Archive for October, 2008
Wednesday, October 29th, 2008
The filmmaker Charles Stone caused a sensation in the indie film world in 1998 with his short film, True, which launched him in both the film and ad worlds. The hilarious short, along with his music videos, led him to make his first feature, Paid in Full. And when the short was seen by ad agency DDB Needham, they had the idea to hire Stone to take the characters and concept and apply it to a Budweiser ad. These spots, called Whassup?!, won all the big advertising awards in 2000 and Stone went on to make movies like Drumline and Mr. 3000.
Now, in an interesting (and funny) case of a filmmaker mining his existing and well known character and narrative properties to make an election year statement, Stone has revisited his characters in a very funny new short. Visit the site to see the short, learn more about Stone and see the original short too. Or, watch it via YouTube, below.
… Read the rest
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008
Jennifer Venditti’s doc Billy the Kid arrives on home video today. Check out Nick Dawson’s interview with Venditti here.… Read the rest
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008
In what is something like an appendix to his famous “The Sky is Falling” L.A. Film Festival keynote speech, Film Department head Mark Gill is the guest on this week’s issue of the “The Business” film podcast. Gill’s segment is called “Mini-Majors, Endangered Species?”, and in it he discusses the independent film theatrical business in the wake of this year’s specialty label shrinkage. Like everyone, Gill wags his finger at overproduction but then he extends the argument to its logical end result — fewer movies in theaters. And that he likes.
Quoting Gill:
“The first and the best news is that there will be far fewer movies in theaters. It will go from probably 600 movies a year down to about 300 movies per year, which is where it should be. That’s really good news, because a lot of the movies on the margin will not get made. The second thing is that it also means to the extent that you are thinking about going to a film on the weekend you don’t have to choose from 12, you have to choose from six. And one of those is probably for teenage girls, and another one of those is the action movie you don’t want to see, and all of sudden you’ve narrowed it down to three or four. And one of those is a tiny little art film you don’t care about and, okay, you’ve got a couple of choices this weekend, as opposed to now, when you look at the internet or the paper for showtimes and there are twelve movies to sift through. It’s untenable, and that will not last. That’s going to be gone within a year.”
Yes, we don’t need our theaters clogged up every week with artistically interchangeable films just angling for their three-word NY Times pull quote on their way to a video release. But those titles are different than the truly diverse and unique films that swing for the artistic fences or which are directed to audiences not served by the tastes and production paradigms embraced by the studios and mini-majors.
Elsewhere … Read the rest
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008
In a piece entitled “Clash of the Titans” at the Haaretz.com blog, Shlomzion Kenan writes about the recent debate between two “superstar philosophers,” Bertrand-Henri Levy and Slavoj Zizek, at the New York Public Library in late September. At one point, the conversation veered into a discussion of the Serbian director Emir Kusturica, whose vision of his homeland Zizek subjects to a a typically idiosyncratic critique of “the carnival.”
From the piece:
Joyously, Zizek spreads arms out and declares to Levy: “I hope we share another point, which is – to be brutal – hatred of [director] Emir Kusturica. ‘Underground’ is one of the most horrible films that I’ve seen. What kind of Yugoslav society do you see in Kusturica’s Underground? A society where people fornicate, drink, fight – a kind of eternal orgy.”
Linking this to Levy’s description of the May revolution as “immortal youth,” Zizek makes another wee turn of the screw to unhinge the hippie mask: “The moral duty today is precisely to problematize this carnivalesque, transgressive model. ‘Order is bad, let’s suspend the rules, let’s have free excess’ and so on. Do you know a detail which maybe will interest you: Mikhail Bakhtin, the great author of the theory of carnival, you know that a Russian friend told me that now they discovered some private papers from the 1930s, when he was writing his book on Francois Rabelais, and you know what was his model of carnival? Stalinist purges: We have to see ’68 in all its ambiguity.”
The applause, again, is vigorous.
Levy, trying to keep up with the sarcasm, comments only that Kusturica is a case in which a man is so much less intelligent than his work that it cancels out the opposite possibility.
