Composer Ben Neill and media artist Bill Jones will premiere a new interactive movie called Palladio at Symphony Space in NYC on March 4 and 5 as part of its Thalia Music series.

"Based on the 1998 novel Palladio by New York Times Magazine writer Jonathan Dee, Neill and Jones's new media performance work tells the story of an unlikely romantic triangle set against the backdrop of the often conflicting worlds of music, art and advertising.

"Palladio's video component, projected onto a movie theater screen, includes commercial samples seamlessly merged with live-action footage as the lead characters played by [Mikel Rouse, a noted composer/performer], Zoe Lister-Jones, [a recent graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and The Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London], and Cort Garretson, [a New York-based actor] are digitally transported into an environment created from the ads portrayed in the story.

Ben Neill, who I know from the early '90s when he was music curator at The Kitchen and I was media curator, is currently a partner (with producer Eric Calvi) in the New York commercial house Green Beet Productions.
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# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 2/28/2005 02:29:00 PM Comments (1)

From an interesting article in Forbes.com:

"Later [today], when Clint Eastwood faces off against Martin Scorsese in the battle for the Academy Award for best director, they could be fighting over much more than a gold statue. Life itself could be at stake. A study by a University of Toronto physician suggests that winning an Oscar can extend a director's life-span dramatically.

In fact, Oscar-winning directors live about two years longer than those who were just nominated, the result of a 24% decrease in the risk of death over their lifetimes. Those with multiple wins saw their average risk of death decrease 48% compared to those with only one statuette.

The results -- a repeat of similar findings in actors -- are thought to provide a powerful window into the ways that success is good for us. Donald Redelmeier, a researcher at Toronto's Sunnybrook Hospital, saw in Oscar winners a perfect laboratory for helping to explain 20-year-old data that show that success has a powerful influence on a person's health."

There is an interesting anomaly in this research however:

"Redelmeier and hs colleagues tried the same technique with screenwriters, and what they found shocked them. 'The screenwriters are a real anomaly,' Redelmeier says. 'Generally, they live shorter lives and their survival is not improved by winning an Oscar.'

In fact, statistically speaking, Oscar-winning writers actually die on average 3.6 years sooner their peers who are just nominated. Redelmeier offers two possible explanations. First, professional prestige has less of a direct impact on screenwriter's careers than it does on actors and directors. After all, screenplays are read anonymously and who remembers who actually wrote Driving Miss Daisy? Another possible factor? Unhealthy lifestyles. Award-winning actors and directors wind up with entourages of personal trainers and nutritionists who make sure they take care of themselves. Writers don't. Indeed, the financial security brought on by winning an Oscar may even allow them to indulge more deeply in their unhealthy habits.

'It's very difficult to sort out the writers because their lives are lived in such obscurity,' he says."
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# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 2/27/2005 11:09:00 AM Comments (2)

The 2005 Independent Spirit Awards were announced this afternoon at the IFP Los Angeles's annual ceremony on the beach in Santa Monica. For the major awards, it was a virtual sweep by Sideways -- Alexander Payne's smart comedy won six prizes. Other winners, listed below, include Garden State, The Motorcycle Diaries, Mean Creek, the filmmaker Jem Cohen, the producer Gina Kwon, and doc filmmakers Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman.

Here are the winners:

Best Picture
Sideways (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
Producer: Michael London

Best Director
Alexander Payne
Sideways (Fox Searchlight Pictures)

Best Screenplay
Alexander Payne & Jim Taylor
Sideways (Fox Searchlight Pictures)

Best First Feature
Garden State (Fox Searchlight Pictures)
Director: Zach Braff
Producers: Pamela Abdy, Gary Gilbert, Dan Halsted, Richard Klubeck

Best First Screenplay
Joshua Marston
Maria Full of Grace (HBO Films/Fine Line Features)

John Cassavetes Award
(For the Best Feature made for under $500,000)
Mean Creek (Paramount Classics)
Writer/Director: Jacob Aaron Estes
Producers: Susan Johnson, Rick Rosenthal, Hagai Shaham

Best Debut Performance*
Rodrigo de la Serna
The Motorcycle Diaries (Focus Features)
*Actors making their first appearance in a feature film

Best Supporting Female
Virginia Madsen
Sideways (Fox Searchlight Pictures)

Best Supporting Male
Thomas Haden Church
Sideways (Fox Searchlight Pictures)

Best Female Lead
Catalina Sandino Moreno
Maria Full of Grace (HBO Films/Fine Line Features)

Best Male Lead
Paul Giamatti
Sideways (Fox Searchlight Pictures)

Best Cinematography
Eric Gautier
The Motorcycle Diaries (Focus Features)

Best Foreign Film
The Sea Inside (Fine Line Features)
Director: Alejandro Amenabar

Best Documentary
Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (IFC Films)
Directors: Joe Berlinger, Bruce Sinofsky

Gina Kwon, producer of Me and You and Everyone We Know and The Motel, received the eighth annual Bravo/American Express Producers Award, which honors producers who, despite highly limited resources, demonstrate the creativity, tenacity, and vision required to produce quality independent films. The winner of the Producers Award received an unrestricted grant of $20,000 funded by Bravo and American Express.

Jem Cohen, director of Chain, won the eleventh annual Turning Leaf Someone To Watch Award, a $20,000 grant created to honor a director of singular vision who has not yet received appropriate recognition. The award is funded by Turning Leaf Vineyards.

Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, directors of Born Into Brothels, won the eighth annual DIRECTV/IFC Truer Than Fiction Award, presented to an emerging director of non-fiction features. The award is accompanied by a $20,000 unrestricted grant funded by DIRECTV and IFC.

