Authors — Vadim Rizov
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Watch: Roman Polanski on Making Rosemary’s Baby
Got 47 minutes? Good, because you’ll want to watch this documentary from the Criterion Collection about the making of Roman Polanski’s rightly beloved Rosemary’s Baby. Present and accounted for are producer Robert Evans, with his legendary voice still intact, star Mia Farrow and Polanski himself, who recounts how Evans got in touch with him to consider directing Downhill Racer (which became Michael Ritchie’s feature debut) and sent over that script and a galley of Rosemary’s Baby, which the producer asked him to look at first. While the director initially thought it was a “kitchen melodrama for television,” Polanski got sucked […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 23, 2014 -
Watch: Martin Scorsese’s Commencement Speech at NYU’s Tisch Salute
Earlier this year, NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts took over Radio City Music Hall for its annual separate, not-quite-graduation ceremony, and the honored speaker at the center was Martin Scorsese (class of ’64/’68). Over the course of half an hour, Scorsese recalled how, when he entered film school, the concept seemed suspicious: as he says, when he told people in his neighborhood he wanted to be a filmmaker, they would ask “What are you going to make, celluloid for Eastman Kodak?” A friend of his called film school “a sandbox for the visually excitable and academically compromised.” From those […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 19, 2014 -
Trailer Watch: Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up Philip
“You sound like you’re bragging,” an ex tells novelist-on-the-cusp Philip (Jason Schwartzman). “That’s because I am bragging,” he answers without missing a beat at the start of this trailer for Alex Ross Perry’s acerbically witty, keenly anticipated third feature Listen Up Philip. Entering limited release on October 17 and hitting VOD four days later, Perry’s follow-up to The Color Wheel has great parts for Schwartzman, Elisabeth Moss as his long-suffering girlfriend and Jonathan Pryce as the young writer’s Philip Roth-esque mentor. (Dig the title card font, taken from the hardcovers of Roth’s ’70s novels.) It’s a funny and depressing work […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 18, 2014 -
Watch: David Lynch Walks Through his Philadelphia Museum Exhibition
Here’s a change of pace for David Lynch: a video in which he’s silent. Apparently coveting the type of foot traffic drawn by MoMA’s Tim Burton retrospective in 2010, which (at least at the time) drew the third-largest attendance numbers in the museum’s history, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts is hosting the first big US retro of its alumnus’ artwork. Here, Lynch strides through the museum, looking at the fruits of his work to the strains of his own “The Night Bell With Lightning” from 2011’s album Crazy Clown Time. If you want a quick walk through this part of the art-school […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 17, 2014 -
Watch: Manakamana Mergings, A Video by Kevin B. Lee
When I wrote about Manakamana last year, I noted that it’s a bit disorienting, more so than the “11 rides in a cable car” premise suggests: The car can go up or down and its passengers can sit facing the direction they’re going or with their back toward it, affecting the camera’s placement opposite. Even before considering the number onboard, that’s four variables that make orientation — knowing what to anticipate in the background, which posts will be passed with a clang at what time, whether a village mid-way through the journey will be visible on the left or right, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 15, 2014 -
Five Questions for Red Army Director Gabe Polsky
Gabe Polsky’s first documentary Red Army briskly reconstructs the story of the fiercely dominant Soviet hockey team of the late ’70s and ’80s. Out of the team, five players coalesced as an unbeatable combination, and their interviews form the backbone of Polsky’s story, fleshed out with a smart selection of archival footage from both sides of the Cold War. Teasing out hockey’s role as a not-so-subtle worldwide representation of the USSR’s success and masculine pride (per a song sung in archival footage by a boy’s choir, “cowards don’t play hockey”), Red Army is also propelled by the light director-subject sparring […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 9, 2014 -
Stray Links 9/1-9/5: Tarantino’s 35mm Prints, Dead Russians and Teddy Bear Detectives
The future of 35mm rep cinema, a personal history of cinephilia as mediated by changing archival access, how the garbage heap of “hot takes” colonizes the internet and more in this week’s round-up of assorted reading: • Quentin Tarantino has owned Los Angeles’ beloved New Beverly Cinema since 2007; now he plans to take over programming himself, drawing extensively upon his private collection of prints. Talking with the LA Weekly‘s Chuck Wilson, Tarantino repeatedly goes off on the crappiness of DCP, including this gem: I have all three Sergio Leone Clint Eastwood movies in I.B. Technicolor. Magnificent looking. I just […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 5, 2014 -
Watch: Jamie Stuart’s Short Film Learning to Like It
Earlier this week we ran Jamie Stuart’s short film Learning to Like It as part of his detailed review of the Blackmagic Production and Pocket cameras. Now we’re posting the short as a stand-alone film in its own right rather than as a technical exercise. Stuart’s behind and in front of the camera as a lonely guy hoping for reconciliation with his ex-girlfriend, but his attempts to get back to her lead to a cavalcade of street confrontations and complications in this zippy, wordless five-minute comedy.
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 5, 2014 -
Trailer Watch: Martin Scorsese’s NYRB Documentary The 50 Year Argument
“As long as we could pay the printer, we could publish anything we wanted,” says New York Review of Books co-founder Robert H. Silvers in this trailer for The 50 Year Argument, a documentary about the literary institution. It’s co-directed by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi, the director’s editor on recent documentaries including Rolling Stones concert movie Shine a Light and the Fran Lebowitz profile Public Speaking. The film will be playing at NYFF before debuting on HBO on September 29th. It looks to be catnip for longtime readers of the publication, which in a just world would be just […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 4, 2014 -
“Making a Great Movie Music Moment”: Stuart Murdoch on God Help the Girl
There’s a certain rhetoric about the “perfect pop song” that feels like it peaked 25ish years ago somewhere on a bus in the UK, where earnest young people bonded over shared cultdom to pass the time, the guiding sensibility that (random example) led Orange Juice frontman Edwyn Collins to approach future bandmate Steve Daly because of a Buddy Holly button he was wearing — a sign they had more to talk about than initially evident. This kind of living through music is the force powering Belle and Sebastian leader Stuart Murdoch’s directorial debut God Help The Girl, an indie pop […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 4, 2014
