SHAKIN’ IT WITH TARKOVSKY

By Scott Macaulay

For all you Tarkovsky obsessives out there, check out this link, in which the great Russian filmmaker’s son Andrei posts and annotates some of his father’s Polaroid pictures.
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MENTORS & PROTEGES

By Admin

The Rolex Mentor and Protege Arts Initiative, held every two years, was established in 2002 “to seek out young artists of extraordinary potential and provide them with a year of individual guidance and instruction from recognized masters.”

“The programme fills a void in arts philanthropy by providing unprecedented corporate funding of individual artists,” says Patrick Heiniger, president and CEO of Rolex SA, headquartered in Geneva. “We believe that no other company is supporting individual artists in such a systematic way, internationally, or across such a broad spectrum of artistic areas.”

Focusing on artist-proteges “whose talent does not match the opportunities [otherwise] afforded them,” the Initiative selects candidates working in multiple disciplines, such as Dance, Literature, Music, Theater and Visual Arts.

This year, the Initiative has added Film to the mix: Indian director Mira Nair, who referred to Rolex as “corporate Medicis” at a press conference earlier this week, was invited to be the Initiative’s first Film Mentor. (She had previously served on its Advisory Board.)

Nair, in turn, selected Thai filmmaker Aditya Assarat (pictured right, with Nair) as her protege.

Assarat — who is currently a Fellow at the Sundance Institute Filmmakers and Screenwriters Labs, and was also named this week as one of the Institute’s first Annenberg Film Fellows — will meet with Nair periodically over the next year as she prepares for Focus Features’ release this September of her adaptation of Thackeray’s classic Vanity Fair, starring Reese Witherspoon.

Nair is also developing adaptations of Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul, for HBO, and Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist, and she is scheduled to contribute a segment to the forthcoming 20-part “collective feature,” Paris, je t’aime, which celebrates the plurality of cinema in Paris, the mythic city of Love.

Together with her production company, Mirabai Films, Nair plans to launch Maisha — from the Swahili word for “zest for life” — an annual filmmaker’s lab to be held near her home in Kampala, Ugand, in spring 2005. Earlier this year, Mirabai Films also partnered with Bala Entertainment International to establish the International Bhenji Brigade… Read the rest

REGARDING THE TORTURE OF OTHERS

By Admin

If you haven’t already read Susan Sontag’s fascinating piece on the images from Abu Ghraib prison, published in this past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, here’s an excerpt:

“…A digital camera is a common possession among soldiers. Where once photographing war was the province of photojournalists, now the soldiers themselves are all photographers — recording their war, their fun, their observations of what they find picturesque, their atrocities — and swapping images among themselves and e-mailing them around the globe.

“There is more and more recording of what people do, by themselves. At least or especially in America, Andy Warhol’s ideal of filming real events in real time — life isn’t edited, why should its record be edited? — has become a norm for countless Webcasts, in which people record their day, each in his or her own reality show. Here I am — waking and yawning and stretching, brushing my teeth, making breakfast, getting the kids off to school. People record all aspects of their lives, store them in computer files and send the files around. Family life goes with the recording of family life — even when, or especially when, the family is in the throes of crisis and disgrace. Surely the dedicated, incessant home-videoing of one another, in conversation and monologue, over many years was the most astonishing material in Capturing the Friedmans, the recent documentary by Andrew Jarecki about a Long Island family embroiled in pedophilia charges.

“An erotic life is, for more and more people, that which can be captured in digital photographs and on video. And perhaps the torture is more attractive, as something to record, when it has a sexual component. It is surely revealing, as more Abu Ghraib photographs enter public view, that torture photographs are interleaved with pornographic images of American soldiers having sex with one another. In fact, most of the torture photographs have a sexual theme, as in those showing the coercing of prisoners to perform, or simulate, sexual acts among themselves. One exception, already canonical, is the photograph of the man made to stand on a … Read the rest

GLOBAL FILM INITIATIVE PARTNERS WITH FIRST RUN FEATURES

By Admin

First Run Features has signed a distribution deal with The Global Film Initiative (GFI), the U.S.-based charitable foundation dedicated to cross-cultural understanding through cinema.

First Run will collaborate with GFI to bring Initiative titles to home video, television and cable, and theatrical and semi-theatrical markets. In addition, educational materials will be made available through First Run’s educational arm, First Run/Icarus Films.

The announcement was made by Initiative chairperson Susan Weeks Coulter and executive director Holly Ornstein Carter on the opening day of the Initiative’s 10-film touring show, Global Lens: New Cinema from the Developing World, May 25-June 2, at REDCAT, the Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater located in the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex in Los Angeles.

Each year, GFI acquires films from countries in Central and South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, and distributes them in the Global Lens series. First Run will represent the titles from each of the annual series up to and including the Global Lens offerings in 2008. The Initiative will hold the copyright on all films.
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MTV LOGO OUTTED

By Admin

According to the International Herald Tribune, “MTV Networks has announced that, after a long delay, it plans to start the first cable television channel directed at gay viewers.

“MTV, a division of Viacom, said on Tuesday that the new network would be called Logo and should be available to cable viewers by next February.

“Beyond the typical challenges facing new cable networks of finding distribution and advertisers, the new channel will have one unusual obstacle: outrage from conservative groups…

“Judy McGrath, the group president of MTV Networks, said detailed program announcements for Logo would be made in July but that original fare would initially make up 25 percent of the total, with the rest being movies and reruns of series.”