A Special Distinction Award was given to the ensemble cast of Mean Creek: Rory Culkin, Ryan Kelley, Scott Mechlowicz, Trevor Morgan, Josh Peck, and Carly Schroeder. The nominating committee was struck by these young actors who turned in performances so uniformly unselfish and so intricately in tune with each other that it became impossible to single any one of them out from their extraordinary achievement together.
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# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 2/26/2005 07:44:00 PM Comments (1)

A new European spot for Volkswagen's Golf GTI begins with one of the most cherished sequences in film history: Gene Kelly's song-and-dance performance of the title song in his and Stanley Donen's 1952 masterpiece Singin' in the Rain. Then, thanks to some astonishing CGI work, Kelly updates his routine. It's not the first time digitally-aided dancing has been shown off in spots -- Spike Jonze did it a few years ago with a Levi's commercial and there are several others currently in rotation on the networks -- but this is the first time I've seen anyone "remix" a classic. I still can't decide if I love it or hate it, but I've watched it countless times. Check it out here.
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# posted by Matthew Ross @ 2/25/2005 12:52:00 PM Comments (0)

"When it comes to truthful depictions of sex and relationships, where are progressive moviemakers going?"

Nerve.com addresses this question in a special Film Issue, online through March 7.

Included in the issue are the following articles/essays:

Donald Sutherland's Buttocks, or Sex in Movies for People Who Have Sex
by Jonathan Lethem
A manifesto for the new adult cinema.
"I'm calling for filmic moments that lure and confuse me the way sex can, at its best. I don't want to choose between scrupulous, grainy, documentary realism (or the new and unsavory hi-definition nudity I've been warned about) and fantasy, imagination, exaggeration, cartoons -- I want them both...C'mon, show me something the mention of which will make my head turn at a dinner party thirty years from now."

Lights, Camera, Lots of Action
by Harriette Yahr
A report from this year's sex-obsessed Sundance Film Festival.
"The same week a SpongeBob video was castigated as gay propaganda and PBS pulled a children's program featuring a lesbian couple selling maple syrup, the Sundance Film Festival unspooled a slate of films that showed no fear."

Suppressed Desires
by Bruce LaBruce
Five lost films that addressed taboos -- and paid the price.
A reconsideration of Bernardo Bertolucci's La Luna; Pasolini's Salo: or the 120 Days of Sodom, from a script by Roland Barthes and Sergio Citti; Lou Adler's Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains; Dusan Makavejev's Sweet Movie; and Paul Morrissey's Forty Deuce.
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# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 2/25/2005 11:25:00 AM Comments (0)

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, raised slightly above the surrounding streets, is paved in a pattern of wood slats, perforated metal and heavy-duty rubber. A row of mechanical "light masts," inspired by the massive cranes along Rotterdam's piers, line the project's northern edge, their muscular steel arms gliding up and down like oil pumps.

By raising the plaza just above street level, the designers enabled light to filter down into levels of parking underneath the plaza -- a further reminder that you are not on solid ground. But the plaza is also a stage for reflecting on Rotterdam's gritty history. A major port in World War II, the city was blasted by British and American bombers during the German occupation. Its industrial piers, modern housing blocks and generic shopping strips are emblematic of the postwar city."
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# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 2/24/2005 06:30:00 PM Comments (1)

Q Television, the subscription cable net "run by and programmed for an audience that identifies it[self] as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and ... straight," has come aboard as a majority financier in John Cameron Mitchell's (Hedwig & the Angry Inch) controversial new feature Shortbus, reports Variety.

Previously known as the Sex Film Project, Shortbus is described as "'an exploration of sexuality, art and music' [that] follows seven characters as they navigate sex and love in modern-day Gotham." The film starts production May 9 with Howard Gertler and Tim Perell producing through their NY-based company Process Productions.

"The movie takes place after 9/11, in a city haunted by terrorism and too expensive for artists anymore. 'Escorting is the new temp job,' Mr. Mitchell said.

"The film takes its name from the 'salon where the characters meet to give readings and performances, and sometimes to have public sex...' The story features a dominatrix who lives in a ministorage unit because she can't afford an apartment, a sex therapist who can't have an orgasm and a gay man who feels trapped in his relationship. They attend the salon 'to find redemption'."

Mitchell calls the film "a love letter to New York."

According to Variety, Q Television "will use Shortbus to brand itself as a cutting-edge, risk-taking entity."

Fortissimo Films, which has an equity stake in the film, is selling international rights to the film, which has yet to secure distribution Stateside.
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# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 2/24/2005 11:12:00 AM Comments (0)

The folks at Cinemaminima pointed to this fascinating clip on Errol Morris's website. It's from one of Morris's "aborted projects," series or films that for whatever reason didn't make it off the ground. In the Quicktime stream, Donald Trump discusses Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, riffing on the lessons the film has to impart on wealth, accumulation and happiness. As Morris does, Trump becomes a poignant, contradictory and very human ambassador from the director's now readily identifiable universe of oddball dreamers and schemers. Check out the clip for some fascinating viewing, and click back to the page in the future. Morris will soon post a clip of Mikhail Gorbachev discussing Tarkovsky's The Mirror and Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove!
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# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 2/24/2005 10:02:00 AM Comments (0)

Kira Muratova's The Aesthenic Syndrome

A few years ago at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the Czech Republic, looking to kill some time, I wandered into a film by the Ukraine-based filmmaker Kira Muratova entitled Chekhov's Motives (or, as the fest catalogue loosely translated it, Chekhov's Motifs). When the film ended two hours later I staggered from the theater, utterly exasperated but profoundly transformed by the experience. This was immersive cinema of a kind I had not encountered before.

During the first half of the film -- which is structured in two very long set pieces -- a peasant woman and her son plead with the boy's obstinate father over dinner to lend him money (for a new sweater, I think) for school. Over and over, the woman and son repeatedly berate the father, as a daughter and a baby look on. The family, seated "Last Supper"-style around a table, face the camera theatrically; the audience, in effect, fills the facing seat, silent witnesses to the plaintive nagging -- for almost 45 minutes!

When the baby begins to nod out in real time at the table, finally falling asleep while struggling to keep its head upright, the audience howls with laughter, but the wife and son's nagging don't let up until the father is finally worn down and he loans the son money to buy the sweater.

Next, on his way to school, the young son hitches a ride from a man who offers to take him to town if he doesn't mind making a quick pit stop at a relative's wedding.

Quick pit stop? The second half of the film is the entire Russian Orthodox wedding, which goes on for so long -- over an hour! -- that, one by one, the wedding guests begin to fall asleep -- mirroring much of the film's audience, which struggles to remain awake.

