August 27, 2010
One of the great stories surrounding MoMA's 1965 exhibition "The Responsive Eye" is how collector/garmento Larry Aldrich turned several Op paintings he owned into fabrics, and then into dresses, which fed into the Op Art Trend that was apparently...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:31 AM
August 26, 2010
Danish artist Jacob Boeskov flew to Lagos, Nigeria to make and star in a short action film he wrote titled, Dr. Cruel and the Afro-Icelandic Liberation Front with the noted Nollywood director Teco Benson. The film was produced by...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:55 PM
August 25, 2010
Holy smokes, Gordon Hyatt, I didn't know what you did 44 summers ago. Among the episodes of CBS's news program "Eye on New York" which were acquired by The Museum of Modern Art in 1967 for their Television Archive...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:47 PM
After watching the first segment at maryandmatt's blog, I was hooked. Mike Wallace, shooting a 1965 episode of WCBS news show Eye on New York in and about The Museum of Modern Art's blockbuster exhibition of Op Art, "The...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:45 AM
August 23, 2010
I watched the documentary Alice Neel last night, made in 2007 by the late artist's grandson Andrew Neel. It's pretty good, definitely worth a watch. Documentaries by family members come with a whole set of conflicts and challenges baked in,...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:21 PM
August 13, 2010
A couple of weeks ago, I watched Henning Lohner's film essay/documentary about working with John Cage to make One11 and 103, Cage's only feature film project, completed just before he passed away in 1992. It's on YouTube, chopped up...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:18 PM
July 26, 2010
Breaker, Breaker One-Nine, I got Moving Serra, a documentary about transporting Richard Serra's 242-ton sculpture Sequence cross-country, from MoMA to LACMA on a fleet of flatbeds, that's blowing my mind right now. We need a convoy of Serra torqued...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:57 PM
July 22, 2010
That Google Street View snafu yesterday reminded me of a still from Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's 1932 abstract//constructivist short film, Lichtspiel, or Lightplay. Normally, I'd say that's the art-nerdiest possible free association in the world, but I've actually been meaning to...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:37 PM
July 21, 2010
While scoping out the 1974 video art conference at MoMA, "Open Circuits, the Future of Television," filmmaker Jose Montes Baquer decided that for some reason, Salvador Dali should be the artist he would collaborate with for his documentary. Baquer...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:20 PM
July 20, 2010
I was half-watching the German artist Ferdinand Kriwet's Apollovision, a film & sound & video collage of the Apollo 11 moon landing as American media spectacle made, incredibly, in 1969, when I heard this:Now you can follow the Apollo...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:32 AM
July 18, 2010
The things you learn at church. So of course I knew that the late illustrator Arnold Friberg's dramatic paintings of scenes from the Book of Mormon, with ripped Nephites and Lamanites striding around the Promised Land, are lodged in...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:11 PM
July 11, 2010
Larry Gottheim's 1970 short film Fog Line is just beautiful to watch. 11 minutes of fog imperceptibly but inexorably dissipating in a rural landscape. It reminds me a bit of Tacita Dean's Banewl, a 63-minute fixed shot of a...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:13 AM
July 10, 2010
I came across a mention of Len Lye's spectacular-looking kinetic sculpture a couple of weeks ago, while reading 1965 coverage of the Buffalo Festival of the Arts. Sandwiched in between a photo of Robert Morris and Yvonne Rainer in...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:02 PM
July 7, 2010
I didn't make it the first time, of course, but I did see Gilbert & George's reprise of "The Singing Sculpture" in 1991 at Sonnabend. It left a pretty deep impression on me in a way their photo compositions...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:50 PM
July 2, 2010
Harrier and Jaguar, Fiona Banner's commission for Tate Britain's Duveen Galleries opened this week, and from the making of film and interview with the artist, it looks spectacular. Banner has installed two decommissioned fighter jets--a BAe Sea Harrier XE695...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:38 PM
One of the simplest, best parts of Innen Stadt Außen [Inner City Out], Olafur Eliasson's multiple public and museum projects in his adopted hometown of Berlin this year, is now online as a short film. In what feels like...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:46 PM
May 24, 2010
This 11-minute documentary short by Brisbane animator Simon Cottee gives a nice look at contemporary pixel art and its origins. Unsurprisingly, game developer Jason Rohrer has the most thoughtful perspective on the idealized, ex-post-facto perception of pixels as these perfect,...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:22 AM
On the occasion of Apichatpong Weerasethakul [1] winning the Palme d'Or, Frieze's Dan Fox has a incisive recap of the debate over Slow Cinema that erupted after Nick James' Sight and Sound recent op-ed calling the genre out as a...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:42 AM
May 20, 2010
My buddy John Powers has been working on this insane project forlikeever: an artists commentary track--with pictures!--that runs alongside Star Wars IV. Tonight he's presenting it at Philoctetes, and discussing it along with Colby Chamberlain and Luke duBois, who's made...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:24 AM
March 31, 2010
I've been looking into how Google Street View panoramas are made, and it's been kind of awesome. Each equirectangular panorama is stitched together on the fly out of 21 photos. Equirectangular projection, or plate carrée (flat square), is a...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:01 AM
March 24, 2010
Suddenly silver mirrored balls are everywhere. Music video and filmmaker Roel Wouters created the trailer for last year's International Film Festival Breda: A silver sphere on an endless checkerboard floor is the default for many 3D modeling applications. It can...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:01 PM
March 22, 2010
Through The Night Softly was a 1973 performance piece-as-latenight-TV-commercial by Chris Burden. It's a 10-second video of the artist, in a Speedo, inching on his stomach across a parking lot full of broken glass. [View it on UbuWeb.] Burden...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:23 PM
March 21, 2010
A great post on language & progress, Claude Levi-Strauss & TIno Sehgal. Some of the most interesting commentary I've read on discerning the actual structure and contours of Sehgal's This Progress, too. [futureofthebook.org via @briansholis] Which makes me wonder: do...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:28 PM
On his blog Into The Abyss, editor/filmmaker Todd Miro has an awesome, screencap-filled rant about the orange-and-tealification of Hollywood. In color theory, teal is the high-contrast opposite of flesh tone [as the palette Miro generated at kuler demonstrates] and...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:19 AM
March 20, 2010
I've been working on a shot-for-shot remake of the Spiral Jetty film for a while, and so I'm quite familiar with the storyboard-like drawings Smithson did for it. Familiar with them as drawings, that is. He called them Movie...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:07 PM
March 18, 2010
"Brian Palma" is a bit of a stretch, but Tarantino's clapboard loader Geraldine Brezca is a true artist in her own right. [via]...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:53 PM
March 16, 2010
While rummaging around in Vito Acconci's early exhibition history for traces of Kathryn Bigelow's work [more on that in a second], I came across a set of three early, short Super 8mm films I'd never heard of: Three Attention...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:17 PM
March 13, 2010
Like everyone else reading it on OSCAR NIGHT®, Andrew Hultkrans' 1995 Artforum interview with Kathryn Bigelow gave me hope for the films-by-artists genre, if not quite from the direction people might expect. To hear a double OSCAR® winner say of...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:40 AM
March 12, 2010
Ken Knowlton's artistic collaborations have been less well-known that his Bell Labs colleague, Billy Kluver, who created E.A.T. Experiements with Art & Technology, with Robert Rauschenberg and who introduced Andy Warhol to Mylar. But we'll get to that. In...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:54 PM
Stan VanDerBeek and Ken Knowlton at Bell Labs collaborated on a series of digital structuralist computer/graphic/text animations in 1966. They used BeFLIX, [Bell Flicks], an 8-bit graphics programming language Knowlton developed in 1963. The Tate's clean version of Poemfield No....
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:16 PM
March 3, 2010
For a generation of art watchers, Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty existed primarily as an image, via the making-of film and Gianfranco Gorgoni's iconic aerial photographs, which were exhibited at MoMA's seminal Information show and were published in Smithson's Artforum...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:31 PM
February 18, 2010
For their "Art of Two Germanys" show in 2008, LACMA recreated part of a 1966 gallery installation by Gerhard Richter called Volker Bradke, which was designed to mimic or reference the postwar German bourgeoisie's penchant for ticky tacky floral wallpaper....
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:05 PM
February 2, 2010
I've been searching for historical and primary source material for Project Echo, one of NASA's earliest missions, which kicked into high gear in 1958. The giant, inflatable satelloons were functional--passive reflection communication satellites. That they were shaped just like...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:58 AM
January 29, 2010
Ten years, people. That's how long it took me to spot this. Ten. Years. What can I say, I got no excuse. I let you down. Olafur Eliasson, Double Sunset, 1999 [olafureliasson.net] While I'm on the topic, my friend...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:01 AM
January 18, 2010
So awesome. With a few skateboard wheels, some L-brackets, and some grip tape, Brussels-based videographer VJ Aalto turned the ladder-shaped side bracket from Ivar, my Ikea component system of choice, into a EUR18 dolly track. The great-looking test videos...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:48 AM
January 7, 2010
So I was watching Marie Lorenz' video, Capsized, on WNYC's Culture Blog, like I was told to do. And not just because she had co-curated Invisible Graffiti Magnet Show inside those Richard Serra torqued spiral segments stored along the Bronx...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:39 AM
January 2, 2010
While poking around last night looking for more films and videos made by Ernesto Neto, I found this clip, a black & white making-of short for Looking for the end, an installation Neto made in the southern Paris suburb of...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:02 AM
December 29, 2009
For the Allied forces, The Battle of Hürtgen Forest was the longest and one of the bloodiest, most pointless battles of World War II. Between October 1944 through February 1945, over 33,000 US soldiers were killed in the dense...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:51 PM
November 16, 2009
Spectacularious music video for "Style," a song from Shankar's Sivaji: The Boss [2007], the most expensive and highest grossing Indian film in history. It was shot on location in Spain, and stars Rajnikanth [b. 1950], the superstar of Tamil...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:32 AM
November 14, 2009
I can't say how I feel about Francesco Vezzoli's work; that's not how my mama raised me. I will grant though, that he's extremely smart and astute and has successfully identified an elemental dynamic of the art world and makes...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:45 PM
November 1, 2009
Tacita Dean on the making of Craneway Event, the rehearsals of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in a former auto factory on the San Francisco Bay, which she filmed exactly a year ago: I edited it alone on my film-cutting...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:15 AM
October 23, 2009
Hilary Harris's 1975 Organism feels like a missing link in the chain of film portraits of New York City as a pulsing, living thing. Like Whitman, whose "Leaves of Grass" provided the text for their1921 film Manhatta Paul Strand and...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:21 AM
September 24, 2009
Gruber calls this Windows 7 Launch Party video "cringe-inducing," and it certainly is. Though I'm pretty sure the technical term for erratic, pointless, exaggerated simulation of handheld camera movement using a fixed camera and a pan handle is seizure-inducing....
