ALL THE BLOGS YOU NEED

By Scott Macaulay

You might want to bookmark this and come back in mid-January, when he says he’ll have finished his tally, but Sujewa Ekanayake is compiling a comprehensive list of indie film blogs. And if you have a blog yourself, let Ekanayake know by posting in his comments section.… Read the rest

HOW TO BLOG

By Scott Macaulay

Over at Slate, Farhad Manjoo has up a nice piece entitled “How to Blog.” After noting that the very clever editors of the Huffington Post has published a book, The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging, Manjoo asks some of his own colleagues for their advice on the medium. Here’s one useful tip:

Don’t worry if your posts suck a little. Unless you’re Jeffrey Goldberg, your first blog post is unlikely to be perfect. Indeed, a lot of your posts aren’t going to be as great as they could be if you spent many hours on them—and that’s OK. Felix Salmon, who writes Portfolio’s excellent finance blog Market Movers, puts it this way: “Quantity is more important than quality. Don’t be scared of being wrong, or inelegant; you have much less of an idea what your readers are going to like than you possibly imagine. So jump right in, put yourself out there.” Nearly every blogger I spoke to agreed with this sentiment. If you’re trying to gain an audience, you can’t afford to worry over every sentence as if it were … see, I was going to spend 15 minutes thinking of a hilarious and deeply insightful simile there, but, damn it, I’m in blogging mode and need to move on.

… Read the rest

HAROLD PINTER, R.I.P.

By Scott Macaulay

… Read the rest

BILL LANDIS, R.I.P.

By Scott Macaulay

Bill Landis, a man who championed the world of underground exploitation moviemaking and exhibition, died this week of a heart attack at 49.

With his wife Michelle Clifford he was the editor of Sleazoid Express, a zine that chronicled the films of the 42nd Street grindhouse scene, which he described in an interview at Nerve.com:

Grind houses were opulent, old-style movie palaces with chandeliers, opera seats and huge screens. They seated several hundred people and played all kinds of films, across genres. A shoebox theater catered to the adult audience, seated eighty to 200, usually on one floor, and was shaped like a rectangular shoebox….

It was a very egalitarian form of entertainment that attracted all sorts — kids cutting school, people on dates, inner-city people escaping the cold or heat. The biggest hits cost five dollars. Certain theaters, like The Ankle, which was across from Port Authority, catered to a more criminal element….

People wanted to get the most bang for their buck. If the movie disappointed them, they’d throw things at the screen…. They became unsafe because of the crack epidemic. Crackheads were insane in their criminality, while the junkies would just pass out.

Simon and Schuster published a Sleazoid Express book. Here is an excerpt from “Chapter 13: Lost in the Roxy”:

Located on the south side of the street next to the Cine Twins, it was originally one of the Deuce’s grungiest, most pungent smelling, and most dangerous adult houses. Sharing management with the landmark scumatorium Show World, the Roxy spent the 1970s through the mid-1980s showing third-run hardcore porn, hosting a live sex show, and serving as an open stomping ground for quickie prostitution. It attracted the worst, most desperate people on the Deuce. You didn’t even stand near the theater unless you wanted a drug addict streetwalker propositioning you as her pimp/live-show partner hung over your shoulder.

In the early to mid-1980s, rare Deuce favorites that had been gone for years were suddenly accessible again because of video, and distributors who hadn’t shown some movies in years suddenly saw dollar signs.

… Read the rest

FACES OF DOCUMENTARY: DOC/FEST SHEFFIELD 2008

Doc/Fest ran from November 5-9 this year. [Here's their site.] From hundreds of moments, a few glimpses beyond the screen by photographer Ray Pride.

Michael Tucker, co-director of Bulletproof Salesman.

Margaret Brown, after receiving a John Grierson award for The Order of Myths, with Astra Taylor, director of Examined Life.

Nick Broomfield takes questions during his masterclass.

Naomi Wolf signs copies of “The End of America” before the screening of The End of America.

Simon Kilmurry, executive director of P.O.V., with Geoffrey Smith, director of The English Surgeon.

Sean McAllister, director of Japan, A Story of Love and Hate, and Rebecca Frankel, FourDocs Editor at Magic Lantern and Channel 4.

An interesting exercise: dozens of buyers briefly explain their programming needs to a packed house.

Director Toshi Fujiwara (The Fence) and his lucky Yohji Yamamoto hat.… Read the rest

JOHN WALTER, “THEATER OF WAR”

By Nick Dawson

MERYL STREEP IN DIRECTOR JOHN WALTER’S DOCUMENTARY THEATER OF WAR. COURTESY WHITE BUFFALO ENTERTAINMENT.

