April 25, 2008
Very interesting. Stream Magazine, part of Wonderland, is a new venue for online filmmaking, or an online venue for new filmmakers. Not quite sure yet. Alls I know is, Austin Bunn has a nice interview with Brett Hoff editor of...
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Posted by greg at
5:39 PM
March 8, 2008
From "Jeremy Blake in Three Parts," written by editor/curator Bennett Simpson for PS 1's "Greater NY" show. In 2000, Blake's 20-min. digitally animated abstraction titled Angel Dust was in both the harried, hasty "Greater NY" and the Pompidou's "Elysian...
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Posted by greg at
4:10 PM
March 5, 2008
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } blue_before and after, originally uploaded by scottburnham. In 2000 curator Scott Burnham organized a projection...
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Posted by greg at
12:10 AM
March 4, 2008
While is ridiculously easy to soak in Derek Jarman's work in the UK at the moment, it's nigh impossible to find anything programmed in the US. Fortunately, one of Jarman's most easily accessible bodies of work--music videos--is also one...
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Posted by greg at
9:04 PM
February 27, 2008
Now I've been a fan of Joep van Lieshout's work for a long time, even if a lot of it's too irreverent or too bombastically oversexualized to evangelize about regularly. ["You see, mom, he builds these room-sized uteruses with built-in...
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Posted by greg at
10:31 PM
January 23, 2008
From the Great Opening Paragraphs Department, Matthew Placek interviewed NZ documentary filmmaker Pietra Brettkelly for V Magazine:In March of 2006 I traveled with Vanessa Beecroft to Rumbek in South Sudan on two separate occasions to produce an image for...
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Posted by greg at
11:42 AM
January 20, 2008
The sonic precision and cohesion of the Coens’ films have much to do with the close collaboration between Mr. [Skip] Lievsay and Mr. [Carter] Burwell. Extensive discussions between a film’s sound editor and composer are rare, given typical post-production schedules....
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Posted by greg at
9:43 PM
December 26, 2007
Though my reflex was to read David Antin's Artforum review of Lawrence Weiner's Whitney retrospective as a bit of an overshare:...these readings are as slippery as rain and evaporate fairly quickly. Take [a 1962 work] "an object tossed from...
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Posted by greg at
1:05 PM
December 9, 2007
Wow. I can't believe this was shot in 1977. Stations of the Elevated, Manfred Kirchheimer's remarkable documentary--is art documentary a genre?--of New York City's graffiti-saturated trains and their environs is a total throwback feast. The film puts graffiti into...
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Posted by greg at
12:14 AM
December 6, 2007
So Speed Racer gets to come out, but they stuff Larry Wachowski back in her closet? From USA Today, which has first look, very anime-looking stills from the film:The brothers Wachowski (The Matrix trilogy, V for Vendetta) take a...
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Posted by greg at
3:05 PM
October 9, 2007
l: Pantheon r: Pantheon w/Ernesto Neto's 2006 installation, Leviathan Thot Wow, worlds collide, I feel like I'm in an Umberto Eco novel. At nights over the course of a year, a group of urban explorers in Paris who call...
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Posted by greg at
3:41 PM
October 8, 2007
Yes, I do have a ton of other things I should be doing, but I can't seem to get Project Echo out of my head. I really want to see this, 100+ foot spherical satellite balloon, "the most beautiful...
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Posted by greg at
11:21 AM
October 5, 2007
It was an historic occasion. I arrived with my cameraman, Bob Chappell, and his first assistant, Eric Zimmerman, within a few days of the 150th anniversary of the fall of Sebastopol on September 8, 1855. The airport at Simferopol —...
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Posted by greg at
8:36 AM
September 29, 2007
Dara Friedman is unobtrusively videotaping people singing show tunes in public in New York City for a project commissioned by the Public Art Fund:The policeman on the staircase barely looks up; the two little girls beside him continue giggling about...
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Posted by greg at
4:50 PM
September 28, 2007
Yes, a commercial has a making of trailer. The premiere is October 5th. NY: Play-Doh [bravia-advert.com via coudal] Previous Bravia bravado; also prior art on the 'lots of bouncing balls' concept...
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Posted by greg at
10:59 PM
September 15, 2007
still from Inner and Outer Space, 1965 Fascinating. In 1965, months before pioneering video artist Nam Jun Paik got his hands on his own first video camera, Norelco loaned Andy Warhol its new, $3,950 slant scan video recording system for...
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Posted by greg at
7:52 AM
September 14, 2007
Wait, the Warhol Museum called the 1-hour excerpt of Empire released on DVD an unauthorized bootleg? Yes they did, in 2004:“It’s a bootleg!” says Geralyn Huxley, a curator at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.Which is odd. The Italian...
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Posted by greg at
6:28 PM
August 27, 2007
For the upcoming release of Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven, Criterion and Paramount have taken the rather extraordinary step of creating a new interpositive, the definitive, second-generation transfer from a film's original negative. Lee Kline's story of color-correcting a masterpiece...
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Posted by greg at
9:44 AM
August 21, 2007
At a recent conference talk on magic given in Las Vegas, Teller [the quiet one] gave the most amazing definition of magic I wish I'd heard before writing about Scott Sforza for Cabinet Magazine's magic issue:[Magic is] the theatrical linking...