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:37 AM
August 28, 2009
So I sneaked out last night to see Inglourious Basterds, which I found to be generally fantastic; Brad Pitt's craft has come a long way since Meet Joe Black. Because, I confess, I'm still working through a stack of badly...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:18 AM
August 10, 2009
It's now known as "Theater Piece No. 1," and it is considered to be the first multimedia happening. It included simultaneous solos of dance, poetry readings and a lecture, along with slides, film, painting, and phonographic recordings. But if John...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:43 PM
August 4, 2009
Wow, Jennie Livingston's incredible documentary Paris is Burning, about vogueing gangs and balls, is on YouTube. This was a formative New York City film for me. I've given talks about it in church, even. I found it one of...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:26 PM
August 1, 2009
Tim Burton was at MoMA yesterday, talking to media folk about a film dept. retrospective of his work, which includes an exhibition this fall of sketches, storyboards, props, puppets, etc. from his wacked out output. I wasn't in town...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:12 AM
July 27, 2009
Was watching this ancient panel discussion, "Time and Space Concepts in Music and Visual Art," from Pleiades Gallery in 1978 with Merce Cunningham, but then I totally fell for Nam June Paik all over again instead. A couple of...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:20 PM
July 23, 2009
Wow. This is a commercial for Cellcom, an Israeli cell phone provider. Check out the [so far unacknowledged] original, "Yeah, yeah, We speak perfect English. Just Serve," a documentary short made by Wholphin editor Brent Hoff and Josh Bearman...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:48 PM
July 16, 2009
Herbert Muschamp in a giant weather balloon movie in Monaco WHAT?This is something we did in Monaco where we put Herbert Muschamp's text, "Bubbles in the Wine," to film. It was my job to go out and find these...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:15 AM
June 27, 2009
Artforum's William Pym covering the extremely non-chalant X-Initiative opening this week:Jordan Wolfson, hovering by Barcelona's Latitudes, took several prods before he could even remember that he was participating in a group show with healthy buzz opening at I-20 Gallery round...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:13 AM
June 25, 2009
From Linda Yablonsky's account of a Matthew Barney/Elizabeth Peyton colabo on Hydra, sponsored by Dakis Joannou:"Barney looked at his watch. 'Just about two hours,' he said to Peyton. 'Not bad. After all, there's a limit to how long you can...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:42 PM
June 15, 2009
I thought Hirokazu Koreeda was going to be making a samurai jidai-geki. Wait, he did, in 2006. Hana yori mo naho. Here's a review: "The only samurai movie with pink flowers on the cover." Odd then, that even considering how...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:37 AM
June 12, 2009
Dear Bootleggers of Christian Marclay's 4-channel masterpiece, Video Quartet, First off, you're fabulous. Second, rather than pan back and forth and back and forth across the four screens, if you would please station yourself to the side and get...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:13 PM
June 6, 2009
In 1973, Chris Burden bought a month worth of late-night ad time on a local TV station in Los Angeles, and aired a 10-second film clip of Through the Night Softly, a performance where Burden, clad only in bikini...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:51 PM
June 1, 2009
Wow, the 2-minute clip of Daniel Martinico's 15-minute Khaan! is fantastic. This is more what I thought Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno's Zidane would be like, but wasn't. LA Weekly review from a 2008 screening [laweekly via boingboing]...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:34 PM
May 29, 2009
Dear Sirs and/or Mesdames: I recently purchased [Brushes/ Red/ a stack of legal pads] after it was featured [all over the Internet and newyorker.com/ Cannes/ in every author Terry Gross has ever interviewed]. It is with great disappointment that I...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:04 AM
April 28, 2009
This gorgeous Darren Almond photograph, Infinite Betweens: Becoming Between, Phase 3, of an impossible-to-map landscape covered with Tibetan prayer flags is coming up at Philips in a couple of weeks. It reminded me how quietly strong his work is,...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:47 PM
April 27, 2009
Who knew? Tacita Dean writes in the Guardian about her late friend JG Ballard's shared interest in Robert Smithson:My relationship to Ballard had begun a little earlier, with our mutual interest in the work of the US artist Robert Smithson....
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:05 AM
April 26, 2009
I'm totally with Andy on this one; you should not embed it; you should watch the new ad for the Honda Insight hybrid on the Vimeo site. The sunrise is spectacular. Meanwhile, as with the making of videos for the...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:43 PM
April 17, 2009
Awesome. YouTube user fluxlaser has created levels in Little Big Planet based on The Cremaster Cycle. So far, there's Cremaster 4 [above] and Cremaster 1 [below], which is tighter. I can't wait to see the mirrored salt flat rodeo...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:25 PM
March 13, 2009
Agnes Varda, who's DV mini-masterpiece The Gleaners was formative in my own decision to start making movies, tells Artforum:I've been making films for so long, for over fifty years now, but I really think I have two paths of work--cinema...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:02 PM
March 10, 2009
G -- He is an archeologist and an anthropologist. A Ph.D. He's a doctor, he's a college professor. What happened is, he's also a sort of rough and tumble guy. But he got involved in going in and getting antiquities....
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:03 AM
February 26, 2009
I discovered the Maysles brothers' 1975 documentary Grey Gardens in my first semester of busines school. My marketing professor showed us Salesman, and it floored me, leaving me to track down the rest of the Maysles' work. So I can't...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:28 PM
February 24, 2009
If Laurel Nakadate ever got knocked up by one of her video subjects, and then sent the kid to Yale for his MFA, too... BOOMBOX from Ely Kim on Vimeo....
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:55 PM
February 17, 2009
Whether it's right or not, this book sounds fantastic:Making art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that inevitably exists between what you intended to do, and what you did. In fact, if artmaking did not tell you (the maker)...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:50 AM
February 13, 2009
I caught a few minutes of Joss Whedon on Fresh Air yesterday; for the first half of the show, he was talking about the making of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, and the awesome-sounding DVD, which includes Commentary! The Musical! the...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:25 PM
January 24, 2009
I remember people scoffing at the Mormon pioneer hymn, "Come, Come Ye Saints" because its tune is from some English drinking song. But that just seals it for me as a song written by and for some seriously humbled folks...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:20 PM
January 14, 2009
For their first show in 2005 Orchard, the collaborative gallery/exhibition space on the Lower East Side, recreated Dan Graham's 1966 Project for Slide Projector:Project for Slide Projector was presented as a set of instructions for an experimental work and...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:38 AM
December 31, 2008
The greg.org Unannounced Holiday Break [UHB? Oh wait, that's already taken] is over. A month from now, on Jan. 31, I'll be part of a panel discussing Mormon art and artists at the Sunstone Symposium in Washington, DC. It's sponsored...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:49 AM
December 19, 2008
It just keeps going and going! From Steven Kaplan emailed with a reply from MoMA curator Christian Rattemeyer about the consciousness of edits in Fischli & Weiss's Der Lauf der Dinge: "It is his contention that many astute and observant...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:08 PM
December 17, 2008
I've been searching for more critical acknowledgment of Fischli & Weiss's Der Lauf der Dinge as an edited construct instead of the miraculous documentation it's normally perceived/presented to be. Though he's talking about another Fischli & Weiss piece [above],...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:08 PM
December 13, 2008
Artforum reports that Fischli & Weiss's 1987 film, Der Lauf der Dinge, (The Way Things Go), [1] was recently sold at Christie's in Zurich for 1.02 million Swiss francs. Which is awesome [2], I first thought, since I have...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:26 AM
December 11, 2008
Before he became the first cinematographer in Hollywood[land], and before he helped fund D.W. Griffith's Birth of A Nation, Billy Bitzer worked for the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company in New York, making actualities, basically documentary shorts. Like this...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:38 PM
December 3, 2008
Wait, The Empire was the US and the Rebellion was the North Vietnamese, but Lucas only put them in space after Hollywood suits wouldn't let him make Apocalypse Now? And the grunge was a simultaneous obeisance and refutation of...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:15 AM
November 18, 2008
Interesting. Vanity Fair published the 16-point memo painter Thomas Kinkade distributed to the crew before they began shooting Thomas Kinkade's Christmas Cottage, a film telling Kinkade's own creation myth, how he became an artist to save his mom's house from...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:59 AM
September 23, 2008
I first encountered filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek's work in Aspen Magazine. His 1964 collaboration with Robert Morris, Site, combined dance/performance, art, and film. Performers create a physical, 3-D approximation of camera wipes and reveals using large black and white panels....
