You may remember this one: six years ago, Nailed, David O. Russell’s proposed follow-up to I Heart Huckabees, had massive financing problems. The would-be political satire about a waitress (Jessica Biel) who gets a nail to the head was ultimately scrapped and lain aside. In the meantime, the once-galvanizing director embarked on his Huckabees‘ apology tour, going from the not-bad The Fighter to the increasingly dispiriting (but renumerative) The Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle. Now whatever footage was shot (it’s unclear, though the Internet says crucial plot parts were never filmed) has been cobbled into some kind of grotesque thing that walks the earth, with […]
Here is a rather comprehensive look at the visual motifs apparent throughout the formative years of Alfred Hitchcock’s illustrious career, from 1934’s The Man Who Knew Too Much to 1976’s Family Plot. Whether staging action around a staircase or riffing on the illusion of free fall, Hitchcock revisited and realigned techniques from one decade to the next. This compilation from Steven Benedict breaks down the visual grammar of 42 of the filmmaker’s features, stitching together his preferred still images with his swooping camera techniques, including a personal favorite: Gregory Peck’s POV as he drinks a glass of milk in Spellbound.
It’s fascinating to watch how DIY production possibilities are changing the nature of the resume and showreel. A couple of months ago we posted this video by Lawrence Rebeiro about how he was able to use a small crew to pre-viz a fight scene. Now, via James Marsh at Twitch comes this impressive fight scene produced by French/Vietnamese performer Celine Tran (formerly the adult actress Katsuni and featured in Gaspar Noe’s episode of Destricted) showcasing her knife-fighting and martial arts abilities. It’s just one of several videos created as standalones showcasing assorted fighting styles and intended to launch her as […]
If you’re going to borrow, borrow from yourself… For an example, check out this well-done video by Milad Tangshir that finds visual, editing and storytelling parallels between Martin Scorsese’s 1964 student short, It’s Not You, Murray and his most recent film, The Wolf of Wall Street.
Five days behind schedule, here’s a great Criterion essay from Michael Koresky on the bleak sentiments behind some of cinema’s classic and overlooked Christmastide tales. Suggesting the holiday’s proximity to winter solstice, and thus, the death of light, Koresky explores the backwards tendency to characterize a time of joy and harmony with mortality, existential crises, and dysfunction in Mon Oncle Antoine, My Night at Maud’s and A Christmas Tale. I’d scarcely be the first to suggest how peculiar it is that the quintessential all-ages Christmas film, It’s A Wonderful Life, is centrally preoccupied with suicide.
Feature and music video director Mark Pellington has released via Nowness a short film, Honesty, that adapts the words of poet David Whyte. Here’s Pellington: “The words written by David blew me away. They don’t preach but they speak their own beliefs in a very strong and challenging way. Each person was cast randomly having no knowledge of the essay. They were only asked if they had experienced loss. They entered the room four at a time and were asked to simply walk forward, stand in front of the camera and listen to the soundtrack–the poem read by David accompanied […]
As our attention spans grow increasingly shorter in the age of information, there appears to be a growing audience for a form of film criticism beyond the written word. More precisely, for the video essay. Kevin B. Lee, the video essayist at Fandor, provides a nice inquiry into the state of the video essay today in his year-end recap, spotlighting the efforts of Tony Zhou and ::kogonada, while musing on what viewers respond to in their works: decisive analysis, politics, or the occasional cinephile fetishism. Further, Lee considers how even a narration-less supercut can adhere to its maker’s perspective based […]
At this past summer’s Frameline festival, where their Go Fish received its 20th Anniversary Screening, actress and writer Guinevere Turner and director Rose Troche interview filmmaker Jenni Olson about her Sundance-bound documentary, The Royal Road. Topics include Olson’s influences (including Chantal Akerman, James and Sadie Benning), archival documentary practice, urban landscapes and shooting on 16mm film. Check it out above.
Here’s an elegant and understated supercut from Jacob T. Swinney, scored with a meditative cue by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Alongside some of the big Hollywood titles — Interstellar, Godzilla — are a number of indies and foreign films like Blue Ruin, Ida and White Bird in a Blizzard. Check it out.
Last week, Robert Greene posted a “virtually unseen” mid-length documentary, shot and edited by Sean Price Williams in 1998, entitled Frantic Fran’s Jewish Stuff. Three years before the cinematographer’s first official credit, and nine years before his quasi-breakthrough with Frownland, the 16mm film presages the close-ups and striking compositions that earned Williams some of the best notices of his career with this year’s Listen Up Philip. And it’s pretty entertaining, as well.