In both halves of the film -- loosely based on two Chekhov works, the play Tatiana Repina and the short story Difficult People -- fascination gives way to exasperation and finally, tedium, but there are more than enough moments of absurdity and comic relief to keep you struggling to prop your head upright.

In the end, what finally impresses in Muratova's uncompromising film is the sheer audacity of the filmmaker to so completley immerse an audience in the pedestrian world of her characters.

Later at the festival I ran into several film programmers, including Wanda Bershen, who, when I described the film, immediately said, "It sounds like Kira Muratova! You've never seen her work before? You have to see the The Aesthenic Syndrome," acclaimed as one of the masterworks of contemporary cinema -- and the only Soviet film banned under Mikhail Gorbachev!

I'll finally get the chance to see The Aesthenic Syndrome next week, along with 7 other films by Muratova, as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's welcome retrospective, Take No Prisoners: The Bold Vision of Kira Muratova, which runs from February 25 - March 10.
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# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 2/23/2005 01:26:00 PM Comments (0)

If you've been reading this blog from the beginning, you'll know that I'm really looking forward to Rick Linklater's adaptation of one of Philip K. Dick's best books, A Scanner Darkly. The folks at Ain't It Cool News (which, frankly, kicked all of our asses when it comes to online coverage of Sundance) have some exclusive pics from the movie up, and now ifilm has posted a seriously cool trailer as well. To top it off, a simple Google search revealed this interesting "making of" A Scanner Darkly blog which seems to contain posts from various people involved in the movie, including Wiley Wiggins.

And with the news via Indiewire that Warner Independent has picked up Paradise Now out of Berlin, it seems that the newest of the mini-majors has some uncommonly exciting product in its pipeline.
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# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 2/22/2005 08:25:00 PM Comments (1)

Unfortunately, I didn't see Shunji Iwai's All About Lily Chou-Chou when it was released theatrically by Cowboy Pictures in 2002 following its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival, but I finally caught up with the film via Home Vision Entertainment's DVD release this past weekend.

This is one of the most stylistically innovative and haunting films I have seen in quite some time. Focusing on the devotees of a fictitious Japanese pop star who communicate through a fansite bulletin board, director Shunji Iwai originally conceived the idea of exploring the world around a teen pop star after attending a Faye Wong concert in Hong Kong and witnessing the almost religious devotion of her fans. Although he initially wrote all of the BBS entries himself as an experiment in creative writing, the imaginary Lily Chou-Chou fansite soon obtained a cult following, and Iwai's creation took on a life of its own as more and more people began writing in to debate the ideas explored in her (non-existent) music.

Iwai never finished the novel he set out to write; instead, he adapted the BBS entries to fashion a screenplay based on the Lily Chou-Chou phenomenon, in which isolated teenage fans communicate anonymously about the singer before finally converging at one of her concerts, at which one of them is mysteriously murdered.

As Anthony Leong writes in his review of the film: "Several years in the making and having gone through multiple incarnations (including an unfinished novel and an on-line forum), All About Lily Chou-Chou is a film that confronts the destructive power of teen alienation in modern-day Japan head-on."

Iwai himself says, "This new film looks in uncompromising details at the everyday life of 14-year-old teens, as blunt and direct a blow to the body."
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# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 2/22/2005 11:47:00 AM Comments (2)

Although the films selected for New Directors/New Films have not yet appeared on the Web sites of the Film Society of Lincoln Center or the Museum of Modern Art, which jointly present this renowned festival, Variety today announced the 2005 lineup, which will open on March 23 with first-time Angolan film director Zeze Gamboa's The Hero (California Newsreel), which recently won the grand prize in the World Cinema Competition at the Sundance Film Festival.

Additional Sundance titles selected for the 34th ND/NF include Jeff Feuerzeig's The Devil and Daniel Johnson, which won best director in the Documentary Competition, as well as Henry-Alex Rubin and Dan Shapiro's Murderball (ThinkFilm), and Phil Morrison's Junebug (Sony Pictures Classics).

Among the remaining titles selected for ND/NF, which runs through April 3, are: Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden's U.S./Cuba co-production, Young Rebels; Hubert Sauper's documentary Darwin's Nightmare, about globalization as reflected in a Tanzanian eco-disaster; Abdelatif Kechiche's L'Esquive (New Yorker Films), one of my favorite films at last year's Berlin International Film Festival; Robin Campillo's They Came Back; Ismael Ferroukhi's Le Grand Voyage (Film Movement), which won an award for Best First Feature at last year's Venice Film Festival; Matteo Garrone's Primo Amore (Strand Releasing); Saverio Costanzo's Private (Avatar Films), which received the Golden Leopard at last year's Locarno Film Festival; Eleonore Faucher's Sequins (New Yorker); Cate Shortland's Somersault (Magnolia Pictures); and Nimrod Antal's Kontroll (ThinkFilm).
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# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 2/22/2005 10:20:00 AM Comments (1)

It's Monday morning and I'll allow myself one posting based on the a.m.'s quick scan of what's out there on the web. The choices? Paris Hilton's T-Mobile pager records and phone book... or perhaps, this engaging interview with our friend, the author, critic and programmer Kent Jones. appearing in Gothamist.

From the piece:

"I mean, I really, really hate TV -- the commercials, the 'hand-held' camera, the music, the personalities of the newscasters. I've given things like Six Feet Under and The Sopranos a try, and I see their merits but they seem like canned art to me -- stuff that's already been carefully digested (the non-functional American family, the odd juxtaposition of the macabre and the everyday) and then sold as cutting edge: how else could it get on TV? Having said that, I love old TV: The Honeymooners, The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, which I'm watching a lot of right now with my sons."
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# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 2/21/2005 09:49:00 AM Comments (0)

A few years after its move to Potsdamer Platz, the old dead zone between East and West Berlin that's now a somber (at least in rainy February) pedestrian mall lit by the logos of its surrounding corporate spires, the Berlin Film Festival represents a shrewdly intelligent answer to the questions surrounding film production, exhibition and distribution today. Whereas the success of most festivals boils down to the cruel calculus of distribution deals and premiering masterpieces, the Berlin Film Festival, through its accompanying Talent Campus and its various retrospective programs, embraces a kind of "film festival as film school" model. By streaming 530 young filmmakers from around the world between its screenings and their various meetings and seminars at the nearby Campus, Berlin topper Dieter Kosslick and his team implicitly argue for the perpetual regrowth of cinema: if you don't like any of the films on display, then who's to say that one of the campus talents won't return next year with one you do.

