FilmInFocus. And a Jamie Stuart alert.

I'd heard the rumor, and now the cinetrix has confirmed it: FilmInFocus, a new site from Focus Features, working in collaboration with Faber and Faber and Filmmaker (smarts and alliteration!), is up. James Schamus himself states its purpose: "Rather than devote our resources to the usual film marketing sites for our movies (though you'll get lots of great Focus film-specific content here, don't worry!), we decided to create a place that expresses our joy in movies, our admiration for great filmmaking, and our insatiable curiosity about film and the discussions that truly challenging films engender, wherever they may come from."

Now then. On top of everything thing else I'll get to in a moment, you need to know that the highlights here are four shorts by Jamie Stuart, all of which are accessible here. His challenge is to rethink the promo clip, and not terribly surprisingly, he's done so with fearless originality.

I also need to go ahead and mention that there's an interview with me here, but also! Andrew Grant (Like Anna Karina's Sweater), who, once again, shows me how it's done.

Here's a nifty feature: "Week That Was," milestones in film history, one for each day of the current week. There're also news and events roundups.

And of course, there are pieces tied into Focus Features releases. You can learn a lot about Atonement, for example:

• Bill Schwartz, who teaches at Queen Mary, University of London, looks back on England between the wars.

• In These Times editor and publisher Joel Bleifuss considers the mutually influential relationship between war and film.

• Richard T Kelly takes another look at adaptations of Ian McEwan's novels.

• There's an extract from Alistair Owen's Hampton on Hampton, meaning, of course, an interview with screenwriter Christopher Hampton.

• Nick Dawson talks with James McAvoy and lists some of the greatest war films.

• Peter Bowen talks with production designer Sarah Greenwood.

• Scott Macaulay talks with composer Dario Marianelli.

Eastern Promises will be out on DVD next week (and finally in German theaters on December 27). Let's see...

• Scott Macaulay interviews David Cronenberg - and finds a wealth of Cronenbergania on the Web.

• Another extract, this one from Kevin Conroy Scott's Screenwriters Masterclass. Here, Patrick McGrath talks about adapting his own novel, Spider - and another from Cronenberg on Cronenberg.

• Jonathan Romney considers the Cronenberg oeuvre: "[H]is stories evoke worlds that are manifestly unlike ours, confronting us with horrors and extremities that, as 'ordinary people,' we might prefer not to contemplate. Yet it doesn't take much reflection to realize, with alarm, that Cronenberg's imagination ruthlessly corrodes the dividing line between the ordinary and the alien, the familiar and the nightmarish, 'our world' and its underside."

• Nick Dawson presents an annotated filmography.

• Peter Bowen talks with stunt coordinator Julian Spencer about that Turkish bath scene.

The Lust, Caution package:

• Here we see what a sharp move it is to team up with a publishing house, especially one as prestigious as Faber and Faber: "Sealed Off," a short story by Eileen Chang. And Ang Lee: "To me, no writer has ever used the Chinese language as cruelly as Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang), and no story of hers is as beautiful or as cruel as 'Lust, Caution.'"

• Novelist Rick Moody, whose The Ice Storm became a film directed by Ang Lee (a film that'll be getting the full-on Criterion treatment in March), considers himself lucky.

• Novelist Alan Furst goes looking for a good espionage movie.

But wait, there's more! No, really, there is. And that'd be just the reading material. You'll also find extensive linkage... and again, all that online viewing.

Posted by dwhudson at December 18, 2007 4:25 PM