The never-ending debate about the influence of film violence on the malleable minds of children recently took a new turn. The British paper The Guardian reported this weekend about a case in a French small town where a "teenage boy described by teachers and neighbours as 'a little angel' ... confessed to a two-hour killing spree last year during which he waited calmly for each member of the family to return home before firing on them with his father's shotgun. In between the shootings he sat on the sofa and watched a video of the film Shrek."

Of course the crazy juxtaposition between a homicidal troubled teen and cuddly ogre again asks the question, "are we really what we watch?" What strikes me, however, is how this Hollywood ogre connects to another one, the one named in the title of French novelist Michel Tournier's The Ogre. The 1970 Prix Goncourt-winning story about a lost youth who ends up training other lost youths in an Nazi school inspired Volker Schlondorff to make a (rather unsuccessful) film adaptation in 1997. In a review in The Eye, Schlondorff repeats his response to people who questioned how he would depict the Nazis, "I said: 'As though they were the most exciting people in the world to be around, of course!' ...That really is the way it has to be done. Because, let's face it -- if no one had found the Nazis attractive, at least on some level, the Second World War would never have happened."

# posted by Peter Bowen @ 11/27/2005 08:35:00 PM Comments (2)

This Thanksgiving, I, like many of you, will be on the road, driving to see family and hoping to arrive at a socially acceptable interval before the turkey is carved.

SeeingJean Baudrillard's imperious visage peering out from the Sunday Times Magazine this past weekend ("France is a byproduct of American culture," he said. "We are all in this; we are globalized.") and thinking about that long drive reminded me of an old essay of his in Hal Foster's The Anti-Aesthetic, which was kind of a po-mo bible during my college years. He writes about the automobile and the shift in our concept of driving from one of psychological projection to one of bio-mechanical symbiosis: "The vehicle now becomes a kind of capsule, its dashboard the brain, the surrounding landscape unfolding like a televised screen."

For the contemporary flaneur, the modern cityscape is also being transformed into a landscape of screens. Tom Vanderbilt has a great article in Artforum about the role of digital display screens in modern urban architecture. "As the glass-curtain wall was to modernism, the screen is becoming the iconic facade of the digital age," he writes.

Vanderbilt's essay references the '80s futurism of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner to describe what screens used to do in the futuristic city:

"The screen, along with the skyscraper, has for some time been one of the particular features of Asian modernity. The screen-centric vision of Los Angeles famously depicted by Ridley Scott in Blade Runner (1982) was, the director has noted, inspired by his time in 1960s Hong Kong, a paradoxical city whose pulsating electronic skyline overlooked a harbor, as Scott has described, filled with nineteenth-century fishing junks. But those screens were merely static vehicles for the transmission of commercial messages, mechanical upgrades of an older public-advertising tradition. What is most interesting about the screens I found in Seoul was that they were not merely architectural appendages broadcasting messages but architecture itself; not simply vehicles for delivering one-way information to a passive public but an active layer of the city's matrices of networks. To stand on a street was to stand on a street of a hundred screens, and by 'screens' I mean the external manifestation -- the collective user-interface -- of the unseen digital flow pulsing down that same street, invisible but as much a part of the city experience as the concrete of the sidewalks."

As the essay progresses, Vanderbilt proposes that the bricks-and-mortar city the virtual world is presumed destined to replace may actually be a more robust creature than we had thought:

"The irony of the city of screens is that the screen itself was supposed to make the city obsolete: The World Wide Web would become a kind of metaurban nonplace, the computer screen our constant interface with this locationless, 24-7 realm. And yet, as [William J.] Mitchell writes: 'Contrary to once-popular expectation, however, ubiquitous digital networking has not simply ironed out the differences among places, allowing anything to happen anywhere, anytime. Instead, it has provided a mechanism for the continual injection of useful information into contexts where it was once inaccessible, and where it adds a new layer of meaning.' In other words, the city and screen have fused, each informing the other.... The screen does not so much kill the city as absorb it."