I'll have more to say about the festival and the Talent Campus in the Spring print edition, but, for now, here are quick thoughts on some of the films I managed to see.

Unfortunately, I missed probably the most talked about film in the Competition, Hany Abu-Assad's Paradise Now, a drama about two Palestinian suicide bombers that was filmed in Namblus. "An olive branch" between the Jewish and Palestinian communities is how one U.S. distributor described the film, which has a script developed at the Sundance labs. While some feel that the film's subject matter and its humanistic take on the lives of two would-be suicide bombers will make a major U.S. distribution deal unlikely, the enthusiastic public and critical response (although it confounded predictors by failing to win an award) should prompt someone in the States to pick it up.

I also missed Mark Cornford-May's U-Carmen, a South African film about a production of Carmen staged in a South African township that won the grand prize, the Golden Bear.

But I did catch the other film dubbed before the festival as a hot Competition title -- Jacques Audiard's The Beat My Heart Skipped, a loose remake of James Toback's deeply sleazy 1978 crime drama Fingers -- even if it too left the festival without a prize. Less violent and lacking the self-reflective misogyny of Toback's film, the pic is a subtle thriller about a young real-estate "fixer" -- a guy who basically threatens and intimidates people out of house and home -- who slacks on his criminal life after reconnecting with his dream of being a concert pianist. The second American remake in a row from French production company Why Not? (the company also produced Focus's current John Carpenter-redo, Assault on Precinct 13) the film trades Toback's brutal worldview for a more, well, French view of love, life, men, women and relationships. Audiard, working in a handheld, quickly edited style, is precise and kinetic in his direction, and Romaine Duris, with a wildly charismatic lead performance, should become a major star with this film.

Taiwan's Tsai Ming-liang returned to the Berlin Competition where his masterpiece The River won the Silver Bear in 1997. His new film, The Wayward Cloud, continues the tact the director has taken after that earlier film as he recombines his various devices -- exquisite framing, minimal dialogue, fantasy musical production numbers and alternately comic and melancholy depictions of urban anomie -- while this time adding a fair amount of softcore sex. There's a welcome surrealism to scenes like the opening, in which the young watchseller from the director's previous What Time is it There?, inventively uses a watermelon for extended foreplay -- a sex trick that leads to a sticky situation when the city experiences a water shortage. Tsai's style remains entirely unique, but I couldn't help but feel that his is an increasingly formal filmmaking as he reworks variations on the same emotionally muted themes.

Tickets, an anthology film directed by Eduardo Olmi, Abbas Kiaorostami and Ken Loach, was a disappointment in the Official Selection. (It premiered out of competition.) Three shorts all set on a European train, the film fell victim to the usual anthology-film trap. One film was bad (Olmi's, a cloying tale of an old scientist fantasizing about a younger woman), one okay (Kiaorostami's, about a young man accompanying a cranky old battleaxe on a trip to a funeral), and only one good (Loach's, about a drama involving a stolen ticket, three Scottish soccer fans, and a travelling immigrant family).

Perhaps my favorite film in the Competition was The Last Mitterand, Robert Guediguian's odd, intimate dramatization of the final days of the late French Socialist President. Based on a French bestselling novel, the film is about a young journalist chosen to interview the ailing Mitterand at length during the last three months of his life and produce a book based on the conversations. The film balances a tale of the journalist's personal crisis -- his wife is pregnant and leaving him -- with the president's smart, sometimes poetic, and occasionally confounding musings on socialist politics in the age of globalization.

The film doesn't deal with Mitterand's late-career corruption scandals nor with his personal life. (The journalist, does, however, try to get to the bottom of Mitterand's activities during the Vichy years.) The peculiar power of The Last President comes not so much from the film's words (and there are a lot of them) but from the sheer cinematic spectacle of a recently deceased president being employed so elegantly within such a fictional construct. Mitterand the character's ruminations on mortality dovetail dramatically with the director's longstanding inquiry into left-wing politics and practice in France. Guediguian has made a sly, charming film from the contradictions between his gentle style -- as well as tthe playful central performance by Michel Bouquet -- and the larger political issues which transcend the death of a single man.

In the next day or two I'll post some reactions to films in the Panorama and Forum sections.
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# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 2/20/2005 11:47:00 PM Comments (0)

The 55th Berlin International Film Festival has announced the prizes for this year's event.

The top prize, the Golden Bear, was awarded to U-Carmen eKhayelitsha (Carmen in Khayelitsha, South Africa, 2004), by Marc Dornford-May.

"Director Mark Dornford-May's adaptation [of Bizet's Carmen] is based on his own thorough analysis of the opera. Transposing a previous stage production into a feature-length film, his screenplay sets the story of the love affair between Carmen and Don Jose against the hardship suffered by those living in a South African township. For the film's soundtrack, the opera's lyrics were translated into Xhosa."
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# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 2/19/2005 10:40:00 AM Comments (0)

As if I needed any further proof that Kim Jong-Il is completely insane, my friend Paul Zucker showed up for dinner earlier this week with an unexpected gift: On the Art of the Cinema, Kim's absolutely bizarre treatise on good movies and revolution. Written in 1973, 13 years before Kim kidnapped South Korean director Shin Sang-Ok and his ex-wife, actress Che Eun-Hui, and kept them for eight years while making them produce propaganda films, the book reads like a 329-page spoof written by the staff of The Onion.

