As the gap widens between the hundreds of features that play the festival circuit every year and the ever smaller handful of films bought and sold by the studio-dependent indie arms, certain overlaps become readily apparent between the inevitable day-todays of the young indie filmmakers who might have been inspired by a book like John Pierson’s Spike Mike Slackers and Dykes, and the indie rock kids who might have been inspired by a book like Michael Azzerad’s This Band Could Be Your Life. For one thing, both the record business and the film business (particularly as it concerns small films, mid-size non-genre films, and virtually anything without franchise potential) have, in the past few years, entered into periods of reckoning which has made it ever more important for emerging artists to take charge of their own marches towards destiny. Last night AFI Dallas assembled a varied panel to answer the question, WHAT LESSONS CAN INDIE FILMMAKERS LEARN FROM INDIE BANDS? To hear the panelists tell it, those lessons break down into two categories: taking advantage of the inroads made by bands to sell themelves (in ways easily monetized and otherwise) online; and taking the old school model of the DIY band on the run and using it to take advantage of brick-and-mortar institutions in financial crisis.
With Esy Casey and Sarah Friedland’s powerful (and beautifully shot) documentary Thing With No Name debuting on iTunes for rental and purchase, I’m re-posting part of a piece I published during LAFF 2008 on the film.
Sarah Friedland and Esy Casey’s Thing With No Name follows two women in sub-Saharan African villages as they controversially begin a program of anti-retroviral drugs after having been diagnosed with full-blown AIDS. Undeniably beautiful to look at and powerfully poetic in its depiction of a community of women stricken with poverty and sick with a virus that they don’t fully understand, the film ironically and sadly fails at its propagandist mission when tragedies of timing and fate intervene.
Twilight star Kristen Stewart is heating up and gaining lots of cool points by being cast as rocker Joan Jett in Floria Sigismondi’s The Runaways, about the all-girl band featuring a young Jett and Lita Ford. Stewart may not look like the best choice for the role (I’d have said Rachel Bilson), but I guess all she really needs is a proper wig. And it probably won’t be too difficult for her to do her own singing in the part.
It may not be a new film version of The Divine Comedy, as I recently called for, but it’s still interesting to see Hollywood making a movie about Dante Alighieri’s classic literary work by adapting Nick Tosches’novel In the Hand of Dante. It’s also unfortunate that producer Johnny Depp may be playing Tosches rather than Dante, since everyone prefers Depp in period dress.
Speaking of Depp in old-time costume, he’d be perfect for the new Phillip Noyce-directed remake of Captain Blood that Warner Bros. is producing. Too bad his slate is very full, and anyway it’s probably fair to give another actor the chance to play a pirate.
Warner Bros.’ The Dark Knight has become the best-selling movie on iTunes this year, and it’s not even available for download yet. I find this interesting less because of all the advance sales, more because of all the people who will be potentially view this IMAX-appropriate film on their iPod.
More Dark Knight home-viewing madness: the blockbuster will be released to video-on-demand in South Korea two weeks before its DVD release there.
Crawford, David Modigliani’s documentary about George W. Bush’s adopted home town, becomes available today for free streaming on Hulu, with downloads to come via Amazon VOD and iTunes. Hulu is billing this as their first movie premiere, which hopefully is an indication that the site, a co-venture of super-mainstream media companies NBC and Fox, are prepared to showcase additional films straight off the festival circuit in the future.
The Texas company has become a name-brand over the past year or so for their film festival websites, which allow attendees to program their own schedules and rate the movies they’re seen, thereby allowing other attendees (and festival programmers, distributors, etc) to gauge a given film’s “buzz” in real time. B-Side has worked with festivals (Fantastic Fest, most recently) in the past to stream their films off of the festival’s own site, and has previously seen films from their Choice Indies slate premiere on IFC TV, before coming to iTunes.
But Crawford is, as far as I can tell, the first B-Side film to go directly from the festival circuit to a major onlie video portal. It looks like a smart move, not least because Crawford, unlike other Hulu features, is embeddable, and thus can easily serve as fuel for political blogs. Watch it above, or grab the code for your own blog here.
I was planning to weigh in on this week’s big digital rights story, the MPAA’s lawsuit against Real Networks for releasing its new RealDVD movie-copying software, but that was at the top of the week. This is the Internet. Everybody said everything that’s to be said on the matter in the first two days or hours or minutes of this, um, controversy. It’s hard to work up any Real passion on the subject anyway, as nobody really likes Real Networks (onetime online audio pioneers, now junky iTunes wannabe) or the MPAA (aka the movie police). But it all seems kinda simple to me: big, ravenous companies trying to expand/protect revenue streams, dressing it up as a copyright/artists’ rights issue. Ancient stuff.