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:30 PM
September 13, 2008
On the occasion of a Film Forum series of his work, Terrence Rafferty has an interesting, if brief and kind of depressing think about David Lean's method in the NY Times. Maybe the series can wrest Lean away from the...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:18 AM
August 20, 2008
Daniel Birnbaum in Artforum, discussing "Beckett/Nauman," a Spring 2000 exhibition at the Kunsthalle Wien The organizers of "Beckett/Nauman," Kunsthalle Wien curator Christine Hoffmann and art historian Michael Glasmeier, aren't really out to prove anything, but their juxtaposition of works by...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:24 AM
August 4, 2008
Alright, so last night I made some wisecrack about a scene from Kevin Costner's 1997 film The Postman, where a mutant general pacifies his slave army by showing The Sound of Music on a floating theater on a lake...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:59 AM
August 3, 2008
I loved Cabinet before I wrote for them, and I love them after. In the latest issue, #30 The Underground, Colby Chamberlain looks at an awesome 1971 drawing by Robert Smithson titled, Toward the development of a Cinema Cavern...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:15 PM
July 29, 2008
Five years ago, someone in North Philadelphia committed suicide by getting hit by the Amtrak train I was riding. I was in the first car behind the engine, where we heard the impact and the aftermath. I was kind of...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:05 AM
July 2, 2008
So elegiac. The chandeliers with the painted-on camera flares sequence is particularly beautiful. [youtube via artforum video] related: Interesting. Paddy put into a coherent statement what I briefly wondered and then forgot: what's the implication of ArtForum showcasing YouTube...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:21 AM
June 30, 2008
Gordon Matta-Clark's 1975 film, Day's End, is on view at MoMA right now. It documents a guerrilla project where he and a couple of collaborators cut a giant, moon-shaped hole in the wall of an abandoned sanitation warehouse on...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:25 PM
June 22, 2008
The scale of the scandal of the management of BYU's art collection was becoming clear just as I entered the art history program there in the late 1980's. For years, the collection had been ignored by everyone except one professor...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:05 PM
June 9, 2008
As the guy married to the officially coolest scientist at NASA, I admit, I took a personal, even a slightly defensive, interest when I read on Gizmodo that Scientists from NASA's Space Sciences Laboratory have made [magnetic fields] visible...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:14 AM
May 27, 2008
Interesting. The script for one of my favorite Scorsese films, his dark, odd 1985 After Hours, appears to have been heavily lifted from a 1982 performance by Joe Frank, one of my favorite dark, odd radio dramatists. Andrew Hearst has...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:30 PM
May 22, 2008
Christopher Knight didn't have as bad a time at the performance/filming of Matthew Barney's "REN" as the audience members who were injured by flying glass when the backhoe went at it with the Chrysler Imperial in the auto dealer showroom:When...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:31 AM
May 13, 2008
This is awesome, like OG William Kentridge in real space. MUTO is a new stop-action animation by Blu, a Buenos Aires artist, where I guess/hope they have different etiquette about painting over someone else's art on the street. MUTO a...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:02 PM
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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....
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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 —...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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,...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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,...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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]...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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....
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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]...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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,...
[read the full post...]
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....
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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....
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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.-...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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....
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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....
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:22 AM
|
Comments (0)
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"...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:17 AM
|
Comments (0)
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:08 AM
May 4, 2006
ìMargene, just to let you know, Nicki is just pretending to have a baby in order to have more time with Bill. Sheís still on the pill; sheís using Bill. I believe she knows about Bill and Barbís affair. Nicki...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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]...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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,...
[read the full post...]
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 JÈrÈmie Renier, the same young actor from their last film, La Promesse. It's not love,...
[read the full post...]
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,...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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,...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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....
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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,...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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]...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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,...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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 Wasnít," a musical based on a trip to Antarctica. The first part was...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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,...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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,...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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....
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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 Landmarkís Sunshine Cinema, a reporter for a vapid monthly didnít recognize...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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....
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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,...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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,...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:49 AM
March 21, 2005
What about Nolan's Memento? Fellow Frenchman Gaspar NoÈ's controversial IrrÈversible? 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....
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:09 AM
March 9, 2005
The cannabis connections of the Ocean's 12 cast and crew [via kottke, party on, dude!]...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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,...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
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...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:16 AM
Jason's got his photos of The Gates up, I'm sure the rest of the camera-equipped world will follow. Albert Maysles talks on WPS1 about the 25+year-long process of making his film about The Gates, The Gates. Maysles is making this...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:50 AM
February 11, 2005
I can't quite say why, but I had a pretty intense Jon Jost phase when I first moved to New York. I saw his All The Vermeers In New York several times, lured in by the title, but kept there...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:22 AM
February 10, 2005
I admit, a lot of Sundance went by me in a blur. No one I knew I knew was showing anything this year, and I knew non-film work would conspire to keep me out of Park City, so maybe I'm...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:33 AM
February 9, 2005
Microsoft has commissioned Alex Garland (28 Days Later, um, The Beach, but we don't talk about that) to write a script for Halo--a v1.0, if you will--which will be offered to producers along with with the game's film rights as...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:11 AM
February 8, 2005
You know how, for whatever reason, some ideas that once seemed like slam-dunks take so long to come to fruition, they fizzle out and disappear because the country's media parade has already passed by? Garfield: The Movie's a good example....
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:38 AM
February 7, 2005
What is it about bunnies and short films? First, the NY Times has a hi-larious, yet thoughtfully insightful interview with Jennifer Shiman, the creator of 30-Second Bunny Theatre. Then Chris Harding's 50's instructional film-style short for Hallmark features a hutchful...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:57 AM
February 6, 2005
North Korea's ambassador in Prague has demanded that Team America World Police be banned from the Czech Republic; it depicts Kim Jong Il consorting with Alec Baldwin, which, he says, would totally NEVER happen. Replies Foreign Ministry spokesman Vit Kolar,...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:13 AM
February 4, 2005
Blair Erickson writes about his experience working with director Uwe Boll on an early treatment and script for the Tara Reid vehicle [sic] Alone In The Dark. Even if it IS the Worst Movie Ever Of The Century Of The...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:40 AM
February 3, 2005
From the English press kit for Madrid 11M: Todos Ibamos en Ese Tren/Madrid M11: We Were All On That Train, a compilation of 27 short films produced by DocusMadrid, a non-profit organization which supports Spanish documentary films:On March 11th,...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:10 AM
After all, Eric Steel didn't say he wasn't going to film the jumpers off the Golden Gate Bridge when he applied for a permit to shoot the bridge all day, every day, for a year. According to the federal officials...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:26 AM
February 2, 2005
"'We've been given the mandate to compete on a more aggressive level,' says [Paramount Classics co-pres David] Dinerstein, who also helped orchestrate the reported $2 million purchase of Mad Hot Ballroom, a Slamdance documentary widely described as Spellbound meets Strictly...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:57 AM
January 25, 2005
Chain, was directed by Brooklyn-based filmmaker Jem Cohen. The movie tells the story of a pair of women seemingly stranded in an instantly familiar, parking lot-filled landscape of big box retail stores, fast food restaurants and malls. It looks like...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:06 PM
January 17, 2005
There's a long profile in the NYT of Section Eight, Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney's Warner Bros-based production company, whose deal is set to run out in a couple of years. I'm not quite sure what the takeaway is: George...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:12 AM
January 15, 2005
In this week's Arts & Leisure section, Adam Leipzig entertainingly/depressingly lays out the beyond-improbable odds of 1) having a successful independent film, and 2) getting your script made into a big studio hit. Not that I would EVER question the...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:12 AM
January 13, 2005
Demonstrating a curatorial wisdom so vast it puts the [sic] in Sicha, Choire has put me in his show at the Clementine Gallery. I'll be screening and editing a new/old short, footage we shot in the summer of 2001 that...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:13 AM
January 12, 2005
Caryn James barely scratches the surface with her article-cum-warning about directors' dream projects: "Here is a basic rule of moviegoing," she starts, "when you hear about someone's dream project, run from the box office fast." On the list of dreamers...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:19 PM
|
Comments (0)
January 7, 2005
Remember? I'm turning the blog into a movie? Monday Night? Millennium Theater? 7:30 for chilling, 8:00 for starting? Here's the previously announced program, which will be musically, if not surgically, enhanced: Coming January 10: greg.org - the movie The Reel...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:15 AM
January 5, 2005
The must-have vanity project for 2005: your own biopic. Andy Towle reports that the NY Post reports that W Magazine reports that Bill Condon's developing a script based on a 2001 Vanity Fair article for Tribeca Films. The subject: Pepe...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:59 AM
December 30, 2004
The Center For Social Media conducted a study of the costs and effects of clearing intellectual property on independent documentary filmmakers. They look at the costs, the process, and the impact on how films are made and on what subjects....
