With Paula Bernstein writing today about Guy Maddin’s The Saddest Music in the World, I was reminded to post about a cool internet essay/music project by Ander Monson with Megan Campbell, March Sadness. For those a bit blue, and no following college basketball — and, probably, more than a few who do — the month-long series has paired off sad songs for voters to up and downvote, mixing in essays on the music by Rick Moody, Juan Diaz, Megan Campbell and others. Explains Monson: So this March I’ve been running this project called March Sadness. Well, I’m already oversimplifying: we […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 29, 2016The San Francisco International Film Festival is underway, the first under the San Francisco Film Society’s new head, Ted Hope. In an interview with Casey Burchby at the San Francisco Weekly, Hope tells the story of his move from producing in New York to running the organization in the Bay Area and how it reflects his own evolving ideas on independent media in the 21st century. I especially like this quote about how artists can rethink their process in a time of plenty. Emphasis added below: Burchby: I wanted to connect your vision for the SF Film Society to the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 28, 2013Playing at New York’s IFC Center tonight — and on newsstands now in the current issue of The Believer — is Laurel Nakadate’s The Wolf Knife, one of Filmmaker‘s Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You Gotham Award nominees for 2010. Tonight’s screening is at 9pm, and will feature an on-stage Q&A between Nakadate and novelist Rick Moody (The Ice Storm). Additionally, all ticket-buyers will receive the new issue of The Believer containing the DVD. The video and photography artist’s second feature, The Wolf Knife is a mysterious parable of female adolescence, following two teenage girls who ditch […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 9, 2012A quick, commentary-lite version… Joseph Conrad wrote a science-fiction novel. “Young and Restless Never Gets Old” — Dennis Lim in the Times on Gregg Araki. Big tech news this week: Google announces that it won’t support the H.264 codec and the HTML5 video tag in its Chrome browser in favor of its own WebM codec. It’s all very complicated and tech-y, but Google’s argument is that they’re supporting “open standards” by backing a codec without royalty issues. Problem is, Apple’s Safari and Microsoft’s IE both use the H.264 format and the short-term victor is likely to be Adobe, whose Flash […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 16, 2011I don’t need any special encouragement to blog about a new book by Rick Moody…. especially when it has to do with a “blocked writer… whose major success is winning the right to author the novelization of the remake of the 1963 horror flick The Crawling Hand.” And when it has a pretty great trailer that took me back to Saturday afternoons watching Channel 20 in Washington, D.C. when I was growing up. (Hat tip: The Rumpus.)
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 2, 2010Author Rick Moody, whose novel The Ice Storm was adapted by James Schamus for an Ang Lee film, discusses Brokeback Mountain in the pages of The Guardian. I wish he had gone a bit more into his thoughts on Lee and the process of adaptation informed by his own first-hand experience, but his is a good take on Lee’s artistic intent: “There is also the question of whether or not Lee’s film is a genuine western. The western, in American cinema, is one of the foundational genres. It’s the bedrock on which the language of film was constructed. It’s the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 18, 2005