The Undefeated, ESPN’s new platform focusing on the intersection of race and sports, premiered the new season of the TV miniseries Spike Lee’s Lil’ Joints with the release of 2 Fists Up, directed by Lee himself. The film takes a look at the protests on the campus of the University of Missouri last November, which included a boycott by the school’s football players. This documentary emphasizes the women organizers behind the protests rather than the football team, a welcome surprise from an ESPN production. 2 Fists Up initially premiered on the university campus in early April with the announcement that […]
One of the best filmmaking video blogs going right now is at the Mentorless site, where filmmaker Nathalie Sejean is posting weekly about her goal of making her first feature film, In Five Years. Both Sejean and her producer, Muge Ozen, attended the Producers Network this month and returned with enough info to fill up two entries. Among the advice offered here is what online filmmakers should make sure to do to get accredited to the Cannes market, when to submit — and not submit — scripts to buyers, and how to consider whether you should even try to tackle […]
This video from DSLRguide covers the very rudimentary basics of shooting Super 8 — over- vs. under-exposure, things to look for when buying a camera, etc. Test footage is included.
This one’s pretty self-explanatory: director Albert Gómez presents the first and last appearance of every major character in Quentin Tarantino’s movies in splitscreen. It does, of course, get bloody.
Seventeen years after director Todd Solondz introduced us to Dawn Wiener (Heather Matarazzo), the downtrodden pre-teen star of the darkly comic Welcome to the Dollhouse, the character, now all grown up (and played by Greta Gerwig), returns in the quasi-sequel, Wiener-Dog. Dawn is just one of several characters featured in Wiener-Dog, which tells a variety of stories, all revolving around a particular dachshund. Featuring Kieran Culkin, Tracy Letts, Danny DeVito, Ellen Burstyn, Julie Delpy, and Zosia Mamet, the film premiered earlier this year at The Sundance Film Festival and is scheduled to be released on June 24 by Amazon Studios and IFC Films. You can check out the […]
Yesterday we premiered Christopher Jason Bell’s short film One Times One; today, we’re following up with the premiere of his colleague/interlocutor Theodore Collatos’ short Albatross. It’s the story of a young girl being raised by her uncle, only to have their relationship disrupted by the unexpected return of her father. As Collatos told Bell in their conversation (which we published Tuesday), “I really wanted to continue to build a fictional story within the context of Matt Shaw’s actual life. Elements of real story beats with real people in a poetic and seasonal time structure. Seasons pass, family changes and the mysteries of life go […]
If you’ve seen a lot of video essays purportedly analyzing the themes, visual motifs etc. of various films, you’ll know that they are, by and large, not very good, simply latching on to famous film titles for an easy traffic layup. Enter Kentucker Audley: director and actor, proprietor of No Budge and the Movies brand. In this inaugural video essay, Audley takes an analytical look at Pleasantville. “It’s a really cool movie, as you probably remember,” he explains, “with cutting-edge cinematography and excellent themes,” nailing the fatuous tone of many an online underperformer. Bonus points for blithely naming the director as […]
Yesterday we posted a conversation between filmmakers Christopher Jason Bell and Theodore Collatos about their films, practicing their craft, managing expectations and much more. Today we’re premiering Bell’s short film One Times One, which had its origins as excised footage from his feature debut The Winds that Scatter. As he explained: “For Winds, we ended up with a 3.5 hour assembly cut. There were a lot of things that I was very attached to that ultimately needed to go. One of them was a small arc in which Ahmad made friends with a man named Mike — he met this guy while looking […]
The Palme d’Or winners are one matter, but what are the best films to premiere at Cannes this decade? Kevin B. Lee unveils a personal canon in this video essay, making the case for Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Assassin, Hong Sang-soo’s The Day He Arrives, Jean Luc-Godard’s Goodbye to Language and more.
One of our 25 New Faces in 2011, Kirby Ferguson has, with his Everything is a Remix Project, created a web series that artfully blends cultural criticism with legal and copyright commentary. In the latest edition, Ferguson considers J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars: The Force Awakens and wonders if blockbuster artistic sampling has run its course. “Is remixing a weak point in The Force Awakens? Is the remix method growing stale? Have we reached the limits of remixing?” For his conclusions, watch the video above.