In conjunction with the release of The Essential Jacques Demy box set, Criterion has offered up a supplemental look inside the 2013 digital restoration of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Above, Agnès Varda, the couple’s children, Mathieu and Rosalie, and technical specialists discuss the intricacies of upgrading the film’s sound, color, and image for the modern viewer. It’s depressingly easy to see why so many films fall by the wayside as prints run obsolete, and digital projection cements its spot as the industry standard. The attention to detail is, as Criterion notes, painstaking, to say nothing of the expense.
If you’re looking for where movie marketing is in 2014, this is it. Last night Beyonce posted to her Instagram a short 15 second teaser for Sam Taylor Wood’s anticipated 50 Shades of Grey, whose official trailer is due to drop this week. A balcony, thigh caress and a key in the lock, scored to a stripped down “Crazy in Love” — that’s all it is, but the simulated intimacy of the Instagram platform and Bey’s implied endorsement (as well as her high, but tastefully hidden, follower count) make this a better buy for Universal than any network TV buy.
From January through May this year, Richard Linklater hosted a series of screenings at the Austin Film Society of his favorite films from the ’80s followed by post-screening Q&A’s. One of his selections was Dennis Hopper’s perverse 1980 tour-de-force Out of the Blue. After the screening, Linklater had a story to tell about seeing Hopper present the film in Houston in 1983 and then taking those in attendance to a racetrack, where he surrounded himself with sticks of dynamite and set them off. You can first watch Linklater describe the evening in question and Hopper’s thinking — that the simultaneous […]
In an article by Esther Robinson in our upcoming Summer issue, Barry Jenkins speaks to the delicate work-work balance incurred by many a filmmaker — that is to say, what he does to financially support his filmmaking career, and how that job tends to detract from passion projects. Jenkins is fortunate enough that his particular day job, as ringleader of the production company Strike Anywhere, allows him to regularly create content, even if of the branded and not feature-length variety. Over at Fandor, resident video essayist Kevin Lee takes a look at Strike Anywhere’s catalogue, and the work Jenkins has produced in the six […]
James Franco, it seems, spent the majority of his Tisch career translating the lives and work of tormented American poets. There was C.K. Williams with the Tar omnibus, Hart Crane with The Broken Tower and Frank Bidart with the just released Herbert White. Franco and Michael Shannon played lovers in the largely misguided Broken Tower, and here, Shannon, fulfilling his menacing hulk of a persona, prefers dead girls. Franco discusses his adaptation of the Bidart poem with Matt Rager, his co-writer on As I Lay Dying and The Sound In The Fury (Faulkner, being yet another poet of sorts), over at Vice. For those who are largely uninterested in the musings […]
Here’s the first American trailer for the keenly anticipated, highly-praised Nick Cave portrait 20,000 Days on Earth. Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard’s hybrid film is part concert/performance piece, part collaborative dramatization of the legendary performer/writer’s day-in/day-out routine. As the trailer indicates, Cave’s come a long way since the days when he treated interacting with journalists and the wider public as a horrific task that reduced him to sputtering rage. Those unfamiliar with this part of Cave’s legacy should check out a recently republished 1988 interview, which opens with him throwing an irate boot at his interlocutor. Regardless, 20,000 looks sleek […]
As Spinal Tap observed, there’s a fine line between clever and stupid, and there’s a similarly thin divider between convincing argument and tenuous grasping. Is this 12-minute analysis of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love, which argues that it refers heavily to the 1978 Superman, reaching too far when claiming e.g. that the harmonium leading Adam Sandler to Emily Watson could be a stand-in for the Fortress of Solitude? Probably, but it’s an enjoyably go-for-broke interpretation regardless. In this formulation, Sandler’s Barry is Clark Kent — meek and mild at some times, superhumanly strong and violent at others — and Emily […]
David Mackenzie’s Starred Up is more or less an exemplary entry in the prison drama genre. Narratively speaking, there isn’t anything wildly original at work, as the hotheaded protagonist Eric Love (Jack O’Connell) is starred up from juvie to the same higher security prison as his estranged father (Ben Mendelsohn). There, he is quick to make enemies amongst both the incarcerated and the administration, with the one exception being a puppy-eyed counselor (Rupert Friend), who claims to see something in Eric worth healing. What sets Starred Up apart are the performances (the charismatic O’Connell has received much notice, but Mendelsohn yet again proves he can do […]
One of the clever recent innovations at the subscription streaming service Fandor is the ability to filter films using the Bechdel Test. Created by cartoonist Alison Bechdel, the Bechdel Test applies three criteria to judge the quality of female representation in a motion picture: 1) it has to have at least two [named] women in it; 2) who talk to each other; 3) about something besides a man. In a new video essay, “Beyond Bechdel: Testing Feminism in Film,” Lee interrogates the Bechdel Test using films from the Fandor library, asking whether the test is a meaningful criteria when considering […]
In 1968, at the age of 18 and six years before the release of her masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Chantal Akerman made this short film, which announces themes and strategies she continues to this present day. From Amber Frost at Dangerous Minds: Akerman actually dropped out of film school before completing a single term in order to make it, selling stocks and working in an office to fund the twelve and a half minutes that eventually paved the way for her three hour plus opus. As with Jeanne Dielman, intense, oppressive boredom and domestic isolation […]