Filmmaker Videos
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Watch: The 50 Shades of Grey Trailer
“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 […]
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Create Your Own Kinetoscope at Thomas Edison’s Black Maria Studio
Before the projector, there was the kinetoscope. Conceptualized by Thomas Edison in 1888 and developed by William Dickson, the device provided a peephole into early moving pictures. Mono No Aware, the Brooklyn-based cinema organization, has scheduled a visit to the Thomas Edison National Historical Park and its adjoining Black Maria Studio to allow participants to produce their own takes on these iconic film strips, at the very birthplace of movie production. An on-site workshop will equip attendees with 16 mm, and the resulting kinetoscopes will be screened and digitized in the same afternoon. To sign up for this Sunday’s excursion, head to […]
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Watch: The First Trailer for Hal Hartley’s Ned Rifle
Here’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. […]
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Behind-the-Scenes of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg’s Digital Restoration
In conjunction with the release of The Essential Jacques Demy box set, Criterion has offered up a supplemental look inside the 2013 digital restoration of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Above, Agnès Varda, the couple’s children, Mathieu and Rosalie, and technical specialists discuss the intricacies of upgrading the film’s sound, color, and image for the modern viewer. It’s depressingly easy to see why so many films fall by the wayside as prints run obsolete, and digital projection cements its spot as the industry standard. The attention to detail is, as Criterion notes, painstaking, to say nothing of the expense.
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Trailer Watch: The 50 Shades of Grey Teaser
If you’re looking for where movie marketing is in 2014, this is it. Last night Beyonce posted to her Instagram a short 15 second teaser for Sam Taylor Wood’s anticipated 50 Shades of Grey, whose official trailer is due to drop this week. A balcony, thigh caress and a key in the lock, scored to a stripped down “Crazy in Love” — that’s all it is, but the simulated intimacy of the Instagram platform and Bey’s implied endorsement (as well as her high, but tastefully hidden, follower count) make this a better buy for Universal than any network TV buy.
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Watch: Dennis Hopper, Richard Linklater and the Russian Dynamite Trick
From 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 […]
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Tall Enough and The Short Films of Barry Jenkins
In an article by Esther Robinson in our upcoming Summer issue, Barry Jenkins speaks to the delicate work-work balance incurred by many a filmmaker — that is to say, what he does to financially support his filmmaking career, and how that job tends to detract from passion projects. Jenkins is fortunate enough that his particular day job, as ringleader of the production company Strike Anywhere, allows him to regularly create content, even if of the branded and not feature-length variety. Over at Fandor, resident video essayist Kevin Lee takes a look at Strike Anywhere’s catalogue, and the work Jenkins has produced in the six […]
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Short Film: James Franco’s Herbert White Starring Michael Shannon
James Franco, it seems, spent the majority of his Tisch career translating the lives and work of tormented American poets. There was C.K. Williams with the Tar omnibus, Hart Crane with The Broken Tower and Frank Bidart with the just released Herbert White. Franco and Michael Shannon played lovers in the largely misguided Broken Tower, and here, Shannon, fulfilling his menacing hulk of a persona, prefers dead girls. Franco discusses his adaptation of the Bidart poem with Matt Rager, his co-writer on As I Lay Dying and The Sound In The Fury (Faulkner, being yet another poet of sorts), over at Vice. For those who are largely uninterested in the musings […]
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Watch: The First US Trailer for 20,000 Days on Earth
Here’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 […]
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Watch: A Video Analysis of Punch-Drunk Love as Superman-Inspired
As Spinal Tap observed, there’s a fine line between clever and stupid, and there’s a similarly thin divider between convincing argument and tenuous grasping. Is this 12-minute analysis of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love, which argues that it refers heavily to the 1978 Superman, reaching too far when claiming e.g. that the harmonium leading Adam Sandler to Emily Watson could be a stand-in for the Fortress of Solitude? Probably, but it’s an enjoyably go-for-broke interpretation regardless. In this formulation, Sandler’s Barry is Clark Kent — meek and mild at some times, superhumanly strong and violent at others — and Emily […]
