Archive for October, 2006
Monday, October 30th, 2006
Publishers Weekly has what seems to be the first review of Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, Against the Day.
From the conclusion:
Now pushing 70, Pynchon remains the archpoet of death from above, comedy from below and sex from all sides. His new book will be bought and unread by the easily discouraged, read and reread by the cult of the difficult. True, beneath the book’s jacket lurks the clamor of several novels clawing to get out. But that rushing you hear is the sound of the world, every banana peel and dynamite stick of it, trying to crowd its way in, and succeeding.
According to the blog Pynchonoid, the new book reads like a cross between the author’s Mason and Dixon and Gravity’s Rainbow. And as the book looks to be a typically dense 1,000 pages plus, readers might need this Pynchon wiki designed to enable navigation through the novel’s themes and storylines.… Read the rest
Monday, October 30th, 2006
Indie films aren’t often noted for their ancillary rights potential, but over ten years after it first premiered at Sundance, there’s a video game based on Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.
Here’s Game Trailers:
Reservoir Dogs is a bit of a chicken and egg debacle. Fans of the movie are going to be put off by an extended story and characters that don’t live up to the original. People who never experienced this dog’s tale before will be wondering “What’s the big deal?”
Regardless of whether you’ve seen the movie or not, it’s not hard to realize that Reservoir Dogs is an average action game. It’s got a couple unique elements, but your mileage will vary based upon how much you love the source material.
And yes, “Stuck in the Middle with You” is on the soundtrack.… Read the rest
Monday, October 30th, 2006
Paul Harrill has a good find over at his Self-Reliant Filmmaking blog. It’s a site that is figuring out a way to raise production funding for web-distributed short-form work.
From Paul’s post:
A few weeks ago, in an effort to show my students some of the more interesting film and video work being created for the web I discovered Have Money Will Vlog. It’s an ingenious site that helps media artists raise funds to produce their web-distributed videos and films. The project budgets are in the $2000 – $3000 range, and the donations are usually small — $10, $20, and so on. Of course, that money adds up when you consider all the people online….
Anyway, if you’ve not yet run across Have Money Will Vlog, now is a particularly good time to check out the site (and to dig in your pocket for some loose change) because funds are currently being raised for a project by Jennifer Proctor and Aaron Valdez, two Iowa City filmmakers. The project is called Lost in Light and, in Jennifer’s words (via email) the project is “devoted to preserving, archiving, and making available 8mm and Super 8 films that are otherwise being lost to time.”
In fact, as they state on the Lost in Light websites (HMWV site, official site), “we will provide free Super 8 and 8mm to video transfers to anyone who asks, in exchange for posting their video to the Lost in Light site and on the Internet Archive with their choice of Creative Commons licenses. In addition, Lost in Light will include articles and features by members of the filmmaking and film preservation communities, video tutorials for making 8mm films, as well as creative work, all with the goal of preserving and championing this important film format.”
So, send them your Super-8 and 8mm films. And send them some $ while you’re at it.
… Read the rest
Sunday, October 29th, 2006
Here’ s someone — typically, not a narrative feature filmmaker — who has figured out how to build a big audience on YouTube with a series of entertaining no-budget films designed especially for the web. Marco Tempest is a magician who has created a fresh persona quite different from David Blaine and Cris Angel. He presents his tricks as entertaining puzzles which he’ll occasionally let you in on, and his YouTube channel contains dozens of clips made for international television and the Microsoft Network in Japan. In his most popular creations, the PhoneCan Magic series (also available as free videopodcasts on iTunes), Tempest creates short, 90 second or so visual illusions which are filmed entirely on his cell phone and which do not feature any camera tricks or editing. He occasionally posts “exposed” clips which detail how the effects are done. Below is one entitled “The Kiss.”
… Read the rest
Sunday, October 29th, 2006
Over at Ain’t it Cool News Moriaty has up a detailed review of David Lynch’s Inland Empire, which the filmmaker is reportedly self-distributing later this year. I missed it at the New York Film Festival and while I heard mixed, Moriaty’s review really got me psyched. But before the review, he relates this anecdote of Lynch using his apartment as an impromptu location a couple of years ago, an evening that yielded about 15 seconds of footage in the finished film:
“They told me that they’d be shooting something for Lynch’s website, a short film. I was shocked to see that all they had with them was DV equipment. One of my favorite things about Lynch has traditionally been the lush cinematography of his films. Altogether, Lynch had about four people with him, along with Dern and a young Polish actress who seemed to speak very little English. My roommate, Henchman Mongo, had just moved out, and Mrs. Moriarty and I were in the process of changing everything in the apartment, so one of the bedrooms was empty. That allowed Lynch to set it up any way he wanted. He had the Polish actress lay on the floor of the room, smoking, while Dern sat with her back against the wall. Altogether, they probably took two hours to work a scene, and at the end of it, Lynch carried his own equipment back out to the car. Jeremy told me that he had no idea if the footage would be used in anything, or if it would just be an experiment in the format for Lynch, but either way, they thanked me. A few weeks later, signed DVD copies of THE SHORT FILMS OF DAVID LYNCH and ERASERHEAD showed up at my door as a thank you.”