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:58 AM
This just in, in time to seal 2004 as The Year Of The Sponsored Short, is A-Clips, a series of aggressively unsponsored shorts:A-Clip plays with the aesthetics of cinema commercials, which are reproduced, satirized or subverted. Each of them has...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:20 AM
December 29, 2004
Or maybe it's greg.org: the videoblog. It's a veritable greg.orgy: everybody come! [uh...] On Monday, January 10th, I'm presenting a program of short films (including one of my own), video art, scenes from features, and other stuff, as part of...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:35 AM
December 21, 2004
At Filter Magazine, David Fear interviews screenwriter/director Noah Baumbach about his collaboration with Wes Anderson on the script for The Life Aquatic.How long did you guys work on this? About a year. We met every day at an Italian restaurant...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:31 PM
From Peter Wollen's essay on Jarman's Blue, recently published in Paris/Manhattan and quoted at length on In Search of The Miraculous, one of Brian Sholis's millions of projects:However, there were more specific reasons for Jarman's growing fascination with Klein. Jarman...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:15 AM
December 15, 2004
"Brilliant! Best PowerPoint of The Year!" -Peter Travers, Rolling Stone. The Indianapolis Star has a play-by-play account of the investigation into the Pacers-fans brawl during the Detroit Pistons game Nov. 19. To announce charges against both fans and players, the...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:33 AM
December 11, 2004
Again, a thousand unposted excuses, I've been writing toward a rather cuh-razy offline deadline. Meanwhile, I haven't been seeing movies like The Life Aquatic. I DO plan to see it, but judging from David Edelstein's review in Slate, it may...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:46 AM
December 8, 2004
When I saw this link the other day, I didn't click on it. Execution couldn't be any funnier than the concept, I figured. Boy, was I wrong. Dubyamovie.com [via Jason, Andy, ]...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:09 AM
December 5, 2004
In order to shoot interior scenes of Barry Lyndon entirely by candlelight, Stanley Kubrick had two extremely fast Zeiss photo lenses from NASA custom-adapted for a motion picture camera. There is a third Zeiss lens in existence, un-Kubricized, and Justin...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:13 AM
December 1, 2004
"But enough about me, let's talk about you. What do YOU think of me?" I hate it that I have a line from Beaches burned into my brain, but once in a while, it comes in handy. I know what...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:31 AM
November 29, 2004
Unlike that otherart rock band, Fischerspooner, Maxi Geil & PlayColt are actually still around. Also unlike FS, you might actually like hearing them play. [Other ways they differ from that flash in the 2002 pan: they're smart, but not in...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:24 PM
For those who wondered how Matthew Barney was planning to top his five-part Cremaster Cycle... For those who wondered, after watching The Cremaster Cycle, if Matthew Barney was really a top... For those who want to top Matthew Barney...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:53 AM
November 24, 2004
The debut live performance of Pierre Huyghe's puppet opera was last week at Harvard's Carpenter Center, Le Corbusier's only building in the US. While it's not quite a review, Ann Wilson Lloyd's report in the Times gives more details of...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:03 AM
Jason's got some discussion/speculation about Wes Anderson's so-far monogamous relationship with Futura in his films, which continues into The Life Aquatic. Futura and Wes Anderson [kottke.org] Related: new The Life Aquatic trailers at Apple.com Talk about control: Anderson's next project...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:56 AM
November 23, 2004
Sorry, your entire Sunday morning isn't enough. Now the NYT Arts & Leisure section wants your whole weekend. Jan 7-9, 2005, to be precise, far enough in advance that you can't pretend you have something else planned. Some program highlights:...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:55 AM
November 22, 2004
Is it a Hollywood perk trend, or just a by-product of working at The Directors Bureau? Whichever, director/artist Mike Mills is the latest auteur to attain that most incongruous of filmmaking achievements: his own blindingly trendy store in Tokyo. Humans...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:13 AM
November 18, 2004
Now! From television's acknowledged experts in adultery, profanity, lying, and covetousness! According to Variety, FX SVP Gerard Bocaccio dreamed up the concept for 'The Ten Commandments,' a series of 10 one-hour TV movies which will "explore the spiritual and moral...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:44 AM
November 17, 2004
"Artists from Abbas Kiarostami to Shirin Neshat to Ousmane Sembene have confronted the misogyny of conservative Islam in ways that are at once more damning and less willfully profane." Still, just because it was at once outrageously incendiary and a...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:37 AM
November 11, 2004
Fimoculous has an excellent collection of articles, interviews [including Rex's own], and links for the premiere last week of Chuck Olsen's film/site/project Blogumentary . Check it out. Blogumentary [mitochondria at fimoculous] Blogumentary production blog...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:52 AM
From the team who ruined BMWFilms.com comes a new collection of dependent shorts, just in time for the holidays. Amazon Theater is a series of five short films "featur[ing] products you can purchase at Amazon." Someone's not getting it in...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:59 AM
Scott MacMillan has a wide-ranging, disturbing roundup of the violent aftermath of Theo Van Gogh's murder and public cremation, including the 5-hour standoff--complete with gunfire and grenades--with militant terrorist suspects in The Hague. [Slate] Holland in Flames Religious violence and...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:59 AM
November 8, 2004
Huh, what're the odds? I just finished a piece for an offline publication about machinima, and the first thing I see at this year's Margaret Mead Documentary Festival is Beyond Manzanar, a video game-based exploration of the internment of Japanese...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:46 AM
November 4, 2004
After the stunning success of Team America World Police [Hey, turns out they got the US political climate right after all...], puppet projects are breaking out all over. At Harvard's Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, the artist Pierre Huyghe is...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:54 AM
ICM's Man in New York, Bart Walker is going to CAA. Walker is known for making it happen for filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch and Sofia Coppola. His "Jarmusch-style" foreign presale fundraising helped Coppola keep the copyright for Virgin Suicides and...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:24 AM
In addition to the shooter/stabber, Dutch police and intelligence officials have arrested eight other men ages 19-26 in connection with the murder of filmmaker Theo Van Gogh. Several of them had been detained before in terrorism-related investigations. Meanwhile, the man...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:06 AM
No, that doesn't mean they're now recruiting Bush dodgers. It means they're promoting the country as an up-and-coming alternative location for film production. Here's a partial list of benefits to shooting in Iceland: At least four months a year, you...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:08 AM
November 2, 2004
Dutch filmmaker and great grandson* Theo Van Gogh was murdered on an Amsterdam street today, ostensibly because of his short film, Submission. [That's the title.] Since Submission was broadcast on the VPRO TV network in August, Van Gogh and...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:06 AM
October 26, 2004
Just got a heads up from a greg.org reader at IFC: the network has picked up the tv rights to Soldiers Pay, the documentary by my boy David O. Russell, Tricia Regan, and Juan Carlos ZaldÌvar, which was originally produced...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:16 AM
October 23, 2004
Interpol Claims Designer Knockoffs Fund Terrorism [via village voice] related: Interpol announces short film contest...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:23 AM
Why didn't I think of that? After reading the page in Matthew Barney's film-financing handbook where he describes selling sculptures and limited editions to raise money for the Cremaster movies, Tom Ford has released his own veritable work of art....
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:06 AM
October 20, 2004
...a black hole: the laws of matter are reversed. - Katariina Lillqvist ...a poem: it takes big themes and distils them. Less is more. -ScreenEast ...poems. - Pertti Paltila ...a poem: brief, still highly literate, and capable of making ripples...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:34 AM
October 18, 2004
The Cinetrix has an engrossing review of an equally engrossing documentary, Nina Davenport's Parallel Lines. The New York director was away on a freelance gig in San Diego on September 11th and decided to film her way home. Through the...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:37 AM
NYT fashion reporter Cathy Horyn goes to Hollywood to see what Tom Ford's up to. True to reports when he left Gucci, he's looking to make a small fortune in the movie business."If I'm going to get one shot to...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:30 AM
October 11, 2004
On the long-anticipated convergence of films and video games: on City of Sound, Dan Hill points out GTA3: Vice City's remarkable multitude of similarities to Scarface, from the landscape, to the music, to the interior decorating details of Tony Montana's...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:06 AM
My mother's house was recently scouted as a location for this season of The WB's Everwood. She didn't want all those people stomping across her limestone, so she turned them down. But according to the LA Times, some homeowners say...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:27 AM
October 10, 2004
While the discovery of an underground cinema in the center of Paris has been widely covered, little or no attention has been paid to what the films actually played there. Les Arenes de Chaillot (The Chaillot Arenas) was created...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:30 AM
October 7, 2004
Don't know the editor, but the actors are familiar, and the script, we all know it by heart now ("September 11th, Saddam Hussein, very dangerous, global terrorism"). BoingBoing points to a video that distills the 4-day message of last month's...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:43 AM
October 6, 2004
And I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free...to take children to see simulated puppet sex. Kudos to the MPAA censors--now sitting in their collective bed smoking a Marlboro Light--who made the producers of Team...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:21 AM
October 5, 2004
Call it Team ANTI-America, just the kind of devious attack you'd expect in an election year: The ever-patriotic MPAA is bravely taking a stand, seeking to protect the high-quality of simulated puppet sex [SPS] America's children know and love from...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:44 AM
September 25, 2004
It's hard to remember now, but things looked so different back then. In August. When Sharon Waxman put David O. Russell on the deck of an aircraft carrier the front page of the Times Arts section for "Conquer[ing] the Hollywood...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:34 AM
September 23, 2004
David Robb slogged through decades of data--a veritable quagmire of documentation, including production notes, official memos, filmmaker and producer interviews, and screenplay drafts--to write his new book, Operation Hollywood. From the interview he gave to Mother Jones, it sounds like...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:21 PM
September 22, 2004
Speaking of Wong Kar Wai... Eros is a compilation of three great directors' short films on the subject of, well, eros, love, and sex. Early reports from Toronto say that Wong's is the only segment that's right. The others, by...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:33 AM
September 17, 2004
[via archinect] Two extensive interviews with Daniel Libeskind--one contemporary, one from 1997, when he was working on the Berlin Jewish Museum--form the core of Rob Schr–der's documentary for VPRO, the cool Dutch TV network. 1997 Libeskind's almost unrecognizable, the earnest...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:24 AM
September 16, 2004
Mission Accomplished (aka f***newyork, the name of the .mov file) was the hi-larious (so true, though, we're only laughing on the outside) video of a gang of private school wiggaz telling it like it was about the RNC takeover of...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:48 PM
September 14, 2004
Slate's Kevin Arnovitz reveals some of the jargon he learned on the "set" during his brief stint as a "writer" on a reality TV series. One example: OTF (n) ["On the Fly"]: A quick, impromptu interview of a reality show...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:46 AM
September 13, 2004
The Bible's Greatest Miracles. Yes, before he donned a wig in Erin Brockovich, but after his breakout performances in Neil Labute's In The Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors (and a supporting role in Oliver Stone's Any Given...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:18 AM
