Authors — Jim Hemphill
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“I Think for Every Story There is a Hidden Way to Tell it Best, and Your Journey is to Try to Find It”: Director Rick Linklater on Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood
When Richard Linklater was in second grade, he became enthralled by the historical moment that was happening right in his Houston backyard as NASA prepared for the Apollo moon landing. Decades later, it occurred to Linklater that he was probably the only filmmaker who remembered the excitement of that moment and was also that geographically close to NASA, a realization that led to his latest feature as writer-director, Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood. Combining the delicate observational eye and ear of Boyhood with the more fantastical animated approach of Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, Apollo 10½ tells the […]
by Jim Hemphill on Apr 1, 2022 -
Written on the Wind, The Devil Strikes at Night, and Dexter: New Blood: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
When German director Douglas Sirk fled the Nazis in 1937 and planted his flag in Hollywood, he quickly became a reliable studio craftsman equally adept at war films (Hitler’s Madman, Mystery Submarine), musicals (Slightly French), comedies (No Room for the Groom, Has Anybody Seen My Gal?) and Westerns (Taza, Son of Cochise). Nevertheless, today his reputation rests almost entirely on the melodramas made in the last five years of his career: movies like Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows, and The Tarnished Angels, whose heightened emotions justify Sirk’s most delirious flights of visual fancy. A brilliant smuggler, Sirk had it […]
by Jim Hemphill on Mar 18, 2022 -
Red Rocket, The Bad News Bears in Basic Training and Claude Chabrol: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
My first recommendations this week are two Blu-rays that are worth picking up not just because they’re terrific movies, but because they come with superb audio commentaries packed with useful information. They’re both comedies, though the first, Sean Baker’s Red Rocket, leaves a bit of a rough aftertaste thanks to the sly way in which Simon Rex’s revelatory performance sneaks up on the viewer. His recent Independent Spirit Award win was well-deserved, as I can’t think of many actors who could have so skillfully walked the line between playfulness and predation; as fading porn star Mikey, Rex beautifully projects an […]
by Jim Hemphill on Mar 11, 2022 -
Outrage, Morvern Callar, Man on the Moon: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
In the 1940s, actress Ida Lupino was one of Warner Bros.’ most reliable contract players, a performer who exuded a tough intelligence in terse genre movies like High Sierra and They Drive by Night. As independent-minded as her characters, Lupino irritated the front office with her refusal to accept sub-par roles and was eventually fired, a development that might not have been great for her bank account but which instigated her most fertile period as an artist. Instead of waiting for the phone to ring, Lupino formed an independent production company and began directing her own pictures, some of which […]
by Jim Hemphill on Feb 18, 2022 -
Stage Fright, Escape from L.A. and Marc Allégret Films on OVID: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
From its opening shot of a curtain rising on a London cityscape to its climactic revelation that an earlier flashback sequence was a lie, Stage Fright (1950) is one of director Alfred Hitchcock’s most intriguing and playful investigations into the cinema’s power to deceive and manipulate. After Stage Fright received mixed reviews and collected lackluster returns at the box office, Hitchcock regretted tricking the audience with the unreliable narrator of the film’s controversial flashback, but I think the bold audacity of that device is actually one of the greatest strengths of a movie that has many, from the cleverly designed […]
by Jim Hemphill on Feb 12, 2022 -
I Wouldn’t Be In Your Shoes!, The Gift and 1408: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
Walter Mirisch is best remembered today as the producer of studio prestige releases like In the Heat of the Night, The Apartment, and the original West Side Story, but before he became one of Hollywood’s most reliable sources of “A” pictures he toiled away in the “B” trenches of Poverty Row company Monogram. He kept the studio in the black with his Bomba the Jungle Boy series, but before establishing that franchise he produced a pair of noir movies based on material by Cornell Woolrich, the suspense writer who would hit paydirt with Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Mirisch’s first solo Monogram […]
by Jim Hemphill on Feb 4, 2022 -
Juice, The Learning Tree and The Devil’s 8: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
1992 was a year of high points for filmmaker Ernest Dickerson, who ended his career as a director of photography with Spike Lee’s majestic bio-pic Malcolm X and began life as a feature film director with the superb teen noir Juice. While Malcolm X may have been more epic in scope, Juice was, in its own compact way, a work of strong ambition and audacity as well, a flawlessly executed coming of age tale that borrowed from Mean Streets, Italian neorealism, and German expressionism but synthesized its influences with Dickerson’s awareness of contemporary New York street life to yield a […]
by Jim Hemphill on Jan 28, 2022 -
“I’d Never Really Written Personally About My Own Loss”: Mark Pellington on The Severing
Director Mark Pellington has long been one of the American cinema’s great chroniclers of grief, from early genre films like The Mothman Prophecies (in which the horror story is a vehicle for an unsettling, affecting tale of personal anguish) to more overtly philosophical takes on the subject like I Melt With You, The Last Word, and Nostalgia. While Pellington’s work is undeniably informed by the devastating loss of his wife Jennifer in 2004, it has tended, up until this point, to come at the subject from oblique angles, as in the 2008 dramedy Henry Poole Is Here. With his latest […]
by Jim Hemphill on Jan 26, 2022 -
Positive Endeavor: CPC London on Striking Affordable 35mm Prints
In February 2020, I attended a screening of Josh and Benny Safdie’s Uncut Gems at Quentin Tarantino’s New Beverly Cinema, a venue widely known and admired among film enthusiasts for its devotion to celluloid exhibition. I was awestruck by the exquisite 35mm presentation of a movie I had previously—like everyone else in the world—only seen projected digitally, and even more astonished when I spoke with the Safdie brothers afterward and learned how simple it was for them to strike a flawless 35mm print from their digital source. Back in 2005, when I directed Bad Reputation, a microbudget horror movie shot […]
by Jim Hemphill on Jan 18, 2022 -
Jim Hemphill’s Top Ten Blu-ray Releases of 2021
Compiling my annual list of the year’s ten best Blu-ray releases (or, to be more accurate, my ten personal favorites), I have come to the conclusion once again that reports of the death of physical media have been greatly exaggerated – there were easily another three or four dozen titles in 2021 worthy of placement on the list, and I can’t even begin to claim familiarity with more than a small percentage of everything that was released. But these are ten titles I can confidently recommend, not only for the fine transfers of superlative films but for the lovingly produced […]
by Jim Hemphill on Dec 27, 2021