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Posted by greg at
6:43 PM
July 31, 2007
In less than thirty seconds, I could rattle off a dozen people in the real estate business, and another easy dozen in the video and film business, and a dozen in the finance business, who have incredibly, admirably, even enviably...
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Posted by greg at
9:50 PM
July 24, 2007
Historians of the moving image take note: The first commercial footage shot with the Handsfree-Transporter Cam Transport, wherein a Steadicam operator steers a modified Segway with his crotch, was a moving [sic] performance of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" by a...
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Posted by greg at
8:56 PM
July 21, 2007
I only discovered the Chinese government's published evisceration of Michelangelo Antonioni's 1972 documentary Chung Kuo - Cina after I thought I'd finished my Cabinet article on Scott Sforza. Jonathan wondered if Susan Sontag's On Photography might have a relevant...
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Posted by greg at
11:06 PM
July 19, 2007
I cannot get me enough of John Frankenheimer. Last week, I stayed up way too late when Ronin came on at 1AM. While reading an interview with David Talbot, who just published a disturbing book about Robert Kennedy and the...
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Posted by greg at
10:19 PM
July 10, 2007
I'm not going to go into detail about my dismally bored disappointment with Michael Bay's Transformers. [Did snap-together transforming sound effects fetishists get enough to work with? Because us ID4-meets-Godzilla-scale, screen-filling apocalyptic battle porn dudes were totally cheated. Even The...
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Posted by greg at
9:40 AM
July 7, 2007
Walter Murch writing on BLDGBLOG:Sometime after the success of his film Blow-Up (1966), the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni visited Manhattan, thinking of setting his next project in New York. Confused and overwhelmed by the city's visual foreignness, he decided to...
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Posted by greg at
1:44 AM
June 1, 2007
When I heard that Christopher DeLaurenti used body mics and a mini-disc-equipped vest to make his surreptitious recordings of orchestral intermissions, I was like, "Half the recording is probably the squeaks of his leather vest. What he's actually capturing isn't...
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Posted by greg at
6:14 PM
May 30, 2007
From executive producers Denis Leary and Jim Serpico ("Rescue Me," "The Job") [and Mike Figgis] and writer Dave Erickson ("The Perfect Husband: The Laci Peterson Story", "Murder in Greenwich") comes "Canterbury's Law," a courtroom drama about a rebellious female...
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Posted by greg at
8:02 AM
May 3, 2007
We finally made it to the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco last weekend. I'll see a Sheeler show any time, any place, but except for a nice population of Diebenkorns and the well-stocked Oceanic galleries--oh, and Gerhard Richter's disorienting photomural...
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Posted by greg at
8:55 AM
April 24, 2007
Tobias Rehberger was interested in how viewers construct a film as they watch it, particularly as they pass through alone what's nominally intended to be a communal experience. So he decided to make a film in reverse, starting with...
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Posted by greg at
11:19 PM
April 20, 2007
First off, what is up with the Seventies? Those folks was funny. This 1972 documentary about what a lovable failure of a city Los Angeles is stars pioneering urban planning theorist Reyner Banham, who fairly bumbles through hippie dippy,...
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Posted by greg at
8:16 AM
April 14, 2007
Holy smokes, I'm in like. Geoff sat down with editor/polymath Walter Murch for BLDGBLOG to discuss, of all things, the music of spheres. At least obliquely. I'd say they were Renaissance men, but as their discussion shows, the Renaissance was...
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Posted by greg at
10:34 AM
April 11, 2007
And by 'out there,' I mean in North Korea. And by 'a Cremaster,' I mean Cremaster 1, Barney's foray into Busby Berkley stadium spectacle. NK's Arirang Festival has choreographed logistics to make even Barbara Gladstone blush [well, maybe]: 100,000...
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Posted by greg at
9:06 AM
April 7, 2007
So I'm researching camera angles for an article I'm writing, and so I break out the trusty Susan Sontag, On Photography, and I finally get to the last essay/chapter, which I guess I've never read. It's the one where she...
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Posted by greg at
11:57 PM
March 19, 2007
I got on the subway last Sunday just as the Imax screening of 300 had let out, and the 1/9 platform was packed with amped up clumps of guys. Just the night before we'd joked at dinner about A.O. Scott's...
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Posted by greg at
8:15 AM
March 4, 2007
In 2004, Volvo released The Mystery of Dalaro [note: there's supposed to be an umlaut over the o], a very serious-sounding 8-minute documentary about a small town in Sweden where 32 people suddenly bought the same Volvo on the...
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Posted by greg at
9:51 PM
February 28, 2007
Right before the movie came out, I remember seeing a puff piece about how they used a dialogue consultant to figure out the slang of the future in Judge Dredd Demolition Man [thanks, Jason, Sandra Bullock's other biggest fan]. Also,...
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Posted by greg at
8:42 AM
February 23, 2007
Sweet. Lessig announced an insurance/legal services partnership for documentary filmmakers whose films are certified as meeting American University's Fair Use For Filmmakers Best Practices Standards. Changing documentary clearance practices was huge enough, and already paved the way for PBS to...
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Posted by greg at
8:07 AM
February 20, 2007
It's fascinating to inadvertently track the transformation of Claude Lelouch's 1976 tracking shot tour de Paris and/or force C'etait un Rendez Vous go from mythical underground film to rediscovered classic to Google-mapped puzzle to demythologized YouTube entertainment--and now to...
