I woke up this morning wondering if I was too harsh on the look of Miami Vice, so I'm going to kick up these comments from Jamie Stuart that are posted below. Stuart disagrees with my pan of the film's visuals and finds its rough-hewn textures compelling, and he makes the point that by choosing to shoot the film on a Viper instead of a camera like Panavision's Genesis, they were deliberately striving for the look they got. (He also makes some comments about my quotation of internet movie reviewer Chuck O'Leary, but I wasn't holding him out as any kind of authority; rather, I just found it odd that the only negative comment I could find about the film's cinematography was from a fairly obscure reviewer while most of the mainstream critics used the same generic phrases to discuss what was certainly a debatable look.)

Here's Stuart:

I thought the digital grain was gorgeous. As I always believed it would be when used within the context of tight professional cinematography. I think too many people have become accustomed to flat, clean TV images and forget how grainy and degraded movies used to be. It was the influence of commercial requirements that led Kodak to develop the tight T grain. And its adoption coincided with the rise of digital home entertainment. Ever watch a DVD of an old movie and complain about the picture grain and wish they'd cleaned the image up? It's cause we became accustomed to TV -- where we watch far more moving images on a regular basis than at the movies.

Unfortunately, for now at least, most people associate digital grain with technical amateurishness -- they inherently associate that look with home video footage. Which is exactly the comparison O'Leary made. It works from time to time, like with I Like Killing Flies, because the audience accepts that it was shot on consumer equipment.

But for me, Miami Vice, on a purely visual level, was the most significant mainstream use of digital photography, in terms of defining the medium's aesthetic, since 28 Days Later. Fincher and Savides used Viper for Zodiac, and it'll be interesting to see where they take it, especially since that takes place in the 60s/70s.

Good comments from Stuart, although I'll note that as a producer of julien donkey-boy I'll hold my grainy-picture-producing credentials up to anyone's!

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/31/2006 11:00:00 PM Comments (1)

Last year I ran a new program from the IFP called the Rough Cut Lab. Over a three-day seminar held during the IFP Market, I lectured along with a group of industry consultants on the process of finishing a feature film and bringing it to market or a festival. The lab covered everything from locking picture with a solid cut of a film, negotiating affordable music rights, festival strategy, creating publicity and marketing materials, selling a movie, and delivering a film to a distributor. Folks like music supervisor Tracy McKnight, composer George S. Clinton, BMI's Doreeen Ringer-Ross, editor Alan Oxman, publicist Reid Roosevelt, post-production supervisor Rob Lyons and the Film Sales Company's Andrew Herwitz all spoke to our small group which comprised of directors, their producers, and in some cases their editors.

In addition to the three day series of meetings and lectures we also tried to keep up with the filmmakers as the year went on, offering advice on festival and sales and even making introductions for the films to different programmers and buyers. And after just one year, I felt the program had several real successes. For example, Eunhee Cho's Inner Circle Line premiered in Rotterdam and won an award at SXSW in addition to finding its finishing money at the Lab when Cho hooked up with an attending producer. Todd Rohal's The Guatamalan Handshake was another film in the lab, and it went on to win a prize at Slamdance. Kat Candler and her producers from Jumping off Bridges travelled from Texas for the lab and went on to finish their film and premiere at SXSW.

Anyway, I'm gearing up to do the program again, and the IFP has told me that applications will be accepted for another week or so. So, if you are a first-time filmmaker with a wholly independent production that has finished principal photography and has made it to a rough cut stage and you think this kind of program would be helpful, click on the Rough Cut link above. The Lab runs September 14 - 16 in New York, and I hope some of you take advantage of it.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/31/2006 06:16:00 PM Comments (1)

Excerpts from the summer 2006 issue of Filmmaker, which hits stands this week, have been posted online. Along with our annual "25 New Faces of Independent Film" list, we've put up the cover story on Half Nelson, an extensive analysis of MySpace Film and online marketing, a diary by filmmaker Richard Press about his experience attending the market at Cannes, and a handful of other pieces. And that's just a fraction of what's in the full print edition, so go out and buy a copy (if you're not a subscriber already)! Enjoy.

# posted by Matthew Ross @ 7/31/2006 11:55:00 AM Comments (0)

I just got back from Miami Vice, and as a huge fan of Michael Mann's work (including the show on which the movie was based), I was pretty disappointed. The first thirty minutes is fairly strong as Mann throws you smack into the middle of an undercover operation and shoots the various night-time clashes and assignations with a purposefully grainy and quite bold visual style -- rooftop meetings against purple night skies, outrageous wheel mounts hovering inches above the Miami causeways, and the grain signifying a dirty reality miles removed from the TV show's pastel-hued romantic nihilism.

And indeed, while reviews of the film are mixed to negative, many of them praise the film's look. There's Ray Pride, below, and how about this A.O. Scott quote:

Some of the most captivating sequences have an abstract quality, as if Mr. Mann were paying homage to the avant-garde, anti-narrative cinema of Stan Brakhage in the midst of a big studio production. Dispensing with the convention that the pictures exist to serve the story, Mr. Mann frequently uses plot as an excuse to construct ravishing pictures.

The camera, with leisurely, voluptuous sensuality, ranges from crowded cities to the open sea, from billowy thunderheads to the rippling muscles on Mr. Foxx’s back. Like “Collateral,” “Miami Vice” was shot in high-definition digital video, which Mr. Mann, in collaboration with the brilliant cinematographer Dion Beebe, treats not as a convenient substitute for film but as a medium with its own aesthetic properties and visual possibilities. The depth of focus, the intensity of colors, and the grainy, smudged finish of some of the images combine to create a look that is both vividly naturalistic and almost dreamlike.

Well, there are many things I liked about Miami Vice's visuals (and I should note that the film was shot by Dion Beebe, one of my favorite d.p.'s), but by the end of the film's two-hour-plus running time, I thought its hi-def cinematography ultimately a failed experiment. When the story simmers down from its overheated opening and starts reeling in the visual tropes of not just the TV show but of its cop-falling-in-love-while-undercover storyline -- the sexy shower scenes, romantic boat rides, and lingering closeups of its protagonists' conflicted faces -- the digital cinematography begins to feel wan and washed out, failing to convey the visual poetry needed to make these hoary scenes work. What starts off seeming like a bold way of shooting a film version of a TV cop drama hailed for its stylishness winds up seeming like a pale, emotionally inexpressive and self-defeating technical choice. Indeed, I wonder if I saw the same movie as some of the critics (or if the projection at my theater was especially terrible -- "intense" is the last word I'd use to describe the colors in Miami Vice). But after reading a bunch of the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, it occurs to me that praising a film's "visual stylishness" has become its own critical cliche, a kind of vague comment that allows a critic to toss some props towards a movie one is otherwise panning.

Actually, the only critic I've discovered who really seems to take the film's visuals to task is somebody named Chuck O'Leary, from a website called Fulvue Drive-In. He writes:

Here's a big-studio film that reportedly cost $125 million by some accounts and $150 million by others, yet somehow looks worse than somebody's bad home videos. Shot on high-definition digital video, the cinematography in Miami Vice is so grainy, dull and blurry; it has the appearance of a 15-year-old VHS tape that's been played at least 100 times. While you might be able to get away with such shoddy technical work on a shoestring budget, such technical incompetence is inexcusable with a budget this huge.

