On the occasion of the Walter Reade’s 30th anniversary screening of Barry Lyndon (the last show is tonight at 7), Jamie Stuart contributes to The Reeler an interview with Kubrick actor and long-time associate Leon Vitali. Vitali, who most recently produced Todd Fields’s Little Children, is in town to intro tonight’s screening and he took a few moments to talk to Stuart, who also snapped the pic of the producer shown here. From the interview: Reeler: But other filmmakers I think of who have a great degree of control — modern filmmakers like say the Coen Brothers or somebody like […]
Director Chris Munch (The Hours and Times) sent the below comment in regarding Ted Hope’s post, below, on start-up online film distributor Jaman. While applauding the company’s goals and its economical price points, Munch wonders whether all the enthusiasm for digital film distribution means that we are being conditioned to accept lower image quality when it comes to viewing our favorite movies. Will the price ever rocket, though? Will producers and filmmakers benefit if it does? Jaman seems like a good idea at a good price point. I’m astonished how “content delivery trend predictors” have been proven wrong time and […]
Ted Hope sent the following thoughts on Jaman’s current trial offering of free online art-film rentals. Check out Hope’s comments and then, if you are so inclined, click over to Jaman to download the player and watch a movie. The absolute hostility, at best, neglect, generally speaking, that the American Film Industry displays towards adventuresome work, and particularly such work done in a non-english language, has some nice byproducts. When no market exists, salesman often resort to the time tested techniques of the drug pushers. Want to sample the product? Find nirvana for free? Here you go friend, feast away, […]
Over at his CinemaTech blog, Scott Kirsner receives an email from Dovetail CEO Jason Holloway about the current debate over just how content creators should be compensated for the online viewing of their work. Holloway discusses the pros and cons of the paid subscription model, the pay-per-download model, and the ad-supported model, and provides an opinion as to which types of content are most appropriate for each model. I’m with Kirsner in believing that there is considerable untapped promise in the pay-per-download model (essentially, this is the model of the iTunes Store), but Holloway makes some points about the value […]
JENS ALBINUS AND IBEN HJEJLE IN LARS VON TRIER’S THE BOSS OF IT ALL. COURTESY IFC FIRST TAKE. Lars von Trier, the enfant terrible of world cinema, is always looking for the next thing to surprise or wrongfoot audiences. He made only three features in the first decade of his career, and though The Element of Crime (1984), Epidemic (1987), and Zentropa (1991) were all critical successes that ably demonstrated von Trier’s cinematic gifts, it is since then that he has truly excelled. In this period, not only has he founded the revolutionary Dogme 95 movement, but completed the Gold […]
For those of you who, like me, didn’t make it to Cannes this year to see Harmony Korine’s new feature Mister Lonely, here’s a teaser: a couple of clips have popped up online on a site entitled Fest 21 and are embedded below:
Here’s U2 performing live on the red carpet of the Palais at Cannes to launch their new U23D concert film directed by Mark Pellington and Catherine Owens. (Hat tip to Variety‘s Dana Harris and GreenCine, which has more links.)
Producer Ted Hope sent in the below rumination on indie film and rock music for the blog. It was presumably prompted by two projects. Hope produced Hal Hartley’s latest, Fay Grim, which opened this weekend. As Hope notes, Hartley has made a “true rock gesture” in all of his films; he’s a director who seems to follow current music, incorporate it into his films, and, through his forays into music video, actively approach it on its own terms.. Also, this week Hope announced The Passenger an Iggy Pop bio-pic set to be directed by Nick Gomez and star Elijah Wood […]
PARKER POSEY IN HAL HARTLEY’S FAY GRIM. COURTESY MAGNOLIA PICTURES. For a period in the 1990s, Hal Hartley was one of a group of directors, along with Jim Jarmusch and John Sayles, who really defined what American indie filmmaking was all about. Hartley’s Trust (1990), Simple Men (1992) and Amateur (1994), set in the suburbs of Long Island but seen from Hartley’s unique perspective, were idiosyncratic, literate films which set the bar high for other writer-directors aiming to portray contemporary American life. Since the mid-90s, though, Hartley has broadened his focus, both thematically and geographically: Flirt (1995) told love stories […]
Today Anthony Kaufman revives memories of Cannes past with the below clip of Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovsky being presented with prizes by Orson Welles: … which gives me an excuse to post an amazing Tarkovsky shot from The Mirror. And then this brilliant sequence from Bresson’s Pickpocket.