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Posted by greg at
11:55 AM
February 10, 2007
Uh-oh, One less trip to the Anthology each year. Todd Haynes' Superstar is on Google Video. [via coudal]...
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Posted by greg at
6:27 PM
January 30, 2007
MGM Cartoon 1939 Peace On EarthUploaded by shawshawshaw In retrospect, 1939 was a rough year to be a diehard pacifist. But that's when Hugh Harman's Peace On Earth anti-war cartoon was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Mahatma Gandhi was...
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Posted by greg at
2:46 PM
The constroversy over Peter Baxter's decision to pull Super Columbine Massacre RPG! from Slamdance's Guerilla Gamemakers Festival hit the New York Times this weekend, and Baxter has yet another explanation for his actions. This time, it's not complaints by a...
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Posted by greg at
10:40 AM
January 19, 2007
As someone whose desktop contains several drafts of an adaptation of a straightforwardly narrative but slightly magically naturalist historical novel, I've watched the discussion of Screenhead's list of unfilmable novels with vested interest. It took over forty comments for my...
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Posted by greg at
9:05 AM
January 11, 2007
There are very few artists I'd like to see a documentary about. For one thing, the narrative arc of a movie is usually ill-suited to either an artist's story/ideas or to the experience of the work itself. And no one...
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Posted by greg at
10:32 AM
January 9, 2007
For the 2006 Turner Prize exhibition, artist Phil Collins had Tate Britain set him up with an office in the gallery, where he and two hired researchers worked every day on Phil's next project: "finding people who feel their lives...
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Posted by greg at
10:29 PM
January 8, 2007
With six trans-oceanic flights last month, I ended up seeing The DaVinci Code with the sound off at least two dozen times. The only thing that surprises me about this Reuters story is that it's taken this long for other...
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Posted by greg at
3:03 PM
Ian at Water Cooler Games has been writing about an incident at Slamdance. Seems the founder of the alt-alt festival yanked Super Columbine Massacre, a charming -sounding RPG that tells the tale of some innocent, young, all-American scamps, from the...
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Posted by greg at
2:38 PM
December 20, 2006
I used to live downstairs from Nam June Paik. I was too starstruck to ever talk with him at length, but we had friendly chats when we'd see each other in the stairway of our Little Italy loft building....
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Posted by greg at
3:17 PM
December 14, 2006
It's got a bit of that smug, self-congratulatory air that always seems to come through in behind the scenes films for commercials [I'm thinking in particular of the Sony Bravia bouncing ball ad guys]. But still, it's all we've...
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Posted by greg at
2:58 PM
November 30, 2006
"At last we have the movie every would-be cinematic visionary has been trying to make since 1927." - AO Scott, NYT Fritz Lang's Metropolis (Restored Authorized Edition) DVD [amazon, image via coudal]...
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Posted by greg at
8:14 PM
November 28, 2006
She insists that as "independent film keeps getting bigger, I want to make it small again," only to confess later during a casting meeting for the movie Infamous that (her italics) "there is nothing more important than sitting in a...
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Posted by greg at
8:59 PM
November 21, 2006
After memorizing The Player, the visceral Short Cuts got me hugely excited for Pret a Porter. Oops. At the time, I had to learn for myself what Pauline Kael knew long ago: she "joked about his fertile seventies output that...
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Posted by greg at
9:58 PM
November 8, 2006
Geoff de BLDGBLOG has a long interview at the JG Ballard megasite Ballardian.com in which he discusses [what else] Ballard & architecture [actually, a lot else. the dude thinks in eyepopping paragraphs]:What do you think of Cronenberg’s Crash? It’s alright...
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Posted by greg at
10:54 AM
November 6, 2006
Jason posted a link to a preview for the video game Gears of War that uses Gary Jules' and Michael Andrews' acoustic cover of Tears for Fears' "Mad World" as the soundtrack. The original music video for Jules' version is...
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Posted by greg at
1:30 PM
October 31, 2006
It feels like ages since I've posted about actual moviemaking around here. I was a fan of Darren Aronofsky's Pi, and a fleeing refugee from the theater of Requiem for a Dream, but I have to give props to his...
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Posted by greg at
8:33 PM
October 9, 2006
Curator Nancy Spector described Robert Smithson's Hotel Palenque, which the Guggenheim acquired in 1999 from the artist's estate [controlled by his widow Nancy Holt and represented by James Cohan Gallery] this way:Hotel Palenque perfectly embodies the artist’s notion of...
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Posted by greg at
4:45 PM
October 6, 2006
After his mother died and his father quickly remarried, filmmaker Doug Block went to visit his childhood home for the last time, as it was being emptied and put up for sale. He ended up spending two years making 51...
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Posted by greg at
4:59 PM
September 30, 2006
It's funny that--oh, wait, no, it's depressing, no, it's funny, no, it's--someone like Mary Harron who has done some good films has also done some great television, but somehow it comes off sounding like a bad thing. I'd love to...
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Posted by greg at
11:29 PM
September 9, 2006
Now the story can be told. It's interesting how long it takes stuff to bubble across the Internet. A recent spate of blog discussion of Claude Lelouch's 1976 cult short film, C'etait un Rendezvous was prompted by the film's...
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Posted by greg at
7:10 PM
September 5, 2006
Andy has some video of some in-game developer commentaries that are included in the Half-Life 2: Episode One. They're a cross between a typical DVD director's commentary track, hyperlinked footnotes, and a first-person video tour. Fascinating. Perhaps the coolest, though,...
