Authors — Vadim Rizov
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BAMcinemaFest Announces Its 2014 Lineup
BAMcinemaFest has announced the lineup for its sixth annual edition. The Brooklyn festival opens with Boyhood and closes with a 25th anniversary screening of Do The Right Thing; in between, Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer will serve as a centerpiece, while David Wain’s forthcoming romantic comedy satire They Came Together will be highlighted in a special screening. But the meat of the festival is in its overview of current festival circuit films, and this year there are 25. Below, the titles, brief synopses from BAM’s press release and links to relevant material we’ve published on the movies in the past: 10,000KM (Carlos […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 6, 2014 -
Trailer Watch: Bruno Dumont’s P’tit Quinquin
“Open that cow’s ass so I can look inside” is just one of the bizarro takeaway lines from this trailer for Bruno Dumont’s first-ever miniseries. P’tit Quinquin (the French title scans less awkwardly than the archaically phrased suggested English title, L’il Quinquin) is 200 minutes of rural murder mystery, and by the looks of it it combines the usual Dumont staples — surly villagers, casual racism, banal brutality — with a seemingly newly discovered sense of (odd) humor. The title presumably comes from the French lullaby (translation: “Little child”), which can be investigated in full here. Dumont evidently likes “Quinquin” […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 2, 2014 -
Movies Without Cuts: A Scientist’s Experiments to Expand Cinema’s Language
A few days ago at Pacific Standard, Jennifer Ouellette profiled Sergei Gepshtein, a neuroscientist with a dream: to eliminate cutting from movies as much as possible. Gephstein studies human perception and the window of visibility. What Gephstein’s doing is tracking how human eyes respond to basic images: the visual example you can see in the profile concerns a series of lines forming the shape of a cube. The brain has to sort out whether it’s “seeing” the cube from above or below. “Either orientation can be discerned in the original image, but the brain cannot see both at once,” Oullette […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 1, 2014 -
Cannes Adds Six Films to Official Selection, Announces First Ever 35mm-Free Classics Selection
In addition to the previously announced Official Selection lineup, Cannes has now added six films, though none in competition: • André Téchiné’s In The Name Of My Daughter marks the veteran director’s latest appearance at the festival after his last film, 2011’s Unforgivable, premiered in the Director’s Fortnight. Téchiné won Best Director at the festival for 1985’s Rendez-Vous. Like 2009’s The Girl On The Train, Daughter is based on a true story, with sales agent Elle Driver describing the story of the 1977 disappearance of Agnès Le Roux as “the most famous alleged murder case of the French Riviera.” • […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 30, 2014 -
DJ /Rupture Releases a Mixtape Tied to Harvard Friend Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act Of Killing
Yesterday Pitchfork Media posted a downloadable mixtape created as a “musical response” to Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act Of Killing by the rightly well-regarded DJ /Rupture. Stage Boundary Songs is a terrific 53 minutes and 50 seconds of (largely) Indonesian music old and new interspersed with poetry by Wiji Thukul, a poet believed to have been “disappeared” by the Suharto regime in 1998. Last December, Rupture (aka Jace Clayton) wrote a brief blog post cheering on Killing, noting that acclaim for the film was “particularly delightful” because “Josh and I went to college together, and for a year or two we […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 29, 2014 -
The Cannes Film Festival Announces Its Jury
With less than a month before the Cannes Film Festival starts up, the jury lineup has been fully unveiled. As announced in January, the jury president will be New Zealand director Jane Campion (Top Of The Lake, The Piano). Now her fellow jurors have been named: • Carole Bouquet, the veteran French actress who made her debut in Luis Buñuel’s That Obscure Object Of Desire • Sofia Coppola, whose The Bling Ring was the divisive opening film of the festival’s 2012 Un Certain Regard slate • Leila Hatami, the Iranian actress best known internationally as the star of Asghar Farhadi’s […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 28, 2014 -
Under The Skin and the Problem with the Adjective “Kubrickian”
As unclassifiable and startlingly original as promised, Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin has an obvious experiential agenda. Scarlett Johansson’s unnamed alien rides around Glasgow, picking up men, bringing them back to her pad for sex, then harvesting them for meat. As sound designer Johnnie Burn told Ashley Clark in an interview Filmmaker published earlier this month, the intensely fussed-over sound mix literally took years. In the mall, at the club or on the street, different snatches of ambient sound compete for attention, with normally unexamined noises briefly coming to the fore. The movie is totally successful at defamiliarizing ordinary actions […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 28, 2014 -
Ecstatic Truth: 15 Years Of Hybrids Rising
Speaking April 30, 1999, at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center, Werzog Herzog laid down 12 edicts on the pursuit of “ecstatic truth” in the documentary. “The so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité,” Herzog proclaimed in his “Minnesota Declaration,” announcing instead his devotion to “poetic, ecstatic truth” accessible “only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” He was speaking specifically about his 1992 masterwork Lessons Of Darkness: unfaked, awe-inspiring footage of Kuwait’s oil fields on fire after the Iraq War, framed by a made-up Pascal epigraph and narration from the perspective of an alien intelligence baffled by what it’s seeing. Herzog unrepentantly […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 28, 2014 -
Josh Wiggins
Starting in fourth grade, Houston native Josh Wiggins acted, edited, written and generally pitched in small, goofy YouTube shorts with his friend Tommy Hohl. He didn’t perform professionally until last year, but since then Wiggins has quickly gone from low-budget filmmaking to big studio work in near-record time. One day before the world premiere at Sundance of Kat Candler’s third feature Hellion, Wiggins signed with UTA and Leverage Management. Hellion began as a short film in 2012 starring Hohl. Wiggins inherited his friend’s part as Jacob, a troubled 13-year-old whose mother is dead. While grieving father Hollis (Aaron Paul) turns […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 28, 2014 -
A Breakdown of the Special Effects in The Grand Budapest Hotel
It’s no surprise that Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel was a technically complicated production, and a video posted this week by VFX house Look Effects, Inc. breaks down exactly how complex putting the movie together was. In a nearly-five-minute reel that can’t be embedded (you should definitely take a look here), a variety of post-production work is highlighted, from color correction of the typically fastidiously coordinated hotel to the mechanics of the dizzying climactic downhill mountain chase. There are surprises big and small, including the amount of physical “snow” used on-set (thereby avoiding the usual hazy look of CGI […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 25, 2014
