Starting this week, I’ll be posting a round-up of stray news items and articles — mostly film, though not all — that caught my eye. Let’s get started: • The great Michael Almereyda’s short film Skinningrove won the short film jury award at Sundance this year, and now you can watch it at the New York Review of Books. It’s about 15 minutes of photographer Chris Killip discussing and showing mostly unpublished photos of the titular Yorkshire village from the ’80s. • Here’s an interesting obituary for Thomas C. Senesac, owner of Chicago’s Acme Prop Rental, a company which got […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 25, 2014“I don’t do romance. My tastes are very…singular.” The keenly anticipated, much-hyped first full trailer for 50 Shades of Grey is now here, having debuted during the Today show earlier today (corporate synergy at its finest: distributor Universal also owns NBC). Jamie Dornan glowers impassively, Dakota Johnson stares into his eyes, and eventually the whips come out. Director Sam Taylor-Johnson has certainly come a long way since 2006, when she directed an eight-minute short of a man masturbating in Death Valley for the arthouse porn anthology Destricted. “I find the whole porn thing a bit creepy,” she said at the […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 24, 2014Our ace webmaster Michael Medaglia is also a talented filmmaker. We’re happy to share the evocative, darkly handsome teaser trailer for his debut feature Deep Dark, the story of a talentless sculptor who gets help with his mobile sculptures from a talking hole in the wall of his mother’s house. His career takes off, but the possessive hole wants more. Clearly no good will come of this relationship. For more information, head to the film’s official website.
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 23, 2014Over at the website of the Bob Moog Foundation, electronic music historian Thom Holmes has an interesting post about some lesser-known cinematic uses of the Moog, the pioneering analog synthesizer popularized by Wendy Carlos with 1968’s Switched-On Bach album, which introduced the public at large to the idea of electronic sounds as more than simple novelties. Carlos would go on to the soundtracks for A Clockwork Orange, The Shining and Tron, but many other movies in the ’60s and ’70s were quick to latch onto the instrument’s possibilities. Paul Beaver and Bernie Krause were among the Moog’s most productive practitioners […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 23, 2014Here’s the first trailer for Ned Rifle, the third part of Hal Hartley’s “Henry Fool” trilogy, which began with the titular 1998 film and continued with 2007’s Fay Grim. The trailer’s wordless for a good chunk, but when we finally hear words, we know exactly what’s going on: Henry (Thomas Jay Ryan) and Fay (Parker Posey)’s son Ned (Liam Aiken) is going to find his dad and kill him. This capstone film — “probably” the final installment, the Kickstarter hedged its bets — was posted in advance of the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival later this year. […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 22, 2014One aspect of Boyhood that’s been relatively underdiscussed (assuming there are any such left) is its use of 35mm, which has been widely noted but little parsed. Richard Linklater’s repeatedly noted that the primary reason for shooting on film over 12 years was to ensure visual continuity from one year to the next. This doesn’t mean he’s a Luddite in any way, as he explains in comments from a recent screening at the BFI on technology’s pros and cons: There is nothing more stable than a 35mm negative. Had I started on the best HD camera back in 2002, I’d […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 22, 2014In 2008, Jake Perlin launched his specialty repertory film label The Film Desk with the first U.S. release of Philippe Garrel’s 1991 I Don’t Hear the Guitar Anymore, a compressed tragic romance doubling as a eulogy for the director’s ex, Nico. Perlin followed with reissues of Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux and Susan Sontag’s Promised Lands. Today, Perlin thinks that adventurous opening trio still represents the kind of movies he wants to reissue. “I go after movies I’m interested in, and part of my interest in them is that I can make prints.” With a few exceptions made for films where […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 17, 2014The third film in Roberto Minervini’s “Texas trilogy,” Stop the Pounding Heart, is his first to get American distribution. His debut feature, 2011’s The Passage, followed a terminally ill woman driving through the state in search of a faith healer, while the following year’s Low Tide focused on a mother and her solitary son in small-town Texas. The three films are realized by Minervini in collaboration with his cast, non-actors whose characters and story lines are drawn from their own life experiences. Sara Carlson was a supporting player in The Passage, while Colby Trichell had a bull riding scene in […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 17, 2014From January through May this year, Richard Linklater hosted a series of screenings at the Austin Film Society of his favorite films from the ’80s followed by post-screening Q&A’s. One of his selections was Dennis Hopper’s perverse 1980 tour-de-force Out of the Blue. After the screening, Linklater had a story to tell about seeing Hopper present the film in Houston in 1983 and then taking those in attendance to a racetrack, where he surrounded himself with sticks of dynamite and set them off. You can first watch Linklater describe the evening in question and Hopper’s thinking — that the simultaneous […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 16, 2014Here’s the first American trailer for the keenly anticipated, highly-praised Nick Cave portrait 20,000 Days on Earth. Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard’s hybrid film is part concert/performance piece, part collaborative dramatization of the legendary performer/writer’s day-in/day-out routine. As the trailer indicates, Cave’s come a long way since the days when he treated interacting with journalists and the wider public as a horrific task that reduced him to sputtering rage. Those unfamiliar with this part of Cave’s legacy should check out a recently republished 1988 interview, which opens with him throwing an irate boot at his interlocutor. Regardless, 20,000 looks sleek […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 14, 2014