Chapter subheadings include:
"A screen portrayal demands first-class filming techniques"
"Make-up is a noble art"
"The assistant director is a creative worker"
"A song with unfailing appeal is a true masterpiece"

On the Art of the Cinema currently has a five-star rating on Amazon (three reviews). List price: $27.50, with free super-saver shipping.
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# posted by Matthew Ross @ 2/18/2005 12:33:00 PM Comments (0)

The IFP/NY, which administers financing to documentary projects in various stages of development through its Anthony Radziwill Documentary Fund, has announced this year's recipients.

Leslie McCleave (How Sweet the Sound --The Blind Boys of Alabama), Tara Wray ( Manhattan, Kansas), Jay Rosenblatt (Suicide), Sam Green (The Universal Language) and Lourdes Portillo (When the Tide Comes In) will receive $10,000 each.

"The Documentary Fund is named in memory of the late Anthony Radziwill, an Emmy Award-winning documentary producer, and was originally established in 2000 by Lee Radziwill and Carole Radziwill to provide a single unrestricted stipend annually to an emerging documentary filmmaker for an outstanding completed documentary feature as part of the IFP Gotham Awards. As of 2004, grants [are now awarded to multiple] projects at the development stage."
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# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 2/18/2005 11:01:00 AM Comments (0)

"For the second year in a row, the Berlinale Talent Campus plays host to The Talent Press. A group of young film critics and journalists gain valuable writing experience and insight on the business of covering a big international film festival by being integrated into the pipelines of the Campus and the various other sections of the Berlin International Film Festival."

Nigerian Film ciritic Steve Ayorinde from The Talent Press profiles the Berlinale's Talent Campus and its focus on "the positive side of cultural globalisation" in IndieWIRE today.
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# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 2/16/2005 11:12:00 AM Comments (0)

Kudos to the folks at Dependent Films, an Illinois-based independent film production company, which offers downloadable sample contracts, budgets, storyboards, templates for call sheets, continuity logs and daily production reports, among numerous other FREE files on its Web site.
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# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 2/16/2005 10:23:00 AM Comments (0)

Among the artists scheduled to show their work at the forthcoming -scopeNewYork contemporary art fair, March 11-14, is Thomas Allen, whose debut exhibit at Foley Gallery in New York closed earlier this month.

"Inspired by a View-Master and 'pop-up' books as a child, Allen," who hails from Minnesota, "became interested in recreating these three-dimensional experiences" -- which he does to great effect by cutting up old books and pulp fiction paperbacks, which he then uses as still life subjects.


"Allen gently cuts around the shape of his figures, physically releasing them from their two-dimensional surface. They are brought to life from their pages and covers with detailed lighting and a thin focus. Pulled and positioned, their intended drama comes to life."

"Pop-up art ascends to sublime heights in these twenty-by-twenty-four-inch chromogenic prints of constructions made from old books," writes The New Yorker magazine about the recent exhibition at Foley. "Why not view the books themselves? Because here the artist controls the lighting, perspective, and focus to create multidimensional scenes rich in detail." The resulting images are distinctively cinematic.
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# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 2/14/2005 01:01:00 PM Comments (1)

Via Green Cine Daily comes the following notice: "Baise-moi director Virginie Despentes has been blogging (in French) and remembers the film's star, Karen Bach, who committed suicide on January 28, leaving behind only empty pill bottles and a short note to her parents: 'too painful.'"

Bach, 31, had worked in the porn industry before starring in Baise-Moi (2000). At the time of her death she was trying to build a career in music.
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# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 2/14/2005 10:39:00 AM Comments (6)

Late last year, Magnolia Pictures' Eamonn Bowles sent me a DVD screener of Ong Bak: Thai Warrior with a note that read: "Tony Jaa is the next Bruce Lee." Bold words, indeed, but when I watched the film, I understood why. Jaa, the star of the Thai blockbuster import, pulls off some of the illest moves ever put on film.

If you don't believe me, just ask Wu-Tang's RZA, who's been promoting the film on cable TV commercials and also hosted the film's premiere on Wednesday night in New York (it opens today.) I asked Eamonn how RZA got involved. "His manager approached us, because he was such a huge fan of the film and was interested in getting involved and potentially re-scoring it," says Bowles. "We didn't have enough time to re-open it for a new score, but we had RZA host screenings, film wraparounds for our trailer, and do national TV and radio spots. He really hit it off with Tony when they met in November and he's been championing the film tirelessly."

In addition to the film, devotees of all-things Wu should pick-up want to consider buying the the long-awaited, recently-released Wu-Tang Manual. Here's the publisher's description: "Written in a style that is at once personal and philosophical, The Wu-Tang Manual unravels the intricate web of personalities (and alter egos), warrior codes, numerological systems, and Eastern spiritual ethics that define the Wu-Tang dynasty. Packed with information that reflects the breadth and depth of the RZA's - and rest of the Clan's - intellectual interests and passions, The Wu-Tang Manual is divided into four books of nine chambers each, for a total of 36 chambers. All together, the book provides the breakdown of essential Wu-Tang components, from basic information about each of the nine core members of Wu-Tang Clan to deeper explorations of the key themes of the Wu-Tang universe, a dictionary-like Wu-Slang lexicon, and an entire section of lyrics with densely annotated explanations of what they mean."
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# posted by Matthew Ross @ 2/11/2005 09:45:00 AM Comments (1)

Making its way through the blogosphere (through sites like Moviecity News) is this link to a website run by an anonymous "Manager Guy" who posts the strangest, wackiest or lamest query letters he receives online for everyone to laugh at or, hopefully, learn from.

As a producer myself, I could forward Manager Guy a bunch of doozies I've received, but it's not like he's short of content. Check out his site to read pitches like this one:

"'Marriage is a great cover.

Emmanuelle can't hold a job. She is chosen to become a mail order bride to infiltrate a spy ring of mail order brides stealing national secrets. She is trained. Emmanuelle marries a rich businessman whose company has access to nuclear weapon storage. She stops a bombing at a nuclear facility just in time.

Miss Congeniality meets La Femme Nikita.'"
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# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 2/10/2005 05:00:00 PM Comments (1)

The Panorama section of the Berlin International Film Festival, which unspools February 10 -20, has long been supportive of gay and lesbian cinema and, informally over the years, has made great efforts to bring together gay and lesbian filmmakers and festival programmers from around the world.

