Filmmaker Videos
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Watch: Melancholy and Loss in The Grand Budapest Hotel
Wes Anderson’s detractors often delight in taking umbrage with the filmmaker’s “twee” aesthetic, claiming that his formal specificity undermines the emotion his films ought to inspire. This video essay by Matt Zoller Seitz, one in a series adapted from his book The Wes Anderson Collection, dismantles that claim through the lens of The Grand Budapest Hotel, and its myriad melancholic layers of loss and thwarted re-invention. With respect to Zero, Seitz notes that “The most important parts of a story are the parts people omit, the abysses they sidestep,” and how Agatha becomes a vague, distant cypher — both narratively and through Yeoman’s […]
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Trailer Watch: Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak
Referring to an unreleased film as an “ultimate masterpiece” in its first trailer is an interesting marketing tactic, to be sure — especially when its maker’s resume is chockfull of blockbusters. But Guillermo del Toro and Co. have more or less thrown down the gauntlet in this bumper for Crimson Peak, which sees him returning to the fantastical horror of his 2006 breakout, Pan’s Labyrinth. Starring the appealing trio of Mia Wasikowska, Tom Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain, the film unfolds in an intricate and gothic mansion, that appears to be home to more than a few types of skeletons. Crimson Peak will be released by Universal Pictures on […]
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Trailer Watch: Wild Canaries Directed by Lawrence Levine
Lawrence Levine’s comedy thriller Wild Canaries is opening February 25 at the IFC Center and on online platforms. Below, from our print magazine, are my comments after the film’s premiere at SXSW. And, check out the trailer above. Most independent films don’t have enough plot. That criticism can’t be leveled at Wild Canaries, Lawrence Michael Levine’s loose-limbed caper comedy. Levine and his wife, the actress and director Sophia Takal, star as a Brooklyn couple who become convinced their upstairs neighbor was murdered to gain control of her rent controlled apartment. Influenced by the “Thin Man” movies as well as Woody Allen’s […]
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Watch: “Mirrors of Bergman” by :: kogonada
The latest in his series of video essays for the Criterion Collection brings :: kogonada face to face with Ingmar Bergman — more precisely, to the Swedish auteur’s use of mirrors in relation to women. Set to a reading of Sylvia Plath’s Mirror (“I am important to her/she comes and goes” nicely encapsulates Persona, at the very least), this short montage considers the meditative reflections — and interior revelations — across several of Bergman’s films. Watch above, and stay tuned for a longer :: kogonada/Bergman essay, set to accompany the Cries and Whispers release.
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Watch: Rio de Janeiro in 10K Timelapse
Shot by Joe Capra, this five-minute test video shows off the super-hi-res capabilities of the PhaseOne IQ180 camera (more information on that here). This timelapse footage of Rio de Janeiro from a variety of vantage points is meant to serve several purposes. As Capra writes: Each shot sequence starts off with the full resolution footage scaled down to fit within a 1920×1080 resolution (14% scale). The next shot in each shot sequence is the full resolution shot scaled to 50%, so basically zooming in quite a bit. From there we go into the full resolution shot scaled to 100%, which […]
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Trailer Watch: Michael Tyburski & Ben Nabors’ Actor Seeks Role, Starring Alex Karpovsky
Writer/director/producer duo Michael Tyburski and Ben Nabors — 25 New Faces alums from 2013 — have a trailer for their new short film. Actor Seeks Role stars another alum — director/Girls regular Alex Karpovsky — as a struggling thespian who takes on a job as a medical actor, exhibiting symptoms he doesn’t possess for student doctors to test their diagnostic skills on. (Shades of Leslie Jamison’s essay on the topic.) The film hopes to launch online later this spring.
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“I’m Scared of Everything”: Alfred Hitchcock’s BBC Interview About Psycho, 1960
In this fairly typical Hitchcock interview from 1960, the director adjusts his tie and sits down for a brisk promotional session for Psycho, describing the plot with typical drollery and running through some of his greatest soundbite hits: the oft-told story about how he was imprisoned briefly as a child at his father’s request, qualifying his statement that actors should be treated like cattle (“You mean you want to make them larger cattle than they are?”), and whether he’s ever wanted to be an actor himself (“Nothing so low as that”).
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Trailer Watch: Kathleen Collins’ 1982 Milestone in Black Film, Losing Ground
Lincoln Center’s vital series “Tell It Like It Is: Black Independents in New York, 1968-1986” kicks off today, including a week-long debut theatrical run of Kathleen Collins’ 1982 Losing Ground. Believed to be the first African-American woman to direct a feature film (1980’s The Cruz Brothers and Mrs. Molloy), Collins’ 1982 second and final feature has never received a regular theatrical run until now. The story of a philosophy professor (Sereh Scott) and her landscape painter husband (Ganja and Hess director Bill Gunn) in the middle of a transformative vacation in upstate New York, the film is described as a […]
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Film Emulation: Behind the Scenes of the Short Old/New
Red Giant has released a new short from Seth Worley called Old/New. Over the past few years Worley has produced a number of imaginative short films on a limited budget that tell a great story and also – somehow – manage to demonstrate the use of Red Giant’s software. Cue the announcement of new software from Red Giant. Red Giant has also released Magic Bullet Suite 12, their collection of color correction and finishing tools. This release brings new features to the applications that make up the suite, as well as a new product: Magic Bullet Film. One of the focuses of this […]
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Watch: Who Deserves to Win the Oscar for Best Director?
Kevin B. Lee has been churning out a series of visual supplements to oscar punditry over at Fandor that weigh politics against actual evidence, even if it is still subjective. His latest video, Who Should Win the Oscar for Best Director?, considers which of the filmmakers behind The Imitation Game, Foxcatcher, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Boyhood and Birdman, displays the most sensitive, contextually sound technique. He’s spot on in his assessments of three of the five, but I’d argue that The Grand Budapest Hotel finds a renewed cause for Anderson’s seemingly premeditated aesthetic, while Iñárritu ultimately limits himself to the very air of spectacle he […]
