ARTHOUSE FILM NEWS - Cosmic Disco Detective Rene at Facets, Chicago 11/29/23

At New American Vision , check it out. - Sujewa

Been busy editing Indie Film Blogger Road Trip , have not had much time to blog this week, but did read a few interesting articles, posts about the changing world of indie film distribution. A lot of the ideas presented in these linked articles are not new to DIY/self-distributing filmmakers; however, it looks like that new combinations of DIY + working-with-several-companies distribution approaches (with publicity coming from fests, the web) may soon be tried out by regular indie filmmakers - the kinds that formerly relied or tried to rely solely on distributors for getting their work out. The end goals are (or should be, if you want to build a catalog of work that can be released through new avenues, have some say on how work gets marketed, make money) distribution AND holding on to long term control & ownership of projects, and simple paths for achieving those goals will probably appear after this current period of experimentation. Here are the links (if you haven't read th

Tom Quinn's got the notes , check 'em out. Here's a little bit: "For “City of God” Fernando looked at 2,000 kids saying their name and some information about themselves on videotape. He then selected 250 and broke them into 6 groups. Rehearsals would run from 8am to 9pm, giving him 2 hours with each group. Initially, he worked on making them less self conscious in front of the camera and building their confidence. While the entire film was scripted, the actors were never given anything to read. Instead, Fernando would give them a scene and have them go work on it as a group. Once they prepared, he would meet with them and shape it, slim it down and feed them lines from the script to throw in. During the shoot, he will often say “keep going” instead of “cut” because actors will often think they are improvising, but resort to the scripted lines making them sound more natural than the initial performance." A lot more at The Workbook Project . - Sujewa

All in all, I think this Variety article by Anthony Kaufman has a lot of good news in it for real indie filmmakers. Don't be lazy, click over & read the whole thing, & to encourage you, here are some quotes: "...more than two years after the initial hoopla, is day-and-date the distribution solution indies have been hoping for? Executives at IFC and within Cuban's indie empire still believe it is, and now they have the numbers to show for it." And: "For foreign and American indie producers, the model has proved largely worthwhile. Paul Trijbits , an exec producer on two of IFC's VOD successes (Ken Loach's "The Wind That Shakes the Barley" and Shane Meadows' "This Is England"), says day-and-date uniquely helped the films to thrive where other releases have failed. "On previous films from Loach and Meadows, there were no overages. Never. They were largely unrecouped films," he says. "Before, we couldn't

Not a cool development. Accepting religious law (basically ancient, superstitious/based on the existence of a supreme being/deity) as legal & binding in a modern secular country with separations between religion & state (at least up to now I thought the UK was a secular place w/ religion & state separations) is definitely a step backwards and can be bad news for a lot of people. Basically accepting religious law = a step back towards the pre- enlightenment dark ages (not to mention sharia courts ruled pre-9/11 Afghanistan where it was illegal to watch TV, women had no rights, etc. - go here for more on Islamic law ; check out aspects of the criminal code that includes lashing as punishment for drinking) where religious orders & appeals to their Gods & morality determined the definition of justice; again, bad news for lots & lots of people. Of course I could be overreacting here, so, here's the full press release from The American Humanist Association : &

Check out a new interview with the writer/director of Medicine for Melancholy here .

There are worse things than religion, and religion is an effective way to organize & motivate people, but ultimately (& perhaps unfortunately), at the core of all major religions on this planet are lies or at least ideas that cannot be tested to see if they are true or not (as far as I can tell), and that makes the whole business of religions suspect (maybe we should invent a replacement for religions, hmmm?). Here's a clip from a doc , about where the Christian church may have gotten the idea for Jesus from:

Check it out here . From the interview: "For more than 25 years Mr. Wang, now 59, has reinvented himself time and again with apparent ease, zigzagging between America and Asia, big and small movies, safe bets and wild risks, insider and outsider status. “The industry can really box you in, so you try to break the patterns,” he said over lunch in Manhattan in July." Read the rest at NYT . - Sujewa

If not, here's a nice scene for you, to make things a little better maybe:

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin telling people that her & their God wants the US to invade Iraq. Young soldiers from one of the wealthiest countries in the world killing a person on the street after invading that person's country without any defensible reasons (Iraq did not attack the US and there were no signs of them doing so). Basically, this is pure evil on video: