Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Men, Women and Children: The 8th Abu Dhabi Film Festival
In Abu Dhabi, it’s easy to let the smoke cozy up to your eyes. The festival, now in its 8th year, unfolds in one of the city’s most dazzling corners, with the mammoth, labyrinthine, five star Emirates Palace as its proverbial hub. Gold dripping from its vending machines and balconies alike, the place is sheer, 11 billion Dirham, stadium sized spectacle. As a festival guest, you are chauffeured from the seaside St. Regis tower to screening venues in a designated Mercedes, which, barring the unwanted sexual advances that come with being a long-haired, white American female, can make you feel […]
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TWC and the Devaluation of Content
The notion of VOD as a stigmatized, modern update on the straight to video release has gradually and dramatically disbanded in the past handful of years. Day-and-date pioneers like Magnolia and IFC capitalized on the platform’s ability to cater to a wider, cross-country audience, demonstrating its economic viability, if occasionally at the cost of art houses. Though their sister label Radius-TWC has proven exceedingly adroit at the multi-platform rollout, The Weinstein Company has tended towards more multiplex fare, which makes their recent, free pre-theatrical release of One Chance on Yahoo! Screen even more bizarre than it sounds on paper. Originally intended for a 10 day “pre-release,” TWC […]
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Paul Schrader on the Theatrical Experience, Web Series and the Death of the Three Act Drama
Last night at the Made in NY Media Center by IFP, Paul Schrader had a conversation with Marc Schiller, as part of the latter’s Future State of Entertainment Speaker Series. Perhaps more than any other director of his generation, Schrader seems to have embraced the democratic technologies available to today’s filmmakers, between crowdsourcing on The Canyons and his recent intent to make a web series. Indeed, if the protest surrounding his latest film is any indication, he may be done with studios for the foreseeable future. Throughout the two hours, Schrader and Schiller covered a variety of topics, from new technologies to the phasing out of […]
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They Shouldn’t Have Killed his Dog: John Wick
John Wick‘s primary premise is lots of well-crafted action delivered by veteran stuntpeople-turned-directors finally given free rein to make sure their work is optimally served. Co-directors David Leith and Chad Stahelski deliver on this front: it doesn’t take much time before retired hitman Wick (Keanu Reeves) is sufficiently angered to leave his New Jersey pad, head into NYC (more inferred than seen) and unleash mayhem in a hotel, club and church. No one is going to confuse 50-year-old Keanu Reeves for prime Jet Li, but he’s more than credible in walking through each point of contact and delivering body blows. […]
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Teen Horniness is Not a Crime: White Bird in a Blizzard
The nice thing about Gregg Araki’s movies is that he genuinely believes that teen horniness is not a crime: not for him Larry Clark’s pseudo-alarmed prurience or a Lifetime movie’s worth of dire consequences trailing teen sexuality. White Bird in a Blizzard‘s narrator/not-quite-heroine Kat Connors (Shaleine Woodley) is in the midst of an inexplicably celibate stretch in a hormonally-drenched first sexual relationship with neighbor Phil (Shiloh Fernandez) when her mother Eve (Eva Green) mysteriously disappears. Kat’s sexuality contributes neither to unearned guilt or poor decisions, and her relationship with the older investigating detective Scieziesciez (Thomas Jane) is never a source […]
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Cinematographer Reed Morano on the Fight Against TV’s “Smooth Motion” Setting
“Stop motion interpolation!” is the call on a Change.org petition urging TV manufacturers to disable the default “smooth motion” setting on new televisions. As the petition explains, “Motion Interpolation was an effect that was created to reduce motion blur on HDTVs but a very unfortunate side effect of using this function is that is takes something shot at 24 fps or shot on film and makes it look like it was shot on video at 60i. In short, it takes the cinematic look out of any image and makes it look like soap opera shot on a cheap video camera.” […]
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Ted Hope on the Need for a Sustainable Investor Class
“The best thing we can do as a film industry is make sure that investors earn risk appropriate returns on their money. We need to create a sustainable investor class,” explains Ted Hope in this video interview with Film Courage. In recent years, Hope has shied away from producing as a career, doing it purely out of love for the film while paying the bills as CEO of Fandor. In order to return to the trade full-time, he’d need for there to be guaranteed returns on investments, as it traditionally goes in the realm of startups and finance. The issue, […]
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Once Upon a Time in Cappadocia: The Scaping of Winter Sleep
According to the Institutional Theory of Art, a work becomes Art only after it has been validated by institutions and other taste maintainers (festivals, exhibitions, etc.). Given that Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest film, Winter Sleep, earned him the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May, you could build a case that, officially anyway, his was the best of the 2014 harvest. Now MoMA is hosting a complete retrospective October 29-November 5 of his relatively small body of work (seven features, one short). Nuri Bilge Ceylan (pronounced “noo-ree beel-gyeh jay-lan”) will be present to introduce Winter Sleep and Once Upon […]
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Cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth on Gone Girl, Digital and Working with David Fincher
Gone Girl marks d.p. Jeff Cronenweth’s fourth feature film collaboration with David Fincher, a stretch that began with Fight Club in 1999 and has continued through The Social Network and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. (He also worked 2nd and 3rd unit on Se7en and The Game.) It’s a partnership that has transitioned the pair to digital cinematography, with Cronenweth creating cool, precisely visualized environments for stories plumbing the complexities of life in our globalized, media-saturated information age. To speak with Cronenweth, we asked Jamie Stuart, whose short films have frequently appeared on this site, and who has interviewed […]
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Julia Marchese on The New State of The New Beverly and 35mm
Cinephiles on both coasts were rattled by Julia Marchese’s blog post last Friday entitled “I Will Not Be Censored,” concerning her departure from Los Angeles’ beloved New Beverly Cinema. Anyone who’s been to the New Bev within the last dozen years will recognize Marchese, for many the welcoming public face of the recently beleaguered rep house. But following a steady trickle of involvement from Quentin Tarantino — first paying the theater’s bills out of love, then becoming its owner, and finally, in September, announcing he’ll be directing a majority of the programming — Marchese was isolated within the staff, and […]