And I thought Ronin had the most jaw-dropping Parisian car chase scene. In August 1976, French director Claude Lelouch (who, it turns out, did the French segment of 11"09'01, the one where the deaf chick decides to break up...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:53 AM
Tony Scott's first report from Toronto really gives you a feel for the festival's sprawl and cinematic frenzy, where you feel like you're missing movies more than watching them. Meanwhile, he only mentions one film, and he mentions the hell...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:18 AM
September 12, 2004
Jim Whitaker is the director of a documentary in the making of the changes taking place at the World Trade Center site. Project Rebirth, as it's called, has been taking time lapse imagery from various cameras perched on buildings surrounding...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:11 AM
September 7, 2004
Wallpaper* founding editor Tyler Brule will host and produce The Desk, BBC4's "long awaited media show," a media-gazing TV gig even more prestigious than, say, Topic A with Tina Brown. Brule's strategy for getting the slot may give a hint...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:45 AM
September 4, 2004
"We are starting to go buggy, just getting on one another's nerves," Mrs Mildred Mauney, 81, told The New York Times, after spending the night with some strangers in a classroom-turned-shelter in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. Whatever, Millie. Join the...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:27 AM
September 2, 2004
So you're saying, if you suspend habeas corpus and pre-emptively arrest hundreds of pedestrians, I'll be able to drive my Mercedes [sic] to the Upper East Side from the Holland Tunnel in 10 minutes every day? I have to confess,...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:23 AM
Irene Lacher writes in the NYT about the influx of film directors to the operatic stage. Lacher likes her movie directos old and in hollywood; she mentions Garry Marshall, William Friedkin, Robert Altman. Sure, Julie Taymor, who was directing operas...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:20 AM
August 21, 2004
Sharon Waxman has a report from the set of Team America: World Police, a $32 million puppet action film being directed by a couple of reluctant, foul-mouthed punks pulled from obscurity by Paramount. Somehow the pair of college buddies, named...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:35 AM
August 17, 2004
The UK Observer does a trend story on guerilla media, that starts with grafitti and small-house publishing, but is mostly a mashup on underground bands--kids playing gigs on the tube, for example--and indie filmmakers--like Outfoxed's Roger Greenwald, and Chris Jones...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:24 PM
You've gotta see Errol Morris's commercials for MoveOn PAC, the unaccountable special interest division of MoveOn.org. Morris took the "Switch" concept he used for Apple, and shot ads of Republicans who discuss switching their vote to Kerry. Morris's straight-on interviewing...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:01 AM
Despite the unmitigated embarassment of his last three directorial forays, the actor Kevin Costner still felt qualified, nay, compelled to let fly with the advice on the set of his current film, Untitled Ted Griffin Project. After wrapping for the...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:08 AM
August 16, 2004
With the sole exception of South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, no movie has provided as dead-on accurate a depiction of war as David O. Russell's Three Kings. Now, in an example of cautious "I told you so" prophecy-checking, Russell...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:01 PM
August 14, 2004
While looking at film directors who are more than dabbling in television, the Village Voice's Joy Press puts the current trend into context. Turns out indie-types like Miguel Arteta (Six Feet Under) and Neil Labute (The L Word)(What's that? Sorry,...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:33 AM
August 8, 2004
OK, do I shoot down that comparison in the first sentence, or later on? Starting with his sculpture and environmental pieces, and later with his video and photography, I've been a fan of Jonah Freeman's work for more than six...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:08 AM
July 30, 2004
Last Sunday at the Hirshhorn, I saw a great documentary about one of my favorite artists. Juan Carlos Martin followed Gabriel Orozco around the world for three years, filming and taping the meandering artist's creative process, his installations, and the...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:51 AM
July 27, 2004
"[Altman] then asked a reporter if he wanted to be an extra in the scene with Redford. The reporter thought for a moment about La Dolce Vita, in which an entertainment journalist ends up orchestrating a drunken orgy in the...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:38 PM
July 23, 2004
Slate's David Edelstein hitting for the fences on The Bourne Supremacy: "a virtuoso demonstration" of "the effect of cutting-edge video and documentary techniques on ho-hum movie material..." "...simply a tour-de-force of thriller filmmaking..." "The film has hand-to-hand battles so close...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:14 AM
July 16, 2004
30fps@140mph = f[(2*2.5GHzG5) + 3.5TbHD + FCP4.0 + 42in.HDTV + PS2 + IS300] Got that? It also equals the most ridiculous incarnation of dependent filmmaking this year. In the feat of boys-and-toys bravado that'll surely earn them front row seats...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:16 PM
My wife is leaving for Japan this morning, so our alarm was set for 5:40 AM which, coincidentally, was the precise instant WAMU, the public radio station in DC, started running a promo for Latino USA. So instead of being...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:50 AM
|
Comments (0)
July 15, 2004
I've been a Sony man myself (VX-1000, PD-150), but plenty of festivals have been entered, reels filled out, and development deals struck with the Canon XL-1. Well, that's all so much Fassbinder the bridge (it's ok, I'll wait...with me?) now....
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:01 AM
|
Comments (0)
Police in the Sicilian town of Trapani clearly don't read Gawker. If they did, they wouldn't brag so blithely about spy-camming the Oceans Twelve "beach scenes [where litigation-happy, bikini-clad-photo-squelching] Catherine Zeta Jones swims in the sea at midnight." The cops...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:39 AM
|
Comments (0)
July 13, 2004
Fresh from his TV success FashionKingdom (aka Naomi Conquers Africa) Unzipped director Douglas Keeve has a new project. For the last six months, NYMag reports, he's been shooting a pilot for an art world reality show starring the Naomi of...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:32 AM
Matador Records released the ten winners of, well, a $1,000 budget to make an Interpol-related short for the band's upcoming new album launch. The finished films are due August 15. Top on the list: Gregory Brunkalla, whose couch-slugs-in-spandex short was...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:27 AM
|
Comments (0)
July 11, 2004
NYT Magazine previews Robert Greenwald's latest documentary, Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War On Journalism, which starts showing this week. It'll be rolled out via selective and massroots screenings organized by MoveOn.org and the Center for American Progress. It's the same model...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:56 AM
July 9, 2004
Art director Scott Smith is a directing finalist on the third season of Project Greenlight. He's keeping a weblog of his experience over at agency Coudal Partners, whose new slogan is either "we put the 'cou' in cool," or "no,...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:31 AM
July 7, 2004
An AP story about the Tyler, TX police department, which recently replaced its tape-based in-car video systems with searchable, metadata-friendly hard drive-based DV. Using the system's cache, the "pre-event" feature also captures the 60 seconds before the officer hits...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:16 AM
The British Film Institute's NFT just started a Graham Greene film program(me) as part of their Crime Scene series. Greene cast a strong shadow over British film and film noir. The series includes a preview of a new BBC documentary...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:44 AM
July 2, 2004
The trend continues. Gettyimages teamed with RES and others to have seven directors make 30-60 second shorts on about The Big Idea (whatever that is). The catch: they were to use Getty's own bank of 70,000+ images and clips. By...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:22 AM
July 1, 2004
I met Satoshi Ono in New York, when his excellent DV doc, Danchizake (Homemade Sake), played at MoMA's Documentary Fortnight Dec. 2002. Danchizake is an elliptical, self-effacing, yet powerful story of the filmmaker's own family and the emotional rifts caused...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:18 AM
June 30, 2004
I heard Newsweek's Michael Isikoff barking on WBUR last night about how the shifty Michael Moore has not released a transcript of Farenheit 9/11, the easier to dispute the points he makes in the film. [Is irony really, truly dead...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:46 AM
June 18, 2004
Welcome to a very special greg.org tribute to lowculture:And I am an optimistic person. I guess if you want to try to find something to be pessimistic about, you can find it, no matter how hard you look, you know?-...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:39 PM
In the Guardian, Thomas Kineally tells the rambling, sentimental story of coming across the Oskar Schindler story in 1980, when he dropped into a Beverly Hills handbag shop. Literally. And in a rambling rant that ranges from the importance of...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:27 PM
June 17, 2004
[via waxy] A Flash movie of Tibetan monks making a sand mandala, made by David Hirmes using photos from the U of C. Also on Hirmes.com, the Lewitt Variations, three Flash animations of possible interpretations of the instructions for a...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:57 AM
June 16, 2004
And this, from just one piece in the Times about the Ziegfeld Theater premiere of Farenheit 9/11: 1. "Can an artist have a luckier break than someone in power declaring their work should not be seen?...It is our belief, seeing...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:46 AM
June 15, 2004
Last night while I was rendering some footage in Final Cut, ("Estimated time: about 2 hours...") I decided to watch the short films in Nike's Art of Speed series. The 15 filmmakers were asked to "interpret the idea of speed."...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:46 AM
My heart is full this day, and I would be very ungrateful if I didn't get up and share my gratitude for Brother Hess, who has blessed us all so much this day with his special film, Napoleon Dynamite. Brother...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:22 AM
June 12, 2004
From the mixed up files of Mr Arthur Robins, an artist who sells his work in front of the Met: While visiting the Met, Robins was questioned in the recent guerilla attacks on that museum and the Guggenheim, where an...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:58 AM
June 7, 2004
It's only half over, but I feel it's safe to declare 2004 l'AnnÈe du Court MÈtrage Soutenu, The Year of The Sponsored Short. Nike got some, Interpol's buyin' some, and now, if you're a socialite, an I-banker, or just a...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:00 AM
June 5, 2004
Kathy Hilton is getting a reality TV show. She'll teach some young bumpkins what they really need to do to get head. A head. Ahead in NYC. How to please a man. Manhattan. How to please Manhattan Society. Bob Morris's...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:52 AM
If it's too late for you to get the money and the inspiration for your short film from Nike--and it is--try Interpol. Matador Records will "fund" ten short films "inspired by the music and aesthetic of the band." I put...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:57 AM
June 3, 2004
It's not just for banner ads anymore. Nick, Choire & co. launched Art of Speed, a weblog-formatted microsite for Nike that'll run for three weeks on Gawker. Art of Speed runs with ideas about filmmaking and web-based marketing that got...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:22 AM
June 2, 2004
On Design Observer, Michael Bierut initiated an interesting conversation comparing the collaborative arts of graphic design and filmmaking (initially, it was just screenwriting). Most discussion is about credit and credit-taking, and presupposes some ideal of creative--that is to say, individual...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:42 PM
May 30, 2004
It seems hard to imagine Tarkovsky doing something so instant, but apparently he took Polaroids all the time. Looking at the few illustrated in the Guardian, though, they're uncommonly beautiful. The director's son provides brief comments, and he's collected...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:34 AM
May 27, 2004
The similarities between Michael Moore and Mel Gibson, and Farenheit 9/11 and The Passion are worth noting. Let's see: zealots with messiah complexes? Yep. Threat of damnation if film's message isn't heeded? Check. Sensationalistic cineporn tactics to reach beyond true...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:30 PM
May 24, 2004
Sometimes the part of me that wants to right wins out over the part of me that wants to be loved. It's at times like this when I want people to confirm to me that my movie/script/editing/whatever is not just...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:36 AM
"There are people who use their blogs to write, like, 'Today I went to the cleaners,'" [aspiring blogger book agent Kate] Lee said. Besides, I see "Today I went to the cleaners" more as a movie than a book....