… Read the rest
Sunday, October 29th, 2006
I don’t know why I’m mentioning this now — we meant to run a blurb in the Summer issue but forgot — but those little numbers that sit next to the different people in our 25 New Faces feature each year… they’re just graphic elements. They don’t mean anything. They let you know we know how to count. We love all of our 25 equally. So filmmakers, enough with the “#7 on Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces!” on your C.V.’s!… Read the rest
Sunday, October 29th, 2006
While out at the Film Independent Filmmaker Conference, which I’ll write more about hopefully later today, I sat down with filmmaker Lance Weiler and learned more about his very impressive model for self-distributing and marketing his independent films. One of his achievements is to simply get as an indie the kind of attention from the big box retailers that studios are used to getting when their videos street.
Today, for example Best Buy offers a $5 discount on a package of Weiler’s two films, The Last Broadcast and Head Trauma.
Here’s a short piece from Indie Features 06 that gives more detail:
HEAD TRAUMA is now available on netflix for rent. Over the next few weeks HT will be rolling out to more stores and rental outlets.
Starting Oct. 29th through Nov. 11th, Best Buy will be offering an exclusive promotion. Customers who purchase both HEAD TRAUMA and my first feature THE LAST BROADCAST will receive $5 off the final purchase price.
With brick and mortar retail stores forced to limit the amount of indie DVDs they can carry, this promotion shows a confidence in the films by a major chain. If sales of The Last Broadcast and Head Trauma live up to expectations, they could pave the way to more DVDs from independent filmmakers sharing shelf-space with leading studio releases.
… Read the rest
Saturday, October 28th, 2006
While SAW 3 slays at the box office this weekend, check out this excellent dialogue between Scott Tobias and Noel Murray over at The Onion‘s A.V. Club on contemporary horror. Here’s an excerpt from Tobias’s comments:
So where is horror going? It seems to me that the genre has hit a crisis point creatively: J-horror is dying off, Hollywood is running out of ’70s and ’80s horror staples to remake, and surely at some point, the Saw and Final Destination franchises will lose their novelty. (Though maybe I’m giving audiences too much credit on that last one.) At the same time, the genre feels more liberated than ever to go in any direction it pleases. With a studio like Lions Gate willing to throw its weight behind The Devil’s Rejects, Hostel, and other unsavory fare, there really doesn’t seem to be any limits on the dark, subversive places a horror film can take us. It worries me when thoughtless splatter films open to great success, while a witty crowd-pleaser like Slither gathers respectful reviews but no audience. If studios feel that regurgitating the same formulas is the surest and easiest route to success, there’s nothing to stop them from churning those films out. I worry, too, that there are no great horror auteurs emerging from the pack; outside of Zombie, who I believe is a major (though dangerous) talent, there are no Romeros, Carpenters, or Argentos that we can count on to put their distinctive stamps on cinema and carry their genre to new places. And yet I remain optimistic, because good, thoughtful horror films keep getting turned out one way or another, whether they slip through the studio system, find backing from the rogues at a major-mini like Lions Gate, or get imported from overseas like Shaun Of The Dead or The Descent.
… Read the rest
Saturday, October 28th, 2006
A colleague who programs for a regional film festival forwarded this link to screenwriter William Martell’s blog in which he launches a lengthy broadside against the purity of film festivals.
An excerpt:
You probably think of film festivals as some sort of important institution – a cultural event designed to select the very best motion pictures and give them the rewards they so rightly deserve. A place where commerce doesn’t matter, and artistic expression is worshiped. A place where people only care about the quality of the film, and only the best films are screened.
Bullshit.
Film festivals are about money and fame. The idea that it’s all about the art is as much of a scam as the idea that the Best Picture Oscar always goes to the very best picture… and trade adverts or backroom deals or DVDs sent to every member of the Academy have nothing to do with what film wins.
My friend said that if the reading is uncomfortable that’s because many of Martell’s observations are true. I don’t know about this. I think his formulation of the Sanctified Film Festival is a bit of a straw man, but his comments about Raindance, Ft. Lauderdale, and a certain festival in Colorado are certainly entertaining.… Read the rest
Sunday, October 22nd, 2006
I came across journalism student Clementine Gallot’s blog Franco American after noticing a comment she posted to one of my postings on Gaspar Noe, below. Gallot posts in French and in English and here she is, excerpted, on Noe’s screening of his short We Fuck Alone to a group of NYU students:
…Noe’s 23-minute piece features a couple having sex on television and a young girl masturbating to a teddy bear while a punk jerks off to an inflatable doll. Shot with a small DV camera between Los Angeles and New York, it employs strobes and the soundtrack of a heartbeat and a crying baby — a few of his regular features. Student reaction was divided; some called it boring, but Noe explained that he enjoys working with non-professional actors and was basically performing an experiment.
“I tried to see how much people can take — what their physical reaction to the screen will be,” he said. “Strangely,” he noted, “there is no pornographic masterpiece.” A few other students, encouraged by the film, showed a bizarre interest for the director’s sex life. “I masturbated a lot as a teenager, sometimes smoking joints and watching films,” he confessed, shrugging….
With his shaved head and teenage manners, the filmmaker seems to not care about the visceral impact of his films on the audience. When The Reeler asked him about the way he depicts violence, he simply said: “It exists, so why not show it?”
So, is it black humor? “Some people think I’m doing something wrong, but they should try not to take my films so seriously,” Noe said.
Like Larry Clark, Noe is a skilled technician who manipulates explosive material without carrying a real discourse but, rather, by having an intuitive relation to cinema. Inspired mostly by his life and obsessions, he predicted, “I won’t make that many movies in my life. … I want to carry on by doing a documentary at some point, and now I’m focusing on my Tokyo project,” a “tripping” movie which will be seen from the point of view of a hallucinating mind.
A student
… Read the rest
