Authors — Vadim Rizov
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Goodbye to 3-D Rules
To a degree, the content of Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language will be familiar to viewers who have kept up with the director’s latter-day work: aphorisms and quotations by the score, obdurately unidentified characters whose relationship to each other is unclear, snatches of disparate music cued and cut off with disorienting abruptness. It’s not for everyone, but Godard’s first three-dimensional film is so visually astonishing that a lack of comprehension isn’t a barrier. Outdoors, sea and land stretch out into a receding horizon deeper than anything you’ve seen. Inside, there are more knockout distortions transforming even the most banal objects: […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 20, 2014 -
Great Expectations: Alex Ross Perry on Listen Up Philip
Alex Ross Perry’s first feature Impolex was an oblique gloss on Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, while his higher-profile follow-up, The Color Wheel, stole the font of Philip Roth’s ’70s hardcovers for its credits, as well as that writer’s abrasive fearlessness and sexual disreputability. Literature hangs heavy over Listen Up Philip as well, not least in its subject: a young, New York novelist on the precipice of success being mentored by a Roth-like literary titan. That writer’s spirit is still present, but the major structural reference is William Gaddis’ behemoth debut The Recognitions, whose main through line is a pure-spirited and […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 20, 2014 -
“Nothing is Simple, Nothing is Easy”: Two Shots Fired Director Martín Rejtman
Its title threatens a sudden loud blast, but Two Shots Fired wrongfoots viewers when its first sound isn’t from a gun but the jolting bass in a club where young Mariano (Rafael Federman) is dancing. He leaves, goes home, mows the lawn, finds a gun in the shed and fires twice — once at his head, once at his stomach, an action taken with the same blankfaced lack of passion as all the ones preceding it. “It was an impulse,” he non-explains. “It was very hot.” Mother Susana (Susana Pampin) removes all knives and other potential implements of self-harm from the house and has Mariano move in with […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 17, 2014 -
Watch: New Beverly Ex-Manager Julia Marchese’s Documentary on 35mm and Rep Cinema
For many years one of the public faces of Los Angeles’ New Beverly Cinema, today Julia Marchese posted an unnerving account of her experience since Quentin Tarantino became the theater’s owner and programmer. It’s worth reading in full, but the gist is that Tarantino’s team put inexplicably tight social media muzzles on all staff and effectively fired (“demoted”) Marchese less than two weeks after her promotion to a managerial role. In short: her hopes dashed for a New Beverly 35mm premiere of her documentary Out of Print — about the importance of 35mm repertory cinema in general and the theater […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 15, 2014 -
Watch: Seven Ways to Hide Lavalier Microphones
This video has been up for a while, but it serves well as a primer for the inexperienced on how to conceal lavalier microphones. With the opening warning that you’re better off not doing that at all, video expert/enthusiast Izzy Hyman demonstrates seven ways to conceal a lavalier microphone on your person while keeping it from making distracting crackling sounds when it brushes against fabric. Starting with a button-down shirt and tie for extra concealment options, he eventually strips down to a t-shirt to show that even there, hiding the mic is possible. Thanks to No Film School for the […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 15, 2014 -
Watch: Gone Girl‘s Post-Production Team on their All Adobe Workflow
The video’s issued by Adobe itself, so take the endorsements contained therein with more than a few grains of salt. Still, for those interested in David Fincher’s ever-evolving post-production process, here’s a little over five minutes of his Gone Girl post-production team talking about their all-Adobe workflow. The big takeaway is how this integrated workflow has made it easier to incorporate f/x into the image sooner rather than later, eliminating the sprawl of coordinating efforts from special effects houses spread out all over and accelerating everybody’s timeline.
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 14, 2014 -
Gone Girl, Mon Oncle d’Amerique and Mutually Negotiated Self-Destruction
[Massive spoilers from the first sentence onwards.] Gone Girl‘s plot in one sentence: dunce-ish Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) is the prime suspect when wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) disappears; halfway through it’s revealed he’s been set up for her murder in a fiendishly well-plotted revenge for his infidelity. The pivot point for Gone Girl arguments is whether “Amazing Amy” is merely an anomalous sociopath in a self-contained story or whether she stands for All Women and heavy-drinking adulterous dullard Nick is All Men. If that’s the case, it doesn’t matter that an innocent man is set up for capital punishment by […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 9, 2014 -
Watch: Sight & Sound’s 30 Greatest Documentaries in 6:24
Kevin B. Lee’s new video takes the top 30 documentaries of all time (at least as voted upon in Sight & Sound‘s poll earlier this year) and stitches them together in reverse order, building from #30 (Leviathan) to #1 (The Man with the Movie Camera) by finding a logical chain of association from one film to the next. The on-duty policeman in Chronicle of a Summer) who refuses to talk about his personal happiness on the job (off-duty he might have given a different answer) sets up the recreated killing of a cop in The Thin Blue Line, whose night-and-fog-machine […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 9, 2014 -
Watch: A Short Test of the Koji Color LUT Suite
For those interested in using a LUT (lookup table) to obtain a more filmic look, our friends at No Film School have drawn attention to Koji Color’s new suite, which attempts to preserve the appearances of six different 35mm film stocks. The program works with most NLE and post applications, and above we’ve got test footage shot by Paul Schefz. It has a strong look; whether it succeeds at preserving 35mm’s textures and colors exactly is obviously up for anybody who wants to debate that. For those convinced enough to buy, the No Film School link above will allow you […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 8, 2014 -
“Set Up like Drama, Shot like Documentary”: 20,000 Days on Earth Directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard
The Guardian recently republished a 1988 profile of Nick Cave in which the infuriated musician veered over the course of days from open, insightful and analytical to infuriatedly seething “I have to spend hours talking to fucking idiots like you who have no kind of notion about anything” and throwing a boot at his interlocutor. As with Richard Hell — who over decades went from alarming Lester Bangs for his nihilistic abandon to writing poetry reviews for The New York Times — Cave is a former self-destructive dark messiah turned elder statesman, a respected screenwriter and still recording/touring musician who’s […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 8, 2014