Miami Vice is the ugliest-looking major film in memory...

I have nothing against "grainy, dull and blurry" -- in the right hands and with the right story, those qualities can be great. And Mann's previous film, Collateral, which Beebe shared credit with Paul Cameron, was a lovely digital cinema advance that used high-definition cameras and night-time shooting to softly radiate a real photographic affection for downtown L.A. And, as this article by Susan King in The L.A. Times makes clear, there was a lot of effort and intelligence applied to the film's cinematographic prep:

They'd already had experience with the technology on "Collateral," but even so, Mann and Beebe spent 4 1/2 months testing the cameras in Miami in conditions similar to what they expected during production of "Miami Vice."

"We shot tests at night, out at sea with helicopters and big boats and freighters," Beebe said. "They were bigger shoot days than I ever had on a feature in Australia — and it was just a test shoot. But the reason was to put ourselves in these situations and ensure we were going to get the results we wanted — securing cameras, [determining] how we were going to power them and cable them and [experimenting with] the settings we were going to choose for them."

After the test footage was shot, Mann and Beebe took it to digital colorist Stefan Sonnenfeld to help devise a formula "for how we were going to use the high definition — how we are going to light it and shoot it," Mann said.

"Miami Vice" was lighted differently than "Collateral." The latter had a "non-directional light" for a softer look, Beebe said. With "Vice," they wanted more of a chiaroscuro-type lighting. "With the shootout at the end, we used these big, hard lights and set out to create a single hard sidelight for the sequence," the cinematographer said. "The problem is maintaining [the lighting] through the sequence because people are moving around and you are changing directions."

But as I sat watching Miami Vice, I thought less about chiaroscuro and more about miniDV shot films like 28 Days Later, The Celebration or even The Blair Witch Project, films in which the desaturated colors, handheld camerawork, and the video-to-film grain really did signify something that aligned itself with the storytelling. I'll be there next film, opening weekend, for both Mann and Beebe, and I really admire them for pushing the visual envelope (or, as the film would say, "taking it to the limit one more time") on a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster. But for me, Miami Vice is a casualty of the digital cinematography wars.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/30/2006 11:24:00 PM Comments (2)

The folks over at Filmcritic.com have compiled a highly debatable but still fun list: The Top 50 Movie Endings of All Time. Of course, it's a calvacade of spoilers, but if you're reasonably film literate you'll have seen most of these and can see if your take on movie clilmaxes syncs up with the site's editors.

Here's one I very much agree with (although Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant might have made my list too):

King of New York (1990) - After facing the last (and oldest) cop of the four that stalked him, crime lord Christopher Walken sits in a cab, letting the bullet in his gut take its final resting place. Abel Ferrara's crime sonata ends the idea of the great overblown gangster ending, seeing Scarface as an aging villain who can't say anything else, feeling the only thing left for him to do is silently drift off to death amongst the dazzle of the city he loves.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/29/2006 09:18:00 PM Comments (1)

I'll probably see it tomorrow, but to tide me over, here's Ray Pride's unexpected summing up of the film:

...The HD process is exploited mostly for a painterly scumble of vivid digital grain in the hardly illuminated night, but in simple summary, Miami Vice is Mann's foreseeable triangulation of Friedrich Nietzsche, linen-edge designers like Ozwald Boateng and distinguished painters of geometric abstraction, like the great Richard Diebenkorn.

Also, Green Cine asked Pride one of their summertime questions: "If you hadn't become a film critic, what would you have done instead?"

Here's an excerpt from his response:

"One night, young, I saw both Nashville on a big screen and The 400 Blows, uncut, Janus Films logo and all, on late night TV. And that was it. There was a path in the darkness ahead, like through the thicket across the way. Many movies followed. Many places followed. Jobs with stories all their own, waiting to be retold. Stories - movies - still hold weight for me in the smaller, smallest details."

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/29/2006 09:07:00 PM Comments (0)

Here's a look at the work of one of three sets of brothers who appear in our upcoming Filmmaker "25 New Faces" feature. Matt Ross wrote about the Neistat Brothers, who are currently in the (Fox) News for punking the network and causing the on-air reporter to flip out.

Guys, next time, work on the blood effects and make the reaction a bit more convincing.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/29/2006 06:32:00 PM Comments (0)

I'm really excited about Brian De Palma's upcoming adaptation of James Ellroy's classic noir novel The Black Dahlia. I remember discovering Ellroy for the first time with this book, and the read was like a dark fever dream. If De Palma is truly on form, he stands a chance of getting some of Ellroy's obsessional memory piece on screen with its perversities intact.

It's hard to tell from the trailer, but I have my hopes up.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/27/2006 09:19:00 PM Comments (2)

Sharon Waxman in The New York Times has a piece up on another conflict arising about the film Crash -- its lack of payments so far to its profit participants. As anyone who works in the film business knows, this is almost par for the course, but in the Crash case, the system's inequities are highlighted by the film's extraordinary success. In addition to winning the Academy Award, the $7.5 million film has "taken in" $180 million around the world.

The movie’s co-writer and director, Paul Haggis, has so far made less than $300,000 on the film, a pittance by Hollywood standards. The eight principal actors in “Crash,” including Sandra Bullock, Matt Dillon and Don Cheadle, have been expecting large checks for months, after deferring their usual fees in exchange for a percentage of the film’s profits. Recently, their representatives say, they each received checks for $19,000.

Documents show, and the principals’ representatives say, that so far none of the profit participants has received more than a low six-figure sum for their work. Moreover, Mr. Haggis and Mr. Moresco were both in dire financial straits when they made the movie in 2004, but deferred their salaries — about $94,000 and $47,000, respectively — to gain approval to move ahead on the film. The deferred salaries were paid in the middle of 2005, after the film broke even, and the money made its way through the accounting system....

There's more, and anyone who is owed money for working on a movie -- or considering investing in one -- should check it out.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/26/2006 10:27:00 AM Comments (0)

Now that Caveh Zahedi's I am a Sex Addict is out of New York, I need to keep reminding myself to continue to go to Zahedi's blog, which he is keeping up with great posts on any number of topics. Here he is at the Wellington Film festival recounting his thoughts following a meeting with the great Iranian director Jafar Panahi:

We are exactly the same age. His English isn't very good, and my Persian is even worse, so we communicated by means of a translator (note to self: learn Persian). But it was fascinating to hear him talk about the difficulties Iranian directors have in trying to get their films past the censors, and it made me appreciate the straightforwardness of the American system in which the rules are at least democratic and clear: only films that are commercially viable will be greenlit. In Iran, the rules are much more nebulous, and open to the vagaries and whims of bureaucrats and clerics.

The irony here is that the international interest in films from Iran (and especially banned ones) translates into a kind of commercial viability, whereas independent American films that eschew blatant commercialism are invariably relegated to a lower rung on the hierarchical ladder of cinematic esteem. Panahi, a director of international repute, was arguably the Wellington Film Festival's most famous guest, and his films are profitable enough to allow him to finance them himself, despite the fact that his last three films have all been banned in his own country. I couldn't help wishing that my films had been banned as well.

