Authors — Vadim Rizov
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Watch: Lauren Bacall Remembers John Huston on Johnny Carson, 1987
In 1987, the late Lauren Bacall paid her last of five visits to The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. She had two recently completed movies to talk up, but in the first interview segment above, the actress and host don’t get around to lesser-remembered titles Appointment with Death and Mr. North. Instead, they focused on Katharine Hepburn’s recently published memoir The Making of The African Queen: Or How I Went to Africa With Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind, with Bacall telling stories about her time on the set. The clip’s given new resonance today by an […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 13, 2014 -
Seattle’s Scarecrow Video Raising Funds to Transition to Non-Profit
Seattle’s legendary Scarecrow Video houses some 120,000 titles on VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray, VCD and laserdisc. The store was the brainchild of the late George Latsios, whose compulsive purchasing of ever more and more titles (documented in this affectionate obituary from 2003) provided the base foundation for the store’s current inventory. With rentals decreasing 40 percent in the last six years, current owners Carl Tostevin and Mickey McDonough have come up with a viable strategy to try to keep the store’s formidable collection intact. A Kickstarter has launched to help Scarecrow complete a planned conversion to non-profit status, a move necessary […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 12, 2014 -
Revisiting Robin Williams in The Birdcage
I didn’t particularly intend (or want) to contribute to the inevitable avalanche of Robin Williams memorial writing online today, but I dropped by last night to visit a friend who’d just put on The Birdcage, which seemed the most appealing of the instant tribute options on Netflix Instant, so here we are. The bedrock tools powering Williams’ patented babble of voices were his formidable mimicry skills and the kind of physical dexterity great athletes have that makes the extremely difficult look very simple. His capacity to assimilate dozens of disconnected reference points and appearances was favorably comparable to Peter Sellers, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 12, 2014 -
Watch: The First Footage Shot with the Blackmagic URSA
In his dispatches from NAB this year, Joey Daoud noted the 4K Blackmagic URSA as one of the conference’s big announcements: URSA’s ergonomics definitely look more like a traditional ENG camera than Blackmagic’s Production cameras, but it’s got some interesting twists. First off the flip out monitor is huge – about the size of an iPad. It’s also got two touchscreens on both sides of the camera to change settings, check image, pull up scopes and monitor levels. Today our friends at No Film School drew our attention to the first publicly shared footage shot with the URSA, though note […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 11, 2014 -
Watch: A 33-Minute Dustin Hoffman Interview from 1975
Today is Dustin Hoffman’s 77th birthday, as good an opportunity as any to post this 33-minute interview from 1975. Conducted with patient professionalism and minimal intrusiveness by veteran interviewer Michael Parkinson, the conversation starts with lots of long pauses and deadpan stares from Hoffman, who claims his real name is Clare Boothe Luce. Loosening up, he deadpans that his “first fantasy was to be a sex symbol film star,” discusses how he drew upon his high school fear of buying “male prophylactics” for the scene in The Graduate when Benjamin Braddock nervously checks into a hotel, recounts his first sexual […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 8, 2014 -
Commemorate Nixon Resignation Day with 1972’s Another Fine Mess
The obvious viewing choice to commemorate today being the 40th anniversary of Richard M. Nixon’s resignation would probably be either Oliver Stone’s expansive, feverishly/ludicrously compelling Nixon or Robert Altman’s more compact but no less outlandish Secret Honor, a paranoid monologue barked by an increasingly intoxicated Philip Baker Hall. In a more ironic vein, you might turn to Nixon’s own viewing choices: he watched 528 movies during his time in office. An apt favorite might be Patton, which he viewed three times prior to initiating the bombing of Cambodia (he told David Frost the movie didn’t influence his decision), or his […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 8, 2014 -
Stray Links, 8/4-8/7: Foreign Blockbusters, Film Preservation and Grazing Goats
Here’s this week’s links round-up of film reading and other assorted pieces: • “My main impression was that Batman looks like he’s wearing a small tank turret on his head. The fans were apparently pleased with what they saw.” Kristin Thompson’s level-headed report from Comic-Con has enthusiasm for Peter Jackson, less so for Zack Snyder, and a detailed overview of the on-the-ground administrative logistics of the fantasy gathering behemoth. • Roaring Currents, a war film/biopic of Admiral Yi, one of Korea’s most historically revered figures, is doing massive, record-setting business at home. The movie inflates the scope of Yi’s (still […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 7, 2014 -
Watch: Enrique Pacheco’s Tips for Time-Lapse Photography
Thanks to our friends at No Film School for pointing us to this useful video from DSLR workshop instructor Enrique Pacheco, which covers the basics of time-lapse photography in under three minutes. His useful tips include the importance of checking the position of the sun, moon and stars before shooting, why you should use an intervalometer, how to avoid flicker, and the importance of a simple ND filter.
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 6, 2014 -
Watch: David Lynch’s New Rouge Louboutin Commercial
David Lynch recently confirmed that he has no plans to direct a new film, but he’s still available for commercials. Rouge Louboutin is a $50 nail polish inspired by the Ballerina Ultima, the tallest shoe Louboutin has ever designed. You can see where this is going: the video is about as festishistic as it gets, filled out by CGI landscapes that look more like The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus than anything in Lynch’s filmography.
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 5, 2014 -
Rip Torn and the Indignities of Product Placement
Forty-ish years on, Rip Torn’s thoughts on the demeaning nature of product placement (as told to Studs Turkel in his classic oral history Working) remain relevant, with no contemporary amendation necessary: I remember doin’ a television show, oh, about ten years ago — I haven’t worked on network television for about eight years. I was smokin’ a cigar. I was playing a Quantrell-type character, so I had a long Cuban cigar. I got up on a horse and we had to charge down a hill. It was a long shot. The director and the producer both hollered, “Cut! Cut! What’re […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 4, 2014
