Archive for October, 2006
Friday, October 20th, 2006
Ted Hope was honored tonight out at the Hamptons International Film Festival with its annual Hamptons/Indiewire Industry Toast. The producer of over 50 movies (and an old and good friend), Hope was given this mid-career honor for producing a body of work that, so far, includes films by, among many others, Ang Lee, Nicole Holofcener, Michel Gondry, Ed Burns, Hal Hartley, and Todd Solondz; the creation of pioneering production companies (Good Machine and now This is That); leading several industry initiatives, including the indie battle against the MPAA screener ban; and, as James Schamus quite eloquently summarized at the evening’s end, years spent mentoring, developing the careers of and bringing together so many of us in the independent community.
But before James’s moving tribute there was plenty of good humor as the various speakers tried to figure out on what side of the “toast/”roast” divide to place themselves. Rosie Perez emcee’d and opened with a tale of first hearing Ted (his nasal twang was much parodied this evening) before meeting him on a set one day. Producer Ross Katz, who began his career at Good Machine, remembered boss Ted “taking him out for a slice” after a grueling day at the office. Todd Solondz had some great one-liners, John Waters, Anne Carey, Anthony Bregman and Diana Victor also spoke, and Ang Lee and Hal Hartley sent their respects in the form of a video message from the set in China and a short film made in Berlin, respectively. And before he got to the heartfelt stuff (“I owe more to Ted than anyone else here does,” he began), James brought the house down by reading a very, very funny set of fictitious emails that my paraphrasing couldn’t begin to do justice to.
It was great to hear Indiewire’s Eugene Hernandez cite Ted’s lacerating 1995 essay “Indie Film is Dead… Long Live Indie Film,” (along with James’s bemused counterpoint) which both appeared in Filmmaker as providing the impetus for him to start Indiewire. I owe Ted much thanks too for not only launching me in the producing business but also for … Read the rest
Wednesday, October 18th, 2006
Thought I’d congratulate Brady Hall who won the Best Feature at the Northwest Film Forum’s Local Sightings festival last week for his feature June and July. I was a judge along with John Vanco of the IFC Center, Charlie Humphrey of Pittsburgh Filmmakers and Lane Kneedler of the AFI Festival.
The film is a somewhat unclassifiable drama about a pair of fraternal twins living in the Pacific Northwest as it mixes science fiction elements with what might otherwise be a small-scale indie relationship movie. Here’s the NWFF’s catalog on the film:
Written and directed by Seattle filmmaker Brady Hall (POLERCHRIST, JERKBEAST), JUNE & JULY turns the 20-something indie film formula on its ear. Lifelong residents of a depressed small town, fraternal twins June (Bernadette Culvo) and July Shauer (Nathan Williams) are inseparable. Sprung into action by the death of their mother, June hatches a plan to leave her brother and the dull rural life, in search of adventure and excitement in the big city. July, unaware of June’s plans, continues to enjoy the simplicity his quaint town has to offer. Before announcing her departure, a house party fight exposes June?s mysterious supernatural physiology. While searching for the link between her powers and her past, June discovers an old photograph that leads the pair on a road trip that unravels the secrets of their family and its genetic history. Injecting drama with humor and even a bit of science fiction, JUNE & JULY is a bittersweet portrait of an unusual pair of siblings and the story of their divergent paths. Great music supports this beautifully lensed exploration of an enigmatic family history, in what can only be called a unique vision from our region.
We also gave the short film prize to What’s in the Barn,, by Mike Corrigan, Travis Hibbner, Derrick King and Gary McLeod for their striking and deliberate gothic tale.
At the event the NWFF also announced its next “Start to Finish” grant, a prize of production support that last went to Rob Devor’s Police Beat. This year the prize is going to David Russo for … Read the rest
Wednesday, October 18th, 2006
Film scholar David Bordwell has a blog and it’s always worth checking out for his investigations into the art and industry of moviemaking. Here’s an excerpt from a piece on the Scorsese’s The Departed. After winding through a very interesting comparison of this film’s narrative resolution and the Hong Kong original’s, he discusses Scorsese’s editing style:
The Departed has calmed Scorsese’s urge to track a bit, but that’s balanced by its over 3200 cuts. The result is an average shot length (ASL) of about 2.7 seconds. Not unusual for an action picture nowadays, but consider where Scorsese started by conning these ASLs:
Mean Streets 7.7 seconds
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore 8.0 seconds
Taxi Driver 7.3 seconds
King of Comedy 7.7 seconds
Gangs of New York 6.7 seconds
The Aviator 3.6 seconds
Like his contemporaries, Scorsese has succumbed to the fast-cut, hyper-close style that has made our movies so pictorially routine, however well-suited they may be for display on TV monitors and computer screens and iPods. In 1990 he seems to have realized that he needed to pick up the pace. Of GoodFellas (ASL 6.7 seconds) he remarked: “I guess the main thing that’s happened in the past ten years is that the scenes [shots] have to be quicker and shorter. [GoodFellas is sort of my version of MTV. . . but even that’s old-fashioned” (The Way Hollywood Tells It, p. 152). (For more on measuring ASLs, see the Cinemetrics site.)
