Authors — Vadim Rizov
-
Stray Links 8/25-8/28: David Fincher’s Gap Ads and Kazakhstani Cowboys
Behind the scenes of David Fincher’s new Gap ad campaign, the logistics of growing the beef industry in Kazakhstan, a look at illegal logging in Indonesia and more in this week’s links round-up: • Yesterday the Gap released four new ads directed by David Fincher. Mashable’s Todd Wasserman has the videos and quotes from Gap Global CMO Seth Farbman on Fincher’s typically exacting work process. One spot had the actors running 50 to 60 times up a set of stairs (the audition included ten minutes of running). Fincher lived up to his end of the bargain by creating “a new […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 28, 2014 -
Watch: David Lynch Takes the Ice Bucket Challenge
David Lynch’s broad sense of humor has always been a bit of an acquired taste, especially when he’s the one on-screen delivering it (recall all those deafness/earhorn jokes in Twin Peaks). This minute-ish video gets the much-discussed ice bucket challenge right, as Lynch is drenched by two buckets — one with coffee added to it for Laura Dern, one straight-up for Justin Theroux — while giving a game stab at playing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” on his trumpet. It ends (spoiler alert?) with a good punchline, as Lynch nominates Vladimir Putin to step up and take the challenge next. No […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 27, 2014 -
The 20 Best Non-Fiction Films on Netflix Instant
Netflix’s ever-shifting catalog is subject to sudden deletions and additions, the latter skewed far more to recent fare than a balanced sampling of all film history. Still, careful mining reveals a decent selection of titles to catch up on if you’re one of the company’s 35 million+ U.S. subscribers, including some relatively slept-on films. I cleared away the underwhelming underbrush to find (in alphabetical order) a semi-idiosyncratic selection of the 20 best non-fiction films available for current streaming on Instant. The Act of Killing (2012) Joshua Oppenheimer’s elegantly disturbing investigation into the determinedly suppressed legacy of Indonesia’s 1965-66 mass killings […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 26, 2014 -
Rotterdam International Film Festival Co-signs Solidarity Statement over Beijing Independent Film Festival Shutdown
You may have read over the weekend about the Chinese government shutting down the Beijing Independent Film Festival. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened: the Associated Press’ Didi Tang has a solid overview of this year’s events and past context here. As writer/critic/curator Shelley Kraicer pointed out on Twitter, the shutdown also included a raid on the Li Xianting Film Fund, the festival host which “has (had?) likely the most comprehensive collection of independent Chinese films.” A statement co-signed by the heads of the Rotterdam International Film Festival and heads of other major fests including the […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 25, 2014 -
Watch: Richard Attenborough on Satyajit Ray
Here’s a video from a less-explored part of the late Richard Attenborough’s career. In 1977, Attenborough went to India to take a supporting part in the great Satyajit Ray’s The Chess Players. In this rare fragment from a TV interview at the time, Attenborough marvels at the all-encompassing nature of Ray’s craft: “He writes the screenplay, he composes the music, he directs it, he operates the camera. He half-lights the set. Certainly he works with the lighting cameraman in such detail that any source of light or change that he wants he gets. He edits his own films, almost as […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 25, 2014 -
Trailer Watch: Gregg Araki’s White Bird in a Blizzard
Here we have the first official trailer from Magnolia Pictures for Gregg Araki’s White Bird in a Blizzard, his first film since 2010’s old-school-wacky Kaboom. By all accounts White Bird is a return to the more somberly melodramatic terrain of teen sexuality and lingering trauma of his 2004 apex Mysterious Skin. The film film hits on demand/iTunes on September 25th, with theatrical release following on October 24th. You can also take this opportunity to catch up with Brandon Harris’ 2011 interview with Araki.
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 22, 2014 -
A Series of Visitations: Alexander Sokurov’s Days of Eclipse
The Strugatsky brothers novel upon which Alexander Sokurov’s 1988 Days of Eclipse is based has the following fairly mind-blowing premise: a group of scientists in Moscow find their research in various fields frustrated by inexplicable events, and conclude that the universe is deliberately sabotaging them in an attempt to preserve its mysteries. Sokurov’s film has plenty of the inexplicable but none of this throughline — it’s parsable only with difficulty and guidance from external sources — and relocates the settting from St. Petersburg to Krasnovodsk, Turkmenistan. Krasnovodsk is now Türkmenbaşy, having reclaimed an indigenous name in the post-Soviet era. This […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 22, 2014 -
Watch: China’s OnePlus One Smartphone Trumps Canon 5D Mark III’s Resolution
Giacomo Mantovani sent over this test video to No Film School, which compares China’s OnePlus One smartphone camera with Canon’s 5D Mark III, which both have 1080p capacity. Some of the side-by-side comparisons aren’t exactly the same: some of the OnePlus One footage cropped 300% is from a 4K file, while the 5K Mark III is only 1080p. The non-cropped footage from both cameras is at 1080p. As Mantovani writes, “The sole aim of this test is to compare how the OnePlus One performs in respect to the Canon 5D Mark III in a ideal light condition. In this case […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 21, 2014 -
Stray Links, 8/18-8/21: Orson Welles’ First Film is Online and Chinese Film History
This week’s round-up of suggested reading is all film-related for a change: • The China Digital Times conducts a long, fascinating interview with Paul Pickowicz, an authority on Chinese cinema who talks about studying film in China from 1982-83 as an “unwelcome guest,” shifting trends in national anxieties as expressed on-screen through the decades, how long-dead political affiliations shape the government’s choice of which films from pre-1949 to promote as canonical, and much more. It may be the most interesting film-related thing I’ve read all week. • Kurmanzhan Datka: Queen of the Mountains, a Kyrgyzstani epic about a 19th-century hero, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 21, 2014 -
Trailer Watch: Kink, the BDSM Documentary from “25 New Faces” Alum Christina Voros
“If pornography were high school, we would be the goth table,” says one of the subjects of Christina Voros’ forthcoming documentary Kink, which looks at Kink.com, the web’s largest generator of BDSM porn. Voros was one of our “25 New Faces of Film” in 2008; you can read that profile here. Since then, she’s been very busy, especially as a cinematographer. Notably, since 2009 she’s regularly served as James Franco’s DP on shorts and features, including the recent Child of God and As I Lay Dying. Kink promises to delve deep and familiarize viewers with the producers of BDSM porn. […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 20, 2014