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 11/23/2005 10:06:00 PM Comments (1)

For those of you who turned down a lucrative job in the advertising game so that you could stay home and write the great American screenplay (or television show), well, you may be in for a big surprise. As reported on NPR's "On the Media", Writers Guild west president Patric Verrone bemoans the new state of product placement. Writers are being commanded not only to include products in their scripts, but to create dialogue that hawks them as well. For example, "Law and Order" might have a serial killer suddenly turn on the witness stand to testify how great Bounty is in soaking up the blood. In response, the WGA, west has issued a White Paper "Entertainment Guilds Call for Industry Code of Conduct or FCC Regulation for Product Integration in Programming and Film Guilds Issue White Paper Report on the Runaway Use of Stealth Advertising in Television and Film." Of course the WGA, west is horrified by this insult to artistry. But their bottom line -- and this is all about a bottom line -- is that if writers are going to have write like ad men, then they should be paid like ad men. Well, one can still dream of writing the Great American Ad.

# posted by Peter Bowen @ 11/21/2005 05:28:00 PM Comments (0)

The ubiquitous but broke boyfriend-and-girlfriend filmmakers behind Four-Eyed Monsters get another jolt of publicity today as they become the poster children for Charles Lyons in his New York Times piece on the personal financial perils of indie-film financing.

From the piece:

"[Arin] Crumley and [Susan] Buice spoke about their 14-month ordeal making Four Eyed Monsters, which dramatizes how they met online, and in which they co-star. The movie was well received at its Slamdance Film Festival premiere in January and screened at 16 other festivals. But like so many independent labors of love, it has yet to attract a theatrical distributor.


'If the result was going to be this,' Mr. Crumley mused, 'a film with no distributor, no way for anyone to ever get a chance to see it beyond those who saw it at a few festivals, would I have done it? That's a tough question to answer.' Ms. Buice added: 'The answer is, no, it's not O.K. for our film to have been mildly successful on the festival circuit. But otherwise, it was just a jaunt into the abyss and now we have financial hell to pay.'

The first-time filmmakers used their $10,000 in savings to begin production and borrowed $55,000 on seven credit cards to complete the film. Ms. Buice's parents have contributed $20,000 more for film festival travel and living expenses."

Lyons' piece, which updates Doug Block's 1991 doc The Heck with Hollywood, engages in some abbreviated handwringing over all the folks losing money in independent film.

But, as Susan Buice's father points out in the film's video podcast this week, "there are all kinds of investment and financial is just one of [them]." Staring at Crumley behind the camera, her mom, explaining why she wants to support Susan and her new boyfriend, cuts to the chase: "My hope is grandchildren."

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 11/20/2005 07:18:00 PM Comments (0)

I flew back from London this weekend and, at the airport, picked up the new issue of the U.K. magazine Dazed and Confused. It's typically full of interesting and very of-the-moment stuff, including a piece about photographer Nick Knight and his Showstudio, a website intending to bring the "'tech hippie' world of the internet into fashion," according to the magazine's Lauren Cochrane.

Through December Showstudio is presenting on its site "Moving Fashion," a commissioned series of very short films -- 30 seconds or so -- by leading names in the fashion world. The films all incorporate items from the Autumn/Winter '05/'06 collections, and the site also features a blog and forum in which the mostly fanciful and charmingly tossed-off shorts are discussed.

The shorts change each week; if you click today, you'll see films by designer John Galliano, model and White Stripe wife Karen Elson, and Kate Moss, who dances -- yes, topless -- in her film to the Ramones' "Sheena is a Punk Rocker."

