Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Hiding in Plain Sight: The Beijing Queer Film Festival
My usual questions as I get ready for a film festival are whether we’ll be able to sell out the show and how the audience and local press will react. Preparing for the Beijing Queer Film Festival last September, I had a different sort of concern: would I be able to show our film without being arrested? The festival had invited me, my partner Joe Wilson and our main character, Hina Wong-Kalu, to screen Kumu Hina, a documentary about Hina’s life as a highly regarded native Hawaiian teacher and cultural leader who just happens to be māhū, or transgender. Because […]
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CES Roundup: 4K TVs are Great, But Pay Attention to What’s Going on in Streaming Platforms and Services
As expected, 4K has dominated the TV news at CES, with manufacturers announcing models that are bigger (Samsung) thinner (Sony) and have even higher resolution than 4K (Sharp.) But while the manufacturers continue to build bigger and better displays, it’s in platforms and streaming services that the real changes seem to be happening. Platforms Back in June Google unveiled Android TV, a platform to compete with the likes of Apple TV and Roku. Sharp, Sony and TP Vision have all announced TVs based on Android TV. The platform will also be coming on a set top box from Huawei and […]
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Boyhood Wins Heterodox Award, Paris is Burning Honored with Legacy Award at Cinema Eye Honor’s Inaugural Honors Lunch
In a new annual lunchtime ceremony, Cinema Eye Honors awarded today the Filmmaker-sponsored Heterodox Award to Richard Linklater’s Boyhood and feted Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning with its Legacy Award. Linklater as well as Livingston and her collaborators were all on hand to accept their awards at midtown’s Etcetera Etcetera. Of the divide between documentary and fiction, Linklater, who was on hand to accept the award, said, “I don’t even call it ‘a blurry line’… I’ve never really drawn a particular line between documentary and fiction.” Continuing, he said, “[Boyhood] is not a documentary but it’s certainly a document. It’s […]
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Trailer Watch (Red Band): Giuseppe Makes a Movie
Via Cinelicious, Adam Rifkin’s documentary on DIY filmmaker Giuseppe Andrews, Giuseppe Makes a Movie, gets a New York theatrical run this month at the Anthology Film Archives via Cinelicious, the distributor who recently opened Josephine Decker’s films. Check out the trailer above. Wrote Lauren Wissot when she intro’d an interview with Rifkin here at Filmmaker: A veteran of both Hollywood and indie film, Adam Rifkin, on the other hand, is a name familiar to any fan of the 1999 cult comedy Detroit Rock City, which Rifkin directed, and which starred Andrews alongside Edward Furlong. Now Rifkin and Andrews have teamed up again […]
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What Would Steven Soderbergh Watch? Learning from the Director’s 2014 Media Diet
In a world of countless choices — and insistent demands by others on your viewing time — the simple act of choosing a movie, a TV show, a book, a play can be fraught with indecision. After all, you only have so many hours left… For fans of Steven Soderbergh looking to step away from the algorithmic in terms of their media consumption — or just anyone looking for insight on the relationship between that director’s inputs and his output — there is his year published media diet, a list of everything he consumed the prior year. 2014’s has just […]
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Biggest Challenge, Best Lesson: Five Nights in Maine Writer/Director Maris Curran
When I first speak to filmmaker Maris Curran on the phone, I’m sitting in the driver’s seat of my parked car about two months after breaking both my arms in a bicycle accident. The accident occurred as I was pulling my bike over to the side of the road in order to phone the editor of this publication to discuss some column ideas I had about the business of filmmaking. I missed that meeting, of course, and since the accident, my mind has been almost singularly focused on the psychological impact of tragic accidents. Since that can get a bit […]
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Red Giant Universe Effects Package Review
There are a number of things that are different about Red Giant’s effects package Universe. It’s offered as a subscription, but you can get access to a sizeable number of effects without paying a thing. Members of the Universe community get to vote on effects that are being added to the set. Universe is cross-platform, works with a variety of software applications and supports GPU acceleration. You can even try out the premium effects for free with your first month of use. The effects and transitions of Universe support a variety of environments: Adobe After Effects (CS5.5 and higher) and […]
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What Revised U.S.-Cuba Relations Could Mean for Film
My knowledge of Cuban cinema is limited to a handful of films — one or two native productions and works by foreigners like Wim Wenders’ Buena Vista Social Club and Michael Rubbo’s Waiting for Fidel. So my interest was aroused when President Obama announced his administration’s change in policy regarding Cuba. The political ramifications of the President’s policies are, of course, extremely personal for Cuban-Americans, and discussions about the politics of the announcement and human-rights issues in Cuba are occurring across the nation(s). While not disregarding these discussions, I wanted to take a moment to look at the possibilities normalized relations might create […]
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Watch Burst, Celine Tran’s Bid to Become an Action Star
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 […]
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Drive, He Said: A Most Violent Year
The guy’s a tease. Up until the end of Margin Call (2011), the debut feature of A Most Violent Year director J.C. Chandor (All is Lost), our moral compass in the story of a New York investment firm at the onset of the 2008 financial crash is brainy risk analyst Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto). The young MIT graduate is so upright that he not only disentangles the masked electronic numbers signaling impending doom for those who can least afford it but also allies himself with the mid-level powers who prefer to forestall than cash in. In the penultimate sequence, once […]