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Posted by greg at
3:28 PM
August 31, 2006
You could make a really good-looking movie right now for ten grand, if you have an idea. That’s the trick. I was watching Alphaville this weekend, and I’d love to do like a ten-minute version of Alphaville here in Manhattan....
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Posted by greg at
2:50 PM
You know, someday, I'll go to Artforum's homepage, and those sidebar links to the Chris Marker photographs of May Day protestors in France ["In this new series, he re-presents the present as, effectively, already past," or as they say in...
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Posted by greg at
12:02 PM
August 16, 2006
Our lives are constantly surrounded by unseen streams ...numerous, invisible rivers composed of love, power, success, pain ...all that we detest and desire. Some we navigate with ease, some we seek forever ...and some are simply whirlpools, spinning us into...
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Posted by greg at
8:59 AM
August 15, 2006
Usually, they're slightly off-kilter but harmless fans, who seem to believe that if they can only get their pitch to their favorite director, they'll make beautiful music together. Turns out Wes Anderson has fans like that, too, only their names...
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Posted by greg at
1:56 PM
August 2, 2006
This: The Tangled Web of Syriana by Philip Dhingra [philosophistry.com via mathowie] reminds me of this: from Mark Lombardi: Global Networks, Nov. 1 - Dec. 18, 2003 [drawingcenter.org] in a good way....
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Posted by greg at
8:43 PM
July 13, 2006
John Ford would probably be pissed at you if you read this article about him in the UK Independent, but go ahead, it's worth the risk. John Ford: Ford focus [independent.co.uk via rw] There's a 2-disc anniversary edition of The...
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Posted by greg at
10:23 PM
July 8, 2006
Red Paper Clip Day could become an annual party, with residents encouraged to wear red paper clips as a Town symbol. The Town is in the process of designing a new logo which is to include a red paper clip.-...
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Posted by greg at
3:12 PM
June 29, 2006
Amazingly, Hugh Hancock has been making Machinima--movies created inside video games--since 1997. [If by "Machinima," he means capturing playing sessions within user-created levels, core functions of the Doom game engine, then hasn't everybody been making Machinima since 1997? But I...
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Posted by greg at
4:06 PM
June 22, 2006
"You may tell yourself: 'He's got some crazy dance moves.' And you may ask yourself: 'Toni Basil co-directed this?!'" - Joe Tangari re Talking Heads 1981 video for "Once in a Lifetime," directed by Toni Basil and David Byrne....
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Posted by greg at
11:37 AM
June 20, 2006
Fellow dadblogger sweetjuniper just posted the 18-minute version of Calder's Circus on YouTube. It was made in 1961 by Carlos Vilardebo, and it's been shown widely around the world--and in the lobby of the Whitney Museum--ever since. Since the...
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Posted by greg at
12:26 PM
June 7, 2006
Deborah Scranton got embedded reporter credentials, but her documentary, The War Tapes was largely shot by US soldiers in Iraq using camera equipment she provided. She did much of her directing remotely via IM and email reviews of Quicktime dailies....
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Posted by greg at
12:46 PM
June 6, 2006
On WETA, the DC public radio station, Sunday night, Mary Tripp, the reporter for a program called Out and About, interviewed some of the musicians who performed in Robert Altman's upcoming Prairie Home Companion. The band members are used to...
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Posted by greg at
11:19 AM
June 3, 2006
Has anyone ever asked Richard Linklater about the role A-Ha played in the development of Waking Life and Scanner Darkly. Just wonderin' A-Ha: Take On Me [youtube] update: I mean, I never thought I was very original to begin...
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Posted by greg at
5:24 PM
Like many people who join cults, my route to Kieslowski fandom and membership in the Church of the Dekalog looks a little goofy in retrospect. I was clearly seduced by the romanticism of La Double Vie de Veronique, not just...
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May 26, 2006
Why is that not the headline for any of the stories about the Smithsonian's exclusive TV programming deal with Showtime? Smithsonian officials signed a 30-year contract with CBS Corporation's Showtime division giving them rights of first refusal to any "commercial"...
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May 17, 2006
Whit Stillman not only lives, he writes in the Guardain about what the heck he's been working on all this time. Some adaptation that didn't work out, a script about Jamaican gospel churches... As I've gone from identifying with the...
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Posted by greg at
5:22 AM
Documentary director Alison Chernick's newest film, Matthew Barney: No Restraint, sounds like a must-see, and not just for the rare behind-the-scenes footage in includes from the set of the artist's own latest production, Drawing Restraint 9. [That's the new...
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Posted by greg at
2:37 AM
May 13, 2006
On the eve of the Cannes Film Festival, John Anderson takes a look at the phenomenally large amount of work that Palme d'Or winners Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne put into making their seemingly artless, effortless films. And he looks at...
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Posted by greg at
10:08 AM
May 4, 2006
Margene, just to let you know, Nicki is just pretending to have a baby in order to have more time with Bill. Shes still on the pill; shes using Bill. I believe she knows about Bill and Barbs affair. Nicki...
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Posted by greg at
11:21 AM
May 1, 2006
While he's been actively posing questions about vision and perception and exploring the relationship between the seen/felt/experienced and reality, I've still had a sense of Olafur Eliasson as a sculptural artist. That object/space/experience thing. And I mean that, even though...
