Open | Filmmaker Magazine

TEENAGE WASTELAND

Filmmaker Michael Kang has taken up a novel and interesting approach to promoting his new film, The Motel. He’s started a blog featuring personal stories sharing the theme of his movie: Puberty Sucks. (Well, that’s not what I’d guess the theme of the movie is, because it’s really a quite winning coming-of-age tale, but then again, stories about people’s rotten childhoods are always entertaining…) Here’s from his first posting: Thanks for stopping by. I’m sorry the place is a bit sparse right now. I started this site not only because of my stunted emtional state but also because of the […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jun 30, 2006

FRIDAY PICKS

Opening this week in New York is one of the boldest and most interesting of recent independent films, Room, written and directed by Kyle Henry. With a stunning lead performance by Cyndi Williams, Room uses the mental breakdown of a lower-class, struggling, unhappily-married-with-kids bingo parlor worker to look at the psychic mindscape of post 9/11 American life. Also opening is Michael Kang’s The Motel, an unusual and interesting coming-of-age tale centered around a 13-year-old Chinese-American boy living with his mother in a downscale Jersey hotel. Finally, in Who Killed the Electric Car, opening around the country from Sony Classics, director […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jun 30, 2006

PICK OF THE WEEK

Many filmmakers lately have been interested in blending documentary with drama, mixing real people and places into classically structured stories. Perhaps the best of these recent attempts is also the most timely and vital; Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’s The Road to Guantanamo, which tells the true story of three British Muslims who, traveling to Pakistan for a wedding, haplessly wind up captured by U.S. military and sent to Guantanamo Bay. Winterbottom and Whitecross shoot on DV and blend talking-head interviews with the real “Tipton Three” — who have since been released — with incredibly dramatic scenes with actors that […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jun 23, 2006

APPROPRIATE APPROPRIATION?

The lawyers at Paramount, who presumably are not fans of folks like Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and other appropriation-based artists, have launched a federal lawsuit against artist Christopher Moukarbel, who we blogged about recently. They are charging copyright infringement with regards to a 12-minute film he created and put up online which is based, apparently, on a copy of the screenplay for Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center. (Filmmaker‘s blog is cited in the Paramount filing.) The Smoking Gun has all the details, including links to screenplay excerpts, which have been filed as exhibits, as well as a side-by-side comparison of […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jun 21, 2006

Agent Provocateur

With The Outsider, cinematic badboy James Toback gets in front of the camera for first-time filmmaker Nicholas Jarecki. “Who is James Toback?” That’s the question documentary filmmaker Nicholas Jarecki poses in The Outsider, a freewheeling and highly watchable portrait of the director of idiosyncratic films like Fingers and Black and White. Jarecki introduces his subject, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Bugsy, on the set of a 2004 film for which Toback had high hopes. When Will I Be Loved, which starred Neve Campbell as a young woman on the make, would, like many of Toback’s films, be a minor presence […]

by Jason Guerrasio on Jun 16, 2006

MOTEL MASH-UP

Actor Sung Kang (pictured) stars in both Michael Kang’s indie The Motel, which opens in a couple of weeks and Justin Lin’s very big budget The Fast and Furious 3. Here’s a mash-up that unites the two movies entitled The Motel and the Furious.

by Scott Macaulay on Jun 12, 2006

DEMONIC DIRECTING

Steve Gallagher emailed today to pass on news about the newly launched website of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation, “the world’s largest multi-media collection showcasing Ingmar Bergman’s professional career, dating back to 1938.” It’s one of the best single-director websites out there, an exhaustive catalogue of the great director’s work delivered, at times, in a surprisingly light-hearted tone. For example, here’s the opening of the page dealing with Bergman and the theme of Death. Bergman and Death have become the subject of parody, and a gentle (or otherwise) mockery of the art house cinema scene. The personification of Death in The […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jun 5, 2006

COMFORTABLE CONVERSATION

Over at Green Cine — yes the site also has a collection of great original material as well as its excellent daily collection of links — Thomas Logoreci interviews Jay and Mark Duplass, whose The Puffy Chair opens today in San Francisco, Austin, Berkeley, Boston, Portland and DC. In the piece, they talk a little bit about what they are doing next: Jay: We’re trying to do a relationship movie in a horror genre. We’re not sure that it’s going to work, but we’re going to make it anyway. Mark: There’s some trepidation, but we do feel very confident in […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jun 2, 2006

LEGISLATING THE CRITICS

From Rob Nelson’s interview with Rick Linklater in this week’s Village Voice: If Linklater leaves the big questions of his movies to their audiences, how does he think they’ll respond when A Scanner Darkly opens in July and Fast Food Nation in the fall? “You can never prove or predict the cause and effect of anything, whatever its purpose,” he says. “When The Jungle was published a hundred years ago, they enacted the FDA. But in today’s world, we’re more likely to see legislation enacted to prevent us from criticizing the way things are. In Texas, it’s against the law […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jun 1, 2006

CINEMATIC CASE STUDIES

Bill Condon may have turned sex researcher Alfred Kinsey into a mainstream movie figure, but underground filmmaker Bret Woods has turned to a slightly more esoteric source for his latest film. According to its new website, Psychopathia Sexualis “dramatizes case histories of turn-of-the-century sexual deviance, drawn from the pages of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s notorious medical text. Among the cases are a sexually repressed man who discovers an unhealthy appetite for blood; a homosexual man who submits himself to a doctor who promises to ‘cure’ his condition; and a masochist who hires a pair of corseted prostitutes to enact a most […]

by Scott Macaulay on May 24, 2006

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