NEW DAVID BYRNE/BRIAN ENO RECORD

By Scott Macaulay

Announced at here. Click on the link to sign up for a free track on August 4. Download drops on 8/18. There’s an announcement video that which I previously had pasted here, but it annoyingly self-starts every time the page loads, so I took it down. You can find it at the site.… Read the rest

FIRST TRAILER FOR OLIVER STONE’S W

By Scott Macaulay

I was initially a little skeptical that Stone could come up with a movie about George Bush that might resonate in the dog days of his presidency, when pretty much everyone just wishes he would hurry up and get the hell out of here. But, I got a kick of this cheeky and ironic first trailer and am hoping that it’s representative of the tone of the final movie.

… Read the rest

CATCHING UP WITH THE LONG TAIL

By Scott Macaulay

I went on vacation for a couple of weeks (hence the diminished blog posts) just as the online debate over Anita Elberse’s article in Harvard Business Review Online appeared. In case you are interested in the concept of the Long Tail and you haven’t read this piece, I recommend that you click on the link above and check it out. After you finish it you can check out Chris Anderson’s response and Elberse’s response to him. And if you just want a taste of the discussion, you can go to Brian Newman’s short and helpful post on the article, in which he summarizes some of its conclusions. An excerpt from Newman:

Elberse points out some very fascinating things about the nature of long-tail business, and while seemingly intuitive in retrospect, it’s great to have some data to back this up. First, she proves that yes, a hit is still a hit and that hits sell a lot more than niche titles. She also shows that this trend is growing. Importantly, however, she identifies two other trends – from 2000 to 2005 sales of the most obscure titles doubled their sales, but the number of titles that didn’t sell a single copy quadrupled. In short, more content is entering the marketplace (thanks, digital, thanks a lot) but not all of it is going to get purchased just because it is available. So, your small title won’t necessarily gain a huge audience just because it’s on every platform available, but you can expect a better marketplace than not to long ago. Those things with some value, however, are seeing an increase in sales due to digital availability. This is especially true on the thinner part of the tail. As Elberse says, “When I differentiate between artists on smaller, independent labels and those on major labels, I find that the former gain some market share at the tail end of the curve.” Clearly, more research is needed on the long end of the tail, but there is a marked increase in activity that you don’t see at the middle end –

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DEPRESSED ABOUT FIGHT CLUB

By Scott Macaulay

At the Scanners blog, Jim Emerson has a great look back at David Fincher’s Fight Club, viewing it through the personal lens of depression.

An excerpt:

One of the (many) reasons I probably connect so strongly with David Fincher’s “Fight Club” (1999) is that, by capturing clinical depression more accurately than any other movie I’ve ever seen (though Laurent Cantet’s “Time Out” and Eric Steel’s “The Bridge” delve mighty deep into that abyss), it helped shake me out of the grips of a depression that was sucking me down at the time. I was the only person in the theater convulsed with laughter from beginning to end, because it was liberating, exhilarating, to see the truth of my own inner experience reflected back at me in its funhouse mirror. I recognized myself in the movie, relished the psychological acuteness of what I was seeing, felt its black absurdity resonate in my poor, chemically imbalanced noggin. From the very first images deep inside the human brain, I felt it could not be about anything else, even though I didn’t know where it was going to go from there.

It’s a long post that winds through a discussion of Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man, Taxi Driver, Errol Morris and Abu Ghraib, bad dreams, American Beauty, and the narcissistic essence of macho. Recommended.… Read the rest

WILD COMBINATION SCORES DEAL

By Scott Macaulay

Indiewire reports that Filmmaker 25 New Face director Matt Wolf has just signed a deal with Plexifilm for his Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell. The film will open at the IFC Center on September 26 and will appear on the Plexifilm DVD label.… Read the rest

BENH, AGAIN

By Scott Macaulay

Over at his Cinema Echo Chamber, Brandon Harris picks up where his “25 New Faces” profile of Benh Zeitlin (photographed here by Richard Koek) left off with this wide-ranging interview. Here Zeitlin talks about the accident he suffered while on his way to the film’s premiere.

CEC: Your film won a shorts prize at SXSW – sadly, you we’re hospitalized just prior due to an auto accident, correct? How is your recovery going?

Zeitlin: The accident happened days after finishing a year and half of breathing Glory at Sea around the clock, so it was kind of a mandatory vacation, Not one I’ve particularly appreciated. I just added a massive geezer-led hospital prison break to my next film, which is certainly inspired my experience in our health care system. But all in all considering the pretzel of metal they pried me out of I’m lucky to be able to wiggle my toes, and its certainly seeming like I’ll make a full recovery down the line. Also, I’m happy to be living proof that watching movies, drinking whiskey, and making love can all be done without the use of ones right leg.

… Read the rest

STRETCHED OUT AND TWISTED

By Scott Macaulay

I normally hate effects-heavy videos like this… but this one is great: “Corporate Cannibal,” from the new Grace Jones record, directed by Nick Hooker. An analysis by Steven Shaviro is here. (Hat tip: GreenCine.)

… Read the rest

“THE INGLORIOUS BASTARDS”

By Jason Guerrasio

With word that Quentin Tarantino has FINALLY begun work on a remake of Italian director Enzo G. Castellari’s EuroCult classic The Inglorious Bastards, Severin Films has put together a remastered three-disc release of the original, the first time it’s been available in the States (though there have been numerous incarnations — you may recall Deadly Mission and G.I. Bro).

