Archive for December, 2005
Friday, December 23rd, 2005
The people over at Boing Boing have a piece up linking to this article on Fleshbot, this piece on SFist, and blogger Violet’s post on her Tiny Nibbles blog, all of which detail the decision by Tribe.com to apply Federal 2257 regulations to pages created by Tribe users. After December 20, all Tribe pages containing sexual content will be rendered “invisible” to the public at large.
Comments Violet: “Now everyone is confused about whether or not they can put up a picture of their own boobies and not end up in federal prison. They’re confusing everyone, and kind of really doing the Justice Department’s job for them by making everyone very nervous and confused about obcenity and sexually explicit materials, and who owns them. But the hilarious part of this whole sad joke is that 2257 is just another organized crime tactic from the government to keep people confused about whether what they’re doing is illegal or not in realtion to sex (and free speech).”
And here’s Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer Jason Schultz in SFist: “What happened at Tribe is what we can expect in a world where the FBI dictates the terms of what freedom of expression means. It’s disappointing that Tribe overreacted like it did and banned far more speech than necessary, but one also has to realize, in a world where you can go to jail for what you help publish on the Internet, there’s a serious chilling effect from laws like 2257.”… Read the rest
Thursday, December 22nd, 2005
ABC News has a surprising story up about a debate in the French government that led to an unexpected victory for file-sharers. When the country’s cultural minister introduced legislation that would have dealt jail time and a fine to those convicted of file sharing copywritten material over the internet, lawmakers instead endorsed an amendment that would make file-sharing legal as long as monthly royalty payments of $8.50 were paid for the privilege.
From the piece:
“‘To legalize the downloading of our music, almost free of charge, is to kill our work,’ venerable rocker Johnny Hallyday said in a statement.
The actors’ and musicians’ branch of France’s largest trade union, the CFDT, said the plan ‘would mean the death of our country’s music and audiovisual industries.’
The proposed royalties duty amounts to a ‘Sovietization’ of the arts, said Bernard Miyet, president of the French music composers’ and publishers’ organization SACEM.
‘You’re talking about an administered price, set by a commission without regard to the music and film economy,’ Miyet said.”
In France, media companies have actually been sued by consumers for attempting to copyprotect their CDs and DVDs. The amendment legalizing file sharing will come up for a final vote in January.
While the media companies have been less than progressive in their approach to dealing with filesharing networks and digital delivery, I think that the proposed French royalty plan, which is similar to the license fees restaurants and stores pay to the publishing societies in order to play recorded music for their customers, is a terrible one. In any of these schemes, the biggest artists walk away with the biggest revenues and newer artists suffer.… Read the rest
Thursday, December 22nd, 2005
It is hard to beat Ray Pride to the punch when passing along a relevant indie-film link. He’s the first to note that the Four-Eyed Monsters duo of Arin Crumley and Susan Buice have just posted Episode 3.5 of their popular video blog. Watch it and you’ll see why they’re not calling it Episode Four, as this week’s podcast deals with the burn-out at having to churn out these video blogs.
More positively, they post on their My Space page links to some of their own favorite video blogs, including RocketBoom, Diggnation, and filmmaker Kevin Bewersdorf’s podcast for his film LOL.… Read the rest
Wednesday, December 21st, 2005
Via GreenCine, which was unanimously hailed at the Indiewire blogger panel I sat on last Friday at the Apple store in Soho as the best film blog, comes this link to Tim R’s Mainly Movies blog in which he relays the not-so-surprising news out of today’s Variety that Terrence Malick is still editing The New World just days before it’s release in theaters. Malick is reportedly making 15 to 20 minutes of trims to the picture, although no sections are said to be being taken out.
What is surprising, however, is that Malick plans to deliver this cut after the premiere of the current version and then New Line execs will decide which version to release when the film expands in late January following the Academy Award nominations.
