Archive for September, 2006
Sunday, September 17th, 2006
Filmmaker Jamie Stuart, who is working on an article upcoming for Filmmaker, met Michel Gondry recently at New York’s Regency Hotel. The picture at left is the result of that meeting, which Stuart explains below:
“I thought this was one of those ideas so obvious and so attuned to the subject that I became paranoid somebody was going to beat me to it. Photo Booth is basically gimmick software that comes with all new Macs — and it seems everybody plays around with it for maybe 5 minutes, then they forget about it. When I met Michel recently to discuss The Science of Sleep, I thought it might be fun to see what he’d do with the various stretch and mirror effects. He already knew Photo Booth, so I slid over my MacBook Pro, he took right over and created these five cool original self-portraits.”
Click this link to see more Gondry/Photo Booth pics or submit Photo Booth pics of your own.… Read the rest
Friday, September 15th, 2006
Our friend and former Managing Editor of FilmMaker Magazine Liz Ogilvie sent us a press release that further demonstrates the growing power of documentaries. Docurama, which hitherto had constrained itself to dvd and home entertainment, has now entered the world of theatrical distribution with Alexandra Lipsitz’s Air Guitar Nation, an hilarious piece that chronicles emergence of the US Air Guitar Championships and a new power strumming victor. If you would like play along, check out clips of expert air guitar technique. You’ll see that there is a lot more to air guitar than just helicoptoring in front of your bedroom mirror in your underwear.… Read the rest
Wednesday, September 13th, 2006
Over at The Daily Reel I’ve been following the online mystery of Lonelygirl15. Today, Virginia Heffernan of the New York Times has near the final word on the subject. Homeschooler Bree is actually a “twentyish” actress named Jessica Rose and “the masterminds of the Lonelygirl15 videos are Ramesh Flinders, a screenwriter and filmmaker from Marin County, Calif., and Miles Beckett, a doctor turned filmmaker.”
The real mystery now is whether Bree’s fanatical cyber audience will love her as much as she morphs into a purely fictional character in whatever future projects her creators have planned for her.… Read the rest
Tuesday, September 12th, 2006
If you’re in NYC tomorrow night, here’s news of a panel event sponsored by the IFP which is free to readers of the Filmmaker blog. And also take note of next week’s Independent Film Week promotion, in which tickets to a bunch of NYC independent theaters are discounted to only $6.
IFP and The New York Times present a Special TimesTalks Panel with Independent Filmmakers
FREE for Friends of Filmmaker Magazine!
“COMING OF AGE ON SCREEN”
Don’t miss this conversation with independent filmmakers whose own rites of passage inspired their films and captured an era. Moderated by David Carr, New York Times culture and business writer, with panelists Catherine Hardwicke, director of “Thirteen,” “Lords of Dogtown,” and the upcoming “The Nativity Story,” Dito Montiel, director of “A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints,” (Winner, Best Director, 2006 Sundance Film Festival) and Peter Sollett, director of “Raising Victor Vargas” (which premiered at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival).
Followed by a reception with the filmmakers.
September 13th @ 6:30-8:00pm
Walter Reade Theater
70 Lincoln Center Plaza
(65th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam)
FREE FOR FRIENDS OF FILMMAKER MAGAZINE
Reservations required. To RSVP, email rsvp@ifp.org with “timestalks” in the subject.
Independent Film Week is a four-day promotional campaign to help draw new audiences to independent films and the theaters which show them year-round. It includes a first of its kind reduced-price ticket promotion at 10 independent theaters in NYC, including the Walter Reade. Featuring $6 admission to all shows Monday, September 18th through Thursday, September 21st.
For specific details about the promotion, and to see a list of participating theaters, visit: www.independentfilmweek.com
… Read the rest
Tuesday, September 12th, 2006
The term “buzz” refers, of course, to those hushed conversations in which the most recent tidbits of financial and other news are exchanged in film festival hallways and theater lobbies. Who bought what for how much? (“Newmarket nabbed Gabriel Range’s Death of a President”); who passed on what film (“wouldn’t you like to know”), and who didn’t make it back to their hotel room until 7 am (“a certain blond who supposedly has a boyfriend”) are standard conversational commodities. But in the age of Treos and Blackberries such conversations are handled electronically. Every screening one notices in the theater a fluttering of glowing lights, like so many lost fire flies, filling the dark room. People reading emails, scanning Indiewire, checking schedules, and I.M.ing in the dark is now standard operation procedure. What are people saying? I often eavesdrop in the dark, reading the other people’s screens to learn that they are “in Varsity 5..boring!” Or interested in the needs of others, as in “Hungry?” or “Need cocktail?”
As such, pre-screening small talk is a actually more relaxed and more often than not on what they thought of a movie and not “what the buzz is.” Tarsem’s The Fall, a strange, visually immaculate epic as an anti- Scheharazade, for example, has generated a range of emotions. Set in a Los Angeles hospital at the advent of silent film, a heartbroken stunt man (Lee Pace) with broken legs weaves a fantastic story for a little girl. But his tale, rather than prolonging his life, is meant to get the girl to steal morphine so the crippled lover can kill himself. What follows is a switching back and forth the between a hospital drama and a lush narrative fantasy that employs nearly every great landscape in India for its narrative purposes. The film’s look, if such a thing can be said, is too perfect. Every grain of sand in a pink desert seems intentionally art designed. On the other hand, the film’s script seems entirely incomplete seems sketchy at best.
Sarah Price and Bradley Beesley’s documentary Summercamp! has generated the same … Read the rest
Tuesday, September 12th, 2006
The Paris Review has scored the first published interview with Laura Albert, the “woman who was JT LeRoy.”
