Kudos to Vice for commandeering a handful of Criterion extras and uploading them to their YouTube channel, Conversations Inside the Criterion Collection. Their most recent addition, from the Frances Ha boxset, is a conversation between Sarah Polley and Greta Gerwig on the process of creating both the titular character and her written foundations. Polley approaches the interview as both a filmmaker and (former) actor, posing astute observations on the registry of Gerwig’s interior monologues, as well as the nuts and bolts behind the film’s climactic dance sequence. The other videos in the series — Wexler on Medium Cool, Polanski on Rosemary’s Baby and Scorsese on Rossellini — […]
Earlier this year, NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts took over Radio City Music Hall for its annual separate, not-quite-graduation ceremony, and the honored speaker at the center was Martin Scorsese (class of ’64/’68). Over the course of half an hour, Scorsese recalled how, when he entered film school, the concept seemed suspicious: as he says, when he told people in his neighborhood he wanted to be a filmmaker, they would ask “What are you going to make, celluloid for Eastman Kodak?” A friend of his called film school “a sandbox for the visually excitable and academically compromised.” From those […]
J.C. Chandor is a filmmaker who looks to be carving a rather eclectic oeuvre. The near dialogue-less All is Lost was made in direct contrast to the motormouthed Wall Street floors of Margin Call, and his latest, A Most Violent Year, sees Chandor wading into genre waters. Starring Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain, the film, which is due from A24 in December, tracks a year in the life of an immigrant couple in crime-addled 1981 New York. Your first look is above.
“You sound like you’re bragging,” an ex tells novelist-on-the-cusp Philip (Jason Schwartzman). “That’s because I am bragging,” he answers without missing a beat at the start of this trailer for Alex Ross Perry’s acerbically witty, keenly anticipated third feature Listen Up Philip. Entering limited release on October 17 and hitting VOD four days later, Perry’s follow-up to The Color Wheel has great parts for Schwartzman, Elisabeth Moss as his long-suffering girlfriend and Jonathan Pryce as the young writer’s Philip Roth-esque mentor. (Dig the title card font, taken from the hardcovers of Roth’s ’70s novels.) It’s a funny and depressing work […]
Here’s a change of pace for David Lynch: a video in which he’s silent. Apparently coveting the type of foot traffic drawn by MoMA’s Tim Burton retrospective in 2010, which (at least at the time) drew the third-largest attendance numbers in the museum’s history, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts is hosting the first big US retro of its alumnus’ artwork. Here, Lynch strides through the museum, looking at the fruits of his work to the strains of his own “The Night Bell With Lightning” from 2011’s album Crazy Clown Time. If you want a quick walk through this part of the art-school […]
POV, America’s longest running television showcase for non-fiction films, is wading into interactive waters. Yesterday, the doc powerhouse launched an online, short-form transmedia section, with six projects, four of which were created by Hackathon alumni, and three of which will be premiering at NYFF’s Convergence sidebar in the ensuing weeks. The works are driven by timelines, geography, and photography, but my hands down favorite, Empire:Cradle, is fueled by a transcendent moral code. One in a series of four shorts that probes the ramifications of Dutch colonialism, Cradle is shot on location at Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport. Pairing clusters of bystanders who watch the takeoffs and […]
When I wrote about Manakamana last year, I noted that it’s a bit disorienting, more so than the “11 rides in a cable car” premise suggests: The car can go up or down and its passengers can sit facing the direction they’re going or with their back toward it, affecting the camera’s placement opposite. Even before considering the number onboard, that’s four variables that make orientation — knowing what to anticipate in the background, which posts will be passed with a clang at what time, whether a village mid-way through the journey will be visible on the left or right, […]
With The Homesman, Tommy Lee Jones follows his directorial debut, the 2005 neo-western The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, with a feminist riff on the same genre. Jones stars alongside Hilary Swank as a drifter who is recruited to smuggle three hysterical women from Nebraska to Iowa. Premiering to mixed reviews at Cannes, the film nonetheless exhibits an interesting inversion of the machismo outlaw, and the helpless damsels in distress, who intimate a threatening aura of their own. Roadside Attractions opens The Homesman on November 14.
Earlier this week we ran Jamie Stuart’s short film Learning to Like It as part of his detailed review of the Blackmagic Production and Pocket cameras. Now we’re posting the short as a stand-alone film in its own right rather than as a technical exercise. Stuart’s behind and in front of the camera as a lonely guy hoping for reconciliation with his ex-girlfriend, but his attempts to get back to her lead to a cavalcade of street confrontations and complications in this zippy, wordless five-minute comedy.
“This is my rifle, there are many like it, but this one is mine,” could easily be amended to “this is my Stanley Kubrick tribute…” for the world wide web of Vimeo. Nevertheless, here is a nice addition to the catalogue from Marc Müller which pairs Kubrick’s characteristic classical pieces (“The Blue Danube,” “Symphony #9,” etc.) with his use of tracking shots, combat, close-ups, one-point perspectives and on. If not bone-to-space station caliber, there are still some nice cuts to be had.