And re the title of this post... hey, gimme a break. One has to boost search engine traffic somehow.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 11/20/2005 04:04:00 PM Comments (1)

I am very excited to see Steve Gaghan's Syriana, which we tried to nab an early screening of for Matt Ross's piece on George Clooney in the current issue of Filmmaker. But, they were editing down to the wire so we were simply intrigued and hopeful by the trailer like everyone else. Now, Todd McCarthy promisingly weighs in in the subscription-only Variety:

"Those complaining that Hollywood never turns out films of topical or political substance are likely to embrace Syriana, a weighty and deeply intriguing look at the many-tentacled beast that is the international oil industry. Wide-ranging and restlessly probing, Stephen Gaghan's second directorial effort uses the same mosaic storytelling technique as in his Oscar-winning screenplay for Traffic to create a revealing portrait of diverse forces contributing to global tension, particularly concerning the Middle East. Terse, understated and sometimes confusing, this is the rare film that could actually benefit from being significantly longer. Warner Bros. release will become a must-see for thinking audiences and make inroads with the wider public thanks to star names and certain critical acclaim."

Roger Friedman on the Fox News site has also registered his surprisingly positive thoughts. "A thriller for people who read the Financial Times," he calls it. Put that on the poster, Warner Brothers!

Here's Friedman: "Syriana is not always easy to follow. Sometimes I felt like I needed a study guide. But Gaghan has made such an engrossing film that you can actually suspend disbelief and just go with it. Once you're in, you're in, too. I don't know if it will make money or be a Best Picture candidate, but Syriana is the most intelligent movie of 2005 so far, and incredibly satisfying."

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 11/20/2005 11:45:00 AM Comments (0)

One of the most startling images in David Zeiger's Sir! No Sir!, a documentary about the G.I. anti-war movement during the Viet Nam era that Filmmaker selected as one of its "Best Films Not Playing in a Theater Near You" this year, is that of Jane Fonda. Sitting regally in the amber-hued foyer of her luxurious home, coiffed to perfection and expertly lit, Fonda's sheer visual splendor is surprising within the context of the film -- most of the film's other interviewees still visibly bear the painful hurts of the period -- as well as within today's entertainment world. With so many stars either apolitical or calculatingly distant from the activism of their youth, it's amazing to see Fonda so animated and proud when discussing her anti-war activism.

Fonda discusses the film along with two others in this Guardian piece entitled "Terror and Trauma."

From the piece:

"The Bush administration's failure to pull themselves out of their current military quagmire has apparently sparked renewed interest in the films that documented the conflict in Vietnam. Hearts and Minds - arguably one of the greatest documentaries ever made, composed largely of interviews with US soldiers and Vietnamese citizens - has been re-released in the UK after revisiting screens in the States. Likewise, Winter Soldier (1972) has hit US cinemas again after more than 30 years. Based on the three-day gathering of war veterans in 1971 that I helped fund, it was a film intended to document American war crimes in the conflict. A third film, Sir! No Sir!, details how GIs were converted to leading members of the peace movement and has recently won plaudits at several film festivals.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 11/20/2005 11:30:00 AM Comments (0)

While at the Creative Capital retreat this summer I met the L.A.-based French artist Marie Sester, who does fascinating work dealing with technology and the interstice of the individual and the social.

From her website:

"I was trained as an architect, then chose the visual and multimedia fields to examine the way that a civilization originates and creates its forms. These forms are both tangible -- such as signals, buildings, and cities -- and intangible, such as the aspects of values, laws and culture.

My work questions the perspective of the West, and the meta-state of a New World Order. I employ archetypes and referents as starting points. For several years I have been committed to working with already-existing data or phenomena, in order to propose a connection between individuals and wider forces, or larger scales, or longer time-bases. And thus reconsider what a society or a community is engaged in, and therefore the individuals, in their everyday life."

She recently sent an email announcing the opening on November 19 of her installation "Access," which is a permanent installation at the ZKM/Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. Sester writes, "ACCESS is a public art installation that applies web and surveillance technologies, allowing web users to track individuals in public spaces with a unique robotic spotlight and acoustic beam system, without people wearing any gear, exploring the ambiguities among surveillance, control, visibility and celebrity."