Earlier he posts on one of my pet peeves -- when you but a DVD because it's a great art movie that you want in your collection and everytime you see it you have to suffer through a bunch of trailers from crummy films before you get to the menu. It's the home video equivalent of commercials in front of the movies in theaters, except that with trailers in front of the DVD menu, you have to suffer through the same crummy clips over and over again if you want to rewatch the movie you bought. Zahedi is bummed (rightfully so, in my opinion) that the Weinstein Company's DVD release of his I am a Sex Addict is afflicted with this curse:

Today, I found out that the DVD of "I Am A Sex Addict" will have trailers for other films at the beginning of it. I was assured by the Weinstein Company that the viewer would have the option of clicking to the main menu and obviating the trailers, but still, the experience will be one of immediate marketing assault.

The upside of going with The Weinstein Company is that the DVD will be in more stores than it would be otherwise, and in fact they have been very accomodating. But the downside is that the DVD will bear less and less resemblance to the product that I myself would have wanted to put out into the world.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/26/2006 10:11:00 AM Comments (0)

Over at Talking Points Memo Cafe, Art Brodsky has a broad-strokes summary of the situation facing the net neutrality bill currently pending in the Senate. Net neutrality is a complicated issue that I've been erratic in blogging about, but Brodsky's piece does bring the issue back down to its core roots.

Here's Brodksy on the political situation:

That leads us to the first number today, 60. That’s how many votes Stevens needs to round up before he can bring his bill to the floor. Senate rules require 60 votes to cut off debate on legislation. Otherwise, practically speaking, the bill is dead. So, the Senate leadership has told Stevens he must have the votes in hand to cut off debate before the bill will be brought up for debate.

Goodness knows, the troops are on the march to achieve the 60-vote objective. The telephone companies and their allies are flooding Capitol Hill, all seeking meetings with legislative staffers. Those allies include any industries that have something favorable to them in the bill. It’s telephone companies large and small. It’s cellular companies, and cable companies. It’s the content companies which want government-mandated technology to stop fair use of TV broadcasts (the “broadcast flag” and advanced recording of music (the “audio flag). That’s a lot of firepower.

Stevens and his staff cut deals to help those people and Stevens and his staff want help in forcing the bill through. Every week, there are meetings around Washington in which the telephone companies and their lobbyists are going through check lists and planning as many meetings as they can with the sole goal of making sure a Senator will vote to cut off debate.

And here he is on what's at stake:

The real debate is over the future of the next Google’s and Yahoo!s. Google and Yahoo! and others are fighting to protect the future of the Internet, so that the economic and regulatory conditions that fostered the original Yahoo! and the original Google will still be around, and so that entrepreneurs won’t have their business plans depend on the kindness, or lack thereof, of strangers in the telephone and cable companies.

No one is talking about heavy-handed regulation of the Internet, as some of the anti-Net Neutrality ads claim.

For our next-to-last number, we can’t even estimate the number of companies that either won’t start or would be shut down before they get off the ground unless solid non-discrimination rules are put in place – the kind that were in place until last September and the kind that allowed the Internet to grow and to flourish.

But read the whole piece for the complete picture.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/26/2006 10:04:00 AM Comments (0)

There is something about an artist that is undeniably intriguing. The public expects their daily lives to be somehow different, filled with the dreamy eccentricities of Dali or the tormented thoughts of Munch. We want their life stories to play out in dramatic form so we see the bridge between the creator and the creation. Because this summer's Guggenheim exhibit focuses on one of the Greatest American Painters of the 20th Century, The New Yorker has taken a look into the life of Jacson Pollock. He is the lead of his own bildungsroman:

"Tragedy enhanced Pollock's status as the first American painter, after the corn-belt realist Grant Wood, to acheive general popular renown, as a shining native son. Born in Wyoming, Pollock came to New York, from California, in 1930. He was mentored at the Art Students League by Wood's American Scene colleague Thomas Hart Benton. He soon found the Expressionist and Surrealist tendencies of the downtown avant-garde more congenial than Benton's mannered figuration, partly because he was tormented by a belief that he could never draw properly. But a sense of nationalist mandate stayed with him."

He is a controversial desirable:

"The glowering Westerner who became known as Jack the Dripper seemed to speak not just for the country but as it, in person: the Great American Painter, at a moment that was hot for Great American thises and thats. His helplessly photogenic, clenched features, broadcast by Life in 1949, made him a pinup of seething manhood akin to Marlon Brando... Abstraction may have scandalized most Americans, but suddenly it was a homegrown scandal, with nothing sissified about it. The macho pose, an obligatory overcompensation for aestheticism in the nineteen-fifties, ill suited a man whose ruling emotion was fear... But it sold magazines."

And finally, he is a groundbreaking artist:

"... You feel the force, however baffled and flailing, of an ambition to recocile boundless pictorial space... with raw, emotionally driven physicality... Pollock at his peak burned his past conditioning and present turmoil, his very identity and character as a man, and he burned them clean. There's nobody to recognize... He prepared us to believe that absolutely anything was possible for him."

# posted by Megan Bright @ 7/25/2006 01:01:00 PM Comments (0)

Over at his blog, Mark K-Punk riffs on Patricia Highsmith's Ripley books, their filmed versions, and glam -- specifically, Roxy Music:

Significantly, Highsmith wrote the first Ripley novel in 1955 and only returned to the character in 1970. Tom Ripley was not a character that could fit into the rock and roll era, with its emphasis on teen desire, social disruption and Dionysiac excess. But Ripley’s‘hedonic conservatism’, his snobbery and his facility with masks and disguise, mean that he would be perfectly at home in the Marienbad-like country estate of Glam. If Sixties rock was characterized, on the one hand, by appeals made to the big Other (demands for social change and/ or more pleasure) and, on the other hand, by the denial of the existence of the Symbolic order as such (psychedelia), then Glam was defined, initially, by a hyperbolic/ parodic identification with the big Other – by the return of Signs and/ of Status.

K-Punk goes on discuss Ripley's change in social status between The Talented Mr. Ripley and Ripley Underground and sees a parallel in the progression of the Roxy albums.

Ripley’s trajectory is uncannily in sync with that of Bryan Ferry (pictured). Roxy Music and For Your Pleasure, those exercises in learning and unlearning of accent and manners, are Pop’s equivalent of The Talented Mr Ripley. The clothes, the bearing and the voice are faked, but not yet perfectly. The roots still show, and the painful drama of becoming something you are not still carries an existential charge. Stranded and the subsequent albums, meanwhile, are the equivalent of the later novels; here, success is assumed, and the threats to the tasteful but banal idyll come from ennui, a certain unease with contentment, and - most ominous of all - the danger of the past returning. The vapid bucolia of Roxy's Avalon - recorded when Ferry was himself married to an heiress and living on a country estate – would be the perfect soundtrack to Ripley puttering around in his Harpers and Queens dream home, Belle Ombre, with his wife, Heloise.

There's more, including a discussion of Slavoj Zizek's critique of Highsmith, over at the link above.
...

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/24/2006 12:24:00 AM Comments (0)

Okay, it's not film related, but...

