In October, timed to the New York Film Festival U.S. premiere of his film, Jauja, Lisandro Alonso was the second director in residence at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. The Film Society invited Filmmaker to report on Alonso’s various events — lectures, Q&As and sessions with students in both New York and Boston — and we asked filmmaker and contributor Alix Lambert. Jauja is produced by and stars Viggo Mortenson, who shares a tie with Lambert. He and David Cronenberg watched her The Mark of Cain film while researching Russian tattoos for Eastern Promises, and Mortensen’s Perceval Press published […]
This Film Riot video (via No Film School) quickly runs down five basic tools you’ll need to have in order to shoot outside — wind socks or other protection for your mic, ND filters and so on — as well as suggesting cost-effective alternatives for especially cash-strapped productions. No money for a bounce board? No problem: pull a pillowcase over a cardboard box and you’re ready to go. While intended primarily for beginners, this video’s pointers can serve as a quick refresher crash course to bring everyone on your crew up to speed.
If I was at all restless during Birdman, it had little to do with the stakes of the plot, and much more to do with deciphering Emmanuel Lubezki’s visual pyrotechnics. Apologies for the spoiler, but you’ve probably heard by now that Iñárritu’s latest is designed to look like one sweeping take, a nod to its theatrical subject matter and setting. The camera ducks in and out of darkness more than once, but surely the technicians in post found points for incision that are barely visible to the naked eye. In this video interview with Variety, the film’s digital intermediate colorist Steve Scott explains […]
Drones. Porn. Directors Brandon LaGanke and John Carlucci of Ghost Cow Films have taken what might have been a cynical, viral video SEO-mashup and delivered something deeply weird and oddly hypnotic. While Drone Boning features couples having sex (so, yes, it’s adults-only and NSFW), the eerie glide of the drone and the camera’s distance from these writhing lovers make them more like elements in a video art piece than reflections of desire. Filmmaker previously featured the work of Ghost Cow when we curated LaGanke’s short film, Play House, for the Northside Film Festival. When he sent me this latest out-there […]
Opening with the decidedly non-canonical duo of Always and All Dogs Go to Heaven, this nifty eight-ish minute montage looks at the afterlife as rendered onscreen. Graphic matches and dialogue segues from one person protesting they don’t belong here to another are smoothly handled, and while it’s more for fun than study, there are some takeaways: i.e., that there’s very little difference in the degree of tackiness of the afterlife as rendered in What Dreams May Come and Little Nicky. Thanks to Press Play for the tip. (There is brief rear male nudity and a dude’s neck being torn apart, […]
This post-SXSW screening Q&A for The Grand Budapest Hotel is a few cuts above average. For one thing, Wes Anderson, Jason Schwartzman and music supervisor Randall Poster get to have Richard Linklater as their moderator, which makes for a higher class of question and a more relaxed rapport between two sympatico filmmakers. Native Texans who’ve both worked with animation, Linklater and Anderson are equally ready to discuss the films of Max Ophuls and which Stefan Zweig books in particular they have or haven’t read. Other highlights: Poster talks about how they arranged to record with a full balalaika orchestra, Anderson […]
One of the more unexpected side effects of Interstellar‘s much-ballyhooed release in 35mm, 70mm and 70mm IMAX has been a wave of videos from local theaters showing their patrons exactly what it takes to prepare and project 70mm. My pick of the litter is this nicely shot two-minute video from the Willow Creek 12 Theater in Plymouth, Minnesota. Watch the process from start to finish as eight cans of film arrive, are unlocked, checked for damage, and then fed onto a platter for projection. An earlier video showed the theater testing its 70mm projector for its first 70mm engagement in 22 years. […]
It’s Halloween and you know what that means: less than two shopping months before Christmas! On the heels of summer’s David Fincher-helmed ads encouraging you to “dress normal,” we now have four Sofia Coppola-directed spots tied to the holiday season. The theme is that you don’t have to “get” your family, girlfriend or other significant players in your life to get them Gap. The shots and vibe are recognizably Coppola’s, the musical selections predictably eclectic. My pick of the litter — the only minute-long spot, the others being 30 seconds long — is embedded above, but it’s a playlist, so […]
In honor of the Criterion release of The Complete Jacques Tati, David Cairns looks at the building blocks of the auteur’s visual gags in PlayTime, his finely choreographed exploration of technology and the modern era. In particular, Cairns examines Tati’s use of reflections and mirror images, as well as the illusion of space, which all play into the rigidity of the film’s expansive set pieces and its fractured narrative.
“The term ‘deranged sociopath’ gets thrown around a lot by the media these days,” Arsenio Hall said in 1989 when introducing Jason Voorhees on his show, “but it really applies to my next guest.” This was the year of Friday the 13th Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan, and a peak-of-his-popularity Jason came out to a nice round of applause. Then he sat down and sat behind his expressionless mask barely moving while Arsenio fired off a barrage of questions to the silent hulk. “I see all your movies man, and you know what I’ve noticed?” No response. “You’re angry.” It’s […]