The Financial Times adds, “The network… is scheduled to launch next February in major markets, including Atlanta, Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco. The company expect the network to be in 10-14m homes by the end of next year, and to break even in two to three years.”
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McDVD

By Admin

McDonald’s Corp. this week announced plans to install “automated entertainment machines” (AEMs), owned and operated by Silcon Valley-based DVDPlay, at 105 of its Denver-area fast-food outlets over the next month.

Each AEM will initially offer 30 to 40 popular titles for a rental fee of $1/day. (The machines can hold up to 350 titles.) No membership fee is required; customers use their credit cards to rent a DVD, which they can keep for as long as they want without paying late fees. DVDs must be returned to participating McDonald’s stores. New DVDs will be added to the vending machines each week.

McDonald’s has been testing the DVD rental service since January 2003 at outlets in both the D.C. area and in Las Vegas. Called TikTok DVD Shops, the machines used in these initial tests-runs were created by Hettie Herzog, president and owner of Automated Distribution Technologies in Exton, Pa., now owned by McDonald’s.

Unlike the Denver AEMs, the TikTok Shops, which charged .99 to $1.50 per day for DVD rentals, as well as late fees, were installed in parking lots rather than inside the restaurant. In Denver, DVDs will be available for rent at Redbox kiosks situated both inside and outside restaurants.

According to the Washington Post, “In the past, similar vending machine concepts have proved risky. Peter Folger, president of Vending Intelligence in Sherman Oaks, Calif., built a machine that sold compact discs in 1992 and placed them around Los Angeles, but he took the machines off the streets two years later because sales were too slow.”
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RIFFING ON NINTENDO

By Scott Macaulay

From the excellent music online mag Pitchforkmedia comes this interesting review of The Advantage, the self-titled debut of a California five-piece band which exclusively plays “heavy, dynamic” indie-rock covers of Nintendo game music like Castelvania III and Super Mario Brothers 2 “that go far beyond simple nostalgia, exploring and ofthen enhancing the brilliance of their source material.”

Continues Pitchfork’s Matt LeMay, “The music for the Nintendo Entertainment system was created under tremendously limiting circumstances– during the time that most of the songs covered here were written, composers had only three individual voices to work with at any given time, each consisting of little more than a modified sine wave. That being the case, melody was almost invariably given precedence over rhythm and texture. In this way, the songs covered here offer a perfect balance to the sprawling, rhythmically intense post-rock played by Hella and their contemporaries — the simplicity and melodic strength of the source material focuses the players, and the players flesh out the source material beyond its original technological limitations.”
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CONTROL ROOM

By Admin

Jehane Noujaim’s Control Room, a behind-the-scenes look at the controversial Arab news network Al Jazeera, broke Film Forum’s 34-year weekend single-screen box office record this past weekend. The film opened on Friday, May 21, selling out every show and grossing $27,125 through Sunday night on only one 180-seat screen.

Released by Magnolia Pictures, the film will expand to other New York theaters on June 11 as well as the top 15 national markets. Other cities will follow throughout the summer.
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PSA COMPETITION

By Admin

The Kangaroo Project has announced the 2004 deadline for its third annual PSA competition.

This year’s competition focuses on AIDS prevention and education: “AIDS has become a crisis of America’s youth. In the United States, half of the 40,000 new HIV infections each year are among people under 25. In 2002, it was estimated that there were 3.2 million teens under 15 living with HIV. Risky behavior has increased [among America's youth] and, consequently, so has HIV infections… The challenge is to create a PSA that will address these issues and reach the youth audience with the message ‘protect yourself’.”

The deadline to submit a concept for this year’s competition is June 11; for the Director’s Competition it is July 30. Fore more information visit the project Web site for an online application, or contact Kirk Hokanson, Voodoo Films, (612) 617-0000. The Kangaroo project is organized by the Sean Francis Foundation, a not-for-profit organizatuion memoralizing Sean Francis, who had a love and appreciation for film and creative media.
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FAHRENHEIT 9/11 WINS CANNES

By Admin

The jury of the 57th Festival de Cannes awarded its top prize, the Palm D’or, to Michael Moore for Fahrenheit 9/11, a scathing indictment of White House actions after the September 11 terror attacks. The film is the first documentary to receive the award since Jacques Cousteau’s The Silent World in 1956. A visibly overwhelmed Moore thanked the festival and jury for putting a spotlight on the film, adding, “I have a sneaking suspicion that what you have done here and the response from everyone at the festival, you will assure that the American people will see this film. I can’t thank you enough for that… Many people want the truth, and many [others] want to put it in the closet, and just walk away. There was a great Republican president, [Abraham Lincoln], who once said, if you just give the people the truth, the republic will be saved… I dedicate this Palme d’Or to my daughter, to the children of Americans and to Iraq and to all those in the world who suffer from our actions.”

For the first time in the history of the Festival de Cannes, Gilles Jacob gave the jury an opportunity to explain their Palme d’Or award choices:

“Judging a film by its politics is a bad thing,” Quentin Tarantino explained. “If it wasn’t some of the best filmmaking, then I would not have chosen it…. You can’t strangle this movie with the title documentary. Michael Moore is fucking with the format to bring us a movie/documentary/critical essay.”

“One of the reasons it is radical in its politics is because of its relation to the media,” said Tilda Swinton. “It starts and ends with a question. It is sophisticated cinema. It wouldn’t have served its political end if it wasn’t a good piece of filmmaking. He has matured as a filmmaker since Bowling for Columbine… It is not a film about Bush, nor Iraq but rather the system. In the words of Godard, ‘We spend so much time looking for the key to the problem; we need to begin looking for the lock.’”… Read the rest