Authors — Vadim Rizov
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Aloha/Defending Cameron Crowe
If you’re a dedicated Cameron Crowe fan, you may have been forced to spend part of the last 15 years repeatedly explaining why. Since Almost Famous, Crowe’s non-documentary feature output has included two movies instantly/violently rejected by both critics and the public (Vanilla Sky, Elizabethtown) and one semi-soft family film that got a parody Twitter account and endless derision months before release solely due to the admittedly risible title We Bought a Zoo. His latest, Aloha, also has a dumb title and arrives savaged by Amy Pascal in emails made public as part of the Sony hack and ominously unscreened for press until the week […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 28, 2015 -
Watch: Bill Murray on David Letterman’s First NBC Show, 1982
Given the overwhelming surplus of articles about David Letterman’s retirement, career and final show tonight, there barely needs to be anything said here. Bill Murray was the guest on last night’s penultimate show, which is fitting, as he was the first guest on Letterman’s first NBC show in 1982. They antagonized each other, watched a panda video and then Murray performed Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical,” which is basically everything you need for good television.
by Vadim Rizov on May 20, 2015 -
Trailer Watch: Arabian Nights, The Three-Part, Six-Hour Follow-Up to Tabu
Miguel Gomes — the wildly talented director of Tabu and Our Beloved Month of August — will be premiering his new film at Cannes. Technically, Arabian Nights might be considered three separate films, since it’s six hours long and in three volumes. As The New York Times‘ Rachel Donadio explained in a fine profile last year, the film examines the Portuguese recession and its fallout on citizens through a dozen stories. The trailer is lively.
by Vadim Rizov on May 12, 2015 -
Khalik Allah and Kevin B. Lee on Online Platforms vs. Festival Programming
Kevin B. Lee’s Transformers: The Premake and Khalik Allah’s Field Niggas are radically different films. Lee assembles footage of the making of Transformers: Age of Extinction and related materials to delve into how Michael Bay’s hyper-blockbuster took over cities all over the globe and made deals with their governments to save money; Allah’s film is an hour-long piece of street portraiture from 125th and Park in Harlem, giving voice to the routinely marginalized. What they have in common is that they both initially launched online before receiving festival play. Lee’s film is still online, while Allah has pulled his movie […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 12, 2015 -
Watch: Mel Gibson and George Miller Talk Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, 1985
Given how much public perception of Mel Gibson has shifted in the last 30 years, this 1985 interview with the star and director George Miller is kind of a trip. Sitting down together to discuss/promote Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, the duo are first asked to describe each other’s strengths. Gibson says Miller is so focused you could drive nails through his feet while he was working and he wouldn’t notice; for his part, the director says Mad Mel is an actor, not just a “personality.” It’s a relaxed, collegial sitdown. Other highlights: Gibson on getting into a harness and discussing the finer […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 7, 2015 -
Watch: Insanely Physical Stunts and On-Set Footage of Mad Max: Fury Road
Many on-set, behind the scenes videos alternate extremely mundane footage of the business of getting coverage with actors rotely reciting how amazing and wonderful everybody involved in this production is. Not so this casually intense assemblage of work on Mad Max: Fury Road, which begins with a car flipping over. What follows is not quite as routinely life-threatening, but it’s still incredibly physical filmmaking. $150 million, it seems, will buy you the budget to stand in the desert, sling a camera around on a very flexible boom, and have some guys swing around on poles.
by Vadim Rizov on May 5, 2015 -
“Addressing Their Wounds is a Revolution”: Laurent Bécue-Renard on Of Men and War
Laurent Bécue-Renard’s Of Men and War is an immersive look at group therapy conducted at a California residential facility for young soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Their stories are, predictably, horrific — a man trying to catch a fellow soldier’s brain as it fell out is typical — and it’s extremely difficult for others to understand what they’re experienced. Veterans talk amongst themselves in often grueling sessions, storming out for a smoke when it becomes too much. One man says he only gets three questions from civilians: did you kill someone, why did you kill them, and if there was any way not to kill […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 4, 2015 -
Shakespeare in the Park: On the Set of Matías Piñeiro’s Hermia & Helena
Argentinian director Matías Piñeiro’s last three films have started from a Shakespearean source text: As You Like It for Rosalinda, Twelfth Night for Viola, Love’s Labour’s Lost in The Princess of France. In all these structurally playful and formally rigorous works, troupes of actors are working on new productions, and the films are given further continuity by a recurring ensemble cast and crew including actress Augustina Muñoz and d.p. Fernando Lockett. In Piñeiro’s newest production, Hermia & Helena, a young woman (Muñoz) comes to New York on a fellowship for a new Spanish translation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, though […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 28, 2015 -
Getting Strong Now: Andrew Bujalski on Results
Andrew Bujalski’s first three features — Funny Ha Ha, Mutual Appreciation and Beeswax — were all more or less of a piece: illusorily casual 16mm portraits of young people in ambiguously comfortable stasis in, respectively, Boston, Brooklyn and Austin. Computer Chess, released in 2013, was a total UFO both in relation to his work and in relation to just about everything else. Film was out, but instead of clean digital, Bujalski shot on three 1969 SONY AVC-3260 cameras, its unfamiliar type of black-and-white grain making even denser a complicated comedy about a computer chess conference happening sometime in the late […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 28, 2015 -
Five Questions for Peggy Guggenheim — Art Addict Director Lisa Immordino Vreeland
Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s feature debut, 2011’s Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel, examined the life and legacy of the legendary fashion photographer. The filmmaker was the granddaughter-in-law of her subject, and the film established Vreeland’s acumen in reconstructing the life stories of complex, powerful women. That applies to her new subject, Peggy Guggenheim, from whose candid memoirs the subtitle Art Addict was drawn. Almost as well known for her numerous relationships, sexual and otherwise, with many of the key creative figures of her time, Guggenheim’s story is reconsidered in this documentary. The film premiered last night at the Tribeca Film Festival; […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 21, 2015
