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After posting about the Coudal Partners Kubrick page, below, I received an email alerting me to this link, which isn’t collated on the Coudal site. It’s from Cinefile Video, and it’s a true Kubrick oddity. Here’s how the site describes it: Somewhere a few months ago, our fearful Cinefile leader Hadrian read the soundtrack album for Full Metal Jacket had on it a track where R. Lee Ermey did a boot camp rap over a cheesy ’80s backing beat. Of course we had to hear it right away… Turns out that it isn’t so much Ermey on the mic than […]
Stanley Kubrick has been an obsession for many, including the folks at Coudal Partners, who have a “Stuff about Stanley Kubrick” page that collates all of the site’s posts on the director. Included are links to articles about unrealized Kubrick Jim Thompson adaptations, a PDF of his Napoleon screenplay, news about “the greatest movie Kubrick never made” (The Flying Padre) and more.
Alexa has added country rankings to their free internet traffic counter and, for reasons I can’t explain, they are claiming that Filmmaker is the 88th most visited website in Ethiopia. And we are in the top 2,000 in Ghana. I’m happy to see our stats up, of course, but I don’t know why our page view rate is several hundred times higher in Ethiopia than elsewhere. Speaking of internet traffic, Filmmaker coolly slipped over the 50,000 friends mark on our MySpace page, so if you’ve got a film to promote, join and post your banner or poster as a comment.
While in Rotterdam I caught Container, the latest experiment from one my favorite filmmakers, Lukas Moodysson. The film, which premiered in Berlin last year, features black-and-white footage of a heavy-set crossdresser and a young Asian woman doing all sorts of strange things underneath a voiceover by actress Jena Malone. To be clear, it is Jena Malone on the soundtrack, and she identifies herself as “the American actress Jena Malone,” but it’s unclear if the non-diagetic voiceover is completely unrelated to the image or whether its the fantasy of one of the characters. In any case, Picturehouse supposedly has the film […]
With his various blogs, Sujewa Ekanayake has been a tireless supporter of DIY independent filmmaking. Now, he’s going to put his money where his keyboard has been with a gesture that, if replicated by others, could lead to a new way of financing no-budget films. Two years after the United Nations announced “The Year of Microcredit,” Ekanayake is applying the economic model pioneered by Muhammad Yunus in which tiny loans — microcredit — are offered to unproven entrepreneurs in order to realize their projects to independent moviemaking. From Wikipedia: Microcredit is the extension of very small loans (microloans) to the […]
Congrats to Esther Robinson (pictured), one of Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces, for winning this year’s Berlin Film Festival Teddy Award with her A Walk in the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory. For more on the film check out Brian Brooks at Indiewire, who has a feature up on Robinson’s doc along with two others: Steven Kijak’s Scott Walker documentary and Rodolphe Marconi’s Lagerfeld Confidential. Check out the Teddy link above for the other awards, which include the Best Narrative Feature Prize to Zero Chou’s Spider Lillies.
Okay, this looks pretty great.
Over at Indiewire, Eugene Hernandez has an excellent report from Berlin on the premiere of Ryan Eslinger’s When a Tree Falls in the Forest. Eslinger, who was one of our 25 New Faces in 2004, is one of the youngest directors to premiere a film in Berlin’s Competition. If you read the industry papers, it’s been a mixed blessing as the film received several negative trade reviews and star Sharon Stone didn’t show for the post-screening Q and A. Hernandez offers a more balanced view, noting fest head Dieter Kosslick’s support for Eslinger and quoting Raj Roy, the American member […]
For those of you excited about the March 2 release of David Fincher’s latest, Zodiac, IESB.net has posted nine clips from the film. And, if you haven’t read it yet, check out Jamie Stuart’s “Are We there Yet?”, an article on HD cinematography that talks with d.p. Harris Savides about his work on the film.
I was surprised how purely lovely I found Doug Aitken’s Sleepwalkers, currently on display through tomorrow (Monday) night outside the Museum of Modern Art. Using multiple projectors to beam images onto walls and screens affixed outside the museum, Aitken’s public art film has an appealingly simple concept: the synchronous, small-scale moments that echo between a group of otherwise disparate New Yorkers going about their daily lives. With actors like Tilda Swinton, Chan Marshall (aka Cat Power), Seu Jorge and Donald Sutherland and carefully composed images that alternate between shallow focus portraits and geometric abstraction, Aitken’s silent city cinema does what […]