There’s only a small excerpt on the website from Nathaniel Rich’s interview with Albert, which I’ve quoted in its entirety below. To read the rest, we’ll have to pick up the magazine. The quote below details that “Eureka!” moment in which a young Albert developed a strategy that she would finetune in later years.
From the interview:
INTERVIEWER: Did you have many friends at school—kids your own age?
LAURA ALBERT: I was friends with all the nerd guys. And the popular kids liked me because I made them laugh. I made up funny stories and I was the best at prank phone calls. In sixth and seventh grade girls started having serious crushes on boys, and we started calling them on the phone. There was this one guy that everyone really liked, but no one could speak to him on the phone because they’d giggle too much. So one day, with the other girls listening, I called him using a Swedish accent, and he fell for it. I kept calling him—and the other girls didn’t know this. I made up a whole character, Katrin. I went to the library to research Sweden, and I studied Swedish to make sure my accent was right. Katrin was living with Laura, with me, but her parents were very strict and she wasn’t allowed to leave the house. So no one ever saw her. I found I had this skill over the phone—which I think a lot of women discover—this idea of, Wow, I have this personality, but I’m not allowed to expose it, because my physical appearance doesn’t match it. The boy fell in love with Katrin. And I fell in love with him.
Our phone relationship went on for months. It got really elaborate. And then one day I met him, as Katrin’s friend Laura, and we started to hang out together. I cut out a picture of a pretty girl from an old yearbook to show him. He had friends that were
… Read the rest
Monday, September 11th, 2006
Toronto has never been a city synonymous with excitement, which is why it is such a great place for a film festival. There has never been much competition for the excitement dollar. So far this year, however, the Toronto International Film Festival has mirrored its host city in terms of cinematic thrills. When I ask guests, critics, filmmakers and the ilk on the sidewalks and escalators around town what they have liked so far, I am more often than not greeted by a range of guttural sounds, which translates more or less into, “I don’t have a clue.” Then most people will grimace and say, ““not a whole lot.”
It is not that the films are bad; just not exciting. Last night’s screening of Christopher Guest’s For Your Consideration felt like eating a slightly stale eclair. You knew exactly what its pleasures would be — Guest and company (Jennifer Coolidge, Eugene Levy, Michael McKean, Parket Posey, Catherine O’Hara, etc.) vamping — but there was nothing remarkable in its production. The only change is that this is not a mockumentary, just a comedy about the ridiculousness of Hollywood. Talk about shooting fish in a barrel.
For me, the festival has begun to feel a bit like a Christopher Guest comedy, with the films, guests and city playing out their cliches with perfect pitch. Torontonians, usually known for the high-toned approach to film culture, descended into the realm of “Entertainment Tonight” as crowds clogged the streets around Four Seasons Hotel and the Hotel Intercontinental, straining to catch a glimpse of Brad Pitt (here with Babel) or Wyclef Jean (here with Ghosts of Cite Soleil). Or maybe there were out for the other celebs up here for no other reason than to get photographed being here, like ex-’N Sync, now-out Lance Bass.
And the films fell into categories that seemed, while perfectly fine, somewhat expected. There was that European art film about the sexual hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie (Stefan Krohmer’s Sommer ’04 an der Schlei). And the high-concept star-studded Hollywood comedy (Marc Forster Stranger than Fiction with Will Ferrell, Maggie … Read the rest
Tuesday, September 5th, 2006
David Hudson over at GreenCine has his usual comprehensive round-up of the opinions on this year’s fest. Critics seemed most impressed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others and Kevin Macdonald’s The Last King of Scotland. Scotland is Macdonald’s first fiction film — he previously made the award-winning documentaries One Day in September and Touching the Void. Other festival-related news include the retirement of co-founder Bill Pence.… Read the rest
Tuesday, September 5th, 2006
I’ve vowed not to link to James Ponsoldt’s blog too much since I produced his feature Off the Black, but he’s a prolific writer who is frequently posting pieces that are interesting and useful enough to other filmmakers. So, here I’m busting my conflict-of-interest self-censorship to note his comments on shrinking Tim Orr’s widescreen compositions to 1:1.35 for our video transfer:
On Tim’s off-days, he and I met at Technicolor to begin the color-timing process (for video/DVD) with the brilliant MIKE UNDERWOOD. Mike’s a colorist, and worked with Tim on both “All the Real Girls” and “Undertow.” The two of them have a short-hand and trust between each other, and that’s invaluable when you’re paying by the hour.
The way the timing worked was like this: in a suite at Technicolor, the three of us watched each scene of the film, and discussed the look of every shot–whether it was too dim, too green, too bright, not warm enough, etc. Then, when Tim had seen the entire film and given extensive notes, he went back to the set of “Year of the Dog.” And then it was just Mike and I…. The color-timing process was slow, but actually seemed like “movie magic.” I know that sounds geeky, but it really felt that way. We were creating something beautiful with fun tools, and there’s something a bit scientific–but also a bit magical–to the way it works.
Now, the pan and scan process wasn’t nearly as pleasurable. I sort of wished I had some morphine for that part.
Here’s a simple explanation of a pan and scan, as it related to “Off the Black”:
We shot our film in anamorphic 35mm (a 2.35:1 aspect ratio). That means gorgeous wide-screen, perfect for movie theaters…when you see it you feel like you’re having a slightly epic experience, perhaps dreamlike, certainly different than everyday life.
But…when the DVD of the film comes out, it will offer several options: one will be be letter-boxed, and that’s the ONLY way a film should be watched at home. If you’re not watching that version, you’re not seeing
… Read the rest
Monday, September 4th, 2006
Via Brian Newman’s blog this movie trailer timed to the release of Chris Anderson’s new book, The Long Tail.
Historical point of reference: Richard Serra and Carlotta Schoolman’s 1973 video, Television Delivers People.… Read the rest