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:21 AM
May 23, 2004
Once again, an all-too-candid video camera has caused political turmoil in the EU. An Austrian Socialist member of the European Parliament, Hans-Peter Martin, claims to have shot over 1,500 hours of footage of his fellow delegates abusing (people, whatever you...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:35 AM
May 22, 2004
The terminal bureaucracy squanders treasure (and, in the case of the state), life in pointless, oft times criminal endeavours, whose true purpose is nothing more than make-work for those employed to demonstrate, in their inactive mass - the power of...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:35 AM
May 19, 2004
From J. Hoberman's halftime report from Cannes comes this description of Abbas Kiarostami's latest film: "[the] remarkably austere Five (after the number of shots) is a DV landscape study that might have been produced by a talented epigone of American...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:19 AM
May 15, 2004
Disney launched a production weblog for Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy this week. Let's see if they've learned anything since 2002, when Miramax published a completely artificial "weekly production diary" site for Full Frontal . The gap between between weeks...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:03 AM
May 12, 2004
Recently, in linking to this site, an otherwise highly accurate Internet publication called me a "film buff." And while I've been known to enjoy a film or two in my time, I have to confess, I'm not buff. Anyone at...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:51 AM
|
Comments (0)
May 7, 2004
The Times has an enjoyable story, " Creepy Space, With Rats, Just $10,000 a Day" about the recurring popularity among film and TV producers of the few photogenic alleys in Manhattan. But the story doesn't hold up and even misses...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:55 AM
May 6, 2004
"Fiachra Gibbons meets Nuri Bilge Ceylan in his apartment in Istanbul to talk about Mehmet Emin Toprak." [via David Hudson, quoted by Greg Allen]...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:57 AM
April 28, 2004
Inspired by Tyler@Modern Art Notes's to-bid-on list for the upcoming contemporary art auctions. I don't think I'll be bidding against him on anything, especially now that he's lining his pockets with all that ArtsJournal loot. Too rich for my blood....
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:30 AM
April 27, 2004
Bill Werde reports in the Times on the sad, dumb story of End of The Century, a highly praised documentary about The Ramones made by Michael Gramaglia and Jim Fields. The article makes it sound like the two novice filmmakers...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:33 AM
April 25, 2004
This Guardian exclusive wins the award for best comic timing of the week. It's a diary of a young man who hooked up with Kevin Spacey online. Money changed hands. Drinks were plied. Gifts and trips were showered. Video was...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:36 AM
In BFI's May 2004 Sight & Sound, James Bell looks at the world of British shorts. His findings: proper support is very important, but hard to come by; when you need it most, there can be no reaction at all;...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:04 AM
April 15, 2004
The classic "Cinderella story" speech from Caddyshack was written as an interstitial camera shot...Ramis took Murray aside and said, "When you're playing sports, do you everjust talk to yourselflike you're the announcer?" Murray said, "Say no more," and did his...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:09 AM
If you're planning to bumrush Bill Murray tonight at BAM to pitch him your 12-page script ["INT - ASSISTANT GREENSKEEPER'S HOUSE - NIGHT"], you're a bigger chump than your ex said you were: it was Tuesday. Don't worry, you can...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:46 AM
April 6, 2004
After a night of hanging out with The Man, and sipping from the firehose of his conversation (hey, whatever it takes to get the movie made, right? ahem.), it's no surprise at all that there are fansites dedicated to picking...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:24 AM
April 5, 2004
[via GreenCine] Terrence Malick's on-again, off-again, on-again-next-year biopic, Che is on again, only it's now Steven Soderbergh's Che. Muy bien....
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:53 AM
April 4, 2004
OK, one more post about Mel's mammon from heaven, The Passion: The Guardian reports on the miracle of Matera: Gibson raised the Italian hilltop town from the economic dead when he chose it as the main location for filming. And...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:59 PM
April 1, 2004
Production Diary I grabbed an image from each of 35 massacre cuts in The Godfather's baptism/massacre sequence to use as reference for shooting. Given the conditions, however, and the fact that I was also a co-host, with a speech...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:52 AM
|
Comments (9)
March 31, 2004
From the painstakingly organized files of Mr Stanley E. Kubrick: Stanley Kubrick filled his St Albans estate with over 400 fileboxes (specially manufactured to his own design) of notes, photographs, correspondence, drafts, props, and much, much more. The first authorized...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:49 AM
March 30, 2004
In the last couple of weeks, I've decided to shoot a fourth short film, which may be part of the Souvenir Series, or may not. We'll see. It was not in the original outline of the series, and it's out...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:09 PM
I'm co-chairman of this gig tonight at MoMA, An Evening With Sofia Coppola. I was going to write my speech, but in the spirit of the director, I'm going totally improv. Then I'm going to kiss every ass I can....
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:01 AM
March 29, 2004
I saw Captive, the debut feature from Gaston Biraben, at New Directors/New Films last night; it's a subtly powerful movie that gripped the sellout audience at MoMA Gramercy. Captive is a fictionalized telling of real events, a surreal, politically charged...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:17 AM
March 22, 2004
Both in today's NY Times: Slate's Bryan Curtis interviews Kevin Smith in advance of the Jersey Girls release. Jersey Girls makes Kevin Smith sound like the perfect spokesmodel for daddytypes.com, but Smith's best comments are about Mel Gibson, "fellow Catholic."...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:42 AM
|
Comments (0)
March 16, 2004
Don't tell the Whitney Biennial folks. That trademarked slogan comes from a series of video loops designed for your giant flatscreen TV that are "100% narrative free with strong visual aesthetics" called Souvenirs from the earth [Ahem. A series...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:52 AM
|
Comments (0)
March 13, 2004
Chadian filmmaker Mahamat-Saleh Haroun talks to David Kehr about Abouna, his second feature and only the third film to be made in his native country. There is no commercial cinema in Chad, yet films--and particularly US films--have a powerful influence...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:34 PM
|
Comments (0)
When I first saw the trailer for Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, I was fascinated, then confused. It looked like Fritz Lang's Metropolis, but it had... Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow? It's some weird studio stunt, I figured....