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Posted by greg at
8:43 AM
April 18, 2006
On the one hand, the posters for the OMA-designed dress exhibit actually call it the "Prada Epicenter." But on the other, she's smart enough to be wary. AND she does have a shrug decorated with the scalps of her two...
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Posted by greg at
1:09 AM
April 16, 2006
BBC3 produced and aired "Manchester Passion" Friday night, a live retelling of the Passion of Christ, that was set on the streets of Manchester and which featured music from local bands made good like Joy Division and Oasis. The...
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Posted by greg at
1:32 AM
Iain Anderson's Airport is an animated short film made entirely of AIGA-standard travel icons. Very cute. Airport by Iain Anderson [funwithstuff.com via boingboing]...
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Posted by greg at
1:12 AM
March 31, 2006
David's a photographer--and the creator of the untouchably cool pre-pixellated logo clothing for reality TV contestants that burned through the blogs last week--who's started a little series of 60-second [give or take] movies. This one is of my favorite...
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Posted by greg at
11:15 AM
March 30, 2006
Hiroshi Sugimoto created a stage for a Noh performance at Dia; unfortunately, it was in October 2001, not a real hot time for cultural diversions in downtown New York City. Missed it. The Noh stage was reinstalled at the Mori...
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Posted by greg at
3:08 AM
March 27, 2006
Maybe it's just me, but whenever I hear a guy talking about himself in a documentary and he utters the phrase, "Never in the history of advertising," my BS detector goes haywire. Even if the rest of the sentence is,...
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Posted by greg at
12:20 PM
March 23, 2006
The Dardennes brothers' latest film, L'Enfant, is about the inner and outer worlds of Bruno, a teenage hood who sells his newborn son. It stars Jrmie Renier, the same young actor from their last film, La Promesse. It's not love,...
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Posted by greg at
9:34 AM
You're making a short story about a couple of gay, white trash shepherds into a movie. The story's been optioned but undevelopable since it came out [sic]. In 2003-4, it looks like you might pull it together as "a low-budget,...
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Posted by greg at
8:29 AM
March 21, 2006
"I suddenly realized that exporting virtual items through the Internet is the same as transmitting Chinese labor to America." That's how the owner of a "gold farming" company in China explains his business in Chinese Farmers In Gamedom, a...
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Posted by greg at
1:02 AM
March 4, 2006
JG Ballard writes in the Guardian about turning his childhood experiences and memories into Empire of the Sun, and then watching as Spielberg and co. turned his novel into a movie, and then watching as the movie and the book...
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Posted by greg at
3:49 AM
February 21, 2006
The trailer for A Scanner Darkly is up, and while it looks good--the rotoscope animation style is much tighter, and it coheres with a lot of the scenes and the vibe of the story--it's clearly a chatty Linklater joint. Plus,...
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Posted by greg at
7:54 AM
February 15, 2006
Michael Winterbottom's A Road To Guantanamo was produced for Channel 4, but they're opening it like a film, too. Like a Soderbergh film called Bubble, to be specific. A simultaneous DVD, Theater, and--hold on--online release next month. The film is...
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Posted by greg at
9:04 AM
February 12, 2006
It Happened Here is a 1966 documentary-style account of a Nazi occupation of Britain, made over the course of eight years of weekends by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo. They were 18 and 16, respectively, when they started production. All...
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Posted by greg at
3:54 AM
February 3, 2006
I will quote goldenfiddle in full on this one, and just say that, Francesco, I was wrong. You were right. Fake trailers to non-existent films are an art form after all:Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez are teaming up to produce...
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Posted by greg at
1:51 AM
January 27, 2006
Granted, I haven't seen it yet, but isn't that in the spirit of Winterbottom's adaptation? Based on Tony Scott's review, I'd say this one is a classic....
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Posted by greg at
3:15 AM
January 18, 2006
The Beastie Boys handed out 50 video cameras to fans at a November 2004 MSG concert, and have edited the footage they shot into a concert documentary called Awesome! I F***ing Shot That!:The film will cost the Beastie Boys about...
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Posted by greg at
10:04 AM
January 12, 2006
I'm a fan of Bernadette Corporation, so even though it's not about results but about process, I'm interested to see what came out of their film gig in Berlin. That's where they ran Pedestrian Cinema, a temporary production center for...
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Posted by greg at
9:58 AM
January 2, 2006
Warner Bros. has released a PDF version of Stephen Gaghan's script for Syriana, which we just saw last night. A very intense film, the story is perfectly matched with the fragmented, multi-threaded structure. In another filmmaker's hands, this movie would...
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2:04 AM
All through 2005, Eirikso shot photographs out of his window in Norway at random times and on random days. Then he merged them into a single, 3.5 minute or so movie using Photoshop and Sony Vegas Video. See the...
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1:48 AM
December 30, 2005
Back in the day (Feb. 2002, that is), I requested clearance to use "Google" as a verb and to show search results screenshots in my first short. The head of Google's marketing sent me an email saying it was a-ok,...
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12:36 PM
December 21, 2005
Have you heard of Wet Magazine? proto-Punk/New Wave LA deal from the late 1970's? I confess, my parents were just taking me to my first concert--the Osmond Brothers--in the late seventies. Anyway, in the Nov/Dec 1978 issue, an unnamed-but-hardhitting journalist...