An homage to war films before it like The Dirty Dozen, Kelly’s Heroes and Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron but with a little more edge and a Spagheti Western feel (not to mention one of the best film titles ever created), Bo Svenson and Blaxploitation icon Fred “The Hammer” Williamson star as part of a rag-tag group of U.S. military convicts who are sent off to prison until an air raid gives them the opportunity to escape. But in their trek to freedom in Switzerland they find themselves thrust back into the war when they agree to take on a mission to hijack a train.

All the testosterone-filled ’70s war film touchstones are there — outcasts and loose canons who turn out to be the best solders America has, a no-way-out finale and violence in slo-mo.

I mean, the tagline says it all: “Whatever the Dirty Dozen did, THEY DO IT DIRTIER!”

Features include Tarantino interviewing Castellari, which has a fun back-and-forth on Taratino’s hopes for the remake and Castellari explains how he had to get creative in some of the scenes after the Italian government confiscated all the guns in the production in fear that they would get into the hands of the Red Brigades (what they would do with prop guns is anyone’s guess). There’s also a featurette on the making of the film that includes all the principles and another where Castellari goes back to some of the memorable locations from the film (like the waterfall where the men come across a group of naked, gun-toting, female Nazis). The third disc only has the film’s soundtrack.

In stores this week, the 3-disc goes for $29.95, and the single disc is available for $19.95.

This is an … Read the rest

HBO’S NY INT’L LATINO FEST DISPATCH

By Admin

The 9th Annual New York International Latino Film Festival got underway this week in Midtown Manhattan with a screening of Neil Abrahamson’s American Son, perhaps one of the most critically lauded films from this year’s edition of Sundance that remains without an American distributor.

The festival is known for its wild parties, but I’ve yet to get to any – the trek from Bed-Stuy to Midtown has proved too much each night so far. Like most ethnic niche fests, the programming is mixed bag. With titles from top shelf fests that may or may not have already seen theaters (Ramin Bahrani’s Chop Shop, tonight at 9:30pm) and star studded headliners (John Leguizamo and Harvey Keitel in festival closer The Ministers for instance) stealing most of the thunder from the smaller pictures. Recurring motifs throughout the selection seem to be multi-strand LA tales (Ernst Gossner’s South of Pico, Celia Fox’s Lawrence Fishburne vehicle Days of Wrath) and musical biographies (Joe Cardona & Mario De Varona’s Celia The Queen, Vlad Yudin’s Big Pun: The Legacy).

The most effecting film of the festival I’ve seen so far is Nicholas Bruckman’s La Americana. The film, a graduate of the 2007 IFP Rough Cut Lab, is an unassuming look at the life of Carmen, a bolivian illegal immigrant, who has come to New York City to earn enough money to support her ailing daughter. Bruckman expertly weaves the contemporary immigration debate into the tale of this unforgettable woman, who must risk what little economic security she’s gained in the US to return and care for the sick girl.

The Hola Mexico Film Festival, a Mexican sidebar to NYLIFF that takes place at the Quad Cinemas, attempted to screen Carlos Reygadas’ universally hailed Silent Light, for the first time in the States since its American premiere at last fall”s New York Film Festival. However, a print from now defunct UK distributor Tartan never arrived, and the film was screened on DVD off of a laptop. It started skipping about fifty minutes into Reygadas’ latest masterwork. What I saw … Read the rest

WIRE FRAMED

By Scott Macaulay

Over at The House Next Door, Godfrey Cheshire explains his decision to walk out on a press screening of James Marsh’s documentary Man on Wire:

The reason for my discomfort was simple: The movie’s soundtrack contains frequent borrowings from the Michael Nyman scores of well-known Peter Greenaway films (as well as couple of other Nyman tracks, including one from Jane Campion’s The Piano).

This, for me, totally destroyed the experience of watching Marsh’s film. I would be trying to follow the story when, every three or four minutes, that familiar music would blare out and my mind would be whipsawed back to the images and moods of The Draughtsman’s Contract, Drowning By Numbers, A Zed & Two Noughts or another film. Eventually I realized this distraction would continue throughout, so I left.

Cheshire goes on to talk about how this decision of Marsh’s is unexplained in the film’s press notes. But Filmmaker‘s Damon Smith talks about this topic with the director in our current issue. Here’s how Marsh explains his decision:

Filmmaker: Nyman‘s score is such a crucial texture in the film, and his titles — “The Disposition of Linen” — are so odd. Did he write any specific music for you?

Marsh: The idea [of using Nyman] actually came from watching Philippe rehearsing on his wire in his backyard. He would rehearse to a whole load of musical textures, one of which was [Nyman‘s] memorial theme from The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, the Peter Greenaway movie. But we couldn‘t afford to pay a composer like Nyman the kind of money he would want to do an original score. Another [director] friend, Gina Kim, had just worked with Michael [on Never Forever], so she brokered a meeting between us in New York. He said, “I can‘t do a score because I don‘t have the time and we don‘t have the resources for it. But why don‘t you look at what I‘ve done in the past? Here‘s my whole back catalogue. Rummage around, I own all the rights to

… Read the rest