Filmmaker Videos
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Trailer Watch: Ms. 45
Hobo With A Shotgun director Jason Eisener cut this fantastic trailer for Abel Ferrara’s 1981 revenge thriller, Ms. 45, which is being re-released December 13 with VOD following March 25. Check out Drafthouse Films’ fantastic remastering job as evidenced by the clips here. Ms. 45 stars the late great Zoë Lund as a shy seamstress who, after multiple assaults in one 24-hour period, goes on a killing rampage against all the men in New York. For more details on the release, with nationwide theatrical dates, visit the film’s page at Drafthouse Films.
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Code: Laura Hanna and Matana Roberts on NYC Stop and Frisk
Filmmaker and media activist Laura Hanna — a co-founder of the production company HiddenDriver and director of docs Gattis, James and Hammer — has directed this short documentary about composer and sound artist Matana Roberts’ recent “stop and frisk” encounter on the Williamsburg bridge. Produced by Creative Time Reports and found on their site, it is introduced thusly: As the composer, saxophone player and sound artist Matana Roberts walked across the Williamsburg Bridge one night in May, she asked herself a familiar question: “How am I going to survive as an artist in this town?” It was too enchanting an […]
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Watch Wes Anderson’s Charming Prada Short Castelo Cavalcanti
I’m not totally optimistic about Wes Anderson’s upcoming The Grand Hotel Budapest — which will open the Berlinale early next year — but watching his latest offering has somewhat raised my hopes. Castelo Cavalcanti, a short film made for Prada, is a charming, self-contained little effort about a racecar driver (Jason Schwartzman) who crashes in the tiny Italian village of Castelo Cavalcanti, which just happens to be his ancestral home. Written and directed by Anderson, it was shot by Darius Khondji and filmed at Rome’s legendary studio, Cinecittà.
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Now Online: Barry Jenkins’ Short Chlorophyl
The Borscht Film Festival does great work, not only playing films already on the circuit but also specially commissioning shorts by Miami-based filmmakers for the event. Amy Seimetz’s When We Lived in Miami was the most notable of these from last year’s fest, and from the previous year that distinction arguably went to Barry Jenkins’ Chlorophyl. The short by the Medicine for Melancholy dirctor is, finally, online. And for a little background, check out Borscht collective member Andrew Hevia’s post for Filmmaker‘s own The Microbudget Conversation about how the film came about.
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Recommended Short: Brandon LaGanke’s Playhouse
I’m a fan of Brandon LaGanke’s short film Play House, writing in my print magazine SXSW report, “Play House is an elegantly disturbing suburban horror short in which the defeated apathy of a wife, daughter and son is revealed to be sickeningly explicable.” The short has just gone up on Vimeo where it is a Staff Pick. Check it out above.
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Trailer Watch: Godfrey Reggio’s Visitors
The premiere of Godfrey Reggio’s Visitors, hosted by Steven Soderbergh and with Phillip Glass’s score performed live by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, was my most singular experience at this year’s Toronto Film Festival. As I wrote in the current issue of Filmmaker: Glass’s haunting soundtrack is among his best, while Reggio’s film is a radical departure from hyperkinetic works like Koyanisquatsi that presaged the visual language of our connected age. Shot in black-and-white and containing less than 60 cuts, the lulling Visitors is mournful yet concerned elegy for a world in which experience has been subsumed by spectatorship. Amusement parks […]
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Spike Jonze and Greta Gerwig Team for YouTube’s Live Music Video Awards
In an effort to assure traditionalists that anything television can do the Internet can do better, YouTube got their first slice of the awards show pie last night with their inaugural YouTube Music Awards. In Saturday’s Times, Chris Milk — under the watchful eye of creative director Spike Jonze — revealed that each performance would be structured around a live music video, utilizing the platform to generate viral content in house. For the opener, Jonze enlisted one Greta Gerwig, replete with twinkle toes and jazz hands, to accompany Arcade Fire’s “Afterlife,” through forests, apartments, and a bearded man’s embrace. It […]
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Watch the New The Wolf of Wall Street Trailer
A new trailer for Martin Scorsese’s upcoming The Wolf of Wall Street has just dropped, and it’s very different in tone from the Kanye-scored one that’s been circulating on the interwebs for the last few months. Check it out above.
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Cinematographer Reed Morano on Climbing the Ladder
Waitressing, temping and working as a grip and electric intern were some of the odd jobs Reed Morano had on the way to becoming a d.p. In this latest Craft Truck video, Morano makes the case that grip and electric is “not putting the light up, it’s what you do with it once you get the light up.” You can watch the full Craft Truck interview here.
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“25 New Face” Mohammad Gorjestani’s Refuge a Staff Pick on Vimeo
Those 25 New Faces folks seem to crop up everywhere, so it’s no surprise that 2013 alum Mohammad Gorjestani‘s Refuge, an excellent sci-fi-tinged short about an Iranian immigrant set in the San Jose of the near future, has been chosen as a Staff Pick on Vimeo, by the cultured curatorial eye of Jason Sondhi, who was chosen for our 2011 list. Check out the film above, or here at Vimeo.
