In the ’90s, French screenwriter and now director Thomas Bidegain was a familiar face in the L.A. and New York film communities. He worked in distribution in L.A. for Connoisseur Films, produced independent films out of New York, and worked in Paris for distributor MK2 and production company Why Not during the years when both were eagerly scouting the latest American independent auteurs. But after writing a series of short films, Bidegain made his biggest career shift yet, moving into screenwriting as he wrote, with Jacques Audiard, the tough prison drama A Prophet. Since then he’s co-written all of Audiard’s […]
Since the 2012 Sundance premiere of Hunger in Los Angeles — a virtual reality piece derived from an actual incident in which a man had a diabetic seizure while waiting in line at a food bank — Nonny de la Peña has become one of the most celebrated artists in the VR world of immersive journalism. With One Dark Night, the “godmother of virtual reality” (as Endgadget dubbed her) has set her sights on another in-the-blink-of-an-eye tragedy — the killing of Trayvon Martin while the unarmed African-American teen was visiting his father’s fiancée’s condo complex in Sanford, Florida. Through 911 […]
We are approaching the 50th anniversary of the publication of Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium Is the Massage (was it a printing error, or a pun?), the book that put the phrase on the map, and whose ideas McLuhan had first advanced in his 1964 book Understanding Media. There he argued that “the personal and social consequences of any medium — that is, of any extension of ourselves — result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.” And, later: “Nobody is interested in TV until there are TV […]
From where we currently sit in the middle of the Great Reality Show Presidential Primary Race of 2016, it seems like a point so obvious as to be nearly mundane: Politics can be the greatest show on earth. And, since the birth of the technology, that show has played out in front of the camera. Picking apart the symbiotic relationship between the media and politicians is an old conversation, merely updated with an ever-evolving set of tools: From Andrew Jackson, who controlled at least one newspaper and also blamed the press for ruining his wife’s good name, to Gary Hart, […]
In this, my sixth annual camera round-up for Filmmaker, I’ll explore the latest developments and trends associated with cameras — as I have each year — which taken together continue to define new directions in digital cinema. I’ll highlight cameras that exemplify these trends. Those seeking an end-in-sight to a decade’s worth of profound change in camera technology might want to stop reading here. In my 2015 camera round-up, I touched on issues of design including modularity, new materials, a return to ergonomics; the birth of camera apps; wirelessness and the dawn of camera IP connectivity; the mirrorless revolution with […]
“Stop thinking as an individual and start thinking as a team,” says Legs (Makyla Burnam), one of the Lionesses — a dynamic Cincinnati high-school drill team — to a group of young recruits, who include the shy, diminutive, but quietly purposeful 11-year-old boxer Toni. Played in writer/director/producer Anna Rose Holmer’s terrific, formally assured dramatic feature debut, The Fits, by the self-possessed and emotionally transparent Royalty Hightower, Toni has been drawn away from the comforting routine of her boxing practice by the sounds, music and movement of the Lionesses and, by extension, the more adult world they represent. But soon after […]
The Boost Released a year after the Partnership for a Drug-Free America’s “This Is Your Brain on Drugs” campaign frightened children into never eating their morning eggs, Harold Becker’s The Boost was this PSA’s cinematic equivalent for adults. An adaptation of political commentator and actor Ben Stein’s 1982 novel, Ludes: A Ballad of the Drug and the Dream, the film is a cautionary tale in which a real estate salesman and his wife grow addicted to wealth, entitlement and cocaine. In his review for The New York Times, filmmaker (and then freelance writer) Cameron Crowe noted that the book “winds up being largely about […]
Just after the Oscar nominations in 2015, Derrick Cameron wrote a guest column in The Hollywood Reporter titled “How to Fix the Oscars: Take a Cue from the Sports World and Fix the Talent Pool” in which he argued that “we have not invested in developing new voices in American cinema, particularly from communities that reflect our various cultures.” In contrast, Cameron and a team of other passionate educators have worked for more than a decade to make precisely that investment. They are the team responsible for Ghetto Film School. Founded in 2000 by Joe Hall in the South Bronx, […]
Sundance Film Festival 2016 by Adam Cook Few film festivals carry inscribed connotations the way that Sundance does. For this newcomer to Park City, a visit to this beacon of American indie cinema came loaded with preconceptions about both the nature of the “Sundance film” (part myth, part truth) and the tendency for the collective critical response to hyperbolize and rush to proclaim the year’s early favorites. Given the calendar-based approach of looking at movies in the context of their year, Sundance emerges on the heels of last year’s best-of lists, nearly 12 months ahead of when its own lineup will […]
In several ways, Love & Friendship has Whit Stillman coming full circle to his 1990 debut Metropolitan, which includes a heated discussion of Jane Austen’s merits. “I love anachronism, and this was the chance to film, essentially, a costume picture set in the present day or recent past,” he told Betsy Sussler in a 1991 BOMB interview. With this Ireland-shot adaptation of Jane Austen’s comparatively obscure epistolary novella Lady Susan, he finally discards the husk of the present, indulging his sentiment expressed on Twitter last summer that “The 18th century just keeps getting better & better.” The puckish opening introduces […]