… Read the rest
Monday, October 27th, 2008
At The Hollywood Reporter, Gregg Goldstein reports on the stellar per-screen gross of Seth Grossman’s The Elephant King this weekend at the Angelika Film Center. The 2006 Tribeca selection, now being distributed by producer Unison Films and Strand Releasing did $16,000 despite modest P&A. The secret was apparently a blend of grass-roots marketing targeting non-film constituencies as well as a Gen Art-like blend of a screening and premiere party for a higher ticket price.
From the piece:
Unison head Emanuel Michael worked with Priority Films to contact Asian, Thai, drug and alcohol groups, and film schools at local universities. The groups then emailed members inviting them to five weekend showings with in-theater Q&As that addressed their concerns. Priority used similar guerrilla marketing tactics to launch the Cambodian sex slavery drama Holly.
The real boost to its boxoffice, however, came with a unique strategy: a premiere at a 198-seat Angelika auditorium open to the public (with the $30 tickets notched in its boxoffice tally) and special Saturday night screenings including opening weekend parties.
Michael contacted Svedka Vodka and Thai beer co. Singha, who saw a marketing opportunity in giving free liquor for an hour-long open bar at the events. Once they were on board, The Country Club and Socialista agreed to host them for free, keeping their crowds well into the morning.
Unison plans a similar strategy at the Friday night Sunset 5 LA premiere, followed by another free premiere party at The Standard.
The trailer is below.
… Read the rest
Monday, October 27th, 2008
Over at Cinema Echo Chamber, Evan Louis interviews filmmaker Celia Maysles, whose debut, Wild Blue Yonder, deals with her father, documentary filmmaker David Maysles, and her relationship to him.
From the interview:
The whole idea behind Blue Yonder [for David] was trying to figure out who his greatest influences were in his life, and who he was, through making a film. He was closest with his father and his cousin Alan, who was a real risk taker, a fighter pilot. But his father never missed a day of work for thirty years. He worked in a dayjob, postal service, in the dead-letter dept. My dad was obsessed with these two extremes and who he was in relation to them both. In Grey Gardens, in all his films, he was trying to look at who he leaned towards and where the characters had come from in terms of his own life, why he was drawn to them. The drudgery of work for Paul in Salesman [who David connected with his own father], Mrs Beale in Grey Gardens as his mother, having had a very co-dependent, typically difficult relationship with her child, and Mick Jagger [from Gimme Shelter] of course was a risk taker, like his cousin Alan. It wasn’t so much I was looking for that type of connection with myself in his films, it was just that I was looking for any information about him, any connection with him, from Edie flirting with him in Grey Gardens, to any of the other parts where he crept into frame, you get a really good idea about who’s behind the camera and on the sidelines.
For more, including a discussion of the controversy surrounding the film and Albert Maysles reaction to it, click on the link above.… Read the rest
Monday, October 27th, 2008
Over on the main page, select stories from the Fall 08 issue is now on the site.
They include great interviews, including Charlie Kaufman on his debut feature Synecdoche, New York; Bruce LaBruce talks about his latest zombie thriller Otto; or Up with Dead People; and just in time for its release this weekend, Zack and Miri Make a Prono‘s Kevin Smith discusses his latest raunchy comedy.
There’s also a piece on the Red camera workflow; director Jon Reiss writes how he pulled off the two-month theatrical window with Bomb It; Scott Kirsner talks about his new book and the future of indie filmmaking and there’s an excerpt of Scott Macaulay‘s roundtable discussion on the current state of indie film. We also visited The Road‘s John Hillcoat in the edit room.
And lastly, starting today Filmmaker is available as a digital issue. You can see everything as you would holding the mag, but with more features. Here’s a sample. Learn more about it at our FAQ page.
There’s a lot going on this issue. Hope you enjoy it.… Read the rest
Saturday, October 25th, 2008
I wrote the below for Filmmaker’s weekly newsletter back in late August when the digital iTunes version of Max Richter’s new album was released. (Each week in the newsletter I try to write something that’s different from what appears on the blog — if you don’t get the newsletter, you can subscribe by submitting your email address at left). Now the CD is out and in the stores, so I thought I’d repost what I wrote here — a kind of musing on the record and some of the new-media related thoughts it inspired.