The web component of the installation invites you, gentle surfer, to participate in the installation by guiding the robotic spotlight and acoustic beam system. Visit the the Access Project for the "tracking hours" when online participation is allowed. Though "beware," Sester warns. "Some individuals may not like the idea of being under surveillance."

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 11/19/2005 06:13:00 PM Comments (0)

Two films coming out this fall will no doubt confuse audiences as to who is who. Is that George Clooney played the diabolically clever Slovenian Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Zizek in the biographical documentary Zizek? Or wait, did Zizek sneak onto the set of Syriana to play Mideast CIA operative Robert Baer? hmmm...

# posted by Peter Bowen @ 11/15/2005 06:53:00 PM Comments (1)

The MPAA has announced the films that have been shortlisted for the Best Documentary Oscar. They are:


"After Innocence"

"The Boys of Baraka"

"Darwin's Nightmare"

"The Devil and Daniel Johnston"

"Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room"

"Favela Rising"

"Mad Hot Ballroom"

"March of the Penguins"

"Murderball"

"Occupation: Dreamland"

"On Native Soil: The Documentary of the 9/11 Commission Report"

"Rize"

"Street Fight"

"39 Pounds of Love"

"Unknown White Male"

Eligible documentaries were screened by the Documentary Branch Screening Committee, made up of members of the branch who serve on a volunteer basis. The above films were chosen after a preliminary round of screenings.

The nominated films will be announced along with nominations in 24 other categories on Tuesday, January 31, at 5:30 a.m. PST.

# posted by Matthew Ross @ 11/15/2005 04:27:00 PM Comments (1)

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 before that), some obscure titles might be missing from the database."

The site has an email link if anyone is interested in buying, selling or trading these posters.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 11/14/2005 02:13:00 PM Comments (1)

A couple of emails arrived this week announcing new online work from folks who have appeared here or in the print magazine. I wrote about NYU student filmmaker Sam Goetz on this blog when he took to the internet to fundraise for his student short, "Bruno." "Breaking a record at the school's production center for most check-outs in one semester, this film was not the easiest to get into the can," he writes. "Fortunately, everyone put in 110% and bore through the 30+ days of shooting with a champion's spirit." He's got a teaser up on the web now for the film, which he expects to finish in the Spring.

And Matt Goldman, one of our "25 New Faces" from 2003 emailed to announce new work on his website, including a music video for the Matador band The Double, some work for Sesame Street and "Bomb Bay!", a short doc commissioned by Red Bull about "legendary DJ and kamikaze bicyclist Ted Shred."

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 11/13/2005 06:45:00 PM Comments (0)

This year Filmmaker partnered with the IFP to create a new award to be given out in a few weeks at this year's Gotham Awards. Titled Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You, the award is designed to highlight worthy films that have fallen beneath the theatrical radar.

We asked 18 festival programmers to each nominate two films from their festival. From this list, our editors -- myself, Matt Ross, Peter Bowen, Mary Glucksman and Ray Pride -- narrowed it down to five nominees and, eventually one winner. It was an interesting exercise. The films nominated by the programmers weren't some of the ones that I was expecting, and, after watching all the films, our nominees (which were voted with a pretty remarkable degree of unanimity) weren't, for the most part, the ones I would have expected from glancing at the list we started out with.

As for the typical festival cry -- "The docs were better!" -- it was interesting that three of our five nominated films are docs and the two that aren't have heavy non-fiction elements.

Here are the nominees and we'll have more on them and the winner upcoming on this blog and in the magazine.

Al Otro Lado (To the Other Side) is Natalia Almada's documentary about an aspiring corrido composer from the drug capital of Mexico who faces two choices to better his life: to traffic drugs or to cross the border illegally into the United States. The film received its world premiere at the New York International Latino Film Festival in 2005. It will be broadcast on POV in late 2006. The whole committee was struck by the lyrical storytelling style experimental filmmaker Almada brought to this hybrid music-social issue doc.

