The Circuit

Variety's full coverage of the 2008 Cannes Film Festival begins at Festival Central today. 

Check our dedicated site hourly for news, reviews, photos and blogs from our team on the ground.

Filmmaker Mag editor Scott Macaulay pointed us to this harrowing short - a time-lapsed video of a man trapped in an elevator for over 40 hours. 

"I was on two short film juries in the last two weeks. If this web video from The New Yorker had been entered in either of them, it would have been a finalist."

The Reeler, aka Stu VanAirsdale, the Gotham film blogger and rabblerouser, is joining the staff of Defamer.  So what's the future of his site? 

For better or worse, I've spent nearly the last three years in this space gazing, gawking and sometimes glaring at the fantastic spectrum that is New York City cinema. Starting Monday, March 17, I'll be widening this focus full-time for the good people at Defamer, where I'll be writing about film business, culture and related mayhem on a daily basis. The Reeler, meanwhile, will return to the blog format through which it was conceived. It will continue to publish often (if not quite as often), featuring observations on local film, filmmakers and happenings from yours truly and many of the fine writers who have made this site such a pleasure and privilege for me to be a part of since 2005.

Full story here.

Arthouse Films is putting up their films, many of which had long festival runs, onto iTunes.  The selection includes features (for 9.99), music vids and shorts (for 1.99).

Their catalogue includes docs like Tribeca and Berlin fest's "A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams & the Warhol Factory" by Esther B. Robinson and the Toronto pick "Obscene: a Portrait of Barney Rosset and Grove Press" by Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O'Connor.

At Variety, we wondered what it takes to make something into a true, four-legged industry.  With film festivals, the fitful birth of its own tradeshow was a sign, mentioned in this fest-stress article. 

Now the industry has its first major federal indictment - Gerald and Patricia Green of Film Festival Management were arrested on bribery charges.  They tried to payoff a Thai official so they could land a contract managing the Bangkok International Film Festival.

My first thought was: "Really?  They wanted to manage Bangkok fest that bad?"  Surely there are countless other more worthy festivals that could use some bribe cash, something other than the usual corporate payola.

But then Grady Hendrix put it in perspective:

I never met anyone who took the Bangkok International Film Festival seriously. It was an excuse for the well-connected industry folks to get flown to Bangkok, eat great food, do some shopping and go out with other people on the film festival circuit all on the Thai government's tab. (I was never invited. Can you tell I'm a little bitter about it?)

From beginning to end it was something of a joke, with few foreign films being subtitled in Thai for local viewers and a line-up usually consisting of leftovers from other fests. It was run by a company in Los Angeles called Festival Management who seemed only to exist to run the Bangkok International Film Festival and they never seemed to do a particularly good job of it.

And yet, every year, the Thai government sunk millions of dollars into the fest.

Full post here, on the must-read Kaiju Shakedown blog.

In remembering the late film critic John Harkness, Joe Leydon brings up an interesting point about film festival tunnel vision.  The outside world does indeed seem to shut down.  Not much can penetrate the cacophony of news, screenings, events, appearances.  Not even a massacre in China, as Joe recounts. 

And the relationships there can only be framed within that fest - between dark theaters, chicken satay, and mini-bars. 

If you totaled all the time I spent with John over the years at various festivals - or with any one of a few other colleagues I never see in any other context -- it might add up to more hours I've spent with blood relatives over the same period. And, yes, there's something ineffably deceptive about spending long periods in close quarters alongside people with similar interests: You start to think that you actually know these people.

But you don't.

Full post here on Joe's blog. 

From The Knife, comes this absorbing commercial directed by Martin Scorsese. The "making-of" part is dubbed -- in the same style as Scorsese's machine-gun way of speaking.  Get through it and to the commercial is pretty cool.

Also, check out the blog-bonus of Orson.