CATS AND DOGS WITH LEOS CARAX

By Scott Macaulay

In the last Filmmaker I wrote about New Order’s recent video compilation and the various “artist-directed” videos that producer and filmmaker Michael Shamberg commissioned for the band over the years. In the piece, Shamberg announced that a website would be up detailing the project, but, due to health issues — Shamberg took ill in London this summer and was hospitalized for three months — the site was delayed.

Now, Shamberg has emailed to say that he’s better and that Kinoteca is online. Over the next few months he will be gradually putting up info on all the New Order video productions. But first up is a treat: Les Amants de Ponts-Neuf director Leos Carax’s sly and unexpectedly charming no-budget riff on the pop promo, a clip that plays like an auteurist take on America’s Funniest Home Videos. The link above takes you to the Quicktime 6 version. The site also promises a downloadable clip for video iPods.… Read the rest

STRAIGHT TALK FROM SUB POP

By Scott Macaulay

Filmmakers looking to score quick tunes from up-and-coming bands for their indie flick often don’t understand the realities of licensing pre-recorded music and wonder why their producers can’t clear a song on the fly. Here, then, is some straight talk from Sub Pop Records, the label that spawned Nirvana and which has a handy $500 festival rights quote but also plenty of provisos that filmmakers need to follow:

“A sync license for a Sub Pop artist will run you $500, half of which goes to Publishing, the other half of which goes to Sub Pop. If you do not want to pay money to use the music then why are you here anyway? Trust me, people, this is cheap. AND, you like this band, right? So now all of the sudden you’re going to try to take food off their tables by trying to bargain with me?! It ain’t gonna happen. Just so we’re very clear here: this is a festivals, student film or non-commercial license only. Any “for profit” uses of the film are not authorized under the $500 license. That, my friend, is an entirely different lecture…

So, in summary, to acquire a license for a Sub Pop artist, excluding The Postal Service, The Shins, or Nirvana, which you aren’t going to get, you will need $500 and at least 6-8 weeks. We do not have the time or patience to bargain with you, so if this doesn’t suit your needs you might want to consider your back-up plan. What, you don’t have a back-up plan? You’re never going to make it in this business.”

If you still want a Sub Pop song in your movie, click to the link above which contains a downloadable PDF application form.… Read the rest

MOVIE POSTER WORD BALLOONS, PART TWO

By Scott Macaulay

Below I posted about the empty word balloons I spotted affixed to various movie posters in the subway and said they were obviously the work of some renegade artist. Apparently, Gothamist posted about this back in September. They’re the work of artist Ji Lee, whose The Bubble Project is intended as a “counterattack” on corporate advertising’s invasion of the public space. Click on the link to see samples of of the “bubbles” filled in by random citizens.… Read the rest

THE LISTS KEEP COMING

By Scott Macaulay

I haven’t been too focused on all of the end-of-year “ten best” hoopla, but there are some lists up today worth checking out. Indiewire has their “insider” ten best, with lists from people like Bingham Ray, Christine Vachon and Ryan Werner. And then there’s our former Filmmaker West Coast Editor Chuck Stephens, whose list is provocatively subtitled “The top 10 fresh wounds to the body politic of global filmmaking.” I only know about half the films on Stephens’ list, so there are a lot of discoveries here. And, as usual, his write-ups are a treat. Here’s what he has to say about Ilea Khrzhanovsky’s 4, a Russian film that screened in Venice and Rotterdam this year:

“Who knows what to make of this sprawling noise-symphony of ludicrous lies, double-double agents, mongrel howling, Robocop jackhammering, sub-Tarkovsky zone-wandering, and naked grannies pelting each other with greasy slices of pork? As unexpected an erruption from a national cinema otherwise thought to be teetering on the edge of insignificance as last year’s Mexican Japón, Khrzhanovsky’s deliberately fracture-prone debut is also as infuriating as it is engrossing, and a one-of-a-kind cosmic/comic marvel that remains this year’s only fantastic 4.… Read the rest

