Archive for July, 2005
Saturday, July 30th, 2005
A few years ago I had the good fortune to be offered an amazing trip by the Italian Trade Commission. A half a dozen producers were invited to tour the Umbria region of Italy as well as Rome over the course of a week. There were great sights, great food, great hotels, great people. At one stop we were interviewed by a local paper who wanted to know our thoughts on Italian film. I riffed off my (somewhat obvious) favorites: Antonioni, Fellini, Pasolini, Argento and Leone. The latter two caused the journalist to laugh at my low-brow tastes. I was kind of shocked — somewhat about Argento but particularly about Leone, whose films over time really stand up as classics.
So, I enjoyed reading Manohla Dargis’s appreciation of Leone in the New York Times which takes the form of a report from the opening of Once Upon a Time in Italy: The Westerns of Sergio Leone, an exhibition at L.A.’s Autry Museum. The opening featured a puppet-show reenactment of the final shootout in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
Here’s Dargis:
“…the three giant puppets listed into the courtyard, guns in hand and faces fixed in Leone-style scowls. They got down to their dirty business quickly. As in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the Eastwood puppet shot first and the Van Cleef puppet bit the dust, or more accurately was gingerly lowered to the ground by the puppeteer wearing the great body and carved-foam head. That was it. The bad guy had been vanquished, the Gallo wine quaffed, the gelato devoured. It was time to hit the trail.”
Click on the link above for the museum’s website, which contains a number of clips and items of interest for Leone fans. The exhibition runs until January 22.
.… Read the rest
Saturday, July 30th, 2005
Assassination Chain Letter is “a film project of global proportions. Instead of the old boring concept of gathering short films into a ‘video compilation,’” the team behind Assassination Chain Letter “decided to begin a project that will be formed into one full-length feature film. [They] are gathering short films from filmmakers from around the world, to be put together into one story, one concept and one hell of an idea.”
The following call for entries was recently posted on Filmmaker‘s Message Board:
“Attention All Filmmakers!
“We are working with short and full-length film directors from around the world to make a movie that will hit you like a bullet.
“If you are looking to be a part of something amazing, that might just get your short film seen by more people than you can imagine, check out the website and get ready to start filming.
“If you have an idea that you have been dying to film, but had no real way to use it or market it … this might just be your ticket. This is somewhat of a contest … but it is also an amazing opportunity for film makers the world over.
“Visit www.AssassinMovie.com for details and information.”
.… Read the rest
Friday, July 29th, 2005
Yahoo! is beginning the Yammys — an annual contest celebrating short films on the Web. Submissions are being taken through August 17th at midnight. The prizes are awesome but the best is that all the videos will enter Yahoo’s video search and the top 25 will be highly promoted on Yahoo — great exposure.
The Yammys’ Grand Prize winner will receive a red-carpet premiere in their hometown, to showcase their winning video with all their friends and family, along with a plasma TV and DVD player. Casio’s also providing 30 Exilim EX-S500 cameras.
The Yammys categories are: Bloopers, Pets, Road Trips, Office Humor, and “I Can’t Believe It!”
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Friday, July 29th, 2005
In the Telegraph’s profile of Nicole Kidman, in which she talks about many things, including her involvement in Steve Shainberg’s currently lensing Fur, one paragraph stands out:
“When she finishes Fur she has scheduled two weeks’ work on the drama The Lady from Shanghai in Hong Kong and has nothing else planned except a vague commitment to do a film with Crowe and Australian director Baz Luhrmann sometime in the not-too-near future.”
Two weeks work on a Wong Kar Wai film? Um… I wouldn’t lay odds on it.
Of the film and Kidman, the director has said, “Normally I will build a story around one character and I think it will be interesting to have Nicole Kidman play it as a woman who claims she came from Shanghai, and it’s very mysterious.”
.… Read the rest
Thursday, July 28th, 2005
David Fincher’s music video for Nine Inch Nail’s “Only,” which features effects by Digital Domain, is online here.… Read the rest
Thursday, July 21st, 2005
In an age in which every last Jess Franco movie is the subject of some scholarly essay or post-modern reverie, it’s refreshing to read J.R. Taylor’s interview with ’70s/’80s grindhouse icon Roberta Findlay in this week’s New York Press. And while Taylor starts with a bit of romantic nostalgia for trash-film viewing on the Forty Deuce, Findlay quickly throws some cold water on it all:
“‘People who like those old movies seem to have deep psychological problems,’ she explains. ‘Under the best of circumstances, I wouldn’t call any of them art. My first budget was $5,000. That was the deal. You’d be given a budget and then they’d own the film. I’d get a fee, whatever the fee was. Until the last picture I did, when my producer wasn’t going to pay me — for no reason. He punched me in the eye, and then, forbearance to sue, he paid me what he owed me.’”… Read the rest
Friday, July 15th, 2005
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you’ll know that one topic we occasionally post about is the impending synergy between new consumer electronics devices and downloadable visual media (i.e., movies). I posted previously about Apple’s switch to the Intel processor and linked to a piece speculating that it had something to do with placing an Intel chip with digital rights management controls within a computer like the Mac mini, thereby creating a kind of Tivo-alternative. Now comes this article on the Ars Technica site which continues this thinking, claiming that what Apple is really after is getting a powerful video-ready chip inside the Ipod so that all elements of Apple’s iLife suite can be downloadable to the device.