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1:40 AM
December 15, 2005
From the website for Showgirls: The Best Movie Ever Made. Ever!:Please join us as we celebrate the 10th Anniversary of 'Showgirls'. The UCB Theatre is proud to present an evening with Mr. 'Joe Eszterhas' as he is interviewed by noted...
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2:36 AM
December 13, 2005
And here I thought Jeff Jarvis was the only one flogging vlogs. The NYT had an article over the weekend about the explosion of vlogging, and the distribution deal that slightly funny vlog Rocketboom made with TiVo. TiVo gives Rocketboom...
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10:13 AM
December 6, 2005
Unrated is the new Rated R. In addition to 17 additional minutes of edited-out footage, the New Unrated Version DVD of The 40-Year-Old Virgin contains "a four-camera behind-the-scenes look at Steve Carell's character, Andy Stitzer, having his chest waxed." I...
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8:05 AM
December 4, 2005
Although it was released on DVD last year, C'etait un Rendezvous, Claude Lelouch's classic/notorious underground film, has turned up online. The film is a Ferrari-eye view of a flat-out race across Paris, shot in a single 9-minute take using a...
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9:30 AM
November 29, 2005
Annie Proulx has seen "Brokeback Mountain" twice: once, when the characters and story originally made their way from her head to her short story in the New Yorker. Then again, when Ang Lee's film rose up before her on the...
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7:08 AM
November 28, 2005
Presumably because he was made to by his editors, Andrew Pulver momentarily entertains the notion that a film directed by Madonna would somehow not be an utterly self-absorbed, epically unwatchable trainwreck:She certainly has the strength of will to become a...
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10:57 AM
November 21, 2005
Bosnian filmmaker Jasmina Tesanovic writes in the latest issue of Make Magazine about turning her website, Diary of a Political Idiot, into a documentary--while her city, Belgrade, was being bombed by NATO forces in 1999. The schedule for each...
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10:13 AM
November 18, 2005
Like this music video, "Motorcycle," from The Rumble Strips, which involves a roundabout, some bikes, a delivery lorry [sic], one light, and a guy who sounds a lot like Lloyd Cole. "Motorcycle," directed by Harry Dwyer [rumblestrips.co.uk via waxy]...
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10:58 AM
November 16, 2005
If the Washington Post, of all "can't dance" papers says someone "break-danced and jigged in a manner so lifelike they seemed like hip-hop aliens from the planet Funk," you're right to be wary. And yet we were seduced, at least...
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12:32 PM
November 15, 2005
In attempting to "remove the clutter" that normally accompanies such "major tent-pole movies," Universal has pared down the marketing and product licensing partnerships for Peter Jackson's King Kong to the barebones minimum. Here's the list. If you start reading now,...
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1:59 AM
October 26, 2005
To differentiate 2001 from the "flying saucer pictures" that owned the sci-fi genre at the time, Stanley Kubrick planned to begin the movie by showing interviews with 21 real-world scientists about their predictions for the future and the likelihood of...
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11:21 AM
October 22, 2005
Guy Debord's films have been getting re-released on DVD; the late Spectacle-hating French theorist had pulled them from distribution in the 1980's when, well, when they weren't succeeding in destroying the neo-capitalist movie industry from within, I guess."He was against...
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11:34 AM
October 13, 2005
James Venturi, son of architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, has made is making a film about them and their highly influential ideas and designs: This film is the story of their struggle, their ideas, and the meshing of...
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1:51 AM
October 12, 2005
So I was stoking the fires of ill will against Martha Stewart by watching the last half hour of The Apprentice, and I'm thinking, "Damn, but that woman bugs the crap out of me," and "DAY-UM, but I hate...
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11:30 AM
It's supposed to keep raining through Friday, when artist Pierre Huyghe is planning to shoot an element of a new video art work in Central Park's Wollman Rink. Huyghe is transforming the rink into a black ice floe, home for...
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11:05 AM
October 6, 2005
So the new year's not starting off that great. I found this great vintage Jewish cowboy belt buckle on ebay... Beautiful old belt buckle has nice detail. Features the Star of David. It is intricately worked in sterling silver. The...
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11:23 AM
October 5, 2005
What is it with French people and penguin movies? Next Friday evening, French video artist Pierre Huyghe will be filming the second part of "A Journey That Wasnt," a musical based on a trip to Antarctica. The first part was...
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12:55 PM
September 28, 2005
Dateline, Paris [of course]:In Hollywood, meanwhile, the jockeying for credit on March of the Penguins was taking place. Last month, Jordan Roberts, a film director turned writer, claimed credit in a Los Angeles Times article for essentially "re-envisioning" the film...
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10:45 AM
September 21, 2005
Catherine Deneuve cares less about makenice the longer she's around (and I do wish her a long, happy, healthy, sexy, regal life, understand). Here's an excerpt from Close Up And Personal about the production of Lars von Trier's Dancer In...
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11:19 AM
September 16, 2005
I shouldn't be surprised that I'm getting this question a lot these days. Here's what Ang Lee told the NYT's Karen Durbin:"When I first read the story, it gripped me. It's a great American love story, told in a way...
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7:34 AM
September 8, 2005
I'm not the only one with a thing for the editing. Donald Sutherland tells the Guardian about what made that sex scene in Don't Look Now so, well, sexy. Hint: it wasn't Julie Christie. OK, it wasn't JUST Julia Christie:"About...