Blog of a Bookslut notes that the new Thomas Pynchon novel, Against the Day, is scheduled to be released by Penguin on December 6.

Pynchon himself has penned the description on the book's Amazon.com page:

"Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.

With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.

The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi, and Groucho Marx.

As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and an unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it's their lives that pursue them.

Meanwhile, the author is up to his usual business. Characters stop what they're doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically. Contrary-to-the-fact occurrences occur. If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction.

Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck."

According to The Guardian, "the author will not be going on a promotional tour."

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/23/2006 05:46:00 PM Comments (0)

Chuck Tryon's The Chutry Experiment points to an interesting and, if my own behavior is any indication, accurate article in The Wall Street Journal Online on how Netflix is changing people's DVD viewing habits. Specifically, the article talks about how the service's easy access to great movies encourages those movies to stay sealed in their little red envelopes unwatched for weeks and even months at a time.

From the article:

Netflix Inc., which boasts nearly five million members, often trumpets how its all-you-can-eat rental model is changing the way people are watching movies. But Netflix may also be changing the way people don't watch them. Through its Web site, Netflix makes it easy to comb through a massive catalog of 60,000 films. It offers access to everything from Charlie Chaplin's 1921 silent tramp movie "The Kid" to recent Academy Award-winners like "Crash." And some members admit that when browsing the Netflix backlog, they overestimate their appetite for off-the-beaten-track films. The result: Sometimes DVDs languish for months without being watched.

The article goes on to talk about how if someone goes to a video store to rent something for that evening, he or she is more likely to pick an entertaining and more commercial movie. If one is putting together a list of movies for future viewing, he or she will pick the cinematic equivalent of a heaping plate of vegatables -- movies that are "good for you."

"It's a paradox of abundance," said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of culture and communication at New York University. If people aren't pressured to see a movie in a specific time frame, he said, viewers tend to put it lower on their priority list. "When you have every choice in front of you, you have less urgency about any particular choice," he added.

The result can be a type of guilt-fueled Netflix bottleneck for users, who may not feel like watching a film but are also loath to return it, said Mike Kaltschnee, who writes a popular blog called HackingNetflix. He's experienced the sensation himself. He twice rented Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ," kept it for weeks, only to send it back unwatched. He cites his Catholic upbringing for his inability to watch the sometimes-brutal depiction of Christ's last days. "It's childish almost. It's just a movie. But I could not put it in the DVD player," he said. "And I know I'm not alone."

For Tryon, Netflix has actually decreased his DVD viewing:

To be fair, I'm still watching a lot of movies, but for whatever reason, that is happening less often on DVD. I've found that when I rented from video stores, it was much easier to gauge what kind of film I'd like to see, and the late fees, even if they were relatively minimal, were punitive enough to motivate me to watch and return movies quickly.

And over at the blog AKMA's Random Thoughts, the condition has received a specific diagnosis: Netflix Constipation:

Tonight, for instance, I voluntarily watched Road to Perdition. The family was suffering from Netflix Constipation: you know, the time when you have all three movies out, and you really want to see them, but just now you’d like something else, but you can’t get something else from Netflix till you return one of the three, which you can’t, because now isn’t the moment to watch those three movies, and so on. I had sent for three relatively somber movies, because (at the time) Margaret was away and Pippa had just been on a comedy spree; I felt I was clear to watch a couple serious flicks without upsetting anyone. But (as John Belushi used to say) “No - o - o - o - o - o. . . .” I got sidetracked for a couple of days, and Margaret came home, and she usually doesn’t like heavy movies as much as she likes light movies, and that goes double when her endocrine system is playing malignant games with her mood. So Road to Perdition, Gangs of New York, and Donnie Darko sat on the dining room table, waiting for someone to have mercy, watch them and send them back to their DVD homes. Pippa sat at the dining room table, thinking that those DVDs could be Austin Powers or Batman, if only Dad would send them back to Netflix so her choices could come. And of course, any day I could simply have mailed them back, and put them back into the queue for a later date — but that would be giving up.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/23/2006 03:22:00 PM Comments (2)

Screenwriting inspiration can come from anywhere, even, if Donald Fagen and Walter Becker can be believed, from their Steely Dan song "Cousin Dupree." In a letter on their website they ask Luke Wilson to do them a solid by speaking to his brother Owen about a matter that's on their minds -- the storyline of You, Me and Dupree, which they, with tongue partially in cheek (or at least I hope so, otherwise the bit at the end about the Russian bodyguard becomes not so funny), say seems inspired by their song.

The lyrics in question:

Well I've kicked around a lot since high school
I've worked a lot of nowhere gigs
From keyboard man in a rock'n ska band
To haulin' boss crude in the big rigs

Now I've come back home to plan my next move
From the comfort of my Aunt Faye's couch
When I see my little cousin Janine walk in
All I could say was ow ow ouch

CHORUS:
Honey how you've grown
Like a rose
Well we used to play
When we were three
How about a kiss for your cousin Dupree

Check out the letter -- it's hilarious.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/23/2006 10:43:00 AM Comments (0)

Some video links for your weekend viewing pleasure.

Here's a link to a rejected (for being too weird) series of jeans commercials by Jean-Luc Godard commissioned by Marithé + François Girbaud's Closed Jeans.

From the amazing Ubu Web comes a a new page devoted to the "Cinema of Transgression," an underground film movement that flourished in New York during the '80s. Along with Nick Zedd's Cinema of Transgression Manifesto you'll find free downloads and streams of films by Richard Kern, Beth B, Kembra Pfahler, Jon Moritsugu, Tessa Hughes-Freeland and others. (The above two links courtesy of Dennis Cooper's blog.)

A while back we linked to Harmony Korine's Cat Power video. Here's her latest, directed by Robert Gordon: "Lived in Bars."

And finally, well, James Ponsoldt emailed the above link plus another that sounded great... a live Pink Floyd TV appearance in which the band is insulted by the host and the late, great Syd Barrett endures it all with impeccable politeness. But in posting the link I see that Pink Floyd management has threatened it off of YouTube. Oh well, check out the rest that's here, especially the links on Ubu Web.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/22/2006 09:45:00 PM Comments (0)

It's great when one of your favorite directors releases something starring one of your favorite actresses... and you had no idea that it was even in the works! James Ponsoldt just emailed me to tell me about this new Chris Cunningham music video, his first in seven years, which features Samantha Morton. The band is The Horrors, the song is "Sheena is a Parasite," and, according to Director File (linked above):

...the 1.5-minute clip, narrated by lead singer Faris Badwan, stars Samantha Morton as the song's manic, transmogrifying subject who whips around like a banshee and spews her intestines at you. Sharply edited and shot on a low budget, the video burns on the bass' running pulse, and provides more fleshy fodder for Cunningham fans. The video's producer was Jim Wilson; it was posted at Golden Square.

The video will be released on a DualDisc on 31 July 2006 via The Horrors' homebase, Loog Records.

Shots has more:

Cunningham was not available for comment, but Golden Square's Inferno artist Rachel Mills, who worked closely with him throughout the process, explained how the promo was done. "'Sheena Is A Parasite' took three weeks of flame compositing," she says. "The whole concept and visual identity of the spot was devised by Chris. The main takes of the promo were filmed in a studio on DV CAM with many other elements shot specifically to fit in with the edit, at a later date, by Chris working at home.

