Category: making movies

“[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 Italian countryside. ‘O.K.,’ he replied.”
— Michael Agger reporting from several sets at once for The New Yorker
Classically awful Showgirls now available in self-mocking DVD version, complete with drinking game and joke commentary. For which you pony up an extra $15?? Not funny. [AP via NYT]
Included on the Wonderland DVD (Val Kilmer as John Holmes? Gets caught up in a murder? Doesn’t sound familiar? Probably because no one saw it.) is the actual LAPD crime scene footage of the actual murders. There’s a feisty discussion about it on IMDb’s message board. [Viewing hint: Rent, don’t buy.] [via Scrubbles]

“[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 Italian countryside. ‘O.K.,’ he replied.”
— Michael Agger reporting from several sets at once for The New Yorker
Classically awful Showgirls now available in self-mocking DVD version, complete with drinking game and joke commentary. For which you pony up an extra $15?? Not funny. [AP via NYT]
Included on the Wonderland DVD (Val Kilmer as John Holmes? Gets caught up in a murder? Doesn’t sound familiar? Probably because no one saw it.) is the actual LAPD crime scene footage of the actual murders. There’s a feisty discussion about it on IMDb’s message board. [Viewing hint: Rent, don’t buy.] [via Scrubbles]

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 and blurry and tumultuous that they summon up your primitive fight-or-flight instincts. It’s as if the filmmaker (and the camera operator) are thinking on their feet alongside the hero, moving instinctively to keep up with their subjects for fear that said subjects will fly out of the frame. And the audience is just as wired-in: I could barely look down at my popcorn.”

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 and blurry and tumultuous that they summon up your primitive fight-or-flight instincts. It’s as if the filmmaker (and the camera operator) are thinking on their feet alongside the hero, moving instinctively to keep up with their subjects for fear that said subjects will fly out of the frame. And the audience is just as wired-in: I could barely look down at my popcorn.”

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 when the revolution comes, tech superpowers, pimped geeked out a Lexus IS300 with a full 30fps HD video editing system, including a 42-inch flatscreen you have to put in the backseat (oops, there goes the sound engineer and PA). [See specs and pics.]
At least the station’s on the passenger side, so you’re not tempted to cut the dailies while you obliviously cut off that school bus. full of handicapped orphans. that just drove into the lake. (Hey! Exclusive footage!)
Anyway, Wired reported on the rig at MacWorld, where the company sponsored “a competition to find the best short film about Macworld that was edited in the car.”
I would get American Standard to sponsor a competition for the best short film about a turd that was dreamed up on the toilet. Oh, wait. Michel Gondry already won that one.

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 when the revolution comes, tech superpowers, pimped geeked out a Lexus IS300 with a full 30fps HD video editing system, including a 42-inch flatscreen you have to put in the backseat (oops, there goes the sound engineer and PA). [See specs and pics.]
At least the station’s on the passenger side, so you’re not tempted to cut the dailies while you obliviously cut off that school bus. full of handicapped orphans. that just drove into the lake. (Hey! Exclusive footage!)
Anyway, Wired reported on the rig at MacWorld, where the company sponsored “a competition to find the best short film about Macworld that was edited in the car.”
I would get American Standard to sponsor a competition for the best short film about a turd that was dreamed up on the toilet. Oh, wait. Michel Gondry already won that one.

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 rustled awake by subdued, overeducated murmuring, we got Tito Puente’s brass section as loud as a dorm room prank.
But this has happened before. The gentle piano intros to NPR’s Weekend Edition that practically brought your first Diet Coke of the day to your bedside are too-old school. Public radio is now trending loud.
WNYC runs the BBC World Service at 9 AM (thank you, I’m up by then), which used to start with no music at all, just the world-synching clock from Greenwhich to cue us and the news reader: “beep beep beeeeeep. 1300 hours, Greenwich Mean Time. BBC World Service. The news, read by Fiona Somebody.” Now, there’s a rousing brass intro with a rapid crescendo.
[I’m linking to these shows in the hope that you’ll know what the hell I’m talking about. This invisible-to-them music isn’t mentioned or credited, and who knows if it’s in the archived streams of the show? My head is full of untraceable music whose existence is not even acknowledged. Where did you go, BJ Liederman?]
But the most consistently startling so far (“We’re public radio. We don’t shock, we startle.”) while mercifully temporary, couldn’t have come at a worse time. WNYC ran promos ad nauseum for its May 7 broadcast of Bernstein’s Candide, which was being given a rare performance at Lincoln Center. As I commented impulsively on TMFTML’s review of the review, “#&^* Candide. The promos on WNYC for that thing blare the oh-so-famous prelude so suddenly, it scares our 2-mo. old and starts her crying every damn time it comes on.” What can I say, it made me feel better.
Like many people, I suspect, I don’t Listen To The Radio; I use it as a kind of aural carpet, the ambient track to my day. Encountering these Startling Themes is like stepping on a toy in the dark. Or it’s like (NPR People, now I’m talking to you) rearranging the furniture in a blind man’s house. A cranky, old, blind man, who lives next door and is always barking, “Turn down that music, you lousy punks!” Damn kids these days.

