News
Monday, May 21st, 2012
As expected, Alex Holdridge’s inspirational interview — about the creative boost he received from making a life change and swapping L.A. and “the system” for a very different life in Berlin — prompted some spirited discussion in the comments section.
In case you read the article but not any of the dialogue that followed on from it, it’s definitely worth flagging up one of the comments — from Holdridge himself — that responded to director Zak Forsman’s list of things he loved about Los Angeles.
Here’s what Holdridge had to say:
I spent 8 years living there, making a film and writing many scripts. It offers all you said and more. As a point of clarification, of course I will be going to LA frequently to meet with actors and people in the industry. In fact, part of the new film takes place in LA. I simply needed new inspiration and for me it was time to get away, so I don’t plan on living there now. Personally I am pouring every penny into this new film and pulling the efforts of talented friends. My whole interest right now is doing all I can to hopefully make a good film. East coast, West coast riffs are not on my mind. Biggie and Tupac are both on my iTunes.
So I offer you eight things I genuinely do miss in Los Angeles that you didn’t mention:
1. The amazing comedy scene – Groundlings, UCB, Largo. It is a comedy lover’s paradise. That mix offers the most ridiculously creative and funny community I know.
2. Downtown – In spite of it all, I am still in love with that part of town. My office was there, and I roamed those streets daily. The Downtown Historic Theater Foundation is incredible and offers tours of the theaters on the weekends. Great group. Support them. They need it!
3. The public library (Downtown and in Santa Monica). Movies, books, photo archives, free wifi, great setting. Script writer’s paradise.
4. The Metro Expedition line. I was obsessed with this, but it wasn’t finished before I left.
… Read the rest
Monday, May 21st, 2012
On April 5, President Obama signed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act, known as the JOBS Act. The Act establishes a number of registration exceptions from traditional securities laws to facilitate a wider adoption of micro-financing practices, including crowdfunding. This is the phenomenon by which a relatively large pool of small investors can use the Internet to make an equity investment in a company.
Filmmaker has covered this important development. Scott Macaulay presented a helpful introductory overview to the Act and discussed some of its likely consequences for indie makes. Matthew Savare, an attorney, and Richard Jaycobs provided a more in-depth analysis of the Act’s features as well as a number of helpful cautionary warnings. Makers are urged to read these useful background pieces before considering crowdfunding as a financing option.
Filmmaker is partnering with Kickstarter, the premier crowdfunding site or what is coming to be known as a “funding portal,” to help raise financing for two-dozen indie projects.
The Act is not scheduled to go into effect until January 1, 2013, as the SEC works through compliance regulations. A recent one-day seminar, sponsored by The SoHo Loft, focused on professional issues relating to crowdfunding and capital formation. For many brokers and Wall Street investors, crowdfunding represents a potentially new means to revitalize the micro-capital equity market. It is seen a bridge or stepping-stone vehicle to enable small businesses to go public through an IPO (Initial Public Offering).
The seminar took place one day prior to the Facebook IPO. The event’s keynote speaker, David Weild, a former senior NASDAQ official and now head of Capital Management Associates, warned that the Facebook IPO was a chimaera, hiding deep structural problems in U.S. financing marketplace.
First, he noted that it covers up the anemic state of U.S. IPOs. In 2001, the total number of IPOs was 79; last year it was only 81. During the rah-rah pre-Great Recession years of 2004 thru 2007, IPOs averaged around 160 per year. Most telling, he noted that the number of underwriters in major IPOs had significantly declined. When Microsoft went public in 1986, … Read the rest
Friday, May 18th, 2012
The French feminist collective known as La Barbe (French for “The Beard”) printed an open letter in France’s daily newspaper Le Monde earlier this week addressing the complete absence of films directed by women in the Competition section at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. La Barbe is made up of actress Fanny Cottençon, writer/director Virginie Despentes and director Coline Serreau, who have also set up an online petition which has been signed by numerous luminaries, including feminist icon Gloria Steinem and filmmakers such as Ry Russo-Young, Gillian Armstrong and Ava DuVernay.
The British newspaper The Guardian ran a translation of the open letter, which reads as follows:
“What has changed in cinema? Everything has changed!” exclaimed Gilles Jacob, president of the Cannes film festival, during the presentation of the 65th Cannes festival film nominations. Everything?! For one second, we trembled. But for no reason, it turned out, as the 22 officially selected movies – happy coincidence – were directed by 22 men. This 65th festival will end up giving the precious award to a male director for the 63rd time, defending the masculine values that give the seventh art its nobility.