From the article by Jon “Hannibal” Stokes:
“It’s critical to understanding the switch that you not underestimate the importance of Intel’s XScale to Apple’s decision to leave IBM. The current iPods use an ARM chip from Texas Instruments, but we can expect to see Intel inside future versions of the iPod line. So because Apple is going to become an all-Intel shop like Dell, with Intel providing the processors that power both the Mac and the iPod, Apple will get the same kinds of steep volume discounts across its entire product line that keep Dell from even glancing AMD’s way.
If you think XScale is too powerful for the iPod — it’s used in powerful color PDAs — then you’re not taking the device seriously enough as a portable media platform. The XScale is plenty powerful enough to do video playback, and I have reason to believe that Apple is currently working on a video iPod to counter the Sony PSP. (My guess is that we might even see it in time for Christmas.) When the video iPod hits the streets, Apple will have an iPod product that plays each of the media formats (music, pictures, video) represented in its iLife suite.”
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Thursday, July 14th, 2005
As reported in Ratchet Up, “A team of researchers at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center has developed the first true, three-dimensional, holographic movies. These movies should appear on a screen near you in about a decade. For the moment, the initial markets for this holographic television system will be in medical visualization and military applications. The system is based on regular digital light processing (DLP) micro-mirror chips, but there is a twist. Instead of using regular lights, the researchers are using laser lights, which are using a unique wavelength. And they feed the chip with interferograms coming from regular 3-D imaging applications. This unique combination leads the micro-mirrors to project a 3-D moving image that appears suspended in air, like a 3-D hologram.”
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Saturday, July 9th, 2005
Since I don’t think readers of this blog always click through to the occasional comments linked below the entries, I thought I’d highlight here a link provided by an anonymous respondent to my blog titled “The Skin Game,” below. In it I highlighted the absurdity of the Department of Justice’s new “2257″ regulations and wondered why the indie community, which marshalled a veritable army of producers-turned-activists when promotional screeners were banned, has been completely silent on this issue which involves not only de facto censorship but privacy rights, sidestepping the Fourth Amendment and more. (Currently, the Free Speech Coalition, which is an adult trade group, is the only organization battling these regulations.)
In this article on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s website the organization notes “Why the DOJ’s 2257 Regulations Aren’t Just a Porn Problem” and explains more clearly the effect of these rules on bloggers, website operators, and online journalists.
.… Read the rest
Friday, July 8th, 2005
I just returned from the opening of filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s new installation, To Walk Next to One’s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge, at the Marian Goodman Gallery on 57th St. in New York. It’s a really beautiful work, and anyone interested in the Belgian filmmaker or autobiographical media art in general should make an effort to check it out.
The installation takes place in two rooms. In the first, text fragments from an autobiographical writing Akerman published last year are projected on a scrim which scrolls inward within the space like a gossamer Richard Serra sculpture. In the second, a two-panelled short film by Akerman is projected on a wall through another scrim onto a which a second projection of highlighted images is thrown.
On a formal level, the piece explores concepts like repetition and transparency, but, at its heart, this is tremendously moving and unexpectedly funny piece in which Akerman uses her artmaking tools to journey back through her family history to trace the desires and ambitions of three generations of women. The film features Akerman and her mother discussing the contents of a diary that Akerman found in their house one day — the diary of Akerman’s grandmother.
“I am a woman!” the diary begins. “Therefore I can’t express all my feelings, my sorrows and my thoughts… dear diary, onto your sheets I will write them. And you will be my only confidante.”
The grandmother’s diary spurs the two women to discuss World War 2 — her mother’s time in the camps and her feeling that she never regained her life afterwards — and the mother’s support of Akerman’s early career as an artist. At one point, Akerman remembers her father watching her first film, Blow Up My Town, saying that that was the moment that he finally thought there might be some future for his daughter in her profession. She also says that the film was the only time she was ever successfully able to mix comedy and tragedy, something she’s been trying to do since.
It was also great to see Akerman at the … Read the rest
