Archive for June, 2006
Friday, June 30th, 2006
Filmmaker Michael Kang has taken up a novel and interesting approach to promoting his new film, The Motel. He’s started a blog featuring personal stories sharing the theme of his movie: Puberty Sucks. (Well, that’s not what I’d guess the theme of the movie is, because it’s really a quite winning coming-of-age tale, but then again, stories about people’s rotten childhoods are always entertaining…)
Here’s from his first posting:
Thanks for stopping by. I’m sorry the place is a bit sparse right now. I started this site not only because of my stunted emtional state but also because of the response over the past year to my film The Motel. It seems that I am not alone in being permanently scarred by those formative years when hormones decide to kill the innocence of youth. So blogging about it just seemed like the obvious thing to do.
This is just the beginning and I promise to share with you some of the great comically tragic events of my teenage years here as well as hopefully get some of my friends to write about some of their own experiences. I will also be posting up submissions if you have any particularly embarassing, tragic, funny stories.
And here’s from a recent post titled Hankie Pankie:
He liked to be called Hankie Pankie. In Rhode Island, that was the closest it came to trying to come up with a cool nickname. Even then, we knew it was retarded. He was a nieghborhood kid. But I never knew exactly where he lived. He just seemed to always be hanging around. And always with Jimmy. They were a team. Hankie Pankie wore wife-beaters and had a caterpillar fuzz mustache. Jimmy always seemed to be clad in a denim jacket that had magic marker band names on it. These were the neighborhood bullies.
The Motel opened this week at New York’s Film Forum.… Read the rest
Friday, June 30th, 2006
I’ve been working on a bunch of stuff, not the least of which is the next issue of Filmmaker, so the blog has been relatively neglected of late. Here then, to nab some quick search engine traffic and boost our Alexa rating, is this “Stunning Nikon” commercial directed by Mark Romanek starring a sinuous Kate Moss. (Click under the tab “provocative.”)… Read the rest
Friday, June 30th, 2006
Opening this week in New York is one of the boldest and most interesting of recent independent films, Room, written and directed by Kyle Henry. With a stunning lead performance by Cyndi Williams, Room uses the mental breakdown of a lower-class, struggling, unhappily-married-with-kids bingo parlor worker to look at the psychic mindscape of post 9/11 American life. Also opening is Michael Kang’s The Motel, an unusual and interesting coming-of-age tale centered around a 13-year-old Chinese-American boy living with his mother in a downscale Jersey hotel. Finally, in Who Killed the Electric Car, opening around the country from Sony Classics, director Chris Paine examines the factors that led to the downfall of the eco-friendly, fuel cell powered vehicle.… Read the rest
Thursday, June 29th, 2006
Spin and Stir runs a post today that purports to be a quiz given to applicants for an assistant position to director Doug Liman (Swingers, Mr. and Mrs. Smith). Among the questions:
1) Doug wants to buy a sheep or a goat as a pet to keep at his farm in Hudson, NY. He wants to buy it this weekend. How would you go about making that happen. Extra points for actually locating a goat.
4) Doug has just found out he needs to introduce Senator Joe Biden. Write a few words for his introduction. The shorter the better. Comedy will score an extra point as will personal Doug details.
5) You find a crushed twinkie on some personal notes Doug has written on his copy of the script he is currently directing. What do you do with the notes?
6) Doug’s mother calls the office and asks where he is. He is skydiving. What is your answer?
7) Doug wants you to hire a pilot for his airplane in Toronto. It is a Mooney Bravo (M20T). His insurance requires the pilot to be instrument rated with 750 hours total time, 50 in type. How would you find this pilot. You should be as specific as possible.
… Read the rest
Thursday, June 29th, 2006
When IndieWire interviews filmmakers they consistently ask: What is your definition of independent film? Directors with work premiering this summer demonstrate the plethora of possible responses to such a question as well as the diversity of the independent filmmakers out there.
Patrick Creadon, Wordplay
“An independent film is a film that is made against all odds.”
Mat Whitecross, The Road to Guantanamo
“…If the term has any meaning, it must be to do with a method of filmmaking which is exempt from the usual pressures and influences associated with studio productions. But it’s become such a broad catch-all expression, I’m not sure if it’s that relevant anymore.”