Only once did the Cannes film festival lose heart. In 1993, the Palme d’Or was indeed awarded to Jane Campion. And last year, doubtless due to a lack of vigilance, four women somehow sneaked in among the 20 people nominated in the official competition. Thierry Frémeaux, the festival’s director general, correctly remarked: “It is the first time that there are so many women.” How weak! All the more unforgivable as in 2011, the Césars set an example by not selecting any women in the categories of best movie or best director.
Sirs, you came to your senses and we are glad. The Cannes film festival 2012 applauds Wes, Jacques, Leos, David, Lee, Andrew, Matteo, Michael, John, Hong, Im, Abbas, Ken, Serguei, Cristian, Yousry, Jeff, Alain, Carlos, Walter, Ulrich, Thomas, all of whom show us once again that “men are fond of depth in women, but only in their cleavage.”
This exemplary selection sends a powerful message to professionals and audiences
… Read the rest
Friday, May 18th, 2012
Here’s friends and fellow directors Paul Thomas Anderson and Robert Downey Sr. talking about Babo 73, one of the five early Downey features included on Criterion’s new box set from their no-frills Eclipse series, Up All Night with Robert Downey Sr., which comes out next week on DVD.
… Read the rest
Friday, May 18th, 2012
When discussing the lineup at the upcoming BAMcinemaFEST a while back, I noted that a new cut of Walk Away Renee, Jonathan Caouette’s long-awaited follow-up to Tarnation, would be playing as part of the festival on June 27. While that’s exciting news on its own, now comes word of a very savvy move by IFC to capitalize on the interest in the film by giving the film a simultaneous online premiere on SundanceNOW’s Doc Club, the SVOD (Subscriber Video-on-Demand) series curated by documentary maven Thom Powers.
“Walk Away Renee makes a perfect headliner for the June [Doc Club] theme of ‘Up Close and Personal,’” said Powers. “Jonathan Caouette directs with such intimacy that viewers feel like a member of his family. I was blown away by this film at Cannes last year and look forward to sharing it with a greater audience.”
“Walk Away Renee was developed from equal parts love, sweat, humility and pure happenstance,” added Caouette. “I am ecstatic that people will now be able to see what I consider the final version of this film.”
Look out for more on Walk Away Renee on the Filmmaker site as its premiere draws nearer.… Read the rest
Friday, May 18th, 2012
Wes Anderson, the cover star of the latest issue of Filmmaker, kicked off the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday with his new film, Moonrise Kingdom, which opens Stateside on next Friday. (The estimable David Hudson, now operating at Fandor, collects the critical consensus on the movie here.)
If you, like me, are not on the Croisette this year, you can still get your Anderson fix via the Cannes website, which takes a special look at Anderson’s body of work through the prism of his use of pop music, collecting together clips from a string of movies plus an interview with Anderson.
And if you’re in New York, you’ll be pleased to know that today marks the start of the Museum of the Moving Image’s Wes Anderson’s Worlds. The 10-day season will screen all of the director’s features, plus has a special showing of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, a film that was a clear influence on The Royal Tenenbaums and which will have a (video) introduction by Anderson himself.… Read the rest
Friday, May 18th, 2012
The following article about Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky’s documentary Indie Game was published during the Sundance Film Festival. The film opens today in Los Angeles, New York (at the IFC Center), San Francisco and Phoenix. For a complete list of venues and upcoming screenings, check out the website.
Independent film, depending on how you define it, has had many births. But for the purposes of this blog post, let’s consider the one in the 1980s, just before the launch of this magazine. She’s Gotta Have It, Parting Glances, Poison, True Love — these were narrative features made by lone filmmakers with a mixture of private money and, sometimes, foreign TV deals, and they were released into the marketplace after being acquired by independent distributors who catered to arthouse audiences. More films followed — Clerks, El Mariachi, The Blair Witch Project — and the idea that one could possibly be not just a filmmaker but an “independent filmmaker” was born.
Of course, things change, and I wonder if a new generation for whom media creation is simply part of life even cares about that self-definition. Is making a movie that special anymore? Maybe the ones who really care about the meaning of “independent” are in other fields, like video games. Case in point: the creators profiled in Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky’s Sundance documentary Indie Game, who evince all the blood, sweat and tears we like to claim as the hallmarks of the independent filmmaker. More importantly, they are creating games during a historical moment that feels both somewhat new and not unlike the rush that the filmmakers behind films like, say, The Blair Witch Project, must have felt when their homemade creations suddenly burst forth on 2,000 screens.
