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Over on the main page Nick Dawson interviews Knocked Up‘s writer/director, Judd Apatow. Here’s Apatow on what he considers to be his defining trait, awkwardness: It’s true, I’m a very awkward person. It’s hard to shake. Some people are wired for drug abuse or alcoholism or smoking; on some level, I’m wired to always feel like a goofball. No matter how well things go, I feel like I’m 15 years old. So when I’m out at a restaurant with my wife, I always feel like I’m on a first date and she might run at any moment. And it’s very […]
Matt Richtel in The New York Times today looks at how the internet is transforming the adult entertainment industry. As the porn business has always been something of a trendsetter when it comes to adoption of new technologies and viewing patterns — the adult biz was instrumental in popularizing home video in the ’80s, for example — the article is worth reading for independent filmmakers. It discusses how the ‘net is now beginning to inflict record-industry-scale losses on the porn industry while also noting how the porn companies are responding to the threat. From the piece: After years of essentially […]
Filmmaker Astra Taylor (Zizek!), who was one of our “25 New Faces of Independent Film” last year, and producer Laura Hanna are producing clips for VideoNation, the new web documentary component of The Nation magazine. Their first has just been posted, a short piece on Iraq Veterans Against the War. The link to the new Nation video page is here and the piece itself is also embedded below. Taylor says to check back in a couple of weeks for her second piece, an animation about industrial food pollution.
I met independent filmmaker Mohammed Naqvi a couple of years ago when he participated in the IFP Director’s Lab, which I taught. Now, he’s finished a powerful film, Shame, which is a doc version of the dramatic script he was writing back then. Premiering on Showtime this week, the film “tells the true story of international human rights icon Mukhtaran Mai, a Pakistani peasant who was gang-raped and publicly shamed in her village, but used her trauma to spark a legal revolution that exposed centuries of brutal tribal conflict and government mismanagement.” Here are the Showtime dates: Showtime May 31 […]
KATHERINE HEIGL AND SETH ROGEN IN JUDD APATOW’S KNOCKED UP. COURTESY UNIVERSAL. After 15 years rising up through the Hollywood ranks, comedy’s underdog is on top of the world. At the moment, studios are scrambling to work with Judd Apatow (there are no less than seven films he’s currently involved with which he has written and/or produced), but this is a stark contrast to the rejection he became used to. It is ironic that the projects now being snapped up are the same ones that were repeatedly passed on previously. Apatow began as a writer on The Ben Stiller Show […]
Over at Cinematical Ryan Stewart rounds up some Darren Aronofsky news including word of his new script (Noah’s Ark) and a link to the director’s MySpace page where he blogs about his fight to release a bonus-packed DVD of The Fountain. From the blog: so the dvd came out.happy that it is in the world.hope more folks will get to see it. as many of you can tell it is light on the extras as compared to my previous dvd releases. everything at the studio was a struggle. for instance: they didn’t want to do a commentary track cause they […]
Today GreenCine links to a couple of articles discussing Rainer Werner Fassbinder, his legacy, and allegations that the Fassbinder Foundation and its director, Juliane Lorenz, have “systematically erased” (to quote d.p. Michael Ballhaus) important figures like composer Peer Raben and actress (and ex-wife) Ingrid Caven from the Fassbinder history. The key document is a translation in Sign and Sight of a Die Zeit interview with Caven (pictured here). Caven’s attack on Lorenz and the Foundation is what’s getting all the press attention, but the interview is also striking for Caven’s memories of Fassbinder’s sex life, the early days of the […]
On the occasion of the Walter Reade’s 30th anniversary screening of Barry Lyndon (the last show is tonight at 7), Jamie Stuart contributes to The Reeler an interview with Kubrick actor and long-time associate Leon Vitali. Vitali, who most recently produced Todd Fields’s Little Children, is in town to intro tonight’s screening and he took a few moments to talk to Stuart, who also snapped the pic of the producer shown here. From the interview: Reeler: But other filmmakers I think of who have a great degree of control — modern filmmakers like say the Coen Brothers or somebody like […]
Director Chris Munch (The Hours and Times) sent the below comment in regarding Ted Hope’s post, below, on start-up online film distributor Jaman. While applauding the company’s goals and its economical price points, Munch wonders whether all the enthusiasm for digital film distribution means that we are being conditioned to accept lower image quality when it comes to viewing our favorite movies. Will the price ever rocket, though? Will producers and filmmakers benefit if it does? Jaman seems like a good idea at a good price point. I’m astonished how “content delivery trend predictors” have been proven wrong time and […]
Ted Hope sent the following thoughts on Jaman’s current trial offering of free online art-film rentals. Check out Hope’s comments and then, if you are so inclined, click over to Jaman to download the player and watch a movie. The absolute hostility, at best, neglect, generally speaking, that the American Film Industry displays towards adventuresome work, and particularly such work done in a non-english language, has some nice byproducts. When no market exists, salesman often resort to the time tested techniques of the drug pushers. Want to sample the product? Find nirvana for free? Here you go friend, feast away, […]