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

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?)Full post here, on the must-read Kaiju Shakedown blog.
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.
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.Full post here on Joe's blog.
But you don't.
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.






