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CHIRLS ON CINEMATECH
Brian Chirls, who was part of the Filmmaker team at Sundance this year, sat down for an interview with Scott Kirsner over at his Cinematech blog/ They talked about audience building, monetizing your web audience, and Brian’s work with the Four Eyed Monsters team. I’ve embedded it below. And if you are not a regular visitor to Kirsner’s blog, click over there for lots of other great commentary on web video, new media, and new distribution and business models.
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 2, 2008 -
ROTTERDAM: ABLE DANGER
Given that he’s just made his debut feature about the mysteries, speculations, half-truths and flights of fancy that comprise the 9/11 Truth Movement, I guess it makes sense that filmmaker Paul Krik is accustomed to finding conspiracy wherever he goes. He’s travelled from Brooklyn to Rotterdam to premiere Able Danger, but when I ask him to shoot me an email about why he chose to make a movie about 9/11 conspiracy theorists, he responds by noting some suspicious activities having to do with Dutch bicycle renting: “Indruk de en Brooklyn fietser in Rotterdam” True Conspiracy #1; It is illegal to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 1, 2008 -
Nadine Labaki, Caramel
WRITER-DIRECTOR-STAR NADINE LABAKI IN A SCENE FROM CARAMEL. COURTESY ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS. As role models, few filmmakers are more inspirational than Nadine Labaki. On top of the inherent difficulty of succeeding as a writer-director, Labaki grew up in Lebanon’s war-ravaged capital, Beirut, in a Middle Eastern culture where women are essentially second-class citizens. However, Labaki’s passion for film drove her to overcome her obstacles, and in 1998 her short film 11 Rue Pasteur (her graduating project at Beirut’s Saint-Joseph University) won the top prize at an Arabian film festival in Paris. Back in Lebanon, Labaki honed her craft as a director […]
by Nick Dawson on Feb 1, 2008 -
HALF-LIFE LOVED IN THE BLOGOSPHERE
Jennifer Phang’s Sundance Frontier entry Half-Life received something of a critical honor recently when producer Mike Ryan, whose thoughtful and passionate reviews can be found at the new Hammer To Nail, cited the film as his favorite of the 34 he saw at this year’s festival. An excerpt: We often see an art film that may leap around in perspective, mostly for rhetorical or comic effect, but it is truly rare to be carried emotionally through a film that tells a multi-perspective story through a seamless integration of naturalistic action, animation and self consciously artificial CGI compositing. Half-Life exists on […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 31, 2008 -
FIENNES WINS ROTTERDAM’S CINEMART COMPETITION
On the 25th anniversary of the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s Cinemart, the prize for the “best project” has gone to Sophie Fiennes’ The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, a follow-up to her The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema which also features philosopher Slajov Zizek. The award comes with a cash prize of 10,000 euros, which one guest at the party tonight quipped would be about equal to the film’s first clip license. Here’s Variety’s wrap-up of the event, and below is a clip from Fiennes’s previous collaboration with Zizek.
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 30, 2008 -
RAY CARNEY ON QUIET CITY
If you just bookmark this blog page and don’t check the main site, head over there so as not to miss professor and critic Ray Carney’s essay on Aaron Katz’s Quiet City, which hits DVD stores this week.
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 29, 2008 -
Rotterdam 2008: Who’s Afraid of Kathy Acker?
Who’s Afraid of Kathy Acker?, premiering here in Rotterdam, is Barbara Caspar’s thoughtful and creative film biography/essay on the late writer, whose formally inventive novels, published from the ’70s through the mid-90s, challenged assumptions about gender roles, sexuality, and the literary canon. A beguiling and intensely contradictory figure, Acker is best known for books which creatively appropriated texts from Great White Male writers, retelling them in an emotionally raw, sexually blunt, and politically questioning female voice. And with her appearance in several conceptual art videos in the ’70s, her close-cropped dyed blond hair, her tattoos and her piercings, Acker was […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 29, 2008 -
ARIN CRUMLEY WAS ROBBED!!!
The Four Eyed Monsters filmmaker is offering a handshake and a hug to the perpetrator if his stuff is returned.
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 29, 2008 -
THE THREE FACES OF INDIE
Over at her Thompson on Hollywood blog, Ann Thompson posts an email she received from indie producer and former distributor Jonathan Dana about “the surfeit of Sundance acquisition titles, many of which remain unsold at fest’s end.” He breaks the indie sphere down into three sections, from the studio specialty titles down to the out-of-nowhere surprises, and concentrates his commentary on the middle sphere, the professionally produced films with name actors that are financed by new money largely based on their presumed marketability. It’s worth a read.
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 29, 2008 -
Trumping Trump
The following essay by Ray Carney on Aaron Katz’s Quiet City accompanies a 2-disc DVD release from Benten Films out this week of Quiet City and Katz’s first film, Dance Party, USA. Mainstream film is so much an art of the maximum – the biggest, the flashiest, the fastest, the most exaggerated – that it is easy to forget that the great films all go in the opposite direction. They are, almost without exception, triumphs of minimalism. They rely on subtlety, understatement, indirection, and simplification. In Stranger than Paradise, Down by Law, and Mystery Train, Jim Jarmusch sets long sections […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 28, 2008
