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Over at The Hot Button,, David Poland, while discussing Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival, throws out some industry analysis that feels pretty dead on and which is the kind of thinking that a lot of first-time filmmakers I encounter don’t really understand when they talk about the value of their film: The new small distributors are trying a new model. 12-16 movies a year. Nothing too big. $15 million is the top. Nothing too small. A $1 million or $2 million pick-up is possible… but only if the film looks like $8 million or more. Cover most of the money […]
Jack Boulware writes the first but certainly not the last profile of Laura Albert, the pen and voice behind the recently unmasked JT LeRoy. At the least, Boulware’s portrait should banish the term “40-year-old Brooklyn housewife” from articles about the literary hoax and hoaxer. The article traces Albert’s path from the NYC punk scene (she was interviewed for but not featured in Paul Rachman and Steven Blush’s American Hardcore) through her gigs as a cybererotica expert in San Francisco’s proto-dotcom days up through the success of “LeRoy” and his books.
The A.V. Club has a review up of the comic book adaptation of Darren Aronofsky’s forthcoming The Fountain. From Noel Murray’s review: “It’s difficult to read The Fountain without imagining how it’s going to look as a movie, or wondering what Aronofsky ultimately changed for the screen. But that’s actually part of what’s enjoyable about the book. Readers can treat it like an elaborate storyboard and see a movie in their minds. Given Aronofsky’s penchant for obscurity, the mind-Fountain may even end up being clearer than the finished version, even though it lacks the director’s gift for dynamic cinematic poetry. […]
David Poland has a nice appreciation up of Street Fight, the great doc about a down and dirty New Jersey mayoral campaign. He’s got the name of the filmmaker wrong — it’s Marshall Curry, not James Baxter — but his take on the film is dead on. Curry was one of our “25 New Faces” this year, and you should look for the film as it screens upcoming on P.O.V.
Via the very clever people at Coudal Partners, whose design-oriented website always has lots of film-related stuff, this link to a database of Polish movie posters. At right: Robert Altman’s 3 Women. Says Tom Kuznar, the site’s proprietor, “Although my goal is to (eventually) provide all available information on all Polish film posters ever printed and every artist who ever designed one, back here on planet Earth my emphasis is on the best period of the mid 50s to early 70s. Since the Polish poster practically ceased to exist at the end of the 80s (and stopped being great long […]
James Seo, whose Lossless Blog covers music, film, and, generally, all things Wong Kar-Wai, has created a new blog, Split Screen. It’s “dedicated to the art of the split screen and multi-layered visuals, as seen in movies, music videos, commercials and other media based on moving images.” Along with various art pieces, music videos (like ones from the Pixies and the B-52s), and links to clips from TV’s primary split-screen narrative, 24, the site highlights makers and projects like artist and designer Brendan Dawes and his Cinema Redux. Some quotes from Dawes’s site: “Using eight of my favourite films from […]
I’ve only recently glommed on to The Reeler, a new blog hosted by Indiewire, and I have enjoyed editor S.T. VanAirsdale’s (really!) funny and sometimes combative take on our industry. So I was sorry not to bump into him at our Filmmaker “25 New Faces” launch party last week. In his blog he asks readers to email him if they actually spotted a real live filmmaker at the soiree since he didn’t see one there other than a few friends of his. Well, S.T., sorry you didn’t make it to the V.I.P. room, but I was back there chatting with […]
The guys over at Ain’t It Cool News have been creaming over Michael Davis’s Shoot ‘Em Up, an action pic set up at New Line starring Clive Owen. First the site’s Moriaty posted an interview with Davis in which the writer/director traces the interesting and circuitous route he took to being the town’s new go-to action guy. (Jeffrey Welles has also written about Davis in a fascinating career study that explains how a 44-year-old direct-to-video guy came to helm a big-budget A-list actioner.) And today, Moriaty links to the Latino Review which has a detailed script review and, most importantly, […]
I attend the Rotterdam Film Festival every year, and I’ve taken that step many times… up a few inches from the street to the plaza that the Pathe theater complex is on. And now this architectural fillip is celebrated at MOMA and reviewed in the New York Times. From the review by Nicolai Ouroussoff of the exhibition “Groundswell,” an architectural survey of “two decades of landscape design”: “…the most innovative may be the Schouwburgplein (1996) in Rotterdam, a plaza by West 8 Urban Design and Landscape that draws inspiration from the eeriness of the city’s industrial waterfront. The plaza’s surface, […]
I’m curious to see the New Museum’s new East Village USA exhibition, which memorializes the downtown art world of the early to mid 1980s, a time in which art, fashion, film, hip-hop, and rock all jostled and congealed into a movement that can now be encapuslated into something like, well, a museum exhibition. (That it was also a time when AIDS rampaged through the New York arts community gives the show its measure of sadness for those who lived in New York at the time and knew many of these people.) Writes curator Dan Cameron, “Imagine a village where everybody […]