Open | Filmmaker Magazine

WAITING FOR THE MAN

Halfway through Pusher, Nicolas Winding Refn’s first installment in what would ultimately become an epic trilogy, the director faced a predicament. Suddenly, the genre marked by guns and car chases held no interest. He abandoned the beatings and foot chases from the film’s early scenes, and went for a haunting, harrowing character study. “I realized I wasn’t interested in gangsters and crime,” the Danish filmmaker explains of his 1996 film. “I was really interested in the morality of the characters, and their emotional descents into hell.” That’s from KM Doughton’s feature on Nicholas Winding Refn’s Pusher trilogy which we’ve just […]

by Scott Macaulay on Aug 16, 2006

Film Fix

Director Nicolas Winding Refn on “The Pusher Trilogy” KIM BODNIA IN “PUSHER” Halfway through “Pusher,” Nicolas Winding Refn’s first installment in what would ultimately become an epic trilogy, the director faced a predicament. Suddenly, the genre marked by guns and car chases held no interest. He abandoned the beatings and foot chases from the film’s early scenes, and went for a haunting, harrowing character study. “I realized I wasn’t interested in gangsters and crime,” the Danish filmmaker explains of his 1996 film. “I was really interested in the morality of the characters, and their emotional descents into hell.” “The Pusher […]

by Jason Guerrasio on Aug 16, 2006

ESSAYING "TALLADEGA NIGHTS"

I was up at the Creative Capital retreat this weekend where I saw a lot of great work by the organization’s ’04 and ’05 grantees. But if I was in town I probably would have been, along with $47 million of you, at the opening weekend of Talledega Nights. It reunites the Anchorman team of Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, and that’s enough for me. James Ponsoldt, who directed Off the Black (which I produced and which is coming out December 1 from Think Film) has just launched a MySpace page and he’s already got several blog entries up, including […]

by Scott Macaulay on Aug 7, 2006

THE GRAIN OVER MIAMI

I just got back from Miami Vice, and as a huge fan of Michael Mann’s work (including the show on which the movie was based), I was pretty disappointed. The first thirty minutes is fairly strong as Mann throws you smack into the middle of an undercover operation and shoots the various night-time clashes and assignations with a purposefully grainy and quite bold visual style — rooftop meetings against purple night skies, outrageous wheel mounts hovering inches above the Miami causeways, and the grain signifying a dirty reality miles removed from the TV show’s pastel-hued romantic nihilism. And indeed, while […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jul 30, 2006

THE BEST LAST MOVIE MINUTES

The folks over at Filmcritic.com have compiled a highly debatable but still fun list: The Top 50 Movie Endings of All Time. Of course, it’s a calvacade of spoilers, but if you’re reasonably film literate you’ll have seen most of these and can see if your take on movie clilmaxes syncs up with the site’s editors. Here’s one I very much agree with (although Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant might have made my list too): King of New York (1990) – After facing the last (and oldest) cop of the four that stalked him, crime lord Christopher Walken sits in a cab, […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jul 29, 2006

COMMERCIAL CENSORSHIP AND TRAILER FATIGUE

Now that Caveh Zahedi’s I am a Sex Addict is out of New York, I need to keep reminding myself to continue to go to Zahedi’s blog, which he is keeping up with great posts on any number of topics. Here he is at the Wellington Film festival recounting his thoughts following a meeting with the great Iranian director Jafar Panahi: We are exactly the same age. His English isn’t very good, and my Persian is even worse, so we communicated by means of a translator (note to self: learn Persian). But it was fascinating to hear him talk about […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jul 26, 2006

THE ATROCITY RETURNS

Several years ago I selected for our annual “25 New Faces” feature filmmaker Jonathan Weiss, who had just finished a many-years-in-the-making adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s great novel The Atrocity Exhibition. The film is full of amazing sequences, has a truly unique and disquieting tone, and embodies a keen understanding of the ideas that course through Ballard’s most radical novel. (Yes, more radical than Crash.) I spoke to Weiss a few weeks ago and it seems like he’s looking for a U.S. video deal for the film. I hope he’s secured one by now, but in the meantime, here’s Tim Lucas […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jul 19, 2006

THE JEDDAH VISUAL SHOW FESTIVAL

Via Netribution, “The first Saudi Arabian film festival opened in the Red Sea city of Jeddah this week, in an ultra-conservative country where the silver screen is so controversial that the word ‘cinema’ does not even get a mention in the title. ‘The Jeddah Visual Show Festival’ started on Wednesday night screening two hours of home-grown short films.” The article goes on to talk about the slow birth of cinema in Saudi Arabia — namely, cartoons and the short films shown at this festival. From the piece: Public screenings of movies are taboo in Saudi Arabia, where religious scholars believe […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jul 17, 2006

ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE

Caroline Bermudez over at Pitchfork chats via email with Scott Crary whose Kill your Idols opens on July 7th at the Cinema Village in New York and comes to DVD this fall. The doc, which Crary says he made for $300 (okay, I know these bands aren’t the Rolling Stones, but I’d hope they got more than $3 each for their music rights) looks at the late ’70s/early ’80s New York No Wave — folks like Arto Lindsay and DNA, Glenn Branca, Sonic Youth, Lydia Lunch — and the current musicians (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Liars, A.R.E. Weapons, etc.) they have […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jul 1, 2006

MOST WATCHED

Slate has a Summer Movies Week going, and this interesting feature is part of it: a survey as to which film various directors and actors watch the most. Here’s Neil LaBute’s reply: Outside of perennial holiday fare like The Wizard of Oz, It’s a Wonderful Life, or Salo, I think I’ve watched Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon more times than any other movie I can remember. (Warren Beatty’s Reds would give it a run for its money—I saw that 14 times in the theater!) For me, Barry Lyndon is the most distinctive and beautiful re-creation of period on film, bar none, […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jul 1, 2006

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