FIRST iPAD REVIEWS HIT THE ‘NET

By Scott Macaulay

The first round of Apple iPad reviews has hit the ‘net. David Pogue of the New York Times split his somewhat muted review into two points-of-view: the tech geek and everyone else. He begins both by writing, “The Apple iPad is basically a giant iPod Touch.’ The tech geek POV review is mixed; the “everyone else” pretty positive. Edward Baig in USA Today is less equivocal:

The first iPad is a winner. It stacks up as a formidable electronic-reader rival for Amazon’s Kindle. It gives portable game machines from Nintendo and Sony a run for their money. At the very least, the iPad will likely drum up mass-market interest in tablet computing in ways that longtime tablet visionary and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates could only dream of.

Walt Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal is also pretty impressed:

For the past week or so, I have been testing a sleek, light, silver-and-black tablet computer called an iPad. After spending hours and hours with it, I believe this beautiful new touch-screen device from Apple has the potential to change portable computing profoundly, and to challenge the primacy of the laptop. It could even help, eventually, to propel the finger-driven, multitouch user interface ahead of the mouse-driven interface that has prevailed for decades.

Significantly, both Pogue and Mossberg report 11.5 – 12 hour battery life with movies continuously playing and WiFi on.

Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing also scored a pre-release iPad. She calls it “a touch of genius”:

It strikes you when you first touch an iPad. The form just feels good, not too lightweight or heavy, nor too thin or thick. It’s sensual. It’s tactile. And it’s a good way to spot a first-timer, too, as I observed with a few test subjects. The dead giveaway for an iPad n00b is pausing a few breaths before hitting the “on” switch, and just let the thing rest there against skin.

The reviews all point out some of the device’s limitations: no camera (so, no Skype or teleconferencing), no Flash (so lots of online video won’t play), no USB, and the centrality … Read the rest

BILL GUNN SURFACES AT BAM

By Brandon Harris

You could say that Bill Gunn was a man who came before his time, but that leaves you working under the flimsy assumption that a time more hospitable to this man of undeniable talents and mercurial preoccupations would some day come. If you don’t already know this is a weak proposition, you’re not paying attention to the tenor of the times we live in. One can be forgiven for being unable to relate to the struggles of an unorthodox black artist to find proper patrons and an appreciative audience I suppose. Still, it is better to say that Bill Gunn, the African-American actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright who died from encephalitis on April 5th, 1989, just one day before Joseph Papp opened Gunn’s new play The Forbidden City at the Public Theater, was a man with a vision we were never quite ready for, black or white, studios or independents, 1970 or 2010. He just didn’t fit the equation of black writer/director = realist/earnest, racialized subject matter that the comers of his generation, especially his peers among Hollywood’s first black directors, Ossie Davis, Gordon Parks and Melvin Van Peebles, very willingly molded themselves into. No wonder then that the author Greg Tate, while eulogizing this unclassifiable man in a 1989 piece for The Village Voice shortly after Gunn died at 59 (or 54, depending on who you talk to), his couple of near masterpieces long forgotten, so aptly observed that “The attempt to bury Bill Gunn began in his life.” While his work on the New York stage spanned from roles in 1950s Broadway and Off-Broadway shows like The Immoralist and Take a Giant Step to his dying days, in his all too short and undervalued career as a director and screenwriter, we hardly got to know him. This weekend, BAM is offering us a second chance.

In the series The Groundbreaking Bill Gunn, which begins tomorrow and runs through Sunday, one can get a glimpse at both of Gunn’s studio screenwriting credits (Hal Ashby’s remarkable Brooklyn gentrification comedy The Landlord and Czech New Wave … Read the rest

“The Thorn In The Heart”

By Jason Guerrasio

Michel Gondry talks about his personal documentary.

… Read the rest

MICHEL GONDRY, “THE THORN IN THE HEART”

By Damon Smith

The ever-whimsical and inventive Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Be Kind Rewind) might have worked with some of the best names in the business, putting his personal stamp on everything from music videos to comedies, TV series, romantic fantasies, and soon, a Seth Rogen–penned reboot of ’60s serial The Green Hornet, but his latest film hews much closer to the heart.