I Am a Sex Addict is an autobiographical re-enactment of director Caveh Zahedi's struggle with sex addition. The film received its world premiere at the 2005 Rotterdam Film Festival. Wildly original, disarmingly persona, and very, very smart, Zahedi's film turns what could have been a conventional "addiction and recovery" movie and turns it into an essay on truth in relationships and storytelling.

In a Nutshell: A Portrait Of Elizabeth Tashjian is Don Bernier's documentary about the goings-on of the Nut Museum and its curator, Elizabeth Yegsa Tashjian (aka, The Nut Lady). The film received its world premiere at the Slamdance Film Festival in 2005. It's fair to say that we were all collectively charmed by the subject of this doc and impressed with the film's low-key intelligence. Starting small with its look at the quirky Tashjian and her "Nut Museum," the film slowly becomes an elegy for a lost post-War generation, an essay about societal attitudes towards the aging, and a celebration of individuality and the power of artmaking.

Police Beat (pictured) is Robinson Devor's unconventional crime film about an African immigrant turned Seattle bike cop who is preoccupied by his turbulent love life as he investigates a series of bizarre crimes (taken from actual Seattle police reports). The film premiered at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. The film will be broadcast on the Sundance Channel in 2006. At Filmmaker we're big fans of this film, which plays out like a strange cross between Alain Resnais and Rick Linklater set in an otherworldly Seattle.

Sir! No Sir! is David Zeiger's documentary chronicling the real front lines of dissension toward the War. The film premiered at the 2005 Los Angeles Film Festival. Zeiger's doc is a fascinating look back at the G.I. Viet Nam war protest movement. It's terribly relevant to the present moment as Zeiger reclaims a bit of history from the "Swift Boat Veterans" and others on the Right and shows the full range of political speech that ricocheted through our society during the late '60s and early '70s.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 11/13/2005 06:21:00 PM Comments (0)

The clock is ticking on a promotion offered by Netflix and Film Independent (FIND, formerly the IFP Los Angeles) and having to do with this year's Spirit Awards.

Only FIND members are allowed to vote for the Spirit Awards, and, this year, FIND members will receive a free three-month Netflix membership and a special code allowing them to rent all the nominated films. To take advantage of this, you need to join FIND (if you're not a member) by November 15.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 11/13/2005 06:17:00 PM Comments (2)

Sony/BMG's debacle over the "rootkit" copy protection on their music CDs has gotten a lot of hilarious press in the last few days. If you haven't been following the story, the digital rights management software contained on Sony music CDs burrows deep into your operating system where it does Many Bad Things, including act as Trojan horse for a lot of malware and bad viruses. As documented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, however, Sony/BMG has added insult to injury by concocting a draconian end-user license agreement that treats a CD-buyer like some sort of pauper out of a Dickens' novel. To wit, if you declare bankruptcy -- which, it must be said, is a much more difficult thing to do under the Bush administration's new bankruptcy laws -- you have to delete all the music from your computer. Oh, and forget about using music in a home movie or even creating a cool slideshow in iPhoto with some songs and pictures of your daughter or niece -- "no derivative works" says the agreement. Check out the EFF article through the link above.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 11/13/2005 12:40:00 PM Comments (1)

Chris Cunningham's new commercial for the PlayStation Portable can be found here.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 11/12/2005 10:49:00 PM Comments (0)

After months of internet buzz, there's finally an "internet teaser" up for Darren Aronofsky's long-awaited The Fountain. Check it out as well as Moriarty's interview with Aronofsky over at Ain't It Cool News.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 11/09/2005 11:58:00 PM Comments (0)

Hollywood.com recently reported that Vincent Gallo, the blue-eyed devil of the independent world, has come up with a new way to make waves and money. Sell his sperm. Supposedly at VGmerchandise, Gallo provided his genetic gifts for a mere million (an extra $500,000, if you want him to deliver it in person). [At the time of printing, the ad was gone.] Of course, attractive women could receive a discount. The perfect Christmas gift for those who would like children with a genetic predisposition to self-aggrandizing, arrogance, and narcissism -- and with the innate creative chops to make a film like The Brown Bunny.

