There is really no reason for us not to post a trailer for a forthcoming “holiday special” directed by Sofia Coppola and designed expressly as a hang-out vehicle for Bill Murray. Judging by the fact that A Very Murray Christmas has an actual plot and a lot of shadowy interior lighting, it would seem that Coppola has effectively made her next medium-/feature- length film rather than dashing off a simple TV assignment. It drops December 4.
Ben Weissner and the gang at Ornana — Filmmaker 25 New Faces in 2012 — have just passed along this video for “The Girl in the Yellow Dress,” a single from Pink Floyd guitarist/vocalist David Gilmour’s new solo album. Explains Weissner about the video’s hand animation: His creative team had seen Confusion Through Sand (which has been re-edited to play at his live concerts) and were drawn to the dimensionality and movement in that style, so they asked if we’d bring a similar technique to their song. The music video is made of about 9.000 frames of animation that were […]
Under the Skin filmmaker Jonathan Glazer and design hero Neville Brody, alongside creative agencies 4Creative and DBLG have “rebranded” iconic U.K. broadcaster Channel 4 with jagged new fonts and a deliriously weird, vaguely Kubrick-ian series of station IDs. Glazer’s four narratively-linked shorts fit more comfortably into his recent film work than they do any kind of television advertising, with their mysterious creatures, magenta rock formations and high-tech science laboratories. As for the fonts, well, back in the day, we at Filmmaker used to spend late nights with our late, great designer Wayne Van Acker geeking out over Brody’s work for […]
Miami-based filmmaker Monica Peña’s debut feature, Ectotherms, was a provocative discovery out of the Miami Film Festival that scored a great review in Variety from Guy Lodge and which announced Peña as someone to watch. Just dropped, then, is the teaser trailer to her second feature, Hearts of Palm. Suitably mysterious and with arresting imagery, it is described simply as “a love story told through science, literature, and music, invoking Miami’s mystical undercurrents.” For more on Peña, read her interview with Sarah Salovaara about the distribution of Ectotherms. And, if you’re in Miami, join me, Peña, Jillian Mayer and Carla […]
Leah Shore made our “25 New Faces” list in 2013 on the basis of her totally trippy animated short, Old Man, which traverses the entirety of 20th century history, from Hitler to Kennedy, the bomb to Michael Jackson, in a rapid-fire, image-morphing five minutes that’s voiced by imprisoned cult leader Charles Manson. The recordings came from a series of tapes Shore obtained by Marlin Marynick, a psychiatric nurse. Explains Sarah Salovaara in her Filmmaker profile on Shore: Marynick forked over approximately 10 hours of audio recordings, which resulted in Shore “sitting in a dark room for two months and going […]
Amid all of the internet’s Kubrick/Anderson/Fincher devotees, few video essayists turn their scalpel toward Cassavetes, perhaps in part because his directing prowess is not so easily distilled. Kevin B. Lee has thus chosen to focus on the opening 14 shots of Cassavetes’ debut Shadows, and how he uses incisive editing and lighting to convey the shifting sentiments in a series of scenes between the two lovers Leila and Tony. Check it out above.
To celebrate the November 18 Blu-Ray and DVD release of Jacques Rivette’s opus Out 1: Noli Me Tangere, the French label Carlotta Films has put out a 2 minute trailer for the 775 minute film. For those of us who don’t own a region agnostic Blu-Ray or DVD player (but live in the New York area), it’s worth trying to catch the film at BAM, showing in four parts from November 4 – 19.
A bit of a rant, Stephen Murphy’s video essay “Capturing the Moment: In Search of Adequate Images” springboards off a diatribe against the epidemic of smartphones at concerts to riff off of Werner Herzog’s long-ago warning that we as a society need to find adequate images. What are these adequate images, and how do we define them? Murphy has some thoughts, and some high praise for A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night as well.
HBO is normally very serious about making sure no commissioned and rejected pilots ever make it into public view, so I’m not sure how Richard Linklater’s rejected 2004 pilot made it to Vimeo or how long it’ll stay there. $5.15/Hr. was, per its title, intended to be an immersion into the lives of underpaid restaurant employees slacking around Austin. I recall seeing an uncharacteristically acerbic Linklater presenting the pilot at SXSW in 2004, with the words “You know how they say it’s not TV, it’s HBO? It’s TV.” If only television had been so good in those days as it reportedly […]
Vancouver is the third-biggest filmmaking city in North America, and yet it’s always a stand-in for somewhere else: New York, Shanghai and San Francisco are all possibilities. What does it mean to be “ubiquitous and invisible” at the same time? In his latest video essay, Tony Zhou examines the many tricks used to disguise the city (from planting USA Today newspaper stands everywhere to making sure the camera looks down outside, lest it accidentally capture mountains that don’t belong to the city), then issues a stirring call for Vancouver to, for once, play itself.