"The post work involved multi-layer composites, seamless transitions between takes and cleaning up backgrounds. One of the challenges of working on the video is the frame accuracy of the visual/audio synchronization. This predetermines the necessity to use multiple takes for shots to sync perfectly," she added.

Wanna see it? Shots is streaming it here.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/21/2006 04:38:00 PM Comments (0)

For those wanting to cut through the MSM filters to read first-hand experience about life in Lebanon at the moment, The Huffington Post has linked to this blogger map on Truth Laid Bear that identifies all the blogs being posted from Lebanon right now by location.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/21/2006 09:08:00 AM Comments (0)

Brooks Boliek in The Hollywood Reporter reports on a bill being voted on by the Senate that extends the reach of the Justice Department's 2257 regulations, which we've blogged about often, to Hollywood films. Bizarrely dubbed "the Adam Walsh Act" -- after the murdered son of America's Most Wanted's John Walsh (what does his death have to do with simulated sex scenes in mainstream films?) -- the bill seems to have been severely scaled back from its original drafting.

From the piece:

The bill potentially reaching the Senate today has been significantly altered to address the concerns of the motion picture industry, contrary to the language first pushed by Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., equating sexy Hollywood fare with hard-core pornography.

Under Pence's original amendment, "any book, magazine, periodical, film, videotape or other matter" that contained a simulated sex scene would come under the same government-filing requirements that adult films must meet (HR 3/9).

Currently, any actual filmed sexual activity requires an affidavit that lists the names and ages of the actors who engage in the act. The film is required to have a video label that claims compliance with the law and lists where the custodian of the records can be found. The record-keeping requirement is known as Section 2257, for its citation in federal law. Violators could spend five years in jail.

Pence's provision expanded the definition of sexual activity to include simulated sex acts like those that appear in many movies and TV shows.

The new bill has scaled back record keeping requirements, but, at the core, it does seem to prohibit a filmmaker from filming a simulated sex scene with an actor under 18.

Again, from the article:

According to a draft of the current legislation obtained by The Hollywood Reporter, the makers of movies and TV programs still would have to keep records that verify the actors involved in simulated sex scenes are over 18, but they wouldn't have to keep separate records or a different record for every scene. As long as the studios tell the Justice Department that they keep records of performers' ages under the course of their normal business practices, they will comply with the new language.

Also removed is language that would have subjected makers of movies and TV shows to specific criminal penalties for failing to maintain records of performers' ages.

The new language also does away with requirements that the films carry labels similar to X-rated movies certifying compliance, removes a prohibition against state and local production incentives for movies with simulated sex and would affect only products made after the law goes into effect. It does not give the Justice Department the right to inspect the records whenever it chooses.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/20/2006 09:51:00 AM Comments (2)

Reuters has an article up announcing the official and long-expected shutdown of Section 8, Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney's production company, and Clooney's formation of a new company, Smoke House, which will be based at Warner's.

As always, Clooney is great with a quote:

The shutting down of Section Eight came about partly because the business aspect of the company was starting to weigh down the filmmakers.

"We decided that three years ago, the minute it becomes a business we're going to get out," Clooney said in January. "It doesn't mean that I won't continue to make films, it doesn't mean that Steven and I won't continue to work together either. You've got to thin the herd after awhile and start again, so it's not all meetings about posters and contracts."

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/20/2006 09:00:00 AM Comments (9)

As we were shipping our annual "25 New Faces of Independent Film" issue last week, we were very happy to hear that writer-director Chase Palmer, who we selected for the list in 2005, has secured financing for his excellent script, Number Thirteen (formerly titled The Young Hitchcockians). The film is a dramatic recreation of what might have happened during the making of Alfred Hitchock's first film, told in a style that's, well, quite Hitchcockian.

Production begins in January, and Ewan MacGregor and Geoffrey Rush are said to be close to signing on to play the leads opposite, Dan Fogler, who's already been cast as Hitch. Gail Mutrux is producing the film, with Union Square Entertainment putting up the money.

# posted by Matthew Ross @ 7/19/2006 03:49:00 PM Comments (0)

Several years ago I selected for our annual "25 New Faces" feature filmmaker Jonathan Weiss, who had just finished a many-years-in-the-making adaptation of J.G. Ballard's great novel The Atrocity Exhibition. The film is full of amazing sequences, has a truly unique and disquieting tone, and embodies a keen understanding of the ideas that course through Ballard's most radical novel. (Yes, more radical than Crash.)

I spoke to Weiss a few weeks ago and it seems like he's looking for a U.S. video deal for the film. I hope he's secured one by now, but in the meantime, here's Tim Lucas reviewing a Dutch disk (that includes a commentary track by Ballard!) in Sight and Sound.

Here's Lucas on the exhibition history of the film:

Made over a nearly ten-year period on a modest, undisclosed budget, The Atrocity Exhibition has had a release pattern almost as oblique as the chapters in Ballard's controversial, non-narrative novel. It debuted as a work in progress at the 1998 Rotterdam film festival, later resurfaced at the 1999 Slamdance festival with a running time of 103 minutes, then was voluntarily cut to 90 minutes as Weiss searched for a distributor that never rode to his rescue. Completely bypassing theatrical release, it has now become the elegantly packaged first release of Reel 23, a subsidiary of the Dutch DVD label Filmfreak Distributie. In the process, it has been restored to its original running time, despite an alarming 80-minute time listing on its sleeve.

And here's his description of the movie itself:

Ballard's work isn't new to being filmed, of course, but compared to Spielberg's Empire of the Sun or Cronenberg's Crash, The Atrocity Exhibition is unique in refusing to meet its source material only half-way. Working in colour and black and white, mixing dramatic and documentary footage, Weiss gives his film a jigsaw texture comparable to the book, and he never flinches from the documentary material demanded by the text: often abrasive and disturbing images of plastic surgery, war atrocities, film stars, fornication, automobile impact tests performed on human corpses, modern art, the assassination of JFK. Only the inclusion of news footage of the Challenger space-shuttle disaster during the chapter of the film devoted to the subject of death in space removes The Atrocity Exhibition from the era in which the novel was written. Indeed, Weiss' evocation of Ballard's wryly scientific, geometric world is so complete, it's almost possible to watch the entire film without realising it was shot in New York; appropriately, the sole shot betraying that fact offers a glimpse of an imminent disaster area, the World Trade Center

About the video label, which also distributes the work of film's latest cinematic provocateur, Cyrus Frisch, here's what its website has to say: "Here's the plan: we'll offer a platform of ideas for ideas of independent minds and disturbing opinions. A series of copious DVDs creating new syntaxes and dismantling misconceptions, bringing the darker side of a postmodern society into the open." Somebody distribute these guys over here!

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/19/2006 08:49:00 AM Comments (2)

Has a Web site ever gotten so many happy birthday shoutouts as indieWIRE, which recently celebrated its tenth anniversary? Unlikely.

