That’s the question two developers from Google, Lars and Jens Rasumussen (creators of Google Maps) asked themselves, and their answer is Google Wave, the one-hour, twenty-minute demo of which is generating talk all over the web. The first 38 minutes are the meat of the demo, and if you want to see the near-future of web communication, check it out. In brief, Wave is an open source protocol that rolls email, chat, blog publishing, forums, photo sharing, wiki contributing and document collaboration into a single “shared object” that is accessed through the browser. Blogger Andy Wibbels says “Google Wave completely […]
Danish cinema currently has numerous talented fiction directors – everybody from Lars von Trier, Christopher Boe, Ole Bornedal, and Susanne Bier to Thomas Vinterberg, Kristian Levring, Nicolas Winding Refn and Lone Scherfig – and now Anders Østergaard is bringing attention to the country’s documentary output. Born in Copenhagen in 1965, Østergaard studied at the Danish School of Journalism, graduating in 1991, before deciding to eschew a career as a journalist to become a documentarian. Throughout his career, he has been concerned with the boundaries of non-fiction and with the idea of documentary itself. Østergaard’s debut film, Gensyn med Johannesburg (1996), […]
Filmmaker Angelo Bell commented on the thread about Ted Hope’s “38 American Film Problems/Concerns,” calling it an “overexaggeration of the challenges” and responding to several of Ted’s points by saying that what is really happening now is not that business models are failing but that there is a “power shift” from studios/producers to individual filmmakers committed to exploring DIY approaches. As I said in my blog post, what Ted did was write an amazingly comprehensive list on which every filmmaker will find several points to agree with. That said, many of the points will be ignorable by each individual filmmaker […]
Stacy Peralta uses his knack for dissecting counter-cultures to highlight the two most violent gangs in America with Crips and Bloods: Made in America. Since his breakout Sundance hit Dogtown and Z-Boys, about the iconic skateboarders who revolutionized the sport (Peralta was one of the Z-Boys), Peralta has stayed in the alt-sport realm as his second doc, Riding Giants, looked at the history of surfing (it was also the opening film at 04’s Sundance). Now Peralta leaves his comfort zone to look at a world he’s not directly a part of. In telling the story of the Crips and Bloods, […]
Premiering in Cannes in Un Certain Regard, Anne Aghion‘s penetrating and transfixing documentary, My Neighbor, My Killer, is the culmination of a decade-long filmmaking quest to address one of the most difficult questions facing citizens, communities, tribes, religious groups and ethnic factions around the world today: “Could you forgive the people who slaughtered your family?” In 1994 hundreds of thousands of minority Tutsis were slaughtered by Rwanda’s Hutus, with villager killing fellow villager, cousin killing cousin. The Rwanda genocide has been well covered in the media, but less focused upon has been the Gacaca Tribunals, open air citizen hearings instituted […]
Just launched earlier today on FunnyOrDie.com, the trailer for Armando Iannucci‘s biting satire and Sundance fav In The Loop (the film opens in the U.S. July 24) cleverly nods to A Clockwork Orange, which I feel is one of the greatest trailers ever created. As Kubrick’s trailer highlights the debauchery and horror of the film in one minute, the Loop trailer superbly captures the film’s wittiness as well as putting the spotlight on the debut of Peter Capaldi (pictured top right) in an unbelievably disgusting role that’s so vile you can’t help but enjoy every second he’s on screen. IN […]
POLICE MUGSHOTS OF POLITICIAN LARRY CRAIG AS FEATURED IN DIRECTOR KIRBY DICK’S OUTRAGE. COURTESY MAGNOLIA PICTURES. Whether his subjects have been small and personal or large and institutional, documentarian Kirby Dick has always dedicated himself to telling important and often provocative stories. Dick was born in Tucson, Arizona, in 1952, graduated from the Film and Video Program at the California Institute of the Arts and subsequently did postgraduate studies at the American Film Institute. He made his directorial debut in 1986 with Private Practices: The Story of a Sex Surrogate, but afterwards segued into television work, taking eleven years before […]
Over at Filmmaker Videos check out Damon Smith‘s interview with Tilda Swinton about her new film, Julia, which opens today, as well as other revealing thoughts about her career.
Perhaps best known for her Oscar-winning turn in Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton and the long, fruitful collaboration she enjoyed with the late Derek Jarman, Tilda Swinton has acted recently for David Fincher, Joel and Ethan Coen, Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr, and in Andrew Adamson’s Chronicles of Narnia franchise. Her flinty, fearless performance as an alcoholic outlaw in Erick Zonca’s cross-border thriller Julia, however, truly spotlights the impressive range and cool professionalism of this adventurous, one-of-a-kind screen actress. (She also appears in Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control, which opened last Friday.) We caught up with Swinton in New York to […]
I liked the first trailer for Lars Von Trier’s Anti-Christ a lot, but some people were mixed on it, thinking it looked too much like conventional horror. I don’t agree — or, perhaps, I like the idea of Von Trier doing an out-and-out horror film — but here’s the second trailer, which has a bit more of a psychological vibe. The film opens in Competition this month at Cannes.