Cinequest has invited Canary for its 2009 festival, which is a big honor considering that we did not officially submit the film (no form, no fee). There is a strong possibility that we will accept the invitation, not least of all because they gave us a bit of red carpet treatment with Around the Bay--two high-profile Saturday night screenings at their best venue and a review in Variety, among other things. Their 2009 iteration will take place from 2/25 through 3/8 in downtown San Jose.

An in-depth interview about Canary (and other things).

"Like the best 'little' films, Canary is a very big film...full of wonder and menace...[I]t is a film to be reckoned with, to be savored, and not to be forgotten."

http://professordvd.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/10/canary-alejandro-adams...

It's never too early for promotion and never the wrong time to hear someone say, "What a knock-out performance."

Chattanooga-based filmmaker Jarrod Whaley interviews Carla Pauli at his site Oak Street Films, noting that he saw a working copy of Canary. His eagerness to talk it over with Carla speaks volumes, and I think she's a well-chosen representative of the forty-odd jaw-droppingly-good performances we managed to pack into this little epic.

Go, read, leave a comment. Please.

I saw Baghead yesterday, so I'll start with that.

Baghead is nearly perfect. It aspires to do little, but it manages to do more than most of the films in this era of no-budget films which conspicuously aspire to do little.

I hardly ever read any industry news (superstition? laziness? self-righteousness?), but this story about the director of a much-lauded Sundance hit withdrawing from a distribution deal with IFC really captures this climate of despair from the other angle--sure, there's been pervasive flap over the indie distributor crisis (excuse the unbecoming journalistic argot), but almost exclusively from a news-critic-blogger-fan angle. Now we're going to start seeing what it's like for those filmmakers who are being offered deals in this new era. "Nevermind."

The first assembly of Around the Bay was three hours and forty-five minutes. The first assembly of Canary, finished last weekend, was 93 minutes.

It's an odd pleasure listening to the commentary track on the Criterion laserdisc edition of Taxi Driver. Recorded when Goodfellas was Scorsese's "new film," the commentary is neatly organized, with Scorsese and Schrader introduced and re-introduced by the stoic moderator, who summarizes their careers intermittently.

As Yvonne mentioned, we recently shot some additional scenes (four months after wrapping). One of the scenes required Eli and Dave to have a conversation in a small office bathroom. We did several takes, and eventually I settled on a shot which covered both actors satisfactorily--it was inventive without being ostentatious.

"Right from the beginning, his understanding of cinema was apparent...He already understood and integrated the plasticity of cinema with the plasticity of narrative. Every shot is the narrative and the narrative is every shot...