Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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MUSIC VIDEO WATCH: ANTONY AND THE JOHNSONS, TOM WAITS
It’s rare that one week brings not one but two ambitiously cinematic, outside-the-box music videos. The first is “Cut the World,” from Antony and the Johnsons and directed by Nabil. Starring Willem Dafoe, Carice Van Houten and Marina Abramovic, it starts out like a bittersweet tale of office longing… and then turns into something else. From Tom Waits and ’80s music video superstar director Matt Mahurin is “Hell Broke Luce,” which Waits describes as picturing “an enlightened drill sergeant yelling the hard truths of war to a brand new batch of recruits. The video grew from the gnawing image of […]
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OSCILLOSCOPE PICKS UP “ONLY THE YOUNG”
Oscilloscope Pictures has added to its consistently strong catalog of films by snapping up Only the Young, the debut feature from documentarians Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims. The film made its debut at True/False earlier this year and won Silverdocs shortly afterwards, while its directors made it onto our “25 New Faces” list for 2012. In his profile of Tippet and Mims, Scott wrote the following aboutOnly the Young: One day, [Tippet and Mims] met high school seniors Kevin Conway and Garrison Saenz at a skate park in Canyon Country, an economically ravaged town located within Santa Clarita, Calif. Skaters, Christians […]
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TRAILER WATCH: “WRONG”
Tim League’s Drafthouse Films yesterday acquired the Sundance 2012 title Wrong, the latest film from French director Quentin Dupieux (aka dance music star Mr Oizo), the man responsible for last year‘s Rubber and the forthcoming Wrong Cops, starring Marilyn Manson. So now’s as good a time as any to post what is one of the most insane trailers I’ve seen in a long time. Even if the film doesn’t turn out to be fantastic, it certainly seems like it will be, at the very least, distinctively different. Let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.
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LOCARNO CRITICS NOTEBOOK #2
Philosophical musings on the nature of time, an unlikely friendship between a sexy Cali chick and an elderly woman, a bizarrely fast-forwarded comical look at a very sad life, and an indictment of systemic oppression in China: these are the subjects of the four films from Locarno’s main competition (“Concorso internazionale”) that I’ve caught over the past few days. First on the docket is Peter Mettler’s intriguing but disappointing—relative to his other work, at least—The End of Time, an epic non-narrative film about the multitude of perspectives that render an objective definition of linear time meaningless. At times expressive and […]
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CHEMO INSTEAD OF GRASS
A rough road from the existential world to the sickie ward to the movie screen, dodging hungry demons and embracing cinematic gems, while maintaining a clear eye on the tall grass on the horizon. For several years, my life revolved around attending film festivals and screening movies and writing reviews. Then the bomb dropped. The C-bomb! Now I’m fighting cancer and enduring chemotherapy and struggling as a whacked-out Chemo Head. Unlike Speed Heads and Flop Heads and Crack Heads, whose chem-soaked brains are tightly wrapped around a single heat-seeking obsession and whose emotions are riveted to one Pavlov […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #148
Second #6909, 115:09 (Note: there are six posts remaining in the project, which will conclude with #154 on August 24.) 1. The seconds preceding this frame show Sandy and Jeffrey in the hallway outside Dorothy’s apartment, embracing, kissing, the shot slowly blowing out to blinding white before fading back into this shot, a close-up of Jeffrey’s ear as he lays dozing (dreaming?) on a lounge chair in his parents’ back yard. 2. The black frame, from earlier, as balance. 3. Is Jeffrey emerging from the dream that has been the film? When Jeffrey awakes in his lawn chair in his […]
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JUAN IS THE LONELIEST NUMBER: LATINBEAT AT FSLC
Solitude: It can come from choice, or by default. An unusual number of movies made across South and Central America over the past year have as a central theme the existential state of loneliness, be it operative or merely a hovering threat. In an umbrella culture that honors celebration, music, and gossip, being shunned, marginalized, or discarded is a declaration of non-being, a metaphoric death sentence. Does the stereotype of Latin Americans as gregarious, affable extroverts hold water? The annual Latinbeat exhibition at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (August 10-23), curated by Marcela Goglio and Richard Pena, measures the […]
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BACK IN TAHRIR
Below Italian filmmaker Saverio Pesapane, who is working on Devotional, a documentary about 2012 presidential elections in Egypt, Russia and the U.S., describes his experiences shooting in Egypt earlier this year. Pesapane has an ongoing Indiegogo campaign for Devotional, which you can contribute to here. I was in Egypt four times between December and June 2012. Everything started with a request from the curators of the International Architecture Rotterdam Biennale to make a film on the Nile Valley for the 2012 exhibition. The first time I went, in December 2011, I spent two weeks there, including New Year’s Eve. We […]
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SHOOTING WITH A DISABILITY
Chicago-based filmmaker Jack Marchetti currently has a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for 4 of a Kind, his debut feature. Below he writes about the uniquely pressing situation that he is facing with this production. “Action!” The actors perform. The camera operator frames the shot. You focus on the monitor. The boom operator steadies the mic. You watch as your work, your writing, comes to life. You smile. You yell “Cut!” and doubt creeps in. Was that good enough? Did we get it? This isn’t simple indecision, it’s something you’ve dealt with most of your life. This isn’t a lack […]
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A QUICK SAIL THROUGH THE 21ST ANNUAL WOODS HOLE FILM FESTIVAL
Two days is not nearly enough time to cover the Woods Hole Film Festival, which started as a “one day, one hour” event over two decades ago, and now for eight days takes over this tiny idyllic town on the Cape, otherwise known for its world famous Oceanographic Institution, and where the moneyed can catch a ferry to Martha’s Vineyard. Luckily, I used my 48 hours wisely, hopping from venue to quaint venue – including the Lillie Auditorium at the Marine Biological Laboratory, the 120-seat Woods Hole Community Hall, and the 70-seat Old Woods Hole Fire Station – and taking […]
