If you are a filmmaker looking for cheap Accutane, or to have your penis enlarged, then, in the last couple of weeks, our message board has been for you. If you are anyone else, it has been rendered unusable by an automated spambot attack that has filled up every category with horrible junk. Accordingly, we’ve disabled posting on the site and are embarking on revamp that will involve upgraded software to prevent this from happening in the future. We will also have more coherent and useful forum headers and we’ll be more actively moderating the boards. First, though, we will […]
ASKHAT KUCHINCHIREKOV AND FRIEND IN DIRECTOR SERGEY DVORTSEVOY’S TULPAN. COURTESY ZEITGEIST FILMS. The image of Kazakhstan and its cinema took a hit recently with the unwanted attention of a certain Borat Sagdiyev, however the rise to prominence of the highly talented writer-director Sergey Dvortsevoy should help redress that national image problem. Dvortsevoy was born in the Kazakh city of Chimkent in 1962 and initially had no particular interest in film. After high school, he attended aviation college in the Ukraine and the Radiotechnical-Institut in Novosibirsk, Russia, in order to become a radio engineer for Aeroflot, the Russian aviation company, a […]
There is an actual college Creative Nonfiction class in Lena Dunham’s Creative Nonfiction, which premieres in the Emerging Visions section at SXSW this week. There is also the actual Dunham, who plays both Ella, a college student trying to get a grip on an ambiguous non-starter romance, as well as the heroine in the 16mm-filmed representation of the John Waters/fairy-tale screenplay Ella is writing. Dunham wrote the script, about her own real-life ill fated dorm-room non-romance when she couldn’t concentrate on her own fairy tale/John Waters script, which she was completing for writing class. In Creative Nonfiction we meet this […]
It doesn’t matter where we’re from, we all remember the way the place used to be. You know, before the local dive bar became a TGIF, the Kroger became the Whole Foods, and back when the scene was truly a scene. But, of course, as powerful as nostalgia can be, it is also self-generating. What’s around us right now will one day be a newcomer’s “way it was.” In terms of a filmmaker’s celebration of his hometown, Rick Linklater’s Slacker has, perhaps, no equal. It not only documented a place, Austin, but it grafted a sensibility onto that place, a […]
Related to the post below, Mike Ryan posts over at Truly Free Film that instead of spending so much time thinking about the future of movies on handheld devices we should be more concerned about making sure that the values of classic arthouse cinema are not allowed to wither and die. An excerpt: For me one of the scariest aspects about the future state of indie film is not the problems connected to distribution (though they are formidable and problematic for other reasons) but instead I am most worried about the future DEMAND for the auteur driven films that I […]
I’ve posted previously on this blog about The Long Tail author Chris Anderson’s recent series of articles (and forthcoming book) on the economics of free. Briefly, Anderson’s proposition is that digital production and delivery, which decreases the marginal cost of goods, drives their purchase price down to zero. For most, this means adapting to the idea of distribution being ad-supported in some way, and this type of revenue scheme is what has dominated Anderson’s previous writings on the subject. But as I noted in a previous post on the Google Book Settlement, the problem with free models for the producer […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 17, 6:15 pm — Eccles Theatre, Park City] I think “story” is the same as it has always been. Maybe the delivery devices change, maybe the venues evolve, maybe the audiences can absorb information faster and maybe they’re more sophisticated in their demands. But the basic craft and fundamentals of story remain unchanged. We certainly didn’t adjust the concept of the film for YouTube, or any small screen for that matter. Maybe on some subconscious level, the short episodic nature of “the days” grew from watching too many YouTube video bursts. But I can’t say for […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 12:15 pm — Holiday Village Cinema IV, Park City] The idea for making The Glass House came organically when the director, Hamid Rahmanian, and I were invited to the Omid e Mehr Center in Tehran during a short visit to Iran (for what should have been a couple of weeks and turned into two years). At first we weren’t interested in covering a women’s crisis center in Iran — it had been done a few times already. Our biggest hesitation was the difficulty in penetrating the thick façade of pretenses that dominate Iranian culture; intimacy […]
What’s the mood heading into the 25th Sundance Film Festival? Overall, the sense of a across the board scaling back is palpable. Almost no one will talk about their own company’s downsizing publicly, for fear of appearing financially unstable, but it’s no secret that the economic catastrophes have hit everyone’s travel and promotional budgets. Besides fewer sponsored parties – Motorola, for instance, will not be in attendance — the rumor is that some photo agencies have majorly scaled back their coverage, sticking to the red carpet only, and usually ubiquitous publications aren’t sending their film critics. “The party grid is […]
I’ve posted a couple of times about the Google Book Settlement, more from a general interest in intellectual property issues than anything else. The relationship between the settlement’s engagement with the publishing industry and its possible application to the world of film are not direct by any means. The Google Book Settlement applies to library collections containing copyrighted but out-of-print works as well as orphan works. But, I did suspect that at some point the issues involved would become relevant to the world of film. (Remember, Google owns YouTube.) Now comes a piece critical about the proposed terms of the […]