Authors — Jim Hemphill
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“When I Shoot Film Today The Set Seems to Move Faster”: DP Nancy Schreiber on Moving from Film to Digital Throughout Her Career
When director of photography Nancy Schreiber receives the Presidents Award at the 31st annual ASC Awards this Saturday, she’ll make history as the first woman to be honored with the award. It’s an appropriate – some might say overdue – recognition of an innovator who has consistently broken new ground in the fields of documentary, narrative features, and television. An early proponent of digital technology (she won the cinematography prize at Sundance in 2004 for her mini-DV work on November), Schreiber is also a fierce advocate for celluloid who creates stunning, expressive images regardless of the format. Her range is second to […]
by Jim Hemphill on Jan 31, 2017 -
The Men’s Club, Stanley and Iris, Jane Fonda and The Light Between Oceans: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Picks
One of my personal holy grails finally arrives on Blu-ray this week in the form of Olive Films’ release of Peter Medak’s bizarre, riveting The Men’s Club. Released in 1986, the film’s print ads promoted it as the successor to popular ensemble films like The Big Chill and The Breakfast Club, which is a little like trying to convince people to watch Abel Ferrara’s The Bad Lieutenant by comparing it to an episode of CHiPs. The Men’s Club follows a night in the life of a group of men (and what a group: David Dukes, Richard Jordan, Harvey Keitel, Frank […]
by Jim Hemphill on Jan 27, 2017 -
“Forget Sepia, It’s Garbage”: Maggie Greenwald on Sophie and the Rising Sun
I first became aware of director Maggie Greenwald’s work in 1993, when her extraordinary Western The Ballad of Little Jo was released. That film, the story of a woman choosing to live as a man rather than yield to patriarchal society’s demands and expectations, established a number of ongoing concerns in Greenwald’s work: a richly observed sense of anthropological detail; a dynamic sense of light, color and composition designed to portray the past with immediacy rather than distance; and a concern with the intersection between the personal and the political that makes her films both timely and timeless. All of […]
by Jim Hemphill on Jan 26, 2017 -
Scandal, Fassbinder, Garfein’s Something Wild and Fellini’s Roma: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Picks
This week ABC dropped a nice surprise for Scandal fans in the form of a new web series that bridges season five and the twice-delayed (first by star Kerry Washington’s pregnancy, then by Trump’s inauguration) season six, which finally begins on January 26. Currently streaming on ABC’s website and app, Gladiator Wanted is the exceptionally entertaining brainchild of Scandal costar Darby Stanchfield, who created the web series and occupies the director’s chair for all six episodes. Scandal has long been one of the most dynamically directed shows on network television, boasting exceptional work by Ava DuVernay, Tom Verica, Jessica Yu, […]
by Jim Hemphill on Jan 21, 2017 -
The Asphalt Jungle, Loophole and More: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
Nearly 30 years after his death, writer-director John Huston remains, in my estimation, a slightly underrated figure in the landscape of American cinema. This may seem like a perverse statement given his multiple Academy Award nominations (including two wins) and the fact that several of his films (The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen, etc.) are widely acknowledged classics, but Huston is even better — far better, in fact — than his reputation suggests. His is a career of astonishing variety and endless probing, one that includes not only multiple jewels of classical Hollywood narrative […]
by Jim Hemphill on Jan 15, 2017 -
Jim Hemphill’s Best Blu-rays of 2016
To finish off 2016, I’d like to round up some of the year’s best Blu-ray releases that I didn’t get a chance to cover in my weekly column. It was an exceptional year for physical media thanks to labels like Criterion, Twilight Time, Arrow, Kino Lorber, and Olive, all of which continue to license neglected titles from studio vaults and give them the first-class treatments they deserve. While the list below barely scratches the surface of the efforts of these companies and others, it contains what I consider to be the most essential discs of the year — movies that […]
by Jim Hemphill on Dec 30, 2016 -
Klown Forever, Porky’s 2/Porky’s Revenge and Moving Violations: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
December is proving to be a strong month for comedies on home video, with one of the funniest films in recent years getting a top-notch Blu-ray release alongside a couple of worthy catalog titles. First up is the latest treasure from the good folks at Drafthouse Films, who have released last year’s Klown Forever in both a stand-alone edition and a spectacular boxed set that contains both Klown films and a collectible flash drive containing all six seasons of the TV series that inspired the movies. For the uninitiated, the Danish Klown films and series follow comedians Frank Hvam and […]
by Jim Hemphill on Dec 23, 2016 -
The Poignant, Romantic and Bleak Snowden: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendation
One of the best films of 2016 begins streaming this week, as Oliver Stone’s Snowden drops on iTunes and Amazon. Stone has long been one of our most versatile directors, having made horror flicks (Seizure, The Hand), a Vietnam trilogy (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Heaven & Earth), a musical (The Doors), historical epics (Alexander, Nixon), a sports film (Any Given Sunday), a love story (World Trade Center), business movies (the two Wall Street movies), and three audacious and darkly funny crime pictures (Natural Born Killers, U-Turn, Savages). With Snowden, Stone synthesizes all of his strengths in one […]
by Jim Hemphill on Dec 16, 2016 -
Moby Dick, Mad Max: Fury Road “Black and Chrome” Edition, and Moscow on the Hudson: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Picks
A great American film finally gets a proper home video treatment on Twilight Time’s new Blu-ray of Moby Dick, John Huston’s 1956 adaptation of Herman Melville’s 1851 classic novel. It’s a film of many virtues, starting with the literary – Huston collaborated with Ray Bradbury on the screenplay, and their adaptation is a surprisingly successful distillation of Melville’s voice and themes. Huston’s memories of the production were not fond; he described it as the most difficult picture he ever made and said in his autobiography, “I lost so many battles during it that I even began to suspect that my […]
by Jim Hemphill on Dec 10, 2016 -
One-Eyed Jacks and Dreams: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Picks for Friday, December 2, 2016
One of the major film restoration events of 2016 was Universal’s digital overhaul of Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks (1961), an important bridge between the classical Westerns of John Ford and the genre-busting revisionism of Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone, not to mention Arthur Penn, who would work with Brando on another great iconoclastic Western, The Missouri Breaks, around 15 years later. Like The Missouri Breaks, One-Eyed Jacks is an unruly passion project filled with idiosyncratic touches and auteurist preoccupations. Yet since Brando never directed another movie before or after, the motifs connect not to his other work behind the camera […]
by Jim Hemphill on Dec 2, 2016