This year, the Panorama will feature an unusal omnibus film, the brainchild of Kristian Petersen, who asked 15 queer filmmakers in Berlin to contribute a short film about their idea of gay or lesbian love and sexuality.

The twist: gay men were given the task of making a short film about lesbian sexuality and eroticism, and lesbians were asked to explore the sexuality of gay men.

The result is Fucking Different!, 15 short films, each between 3 and 7 minutes, shot on MiniDV and spanning disparate genres and forms, but all "primarily concerned with the pinpointing, questioning and deconstruction of cliches -- cliches which, in spite of the ostensible proximity of gays and lesbians during the past ten years, appear to persist to a shocking extent in the minds of many in the opposite group."

Fucking Different! is being sold at the Berlinale by GM Films, which will release the project in Germany following the festival.

Image: from Blue Box Blues by Michael Brynntrup.

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# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 2/09/2005 10:55:00 AM Comments (0)

From an email from filmmaker Garrett Scott, who premiered his smart, sometimes surreal but always penetrating doc on a U.S. Army unit deployed in Fallujah, Occupation: Dreamland (pictured) in Rotterdam, where I got snagged in my hotel room with the Sundance flu for a couple of days:

"It is widely believed that the deadly global Influenza epidemic of 1918 spread across the U.S. so rapidly because of mass troop mobilization for the First World War. No one realized what sort of by product would arise from moving all those bodies into closely compressed camps. Then, move them by train to the next camp and you are moving tons of incubators all across the globe. The festival circuit can't be much different. Get out of the vector, my friend!"

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 2/08/2005 08:18:00 PM Comments (1)

From a press release we received today:

"Emerging Pictures announced today that it will launch its Digital Cinema Network with an investment by Los Angeles-based Participant Productions. This digital cinema initiative will establish a nationwide network for the distribution and exhibition of specialty films in such venues as prestigious museums, performing arts centers, science & technology institutions, and restored movie palaces. These venues will screen independent and international films, both dramatic and nonfiction, as well as alternate content such as film festivals, dramatic performances, concerts, and other mission-appropriate programming.

"Participant Productions, founded in 2004 by eBay pioneer and philanthropist, Jeff Skoll, focuses on socially relevant, commercially viable feature films and documentaries. Coincident with the investment, Participant Productions and Emerging Pictures have formed a content-based distribution relationship which will expand the reach of Participant Production's projects....

"As part of its roll-out Emerging Pictures will partner with the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival this April 7-10 to syndicate the event in real-time into more than a dozen additional cities. Roll-out programming will also include presentations in association with broadcasters PBS, National Geographic Television & Film, Japan's NHK and others, including the recent eight city pilot release of Ken Burn's Unforgivable Blackness -- The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, for PBS."

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 2/07/2005 09:22:00 PM Comments (0)

"As New York City prepares to be wowed by the environmental artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude's massive art installation 'The Gates' in Central Park [beginning February 12], WNET and MoMA have chosen to give the public a taste of past projects by the artists by showing the feature documentary Umbrellas, directed by Henry Corra, Grahame Weinbren, and Albert Maysles. The film explores the concept and realization of the artists' 26-million dollar project for Japan and California in 1991. Christo and Jeanne-Claude found it to be the most difficult of all their projects, as violent weather and ultimately the tragedy of two accidental deaths plagued the artwork. But the project's glory -- in the form of 1,340 blue umbrellas 18-foot tall umbrellas in Japan and 1,760 yellow umbrellas in Southern California -- shines forth as an incredible work of art."

Thirteen/WNET will screen Umbrellas on Thursday, February 10 at 10:00PM & Tuesday, February 15 at 12:25AM. The film will also be screened at MoMA on Wednesday, February 23, 2005 at 8:30PM.

# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 2/07/2005 03:32:00 PM Comments (0)

The South by Southwest Film Festival today announced the lineup of feature films for this year's event, which runs March 11-19. "The 2005 program was created from over 2500 submissions from around the globe," writes Festival Producer Matt Dentler in a press release received today. "The Narrative Feature Competition includes World Premieres starring Elijah Wood (Hooligans), Lorraine Bracco (Max & Grace), Dominic Monaghan (Shooting Liven), and more. The Documentary Feature Competition features the new film from award-winning director Kate Davis (Pucker Up), as well as The Comedians of Comedy, following a stand-up tour headlined by Patton Oswalt. The 'Emerging Visions' section features a wide range of work from feature newcomers, including the sci-fi epic Cl.one and the Iraq war documentary Occupation, Dreamland.

"Recent additions to the program include Unleashed (starring Jet Li and Morgan Freeman), All We Are Saying (directed by Rosanna Arquette), The Ring Two (starring Naomi Watts), Drop Dead Sexy (starring Jason Lee and Crispin Glover), and Murderball (directed by Harry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro). The festival's Opening Night Film is The Wendell Baker Story (pictured right), starring Luke Wilson, Owen Wilson, and Eva Mendes."

In addition, the Festival has announced the finalists for this year's Web Awards. All Web Award nominees are sites that have launched or been completely redesigned in the past year.

# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 2/07/2005 02:59:00 PM Comments (0)

Director Andrew Horn's biopic The Nomi Song about the lendendary New Wave performer Klaus Nomi finally opened in New York and Los Angeles this past weekend via Palm Pictures.

As J. Hoberman writes in The Village Voice: "Nomi's particular retro-futurist post-punk synthesis, cartoonish cabaret persona, homemade special effects, high-pop aspirations, and tantalizing near success made him a legendary figure -- if not an icon -- of downtown bohemia. He has a corner spot in the performance component of the New Museum's current 'East Village USA' show, but that scarcely does him justice. Made with considerable wit and style, Horn's thoughtful celebration of the era and its most uncanny diva could function as the show's supplement."

# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 2/07/2005 11:49:00 AM Comments (0)

Checked out the Cyan Pictures site and discovered several new postings, the most interesting of which is the announcement of Long Tail Releasing, the Manhattan-based production company's new distribution arm. Long Tail plans to release from 15 to 25 films in its first year and gear up to the release of an astounding 250 films annually, all by economizing and compacting the costs of distribution.

