Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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“I Do Take Pride in the Fact that All of the Parties Feel Authentic and Accurate”: Jessica Switch on Producing the Sundance Comedy/Drama, Cha Cha Real Smooth
The big sale — to Apple for a reported $15 million — of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, Cha Cha Real Smooth is writer, director and lead actor Cooper Raiff’s follow-up to his 2020 debut, SHITHOUSE. Again essaying a twentysomething young man navigating the indeterminate period before real life and real romance takes hold, Cha Cha Real Smooth finds Raiff’s character, Andrew, working a dead-end fast-food job while working side gigs as a bar mitzvah party starter and babysitter. When he demonstrates a rapport with a 12-year-old autistic girl (Vanessa Burghardt), her mother, Domino (played by Dakota Johnson, also a […]
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“Something Makes us Feel Like We can be Saved When Action Stars are Elected as Our Leaders”: Martika Ramirez Escobar on Leonor Will Never Die
Thrown from a second floor window, a box television clocks old Leonor (Sheila Francisco) square on the head. She wakes up inside her work-in-progress movie script, an homage to ’80s Pinoy action movies, able to steer the rest of the unwritten plot in first person. Back in reality, the retired movie director lies comatose in a hospital bed while her sons–one flesh and blood, the other a ghost–wander and wonder around, trying to option their mother’s unfinished script to pay the bills. Will Leonor wake up in time, if at all, to retain agency of her comeback story? When you […]
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Commercial Breaks: How AVOD is Providing Independent Film Distribution Opportunities
As theatrical audiences continue to shrink due to COVID, DVD and Blu-ray sales wane and, for filmmakers, streamer licensing deals trend lower as companies prioritize original production, the film sales distribution business is transforming in real time. We’re now in the age of hybrid windowing, and with it a lot of head scratching and uncertainty. But hopeful independent filmmakers, sales agents and distributors are finding that one release model is generating unexpected upticks in revenue: AVOD (advertising-supported video on demand). “According to trade news and distributors I speak with, AVOD is one of the fastest growing categories and buyers for […]
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The Kybalion: A Strange Journey from Short Form to Feature
Standing at just 5’6”, I often jokingly refer to myself as “Ronni Thomas. Short, filmmaker….” But in all honesty I am part of a very small demographic of film makers who prefer making short-form docs, most of my films being between four and 20 minutes. Nowadays, what could be a compelling 30 to 40-minute masterpiece is typically and unnecessarily stretched out into six one-hour long episodes across several seasons. So, a few years back when my friend and long-time collaborator, Mitch Horowitz, came to with me with a proposition to direct a feature-length adaptation of a 1908 occult manuscript, The […]
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Gessica Généus’s Freda: A Female Gaze on Life in Haiti
The making of Freda, the narrative feature debut of actor, singer and documentarian Gessica Généus, shot between lockdowns in the endlessly troubled streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, was “like a sprint,” says Généus, “I was rushing, I didn’t sleep.” Freda is a family drama masterfully set against the backdrop of the chaos of life in Haiti. With a wry eye on societal issues, Freda offers a heartbreaking and complex female gaze on life in a machismo culture. Freda received a standing ovation at its Un Certain Regard screening at the 2021 Cannes festival and was only the second Haitian film to […]
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The Year in Nonfiction Cinema: 21 Highlights of 2021
A highly personal hodgepodge of interviews, essays, coverage and quotes that stayed with me throughout (despite) this information overloaded year. Crime and Punishment Jon Alpert’s HBO doc Life of Crime: 1984-2020 (DOC NYC curtain raiser for Hammer to Nail) Thirty-six years following three street criminals in Newark, NJ culminates in one powerful, tightly-edited, two-hour journey. Stanley Nelson and Traci A. Curry’s Showtime doc Attica (interview with Curry for Filmmaker magazine, interview with former inmate Al Victory for Documentary magazine) A clear-eyed revisitation of the five-day, real-life, made-for-TV event that resulted in “the deadliest violence Americans had inflicted on each other in a single day since […]
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Indie Camera of the Year: Blackmagic Delivers Small in a Big Way
Since forever, I’ve gotten the question, “What camera should I buy?” This always comes from someone not in the market for an Alexa Mini or 8K RED, but instead something recent, capable, and cheap. Did I mention cheap? There’s no slam-dunk answer to this question, obviously, and never will be. No single camera is right for everybody or every situation. But among the wonderments of our 4K moment is the fact that virtually all 4K cameras make good pictures, taking into account their intended markets and price points. To wit, you only have to reach for that iPhone Pro in […]
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Wanting Less and Needing More: Minimalism, Maximalism, Ryusuke Hamaguchi and the Rest of 2021 in Film
There is a sign somewhere out in the desert (every designer knows where) like a motel sign, except that instead of “NO VACANCY” it says “SANS SERIF,” and the most important man in America is the man whose sole job is to pull the giant lever that turns “SANS” off or on, which he does once every ten years. The KonMari craze of the late 2010s, with its flat-pack packaging of deaccumulation into a lifestyle brand, represents the top of the decade-long pendulum arc that swings forever between minimalism and maximalism. When I still took the subway to work every […]
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Jim Hemphill’s Top Ten Blu-ray Releases of 2021
Compiling my annual list of the year’s ten best Blu-ray releases (or, to be more accurate, my ten personal favorites), I have come to the conclusion once again that reports of the death of physical media have been greatly exaggerated – there were easily another three or four dozen titles in 2021 worthy of placement on the list, and I can’t even begin to claim familiarity with more than a small percentage of everything that was released. But these are ten titles I can confidently recommend, not only for the fine transfers of superlative films but for the lovingly produced […]
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For Licorice Pizza’s Christmas Release, Some Theaters Left Out in the Cold
For art-house movie theaters, already struggling during the pandemic, the wide expansion of Paul Thomas Anderson’s critically acclaimed Licorice Pizza on December 25 was seen as a godsend. When the film opened in late November in just four locations, it generated the year’s best per-screen average (at $83,852) and continued to show staying power in its subsequent weeks in limited release. But last Tuesday, just as theaters were starting to promote their Christmas opening of the film, United Artists Releasing pulled it from hundreds of locations, inciting at least one exhibitor to cry “bah, humbug!” Originally set to be released […]