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. Canon’s released the Canon XL2, which, according to Gizmodo’s way-too-technical-for-me description, can sync settings between multiple cameras and “…there’s just so much to this camera, though, it’s sort of hard to explain.” It’s coming in around $5K. Time to dole out producer credit to “Amex” and “Visa.”
Canon XL2 product page

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 went to elaborate lengths to justify this surveillance, even “arresting” 23 of their cousins for being in the Mafia and plotting to extort money from the production.
World Movie Magazine has the “official version,” but we know what really happened. I mean, come on, what Mafioso would make a move against Warners, which produced no less than five Steven Seagal movies (and don’t even get me started on The Sopranos)?
Related:
From Action Lama to Achtung Lama
Threads woven together, like the saffron robes of a reincarnated lama

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 one of the funnier installments of Nike’s Art of Speed series. Nice work if you can get it.
Related:
The Rise of Dependent Filmmaking
Interpol film contest
Art of Speed reviews

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 that quickly sold 120,000 copies of his last film, Uncovered, the critique of a certain Iraqwar-mongering administration.
The production details for Outfoxed are kinda cool, if you have access to a lot of volunteers and interns: Greenwald set dozens of DVD recorders to capture Fox News 24/7 for about six months. MoveOn orchestrated volunteer monitors to watch the network and note the exact time of footage that showed any of a dozen or so distortion techniques that Greenwald wanted to document. Then teams of highly paid editors became teams of low-paid editors to sort and structure the narrative.
All this was done without obtaining clearances from Fox. I guess when Larry Lessig’s your permissions guy, you get a little crazy on the ‘fair use.’

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, our stylesheet’s not broken.”
The weblog may go on for weeks, or, if he gets dinged, it may end tomorrow. For Smith’s sake, I kind of hope he takes a clean second, earning enough recognition to get a real deal, without having to put up with all the documentary shenanigans. Besides, the two Greenlight movies to date have done about as well as Ben Affleck’s latest gigs. [Maybe it’s Kevin, not Scott, Smith, that needs Chris Moore’s brand of tough producer love.]
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go over here and burns some Triggerstreet bridges…

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 by Frederick Baker about the making of Graham’s greatest cinematic achievement, The Third Man. Shadowing The Third Man tells stories of Orson Welles’ on-location “shenanigans” to get more money, and, oddly, projects scenes from the original film “onto the very walls and spaces where it was shot.”
I don’t get it, but it’s listed as a UK-France-Japan production. If that means NHK, take a pillow: the hook for their soporific Kurosawa documentary was a totally content-free stunt reunion of Kurosawa actors and crew, which was no doubt crucial to greenlighting the film. [via Kultureflash]

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 default, collage, compositing, and digital manipulation rule. Making a film from pre-existing images refracts so many layers of intentionality, it makes my head spin. Marc Wilkins’ explanation of his own short, To Long For, could apply to working from the imagebank itself: “The film starts with pictures waiting for something — not doing anything, not moving and not acting; just searching, waiting.”

There are no accidents. Or, rather, if any accidents happen, they’re buried deep in the production process and within the prescribed boundaries of the corporate source. The closest anyone comes is Koichiro Tsujikawa, whose initial conceptual approach, to make “a collage of images that come up when I search related keywords,” turned out to be too broad. Eyes is a seductively manipulated kaleidoscope of his search results for just one word.
If it’s going to be collage, then, how about a John Cageian level of randomness? What if you determined which digital bits and clips to use by throwing the I Ching or some other arbitrary randomizing system at the database? Such a film would be about the imagebank itself. You could call it The Better Idea. [via coudal]

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 by years of economic hardship. Midnight Eye reviewed it in the Spring of 2001.
In the latest issue, ME does a roundup of jishu eiga, selfmade films, a burgeoning genre in which Ono is cited as a leading practitioner. [His 2003 short, Good Morning Yokohama, just screened in Dallas at the Asian Film Festival.]
ME also includes a technique-heavy interview with Japan’s most successful documentary-style filmmaker, Hirokazu Kore-eda. I’ve admired Kore-eda’s work since seeing the quiet, beautiful small-footprint Maboroshi at New Directors/New Films almost ten years ago. And After Life is one of my favorite films ever.
Now, with the coming release of his fourth feature Nobody Knows (#3, Always, wasn’t distributed in the US), Kore-eda seems ready for a change: he’s making a jidai geki (costume drama) for Shochiku. “To be natural doesn’t automatically mean to be real,” he says. “So far I’ve tried to use naturalism to search for reality, but now I will try total fiction to search for that reality.” [via greencine, of course]