“What do we make of this?” Tim R. writes. “Much as I pray Malick eventually delivers a cut that works, languor and overlength per se weren’t the problems for me. Choppiness was. It’s just possible that cutting it down further might have ironed out some of the movie’s wonkier transitions, though my own nagging hunch was that it really needed to be longer, and that too much of the colonial context was getting short shrift as it was. Either way, I’m pretty keen to see this new cut, if only for academic reasons, and fingers crossed that it’s some kind of an improvement.
25 years ago Kubrick did much the same thing with The Shining, which is 15 minutes longer in its US theatrical version than its European one. In that instance I think the shorter cut is the better movie, but it goes without saying that this isn’t always so. (Look at Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America for a particularly sad counter-example.)
With The Thin Red Line Malick had a wealth of footage to choose from and still managed to assemble a masterpiece. He’s got a different struggle on his hands trying to crystallise The New World down to the very good film it often promised to be, without exacerbating its most serious flaws – rhythmic … Read the rest
Wednesday, December 21st, 2005
I was a big, big fan of the TV show, and I actually don’t hate this. It’s just a teaser, of course, and the AICN talkbackers are having a field day with it, saying it looks like a Bacardi ad, but, Linkin Park music and all, the vibe seems right for a 2006 update of Miami Vice directed by Michael Mann.
It’s weird, though, the dozens of hours I spent watching that show seem co-opted in my head by the considerably fewer I spent playing GTA: Vice City, and it’s those scenes that I’m flashing back to as Colin Farrell and Jamie Fox strut the screen.… Read the rest
Wednesday, December 21st, 2005
Dennis Lim has a great appreciation in the Village Voice today about Claire Denis’s memorable and mysterious new film L’Intrus (or, The Intruder). Opening at the Quad in some kind of stealth release from Wellspring, the film continues the intuitive, searching and philosophical cinema that Denis has been pursuing since Beau Travail. It’s a cinema in which storyline, subtext, motivation and the unconcious are all interwoven as they collectively pursue a meaning that is as much in the viewer’s mind as it is in the celluloid.
Writes Lim: “Allergic to the dictates of linear storytelling, her movies have grown increasingly convulsive in their ellipses and associations. More than any other narrative filmmaker working, Denis chases the rapture of rupture. Her latest feature, The Intruder, is a decisive breakthrough — her most poetic and primal film to date, as thrilling as it is initially baffling.”
Lest you think this story of a man searching for a lost son after receiving a heart transplant is forbiddingly intellectual, please note that Denis is one of cinema’s great sensualists. Her films have an almost tactile immediacy, and their seductive surfaces and rhythms are constructed to allow the viewer to find his or her own place within them.
As she comments in Senses of Cinema: “I think in a way people expect so much of a film, so many answers, that they are very much afraid to let themselves drift. My films are not highly intellectual, and L’Intrus is like a boat lost in the ocean drifting, you know? I think that’s the way I picture it.”… Read the rest
Tuesday, December 20th, 2005
I’m sure I’m not the only New York producer trying to figure out what the NYC transit strike means to an already down-to-the-wire Sundance feature post schedule. Fortunately, the project I’m working on is picture-locked and all elements are to the appropriate vendors. My worry is with the vendors and their employees, hoping that the strike doesn’t slow them down. I started my day today by calling our neg cutter. Fortunately, she was on the job and had left her outside-of-NYC home at 4:00 a.m. so as not to get nailed by the driving restrictions. My morning meeting at the lab cancelled, however, as people were stuck getting into the city. And we’ve been trying to figure out how to use FTP sites like YouSendIt.comto email large music files back and forth between the composers and the editors instead of messengering CDs.
If you’re shooting now or racing to finish, let us know by posting below how the strike is impacting you.… Read the rest
Tuesday, December 20th, 2005
There’s been much in the mainstream media this week about the New York Times reporting that Bush via executive order — and not judicial warrant — authorized the wiretapping of American citizens. The political blogosphere, such as Kevin Drum, is discussing the issue in greater detail, commenting on the obvious conclusion that the spying Bush authorized is probably part of some new data-mining system of surveillance, something quite different than garden-variety phone tapping.