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:00 AM
|
Comments (0)
March 5, 2004
[via Gawker] It'll cost you, but this may be the closest you'll get to a hummer from Chloe Sevigny. Director/actor/antagonist Vincent Gallo is selling his meticulously assembled and tuned film production package on ebay. According to the sale, Gallo designed...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:52 AM
|
Comments (0)
March 4, 2004
[via Archinect] In Metropolis Magazine, David D'Arcy looks at an onanistic genre of film (as if there were any other kind): "the making of the building" documentary. These now-de rigueur films share a common dramatic arc: "The process is depicted...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:07 AM
|
Comments (0)
March 3, 2004
Two films by Etienne Sauret, including the eerie WTC: The First 24 Hours, [which screened on the program with my first film at MoMA's Documentary Fortnight] are showing at Film Forum today through March 16. Etienne will introduce the films...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:48 AM
|
Comments (0)
February 20, 2004
Tom Ford has signed with CAA agent (and longtime friend) Brian Lourd to find films to direct. The NYPost's Suzanne Kapner pitches him a really edgy story: Robert Evans called. He wants his schtick back... "For his last Gucci menswear...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:22 PM
Last week, in the Sony Classics offices on Madison Avenue, I sat down to talk with Errol Morris, whose current documentary, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, was nominated for an Academy...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:03 PM
February 19, 2004
Doin' it for the children of the revolution: Malick's directing another movie before these kids graduate from college. Production is set for four months, starting in July--this July, 2004-- for Terrence Malick's next film, Che, starring Benecio Del Toro...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:01 AM
|
Comments (0)
[via Fimoculous] Michel Gondry's new video for Steriogram is all stop-action knitting. There's a little too much Peter Gabriel going on, but the shots where the band's watching a knitted movie are brilliant. It reminded me of a piece at...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:09 AM
|
Comments (0)
February 17, 2004
Don't know how I missed this. The Guardian/Observer's Damon Wise goes on a revealing to Filmbyen, or Film Town, a Danish hive of suburban movie production, founded by Lars Von Trier and his producing partner, Peter "The Eel" Jensen. (That...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:06 AM
|
Comments (0)
February 15, 2004
After British director James Miller was killed--shot in the neck by an Israeli army sniper in Gaza in May 2003--while filming an HBO documentary, his wife Sophy, field producer Dan Edge and other crew members felt compelled to complete the...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:48 AM
|
Comments (0)
February 10, 2004
[via Gothamist] The Style Section article a few weeks ago where Neil Strauss plays wingman to some David Blaine wannabe named Mystery (Seriously. You think the Times didn't factcheck something so goofy?) has been optioned by Columbia Pictures (along with...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:52 PM
|
Comments (2)
For the ever-popular Law & Order, the producers mine today's headlines for new story ideas. HBO's K Street is just the opposite. Not in the "what, it blew and nobody watched it?" way you're thinking, in the "life imitates...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:55 AM
|
Comments (0)
February 3, 2004
Mary-Ellis Bunim, the co-creator of The Real World, which revolutionized television while destroying civilization, died of breast cancer at age 57. Bunim also produced The Real Cancun, which, while better than Justin and Kelly, was not as entertaining as the...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:10 AM
|
Comments (0)
January 25, 2004
If screenwriter/director Avary doesn't reveal enough for you in his Q&A session with the Guardian, go to his weblog--which he must deplore. And when you view his webcam, he may flip you off personally. He was working on the script...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:02 AM
|
Comments (0)
January 21, 2004
Filmmaker reports that in the face of religious boycotts, the missionary-meets-boy tale, Latter Day, was dumped by its Salt Lake venue, Madstone Theaters. Actually, this is good news; it means they might be open to dumping Mel Gibson's controversy-baiting The...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:58 AM
|
Comments (0)
January 19, 2004
Gotta run, but before I do, the fine fine folks at Filmmaker Magazine timed the launch of their weblog to the opening of the under-the-radar Sundance Film Festival. Sundance is not, as its name suggests, held in a warm, sunny...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:04 AM
|
Comments (0)
January 15, 2004
I see through fellow Best NY Blog nominee Lockhart Steele's feeble ruse to get me to post more non-NYC stuff. Even as I'm powerless to thwart it. Tommy Ryk's documentary, Work Sucks, I'm Going Skiing follows the antics of a...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:42 AM
|
Comments (0)
January 10, 2004
Christopher Guest talks at length with the Guardian's Richard Grant about the incredible levels of authenticity required for making fake documentaries. Hilarious anecdotes from This is Spinal Tap and A Mighty Wind ensue. If Grant's right when he calls it...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:31 AM
|
Comments (0)
January 6, 2004
On another site, the headline would read, "Walter Murch edits Cold Mountain, but on MacCentral, the headline is "Final Cut Pro used to edit Cold Mountain." Posthouse DigitalFilmTree set Murch up on four full FCP stations and several PowerBook-based "satellite...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:06 AM
|
Comments (0)
December 30, 2003
Just ask Dharma. According to the Formula, you can have only one creatively named character per sitcom. Fortunately, Wired Magazine articles have no such limit. And so, in this month's wacky episode edition, Choire and Xeni team up to report...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:57 AM
|
Comments (0)
December 17, 2003
[via Gothamist] Jimmy Orr, the Choire Sicha to George Bush's Nick Denton, has posted his new short film, Barney Cam II: Barney Reloaded, on his weblog, whitehouse.gov. Elizabeth Bumiller, the Times' specialist on the dependent film industry, gives it a...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:29 AM
|
Comments (0)
December 16, 2003
Finally, someone's asking the right questions in Iraq, like, "how'd they get that shot?" Virginia Heffernan reports in the Times on the ultimate embeds: the soldiers who go into battle armed with digital video cameras ("the camera is our first...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:44 AM
|
Comments (0)
December 10, 2003
Gus Van Sant, Elias McConnell, and Dany Wolf at Cannes 2003, image: festival-cannes.com There he is, scorched in Death Valley and on the Saltflats of Utah; in a mold-closed school with a barebones crew on scooters; and on the...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:59 AM
|
Comments (0)
November 28, 2003
Excellent story in the Guardian by Chris Payne about a film school outside Havana whose students' production--an actually independent feature film-- doesn't officially exist, but nonetheless is getting plugs for Sundance. There's more story here to be told. Also from...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:05 PM
|
Comments (0)
November 20, 2003
Hide your peasant bread, people. the half-assedly Atkinsing Neil Labute just landed in New York, and he's loaded for bear claws. Yesterday in his Slate diary, Labute wrote about an eating a meeting for his next project, a screen adaptation...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:30 AM
|
Comments (0)
November 8, 2003
Finally, POV is back, and in a relevant way. By relevant, I don't just mean talking money. But that's what she's doing, with a post about fundraising for independent films. Liz reviews the Money Matters issue of The Independent, which...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:48 AM
|
Comments (0)
November 4, 2003
Gus Van Sant's the center of the universe, you see, or you will see, by the end of this post. [Before, I'd been forced to the alarming conclusion that the universe revolved around Norman Mailer, so you'll understand if...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:39 AM
|
Comments (0)
September 29, 2003
It's the dialogue, stupid. (Or is that, "It's the dialogue. Stupid."?) After only three episodes, I'm getting fed up with the uncertain, equivocating, sometimes borderline incoherent dialogue that constitutes the majority of HBO's K Street. I know it's improvised, and...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:17 AM
|
Comments (0)
September 26, 2003
Anne Thompson has a very informative artlicle in this month's Filmmaker Magazine about the hustle to get Lost in Translation made. Sofia Coppola's first finished draft of her script--the one they used to raise money--was only 70 pages long, which...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:08 AM
|
Comments (0)
September 25, 2003
Nothing wrong with bigname film folks making commercials. Errol Morris (whose The Fog of War I just saw and will write about soon) directed the Apple Switch ads. Swedish master Ingmar Bergman made some cake by selling cakes of...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:01 AM
|
Comments (1)
September 14, 2003
A friend showed me a website for a DC spa that was so hilariously and transparently metrosexual, I almost posted it here last week (at the risk of either reigniting the whole tired metrosexual discussion, or, far more likely, being...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:57 AM
|
Comments (0)
HBO's K Street is shot in DV and makes the most of the saturated blues (outdoor) or yellows (indoor) that come from shooting with available light. Even though the processes are very different, the photography is reminiscent of Traffic. That's...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:50 AM
|
Comments (0)
September 12, 2003
Apparently, only real lobbyists have unfettered access to the halls of power. TMN points to a Roll Call story that the Trent Lott, chairman of the Senate Rules Committee has deemed shooting of Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney's new HBO...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:22 AM
|
Comments (0)
August 16, 2003
David Kirkpatrick's got an interesting article in the Times about how DVD sales are an increasingly important factor in greenlighting films. Net net: men buy action blockbusters. No one buys anything else. DVD sales projections drove the glut of pathetic...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:49 AM
|
Comments (0)
August 5, 2003
I'm working on a couple of new features, or Features, interviews with some interesting filmmakers. Greencine must know that, because they're throwing up so many interesting filmmaking reads, including: Steven Soderbergh and Richard Lester's Getting Away With It: Or: The...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:55 AM
|
Comments (0)
July 29, 2003
From David@GreenCine's, Summer reading list (hint: print them out for the Jitney): Graham Fuller's 1999 NYT look at directors who make a city their own. For the more hardcore, try Michael Wood's London Review pretty followable, ecumenicist recap of anti-Deleuzian...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:42 AM
|
Comments (0)
July 22, 2003
According to a NYTimes article on the recent poor performance of several expensive, hand-drawn animation films, and the success of such CG films as Pixar's Finding Nemo, Dreamworks (with voice provided by animaster Jeffrey Katzenberg) is calling hand-drawn animation "a...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:51 AM
|
Comments (0)
July 21, 2003
Wired interviews director/etc. Robert Rodriguez, a young master of the atypical production process, for the launch of his new film, Spy Kids 3-D. It's less than a year since Spy Kids 2, when the NY Times' Rick Lyman looked at...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:05 AM
|
Comments (0)
July 16, 2003
Rebecca Traitser writes in the Observer that the tide has turned (again), and studios are coming back to New York to develop new films. As John Lyons puts it, "I think there is a little sense of exhaustion creeping in...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:10 AM
|
Comments (0)
Jonathan Van Gieson has launched a team production weblog for his off-off-Broadway show, Buddy Cianci: The Musical, wherein "more than 20 people (10 cast members plus a sizeable staff) all working their asses off to get "Buddy" up and...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:03 AM
July 9, 2003
Don't know how I missed this; in Feb., Gus Van Sant talked to The Onion A.V. Club about making his films. The sequential filming mode from Gerry was used again on Elephant; with a small, light crew, Van Sant...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:44 AM
|
Comments (0)
July 1, 2003
via GreenCine, although I should be reading Indiwire more regularly anyway. We all should. Howard Feinstein pays homage to First Run/Icarus on the distributor's 25th anniversary. "Now officially hip, documentaries are gaining more and more converts among aficionados of fiction."...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:40 AM
|
Comments (0)
June 17, 2003
For almost three years, I've carried a little red movie ticket in my wallet, the old-fashioned pulpy kind, from a big roll. It says "Emergency Re-admit" on it. It enables me to return and see Dancer in the Dark, which...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:49 AM
|
Comments (0)
June 16, 2003
Well, Jason is, anyway. It's a love story. Believe me, you'll laugh, you'll cry....
