Authors — Jim Hemphill
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“Sprinkling a Little ‘Stacey’ On It”: Director Stacey K. Black on How to Excel at Directing Episodic Television
Directing episodic television can be one of the most challenging forms of filmmaking. A tricky balancing act is required by having to simultaneously meet the expectations of the audience, the demands of the network and showrunner, and the desires and opinions of actors and crew, who have been on the show for years — and all while providing a distinctive enough point of view so as to make one’s self essential to the process (and thus get asked back to direct more episodes). Few directors have managed to navigate the intersection between personal expression and mass entertainment as well as […]
by Jim Hemphill on May 22, 2018 -
It’s Alive Trilogy, Gun Crazy and A Fistful of Dollars: Jim Hemphill’s Weekend Viewing Recommendations
It’s a good week for cinematic iconoclasts, with extras-laden Blu-ray editions of Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive trilogy, Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy, and Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars all newly available. Cohen’s reputation has received a major and well deserved boost in the last couple years with the release of Steve Mitchell’s King Cohen documentary and reissues of many of his best films (Black Caesar, The Stuff, Special Effects) on Blu-ray. Shout Factory’s new boxed set containing It’s Alive (1974), It Lives Again (1978) and It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive (1987) is likely to further fuel the […]
by Jim Hemphill on May 18, 2018 -
Class Rank, Mikey and Nicky and The Blacklist: Jim Hemphill’s Weekend Viewing Recommendations
One of the most charming and intelligently written and directed teen films of recent years, Class Rank, premieres both in limited theatrical release and on multiple digital platforms today, and it’s well worth seeking out in whatever format one chooses to experience it. Olivia Holt and Skyler Gisondo (both terrific) play a pair of teenagers who take on their local school board over a bit of bureaucratic minutiae and in the process navigate both daunting struggles for power in the adult world and the complications of first love. The script by Benjamin August is a delicate treasure that’s hilarious but […]
by Jim Hemphill on May 11, 2018 -
Play It to the Bone, New Titles from Warner Archive and More: Jim Hemphill’s Weekend Viewing Recommendations
Back in October 2015, I interviewed writer-director Ron Shelton for this site about the making of his immensely entertaining Play It to the Bone, a 1999 boxing picture that subverted sports movie clichés to its commercial detriment but artistic triumph. A deftly balanced work that is as smart and violent as it is sweet and funny, Bone is one of Shelton’s best films, and certainly his most underrated – something I’ve always found mysterious given how obvious and pleasurable its virtues are. It’s now available in a new Blu-ray edition along with Shelton’s Bull Durham follow-up Blaze (1989), which finds the director […]
by Jim Hemphill on May 4, 2018 -
Natural Born Killers, The Virgin Suicides and More: Jim Hemphill’s Weekend Viewing Recommendations
From 1986, the year in which he made two flat-out masterpieces (Salvador and Platoon) to 1995, when he directed his boldest and richest film to that point (Nixon), Oliver Stone was on a streak like no other filmmaker has ever had before or since. Ten films in ten years, many of them (Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, The Doors) enormous epics and all of them ambitious attempts to assess where America had been, where it was, and where it was going. The scale and depth of Stone’s work during this period is equaled by the diversity of tone, […]
by Jim Hemphill on Apr 27, 2018 -
“We Don’t Have a Script, But We’re Working on It”: Michael Pressman on Doctor Detroit and Transitioning from Film to TV
One of the most interesting filmmakers to emerge from Roger Corman’s New World Pictures in the 1970s – a period in which great directors like Jonathan Demme, Allan Arkush, and Joe Dante were making their first movies for the company – was Michael Pressman, whose 1976 action-comedy The Great Texas Dynamite Chase remains one of the smartest, funniest, and most energetic exploitation pictures of its era. Throughout the late ’70s and early ’80s, Pressman directed one distinctive film after another, exhibiting astonishing range – the only thing his movies of the era have in common is that they have nothing […]
by Jim Hemphill on Apr 24, 2018 -
“What’s the Ripple Effect?… It Was the Most Complicated Script I’ve Ever Shot”: David Barrett on Directing the Time Loop Episode of Star Trek: Discovery
A couple years ago, I was in a hotel room flipping channels when I came across an episode of the popular CBS series Blue Bloods, an ensemble family drama in the form of a procedural anchored by Tom Selleck. I was struck almost immediately by how stylistically expressive the episode was; it was clear that the director had thought through a precise means of conveying each character’s perspective in a distinctive way, assigning specific focal lengths, camera moves, and color and lighting strategies to each protagonist. It was the kind of subtle but dynamic approach to visual design one finds […]
by Jim Hemphill on Feb 14, 2018 -
“Everybody Can Make Their Money Back and You Get to Make the Movie”: Mark Pellington on Nostalgia
Director Mark Pellington has long been one of the American cinema’s foremost chroniclers of the connection between mortality, memory, and identity; questions related to how we define ourselves in life and how those lives define our legacies have been key in films as diverse as The Mothman Prophecies (a thriller in which Richard Gere becomes obsessed with the supernatural ramifications of his wife’s death), Father’s Daze (a documentary about Pellington’s father’s struggle with Alzheimer’s Disease) and Of Time and Memory (an unconventional adaptation of Don Snyder’s novel about Snyder’s attempts to know his deceased mother). In Pellington’s last several features, […]
by Jim Hemphill on Feb 8, 2018 -
Desert Hearts, Wild Bill, Pretty Little Liars and More: Jim Hemphill’s Year-End Home Video Recommendations
For my final home video column of the year, I’d like to round up the most interesting and enjoyable Blu-ray and DVD titles I’ve encountered in recent months — not necessarily a “ten best” list, but a compendium of highly recommended releases that rank among 2017’s home viewing highlights (and that make great gifts for cinephiles as the holiday shopping season approaches). Here goes: Desert Hearts. Director Donna Deitch embarked on her narrative feature debut with a simple goal — to tell a love story between two women that didn’t end with either of them dying or in a bisexual […]
by Jim Hemphill on Nov 24, 2017 -
La Chinoise, Le Gai Savoir, Personal Shopper and Two by John Sturges: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Picks
“How has La Chinoise aged?” asks Amy Taubin in her liner notes to the new Blu-ray edition of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 provocation. Elsewhere in the disc’s accompanying booklet Richard Hell examines how he has shifted positions from seeing La Chinoise as lesser Godard to “a glorious experience” superior to more easily accessible works like Pierrot le fou. Both critics circle around one of the things I find most fascinating about Godard in general, which is the fact that his movies, more than those of any other filmmaker, seem to change the most drastically from one viewing to the next. Of […]
by Jim Hemphill on Oct 20, 2017