… Read the rest
Wednesday, October 18th, 2006
Ben Fritz and Phil Gallo have an article in Variety this week titled “Biz’s share scares” that details the games the major entertainment congolomerates are beginning to enter into with the various media-sharing companies. In short, Universal Music has launched a copyright infringment lawsuit against Grouper Networks, which runs the media-sharing site Bolt.com. The two twists in the article are that Grouper is owned by Universal-rival Sony, which bought the network this summer, and that Universal Music recently signed a revenue-sharing deal with YouTube, the largest of the video-sharing sites.
Here’s the key passage in the article:
The two suits were filed just a week after UMG signed a deal with YouTube to share revenue from advertising that appears on a Web page when U Music works are being played on the No. 1 video site. Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion the same day that several major labels announced their deals with Google Video and YouTube.
Grouper and Bolt are both relatively small video sites with significantly less traffic and content than players such as MySpace Videos, Yahoo Video and Break.com. Nonetheless, UMG said both sites had significant copyright infringement and encouraged users to further violate copyright laws. UMG may hope to use them as examples to pressure bigger Netcos into signing deals.
The question then becomes, what mechanism or accounting system exists to reward individual copyright holders from the revenue “shared” with Universal by YouTube? Do artists signed to Universal see (or do their balance statements reflect) this income? And what about all the other artists whose video is being shared on YouTube and other sites? If there’s no way of accounting for the traffic generated by a Universal artist, is Universal then sharing in the revenue generated by the material produced by non-Universal artists on YouTube who lack a threatening corporate giant in their corner?… Read the rest
Wednesday, October 18th, 2006
Doug Block’s doc 51 Birch Street opens this week at the Cinema Village in New York.
Here’s what Paul Harrill at Self-Reliant Film had to say about it:
The film is being billed, not incorrectly, as a documentary mystery: Just a few months after Doug’s mother dies, Doug’s father suddenly announces that he’s engaged to his former secretary. It’s not long before Doug finds himself at their wedding, awkwardly toasting the new couple. At the reception his father, the groom, is a different man. What’s the story?
Was his father unfaithful? Was his parents’ seemingly happy marriage a sham? Doug starts asking questions and the more the detective digs, the more uncertain he is he wants to know the truth.
On one level, 51 Birch Street is a well-made, if somewhat conventional, autobiographical documentary. Block’s conflicts with his father reminded me of Alan Berliner’s Nobody’s Business and, though it’s unfair to compare the two, I do wish that 51 Birch Street had some more stylistic flair. The visuals rarely transcend the plain, home-movie look so common to video, and Block’s voice-over sometimes explains more than is necessary.
But the movie is about looking beneath the surface, and on that meaningful score 51 Birch Street succeeds. Block shows us a seemingly stable marriage, then peels back layer after layer until he discovers the heartbreaking truths of two unfulfilled lives and the relationship they both outlived. Implicit throughout is a critique of blind allegiance to “family values”: What good is a golden-anniversary marriage, if it’s stale, maybe even dead, at its core? The comparison to Updike (as at least one reviewer has made) is apt: This couple could have lived at 51 Birch Street. Or in your suburban neighborhood. Or maybe in your own home.
51 Birch Street makes an impact. I’ve thought about it every day since I saw it well over a week ago.
… Read the rest
Tuesday, October 17th, 2006
An Andy Warhol Braniff Airlines commericial from the 1970s:
… Read the rest
Tuesday, October 17th, 2006
The latest configuration of the Cleveland rock band Pere Ubu has a new album out, Why I Hate Women, and here’s frontman David Thomas in this month’s The Wire on the real avant garde:
“In the early 70s,” he says, “the evolution of rock was very, very, very obvious. Analogue synthesizers and concrete sound was entering into the music. Various people had various strategies, and it wasn’t one thing. It was stuido techniques and other things. All of it, to us, was coming to this juncture. And it was very obvious to us that this was what rock music was supposed to be, to make use of this powefull, relatively new narrative voice. That’s why I’ve always said that we are in the mainstream. It’s people like Eminem or Britney Spears who are the weird experimentalists. They are avant garde. They are dealing with weird alternative worlds. If you put our view of the human condition alongside Britney Spears’s, one of them is extremely experimental and weird, and it’s Ms Spears’.”