JULY ENDS IN DECEMBER

By Scott Macaulay

Miranda July says adios with a final post on her Me and You and Everyone We Know blog, offering to us as her going-away present an artful Google image tree that unspools her life for the past year.… Read the rest

SUGAR HIGH

By Scott Macaulay

If you’re strolling through New York’s Chelsea neighborhood this weekend, you can stop for a bit and check out one of the more interesting films from last year’s Sundance Film Festival — in a gallery, not a theater. Running through January 7 at Roebling Hall in Chelsea is Sugar, a film installation by Reynold Reynolds and Patrick Jolley with Samara Golden. When the feature version of this work played in Sundance’s Frontier section, I remember appreciating its visual-art feel, and now, for their gallery show, the artists have expanded on Sugar by creating “two life-size hyper-real sculptures” to accompany the film loop.

Here’s what I wrote about Sugar here earlier in the year:

“A single room — in this case, a particularly disgusting and fetid one — is the sole locale for Reynold Reynolds and Patrick Jolley’s Sugar, which plays like a Cinema of Transgression remake of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. There’s virtually no dialogue to this tale of a single woman who rents a decaying street-level apartment, finds a body in a crawlspace and gradually loses her mind. Jumping back and forth from color to scratchy black and white, its camera slowly tracking over piles of trash, peeling wallpaper, dirty dishes and undefinable stains over a soundtrack drone by J.G. Thirwell, it’s almost as much a filmed gallery installation as a feature narrative. (In addition to making several short films, the directors have exhibited visual art pieces around the world.) But while the relentless Sugar can be hard to sit through at times, it makes a virtue of its theatricality and contains genuinely terrifying sequences — I was on the edge of my seat during one disturbing interlude in which our heroine of sorts becomes slowly trapped by a puddle of seeping water and a thrashing electric fan. Recommended.”… Read the rest

DEREK BAILEY, 1930 – 2005

By Scott Macaulay

According to various postings on the web, free-music guitarist Derek Bailey died on Christmas Day. I’ve seen Bailey a few times, all of them a long time ago when he’d periodically put together in New York one of his “Company Weeks” of group improvisation. I saw him play with folks like Bill Laswell, John Zorn and George Lewis, and to several musician friends of mine, like Donald Miller from Borbetomagus, he was a god. Certainly the most radical guitarist of his generation due to the simple fact that much of what he played didn’t sound like guitar, he was a huge influence of musicians ranging from Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore to John Fahey.

Here’s a portion of his bio from the All Music Guide: “At first glance, Derek Bailey possesses almost none of the qualities one expects from a jazz musician — his music does not swing in any appreciable way, it lacks a discernible sense of blues feeling — yet there’s a strong connection between his amelodic, arhythmic, atonal, uncategorizable free-improvisatory style, and much free jazz of the post-Coltrane era. His music draws upon a vast array of resources, including indeterminacy, rock & roll, and various world musics. Indeed, this catholic acceptance of any and all musical influences is arguably what sets Bailey’s art outside the strict bounds of “jazz.” The essential element of his work, however, is the type of spontaneous musical interrelation that evolved from the ’60s jazz avant-garde. Sound, not ideology, is Bailey’s medium. He differs in approach to almost any other guitarist who preceded him. Bailey uses the guitar as a sound-making, rather than a “music”-making, device. Meaning, he rarely plays melodies or harmonies in a conventional sense, but instead pulls out of his instrument every conceivable type of sound using every imaginable technique. His timbral range is quite broad. On electric guitar, Bailey is capable of the most gratingly harsh, distortion-laden heavy-metalisms; unamplified, he’s as likely to mimic a set of windchimes. Bailey’s guitar is much like John Cage’s prepared piano; both innovations enhanced the respective instrument’s percussive possibilities. As a group … Read the rest