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9:21 AM
September 7, 2005
I find that I remake a movie at least three times: when I write it, when I shoot it, and again when I edit it. The one I didn't realize--and that still seems wildly underappreciated to me--is editing. Well, here's...
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10:55 AM
Turning from the descent of our country into unaccountable, repressive totalitarianism for a moment... A reader emailed a question that I thought would be interesting to open up to other readers, too. He's preparing to make a documentary on a...
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10:33 AM
August 28, 2005
Regine links to several examples of Japanese graphic artist Akinori Oishi's work, but my favorites are the micro films. Tiny loops formatted as animated gifs, they remind me of the best of the AIM buddy icon movies. These are older,...
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2:50 AM
August 22, 2005
Lactaid Commercial [May 27] - Greenwich Street near 12th: Interior still shoot. Parking taken to unload cows. No complaints. ... Law & Order [January 28] - Commerce: Strikes again. Despite assurances that company wanted a better relationship with the community,...
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8:43 AM
August 21, 2005
If it's any consolation, Japan looked like it had been plush carpetbombed by penguins, too. WPS1's Stephen Schaefer did an interview with Luc Jacquet, director of March of The Penguins, which was first broadcast on July 18th. [scroll down] Beyond...
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2:39 AM
Radar Online has a print-sized [i.e., too short] q&a with Murderball co-director Dana Adam Shapiro, but it's mostly about his novel [The Every Boy] and his childhood. It's interesting that filmmakers don't get asked how autobiographical their work is as...
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1:31 AM
August 18, 2005
I shot another short while I was in Japan; more on that soon, I hope, but one of the overriding impressions I came away with was that shooting outdoors all day in the deadheat of August is, well, hot. Seems...
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8:52 AM
August 8, 2005
The NYT Magazine has an excellent firsthand report from the set of Red vs. Blue. It turns out that a few scrappy creative types are actually making movies inside of video games. If this catches on, it could be revolutionary....
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2:22 AM
July 30, 2005
O me of little faith. Richard Dutcher, the guy who made the first Mormon niche film, God's Army, goes around making sure he's referred to as "The Mormon Spielberg." Meanwhile, the guys at HaleStorm seem to have set their sights...
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10:39 AM
July 29, 2005
Stefano Basilico's well-rounded exhibition on artists' use of films--not film--as a medium got a nice review from Roberta Smith in the NYT. My absolute favorite piece in the show--which was in Miami last winter--is Christian Marclay's Video Quartet. But Pierre...
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9:37 AM
July 27, 2005
The Observer reports from the premiere of Gus Van Sant's latest film, Last Days, which completes a teen trilogy of sorts, with Gerry and Elephant:On the red carpet at Landmarks Sunshine Cinema, a reporter for a vapid monthly didnt recognize...
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11:08 AM
July 8, 2005
Architect and one-time actor Brad Pitt is making a documentary about Frank Gehry and the development of his billowing-skirt residential towers in Brighton, Eng-uh-land. PITT TO MAKE UK DOCUMENTARY [contactmusic.com, via gutter, the source of that sweet quote above] Brighton...
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1:28 AM
July 7, 2005
Jason writes about John Sheetz, a longtime HAM and a Teletype artist [who knew? which is precisely the point] he interviewed in 2003 for his BBS Documentary, and who passed away last January. How many life's works are biding...
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4:15 AM
July 6, 2005
Making a "short feature film," just for the heck of it, it turns out, and documenting the production online:The very first thing that happened is that we dropped an expensive rented audio remote unit down three flights of stairs. Oops....
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6:15 AM
June 30, 2005
A couple of snaps from Robert Melee's Talent Show at The Kitchen. With touches of Wigstock, Laugh-in, Blow-up, Moulin Rouge, Merce, Cher, Olivia Newton John fitness video, Puppetry of the--um--and Fischerspooner-meets-Spinal Tap, it's a NSFW riot. And don't forget...
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2:17 AM
June 23, 2005
Once again, a highly acclaimed documentary is nearly wrestled to the ground by the exorbitant cost of clearing the rights to music--including a ringtone--that appears in the film. Not talking about the soundtrack here, either, but the diagetic (i.e., in-story,...
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8:49 AM
June 22, 2005
You have to admit, she does look rather mannish." For a brief moment in the early 90's, The Modern Review was really good, almost a smarter, smugger Spy, if such a thing can be imagined. Then it started to...
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11:43 AM
June 15, 2005
For the first time, Matthew Barney and Bjork have collaborated on a film and soundtrack called Drawing Restraint 9, after some of Barney's earliest, pre-Cremaster works. In DR9, the two visit a Japanese whaling ship in Nagasaki, undergo various Shinto...
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10:14 AM
May 24, 2005
The latest issue of Senses of Cinema includes Cubie King's intriguing look at PT Anderson's use of color in Punch-Drunk Love. In addition to the interstitial abstract animations by artist Jeremy Blake [which were originally meant to represent--is that too...
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12:06 PM
May 16, 2005
Personally, every time I see those "Who Makes Movies?" spots where some lowly crew member is trotted out to say how Internet pirates are taking food out of his dyslexic kid's mouth, I want to say, "Actually, it's Canadians who...