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:03 AM
|
Comments (0)
May 21, 2003
In the the Observer's "Satisfying Mr. Soderbergh", Rebecca Traitser writes about Warner Brothers' drawn out search for someone to head up their long-planned specialty film division. One of the key requirements of the job: make Steven Soderbergh happy by releasing...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:22 AM
|
Comments (0)
May 17, 2003
Thanks to a 13-year old niece of Boing Boing, I found Badass Buddy. It's a site with 1,200 AIM free buddy icons, a collection which, over 2+ years, has evolved from simple riffs on the little AOL dude (you know,...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:27 PM
May 9, 2003
Wave UFO, Mariko Mori for the Public Art Fund image: Tom Powel, nytimes.com INT - DAY, IBM BAMBOO GARDEN, 56th & MADISON A promising DIRECTOR wanders into the atrium to examine Mariko Mori's Wave UFO, a large, shiny pod-looking...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:30 AM
|
Comments (0)
May 7, 2003
Also from the Voice: I have no idea what to make of Guy Maddin's production diary for his newest film, The Saddest Music in the World, but it's good readin'. Something to do with a legless Isabella Rossellini. Don't...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:39 AM
|
Comments (0)
I don't mean in the sense of "So, what do you do?" for people whose profession (e.g., writers, filmmakers...especially writers) might not appear to involve actually doing very much. I mean in the nosy sense. A boss or busybody or...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:14 AM
|
Comments (0)
May 4, 2003
John Malkovich has been doing the media circuit for The Dancer Upstairs, his directorial debut, and it sounds pretty respectable. It got me thinking, so I made some Amazon lists for your blogger-/info-/shopper-tainment: Directors' famously first movies What I really...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:42 AM
|
Comments (0)
April 26, 2003
"Who wants to star in The Real Cancun 2?" image: therealcancun.com As a maker of documentary-looking films, I was a reluctant fan of New Line's The Real Cancun once I figured out what it was. Now that I've read...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:51 AM
|
Comments (0)
April 10, 2003
Last evening, 7:30, heading to a tour a friend gave a museum group of her art collection, I was momentarily freaked out by the light. At first, I figured it's how streetlights turn on before it gets dark, but no....
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
2:17 AM
March 2, 2003
from r: Jane, David, Nancy, Swoosie First, the good. Star photographer-to-the-stars Patrick McMullan has posted Billy Farrell's party pics from the Alexander Payne event last week. Then, the lame. In a bit they call House of Payne, the Daily...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:50 AM
|
Comments (0)
February 24, 2003
Tad Friend attends the hilariously useless Jean Doumanian seminar on "How to Get Your Play or Movie Produced." Here, Doumanian ("You may know me from such films as "Woody Allen sued me and my bankrolling boyfriend.") advises an attendee on...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:04 AM
|
Comments (1)
February 19, 2003
Today's Guardian asks twelve actual historians to lend their authoritative-sounding accents on politicians' arguments that Iraq is the next [check all that apply] 1939 Germany 1956 Egypt 1967 Israel 1991 Iraq 1963 Vietnam 1899 South Africa 1936 Ethiopia A long...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:42 AM
|
Comments (0)
February 6, 2003
Richard Kobayashi, farmer and cabbages, Manzanar Internment Camp photo by Ansel Adams image: loc.gov In 1990, just out of school, I was transfixed by a copy of Ansel Adam's self-published book, Born Free And Equal, at a big antiques...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:45 AM
February 3, 2003
when someone sneezes during the movie, six people-- from around the theater, as if in THX Surround Sound--say, not "SHHH!" but "bless you." when you ask to see the manager about the sound that, annoyingly, kept shorting out, he...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:40 AM
|
Comments (0)
January 27, 2003
Anthony Lane on Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's documentary, Lost in La Mancha: "For anyone who suffers from the wish to make movies, or who fears that this terrible condition may strike at any time, here is the cure."...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:56 AM
|
Comments (0)
January 20, 2003
Now that S(J03) is locked and getting ready for color correction and film transfer, I thought I'd catch up with the guys at Cyan Pictures, who I'd been in only intermittent email contact with for the last few weeks. They're...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:34 AM
|
Comments (0)
December 31, 2002
Sifting and digitizing footage for S(J03) until the batteries in my camera ran out, when I watched two DVD's back to back, XXX and Don't Look Now. At a stretch, I can say XXX is research for the Animated Musical....
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:43 AM
|
Comments (0)
December 11, 2002
Louis Begley spoke before a screening of About Schmidt last night. An extremely genteel guy, he explained why he's quite pleased with the film, even though it differs significantly from his novel. For Begley, "write what you know" means Schmidt...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:48 AM
|
Comments (0)
November 5, 2002
The Opposite of Sex and The City, by FTrain's Paul Ford....
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
6:03 AM
|
Comments (0)
November 4, 2002
On the set of Starship Troopers: DP Jost Vocano, director Paul Verhoeven, star Casper Van Dien, writer Ed Neumeier Yesterday's NY Times Magazine is a veritable toolbox (and I use that word deliberately) for film, all you want to...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
9:40 AM
|
Comments (0)
"Asbury's book is a tribute to the magical power of naming: long stretches of 'Gangs [of New York]' are taken up by lists of gangs and villains and even fire engines, and, like the lists of ships in the Iliad,...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:54 AM
|
Comments (0)
November 2, 2002
Whatever else it may be, Jackass is possibly the purest cinema experience ever. It is undiluted, unadulterated and unambiguous. It will make you run. You certainly don't need me to tell you, though, if you should run toward or...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:06 PM
|
Comments (0)
October 26, 2002
So I'm watching the PBR Bud Light Cup World Finals, and there's a camera guy in the ring, all decked out like he's, well, like he's going to the biggest bullriding rodeo event of the year, thank you very...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:25 PM
|
Comments (0)
October 25, 2002
In this article in Moviemaker Magazine, David Geffner lays out the latest crisis in independent film: distribution. Sure, DV and laptop editing may have spurred a renaissance in indie production (Hi, nice to meet you), but in the same period,...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:42 AM
|
Comments (0)
October 20, 2002
I'm watching Star Trek: The Motion Picture right now, and it's blowing me away. It's the first movie, the one with the original crew, the bald chick, and V'Ger, a cloud-like alien vessel with the Voyager space probe at...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:23 AM
|
Comments (0)
October 11, 2002
Jason Kottke made a weblog on Susan Orlean's site about Adaptation, a movie Spike Jonze directed based on Charlie Kaufman's script about adapting a Susan Orlean book about orchid thieves. It's OK to go back and read that sentence again....
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
10:41 AM
|
Comments (0)
October 8, 2002
James "Sweet Jimmy the Benevolent Pimp" Ponsoldt was a co-founder of Porn 'n Chicken, a Yale timekiller-cum-media spoof-cum-Comedy Central movie. (If that sentence doesn't get this weblog banned by your corporate firewall, it'll at least get you a reprimand at...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:16 AM
|
Comments (0)
September 30, 2002
Congratulations to the guys at Cyan Pictures for getting their rough cut fedexed to Sundance just in time. [Technically, they could've eked out a whole other day by flying the tape to the festival office in person, so they had...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
12:09 PM
September 8, 2002
Dateline, Malibu: Directin' ain't easy, even for Stephen Gaghan, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Traffic, a man who has Steven Soderbergh on his Buddy List (and IM's him for advice on "Super-35 blown up to anamorphic" or not). He writes about...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:21 AM
|
Comments (0)
September 1, 2002
The Spiral Jetty is back. Although it was submerged when we checked in July, my college senior sister said it was visible from the hill above it when she took a first date out to see it a couple of...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
7:42 AM
August 6, 2002
This weekend, after seeing Full Frontal, we discussed the dialogue at length. My (grew-up-on-the-stage) wife spotted a lot of weak improv, or weakly directed improv--actors left to figure it out for themselves and, more often than not, not pulling it...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:25 AM
|
Comments (0)
August 1, 2002
The reviews of Full Frontal are coming in, and it's not sounding good. Here's a broad cross-section from the global media: New York Press ("Even a bad Steven Soderbergh movie is worth seeing, and Full Frontal is worth seeing.");...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:37 AM
|
Comments (0)
July 22, 2002
"The advantage of [shooting on digital video] is that nobody knows, or at least cares, that you're making a movie; the disadvantage...is that the end product appears to have been filmed through a triple layer of bubble wrap." - from...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
4:22 AM
|
Comments (0)
July 14, 2002
I may be the newest proponent of home schooling, home film schooling, anyway. Spent the afternoon watching the Criterion Collection edition of Traffic, which--in addition to three complete commentary tracks (dir./writer; producers, consultant/composer)--has a supplemental DVD with 25 deleted scenes,...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:03 AM
|
Comments (0)
June 28, 2002
Welcome to the party! This week, another weblog launched documenting the conception, birth and life of an independent film. Cyan Pictures is the brainchild of two guys, Joshua Newman (aka "a veritable Doogie Howser") and Colin Spoelman (aka, a veritable...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
3:21 AM
|
Comments (0)
June 4, 2002
Yeah, yeah, I'm working on a post-preview screening post, but in the mean time, There's this crackup exchange from the courtroom where Woody Allen gave testimony in his lawsuit against his one-time producers and friends (as excerpted in the NY...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
11:37 AM
|
Comments (0)
May 23, 2002
One of the reasons I'd delayed submitting to some festivals was (of all things) my lack of a "director's photo (B/W)," which some festivals require. Last week, Roe Ethridge, a friend and artist whose work I've collected for three-plus years,...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
1:06 AM
|
Comments (0)
August 5, 2001
Since I made the decision to actually go forward and shoot this film project (rather than just ruminate over it and periodically outline it), I've been watching films in slightly changed light. Now, I'm much more conscious of really parsing...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
5:54 AM
|
Comments (0)
July 29, 2001
Some links I've found as I familiarize myself with to-date research and thought on how culture, worldview, personality, and behavior patterns develop or are transmitted: Faces of Culture [via PBS.org] this appears to be an introductory anthropology course comprising a...
[read the full post...]
Posted by greg at
8:49 AM
|
Comments (0)
