Open | Filmmaker Magazine

FOUNTAIN SPURTS

The A.V. Club has a review up of the comic book adaptation of Darren Aronofsky’s forthcoming The Fountain. From Noel Murray’s review: “It’s difficult to read The Fountain without imagining how it’s going to look as a movie, or wondering what Aronofsky ultimately changed for the screen. But that’s actually part of what’s enjoyable about the book. Readers can treat it like an elaborate storyboard and see a movie in their minds. Given Aronofsky’s penchant for obscurity, the mind-Fountain may even end up being clearer than the finished version, even though it lacks the director’s gift for dynamic cinematic poetry. […]

by Scott Macaulay on Feb 6, 2006

IS AMY PASCAL REALLY AMY PASCAL?

I supposed I should take note of the whole JT Leroy thing. I’m referring, of course, to the recent piece by Warren St. John in the New York Times revealing that the shy, diminuitive figure with a floppy hat, black sunglasses, and a smear of red lipstick appearing in public as author JT Petty is actually a woman named Savannah Knoop, the half sister of Geoffrey Knoop, husband of Laura Albert. Albert is the 40-year-old Brooklyn woman who, in a New York magazine piece a few months ago, Steven Beachy asserted was the person behind JT Leroy’s fiction and rapidly […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jan 13, 2006

FAMILY PROGRAMMING

Dennis Cooper writes about artist Ryan Trecartin in the pages of Artforum this month, situating the 24-year-old’s work somewhere alongside that of “Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, and early John Waters.” From the piece: “…everything aesthetic about his videos — from the baroque screenplays that polish flippant teen slang into cascading soliloquies to the dueling fascinations with profound loneliness and extremely affected behavior to the swarming, jumbled, yet precisely composed shots that pack each frame to the rafters with visual stimuli — displays a near obliviousness to what’s going on in his field, whether it be the cliches of current video […]

by Scott Macaulay on Jan 3, 2006

HEARTSTOPPING

Dennis Lim has a great appreciation in the Village Voice today about Claire Denis’s memorable and mysterious new film L’Intrus (or, The Intruder). Opening at the Quad in some kind of stealth release from Wellspring, the film continues the intuitive, searching and philosophical cinema that Denis has been pursuing since Beau Travail. It’s a cinema in which storyline, subtext, motivation and the unconcious are all interwoven as they collectively pursue a meaning that is as much in the viewer’s mind as it is in the celluloid. Writes Lim: “Allergic to the dictates of linear storytelling, her movies have grown increasingly […]

by Scott Macaulay on Dec 21, 2005

Sundance Screenwriters Lab, 2006

The Sundance Institute has just announced the 12 projects selected for the 2006 Screenwriter’s Lab, which takes place in January the week before the Sundance Film Festival at the Sundance Resort. From the press release, here are the attendees and their projects: “Kit Hui (writer/director), U.S.A./China, A BREATH AWAY: As Typhoon Ellen approaches Hong Kong, the residents of a high-rise apartment complex struggle with their individual emotional demons, not realizing they are connected by more than the increasing swarms of flies invading their homes. Born and raised in Hong Kong, Kit Hui emigrated to the United States at age 16. […]

by Scott Macaulay on Dec 17, 2005

THE BARNEY CHRONICLES

Paul Cullum has a great, out-of-nowhere piece in the New York Times on the unexpected collaboration between avant-garde publishing elder statesman Barney Rosset and Chicago-based filmmaker James Fotopoulos. Rosset ran for years Grove Press, publishing works by such authors as D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and William Burroughs, and then successfully defending these works from U.S. obscenity charges. When I was a teenager I picked up the Evergreen Review Reader, an anthology of works culled from his literary magazine, and it opened the door for me to a whole world of radical literature and theater. Cullum’s piece is one of those […]

by Scott Macaulay on Dec 4, 2005

CHRISTMAS PRESENT

For months I’ve been hoping that the self-consciously heroic trailer for Terrence Malick’s upcoming The New World has been a colossal red herring. Now, I’m thrilled that that seems to the be the case. First, Fox’s Roger Friedman called the film “Pocahontas on acid,” and now comes Robbie Freeling at the Reverse Shot blog: “Then again, this is still a Malick film, as challenging as ever in its ambitions, even while perhaps functioning as his most accessible narrative. Less historical revisionism than resolutely personal, transcendentalist tone poem (not much of a surprise there), Malick’s fourth picture is adorned with almost […]

by Scott Macaulay on Dec 4, 2005

ADDICTION AND RECOVERY

Leave it to Caveh Zahedi to win the hearts of indie filmmakers at the Gotham Awards when he accepted the Filmmaker-sponsored “Best Film Not Playing in a Theater Near You” prize. In his remarks he said that too many great indie films don’t make it to the theaters because, frankly, filmmakers are “too tired” after finishing their films and expect, unrealistically, distributors, who are struggling to get their own slates out there, to do all the heavy lifting. Zahedi said that after recuperating a bit after his own shoot and festival jaunt, he got on the phone and asked distributors […]

by Scott Macaulay on Dec 3, 2005

I SPY

While at the Creative Capital retreat this summer I met the L.A.-based French artist Marie Sester, who does fascinating work dealing with technology and the interstice of the individual and the social. From her website: “I was trained as an architect, then chose the visual and multimedia fields to examine the way that a civilization originates and creates its forms. These forms are both tangible — such as signals, buildings, and cities — and intangible, such as the aspects of values, laws and culture. My work questions the perspective of the West, and the meta-state of a New World Order. […]

by Scott Macaulay on Nov 19, 2005

ALEX COX BLOGS

Via GreenCine comes this link to a good new blog by Repo Man director Alex Cox. Click over to it and you’ll find Cox’s commentary on a forthcoming DVD “special edition” of his cult classic, news on possible new projects, and a bunch of interesting observations, from fancy L.A. hotels (“Hotels like this terrify my because they’re so fucking expensive. Even though my generous hosts paid for my bed and breakfast, every time you approach a door, some guy in a top hat opens it for you and you have to tip him ten bucks — whether you want to […]

by Scott Macaulay on Oct 30, 2005

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