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8:30 AM
May 10, 2005
You can't make this stuff up, folks. Microsoft UK is sponsoring a short film contest, with 2,000 worth of equipment vouchers. The theme: Thought Thieves. "The theme of your film should be about how intellectual property theft affects both individuals...
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6:15 AM
May 3, 2005
Move over, Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law. In his article in Slate, "Paranoia for Fun and Profit: How Disney and Michael Moore cleaned up on Fahrenheit 9/11", Epstein shows how Moore played up Disney's refusal to distribute his Cannes-winning doc,...
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10:59 AM
April 30, 2005
The Guardian reports that Steven Soderbergh's new series of HD films will be released by Mark Cuban's and Todd Wagner's 2929 Entertainment simultaneously in the company's theaters, on their HD TV channel, and on DVD. Given the reach of the...
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3:00 AM
April 22, 2005
The problem is that Penn can't play just any agent trying to do his job. He has to have his own traumatic back story and overflowing well of grief over a dead wife, because what's a Penn performance these days...
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4:06 AM
April 21, 2005
Never the innovator, apparently, NEC commissioned a series of sponsored short films which debuted last fall. The theme(s)? "Ubiquitous" and "U Can Change." Let me just say, that slogan's no "Art of Speed." I guess they think it works alright...
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2:51 AM
April 16, 2005
Gus Van Sant's new film, Last Days, is a fictional recreation of the impending death of Kurt Cobain, shot in the director's now-mature semi-documentary style. The trailer's up; Last Days opens May 16 in France, timed, presumably, with its debut...
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12:25 PM
April 11, 2005
Some of you have already gotten this in email, but tomorrow night (Tuesday, 4/12) is the fourth annual installment of A Work In Progress, where MoMA's Film & Media department celebrates a distinct directorial voice in cinema. This year's honoree...
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7:17 AM
April 5, 2005
Now that's a deft review. While Michael Atkinson praises Wong Kar Wai's segment of Eros he largely ignores Soderbergh's contribution--and he totally pans Antonioni's in the most deferential possible way: "[Antonioni]...is 20 years into his post-stroke period and whoit must...
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8:52 AM
April 4, 2005
Technically, The Year of The Dependent Short was 2004, but the people at Blu Dot are usually so far ahead of the curve, I'll cut them some slack. In conjunction with Daylight Savings Time, Blu Dot launched the first in...
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4:38 AM
April 3, 2005
I want to say, "Finally!" The NYT reports on the players in the burgeoning medium of DVD extras: directors like Laurent Bouzereau (Spielberg) and producers like Mark Rowen (Shrek 2). Bouzereau started in the laser disc business and spent time...
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11:12 AM
March 27, 2005
Will Ferrell's last line in the trailer for Bewitched is, "How did this happen??!" I was wondering the same thing when I found out the movie's not a remake of the TV series, it's about making a remake of the...
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10:49 AM
March 21, 2005
What about Nolan's Memento? Fellow Frenchman Gaspar No's controversial Irrversible? The UK Observer's Phillip French conjures a half-baked history of movie storytelling in flashback in order to create some context for his review of Francois Ozon's half-baked 5 x 2....
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11:54 AM
March 16, 2005
I finally saw John Walter's entertaining and transfixing 2002 documentary, How To Draw A Bunny tonight on Sundance Channel. Walter--an editor-turned-director--collages together the incredible story of the artist's artist Ray Johnson, whose life, art, and elaborately contrived 1995 suicide in...
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1:18 AM
March 15, 2005
"{Dimension Films exec Andrew] Rona is only too delighted to play the heavy and play it to the Mephistophelean hilt. In fact, when the studio doesn't get its way in the selection of a director, he signals that he will...
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11:26 AM
So let it be written, so let it be done. Many of the thousands of Ten Commandments statues gracing public parks, courthouses and city halls around the country--including the one whose constitutionality is being considered by the Supreme Court--were placed...
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10:09 AM
March 9, 2005
The cannabis connections of the Ocean's 12 cast and crew [via kottke, party on, dude!]...
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9:38 AM
March 8, 2005
Ed Halter has a interesting take on how two Iraq documentaries may rehabilitate the image of the much-criticized embedding process as a means for creating accurate historical documents of the war. [Of course, that that's not at all how it...
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9:28 AM
March 3, 2005
Rex's mention of Interpol's new video reminded me of the short film contest they threw last year for the release of their album, Antic. Winners got $1000 to make an Interpol-inspired film, not a music video. In fact, it didn't...
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4:10 AM
Interpol's video for "Evil" from their recent album "Antic" was directed by the artist/CG animator Charlie White. It features an Interpol-ish puppet--"pale, thin, with dark hair and a boyish-man quality"--that looks like White's trademark alien/troll figures in human drag. MTV.com...
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3:59 AM
February 28, 2005
So while he is taping himself for "his talk show on skates," Tony Danza runs into The Gates and falls flat on his face. I don't know how to unpack this little gem of a story, though: Danza, Schmanza,...
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4:29 AM
February 16, 2005
I was an initial, albeit paying skeptic, then a non-practicant, then I bought the last issue of The Believer magazine primarily on the promise of its accompanying DVD filled with short films. That promise has not yet been filled--I have...
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10:47 AM
February 12, 2005
Art in General's hosting a screening of Tarnation at 3, and Jonathan Caouette will be entertaining your questions while you all drink their wine at around 6. Whatever you can get him to do in that mystical hour or so...
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