HAWK IS DYING MONEY BACK GUARANTEE

By Scott Macaulay

Ted Hope, who produced Julian Goldberger’s The Hawk is Dying with Jeff Levy-Hinte and Mary Jane Skalski, sent the below email out to his personal list regarding the film’s opening this Friday at the Cinema Village in New York. In it, he makes a bold and honest offer that he decided to open up to readers of this blog. I’m glad he did. In addition to his no-risk offer to see a provocative film that finds a new visual language to apply towards cinematic narrative, Hope makes a great argument. I especially was struck by his equation of today’s specialty film scene with the stuffy French “cinema of quality,” the films that the French New Wave of Godard, Truffaut and Rivette rebelled against.

Hope’s email:

Here in NYC it’s New Directors/New Films time again. I love this series. And it’s an interesting coincidence that this Friday, March 30th, THE HAWK IS DYING is opening at Cinema Village. Many years back at ND/NF I saw an incredible film called TRANS. It was made for a penny with non-actors and a very strong sense of place and individual style. I figured it had an audience of me and a few others, but I approached the director and told him how impressed I was, and how if he ever wanted to do something slightly more conventional, with an actual scripted narrative, I would love to help him out. The director of TRANS is Julian Goldberger, and THE HAWK IS DYING is his film that came out of that initial conversation.

We premiered THE HAWK IS DYING at Sundance in 2006. It was the only Sundance film to go to Cannes where a revised cut (the one you will see in the theaters) screened to great response in Directors Fortnight. The film captures a tour de force performance by Paul Giamatti, raw and incredibly human. Julian’s expressionistic style is so well suited to Harry Crews’ tale (his first novel to make it to the screen) — both are reinvented in the process. Ten years ago this would be a film celebrated by the entire

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RECURRING TRAUMA

By Scott Macaulay

In Philadelphia this weekend Lance Weiler is staging an innovative event based around his movie Head Trauma. Weiler describes it as a “collision of movies, music and gaming — a new cinematic experience.” After its premiere this Saturday, the event will travel to London, New York and other cities.

More on the event:

WHAT:
Street parking and two parking garages in walking distance

HOW MUCH:
$14 for all seats – seating is on a first come first serve basis

FOR MORE INFO:
Show info and advance tickets and click here for more info on the movie.

And for a little bit more on the concept behind the event, here’s more from the press release:

The event consists of three core elements. 1. A screening of HEAD TRAUMA with a live soundtrack performance by Bardo Pond, Espers, Fern Knight, Marshal Allen (Sun Ra), Steve Garvey (Buzzcocks) and others.

The music is mixed live with the dialog and sound effects tracks from the film to create a new alternate soundtrack. 2. Various props and sets from the film are setup on stage and certain characters from the film will emerge from the audience. 3. During the course of the film a phone number appears on screen. When viewers call the number they begin a game that will last through the film and follow them home.

They receive a number of cryptic clues as they are asked to solve a series of riddles. The interaction involves phone calls and text messages from the characters of HEAD TRAUMA that will lead viewers to hidden clues spread across the Internet.

“We’re trying to change the cinematic experience. We want to take the concept of narrative storytelling and move it across multiple devices and screens, so it is engaging the audience in new and different ways. People have been calling it a cinema ARG and the response to the initial screenings has been amazing. Not to mention I’m always looking for new ways to scare the audience.” Says HEAD TRAUMA creator Lance Weiler.

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ONION RINGS

By Admin

For years, “The Onion” has presented hilarious new takes on the week’s news, usually putting its punch line in its headline. This week featured an article entitled “Anna Nicole Smith Finally Reaches Target Weight.” As usual, the head line is succinct,witty and undeniably cruel. Now The Onion joins the growing industry of televised fake news with their internet-based “Onion News Network.” In their publicity plug, The Onion explains how they have “set the standard for globe-encompassing 24-hour television news since it was founded in December, 1892. The network boasts channels in 171 languages and can be viewed in 4.2 billion households in 811 countries.”

Immigration: The Human Cost… Read the rest

ON THE MARK

By Scott Macaulay

In the current New Yorker, David Denby reviews Shooter and articulates a possible new action movie formula for the post-BushCo age:

On the surface, the movie offers liberal ideological sentiments: it condemns covert overseas operations controlled by oil interests; it’s angry at the higher-ups who escaped blame for Abu Ghraib; it exhibits a clear distaste for the person and values of Dick Cheney. But it places these sentiments within a matrix of gun culture and lonely-man-of-honor myths. Swagger is the latest incarnation of Rambo, the anti-government crazy. The filmmakers may be trying to appeal both to liberals and to the Pat Buchanan conservatives who hate big government and multinational corporations and want American warriors to stay home. The clash of political currents suggests the degree of confusion roiling Hollywood at the moment. How do moviemakers find military heroes in the midst of an unpopular overseas war?

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BEFORE THE FALL

By Scott Macaulay

Over at Alternet, Joshua Holland interviews James Scurlock, director of Maxed Out, a documentary on debt and the debt industry in America. Completed in 2006 when it made the festival rounds and now available on Netflix, the pic is unfortunately all too timely given the current collapse of the sub-prime lending market.

Here’s Scurlock from the interview:

When I started the project a lot of people didn’t even know what bankruptcy reform was, but most do now. A few weeks ago, nobody knew what “subprime” meant and now because of this whole mortgage fiasco I think everyone knows what that means. So here we are, two years after the start of the project and everything discussed in the film and the book has gotten worse. As we talked to people for the film, it became pretty obvious that things were just totally out of control and there was this sense that at some point the chickens are coming home to roost and that’s largely what’s been happening. I’m not gloating about that — it’s really tragic.

