Authors — Vadim Rizov
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Watch: Tony Zhou on Drive and “The Quadrant System”
This quick Tony Zhou video starts by breaking down a shot from Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive in which Carey Milligan and Ryan Gosling walk to their respective doors in a hallway, pointing out how the left and right sides give us two separate stories in one composition. Then Zhou moves on, repeatedly slicing the film’s frames in half vertically and horizontally. A model of textbook visual analysis, Zhou gets to the essence of what thoughtful shot composition looks like. Heed Zhou’s wise parting words: “You don’t need Steadicams or cranes or drones, or the latest 4K whatever. You need top, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Feb 2, 2015 -
Sundance 2015, Dispatch 5: The Chinese Mayor, Cartel Land and City of Gold
The vast world of Chinese independent documentaries was finally acknowledged by Sundance with the inclusion of Zhou Hao’s The Chinese Mayor. That’s not to bag on the festival for an anomalous oversight: this exciting and politically urgent strain of films has been happening for 15 years or so but not often acknowledged by U.S. festivals at large. This is a very good starting point. The mayor of Datong, Geng Yanbo, confesses that he’s happiest with communing with China’s past, so it makes sense that he plans to revitalize the country’s most polluted city by restoring its ancient wall, part of […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 30, 2015 -
“There is Always a Lot of Pressure to Keep Your Main Character Likable”: Advantageous | Director Jennifer Phang
What fear — whether it’s personal, or one related to the development, financing, production or distribution of your film — did you have to confront and conquer in the making of your movie? Preparing the visualization and unfolding of the story and its themes, I had to plan carefully how we could scale our visual ambition with the resources available. In working with designers on the technology and the city buildings, I emphasized our Victorian Futurist aesthetic. It felt fitting for a story inspired by Victorian period novels. I’ve always been intrigued by stories about class mobility, devotion to family, and hidden […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 29, 2015 -
Sundance 2015, Dispatch 4: Experimenter, Station to Station and Listen to Me Marlon
It’s been far too long since Michael Almereyda’s last feature, 2009’s dreamy diary film Paradise; his 2015 return with not one but two features (the Ethan Hawke-starring Cymbeline adaptation Anarchy is set for release later this year) is overdue and very welcome. Experimenter, a pared-down biopic of social psychologist Stanley Milgram, ostensibly exists to hit the career highlights, but it’s far from standard issue. As in his career (the writer said with all the authority conferred by a quickly read Wiki), the film begins with, and is dominated by, Milgram’s obedience to authority experiments. The “teacher” sits on one side of a […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 27, 2015 -
Sundance 2015, Dispatch 3: The Wolfpack, Western and Dreamcatcher
I stopped taking notes after a while during The Wolfpack; I was feeling a bit too disturbed to keep at it and it seemed somewhat besides the point. Crystal Moselle’s first feature follows the Angulo brothers: six siblings, born to father Oscar, who for something like 15 years never left their LES apartment, save sporadic supervised summer walks. Oscar named them all Hare Krishna style — Govinda, Bhagavan, etc. — and amassed a collection of some 5,000 films, their sole meaningful connection to the outside world. They were homeschooled and lived in a state of fear — Oscar’s past/present (?) […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 26, 2015 -
Sundance 2015, Dispatch 2: Tangerine, Z For Zachariah and Pervert Park
Sin-Dee (Kiki Kitana Rodriguez) sits on one side of a donut shop booth, her best friend Alexandra (Mya Taylor) on the other. The camera’s on the table, restricted to shot-countershot looking up, with large windows setting both in sharp urban relief against different halves of a large L.A. intersection. With rapid cutting back and forth reminiscent of the dashboard cams in Kiarostami’s 10, Tangerine‘s opening is both intimate and epic, and it’s exciting to see all this space so clearly laid out behind the two. There’s a micro story being established and simultaneously the introduction of a landscape to be explored: an instant […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 25, 2015 -
Sundance 2015, Dispatch 1: Best of Enemies and Eden
Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon’s documentary Best of Enemies, premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, details the particulars of the eight televised debates between William Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal held on ABC in 1968 — four during the Republican convention in Miami, another four during the infamous Democratic one in Chicago. A very prototypically Sundance-y doc (destined for TV and classrooms, “audience-friendly”), this is a consideration of an Important Topic fleshed out with contextual talking heads and zipped up into a brief, digestible package. Given sufficient interest in the subject, it’s the kind of thing I’d generally watch on […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 24, 2015 -
Watch: The Cinema of Michael Mann
Released this past Friday, Michael Mann’s Blackhat has already proven a colossal flop, which is a shame: following up on Collateral, Miami Vice and Public Enemies, it’s another never-less-than-visually-intriguing investigation of the kinds of truly new images digital cameras can produce in the guise of a cyber-hacking thriller. Go check it out while you still can. Beforehand, you may want to prep with this above-average supercut credited to one “balistik94,” which ties together Mann’s filmography in a number of different ways: dialogue that persists from one film to another (“Time is luck” as recited by both Gong Li in Miami […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 20, 2015 -
39 Movies Released in 2014 Shot on 35mm
Last year, I posited that Boyhood‘s use of 35mm seemed to be a kind of special effect as much as anything: committing to film ensured an internally continuous look over 12 years of production whose uniqueness would survive despite a digital intermediate and no prints being struck for American release. This type of use of 35mm, separate from its ongoing viability as an exhibition format, was one common reason cited for its use in 39 2014 US releases originating in whole or substantial part from it. That’s a list that’s probably not complete: collating the release calendar against the technical specifications primarily quickly […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 15, 2015 -
“He’s Like Napoleon”: Tom Noonan on Making Michael Mann’s Manhunter
With Michael Mann’s Blackhat opening this Friday, last night was an appropriate time to screen an earlier film at New York’s IFC Center. Generally noted as the first Hannibal Lector film (“Lektor” here), 1986’s Manhunter relegates Brian Cox’s (delightful, to be sure) take on the character to a handful of scenes. The bulk of the serial killer action lies with Tom Noonan as Francis Dollarhyde, aka the “Tooth Fairy.” The imposing actor first appears with a stocking tied around his head, which doesn’t disguise his face but only makes him look more sinister. Below, the highlights of Noonan’s Q&A looking back on working with Mann and receiving the director’s […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 14, 2015