Count us in as the latest toastmaster. It's not an understatement to say that indieWIRE -- led by its tireless, inspiring editor editor, Eugene Hernandez -- is more respsonsible than any other individual or organization for bringing independent film and the Internet together. If they hadn't created the blueprint, there would probably no Greencine, Movie City News, Cinematical, etc. They also survived the collapse of the dot com economy, a feat that only a handful of specialized online publications that launched in the 90s were able to do. (If you don't believe me, just ask anyone who got laid off from an overpaid job in 2000 or 2001.)

I worked as the senior editor of indieWIRE for all of 2002, and my experience there has proven to be invaluable to my career as a journalist and filmmaker. So happy birthday, and congratulations to Eugene, Karol Martesko, Brian Brooks, Brian Clark, James Israel and the rest of the team over there!

# posted by Matthew Ross @ 7/17/2006 11:19:00 PM Comments (0)

Studio 360 of National Public Radio discusses the biology of creativity in their popular weekend segment. With the aid of neuroscience experts, Kurt Andersen explores the stereotype of the mad genius and the brain’s impulse toward creation. Also in the program, Tamar Brott raises the question: “In the official Hollywood template, you pretty much can't be a genius without also being nuts – is there a connection between great creativity and mental illness?” Think Jeff Feuerzeig’s documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston or Scott Hick’s 1996 release, Shine.

# posted by Laura Davies @ 7/17/2006 04:17:00 PM Comments (2)

Via Netribution, "The first Saudi Arabian film festival opened in the Red Sea city of Jeddah this week, in an ultra-conservative country where the silver screen is so controversial that the word 'cinema' does not even get a mention in the title. 'The Jeddah Visual Show Festival' started on Wednesday night screening two hours of home-grown short films."

The article goes on to talk about the slow birth of cinema in Saudi Arabia -- namely, cartoons and the short films shown at this festival.

From the piece:

Public screenings of movies are taboo in Saudi Arabia, where religious scholars believe any depiction of the human form is forbidden in Islam and where the U.S.-dominated film industry, with films often depicting sex and violence, is seen as an immoral force.

Saudi Arabia is deeply conscious that it is the birthplace of Islam and shuns activity that is commonplace in other parts of the world. Cinemas, for example, could allow mixing of unrelated young men and women, seen as sinful by Saudia's Wahhabi religious establishment

The new festival suggests that even devout Saudi Arabia is having to re-evaluate what should or should not be forbidden. At a news conference the festival, director Mishael al-Enazi said, "The Ministry of Information and Culture said let's not call it cinema, that could imply God knows what -- let's say 'visual shows.' We hope that showing these short films will lead to more acceptance of cinema."

I think that we in the U.S. should start using the phrase "visual shows" to describe some of what's in our cinemas.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/17/2006 03:48:00 PM Comments (0)

KJ Daughton's article on Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's Brothers of the Head has just been posted to the Filmmaker Web site. The mockumentary about a pair of '70s punk-rock Siamese twins has been a hit on the fest circuit and will be released by IFC on July 28. Check out the piece here.

# posted by Matthew Ross @ 7/16/2006 09:46:00 PM Comments (1)

Rick Linklater's A Scanner Darkly is the best screen capturing of the vibe and ideas of one of my all-time favorite writers, Philip K. Dick. If any of you are on the fence about seeing the movie, the folks over at Film Force have posted the first 24 minutes of the movie. Click over to the site and check it out.

Elsewhere on Film Force, A Scanner Darkly producer Tommy Palotta talks about the team's desire to do Dick right:

When we initially approached the estate, we told them that we wanted to do a really faithful adaptation. You know, Phillip K. Dick is the most successfully translated sci-fi author to screen. But being a big fan of his work and a fan of the films that have been made of his work, it occurred to us that there hadn't really been that close of an adaptation. There are a lot of things missing from the other films that I really enjoyed in his stories... like the humor. And we knew that humor would work really well in this form. A lot of people haven't really seen the Phillip K. Dick vision on screen the way that we saw it. And I think this story in particular there was really no way to make it something that it wasn't. This one always felt like it was going to be a very literal adaptation. I'm actually talking now about doing another Dick adaptation, but it wouldn't be as literal as this one.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/15/2006 01:55:00 PM Comments (0)

The guys over at Other Music have noted the DVD re-release of Ron Dorfman and Peter Nevard's 1970 documentary, Groupies. A rarely seen cult film on the '60s rock scene, Groupies is now out from Cherry Red Records and is described by their catalog like this:

A classic sixties documentary, "Groupies", finally gets its release on DVD. "Groupies" is the ultimate expose of back-stage shenanigans. At times hilarious, at times almost tragic, the documentary follows the fortunes and dilemmas of various real life groupies, a supremely hedonistic bunch of rock fans, on their relentless search for a new kind of kick. Competition is fierce. The bigger the star the higher the score. Weird tales abound. There’s the washed out S&M freak, the runaway schoolgirl who’s parents are closing in, the boy groupie beaten up and broken hearted over his love for a star and the most unusual collection plaster cast mementos you could imagine. Laced with plenty of live footage from various gigs, "Groupies" includes classic performances by Terry Reid, Spooky Tooth, Ten Years After and Joe Cocker.

And here's what Other Music has to say about it:

I've always had a difficult time trying to ascertain what exactly the counterculture was in the '60s. What I mean by that is counter to what? It seems like everyone has this romantic notion of this decade and everyone's father, teacher, uncle, minister, etc. apparently participated in it. There's been accounts of pitchers throwing no-hitters on acid, Ronald Reagan allegedly smoking pot at a dinner party he hosted at the Governor's mansion, and enough free love and groupie action spread around that even Dean Martin and the Rat Pack were having love-ins. How much of this is true is hard to gauge, and I'm sure most of the people who claimed to be in the thick of it probably weren't, but if everybody in the mainstream were involved in this culture, what was truly bubbling underground? What was really going on? It seems that most of the people who actively participated in this thing some 35-plus-years ago aren't really here to tell us this story, and the ones who are still alive don't really seem to remember much about it.

This exploitation documentary that was produced and filmed in the late-'60s is probably the closest thing that I've seen that actually seems to offer an unflinching glimpse into the true nature of the counterculture vibe of that time.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/15/2006 01:41:00 PM Comments (1)

In the mood for a twist on the rags to riches story or feel like cutting ahead of the crowd and attending a world premiere? Look no further. Tonight Breno Silveira's Two Sons of Francisco and Marcelo Santiago's Dancing in Utopia will kick off MoMA's fourth annual Premiere Brazil! film exhibition. The exhibit, designed to provide a gateway for audiences into the varied and colorful world of Brazilian film, will feature films ranging from the experimental to blockbuster genres, ensuring there's a bit of Rio for everyone's palette. It will run from today to July 23 and includes nine recent Brazilian films on the roster as well as a restored version of Marcel Camus' award winning Black Orpheus, a tale of the Greek hero told through the Carnival setting.