But my sense — and I’ve talked to a lot of people since the project’s been done — is that the really big system hits are yet to come. There are a lot of bad mortgages out there; there are a lot of these “liar loan” mortgages out there; there are a lot of credit cards and people used to paying off their bills by refinancing their houses every year.

And, later, he discusses how the credit industry has changed in America:

It’s because it’s gone from a business based on a conservative business model where you were loaning to people who could safely pay you back and you weren’t making a ton of money — just a bit on the spread — so you had to look at all your risks very, very carefully in order to make money. That model is now history, and the new one is that you charge a huge amount of fees, and a very high rate of interest. So the trick is actually getting people who

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WOULD THE REAL STANLEY KUBRICK PLEASE STAND UP?

By Admin

On Friday I interviewed Brian Cook, the director of Color Me Kubrick, the new movie about Stanley Kubrick‘s impersonator, Alan Conway. Cook’s film is based on a true story, and there is an interesting little documentary about Conway which I’ve embedded below (the Italian subtitles were not my idea…)

And while we’re on the subject of not Stanley Kubrick, I thought I might as well throw in this collection of bloopers as a bonus offering.

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SCARY TIMES

By Admin

In a LA Times.com interview, horror master Wes Craven talks with Deborah Netburn on the politics of horror. The political slant of his new remake of The Hills Have Eyes 2 is almost too obvious for comment. The all-American family of his 1977 original The Hills Have Eyes and its 2006 remake –- and the bikers in his slap-dash 1985 The Hills Have Eyes 2 – have been replaced by National Guard trainees, who ultimately will be deployed in Iraq. (Of course, the family in the original may be too close for Craven, since he wrote this remake with his son Jonathan.)

Latimes.com: You have an amazing legacy of figuring out exactly what people are scared of at a given moment in time. What do you think is scary today?
WC: The current administration. That’s the standard answer now. Unfortunately I’m not even joking. But the basic themes of what is scary have always been the same. A murderous rage that builds up in a family, a neighborhood or a nation, those are things I think are scary.

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VERHOEVEN FROM ACROSS THE COUCH

By Scott Macaulay

Hot off the servers, here’s Jamie Stuart’s not-to-be-missed newest creation which again blurs genres (here between the short film, the TV entertainment magazine show and the celebrity interview) to, this time, particularly mind-warping effect.

Director Paul Verhoeven has fried a lot of brains in his cinematic lifetime, and his new film, Black Book, is being considered as one of his best. To interview him, Stuart put away his knit cap and one-ups the master of free-floating perversity by handing the reigns to a chirpy and obscenely animated E!-style news chick. Check it out by clicking here.… Read the rest

BROWN BAGGING IT

By Scott Macaulay

The Times of London runs a sobering story from a Hollywood producer who can’t get a film made. In “Will I Ever Eat Lunch in This Town Again?” “Mr. X” discusses the travails of producing movies within the system.

Here’s how he begins:

Ostensibly, I produce movies for a living. The most recent movie I had a hand in producing won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Pretty heady stuff, to be sure. The reality, though, is slightly less fulfilling. We shot that film two years ago and, since then, I’ve produced nothing. Zilch. Not a frame of film, a byte of sound, a kernel of popcorn.

How, you may ask, does one survive in the film business without actually making any movies? Or, more relevantly, what the hell have I been doing for the past two years? Good question. Here’s the answer, which is really a guide for those of you looking either to become a producer or waste your time completely. The two are often indistinguishable.

What follows is a blow-by-blow account of the development of his latest project, a thriller set on the Mexican border with an acclaimed African-American actor set in the lead. “Mr. X” takes us through the endless development process, the vexing search for a director, and the crushing apathy of an industry only looking for a sure thing.

With a good project with seemingly saleable elements, “Mr. X” finds himself in a precarious position:

People in the industry were beginning to wonder – what was I working on? Calls were going unreturned. I developed the unmistakable stench of desperation. My wife started leaving the mortgage payment notices (and her shopping receipts) on my bedside table.

A producer friend once told me: “You’re either making a movie or you’re not. Everything else is just talk.” (He hasn’t worked in five years, but that’s another story.)

I clearly wasn’t making a movie. What I was doing was bleeding money. I had rung up a profoundly large credit card bill (wooing the various talents), ludicrously high legal fees (negotiating everyone’s deals) and astounding costs for therapy

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DON’T JUDGE THE MOVIE BY ITS POSTER

By Scott Macaulay

After earning the ire of both the MPAA and alarmed motorists with its unapproved billboard campaign for the upcoming Elisha Cuthbert torture pic Captivity, After Dark Releasing is preparing to court further controversy with its campaign for Wristcutters, a very good film that deals, in part, with suicide.

Here’s Gregg Goldstein in The Hollywood Reporter:

Fifteen suicide prevention groups are dead set against After Dark Films’ proposed campaign for the comedy Wristcutters: A Love Story, which is set to bill itself with signs showing people killing themselves.

After Dark Films co-owner Courtney Solomon said late Friday that while the film’s promotion may feature images of people jumping off a bridge, electrocuting and hanging themselves, they would be displayed as traffic-style stop or yield signs with a barring-style circle and line over the illustrations, along with hearts to reference the film’s romantic story line. He said the campaign may change before its mid-July rollout because of the outcry.

Solomon intends to offer screenings or DVDs of the film to concerned organizations in the next few weeks, then discuss the campaign with them and ask for their input. “The movie takes place in purgatory, and its message is that love is better than suicide,” he said, adding that the film may even help prevent suicide. “Our job is to get people into the theater in a way that’s accessible to them. There are many different ways to skin a cat. God forbid someone was considering committing suicide. This film may change their opinion.”

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