Filmmaker has a longstanding policy of not covering projects in which its staff members are involved — which is why you have never read in the pages of the magazine about Tom Noonan’s What Happened Was or The Wife, Harmony Korine’s Gummo or Julien Donkey-Boy, Jesse Peretz’s First Love, Last Rights or The Chateau, Peter Sollet’s Raising Victor Vargas and John Leguizamo’s Undefeated, among numerous other films — each of which was produced by Filmmaker editor Scott Macaulay and his partner at Forensic Films, Robin O’Hara. However, we’ve been chomping at the bit to spill the beans about Scott and […]
The Asia Times’ Pepe Escobar is always a good read when it comes to the Mid East and the War on Terror, but today’s web edition of the paper contains this interesting story on Girlfriends, a film that seems to be Bollywood’s (delayed) answer to Basic Instinct. Predictably, the film, which deals frankly with a lesbian relationship, is being attacked — violently — by Hindu right-wing organizations seeking a government ban as well as critics and those on the left. The “grade C film” tells the story of a lesbian who falls in love with a man, causing her female […]
There’s a great lead article in Variety this week by Dana Harris and Claude Brodesser — sorry, subscription only — titled “Films Buried Alive.” And although the headline might lead you to think that the piece is about the many long-delayed films on the Miramax release shelf, it’s actually a perceptive article about the politics involved in greenlighting a studio film. It confirms in print something producers have long known: despite the importance placed by studio execs on the development process, the scripts that actually get greenlit by the studios are often the least developed ones. And if there’s one […]
Sitting here editing the latest issue of Filmmaker, I came across this interview segment from Andy Bichelbauer, the “Yes Man” featured in Chris Smith’s outrageously entertaining political doc The Yes Men forthcoming this fall from United Artists. The Yes Men are a group of political performance-art provocateurs who infiltrate government and NGO-type events and pose as World Trade Organization officials. But lately the group has been having problems dealing with the implications of the Patriot Act, which broadly construes a variety of behaviors as potentially terrorist acts. Within the art world, the first casualty is that of Steve Kurtz, a […]
In our effort to present to you, our dear readers, with links and contacts you won’t find elsewhere, I present the following sincere e-mail received by a reader of this blog, who has crafted a Flash animation site promoting both herself and Keanu Reeves and The Matrix: “Hello, first congratulations for your website :-) I present myself: I am a 36 year old young woman, impassioned by the cinema, Internet and Flashmx. I invite you, by the present one, to come to visit my 4 galleries of animated photographs, dedicated to the Matrix trilogy and Mister Keanu Reeves, on the […]
While writing the blogs below, I’ve been listening to the new CD remaster of Brian Eno’s great Here Come the Warm Jets, which was recently released along with three other Eno classics from the ’70s. Todd Haynes referenced this album in his Velvet Goldmine, and, if anything, it sounds more inventive and emotionally connecting after all these years. All four albums are thoughtfully reviewed at Pitchfork Media, and tracks from two of them — Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) and Before and After Science, along with a couple of other Eno albums, provide most of the soundtrack to Olivier Assayas’s […]
Back in 1999, the first film I ever worked on was Raul Ruiz’s The Golden Boat (James Schamus’s first production), and, using some grant money that I raised at my job at The Kitchen, I got my friend John Zorn to do the score. (I ran into Zorn on the street a while ago and he told me he’d score another film of mine if I asked — “But you know the drill,” he said. “I’ll do it, fast, cheap, but I get complete creative control!” Anyway, John did amazing work for not much money, and one of the score’s […]
Producers don’t get all the props that they deserve, so I was happy to see the glam portrait of downtown New York producer Caroline Baron, whose credits include Monsoon Wedding and Bennett Miller’s upcoming Capote, in the new Vanity Fair. The article was as much about Baron’s activities as a specialty exhibitor, though, as her producing. What is her specialty distribution biz? Baron is the founder of FilmAid International, a non-profit organization that brings outdoor cinema to both countries devastated by war and the populations displaced by its effects. The organization also runs a video program that puts cameras in […]
The great U.K. music magazine The Wire doesn’t have much of a Web site (there are some long interview transcriptions and MP3 downloads from artists like Sonic Youth’s Jim O’Rourke), but the print edition remains invaluable for anyone interested in new music. The mag has a small column on the Web and, this issue, it points to a couple of interesting sites. The first is The Eye, a Web site containing mini downloadable documentaries on music and media groups like Wire, Papa M, Locust and others. The column also mentions something closer to home — the launch of P.S. 1’s […]
For Philip K. Dick fans out there — and I’m one of them — there’s a lot of excitement surrounding Richard Linklater’s new film, A Scanner Darkly. Based on one of Dick’s best books, the film promises to capture the Dick-ian mindset, with its mixture of philosophical paranoia, ’70s drug-era existentialism, and topsy turvy identity questioning, in a way that none of the other Dick adaptations (Bladerunner, Total Recall, Minority Report, etc., have done. Jason Koornick has long operated a Philip K. Dick fansite which recently went “official” with the participation of the Dick estate. On the site, there’s now […]