An affectionate and emotionally probing portrait of Gondry’s Aunt Suzette, a schoolteacher in rural France for 34 years, The Thorn in the Heart is a personal documentary in the purest sense of the term, a first-person recounting of life experience that occasionally drifts into a study of family dysfunction. Revisiting the sites where she taught a cross-section of provincial students, some of whom, now middle-aged, she has brief reunions with, Suzette comes across as a salt-of-the-earth matriarch, sensible and good-natured, even progressive in her approach to education. The hitch comes when Gondry begins to press Suzette about the conflicted feelings she has for her fiftysomething gay son Jean-Yves, whose presence is felt more in Thorn’s latter half, exposing a layer of resentment that’s never quite resolved. Shots of Jean-Yves’s elaborate model train set punctuate the film, linking episodes across time and geographical distance. Though simple and stylistically unadorned, Gondry’s genial flair sparks through, as when he recreates a humorous bathroom mishap at Suzette’s home and, in another sequence, outfits a classroom of children in “invisibility” cloaks as a Charlotte Gainsbourg song unspools. It’s a quiet, intimate portrait of internecine dynamics, part Super 8 home movie and part endearing homage to an average but colorful life, with a lingering emotional resonance as it digs gently under the skin of unspoken disappointments.

Filmmaker spoke with Gondry about family, television, real-life stories versus feature filmmaking, and the respect we owe an older generation.

The Thorn in the Heart opens at Village East Cinemas in Manhattan on Friday.

Filmmaker: You seem very attached to your aunt’s side of the family. Were you always?

Gondry: Well, we lost touch a little bit. But I wanted to … Read the rest

NEW INDIE FILM MONETIZATION PLAN: SUING DOWNLOADERS

By Scott Macaulay

In a surprising Hollywood Reporter article, Eriq Gardner discovers a new indie film monetization scheme. He quotes Jeffrey Weaver of the D.C.-based U.S. Copyright Group who says of his company’s work, “We’re creating a revenue stream and monetizing the equivalent of an alternative distribution channel.”

Like many others in the indie community, Weaver’s efforts involve torrents. In his case, however, the company is not using torrent sites as a no-cost means of cultivating an audience but rather as objects of prosecution.

From Gardner’s piece:

In what may be a sign of things to come, more than 20,000 individual movie torrent downloaders have been sued in the past few weeks in Washington D.C. federal court for copyright infringement. A handful of cases have already settled, and those that haven’t are creating some havoc for major ISPs.

The lawsuits were filed by an enterprising D.C.-based venture, the US Copyright Group, on behalf of an ad hoc coalition of independent film producers and with the encouragement of the Independent Film & Television Alliance. So far, five lawsuits have been filed against tens of thousands of alleged infringers of the films Steam Experiment, Far Cry, Uncross the Stars, Gray Man and Call of the Wild 3D. Here’s an example of one of the lawsuits — over Uwe Boll’s Far Cry.

Another lawsuit targeting 30,000 more torrent downloaders on five more films is forthcoming, we’re told, and all this could be a test run that opens up the floodgates to massive litigation against the millions of individuals who use BitTorrent to download movies.

The piece goes on to detail propietary technology by the German company Guardaley IT that offers real-time monitoring of downloads. U.S. Copyright Group, which is comprised of intellectual property attorneys, uses this technology to offer services to its clients. From the group’s website (whose URL, by the way, is savecinema.org:

AT NO COST TO OUR CLIENTS, THE US COPYRIGHT GROUP WILL:
IDENTIFY ILLEGAL DONWLOADERS BY ISP ADDRESS
SUBPOENA IDENTIFYING CONTACT INFORMATION
SEND A CEASE & DESIST LETTER TO DEMAND PAYMENT OF DAMAGES
OBTAIN SETTLEMENT OF

… Read the rest

SCARFACE REVEALED

By Scott Macaulay

In my post below about “Scarface School Play” I injected a healthy note of skepticism that any school would sanction a school play in which mounds of popcorn stood in for Tony Montana’s cocaine. Now, TMZ is reporting that the video was indeed a fake.

According to the site:

Instead, it’s the work of director Marc Klasfeld and Rockhard Films who did the videos for Lady Gaga’s “Pokerface” and Adam Lambert’s “For Your Entertainment.” It was produced in L.A. within the last few weeks and the audience members were a mix of cast family members, colleagues and friends.

As Travis Crawford notes in the comments thread below, many in the blogosphere are heaving a sigh of relief that it wasn’t an official school project. Still, though, the content is exactly the same: too-young kids playacting the Scarface final shoot-out scene. Crawford writes, “Oddly, I sort of felt like that might make any moral objections one might have to the material that much WORSE. I’ll be curious to hear the filmmakers comment on it eventually.”

Me too. And I wonder what the context winds up being for this production. A one-off prank? Seems improbable. A teaser for some new web series — kids doing unlikely dramatic material? Doubtful. The rights issues would seem prohibitive. But I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough.… Read the rest

TRIBECA GALA PREMIERES ANNOUNCED

The Tribeca Film Festival has announced that Freaknomics will serve as the closing gala of the festival on April 30. Freaknomics is a documentary that was based on the bestseller Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Exposes the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. It melds pop culture with economics, and examines economics in such diverse subject matter as legalized abotion, drug dealing, education, and naming children. The film is directed by an array of critically acclaimed documentary filmmakers: Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me), Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing (Jesus Camp), Eugene Jarecki (Why We Fight), and Seth Gordon (The King of Kong).