Forgive my lack of surprise, but isn’t this what the NSA has been in the business of doing for years? And yes, the focus on American citizens without court order is disturbing, but isn’t it known that the U.S. trades intelligence with foreign spy programs in order to get around all these pesky congressional laws?
Here’s what I wrote in Filmmaker‘s Super 8 column back in 2000:
Echelon and Carnivore. A vast intelligence network is created that eavesdrops on virtually every telephone, cable and fax communication made in the world. Nation-states secretly band together to keep the network running, trading one another’s spy data in order to circumvent their own laws against wiretapping. And, increasingly, governments collude with big business by using this surveillance for corporate espionage, all under the redefined guise of “national security.” The next William Gibson novel? No. Echelon, an automated global “interception and relay system” was begun in 1971 as a project of the American, Canadian, Australian, British and New Zealand governments, but recent technological innovations have expanded its power tremendously. It is now thought to intercept up to three billion messages a day, subjecting all of them to artificial-intelligence programs designed to flag a myriad of suspicious intents. And while Echelon is run by the shadowy folks at the National Security Agency, the good old FBI has come up with Carnivore, a program — run on Windows, of course — that dials into Internet Service Providers and sifts through all their e-mail messages for similar nefarious purposes. (For further info on our digital Big Brothers, check out Epic.org.)… Read the rest
Monday, December 19th, 2005
While movies are becoming more like videogames, journalism seems to becoming more like the movies. Or, rather, one often can feel the movie-option ambition embedded in print journalism published by Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and, today, The New York Times.
The Grey Lady’s latest must-read is the shocking and strange tale of Justin Berry, a 13-year old California teen who, over the course of the six years chronicles in the paper’s very long story, goes from innocently flirting with other kids on the Internet with a $20 webcam to running a child porn online empire with himself as the lead attraction. “Through His Webcam, a Boy Joins a Sordid Online World,” is the story’s title, and, indeed, there’s so much bizarre stuff in here, like the part where Barry reunites with his estranged fugitive father in Mexico only to have his dad become a new business partner in an even more extreme XXX site.
But as the story progresses, author Kurt Eichenwald, perhaps feeling that the subject matter is a touch indelicate for the film scouts, decides to help things along by pumping up the action and underlying the redemptive elements. Here’s a bit from the end of the article, after Berry has turned state’s evidence, supplied the Feds with the names of the adults who have partnered in his ventures, and identified other kids under the control of Internet predators. While the Feds get ready to raid a house, Berry draws the prey out in an online chat:
“In a location in the Southwest, Justin glanced from his computer screen to a speakerphone. On the line was a team of F.B.I. agents who at that moment were pulling several cars into Mr. Mitchel’s driveway, preparing to arrest him.
‘The kids are in the house!’ Justin shouted into the phone, answering a question posed by one of the agents.
As agents approached the house, Justin knew he had little time left. He decided to confront the man who had hurt him for so long.
‘Do you even remember how many times you stuck your hand down … Read the rest
Sunday, December 18th, 2005
Albert Brooks premiered his new movie, Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, in Dubai last week. In the film, Brooks’s character is sent by the U.S. Government to Hindu India as well as predominantly-Muslim Pakistan to learn more about Muslims and their taste in humor.
From Heba Kandil’s Reuters piece:
“Audiences in Dubai gave mixed reviews of the film, which Brooks wrote, directed and starred in. But for the most part, they welcomed it, saying it was refreshing to see a U.S. production that did not vilify Muslims.
‘It was different from the usual movies we see from America. It’s good to show others cultures of the world,’ said 18-year-old Zeinab from the United Arab Emirates.
But her friend Asma criticized the film for not doing enough to improve the image of Arabs. ‘They showed one perspective of Islam, the Indian and Pakistani one. I don’t think that an American who doesn’t know anything about Islam and the Arab world would learn anything about us from this film,’ she said…
Although the movie does not discuss religion and lightly ridicules Washington, Brooks faced difficulties getting it on screen. He said the title caused Sony to refuse to distribute it fearing reprisals from Muslims, a reaction he said underscored the importance of challenging stereotypes in Hollywood.
Sony said it had passed on the film because of merit.”… Read the rest