Thanks to The Existence Machine for the quote.… Read the rest
Tuesday, October 17th, 2006
Over at his blog Sit Down Man, You’re a Bloody Tragedy,, Owen Hatherley writes about Todd Haynes’s Safe and recognizes its foreshadowing of our contemporary urban situation:
From it’s opening sex scene onwards- the grim treadmill behind the neon-lit Southern California cityscape of the generic erotic thriller- Todd Haynes’ Safe is a depiction of the most important city of the early 1990s. The edge of apocalypse you can hear in the synth whines of Dr Dre’s The Chronic, the fire and brimstone of Amerikkka’s Most Wanted, Mike Davis’ City of Quartz and of course the LA Riots: in all this the dream and the nightmare coalesces so that one is indistinguishable from the other.
Safe is the edge of hysteria in Joan Didion’s neurasthenic LA teased out and emphasised to the point of total psychosis, which shouldn’t obscure the fact of how prevalent its mysterious ‘environmental illness’ has become. A wave of allergies seems to be sweeping through the US and Europe, their indiscriminate gluttony is overdiscussed compared to the fetish for the inorganic, the ‘homemakers’ with intolerances (what a wonderful phrase!) to lactose, wheat, dairy, pesticides, carpets…on one level one shouldn’t complain about this (seeing as my own immune system is not enturely functional, it’s nice to be able to get food in Sainsbury’s that won’t have unpleasant consequences) as it represents perhaps some sort of protest. Such as for the inmate in the self-help camp of Safe who declares she’d like to ‘shoot in the head all the people that made me like this’. Hence, for all his didain for ‘girly men’, the Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger has to make the right gestures towards environmentalism and organic farming…
The angels of Los Angeles
Are tired out with smiling. Desperately
Behind the fruit stalls of an evening
They buy little bottles
Containing sex odours.
Brecht, Hollywood Elegies
A subtext is that as the car becomes more and more dominant, as the out of town shopping centres proliferate, and as the service industry and the office take up an ever greater share of employment, we are all Californians
… Read the rest
Tuesday, October 17th, 2006
Nick Knight’s fantastic art/fashion/culture website SHOWstudio launched a new project today: a video diary by Asia Argento, updated three times daily. Titled “Don’t Bother to Knock,” the series is running with five entries so far in which the director and actress talks about travel (she is promoting a film), freaks (Todd Browning’s and others), burn care and more.
From the site:
As one of the Bal Masqué’s twelve muses –chosen by Maison Martin Margiela to model their silver flower dress at the grand event on the 24th October- controversial actress/director Asia Argento has kindly agreed to also lend her cinematic skills to SHOWstudio for a diary project that she has named ‘Don’t Bother To Knock’. Over ten days, from tomorrrow, 17 October, until the 25th of this month, Asia will document her daily life whilst she is over here promoting her new film via series of intimate video entries. Starting from 12:00hrs (UK time) tomorrow, these will be published three times per day: at noon, 6pm and midnight, so log on thrice daily to keep up!
The videos are candid, intimate and quite hypnotic. Check them out through the 25th.… Read the rest
Tuesday, October 17th, 2006
There’s a film festival this weekend taking place at a decadent playground where the idle rich enact scenes of ritual perversion. And for those who won’t be heading out to the Hamptons Film Festival, there’s Cinekink, which bills itself as the “true alternative film festival.” The fest opens tonight at Bacchus with a live performance by the Wet Spots and then bases itself at the Anthology Film Archives for its screenings and panels.
Highlights include a panel discussion on Saturday, October 21st at 4:30pm entitled “The State of Smut,” which features NYC filmmakers Audacia Ray/Waking Vixen Productions, Tony Comstock/Comstock Films, Tony DiMarco/Lucas Entertainment, Joe Gallant/Black Mirror Productions and Candida Royalle/Femme Productions.
From the press release:
No longer the hub of porn production it was in the 1970s, New York City has become a haven for filmmakers who are forging new paths in adult entertainment. A panel of NYC-based directors will discuss what it is like working in this sector of the film business, also considering whether the city itself inspires a unique approach to the subject matter and whether the movies made locally are all that different from those produced in “Porn Valley.” Questions from the audience will be encouraged and film clips will be included in the presentation.
And then there’s work by husband and wife filmmakers Usama Alshaibi and Kristie Alshaibi. Usama, whose doc Nice Bombs won the Best Documentary Prize at the Chicago Underground Film Festival this year, screens The Amateurs, a doc about a trio of struggling amateur pornographers, as well as a couple of shorts. Kristie, who also goes under the performance name of Echo Transgression, will be showing Other People’s Mirrors (pictured), in which she stars with filmmaker Nick Zedd. Cinekink founder Lisa Vandever tells me that both are “insightful in their transgressions.” And on Saturday night there’s O: The Power of Submission, veteran hardcore director Ernest Greene’s take on Pauline Reage’s classic book featuring Nina Hartley.
Over at The Reeler, Stu VanAirsdale has more of a preview. Here he talks with Vandever about the challenges of running the … Read the rest
