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TAGGED

Over at his increasingly essential Workbook Project, Lance weiler posts an audio podcast with Bomb It director Jon Reiss. I liked Reiss’s film, which starts off as a straightforward doc on the origins of urban graffitti art and then, as it globetrots to five countries, subtly morphs into a compelling essay on the changing nature of public space. Hear what Reiss has to say at the link above.

by Scott Macaulay on Sep 1, 2007

THE NBC/iTUNES SKIRMISH

Louis Hau has a solid piece in Forbes on the current skirmish between GE/NBC/Universal and Apple’s iTunes. If you’re not up on it, NBC has notified Aplle that it will no longer sell its television shows over the iTunes store. (It has also announced its own streaming and download site, Hulu.) Hau notes that NBC’s notice of termination occurs while negotiations are continuing and that, in the end, a deal may be worked out even as the network’s long-term strategy may be away from the pay-to-download model: Apple wants as much video content as it can get to continue driving […]

by Scott Macaulay on Sep 1, 2007

John August, The Nines

RYAN REYNOLDS IN JOHN AUGUST’S THE NINES. COURTESY NEWMARKET FILMS. John August holds a unique position as not only one of Hollywood’s most sought-after screenwriters, but also one of the filmmaking community’s most active and helpful members. August’s first produced script was Go (1999), directed by Doug Liman, a triptych of interweaving stories which played out like a junior version of Pulp Fiction. He has since written the animated Titan A.E. (2000) and both Charlie’s Angels movies, and collaborated with Tim Burton on Big Fish (2003), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Corpse Bride (both 2005). All the while, he […]

by Nick Dawson on Aug 31, 2007

SMILE LIKE YOU MEAN IT

I want to thank David Lowery for contributing the great interview with Ronnie Bronstein that’s up on the main page right now. I love Bronstein’s film Frownland and am really happy to be hosting a special screening of it with director Lodge Kerrigan at the IFC Center next Wednesday at 7:30 pm. Lowery is right when he calls Frownland “one of the most confrontational and uncompromising visions to emerge from the American independent scene in recent memory,” and I hope that a lot of you come to this special edition of Filmmaker‘s series at the IFC. Here’s a taste of […]

by Scott Macaulay on Aug 30, 2007

SOFT VOICES

For all the talk this past week about mumblecore — what it is and how these films are similar — it should also be noted how different the aesthetics of its various directors are. A case in point is this week’s opening at the IFC Center, Quiet City, directed by Aaron Katz, which boasts some of the trademarks of the genre — 20-something protagonists, a focus on transitory lifestates, relationship issues, an extreme naturalism — but which also has its own very distinct sensibility that’s quite different from some of the genre’s other filmmakers. As its title suggests, the film […]

by Scott Macaulay on Aug 29, 2007

SHIT HAPPENS

Police Beat writer Charles Mudede pens a curious ode to Stanley Kubrick in Seattle’s The Stranger. After opening by saying that Kubrick’s contempt for mankind was “deep,” he moves on to a fuller explication of his worldview: “I’m in a world of shit,” says Private Joker at the end of Kubrick’s unremittingly dark Vietnam War film, Full Metal Jacket. That is what Kubrick has to say about the state of everything: The world is shit, humans are shit in shit, life is worth shit, and there is nothing else that can be done about the situation. In Kubrick’s movies, progress, […]

by Scott Macaulay on Aug 25, 2007

WHAT WOULD THE COMMUNITY THINK?

Over at his blog, filmmaker A. J. Schnack thinks about the whole mumblecore thing with tons of links to all of this week’s NYC press coverage and more (including the filmmaker’s own piece on Swanberg and DIY distribution in February, 2006). Schnack, a doc maker, considers the phenomenon and takes the right lessons away from it: And perhaps the biggest thing that we should learn from these filmmakers is that we can and should work together. And I mean that literally. Although the doc community is a pretty tight-knit bunch, we should continue to find ways of collaboration, on screen […]

by Scott Macaulay on Aug 24, 2007

WE ARE CURIOUS… AND YELLOW

Our friends at MySpace have just launched their new Film page. It’s wider, with more features and info, and Filmmaker has even more real estate on it. And over on the Filmmaker MySpace site, we’ve changed our color scheme, away from our undeniably impressive but eye-straining backdrop of past covers to a stylish yellow/orange. The MySpace site will have more on it in the days ahead, but, for now, here’s something I found: a clip from Lynch, the doc on David Lynch Nick Dawson wrote about in a posting below.

by Scott Macaulay on Aug 24, 2007

Still Goin’: In Conversation With John Voight

September Dawn has been attracting controversy ever since it began shooting last year. The film, directed and co-written by Christopher Cain (Young Guns), tells the story of the events surrounding the Mountain Meadows Massacre when, on the morning of September 11, 1857, a wagon train of over 100 Westward-bound Christian settlers were brutally slain by Mormon militia. The incident has continued to be a historical talking point as the Mormons accused of the murders were disguised as Native Americans and have always denied any culpability in the matter. However a wealth of documentation backs up the claims against the Mormons, […]

by Jason Guerrasio on Aug 24, 2007

Joe Swanberg, Hannah Takes The Stairs

MARK DUPLASS AND GRETA GERWIG IN JOE SWANBERG’S HANNAH TAKES THE STAIRS. COURTESY IFC FIRST TAKE. Whatever the merits or otherwise of the “mumblecore” tag, one positive thing it has certainly done is help bring deserved attention to filmmakers like Joe Swanberg. The precocious 25-year-old was born in Detroit, but moved around as a kid before attending Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where he studied film. After graduation, he used money he had made from web design work to fund his first feature, Kissing on the Mouth (2005), which played at the SXSW Film Festival at the time the concept of […]

by Nick Dawson on Aug 22, 2007

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