Yesterday saw the launch of iArthouse, a download-to-burn service offering a large selection of foreign films. According to Scott Kirsner, the site is an outgrowth of an existing service that I’ve never heard of called EZ Takes––Scott calls it “a rebranding of EZTakes.com without some of the schlockier stuff — no ‘Extreme Sports’ category, for instance, and no Troma movies like Toxic Avenger.” Not that it’s all trophy class from here on out––Currently promoted on the front page of iArthouse: Roberto Benigni’s much-maligned The Tiger and the Snow. Scott goes on to note that EZTakes’ traffic currently falls far short of iArthouse’s logical competitor, Jaman.com, although metrics for actual downloads on these kinds of sites are hard to come by.
Meanwhile, in news that’s so related as to seem ironic: today comes the news that both Starz!-owned Vongo and Morgan Freeman-owned ClickStar are shutting down.
So, you hear about this iPhone thing? It’s, like, a big deal! We knew there would be lines; we assumed there’d be, at the very least, a Twitter outage. But apparently today’s impatient early adopters are finding that they can pay their $199, but they can’t use their new gadget thanks to an Apple network error––the dreaded 9838.
But we already learned this week that some economic problems are apparently nothing but neuroses––and suggestions otherwise are apparently bait for nonsensical James Bondreferences as comeback. So it’s not inconceivable that maybe 9838 is a manifestation of the psychological torment and guilt shared, at least on a subconscious level, by the energy-conscious, generally politically correct consumer class who, in spite of anti-corporate, anti-waste lip service, can’t stop themselves from placing of hundreds of dollars on the feeder bar and pressing down hard every time Apple release a new slice of fake plastic happiness. Or, as Anil Dash puts it in the Twitter above, you can’t go around saying that Wall-E has the power to change the wicked ways of the world if you’re not willing to let that change begin with you.
Semi-related: If you do get your new iPhone to work (and/or have an old one), Paul Harrill has rounded up a list of relevant iPhone apps for filmmakers.
Apple is on track to triple sales and rentals of movies on iTunes this year. Their business got a shot in the arm when they began selling new releases early last month, enabling untold numbers of McConaughey addicts to get their Fool’s Gold fix on the go.
AMPAS will limit Oscar nominations in the Best Original Song category to two per film. This should help head off a disaster like this year, in which the three nominated songs from Enchanted split the vote, leaving the door open for the independent artists behind the movie Once to steal an Oscar that rightfully belonged to the Hollywood blockbuster.
Wayne McClammy, the I’m Fucking Matt Damon guy, is attached to direct Le Car, a comedy about the CIA and the Winter Olympics, based on script by himself and Will Burke.
Spain’s ICAA Film Institute gave Javier Bardem 30,000 Euros for his “defense of the acting profession and continued commitment to Spanish film at home and abroad.”
Fitting for May Day, Variety has the latest on the AMPTP and SAG negotiations, and things don’t look good. The majors are quite upset with the demands of the union, delivering the message that “Unless SAG backs off its demands on DVD and new media soon, it can forget about a deal even if thesps go on strike.”
SAG might want to take note of Apple’s latest announcement, then, and rethink its DVD demands, because the news that iTunes will now sell films day-and-date means the tangible home video format could soon be a relatively minor ancillary.
On the subject of actors backing down (and out), Javier Bardem has exited Rob Marshall’s musical adaptation Ninedue to exhaustion. He’ll take a year off from acting while Marshall will have the difficulty of finding another actor suitable to fill the shoes of Marcello Mastroianni.
Squashing some of the debate over whether or not the documentary should be allowed Oscar contention based on its sneaky theatrical “release”, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired will be getting an official run from THINKfilm beginning July 11. Of course, that’s a month after HBO debuts the film on cable.
Analysts are expecting opening week sales of Grand Theft Auto IV to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million. Why do we care? Because, as Ben Fritz puts it at Variety, that’ll be “close to, if not above, the No. 1 film bow of all time, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, which grossed $404 million worldwide in its first six days. For a taste of what the fuss is about, check out the game’s trailer above.
After the massive success on the site of the film’s soundtrack, Juno became the first Fox film to became available for download-to-own on iTunes yesterday, the same day as its DVD release.