# posted by Peter Bowen @ 11/09/2005 05:51:00 PM Comments (0)

If there really is a film community outside of the premiere/festival cocktail circuit, then today makes me proud to be a part of it. The reason: Tom Gilroy.

A talented actor-writer-director and also a friend and colleague, Tom has written the most impassioned, intelligent, and troubling political essay about U.S. politics I've seen in a long time at The Huffington Post. The piece, titled "'White House in Chaos' & Other Utter Horseshit," excoriates the Democratic party for lazily taking credit for the recent "setbacks" within the Bush administration, which Gilroy persuasively argues aren't really setbacks at all.

A sample: "As long as Democrats and their well-fed punditocracy measure Bush, et al with a yardstick of morality, popularity or ethics, they will never recapture the majority, and here's why; Bush, et al aren't driven by morality, popularity, or ethics. They're driven by money.

"You can almost deduce what Rove will tell them to do next by simply asking yourself what would be best for the rich. But ask yourself what would any normal person do when their egregious gluttony, mendacity and utter scorn for the common man was exposed and you'll find the Bushies actions baffling. You'll wait for their humble confession until you're blue in the face—uninsured at an underfunded emergency room. Judge them by their drive to get at even more of our public resources and money, and suddenly you'll recognize they're still a well oiled machine.

"So they don't 'Reel With Frustration' or 'Rethink Their Message' or 'Try to Recapture the Public Mood,' that's just delusional journalists waxing poetic over how a decent person would behave. But these people aren't decent, they're crooks, and crooks don’t give a shit about you seeing them for what they really are. They don't care what you see as long as they're getting you’re money.

"But 'On the Brink of Collapse?' 'A Crack in the Empire?' 'Running Scared?' 'Drowning in an Ethical Quagmire?' 'Crisis of Leadership?' 'Humbled by the Damage to Their Legacy?'

"Yeah, sure.

"They're so humbled they just last week passed landmark changes gutting Florida's Medicaid and Medicare programs, to be used as a model for other red states so their Republican governors can appear fiscally responsible. So you crippled grandmother better not exceed her spending cap next year, or she's shit out of luck; her dog food rations will have to go up to 3 meals a week just to pay for her meds. Boy, thank God the GOP's been humbled by the ethical quagmire.

"They're so humiliated by their treasonous lies and media intimidation in the lead-up to the illegal war, they just nominated a raving puritan lunatic to the Supreme Court, a brown-shirted lemming so in thrall of corporate power and totalitarian government control he makes Maggie Thatcher look like a feminazi. Running scared!"

Read the full post here. Judging from the huge response in the comments section, it looks like Tom may have hit a nerve. Let's hope so.

# posted by Matthew Ross @ 11/06/2005 09:13:00 PM Comments (0)

Artist, filmmaker and production designer Dan Ouellette contributed a thoughtful and in-depth interview with Chris Cunningham to Filmmaker's current issue (sorry, it's only in the print magazine), and today he's just launched his new website, Neurotica Divine, which has to be one of the best personal artist sites I've seen.

At the beginning of his film career Ouellette was known for his production design of Hal Hartley's early work. More recentlly Ouellette production designed Alice Wu's Saving Face. But Ouellette has always been a vivid visual artist whose work combines science-fiction and horror imagery with dashes of surrealism and dark sexuality. His website explains it all, from his visual art portfolios to his more recent work in film. Music videos and other footage featuring musicians like Android Lust and The Birthday Massacre are streamed on the site along with synopses and comments on "in development" feature scripts like Ritual and Significant Others.

