retirees who enjoy golf, tennis, and dinner at five, is also the home of a pretty cool film festival, started by Sonny Bono in 1990. Once, it was a sleepy little affair where audiences could see multiple films in the same theater on the same ticket, and no one paid much attention to the results. Those days are emphatically over. Wrapping its 22nd year on January 17, the Festival broke its own attendance record in 2011, as more than 130,000 cinephiles crowded into […]