In the field of documentary, John Walter has emerged as the medium’s most eloquent and entertaining cultural historian. The Detroit-born director, who is also an unpublished poet, began his career in the film industry as a boom operator and worked in that capacity on Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II. In the mid 90s, he became an editor, beginning with Norman Reedus’ Messenger (1994), and in 1995 he directed Edison’s Miracle of Light, an episode of PBS’ television series The American Experience. In 2002, Walter made his documentary feature debut with How to Draw a Bunny, a portrait of the Pop Art collage artist and prankster Ray Johnson, which won the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and received an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Documentary. He has since directed the small screen doc The First Amendment Project: Some Assembly Required for Court TV and edited a number of projects, including Thom Powers’ Guns & Mothers (2003) and Amir Bar-Lev’s My Kid Could Paint That. He currently lives in New York City’s East Village with his wife, filmmaker Adriane Giebel.

For years, Walter had been looking for an opportunity to make a film about the iconic German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht, a literary figure he has been fascinated with for two decades. The opportunity came when he was given permission to film the rehearsal process of the Public Theater’s Central Park production of Brecht’s Mother Courage and her Children, adapted by Tony Kushner and starring Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline. Theater of War fortunately does not dwell on the minutiae of the show’s preparation period or capture arguments between cast members, but instead uses the production as a conduit to discuss the play and its author, plus a number of other topics – Marxism, war, politics, art, parenthood – which logically arise in that discussion. Theater of War weaves together interviews with the theater principals (plus outside figures like novelist Jay Cantor and theater professor and … Read the rest

FILMMAKER YEAR IN REVIEW: ALICIA VAN COUVERING

By Admin

… Read the rest

FILMMAKER YEAR IN REVIEW: DAMON SMITH

By Scott Macaulay

Damon Smith, who has contributed several feature interviews as well as, under his Filmcatcher affiliation, produced various videos we’ve presented on the site, sends his thoughts, below.

Top Ten

The Class
Paranoid Park
Man on Wire
Happy-Go-Lucky
35 Rhums
Reprise
Waltz with Bashir
Tulpan
Sugar
Munyurangabo
Ballast
Encounters at the End of the World
My Winnipeg

In a year that brought a wealth of new work by established filmmakers such as Mike Leigh, Gus Van Sant, Guy Maddin, and Werner Herzog, as well as exquisite follow-up efforts by James Marsh, Laurent Cantet, and Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden, it’s hard to be sanguine about lists. But three indelible, goose-bump-raising sequences will mark me well into future days: The moment when Philippe Petit steps onto the tightrope his collaborators have strung between the Twin Towers in Man on Wire, as Satie’s nimble Gymnopédie tinkles on the soundtrack; the sultry, after-hours barroom dance performed by Gregoire Colin and Mati Diop in Claire Denis’ ravishing 35 Rhums; and the real-time live birth of a sheep’s calf in Sergey Dvortsevoy’s boisterously funny outer-Kazakh nomad fable, Tulpan. Watching each, I felt weightless and esctatic, in the Teresan sense, and boundlessly happy to be alive, planted in front of a movie screen.… Read the rest

FILMMAKER YEAR IN REVIEW: BRIAN CHIRLS

By Scott Macaulay

Brian Chirls, who contributed the piece on Soderbergh’s RED camera post-production in the current issue, weighs in with some of his ’08 personal bests.

Best Foreign Film About Food That I Saw at a European Festival Of Which No One I Know In the States Has Ever Heard:
Estômago

Best Film About Zombies in High School
Dance of the Dead

Best Film of the Year/Best American Film About Food
Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead

Best Film About Pistachios That I Never Heard From After Its Sundance Premiere (Even Though It’s Not About Cannibalism)
Anywhere, USA

Best Film That I Never Actually Got Around to Seeing But Had an Amazing Sundance Karaoke Party That Was Raided By the Police or The Fire Department or Something
Timecrimes

Ok, the last one’s not serious, though that party was memorable. But the rest are serious.… Read the rest

FACES OF DOCUMENTARY: TRUE/FALSE 2008

A few flickers of the long Leap Day weekend that was True/False 2008: in its fifth edition, the Columbia, Missouri-set nonfiction festival began with the traditional grand march through town, led by “punk marching band” Mucca Paaza. Images of swamis and Diane Arbus pictures danced in the streets.

Gregory O’Toole and Rivkah Beth Medow show their jaw-dropping doc Sons of a Gun as a work-in-progress.

Alex Gibney was fresh off his Oscar win for Taxi To The Dark Side.

True/False is great at ferreting out films too good to be overlooked; one of them was the premise-violating whirlwind, Forbidden Lie$, by blunt Aussie director Anna Broinowski, seen at a panel.

The festival calls its advisors-to-filmmakers “swamis”; while donning the golden turban, in memory of Columbia’s own true-false footnote to space-age lounge music Korla Pandit, is optional, Peter Broderick went full swami while taking questions about distribution models.

Ubiquitous festival co-founder David Wilson at the freshly christened Ragtag Cinema…

And Wilson with director James Marsh before closing night’s Man on Wire.

Once more, with feeling, Mucca Pazza.… Read the rest