But what makes the site so good is Ouellette's interconnected and self-aware approach. The stylishly designed site is a true "portrait of the artist," featuring honest statements of artistic intent, "studio cams" showing the work being created, and a great "outside world" section in which Ouellette writes thoughtfully on influences ranging from Brian Eno to Gilles Berquet to Carl Theodor Dryer.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 11/06/2005 12:59:00 PM Comments (0)

Somehow Filmmaker's proprietary search engine which scours the web to collect all manner of breaking indie film news missed the following announcement, which did not escape the sharp eye of The Reeler:

R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet is now out on DVD.

For those of you going "huh?", think back to this year's MTV Music Video Awards and that mid-show detour to Off-Broadway featuring pop star R. Kelly rapping, singing and emoting a tale of infidelity, bisexuality and a megastar hiding in a closet. Explains the publicist of the 12-part DVD film compilation, "What began as a simple music video has become a cultural, cliff-hanging phenomenon. From the first airing of the four-minute video for 'Chapter 1' of R&B superstar R. Kelly's song cycle, Trapped in the Closet, the broadcast of each successive new 'episode' went on to become a nationally-awaited event. The two people responsible for turning an unprecedented labor-of-love 'urban opera' from one of pop music's biggest names into a cinematic mini-epic are independent producer Ann Carli and maverick director Jim Swaffield." The release goes on to quote the makers discussing how they convinced Kelly to forget the world of music video and make an "actual independent film."

The Reeler says that his "tongue is not in [his] cheek," and neither is mine. Trapped in the Closet should be in video stores now.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 11/06/2005 12:49:00 AM Comments (0)

Anne Thompson's industry column "Risky Business" lived for a while at Filmmaker before moving to swankier digs at The Hollywood Reporter. Now, Thompson's opinionated takes on the intersection of films and the film business has spawned a blog. Bookmark it now.

And, via GreenCine, comes this notice of New York Times critic Dave Kehr's blog, which is subtitled "Dave Kehr reports from the lost continent of cinephilia." Kehr's posts are great reads, like this early take on Harold Ramis's upcoming Focus release, The Ice Harvest:

"After all the failed attempts to capture the flavor of the great noir novelists like Jim Thompson, David Goodis and Charles Willeford, here is the film that finally does it, and without betraying the slightest sign of self-consciousness. This is no stuffed-and-mounted 'homage' but a living, breathing film with a black heart and a sense of humor. Ramis demonstrates again how closely related comedy and suspense timing are, introducing his twists and reversals with the same dual sense of surprise and inevitability that sets up a great punch line. His control is perfect but his presence is imperceptible -- one definition of high classical style."

On the other hand, Ray Pride seems to be less impressed with Kehr's blog and questions whether or not it's a fake...

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 11/06/2005 12:31:00 AM Comments (0)

Arin Crumley and Susan Buice, makers of the film Four-Eyed Monsters, sent out an email blast announcing their new videoblog, which in just three days has been seen by over 5,000 viewers and made it onto the iTunes Music Store. And while the videoblog is ostensibly a promotional tool designed to raise awareness of the couple's film and help it find a distribution deal, their poetic downloadable musings on art, life and filmmaking limn the contours of a new and appealing intimate aesthetic medium.

Writes Crumley and Buice, "Now all we need to do is get the film distributed. But the video podcast should help. The larger the video podcast audience is, the better the chances are of getting the film released which is why we've moved into Susan's parents house in Malden MA to focus all of our attention on the series. In NYC raising money each month to pay rent was getting too distracting. So tell everyone you know to subscribe and hopefully the film will get released and we'll be able to move back to NYC."

In addition to iTunes, the videoblog/podcast can be subscribed to via the film's MySpace blog. Between their effective use of the Apple music/video store and the MySpace community, Crumley and Buice are redefining grass-roots film publicity.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 11/06/2005 12:08:00 AM Comments (0)