Writes Cyan's Josh Newman:

"Long Tail started from a simple question: what costs make up that $250,000 [the initial releasing costs of a low-budget arthouse film], and how can we drastically reduce, share or eliminate them? If we can get the initial release cost of each film close to zero, we can release as many films as filmmakers will let us. Some, likely, will only find very small niche audiences. Others, the strongest ones that acquisition execs (who are, contrary to popular belief, human after all) didn't recognize, will likely be able to scale up on their broad appeal, assuming we rally resources behind each as it begins to succeed. Aggregate all the releases of various eventual sizes, and collectively we have a profitable business, and therefore a way to keep releasing films.

This is Not a Film, directed by Michael Nickels, is the company's first release.

Also on the same page is an update on a story we blogged about previously, the release of Adam Goldberg's I Love your Work. Newman relates a distressing tale about how a producer and a defunct sales agent can both hold exclusive sales rights to a film in the same territory. The good news is that he says the film should be in theaters within the next few months.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 2/07/2005 01:54:00 AM Comments (0)

A friend and I were talking about how, for those whose parents remained married, Noam Baumbach's new film plays as a charming coming-of-age comedy. But for children of divorced parents, The Squid and the Whale seems to come off as a harrowing and painful relationship drama. I'm in the former camp, so I appreciated the excellent direction and acting (particularly by Jeff Daniels), the film's balance between irony and affection, and its concise, purposeful pacing. It's like an elegant novella extracted from a well-remembered life.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 2/07/2005 01:38:00 AM Comments (0)

In today's world of accelerated web journalism, normally I'd think I'm past the Sundance shelf date filing these final thoughts a couple of days after I returned from Rotterdam. But, despite all the columnists and websites, I notice that Sundance wrap-ups are still occurring and that a number of premiere films have yet to receive any press out of the festival at all. Like many others, I weighted my own attendance towards the festival's first half (blame Rotterdam again) and will try to catch up on a number of films I missed on tape back here in New York.

For the moment, though, some thoughts:

The Spectacle. A few years ago the physical environment of Sundance seemed to burst under the weight of the dotcom boom. There were more people, more parties, more celebrity razzle-dazzle, and the fest felt overwhelmed. When the dotcom bubble burst, Sundance seemed to quiet down a bit and the focus went back to the films. This year, the glitz quotient boomeranged back through the roof. Stars as unlikely as Pamela Anderson and Sylvester Stallone made bee-lines for the festival, Paris Hilton became a Sundance regular, and conscience-stricken indie actors debated the ethics of making off with the giant amounts of swag on offer.

I didn't mind all of this. With industry screenings at the Yarrow and the spacious new Racquet Club functioning as a release-valve for Sundance's historical overcrowding, the festival effectively completed its move away from Main Street. If you only wanted to see the movies, you could shuttle around the various theaters (save the now-lonely Egyptian, which is the sole Main Street house) and avoid the hoopla.

But if you have something to do with the making of independent film, you have understand the positive effect of the Sundance spectacle, something that's easier to do without the phony economy of the dotcom era confusing the issue. The fact is, on purely financial terms, independent film is a bad investment. Usually, a very bad investment. And for many, whether it's the dentist with some discretionary income, a slumming star, a d.p. willing to cut his rate, or the former P.A. who works for free for a year for an associate producer credit, the experience of Sundance is part of a film's actual return on its investment. That that experience is capable of creating a singular acquisitions environment capable of producing real cash returns goes without saying. What is increasingly clear is that mere admittance to the festival is for many a positive value that drives and ultimately validates their investment.

This was underscored by a story a friend told me of running into the representative of a major Hollywood star, both of whom were in Sundance with a film for the first time. For this obscenely wealthy star and his rep, as they wandered through Main Street's art-imbibed mixture of the quaint and the glitzy, they had finally made it.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 2/06/2005 04:16:00 PM Comments (0)

Mary Kuryla sent an email saying that it's the last weekend for her indie feature Freak Weather at New York's Pioneer Theater -- fans of transgressive feminist portrayals of what Village Voice critic C. Carr once dubbed "the unsocialized woman" should check out this hard-edged film.

Here's what Kuryla herself wrote about her pic:

FREAK WEATHER seems to finally have come into its own. The film's punk sensibilities and irreverent, self-destructive protagonist, PENNY, strikes a chord with viewers in their twenties, in particular. Penny seems to express their own ambivalence toward the responsibility of parenting and ownership. Her foolhardiness in love, her rebellious engagement with untruths, her self aggrandizing -- and finally, her hurt over childhood injuries overlooked and consequent sublimation of this hurt into drugs and partying -- may well reflect an anti-authority stance that appears to be steadily growing out there.
Berenice Reyneau wrote in Cahier du cinema that Penny is like a female Jack Kerouac. Younger audiences tell me they've never seen a story about this type of woman on screen before. They seem relieved to see something of their own anxieties and waywardness and hostility to the powers that be expressed on screen, without judgment, but with a wicked and dark humor instead.

The ever-present question of whether Penny is sympathetic seems beside the point with this audience. Raised on reality programming, they are not put off by seeing their rreality reflected back to them. If anything, they expect it, in all its ugly and amusing truth. Absent is this dread of having one's flaws exposed, even for female audience members. They seems to understand better than previous generations that in standing by and building on their limits, or flaws, they gain in strength.
FREAK WEATHER began as a seven-page short story that I wrote in order to grapple with my desire for a character who has an immediacy and almost violent urgency. I wanted the feeling of falling into the middle of a story that's already out of control. I think the film delivers on this impulse.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 2/04/2005 10:19:00 PM Comments (0)

Love, Ludlow screenwriter and exec producer has created an honest and engaging blog detailing his experiences making the movie and going to Sundance. In today's entry, he identifies a phenomenon -- call it the "Package B" effect -- that I had been sensing myself.

