Authors — Sarah Salovaara
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Trailer Watch: Barry Levinson’s The Humbling
Out of Venice, reviews for The Humbling seem to once again suggest that the biting wit of Philip Roth’s cannon is not exactly adaptable to the filmic format. Poorly received on the heels of the raved opener Birdman, which treads similar aging acting territory, Barry Levinson’s latest sees the adrift Al Pacino falling head first into a love affair with an ex (?) lesbian and daughter of his close friends, played by Greta Gerwig. The film does not yet have a distributor, although I imagine on the strength of the cast alone, it shouldn’t be long.
by Sarah Salovaara on Sep 3, 2014 -
Watch: How Color Correction Alters a Film’s Tone
Color correction is often the least talked about, most overlooked portion of the post-production process. Alex Bickel has spoken out about how grading can alter the presumed production value of a film, and a recent guest post from Michael Medaglia and Jalal Jemison discussed the importance of communicating your story through the process. This video from the International Colorist Academy offers a nice visual supplement to the aforementioned claims, as it demonstrates the colorist’s ability to amend the tone and context of any given scene. When it comes to transforming day to night, and romance to horror, some things can be left […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Sep 2, 2014 -
12 Picks for the SXSW PanelPicker
Not five months after the mammoth festival wraps, SXSW opens up their PanelPicker site, an online forum which aggregates all industry and filmmaker programming pitches for their next conference. Last year, I went through the offerings and highlighted 15 that piqued my interest; this year, the stakes are higher, and I’m down to 12 from the 183 listed. You have till September 5 to vote on your favorites. How “High Maintenance” Is Redefining Storytelling I fondly recall the day former Managing Editor Nick Dawson sent me a link to an episode of High Maintenance some 18 months back. Since then, Ben Sinclair and […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Aug 29, 2014 -
Somebody: Miranda July’s Messaging Service
Remember We Think Alone? Miranda July’s investigatory aggregate into the emails of famous people? July is again re-examining how people communicate in the age of information with a new app/messaging service entitled Somebody. Some sort of sick combination of texting and Tinder, Somebody ensures human contact upon receiving a message because that message is not your own — it belongs to someone nearby, and you are tasked with delivering it. To promote the project, Miu Miu commissioned a short from July that premiered today at the Venice Film Festival. In the supplement, a varied cast of characters (including July herself) […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Aug 28, 2014 -
Trailer Watch: Jesse Moss’s The Overnighters
I was flat out floored when I saw The Overnighters a few months back. It’s a documentary that unravels with the jagged edges of a thriller, while managing to be both an individual character study and comprehensive portrait of blue collar middle America and the nation’s economic and environmental crises. Still, it is somewhat unsurprising that many critics are calling out the film’s so-called manipulative treatment of its subjects, in a manner not unlike The Act of Killing‘s dissenters. I’d recommend seeing it for yourself and coming to your own conclusions when it opens on October 10. In the meantime, there’s the first trailer for […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Aug 28, 2014 -
Watch: Visual Effects at Work in Pascale Ferran’s Bird People
“Confounding in a good way” is probably a cop-out way to describe a film, but I can think of few other ways to succinctly sum up Pascale Ferran’s Bird People. As you may have deduced from the title, this binary portrait features a supporting character of the avian persuasion, who turns in some of the most seamless VFX work this side of The Wolf of Wall Street. The above video from French special effects company BUF — who also handled The Matrix series, United 93 and The Dark Knight — reveals that nearly every background in the film was transposed onto a green screen. This would seem logical as […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Aug 27, 2014 -
Watch: Gina Telaroli on Smaller Cinema as an Extracurricular
Ricky D’Ambrose consistently runs some of the most revealing, worthwhile video interviews over at MUBI Notebook, and his latest is no exception. This go around, Ambrose converses with Gina Telaroli, one of our brand new 25 New Faces, about her process, the “classic Hollywood system,” and the potential drawbacks of having your hand in too many of the industry’s depleted honeypots. Most significant are Telaroli’s opening remarks: “I think there’s really a lot of people who still have this idea, either filmmakers or film writers, that they will be the person that somehow makes it, that somehow is the genius. […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Aug 26, 2014 -
Should Documentary Films Strive For Social Change?
It’s a widely recognized fact that today’s low-budget independent filmmaker can no longer delight in the luxury of simply getting from development through post. She may be the writer-director, but chances are, she also has a hand in the film’s grassroots publicity efforts and even its release. In the case of documentary film, some are tacking ‘public advocate’ onto their ever-expanding CVs. Aggregate, a Seattle-based policy firm that aims to promote social change, partnered with the True/False Film Festival to survey the 2014 filmmakers on how they saw their films in relation to public policy and advocacy. 56% of participants said they had no plans to conduct […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Aug 25, 2014 -
Trailer Watch: Tim Sutton’s Memphis
Tim Sutton’s Memphis is a sort of ethnographic rendering of slow cinema, at once alluring and incomplete. The Brooklyn-based director’s second film stars non-actor Willis Earl Beal in a quietly transfixing performance as a mysterious, errant musician, who slinks about the city, with little mind for his work. For its many hypnotic elements (the soundtrack not least among them), Memphis is at its most electrifying when Beal is allowed to lay into some unsuspected sycophant or do-gooder with exacting cool remove. Unfortunately, it’s a remove that often bleeds into the narrative, whose fragments leave the viewer with little to cling to. Kino Lorber will release the […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Aug 22, 2014 -
Watch: Stan Brakhage at Work on Very and Night Mulch
If nothing else, I owe Stan Brakhage for my irrational fear of childbirth ever since I was forced to sit through a collegiate projection of Window Water Baby Moving. Often polarizing for those new to the medium, it’s impossible to deny Brakhage’s ingenuity in his tactile use of film. His oeuvre seems to erase the boundary between method and the means by which to achieve it, which becomes all the more peculiar once you seem him in action. Phil Solomon, a fellow experimental filmmaker and collaborator, has uploaded a handful of videos of Brakhage, in the classroom and out, which The Seventh Art says will serve as the basis […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Aug 21, 2014