# posted by Megan Bright @ 7/13/2006 03:02:00 PM Comments (1)

When comingsoon.net sat down with William H. Macy to talk about his role in the upcoming Mamet film, Edmond, the Academy Award nominated actor announced his next big step – directing his first feature. Set to shoot this winter, the film titled Keep Coming Back, stars Salma Hayek and a few other names still in the works. Reflecting on his directorial experience Macy says, “I directed a little film for HBO about 100 years ago, but that was shorter with about a million-dollar budget. This is a real movie, it's an indie.” As if his plate wasn’t full enough Macy is also taking a stab at producing (The Deal, a romantic comedy he co-wrote with Steven Schachter) and plans to do a Broadway show with wife Felicity Huffman.

# posted by Laura Davies @ 7/13/2006 12:50:00 PM Comments (0)

In The New York Times, Felicia Lee reports on artist Chris Moukarbel, whose art riff on Oliver Stone's 9/11 film got him sued by Paramount Pictures, as we have blogged about extensively below.

Moukarbel currently has a related artwork up this month at Chelsea's Wallspace Gallery (the new artwork uses no materials appropriated from Stone's work) and, the article says, is hopefully near a settlement.

From the piece:

After a temporary restraining order was placed on the distribution and showing of his video (part of a thesis project for his Master of Fine Arts at Yale), Mr. Moukarbel went ahead and produced another for Wallspace. For his new 13-minute video, he used film of the two actors in the first video while they were waiting for direction and getting into character. It has no dialogue except for the banter between the actors and off-camera direction from Mr. Moukarbel.

Mr. Moukarbel, 28, who graduated from Yale in May, said his new video was intended to capture the art of performance and to serve as commentary on his plight. "I had to put together a project to reflect on the old project but also stand in its own right," he said.

Chris Klatell, a lawyer for Mr. Moukarbel, said yesterday: "We've reached a settlement in principle with Paramount that we hope to finalize. Chris is in full compliance with the temporary restraining order. The new video doesn't have any dialogue or any elements of the 'World Trade Center' screenplay."

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/13/2006 07:00:00 AM Comments (0)

... the new trailer for Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette/. It starts off with a lovely non-beat-oriented track from Aphex Twin's underrated Drukqs album before cutting to an essential track by the Gang of Four, "Natural's Not in It," that announces the film's themes in its brilliant lyrics: "The problems of leisure/What to do for pleasure... This heaven gives me migraine!" It then concludes in quite with "Ceremony," the first single by New Order that was penned as a Joy Division track and which functions as a epitaph to Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, who committed suicide shortly after recording demo versions of the song.

For those who want to hear these songs and others in the movie, here's a Last FM page that lists and links all the tracks, which include songs by Squarepusher, Bow Wow Wow, Adam and the Ants, The Strokes, The Cure, and Siouxsie and the Banshees.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/07/2006 09:33:00 PM Comments (1)

There's a trailer up for Allan Coulter's debut feature, Hollywoodland, and it looks pretty great. The film seems to be a noir detective story based on the real-life mystery surrounding actor George Reeves, best known for playing Superman in the tv series, and his mysterious death. Ben Affleck plays Reeves, and he looks really good as does Adrian Brody, Diane Lane, and the rest of a great cast. Coulter is best known for directing many episodes of The Sopranos and he's been a hot name on various director lists for years.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/06/2006 12:54:00 AM Comments (2)

Congrats to director Robert Crary and writer/star Jennifer Westfeldt (pictured) whose Ira and Abby won one of two L.A. Film Festival Audience Awards. The film was one of the three selected in 2003 by the L.A. Film Festival and Filmmaker to become part of our "Fast Track" program.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/06/2006 12:20:00 AM Comments (0)

Filmmaker and journalist Daniel Nemet-Nejat took a short break from his blog 40 Years in the Desert but he's back now with two posts that riff on the ways new distribution technologies can enable new and successful independent film content. In the first, "HIgh Tech Hams,", he describes his experience reporting on XM Radio for a magazine piece and muses on what filmmakers might learn from the satellite network.

In the piece directly below it, Excuse Me While I Howl at the Moon, Nemet-Nejat begins to describe the business and artistic imperatives behind the construction of an "internet aesthetic" when it comes to independent film.

An excerpt:

To date no filmmaker has turned a profit with content geared for online. But, it will happen-- and soon. I have brought up Roger Corman in this space before. Not because I think his films are works of misunderstood genius, but because he created a model for surviving-- and thriving outside the Hollywood system. He knew that if he exploited a subject or an attitude (think the anarachic feel of Rock N Roll High School) and threw in just the right amount of T&A and/or violence and made it for a certain budget, chances are, he would turn a profit.

We need to apply the Corman model to the Internet. That doesn't necessarily mean exploitation films (though he has suggested to me that all films are, to an extent, exploitative. But, that is a song for a different album). Independent filmmakers need to develop an "Internet aesthetic," to develop a style-- or styles-- that take advantage of the medium. The aesthetic would allow filmmakers to move beyong the bite size viral video (though some of it, I must admit, is fantastic), to create a new type of independent film, tailored for the Internet. Some people argue that only comedy, horror and porn can succeed in grabbing viewers on the 'Net at this point. But, we need to reach audiences across every conceivable genre-- and to invent new ones.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/06/2006 12:12:00 AM Comments (0)

The new issue of Film Comment isn't online yet, but a friend emailed me this excerpt from Gavin Smith's Cannes review in which he singles out for praise Julia Loktev's mysteriously compelling American independent film Day Night Day Night:

"In the end, it was the Directors' Fortnight that served up the festival's single most riveting work, Julia Loktev's unforeseen tour de force Day Night Day Night. The film's cool, uninflected observation of a young woman being prepared for and then setting about executing a suicide bomb attack in the middle of Times Square obviously courts controversy, even thought the Russian-born filmmaker was originally inspired by the cases of several female Chechen suicide bombers in Moscow. Loktev refrains from both moralizing and sensationalism and keeps her handheld camera fixed on her nameless and acquiescent subject (played by Luisa Williams) as she obediently follows the instructions of her masked and anonymous handlers. Motivation remains opaque and ambiguous - is this for real? What's the twist? Loktev is ultimately fascinated by the accumulation of human details - banal and incongruous gestures, contradictory impulses, and unexpected acts of generosity and gratitude on the crowded streets - and how they threaten to overwhelm this timid-seeming girl's apparently unshakable resolve. Loktev's film is about the way the world around you can steadily erode your moral certainties and convictions - the attrition that experience brings to bear on systems of belief.

"Otherwise, Day Night Day Night's raison d'être is wholly enigmatic. On some level it feels like a kind of experiment a la Yoko Ono's 1969 feature Rape. On the other, it's a kind of provocation, in the best possible sense. On another still, it seems deeply invested in a sense of what can only be called dispassionate compassion. In the end it's a genuinely unnerving and unexpectedly moving experience. If only Cannes offered more such fare."

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/05/2006 11:58:00 PM Comments (1)

Ain't It Cool News is ten years old today, and they've got a great, low-key birthday feature up: they've asked their various contributors to pick ten films "that best sum up America." The lists are really interesting, and the capsule blurbs about the films are full of the genuine enthusiasm for film that has distinguished the site over the years. All the Presidents Men, Taxi Driver, Nashville and, um Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle all make an appearance on the list. Check it out and, AICN, happy birthday!

