Bet on Foreclosure Boom Turns Sour for Investors

BUSINESS DAY

By JULIE CRESWELL and BARRY MEIER

Published: February 1, 2011

Investors hoping to make millions buying the back-office operations of a foreclosure lawyer have come up short. #Foreclosure

Social Text Interview with Director Richard Ledes

Interview by Kristina Huang with Richard Ledes, Director of "Foreclosure" published in the blog of Social Text.

"...the possibility of using the genre of horror to allow people to express the psychological truth of living in one time, but of having that time always, in a sense, haunted by the traumas of their own particular past..."

BBC's Tom Brook Visits the Set of Foreclosure

Tom Brook, host of BBC's Talking Movies, recently visited the set of Foreclosure. BBC has run a video segment with exclusive footage including interviews with stars Michael Imperioli and Meital Dohan, as well as a sit down with writer/director Richard Ledes.

Michael Imperioli to star as "Foreclosure" lead

The Hollywood Reporter and Variety have both announced the casting on Michael Imperioli as the lead in "Foreclosure."

The Hollwood Reporter writes:

The former "Sopranos" star joins Wendell Pierce, Bill Raymond, Jeff Burchfield, Meital Dohan, Brandon Gill, Spencer List, Tristan Laurence Perez, William Stone Mahoney and Roger Robinson in the creeper.

With a tagline of "ghosts don't move out," "Foreclosure" sets its action in a nearly empty, economically depressed neighborhood block, amid the real-life context of the mortgage crisis where so many homes are bank-owned.

Cast of "Foreclosure" Announced

ShockTill You Drop, Dread Central, and ComingSoon have announced the cast for "Foreclosure."

Michael Imperioli ("The Sopranos") is set to star with Wendell Pierce ("The Wire," "Treme") and Bill Raymond joining him.

Announcing the “Foreclosure” store - all profits go straight to Haiti

Hey! Have you noticed the “Store” tab on the “Foreclosure” website? We’ve got a wide selection of tees, sweats and caps bearing the “Rot and Decay Films” and “Foreclosure” logos. And from now until forever, we will donate all profits from the store to “Partners in Health” a non-profit organization working on the ground in Haiti for the last twenty years. So support Haiti and support independent film and get yourself a cool new t-shirt.

To learn more about Partners in Health, visit their website: www.pih.org

And www.ghostsdontmoveout.spreadshirt.com will take you directly to our store.

...in the lap of a ghost

"I assure you that every audience in this house will be sitting in the lap of a ghost."

ATHOL FUGARD, the South African playwright, on a new theater in an area where 60,000 residents were driven from their homes during apartheid.

His Next Act: Driving Out Apartheid’s Ghost

Haiti and Horror Movies

"Haiti and Horror Movies" is a six-minute video made by Rot & Decay Films that we hope you will watch and let us know what you think.

Scorsese and Horror

FEARnet recently posted an article on The 12 Scariest Moments in Scorsese Movies in anticipation of "Shutter Island." A creepy trip through memory lane worth checking out.

Myths Obscure Voodoo, Source of Comfort in Haiti

Dismissive attitudes follow a history of misrepresentation in American journalism and popular culture.

Shindo on Shindo

Below is an excerpt from an interview between Kaneto Shindo and Joan Mellen.

The prolific Japanese director talks about his whole career. Below he discusses the social elements at work in his supremely eerie horror folktale, "Onibaba" (1964).

Mellen: I find the social dimension of your films very complex and interesting. Would you describe how in your films you depict the class struggle as it appeared both in history and society?

Shindo: Speaking about Onibaba in particular, my main historical interest focuses on ordinary people... their energy to carry themselves beyond the predicaments they encounter daily. I wish to describe the struggles of the so-called common people which usually never appear in recorded history. This is why I made Onibaba. My mind was always on the commoners, not on the lords, politicans, or anyone of name and fame. I wanted to convey the lives of down-to-earth people who live like weeds.

Mellen: In the setting of Onibaba I noticed that the people seemed very small, moving around a lake where the reeds were very tall and imposing.

Shindo: Yes, the tall, swaying reeds are my symbol of the world, the society which surrounds people. In Kuroneko bushes are used for the same symbolic end. Tall, densem swaying reeds represent the world in which these commoners live and to which the eyes of lords and politicians do not reach. My eyes, or rather the camera's eyes, is fixed to view the world from the very lowest level of society, not from the top.

Bushwick and the Housing Crisis

Eva Sanchis of El Diario has published a series of articles for the newspaper on how the foreclosure crisis has impacted Bushwick. The Brooklyn neighborhood has been one of the hardest hit by the housing recession and Sanchis's slate of articles just go to show which New Yorkers are taking the worst toll in this damaged market.

Here is a link to an English language digest of what was a three article report (our Spanish speaking readers can find the first of the original articles right here)

Additionally, The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC hosted Eva Sanchis. This is the link to a podcast of that interview.

"Peeping Tom" and First-Person Horror

The Criterion Collection recently announced that they are discontinuing a slate of StudioCanal owned titles. They’ve lost the DVD rights to films like “Grand Illusion,” “Pierrot Le Fou” and Jean Cocteau’s Orphic Trilogy.

(They are having an Out of Print Sale, linked here)

I was dismayed to see “Peeping Tom” on the list. I can think of few films so essential to our understanding of contemporary horror.

The film follows the murderous exploits of Mark Lewis, a solitary photographer who preys on women. Sometimes posing as a documentarian, Mark gets his victims in front of his 16mm film camera, he kills them with his tripod immortalizing their death throes on film.

The viewer is thrust into the point of view of the camera’s viewfinder, forcing us into identification with both the deadly mechanism and the deeply disturbed Mark. We become both the murderer and the means. Even more disconcerting is the allegorical significance of this approach. The viewer is confronted with their own voyeurism.

“Peeing Tom’s” first person aesthetic takes on a new significance when we consider the current horror film fixation with POV. Camera phones, video messaging, and other portable media have provided a new awareness of the first person field of vision that the modern horror film exploits. Movies like “Quarantine” and “Cloverfield” mimic familiar digital platforms as a foray into traditional zombie/infection and monster films respectively.

These are standard genre movies but they are always seem to be reaching to a higher level of verisimilitude. Their approach assumes that the familiarity of the first person digital viewpoint is what incites fear in the viewer. The limited range of vision offered by this approach can be genuinely terrifying (see "[REC]") but a film like “Peeping Tom” exposes an oversight these recent horror films make. They do not realize that identification with the monster is far more horrifying than relation to the victim. When we are forced to identify with the monster, we are faced with out own unrepresentable dark side.

John Carpenter’s "Halloween” aligns us with the central monster to great effect. The opening tracking shot gives us the POV of Michael Myers as a child.

The power of this opener is that it gives us a greater understanding of his monstrous pervasiveness. When we find ourselves yelling at the screen at some nubile slasher victim-“Don’t go into that house, whatever you do, don’t go in that damn house!”- it’s because we have this special access to the monster that Carpenter provides.

(please refer to this great explication of the opening of “Halloween” on Jim Emerson’s Scanners website: Opening Shots: Halloween)

This does not mean that victim identification and pro-sumer video are useless as horror strategies. Perhaps more successful than the strict video mimicry of a film like “Quarantine” is the hybrid method of “28 Days Later" which replicated the lo-fi look of broadcast style video without tethering the film to a visual conceit. The flip side of this aesthetic discussion is the practical use of video. "The Blair Witch Project" and "Paranormal Activity" -despite all their flaws and even- made their limitations a narrative virtue, far outstripping production costs upon release.