Archive for April, 2006
Sunday, April 30th, 2006
Of the many documentaries playing at the Tribeca Film Festival, Gary Tarn’s Black Sun defies the traditional documentary moniker. While it is about an artist, French painter and filmmaker Hugues de Montalembert who was made blind in1978 after a brutal attack, the film is not a biography. While it deals with issues of blindness, Black Sun is hardly a social issue film. Tarn, a composer by trade, is a first-time filmmaker who traveled the world collecting images to match Montalembert’s narrative. The overall effect, not unlike the documentary work of Chris Marker, is less journalistic and more philosophical, and the brunt of Montalembert’s memoir takes one beyond the traditional epistemology of vision into a surprising inquiry about the morality and ethics of seeing. The film will be playing this week at the Tribeca Film Fetival. Worth seeing.… Read the rest
Sunday, April 30th, 2006
The Duplass Brothers have launched a website for their new movie, The Puffy Chair, which was one of the films spotlighted at the DIY distribution panel I moderated a couple of weeks ago. Their film will be out this summer in a unique deal in which Netflix partnered with the filmmakers and Roadside Attractions.
The film’s trailer is below.
… Read the rest
Friday, April 28th, 2006
Over at The Hot Button,, David Poland, while discussing Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival, throws out some industry analysis that feels pretty dead on and which is the kind of thinking that a lot of first-time filmmakers I encounter don’t really understand when they talk about the value of their film:
The new small distributors are trying a new model. 12-16 movies a year. Nothing too big. $15 million is the top. Nothing too small. A $1 million or $2 million pick-up is possible… but only if the film looks like $8 million or more. Cover most of the money with foreign pre-sales. And hope for a few miracle winners a year.
Why not embrace the smaller, quality films? Because the return tends to match the size of the film. Lots of people would be thrilled to make $750,000 profit on a film that cost $1 million. But not a lot of companies would….
The future will open up the avenues of distribution. However, the difficulty of being heard above the constant hum of noise created by the big boys, both major and Dependent, is only going to get worse. The same way that AtomFilms and iFilms were able to get people who spent $60,000 – $120,000 on short films to accept deals for $2000 for all rights is the same thing that will happen, on some level with features. Perhaps the balance will be less onerous for the filmmaker. But the reality is that possible gross revenues from, say, 50,000 people wanting to see your film via digital download to the TV or home-burnt DVD is probably less than $400,000. Split that with the delivery carrier and it’s no more than $320,000. Factor in distribution expenses, including promotion, and it’s down to, say, $250,000.
How many feature films that cost $250,000 are going to find an audience of 50,000 people who will pay for the privilege? How many $8 million projects that hope to be theatrically released will end up having their budgets cut to $2 million in hopes that they will either get lucky – and on
… Read the rest
Friday, April 28th, 2006
The Tribeca Film Festival is throwing NYC’s normally dense exhibition signal-to-noise ratio way out of whack this week, but one film you should definitely not miss that’s opening today is Robinson Devor’s Police Beat. It was one of our “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You” Gotham Award nominees last year, and it was also a critical highlight of the 2005 Sundance Film Festival.
Distilling influences ranging from Alain Resnais to Rick Linklater to Jim Jarmusch, Police Beat is an utterly gorgeous portrait of lovesickness set against the psychic turmoil that is post 9/11 American life. A Muslim-American police officer goes on bike patrol all over Seattle — which is shot in anamorphic 35mm like some exotic new country by d.p. Sean Kirby — while obsessing over his girlfriend, who has gone on a camping trip with a male “friend.” The script was written by Charles Mudede (one of our “25 New Faces’ last year), and it incorporates material from his weekly column of the same name in the Seattle Stranger while adding a lovely melancholy romanticism.
Here’s what director Devor has to say about his film: “[Police Beat] a highly unconventional crime film in which the protagonist Z is so preoccupied with his possibly unfaithful girlfriend that he never once acknowledges the criminal world that swirls around him. The crimes Z encounters become mirrors of his turbulent inner state, allowing him to philosophize about his unstable romantic relationship as well as his own development as an emotional being. While Z’s regular interactions are in English, his thoughts – the film’s narration – are in his native Wolof, the primary language of West Africa. In this way, POLICE BEAT is an unusual portrait of an immigrant new to the United States that focuses less on the protagonist’s socio-economic difficulties than on his emotional responses to American life.”