Pajot and Swirsky interviewed 25 game designers before narrowing their film’s focus to three. Braid creator Jonathan Blow (pictured above, at right, with Pajot and Swirsky at the Sundance Q&A) is the eminence grise, the obsessive elder statesman who revolutionized the indie game world with a work that was not only fun … Read the rest
Thursday, May 17th, 2012
NYU student Elena Parker has created an intriguing device called Walter (named for the legendary Walter Murch) which tackles editing in an innovative new way. Here’s the description from the university website’s about her “eye-ware kinetoscope”:
Walter watches your eyes as you watch a film, and every time that you blink, it edits the video.
Based on the theories of Walter Murch in In the Blink of An Eye, I’ve transformed the subliminal action of blinking into a method of interaction with the film. By cutting every time that you blink, Walter creates a customized narrative for you, without interrupting your absorption in the film. You are free to watch while your unconscious does the work.
All edited footage of the “scene” of the girl/boy/director in this video was edited using blinks and not manipulated in further post.
Walter was built using a hacked PS3 Eye camera. Based on instructions from the creators of Eye Writer, I attached an infrared LED in order to track the eye. I wrote a program in processing that looks for the infrared light in relationship to the pupil. Whenever your eye is closed, the reflection vanishes, and the program moves to the next in a sequence of images. So, blink by blink, you control the flow of the film — and are delivered a narrative customized to your interests and attention.
You can see Walter in action below…
… Read the rest
Thursday, May 17th, 2012
(Distributed by Cinema Conservancy and Factory 25, The Color Wheel opens theatrically in NYC at BAM on Friday, May 18, 2012. It world premiered at the 2011 Sarasota Film Festival and co-shared the Best Narrative award at the Chicago Underground Film Festival before screening at BAMcinemaFest and many, many more festivals throughout the world. Visit the film’s official website to learn more. NOTE: This review was first published on June 22, 2011.)
Full disclosure: I first met Alex Ross Perry in the autumn of 2010. We had attended a screening with a mutual friend and he mentioned to me that he was finishing a new film and offered me a look. As a film festival programmer, I was honored and we met for coffee, where he delivered me a DVD, which I promptly filed in my stack of screeners and didn’t get to watch for roughly three months. When I finally did watch The Color Wheel, I was galvanized by it and offered the film a slot at the Sarasota Film Festival, where it World Premiered this past April. I hope that my own thinking about the film, one that I very much admire, will shine through the perception of a possible conflict of interest and that you’ll take me at my word when I tell you that I don’t write about movies I don’t like, I don’t fancy myself a film critic and I don’t pretend to some ideal of objectivity. Instead, I think it is important to foster discussion about movies that I love, so I welcome your feedback and polite disagreements in the comments below.
***ED. NOTE: A NOT OVERT BUT SOMEWHAT CLEAR SPOILER IS CONTAINED WITHIN PARAGRAPH FOUR. PROCEED WITH CAUTION IF YOU HAVEN’T YET SEEN THE FILM!***
In The Color Wheel, writer/director/star Alex Ross Perry’s second film, J.R. (co-writer Carlen Altman) and Colin (Perry) are siblings living in the cloistered world of their own making; J.R. dreams (and only dreams) of making it as a broadcast news personality while Colin, afraid of his own dreams of becoming an author, … Read the rest
Wednesday, May 16th, 2012
With less than twenty-four hours to reach my set goal on my Indiegogo campaign, it seems that every passing minute without a tiny donation is a strike against my project and a personal slap to my face. It’s hard not to take personally the fact that your idea is most likely a failure that generated little to no interest with the public. At the time of writing this, I have only acquired $140 dollars of my $1,000 final goal and it is quickly becoming evident that my project will end up under-funded, unless, of course, some patron from the heavens randomly decides that it would be in their best interest to donate the remaining funds necessary in order for me to feel like a success and move on without funding the project out of my empty pockets. While many people, and I mean the reasonable ones, of course, would throw their hands up in the air, consider their project a failure, curse out the Gods before praying for a miracle, and down a pint of whiskey to wallow in their self-pity, I, on the other hand, view this situation as just another, slightly expected, hurdle in my career of being an independent filmmaker. Though, I must admit, I am sipping a whiskey right now.
The campaign was/is for a film festival that a few months earlier I decided to launch with my dear friends Reverend Jen (pictured here with me), Robert Prichard, and Tom Tenney called Assdance Film Festival. Now, before I go any further, let me briefly explain myself, as I know what you’re thinking:
“Of course you’re not gonna make any money on something called Assdance, Courtney! How could you be so stupid into believing you would?”
To be honest, I knew I couldn’t. Yet, I have never steered away from pursuing even the craziest of my ideas; and believe me, I have quite a few of them. Also, don’t let the title fool you; this is not nor was it intended to be a porn film festival! The “Ass” in “Assdance” is actually an acronym for “Art Star … Read the rest