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/03/2006 11:09:00 AM Comments (0)

Over at his blog, Anthony Kaufman rounds up some news on David Lynch and his upcoming Inland Empire, which reportedly will screen in Venice. He links to this YouTube clip entitled "David Lynch Experimenting with Digital Video." There's no real solid info to confirm whether it's truly by Lynch or not, but it certainly feels like something of his.

He also links to Lynch's blog, which consists of short questions on various topics, many related to 9/11, that Lynch throws out for his readers to respond to.

Also, here's an interview from Business Week in which Lynch talks about his work with Transcendental Medititation, which involves lecturing to businesses about how TM can "enhance creativity and decision-making."

An excerpt:

Business Week: You also say meditation helps with making decisions. Can you give an example from your work?

Lynch: One night while we were making Lost Highway, we had a scene underneath a covering at an indoor-outdoor '50s kind of diner with a parking lot in the background. Everyone in the scene was dressed in dry clothes and didn't have wet hair. We came there and it started raining. We had already established a dry look. Now the parking lot in the back was wet.

There was a real indication that we were going to all go home. We would have lost a night and lost a lot of money. I decided to continue to shoot. I pictured the scene shot by shot and thought, what would make that parking lot wet other than rain? And so I put kids in the background shooting garden hoses, and therefore the rain looked like it came from that. The hoses idea saved the day.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/02/2006 11:12:00 AM Comments (0)

Caroline Bermudez over at Pitchfork chats via email with Scott Crary whose Kill your Idols opens on July 7th at the Cinema Village in New York and comes to DVD this fall. The doc, which Crary says he made for $300 (okay, I know these bands aren't the Rolling Stones, but I'd hope they got more than $3 each for their music rights) looks at the late '70s/early '80s New York No Wave -- folks like Arto Lindsay and DNA, Glenn Branca, Sonic Youth, Lydia Lunch -- and the current musicians (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Liars, A.R.E. Weapons, etc.) they have inspired.

As Crary tells Pitchfork:

Originally, I was pursuing just the newer bands and a much wider cross-section of them (with bands like the Walkmen, Interpol, etc.). Over time, a certain concentration of the bands I was interviewing either kept referencing a certain 5 year period in NY underground rock (77-82) and/or were being paired with bands from then by the media. The interplay between those two generations of bands became more compelling to me, so I began hunting down the originators that everyone was referencing from 30 years ago to see what they thought of their progeny.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/01/2006 05:29:00 PM Comments (0)

Slate has a Summer Movies Week going, and this interesting feature is part of it: a survey as to which film various directors and actors watch the most.

Here's Neil LaBute's reply:

Outside of perennial holiday fare like The Wizard of Oz, It's a Wonderful Life, or Salo, I think I've watched Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon more times than any other movie I can remember. (Warren Beatty's Reds would give it a run for its money—I saw that 14 times in the theater!) For me, Barry Lyndon is the most distinctive and beautiful re-creation of period on film, bar none, and its leisurely pace and novelistic approaches to style—watch the way Kubrick slowly reverse zooms on the opening shot of many scenes, unveiling each new "chapter"—are pure cinematic pleasure. Plus, Ryan O'Neal kicks acting ass in this picture, swaggering through the proceedings with a brutish beauty, until he finally breaks your heart. Chilly and distancing? Sure. Long and filled with voluminous narration? Absolutely. It's also grandly handsome and furiously savage, and lit by John Alcott with lightning from the gods. It is not to be missed.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/01/2006 12:44:00 PM Comments (0)

In another lifetime when I used to produce performance and theater at New York's The Kitchen I presented the Bay Area-based Survival Research Laboratories in a very noisy and very rainy show in the parking lot of Shea Stadium. Via BoingBoing, the group is still at it and will perform their latest spectacular on August 11 in San Jose, California as part of the 13th Annual Symposium for Electronic Arts.

Bre Pettis at Makezine has posted a video blog recounting a visit he took to the group's S.F. headquarters.

(The image at right was shot by A*A*R*O*N at an SRL show in Los Angeles.)

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/01/2006 11:58:00 AM Comments (0)

Over at the online gaming website Bioware, Hugh Hancock, the Artistic Director of the Strange Company, provides a great "how-to" on the making of his Machinima game BloodSpell. For those interested in making a film using a video game engine, Hancock walks you through concept, script, building sets and characters, creating animatics and more.

BloodSpell itself has a site here, and below is a quote from the piece:

Around about August 2003, a mad Frenchman named Francoise said that Strange Company needed to "get the punk back." The day after that the folder on my hard drive called "Gettin The Punk Back" (still the main hub of BloodSpell development) was created.

We didn't have a firm idea of what we wanted to do with BloodSpell when we started it. We just knew we wanted to make a fantasy film because we were sick of aliens and space marines. We figured we wanted to use Neverwinter Nights. And that was about it.

We spent a little while playing with Neverwinter Nights to figure out what we could do with the engine, what would work well, and what wouldn't. Then I sat down with a whole bunch of people (the "Creative Consultants" you see in the credits) and started brainstorming ideas. And we kept brainstorming...

Eventually, we narrowed our ideas down to a concrete story, which we then "broke" into acts (we were originally intending BloodSpell to be 6 acts of 5 minutes each), and then down to scenes within those acts. About now, we were starting to figure out that maybe this story we'd developed was a little bigger than we had intended.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/01/2006 11:44:00 AM Comments (1)

Filmmaker Michael Kang has taken up a novel and interesting approach to promoting his new film, The Motel. He's started a blog featuring personal stories sharing the theme of his movie: Puberty Sucks. (Well, that's not what I'd guess the theme of the movie is, because it's really a quite winning coming-of-age tale, but then again, stories about people's rotten childhoods are always entertaining...)

Here's from his first posting:

Thanks for stopping by. I'm sorry the place is a bit sparse right now. I started this site not only because of my stunted emtional state but also because of the response over the past year to my film The Motel. It seems that I am not alone in being permanently scarred by those formative years when hormones decide to kill the innocence of youth. So blogging about it just seemed like the obvious thing to do.

This is just the beginning and I promise to share with you some of the great comically tragic events of my teenage years here as well as hopefully get some of my friends to write about some of their own experiences. I will also be posting up submissions if you have any particularly embarassing, tragic, funny stories.

And here's from a recent post titled Hankie Pankie:

He liked to be called Hankie Pankie. In Rhode Island, that was the closest it came to trying to come up with a cool nickname. Even then, we knew it was retarded. He was a nieghborhood kid. But I never knew exactly where he lived. He just seemed to always be hanging around. And always with Jimmy. They were a team. Hankie Pankie wore wife-beaters and had a caterpillar fuzz mustache. Jimmy always seemed to be clad in a denim jacket that had magic marker band names on it. These were the neighborhood bullies.

The Motel opened this week at New York's Film Forum.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/01/2006 12:50:00 AM Comments (0)

I've been working on a bunch of stuff, not the least of which is the next issue of Filmmaker, so the blog has been relatively neglected of late. Here then, to nab some quick search engine traffic and boost our Alexa rating, is this "Stunning Nikon" commercial directed by Mark Romanek starring a sinuous Kate Moss. (Click under the tab "provocative.")

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 7/01/2006 12:44:00 AM Comments (4)