The film runs today through May 4 at the Anthology Film Archives, and I highly recommend you check it out. (For more, here’s Manohla Dargis’s New York Times review.… Read the rest
Friday, April 28th, 2006
For those of you who are members of Filmmaker‘s MySpace page, click over to your in-boxes. I’ve just posted a bulletin with invites to a free MySpace Tribeca secret screening of two films. One I’ve seen and it’s really great, and the other is a doc on a subject that can’t go wrong.… Read the rest
Thursday, April 27th, 2006
Mary Jordan’s Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, which premiered Wednesday night at the Tribeca Film Festival, is a real triumph — a great doc on an artist that manages to encapsulate the spirit and values of its subject while situating his work historically and testifying to his influence on the generations that followed him.
Jack Smith was an artist, photographer, filmmaker and performance artist who achieved a blast of notoriety in the early ’60s when his experimental film Flaming Creatures was dubbed obscene and banned in various states and countries. But as Jordan details in her film, Smith resented the attention Flaming Creatures generated and dedicated the rest of his days to creating work that couldn’t be so easily encapsulated. (In later films like Normal Love, Smith would go to the theaters himself with reels of the movie and splice it live as it was being projected.) Jordan covers, among many other things, Smith’s early years, his hatred of his mother, his love of Dominican film star Maria Montez, his discovery/creation of tranvestite superstar Mario Montez, his bitter anti-capitalism, his various intersections with Andy Warhol, his influence on Federic Fellini, his five-hour performances of the ’70s and 80′s, and finally his death from AIDS.
We’ll cover this film more extensively in the magazine in the future — these are just quick thoughts — but it seemed to me that Jordan, who was one of our “25 New Faces” last year, made all the right choices in her film. From her extensive use of Smith’s strange, incantatory voice, recordings of which run throughout the movie, to her layered montage to her choice of interview subjects, Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis is a lovingly crafted portrait of the artist that also feels like something of an aesthetic manifesto, a forceful argument for the continuing importance of Smith’s ideas and art practices.
Watch the trailer here.… Read the rest
Thursday, April 27th, 2006
Over at his blog, Anthony Kaufman is blogging about developments in Net Neutrality::
Yesterday, a Republican-dominated House committee shot down an amendment put forth by a Massachusetts Democrat that would have prohibited broadband providers (such as AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast) from blocking or degrading Internet connections to websites that they may deem as competitors. “Net Neutrality” has suffered a major setback… If you don’t think this affects your livelihood and freedom as artists, consider this similar to the Showtime/Smithsonian deal: It’s all about privatizing and monetizing institutions and archives (be they physical or digital) that should be free and equal to the public.
The House committee rejected the amendment, on a vote of 34-22, with all but one Republican opposing. “This will stifle openness, endanger our global competitiveness, and warp the Web into a tiered Internet of bandwidth haves and have-nots,” said Democrat Edward Markey, who wrote up the amendment.
As the vote hits the House floor, you can make a difference. For more on the issue, check out savetheinternet.com, but more importantly, contact your House representative HERE. (via Evan at Alternet)
… Read the rest
Thursday, April 27th, 2006
For those worried about the announcement a few weeks back that New York ran out of money for its successful film tax rebate program, here’s an email from Pat Kaufman that arrived in my inbox this morning:
The legislature has approved the Governor’s recommended expansion of the film credit!!
We are pleased to confirm that funding for the NY State’s Production tax credit has been expanded and extended through 2011.
New York State will continue to offer a fully refundable tax credit of 10% of the below the line budget of qualified feature films, episodic television and pilots. The city will again be given the option of joining the program and providing a matching 5% credit as before.
We at the New York State Governor’s Office for Motion Picture and Television Development look forward to working with you on your projects. New York is better than ever. We know you want to be here and you can be.
Pat Swinney Kaufman
NY State Governor’s Office For
Motion Picture and Television Development
So, the 10% state rebate seems intact and I guess we’ll wait to see if the city confirms their further participation.… Read the rest
Wednesday, April 26th, 2006
Warner Independent has just launched a very cool website for A Scanner Darkly, in which you the viewer are placed within the surveillance culture Linklater’s film dissects.… Read the rest
Of the many documentaries playing at the Tribeca Film Festival, Gary Tarn’s Black Sun defies the traditional documentary moniker. While it is about an artist, French painter and filmmaker Hugues de Montalembert who was made blind in1978 after a brutal attack, the film is not a biography. While it deals with issues of blindness, Black Sun is hardly a social issue film. Tarn, a composer by trade, is a first-time filmmaker who traveled the world collecting images to match Montalembert’s narrative. The overall effect, not unlike the documentary work of Chris Marker, is less journalistic and more philosophical, and the brunt of Montalembert’s memoir takes one beyond the traditional epistemology of vision into a surprising inquiry about the morality and ethics of seeing. The film will be playing this week at the Tribeca Film Fetival. Worth seeing.… Read the rest