Universal’s Vivendi Entertainment has made its first theatrical acquisition with New York, New York, that omnibus thing with the Natalie Portmans and the Scarlett Johanssons and the etcs.
Zoolander, Ben Stiller’s 2000 fashion world spoof, has been doing consistently well on iTunes’ movie download-to-own chart. NewTeeVee’s Chris Albrecht wonders why. “Wait, what? An eight-year-old comedy is more popular than Ratatouille, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, and High School Musical (parts 1 and 2)?”
Apple hasn’t released demographic information, but let’s try to imagine, for a second, who might be willing to spend $10 on a legal––but DRM-heavy––movie download at this stage of the game. First of all, it’s gotta be someone who uses Mac products exclusively: students, artists, upper-middle-class nerds, aging hipsters, style-conscious parents, the curious rich, celebrities. Albrecht has screen caps of several recent iTunes top sales charts, and it’s clear from a glance that adventurous cinephilies don’t seem to be yet represented––but then, with the exception of a handful of classic titles, iTunes’ movie catalog doesn’t seem to be going for adventure. So let’s assume that the cool hunter Apple user is getting their movies elsewhere, and concentrate on the more middle-of-the-road aspects of the Apple demographic.
Bob Iger says Disney’s Hong Kong thene park had a rough second year because his researchers drastically under-estimated how long it takes to eat lunch. “There were longer lines to eat than to ride Space Mountain.” Oh, and iTunes makes money.
Warner Brothers is trying to coax New Line’s Toby Emmerich to take a newly-created position as head of the pared-down, independent studio. WB wants to refashion New Line into a boutique producing half a dozen films a year at no more than than $50 million each. Variety says this could throw a wrench into a few proposed New Line projects, including (obviously) The Hobitt, and (not so obviously) a sequel to Wedding Crashers. Adjust that 2005 film’s budget for inflation and you’re up to just over $43 million; are we to assume that the remaining seven million is to spent on keeping both Fred Claus and Drillbit Taylor on retainer?
The Hollywood Film Festival is adding the Hollywood Trailer Awards to their October slate of festivities. Yeah, I know–I spend a week in Texas, and this is all I can come up with on my return? Blame the cold I picked up somewhere on the journey home. Or, hell––just blame Variety.
Remember that episode of Growing Painswhen little Ben decides he should carry all his possessions around with him so that burglars won’t get them? (If not, watch it here). Well, more than twenty years later, Ben is probably carrying a lot of his possessions around with him, at least his music and some of his movies, via his iPod. But if you know anyone who has been mugged in New York City, you know that it’s now easier to be robbed of all your possessions. Unless you’re still holding on to your CDs or have your iTunes purchases backed up on your hard drive, once you lose that iPod you’ve lost everything.
But now, following yesterday’s announcement that iTunes is renting movies, there’s nothing to worry about. We can do away with possessions altogether (as Carol suggests — hair dryer excluded, of course). And we can begin by throwing out all our DVDs and VHS tapes (you still have VHS tapes?). Who needs to own when you can rent whatever movie you’re interested in watching whenever you want to watch it? And you don’t even have to travel around looking for a local video store (if you even still have a local video store). Some people may have even already given up on possessing movies when Netflix came out. I, for one, stopped buying movies when I first subscribed, though I still haven’t thrown out the few DVDs I already own. Within the year, I may very well clear off those movie shelves and replace the DVDs with books.
I’m refreshing a couple of myfavoritetechblogs every few minutes to glean the movie-related news from today’s MacWorld keynote. Here’s what I’m learning, in real time. Keep refreshing for new stuff.
12:21: It looks like watching video will become more feasible on the new version of the iPhone, which is set to ship in late February. From TUAW: “New features rolling out! Maps with location for iPhone. Webclips. Customize home screens. SMS multiple recipients. Chapters for video. Karaoke mode! (Lyrics displayable)”
12:29: The IPhone video updates, including subtitle options will be “available today as a free update for all iPhones.” [TUAW again]
12:32: ITunes sold 7 million movies last year — better than every other movie download service, but still below expectations.
12:33: “We think there’s a better way to deliver movie content through iTunes. So today, we’re introducing iTunes Movie Rentals.” [Engadget]
Remember last week, when that guy at CES asked the guy from Netflix why their Watch Instantly streaming service doesn’t work on a Mac, and the Netflix guy was all, “It’s totally Apple’s fault,” and I bought it, and a million Apple fanboys wrote in to tell me that I was wrong? Those were heady times. But now it looks like there’s a new kink in the works, which puts Netflix and Apple’s reticence to get together in a new light.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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