In addition, the festival will also host a gala premiere for Gary Winick‘s Letters to Juliet on April 25, which stars Amanda Seyfried (Mamma Mia!) and Vanessa Redgrave, and My Own Love Song which is the English language debut from Olivier Dahan, director of La Vie En Rose.

Visit tribecafilm.com for more information about these films, and the entire TFF line-up.… Read the rest

IFP ANNOUNCES DISTRIBUTION LAB; NARRATIVE LAB DEADLINE EXTENDED

By Jason Guerrasio

In a press release sent out today, the IFP has announced that they’ve expanded their Independent Filmmaker Labs to include distribution.

In collaboration with Ted Hope and Jon Reiss, the Distribution Lab will take 20 projects (10 docs, 10 narratives) and gives them a year-long fellowship to assist the filmmakers with marketing and distributing their films. Filmmakers will receive, among other things, year-round access to IFP staff and Lab leaders, one-on-one mentorship with working producers and a five-day Completion Lab. To learn more about the Lab and its benefits read the full release below.

Also on the IFP front, the Independent Filmmaker Narrative Lab has extended its deadline to April 2. To learn more about the Lab and how to apply go here.

IFP ANNOUNCES NATIONAL DISTRIBUTION LAB FOR INDEPENDENT FILMMAKERS

www.ifp.org

For Immediate Release – New York, NY (March 30, 2010) IFP announces the expansion of its prestigious Independent Filmmaker Labs, introducing the addition of its 2010 Distribution Lab in collaboration with Ted Hope & Jon Reiss.

While many programs are well geared toward teaching filmmakers how to write, produce, direct, and compose their films, IFP’s Labs are currently the only program in the country that supports diverse, low-budget, independently produced filmmakers when they need it most: through the completion, marketing and distribution of their first feature film. Focusing exclusively on feature narratives and documentaries at this critical stage, this highly immersive mentorship program provides participants with the technical, creative and strategic tools necessary to launch both their films – and their careers.

“The IFP was originally founded to help filmmakers get their films seen and build the audiences necessary to help them sustain full bodies of work and lasting careers. It is our mission to make sure new voices are heard and that filmmakers are continually supported by a community of peers and professionals who can help them succeed”, says Joana Vicente, Executive Director of IFP. “A lot of theory and inspiration exists about distribution on the Internet and in panels, but cold, hard facts and techniques are hard to come by. This program … Read the rest

“Breaking Upwards”

By Jason Guerrasio

Daryl Wein & Zoe Lister-Jones talk about their look at a disintegrating relationship.

… Read the rest

“AFGHAN STAR”

By Jason Guerrasio

If you thought you were crazy about American Idol, imagine if you grew up in an area of the world where singing and dancing were forbidden. Well, that’s what director Havana Marking highlights in her moving documentary which follows four contestants competing in the wildly popular TV show Afghan Star.

Since 1995 the Taliban have made it illegal to sing or dance in Afghanistan. But recently with the Taliban fleeing the country a freedom of expression has surfaced that’s unlike anything the country has seen in a brutal, war-torn 30 years. Starting in 2005 the TV network, Tolo TV, in Kabul capitalized on this liberation by creating the singing contest Afghan Star, which, like American Idol, travels the country searching for the best singers and then eliminates them until they get down to one. But unlike Idol the fandom over the singers is Beatlesesque, leading to the contestants having the loyal support from the regions they are from and dangers they had never contemplated.

Though Marking structures the film in the vein of popular competition docs like Spellbound or Wordplay — highlighting the trained musician (Hameed), controversial songstress (Setara), the heartthrob (Rafi) and the shy siren (Lema) — finding out who wins isn’t necessarily what keeps you in the film, it’s watching the rebirth of culture, the arts and the feel of community to a people who are climbing back to modernity.

When the film begins there are ten contestants left and favorites are beginning to emerge. Rafi often travels with an entourage as he walks the streets of his hometown, but is often cautious of doing interviews for the film in public or taking pictures with fans as the fear of the Taliban is still present, or just someone harming him who is against the “new Afghan.” Danger is also most evident to the two female contestants Marking highlights. Setara is a brash kid who has no fear on stage. This is highlighted when she’s eliminated from Afghan Star and while singing her final song takes off her headdress and begins dancing around the stage. … Read the rest