MISE-EN MESS

By Scott Macaulay

As 2005 winds to a close, so too the boring parade of “Ten Best” lists. And now, with the last Sunday of the year gone, the newspaper columnists will move on to their “New in 2006!” pieces while the internet stragglers take up the rear with a more interesting bunch of kudos. GreenCine has been diligently covering the whole year-end shebang, and today the site has a bunch of interesting links to everything from DVDTalk and others ranging from Best Schlock of 2005 to Top 20 Adult DVDs, which feature lists from both male and female reviewers, to the most interesting, Top 10 Obscure Outsider Homemade Movies on DVD That You Probably Never Heard Of in 2005. The list is by DVDTalk’s Bill Gibron, and I’ve heard of only two of his 10. One is The American Astronaut, Cory McAbee’s black-and-white indie fantasia. The other is Reflections of Evil, Damon Packard’s unclassifiable pop-culture mash. I only know it because he sent me a DVD of it years ago — it was made in 2002 — and I kept watching it in bits and pieces, never really figuring out whether there was some genius in there or whether it was just a filmmaking mess. So, I thank Gibron for putting it in context:

“Along with the sublime Giuseppe Andrews, Damon Packard is a true God of the outsider effort. Using a style that can best be described as mise-en-mess, and a persona filled with equal parts Tourettes and talent, this true independent maverick has mixed his 70s obsessions with his hatred of the world to weave a truly inspired expression of self. Packard plays an overweight street vendor dealing with the death of his sister. In between his profane public outbursts, we witness clips from The ABC Movie of the Wee, a young Stephen Spielberg onset, and footage from the Universal Studio tour. As a film, it’s fascinating. As a cry for help, it’s downright disturbing.”… Read the rest

POOR CHOICES

By Scott Macaulay

A while back I linked to D.C.-based filmmaker Sujewa Ekanayake, whose blog, Filmmaking for the Poor, covers a range of no-budget film topics. Today GreenCine draws my attention to his site again with this link to a good post for the New Year: Ekanayake’s picks for “10 Filmmakers to Watch in 2006.”

There are a few obvious choices here, talented filmmakers who he’s eager to see what they do next. Miranda July, Andrew Bujalski and Caveh Zahedi fit into this category. But then there are people I don’t know as well, like Amir Motiagh, Andrew Dickson, and Elizabeth Nord. And he’s also picked Todd Rohal, whose Slamdance-premiering The Guatamalan Handshake (pictured) I’ve seen in rough cut and think is really great.… Read the rest

STUFF YOUR STOCKING WITH THE F WORD

By Admin

Filmmaker Jed Weintrob, whose doc/fiction hybrid The F Word was profiled in Mary Glucksman’s production column earlier this year, is selling DVDs of the film via the Web.

We’ll let Weintrob’s email pitch speak for itself:

“Hi All,

“A lot has happened since I first talked to you about The F Word, my new feature film which we shot all over New York City amongst the 500,000 protesters during the Republication National Convention last year, and premiered to sold-out screenings at the Tribeca Film Festival this year.

“In the process of planning to bring the film out to more and more people, we’ve gotten to meet and become involved with some very passionate grassroots activists who are fighting to protect some of our core civil liberties which desperately need protection nowadays.

“As we plan to move forward into a broader release in election year 2006 (national television, theaters, more film festivals, political events, official DVD release), we are approaching our friends, colleagues, independent film lovers and politically curious citizens (on both sides of the political fence) with a request for support…and a challenge:

“Starting today, we are independently releasing (in conjunction with a few other like-minded organizations) the Limited Edition F Word DVD.

“Can we, together, make The F Word release a success?

“The film is priced at $17.76 (as in the year), and we also have a special holiday stocking/menorah stuffer 10-pack of DVDs for the special price of $100. Buy a bunch and give them to family, friends, film buffs, and anyone you think would appreciate this truly unique film, which seamlessly blends fiction and documentary footage.

“We need this film and other films like it to work in the “real” commercial world of distribution. The number of copies we manage to sell in this limited independent release will help determine not only the further release of this film, but also the future of a number of other smart, politically-minded entertainment projects we have in the works. If we can find and grow a base of support for our non-profit work with The F Word, then we … Read the rest