Authors — Vadim Rizov
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Malcolm X in Dinesh D’Souza’s America: A Dialectical Double-Feature
Cities with active repertory theaters offer options for constructing cross-town do-it-yourself double-features, and a chance this Sunday to follow Malcolm X at BAMcinématek’s Spike Lee retro with Dinesh D’Souza’s America: Imagine the World Without Her seemed too dialectically productive to pass up. The connecting common component turned out to be a compact Malcolm soundbite (“We don’t see any American Dream. We’ve experienced only the American Nightmare!”), recited by Denzel Washington at the end of a longer peroration in Lee’s opening credits and presented as a stand-alone snippet from the real Malcolm in D’Souza’s film. It’s no surprise America ditches the […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 8, 2014 -
Watch: How to Hack a Lomo Camera Fisheye Lens for a DSLR
Australian artist/filmmaker Max Piantoni has a Lomo camera sitting around that’s not much good for anything these days, but he thought he could reappropriate the fisheye lens for a DSLR to cool ends. So he took a hammer, smashed apart the Lomo, and added the lens to the DSLR. In this video, he explains the relatively simple process and shows off some neat test footage that he took. Yes, Piantoni knows that there’s already a Lomo fisheye lens for DSLRs and no, he doesn’t care. Thanks to our friends at No Film School for the heads-up, and definitely head over […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 3, 2014 -
Watch: David Cronenberg’s NSFW New Short The Nest
“David Cronenberg — The Exhibition” launched in Toronto last year and is currently on display at Amsterdam’s EYE Film Institute until September 14. Cronenberg directed The Next for the show, and from now until the closing date you can watch it online. It’s NSFW, unless your workplace doesn’t object to topless women, so perhaps bookmark this suggestively creepy one-shot short for later viewing. In a dirty cleaning supplies closet, a surgeon (psychiatrist? lunatic kidnapper? janitor?) with a camera strapped to his head questions a young woman convinced that her left breast contains an insect colony and needs to be amputated. […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jun 27, 2014 -
Coherence: Puzzles and Feelings in Los Angeles
Eight friends gather for a dinner party. They interrupt each other with trivial anecdotes and laugh ceaselessly while refilling their wine glasses, their would-be long-established intimacy coming off as desperate collusion to pretend all concerned are having a grand time even though anxiety is the dominant undertone. Coherence first plays like an especially annoying slice of Los Angeles life about glossy, well-groomed people getting on each other’s nerves, both in relation to their romantic partners and in a sexually neutral-ish social context — i.e., it looks like jobbing but lesser-known professional actors (mostly) pretending, not all that successfully, that they’re […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jun 20, 2014 -
MoMA Björk Retro in 2015 to Feature Installation Directed by 25 New Faces Alum
A new press release from MoMA announces that the museum will be the sole host of a Björk retrospective from March 7 to June 7. From the press release: The installation will present a narrative, both biographical and imaginatively fictitious, cowritten by Björk and the acclaimed Icelandic writer Sjón Sigurdsson. Björk’s collaborations with video directors, photographers, fashion designers, and artists will be featured, and the exhibition culminates with a newly commissioned, immersive music and film experience conceived and realized with director Andrew Huang and 3-D design leader Autodesk. Andrew Thomas Huang, who directed Björk’s “Mutual Core” video, was one of […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jun 18, 2014 -
Watch: The Trailer for Steven Soderbergh’s The Knick
Here we have the longest trailer yet for The Knick, the 10-episode Cinemax series photographed and directed by the nominally-but-not-quite-yet-retired Steven Soderbergh. It’s still not clear what will go down in Soderbergh’s portrait of NYC’s Knickerbocker Hospital at the turn of the century. “More has been learned about the treatment of the human body in the last five years than was learned in the last 500,” Clive Owen promises in a strained voice, but the trailer’s imagery — sex, blood, rioting crowds — promises the kind of bad craziness ideally required to push serial narrative TV. Related: the director’s posted […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jun 17, 2014 -
Information Overload: Kevin B. Lee’s Transformers: The Premake
Kevin Lee (a longtime friend, full disclosure) has earned a heady reputation online and in academic circles for video essays like his much-circulated dossier on “The Spielberg Face” that rearrange film history’s visual building blocks and understood components. His latest film views the forthcoming Transformers: Age Of Extinction from every angle but head-on. The starting premise of this “premake” is a new phenomenon I hadn’t considered: if everyone has a smartphone, then a counter-promotional EPK can be easily assembled from the variety of surplus (ancillary?) documentation available online. With its wide spread of locales and very public filming, Transformers generated […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jun 17, 2014 -
Watch: Lars von Trier’s First Short, an Animated Movie Made When he was 11
A hat-tip to Amber Frost at Dangerous Minds, who’s drawn attention to Lars von Trier’s first effort The Trip to Squash Land: A Super-Sausage Adventure, which appears to have been online for a few years. There seems to be no English-language information on the internet about how or why an 11-year-old von Trier made a two-minute animation centering around rabbits and some kind of sausage creature, but the effect is suitably disorienting and bracingly unenlightening. Here we have two minutes of a strummy folk song backing a stop-start story of some kind of nature utopia or other without the faintest […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jun 16, 2014 -
Scenes of a Crime Subject Adrian Thomas Found Not Guilty, Released From Jail
In the activist vein of The Thin Blue Line and the Paradise Lost trilogy, documentarians Grover Babcock and Blue Hadaegh’s Scenes of a Crime investigated the coerced confession of Adrian Thomas, a father convicted of killing his infant son after ten hours of rough interrogation. The evidence pointed to the baby dying of sepsis (a full-body bacterial blood infection), but Thomas was convicted and incarcerated regardless. The film played in theaters in 2012 after winning the Filmmaker-sponsored Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You IFP Gotham Award. “We’ve all heard stories about false confessions and those triggered us […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jun 13, 2014 -
RIP Ruby Dee (1922-2014)
Iconic actress Ruby Dee died yesterday at age 91 in her home at New Rochelle, New York. For a comprehensive overview of her life and work, start with Sarah Halzack’s obituary in the Washington Post. Her achievements on stage, TV and movie screens were inseparable from her political work alongside late husband Ossie Davis. The couple were famously friends with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., and politics were a non-negotiable constant in their lives. “We believe in honesty,” Davis explained in 1988. “We believe in simplicity. We believe in a good breakfast when we can get it. We […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jun 12, 2014
