If you happen to check this blog in the next, oh, half hour or so… tune in to WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show” where he’ll be interviewing director Alison Maclean (Jesus’s Son) and screenwriter Tiara Bennett about their short film The Choices We Make, which was produced for the Scenarios USA series. The interview begins at 11:40 and lasts until noon.
Ray Pride has commentary and an excellent round-up of links about Edward Yang, who died last week. He includes YouTube clips as well as comments from Larry Gross and a downloadable PDF of an essay about Yang referencing commentary by Frederic Jameson.
Over at The Huffington Post, producer Sean Daniel (the Mummy, Dazed and Confused) looks at one legacy of John Landis’s comedy Animal House: its misuse as a comparison point for current political disasters. Here’s how he begins, but click to the link above and read the whole piece: It has happened again and it has to end. The use of the term “Animal House” to represent foul political behavior or historical events gone very badly has got to be stopped. This time the misuse is by the usually very wise Robert Borosage in his recent post on the Huffington Post […]
2007 is the 25th anniversary of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and in Popular Mechanics special effects technician Adam Savage discusses why its FX are still better than much of what’s on screens right now. An excerpt: You have to remember, Blade Runner was made years before digital effects became common. Today, CGI [computer-generated imagery] is becoming a mature art form, but even now there are times you just can’t beat doing some effects like these “in camera.” Most of these cityscapes are a combination of models and traditional matte paintings. For the aerial shots they used a set about 12 […]
Magician Marco Tempest, who has made a name for himself with his series of YouTube-posted cell phone illusions, bought an iPhone and within 30 minutes posted this video featuring some unexpected uses for the device:
Everyone’s a critic, but when it comes to considering Michael Moore’s Sicko, some critical voices might be a little bit more important than others. From Roger Ebert’s positive review: I saw the movie almost a year to the day after a cartoid artery burst after surgery and I came within a breath of death. I spent the next nine months in Northwestern Memorial Hospital, the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, and the Pritikin Longevity Center, and still require the daily care of a nurse. I mention this to indicate I am pretty deeply involved in the health care system. In each […]
On the day of Sicko’s expansion to over 400 screens, John Pierson, who repped Roger and Me and namechecked Michael Moore in the title of his Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes, sends an open letter to the director. While citing Sicko as Moore’s best filmmaking to date, he brings up the issues about Moore raised in the doc Manufacturing Dissent and discusses the goals of political filmmaking in general. Read it over at Indiewire.
Over at his blog, Scott Kirsner says he wants to avoid getting sucked into the iPhone media vortex but has failed. He links to two articles, , one in Variety, where he discusses Apple’s Fair Play DRM and how the company has created a “closed loop” in which it will be difficult for other content providers to sell media for the iPhone platform. Still, there’s enough in Kirsner’s article and elsewhere to make me think that the iPhone will be more successful than some think as a movie platform. In his piece Kirsner talks to Jim Flynn, chief exec of […]
2PAC AND HIS SOLDIERS IN ASGER LETH’S GHOSTS OF CITÉ SOLEIL. COURTESY THINKFILM. Asger Leth grew up with film as a way of life. His father, Danish film giant Jørgen Leth, featured him in Life in Denmark (1971) before young Asger could even walk or talk, and he also appeared in two more of his father’s documentaries, Good and Evil (1975) and Moments of Play (1986). Keen to escape his father’s shadow, Leth initially considered a career as a lawyer but ultimately could not resist the lure of filmmaking. He started directing short films in the mid-1990s, while simultaneously working […]
Last year writer/director So Yong Kim (pictured) was one of Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces of 2006, and now, her debut feature, In Between Days, is opening in New York. GreenCine rounds up links to the rave reviews, and The Reeler has an interview with Kim in which she discusses her upcoming projects, the current movie’s long march through the festival circuit and into release, and the methods by which she cast her movie.