Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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RIP Ruby Dee (1922-2014)
Iconic actress Ruby Dee died yesterday at age 91 in her home at New Rochelle, New York. For a comprehensive overview of her life and work, start with Sarah Halzack’s obituary in the Washington Post. Her achievements on stage, TV and movie screens were inseparable from her political work alongside late husband Ossie Davis. The couple were famously friends with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., and politics were a non-negotiable constant in their lives. “We believe in honesty,” Davis explained in 1988. “We believe in simplicity. We believe in a good breakfast when we can get it. We […]
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Trailer Watch: Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman
Alejandro González Iñárritu last film Biutiful was so relentlessly depressing its body count nearly totalled that of an apocalyptic blockbuster, so it’s nice to see him swinging in the other direction with what looks to be a high-concept, gonzo comedy with Birdman. Starring Michael Keaton as an over-the-hill superhero actor struggling to mount a Broadway comeback, the film, which is shot by the inimitable Emmanuel Lubezki, boasts an eclectic ensemble in Naomi Watts, Michael Keaton, Zach Galifianakis, Amy Ryan and Emma Stone. What piques my interest, however, is the fact that the Broadway play is an adaptation of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When […]
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Acts of Rebellion: The Dialectical Cinema of Nadav Lapid
In Sergei Eisenstein’s seminal essay “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form,” the Russian filmmaker lays out the foundational theories for his radical political cinema. “Art is always conflict,” he famously writes. “(1) according to its social mission, (2) according to its nature, (3) according to its methodology. According to its social mission because: It is art’s task to make manifest the contradictions of Being.” Israeli auteur Nadav Lapid may not adhere to Eisenstein’s aesthetics of montage, but he appears to be directly influenced by the Russian’s dialectical philosophy of art. Lapid’s astoundingly assured two feature films, 2011’s Policeman (opening this […]
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James Franco, Vince Jolivette Launch Online Screenwriting Class
Continuing to disprove the assertion that there are 24 hours in a day, prodigious multi-hyphenate James Franco, who has taught at USC, UCLA, CalArts and NYU, and his Rabbit Bandini producing partner Vince Jolivette are launching another new venture: an online course, “Introduction to Screenwriting for Short Films,” on the Skillshare site. Over 30 short video lessons beginning screenwriters will learn the craft by penning an eight-page adaptation of one of three texts: John Steinbeck’s Pastures of Heaven, a story from The Spoon River Anthology, or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small-Town Life. Right now […]
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Nigeria Turns Out Two Boko Haram Movies
For even casual observers of the Nigerian film industry, it’s not surprising news that the nation’s second largest-employer (behind agriculture) has already churned out two films about the April kidnapping of 276 girls by Boko Haram: at an average of 50 movies a week, the industry makes a routine point of speedily incorporating topical concerns. Last year’s Boko Haram: The Movie (understandably retitled Nation Under Siege at home) is far from unique, with a particularly high-profile example in 2012’s Last Flight to Abuja, a plane crash drama inspired by the nation’s spate of air disasters that coincidentally premiered just after […]
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Seed&Spark Partners with American Express’ Digital Distribution Service
On Monday, it was announced that the crowdfunding and streaming platform Seed&Spark would partner with American Express’ AmEx NOW distribution service in an effort to bring their titles to an audience of 67 million households. AmEx will select five films a month (both shorts and features) from Seed&Spark’s library to screen on their interactive TV channel, AmEx NOW. The first crop of films includes features Like The Water, The Man Who Ate New Orleans, Mana’olana: Paddle for Hope, and shorts Tick Tock Time Emporium and Lex. Filmmaker spoke to Seed&Spark’s Director of Content, Amanda Trokan, about the details of the new initiative and the open submissions process. Filmmaker: In collaborating […]
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This is the Electro-Optic Camera, the World’s First DSLR
A few years ago, former Kodak engineer James McGarvey posted photographs and information about the world’s first DSLR camera, which he worked on at the government’s request in 1987 as part of Kodak’s Federal System Division. Along with a team of three others, McGarvey designed an Electro-Optic Camera “intended for unobtrusive use” in situations requiring a film camera. It’s unclear whether this first prototype still exists, but McGarvey scanned his 8×10 photos of the finished product and put them online, along with an admirably detailed explanation of the camera’s circuitry and supplementary parts. The only sample image that remains (army […]
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Watch: David Fincher’s Zodiac and the Art of the Insert
Within David Fincher’s filmography, Zodiac has always struck me as something special, if not anachronistic, for its handling of the police procedural genre. Perhaps it’s because, despite legions of so-called confessors, its true-life case was never closed. Appropriately, the film seems less concerned with tidy plotting than the psychosis — personal, collective and social — such a lingering mystery can create. Still, for all the film’s meta-textual aspirations, Fincher is, at heart, a narrative filmmaker and does relate the necessary details with a compendium of insert shots. They are all spliced together here in this supercut from Josh Forrest.
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Edge of Tomorrow: The Anxiety of Expendability
Despite perpetual predictions of the imminent end of Tom Cruise’s viability as a box office draw — a fate presumably tied to his Scientology, perceived egotism or the general difficulties of maintaining longterm A-list status — the actor keeps trucking along in vehicles that, consciously or not, tap into anxiety about how he’s perceived. There is, most notably, the precedent of Vanilla Sky, which seemed like a mid-life crisis writ large: a movie about a wealthy, successful man whose sudden downfall is precipitated by facial disfigurement — surely as much an actor’s nightmare as much as anything. This type of […]
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Data Points Emerge in the VOD Landscape
Lately, it’s seemed like I’ve been inadvertently launching a weekly VOD column, but here is yet another contrarian and unexpected entry in the financially-shrouded market’s set of data points. Over the weekend, Radius-TWC released their digital grosses for The Unknown Known and 20 Feet From Stardom at $1 million and $1.3 million, respectively. In the exclusive report, co-president Tom Quinn offered his reasoning behind the films’ release strategies (“Errol Morris has a heavy following on Twitter”), while the author Brian Brooks points out that although VOD is assumed to be a major source of revenue, “some execs have noted that tabulating nontheatrical grosses is inherently not the […]