I’ve been listening lately to Max Richter’s very good new album, 24 Postcards in Full Colour. If you don’t know his work, Richter is an Edinburgh-based composer in the minimalist Philip Glass and Michael Nyman vein whose music often marries itself to other forms of content. His album The Blue Notebooks sets his music against readings by Tilda Swinton of Franz Kafka and Czeslaw Milosz while the following CD, Songs from Before, features Robert Wyatt reading texts from Haruki Murakami. Like a lot of modern neo-classical composers, Richter’s music sometimes sounds as if it should accompany a film and, indeed, he’s been scoring movies too – most recently the Cannes Competition entry Waltz with Bashir.
In the past I’ve liked Richter’s work even as I’ve sometimes felt that his collaborators carried a bit too much of the weight in the collaborations. I’m liking his new record a lot more, however, and I think the concept behind the album is part of the reason. You see, Richter is not calling his new release an album – he says that its 24 pieces are just a collection of ring tones. He writes on the record’s website, “Thinking about how we listen to music now, with the range of options available, I wondered why it is that the ring tone medium has so far been treated as unfit for creative music or… ‘Who says ring tones have to be so bad?’ Actually, there are lots of reasons why this medium is interesting – it is very … Read the rest
Friday, October 24th, 2008
I wasn’t able to make it out to The Conversation in Berkeley last weekend, but I heard great things from people who did attend. In a post on his CinemaTech blog, organizer Scott Kirsner gives a quick run-through of some of the highlights. Here, for example, is one of the 15 or so brief bullet points he includes in the post — from Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, a discussion of the “90-minute-plus chunk of viewing time” that he says is on the decline.
Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix, participated in a great on-stage interview with filmmaker (and Conversation co-host) Tiffany Shlain. He mentioned that Crash is the #1 most-rented DVD in the service’s history. He said that the TV is turning into a Web browser, capable of displaying any content that can be published online. He suggested that a remote like the one that comes with the Nintendo Wii might be what we use to navigate this new world. Generating audience demand for your content is the new problem — not producing or distributing it. Most provocatively, Hastings said that “the 90-minute-plus chunk of time is on the decline, as far as social relevance.” Are we all still talking about films, and suggesting that our friends go see them — or are we talking about the latest viral video we’ve seen? (I totally believe that people who insist on continuing to make only 90-minute features are missing the biggest opportunities of our era.)
… Read the rest
Thursday, October 23rd, 2008
COLIN FARRELL AND EDWARD NORTON IN DIRECTOR GAVIN O’CONNOR’S PRIDE AND GLORY. COURTESY WARNER BROS.As a director who values realistic characters and emotionally resonant stories above all else, Gavin O’Connor is a young filmmaker who is keeping the values of a bygone Hollywood alive. The son of a cop, O’Connor grew up in New York on a diet of classic studio movies from the 30s and 40s then immersed himself in the great films produced by the New Hollywood auteurs of the 1970s. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, O’Connor returned to New York, where he began writing plays (such as Rumblings of a Romance Renaissance) and the short films The Bet (1992), Ted Demme’s directorial debut, and American Standoff (1994), which he also directed. O’Connor made his first feature, the gritty romance Comfortably Numb, in 1995 but only came to prominence in 1999 when he co-wrote and directed Tumbleweeds, a mother-and-daughter drama which won O’Connor the Filmmaker’s Award at Sundance and earned numerous accolades and nominations for Janet McTeer’s lead performance. It was another five years before he made his next film, Miracle, a Disney movie about the 1980 U.S. hockey team, which once again demonstrated O’Connor’s ability to connect with the emotional core of material and proved he could make a film that was both a financial and critical success.
Pride and Glory, O’Connor’s latest film, conceived with his twin brother Greg and written in tandem with fellow writer-director Joe Carnahan, has been in gestation for almost a decade. A richly textured and highly involving picture, it centers on the Tierneys, a family of New York cops made up of patriarch Francis Sr. (Jon Voight), senior detective Francis Jr. (Noah Emmerich), withdrawn missing persons detective Ray (Edward Norton) and his high-flying brother-in-law Jimmy Egan (Colin Farrell). Following the brutal slaying of four cops who worked under Jimmy and Francis Jr.’s command, Ray is asked to head up an investigation into their deaths and starts to uncover awkward truths that test his allegiance to both the police force and his own … Read the rest
