Alison Willmore | SpoutBlog

ABCs and Buzz: BlogNosh 05/14/08

By Karina Longworth posted 1 year ago

Skype sponsored a panel at Cannes today called “Buzz Builders,” and it featured a number of Friends of SpoutBlog: Alison Willmore, Michael Jones, Eugene Hernandez and, via the sponsor’s internet based calling system, David Poland. Poland used the panel to announce that he’ll “be very surprised” if “The Hollywood Reporter is still [around] three years from now.” Jeff Wells’ commenters used the opportunity to make cracks at Poland’s track record with predictions.
Girish calls Robert B. Ray’s The ABCs of Classic Hollywood ” the best new film book I’ve encountered in a long while.” It sounds fascinating: “Ray’s starting point is this quote from Vincente Minnelli: “I feel that a picture that stays with you is made up of a hundred or more hidden things. They’re things that the audience is not conscious of, but that accumulate.” Ray proposes a fascinating and unorthodox method for discovering these hidden things. For each film, he puts together a collection of ‘entries’, one or more for every letter of the alphabet.”
Andy Horbal’s going all Web 0.5, using his blog to advertise his email list. I’ll let him explain: “…by the time my friends realized [a movie] had opened, I’d already seen it and was on to the next film.In response to this problem I started a mailing list for everyone I knew who was interested that discussed what was new, what looked good, and when I was planning on seeing everything….[A]fter about two months I believe I have a handle on what I’d like these e-mails to look like and I’m going public: you (yes, you!) can now subscribe to ‘The Movie E-Mail.’” Details at Mirror/Stage.

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Cannes 2008, Classics, Festivals

Event Wraps: BlogNosh 04/15/08

By Karina Longworth posted 1 year ago

While I gather my final thoughts on the Moving Image Institute, check out the most recent dispatches from my fellow attendees, Doug Cummings and Kevin Lee.
I had to leave the Sarasota Film Festival long before the awards were announced, but I was happy to learn that both Josh Safdie’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed and Barry Jenkins’ Medicine For Melancholy went home with prizes. Alison has further details at Indie Eye.
In his round-up of the various stories on Matt Dentler leaving SXSW for Cinetic, David Hudson pays tribute to Dentler’s years at the festival. “As I’ve said here in the past, any history of American independent cinema in the 00s is going to have to include a passage on the impact of Matt’s smarts, instincts and sheer guts as a programmer.” David also links to Scott Kirsner, who has some reservations about the digital division of Cinetic that will becomes Dentler’s new home, at least in terms of its potential attractiveness to filmmakers.