Filmmaker Videos
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Trailer Watch: Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up Philip
“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 […]
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Watch: David Lynch Walks Through his Philadelphia Museum Exhibition
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 […]
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POV Launches Interactive Shorts Including Empire:Cradle
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 […]
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Watch: Manakamana Mergings, A Video by Kevin B. Lee
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, […]
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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 […]
