I was editing the next edition of “Game Engine,” Heather Chaplin’s game column in Filmmaker, and I started wondering where I could play some of the really interesting indie games she has been writing about. Of course, they are available on PS3 or Xbox for download, but that brought up the question for me of why can’t there be a console intended for games that don’t exist as disks but as downloads or streams? Well, today, voila, just such a console was announced. At Variety, Marc Graser was the first to announce the new OnLive, created by WebTV founder Steve […]
Over at our SXSW coverage page we are posting in the next few days a few straggler reviews and pieces. First up is Alicia Van Couvering’s talk with Gerald Peary about his For the Love of Movies: The History of American Film Criticism. Van Couvering gets Peary to talk about a number of issues echoing across the blogosphere these days, including, well, the blogosphere, but also the pressure to write shorter, the huge number of ex-critics, and, of course, the rivalry between the Paulettes and the Sarris-ites. A question about which camp he adheres to (A: Sarris) leads to this […]
Gerald Peary is not a cell phone person. He has witnessed a quarter century of films and criticism, from when Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris drew their lines in the critical sand to the currently expanding blogosphere. Gerald Peary is old school. A working film critic for 25 years, his work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Toronto Globe and Mail, The Chicago Tribune, Film Comment, Cineaste, Sight and Sound and Positif, to name a few. He is the weekly reviewer for the Boston Phoenix, one of a rapidly diminishing club of alternative weeklies as paper after paper […]
Amy Taubin (and Manohla Dargis, J. Hoberman and Scott Foundas), you have truly penetrated the popular culture when you are namechecked in a Funny or Die video — in this case, the channel’s take on indie film and the m-word. (Although I doubt the film in question would garner these quotes from any of you…) The Dirty Garage – watch more funny videos
Tribeca Film Institute today announced the selected projects for Tribeca All Access (TAA). TAA is designed to help foster and nurture relationships between film industry executives and filmmakers from traditionally underrepresented communities. Celebrating its sixth year, Tribeca All Access will present 27 new projects during the six-day event taking place April 20 – 25 during this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, held from April 22 – May 3. This year’s TAA jury is comprised of respected industry professionals – actors, writers, producers and directors – who will review script excerpts and work samples prior to the Festival, and deliberate over the […]
If you missed Joe Swanberg’s Alexander the Last on screen at SXSW last week (the only place, actually, where you could have seen iit on screen), then join Swanberg and stars Jess Weixler and Amy Seimetz at the IFC Center in New York tonight for what will be a rare public screening of the film. I say “rare” because the film is already screening on IFC’s On Demand and with that being the case many regional festivals will likely take a pass on the movie. Filmmaker‘s Alicia Van Couvering, who wrote for us in 2007 what I still think is […]
As the clock winds down, members of the New York City film production community are lobbying hard for the continuation of the Empire State Film Production Tax Credit, which has supported a boom in film and television production in New York. Once financing is in place, film production companies can start on a dime, quickly crewing up and supporting local vendors, restaurants, hotels and other businesses. They often attract investment capital from outside the state and even outside the country, and they are swift tools of job creation. Furthermore, when it comes to television production, these jobs stay within the […]
Kudos to Noah Harlan for braving the tape-recorded audio wilds of the breakfast conversation I took part in at SXSW this past week. At the festival CinemaTech’s Scott Kirsner gathered myself, Ted Hope, Lance Weiler, Brian Chirls, Liz Rosenthal, Brett Gaylor and Caitlin Boyle for a morning roundtable in which he asked us what had been on our mind while attending the festival. Each of us spoke for a few minutes and then there was a group discussion. As Harlan notes, the audio quality is poor, and I think an edited version, which I hope one of us can put […]
One of the best received narrative films at SXSW this past week was David Lowery’s St. Nick, his subtle tale of two children making their way through their world mysteriously on their own. Alicia Van Couvering interviewed Lowery for Filmmaker here, and David Hudson rounds up reaction from the blogosphere here, but over at his own blog, Drifting, the writer/director posts the screenplay as a PDF download. Writes Lowery: A few weeks ago, I read over the film’s final shooting script for the first time since production, and was surprised to find it even more exiguous than I remembered. It […]
Director Spike Jonze has returned to music videos with a clip for UNKLE entitled “Heaven.” It’s a gorgeously shot slo-mo return to Jonze’s skateboarding days that crescendos with… well, I won’t spoil it any more than the below statement from UNKLE’s MySpace page (and the screen grab) already does. “Heaven” was used in the acclaimed skate film Fully Flared directed by Spike Jonze and Ty Evans. The collaboration inspired the directors to take footage and re-edit a sequence of shots that shows the Lakai skateboarding team demonstrating their considerable skills as they navigate through and around various exploding obstacles. With […]