Filmmaker Videos
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Trailer Watch: Tommy Lee Jones’ The Homesman
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.
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Watch: Jamie Stuart’s Short Film Learning to Like It
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.
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Watch: The Visual Poetry of Stanley Kubrick
“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.
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Trailer Watch: Martin Scorsese’s NYRB Documentary The 50 Year Argument
“As long as we could pay the printer, we could publish anything we wanted,” says New York Review of Books co-founder Robert H. Silvers in this trailer for The 50 Year Argument, a documentary about the literary institution. It’s co-directed by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi, the director’s editor on recent documentaries including Rolling Stones concert movie Shine a Light and the Fran Lebowitz profile Public Speaking. The film will be playing at NYFF before debuting on HBO on September 29th. It looks to be catnip for longtime readers of the publication, which in a just world would be just […]
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Trailer Watch: Barry Levinson’s The Humbling
Out of Venice, reviews for The Humbling seem to once again suggest that the biting wit of Philip Roth’s cannon is not exactly adaptable to the filmic format. Poorly received on the heels of the raved opener Birdman, which treads similar aging acting territory, Barry Levinson’s latest sees the adrift Al Pacino falling head first into a love affair with an ex (?) lesbian and daughter of his close friends, played by Greta Gerwig. The film does not yet have a distributor, although I imagine on the strength of the cast alone, it shouldn’t be long.
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Trailer Watch: Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini (Mildly NSFW)
“I’m going to be frank with you,” says Willem Dafoe’s Pier Paolo Pasolini in this trailer for Abel Ferrara’s keenly anticipated biopic of the Italian director, killed under still mysterious circumstances in 1975. “I’ve been to Hell, and I know things that don’t disturb other people’s dreams.” The musically-literally-operatic trailer for Pasolini is subtitled in French but mostly in English, save for a brief, easy-to-follow French passage (asked whether he considers himself a screenwriter, critic, actor, etc., Pasolini replies that on his passport it simply says writer) and a tiny bit in Italian. This is mildly NSFW, as there are […]
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Watch: New Blackmagic URSA Test Footage
Last month we shared the first test footage shot with the Blackmagic URSA camera, and now we’ve got more samples to look at. This time around the footage was shot using Canon’s EF line of lenses and looks very sharp. Full tech specs can be found here; thanks to No Film School for the heads up.
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Watch: How Color Correction Alters a Film’s Tone
Color correction is often the least talked about, most overlooked portion of the post-production process. Alex Bickel has spoken out about how grading can alter the presumed production value of a film, and a recent guest post from Michael Medaglia and Jalal Jemison discussed the importance of communicating your story through the process. This video from the International Colorist Academy offers a nice visual supplement to the aforementioned claims, as it demonstrates the colorist’s ability to amend the tone and context of any given scene. When it comes to transforming day to night, and romance to horror, some things can be left […]
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Somebody: Miranda July’s Messaging Service
Remember We Think Alone? Miranda July’s investigatory aggregate into the emails of famous people? July is again re-examining how people communicate in the age of information with a new app/messaging service entitled Somebody. Some sort of sick combination of texting and Tinder, Somebody ensures human contact upon receiving a message because that message is not your own — it belongs to someone nearby, and you are tasked with delivering it. To promote the project, Miu Miu commissioned a short from July that premiered today at the Venice Film Festival. In the supplement, a varied cast of characters (including July herself) […]
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Trailer Watch: Jesse Moss’s The Overnighters
I was flat out floored when I saw The Overnighters a few months back. It’s a documentary that unravels with the jagged edges of a thriller, while managing to be both an individual character study and comprehensive portrait of blue collar middle America and the nation’s economic and environmental crises. Still, it is somewhat unsurprising that many critics are calling out the film’s so-called manipulative treatment of its subjects, in a manner not unlike The Act of Killing‘s dissenters. I’d recommend seeing it for yourself and coming to your own conclusions when it opens on October 10. In the meantime, there’s the first trailer for […]