Lian Lunson, Leonard Cohen I’m Your Man
“I think the concept of ‘independent film’ has changed dramatically with the introduction of the digital world. I mean I could get in a car with my camera and my laptop and drive across America and make a film single handedly now…”
Kyle Henry, Room
“…As a nation, we seem to be culturally stuck in a really bad groove of lying to ourselves (Iraq, non-stop commercialization, fundamentalist religion, reality TV, etc.) and I hope a majority of us break free from its grip soon…”
Josh Gilbert, a/k/a Tommy Chong
“My definition of independent film is making a film independent of traditional studio/Hollywood involvement in any and all aspects of the process, from conception through distribution… It’s very very very difficult to be truly independent. And very lonely…”
Larry Clark, Wassup Rockers “My films.”… Read the rest
Thursday, June 29th, 2006
Nathan Lee of the New York Times pays homage to the great Jean-Luc Godard’s ego in his Sunday article on the filmmaker’s current self-tribute at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris. The exhibit is a collage of art forms, highlighting Godard’s essential works and those of his various muses and influences – Delacroix, Goya, and the Lumiere Brothers to name a few. Lee comments on Godard’s surrealist installation: “The entire exhibition functions as a kind of conceptual filmstrip for which the viewer is the light source and the cinema is entirely inside the mind.” While the exhibit has opened with controversy surrounding Godard’s hard-to-handle attitude, Lee brings up a crucial selling point, “As cinema undergoes its digital sea change and is displaced from the center of popular culture by a proliferation of new media, the time is right to reckon with a filmmaker who has thought longer and harder about motion pictures than anyone else.”… Read the rest
Thursday, June 29th, 2006
The Human Rights Watch Film Festival wrapped up their New York run last Thursday, June 22nd at Lincoln Center. The first and final screening, Zach Niles and Banker White’s The Refugee All Stars was the perfect bookend, encapsulating the festival’s objective: “to put a human face on threats to individual freedom and give a voice to those who might otherwise be silenced.”The Refugee All Stars tells the story of six Sierra Leonean musicians forced to escape into the Republic of Guinea during the 1991 civil war. Together they form a band and travel throughout refugee camps offering musical inspiration to fellow survivors. The film provides a recurring message, one that all of the Human Rights Watch filmmakers would agree on; art can save lives. While rooted in a conflict that has since been resolved (thanks to the 1999 Lomé Peace Accord), The Refugee All Stars contains subtle moments that speak to today’s audiences. In a candid scene the band’s drummer lifts his drumsticks into the air addressing the camera, “You cannot compare this to a gun.” The festival, which opened on June 9th, showcased fifteen films including Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’ The Road to Guantánamo and a special sneak preview of Shari Robertson and Michael Camerini’s My American Dream: How Democracy Works Now.… Read the rest
Tuesday, June 27th, 2006
In an exchange below, a reader and I have gone back and forth over the art-making strategy of appropriation, a discussion brought up by the lawsuit announced against artist and Yale MFA student Chris Moukarbel, whose World Trade Center was a 12-minute video piece made using portions of the screenplay for the forthcoming Oliver Stone film. He posted this statement to the thread, but I thought I’d bring it up to the main page as it succinctly outlines the specifically political intent behind his piece:
Firstly, I wont be able to address all aspects of this issue pending litigation. I graduated last month from an MFA program and I made World Trade Center 2006 as part of my final thesis at school. I make site-specific video, sculpture and installation, often using found media or objects as my source. My projects explore the idea of memorial, fiction, and the way in which politically driven events are edified. This project was created as commentary on Hollywoods presumed authority to write history. Through their depiction of a historic event, they are ultimately in the postion to influence ideas and effect policy.
Using Stone’s script was the meaning of the work. I’m not a commercial filmmaker. Offering their story for free online was a statement on their 60 million dollar effort. I explicitly stated on my site that the video was made using their script so I didn’t see the need for the side-by-side comparisons in the press. Though I can’t speak to ‘Fair use for the purpose of political commentary’ in copyright law, I can say that I wasn’t trying to make a point about appropriation. I was using that strategy to make a statement about power.
… Read the rest
Friday, June 23rd, 2006
Many filmmakers lately have been interested in blending documentary with drama, mixing real people and places into classically structured stories. Perhaps the best of these recent attempts is also the most timely and vital; Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’s The Road to Guantanamo, which tells the true story of three British Muslims who, traveling to Pakistan for a wedding, haplessly wind up captured by U.S. military and sent to Guantanamo Bay. Winterbottom and Whitecross shoot on DV and blend talking-head interviews with the real “Tipton Three” — who have since been released — with incredibly dramatic scenes with actors that capture both the heartbreaking chaos and the grim illogic of the current war on terror. It’s the most important and to my mind best movie of the year, and it opens this week.… Read the rest
Wednesday, June 21st, 2006
Below we linked to The Smoking Gun regarding a lawsuit threatened by Paramount against an artist who created a twelve-minute video piece apparently based on the screenplay for Oliver Stone’s forthcoming World Trade Center.
Interestingly, the New York Times ran a piece this weekend about the same studio’s tolerance (so far) of fan-produced Star Trek episodes and movies. The video equivalent of “fan fiction,” some of these not-intended-for-profit works have been downloaded 30 million times!
From the article as reprinted in IndyStar.com:
Fan films have been around for years, particularly those related to the “Star Wars” movies. But now they can be downloaded from the Web, and modern computer graphics technology has lent them surprising special effects. And as long as no one is profiting from the work, Paramount, which owns the rights to “Star Trek,” has been tolerant. (Its executives declined to comment.)
Up to two dozen of these fan-made “Star Trek” projects are in various stages of completion, depending on what you count as a full-fledged production. Dutch and Belgian fans are filming an episode; a Scottish production is in the works at U.S.S. Intrepid.
A group in Los Angeles has filmed more than 40 episodes, according to its Web site, Hidden Frontier, and has explored gay themes that the original series never imagined. Episodes by a group in Austin, Texas, at Star Ship Exeter, feature a ship whose crew had the misfortune of being turned into salt in an episode of the original “Star Trek” but has now been repopulated by Texans.
… Read the rest