Patterson writes:

Apparently there's a bit of grumbling from some of the smaller films shown at Sundance this year. Some feel there was a bit of "frontloading" to the schedule. This meant that the bigger films with bigger stars were shown in the first week of the festival, while the smaller one's premiered near the end. The problem is most film buyers left by Thursday morning (Jan 27) of the festival, while there were still about a dozen films yet to premiere, including Love Ludlow.


Honestly I don't know if it's true, but I found it interesting that LOVE LUDLOW ranked third in the audience poll, yet the films that ranked 1st, 2nd and 4th all premiered in the first week and were sold. Those buyers left before seeing L,L. Hmmmmm.

Here's a link to Roger Ebert's positive review of Adrienne Weiss's film.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 2/04/2005 07:14:00 PM Comments (0)

Anne Thompson, whose "Risky Business" ran in Filmmaker for the past year, recently moved over to The Hollywood Reporter where her identifiable and accessible brand of smart industry reporting has already garnered a number of scoops and interesting pieces. Her latest is an intriguing piece on indie mogul Bob Yari, which implies that the producer is holding off on a deal for Mike Mills' well-reviewed Sundance entry Thumbsucker so he can self-distribute it through a new distribution venture.

Writes Thompson:

Yari isn't thrilled by how his films have performed so far. Most distributors, he finds, use the domestic release as a test run that determines how much to spend on the video. "The more a distributor is invested in a project," he says, "the more attention they pay to it. We want to make a strong deal on 'Thumbsucker.' This is not one that we can let go very easily. It's not just another film a distributor takes a shot at."

As Yari realizes, if he creates his own distribution outfit, then he will get to keep the pot of gold that goes to the distributor when a movie hits big. He is currently finalizing a new video label to go out through a studio, which he plans to announce in a few weeks, and then, says Yari, "the next step for us is domestic theatrical, having the ability to release a film on 400-500 screens."

The piece goes on to quote Newmarket's Bob Berney, who opines that distribution "isn't as easy as it looks." That is undoubtedly true, but producers who also have deep pockets at some point realize the obvious -- with the exception of the distributor's initial minimum guarantee (often incorrectly dubbed the "sale price"), producers and equity investors are usually dead last in a film's revenue stream. At a certain point, seeing all the percentages going to producers' reps, sales agents, theatrical distributors, video distributors, TV sellers, etc. before a film can inch toward recoupment, most sane producers have to wonder if they shouldn't try doing it themselves... It's just that few of them have the capital to do it. Here's hoping that Yari pulls it off.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 2/04/2005 06:58:00 PM Comments (0)

Ted Hope (who penned the Highsmithian title above) forwarded this email from director Barbet Schroeder regarding the disappearance of a friend of his in Iraq:

Dear friends,

Sorry to bother you with my own home made spam but it is unfortunately the only thing I can do for now. My close friend Florence Aubenas has disappeared in Bagdad a month ago. No news whatsoever since then. She was doing her job as a journalist for the daily paper "Liberation". Everybody in France knows about it but I see nothing in the English speaking press. The only protection I can provide her, the only oxygen I can try to send her is to help by any means create awareness about her situation.

So here is the English version of a site that will tell you more, and here is a site that has translated in English a sample of her writing.

Whatever you can do to make this known.

All the best.

Barbet

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 2/04/2005 01:29:00 PM Comments (0)

Via The Movieblog comes this link to a brief CNN article about the shifting definition of "producer" in Holywood and the battle for screen credit: "The title of producer has in the last 20 years become a bargaining chip, a negotiated perk, given to those who can extract it from the studios," Kathleen Kennedy, president of the Producers Guild of America, said last year when introducing a new program designed to limit credits."

"According to guild guidelines, [screen credit should only be given to] a producer [when they exercise] decision-making authority in one or more of four areas of filmmaking -- development, pre-production, production and post-production/marketing."

# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 2/04/2005 11:14:00 AM Comments (1)

I'll have some stuff to say in the next day or so about Rotterdam and also, belatedly, Sundance, but while it's still up and free I'm linking to this rave review in Screen International for Caveh Zahedi's I Am a Sex Addict, which, unfortunately, premiered at Rotterdam before I got there. But from the sounds of it, there will plenty of opportunities to see it at festivals and, hopefully, in the theaters in the future.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 2/03/2005 05:49:00 PM Comments (0)

"More and more, it seems the American dramatic imagination has curtailed itself, choosing to avoid the horrific events through which we are living today" complains critic (and Dramatic Competition Jury member) B.Ruby Rich in her roundup of this year's Sundance film festival for The Guardian. "Sooner or later," Rich writes hopefully, "the times we live in will force their way on to the screen -- no matter how much angst and sex and personal dysfunction try to fill the space and keep them out."

Those (like B. Ruby Rich) looking for more socially conscious filmmaking might do well to check out the Museum of Modern Art's Documentary Fortnight, February 10-28, which will feature a sneak peek at Ellen Spiro and Karen Bernstein's Troop 1500 (Spiro with cast, pictured right), which premieres at SXSW on March 12, as well as Coco Fusco's a.k.a. Mrs. George Gilbert (co-written with Rick Moody), Maryam Keshavarz's The Colour of Love, and Deep Dish TV's Shocking & Awful: A Grass-roots Response to War: The Real Face of Occupation, among numerous other titles.

# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 2/03/2005 02:11:00 PM Comments (0)

In conjunction with the release of Jack Rothman's book Hollywood in Wide Angle: How Directors View Filmmaking (Scarecrow Press, 199 pp., $24.95), New York Women in Film and Television and Cine Women NY have organized a panel discussion on February 8 at at 6:30 p.m. at the New York Film Academy.

Moderated by Rothman, a professor emeritus at UCLA's School of Public Policy and Social Research, the panel will focus on women filmmakers talking about their career choices and the particular challenges they faced to get their films made. Among those invited to attend are Cheryl Dunye (My Baby's Daddy), Nisha Ganatra (Chutney Popcorn), Maggie Greenwald (Songcatcher), Katja Esson (Ferry Tales) and Rosemary Rodriguez (Acts of Worship).

# posted by Steve Gallagher @ 2/01/2005 05:38:00 PM Comments (1)