Second #6439, 107:19 Jeffrey is about to enter Dorothy’s apartment where he’ll find a hellish scene of Frank’s human butchery. The frame captures his vulnerability, his exposed back to the implied danger of the frame’s open space. The red light at the end of the hall, the sharp-edged shadow across the far door, the tar-pit black hallway floor, and the faint ringing noise on the soundtrack, like something deeply broken in the building itself, all conspire to create a feeling that verges on existential terror. In the pan and scan 1987 VHS version (the photo below is of the film […]
Director Mark Raso, whose short film Under won a Student Academy Award earlier this year, will be writing a series of blog entries about making his feature debut with a microbudget movie shot in Copenhagen, Denmark. This is his first dispatch. After watching an inspiring Q&A with director Mike Cahill at an IFP screening of Another Earth in February of this year, my colleague and the producer of our film Mauro Mueller turned to me and said, “Let’s do it, no matter what.” I agreed. Five months later, I find myself in Copenhagen, Denmark, two weeks out on principal photography on my […]
Martin Donovan is destined to be forever remembered for his remarkable actor-director partnership with Hal Hartley during indie film’s halcyon days of the early to mid 1990s. In era-defining movies such as Trust, Simple Men and Amateur, Donovan was Hartley’s on-screen simulacrum, a smart, softly spoken man who was simultaneously familiar and enigmatic. While Hartley’s work is sadly not nearly as popular or present as it once was, it’s fitting that Donovan has made his debut feature as a writer and director with Collaborator, a knowing and witty cinematic chamber piece that feels nostalgic for the more culturally sophisticated times […]
I was born in 1959. Filmically speaking, it was the year of Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, one of the early films of the French New Wave. Truffaut along with Godard, Varda and others were fighting what they saw as the tired narrative of post-war French films. 1959 was also the year that John Cassavetes made his debut with Shadows, a movie he described as being about “the little people – the ones Hollywood doesn’t talk about.” The film couldn’t get a U.S. distributor but still managed to win the Critics Award at the Venice Film Festival. This helped secure […]
Second #6392, 106:32 If you’re of a certain age, you first saw Blue Velvet on VHS (Karl-Lorimar Video) in 1987, in its over-saturated, pan and scan version, which eliminated nearly 40% of the framed image (below). This is Sandy in her father’s home office, on the phone to the police station, trying desperately to reach her father to safeguard Jeffrey, who is on his way to Dorothy’s apartment. “We don’t know his whereabouts at this time,” the voice tells her from the other end of the line. In the VHS version, Sandy is psychedelic, illuminating the screen with her desire. […]
You never know where an interesting project can come from — a friend, a client or even from Twitter. Such was the case for Boston-based d.p. Todd Mahoney, who spent ten days documenting the progress of The Solar Odyssey Project after seeing a tweet looking for someone to sub for their regular d.p. The Solar Odyssey is an attempt to cover the waterways of “The Great Loop” in a solar-powered boat. The project is led by skipper and adventurer Jim Greer, and technologist and host Philip Hodgetts. In part 1 of this interview, I spoke to Todd the day after […]
First there was the “Look here, internet girl” phenomenon and now there’s Kevin Porter‘s Supercut of recycled Aaron Sorkin dialogue, which is over 500,000 views so far on YouTube. The guy who wrote The Social Network is getting massively disrupted by viral internet commentary. From Porter: This video is a tribute to the work of Aaron Sorkin: the recycled dialogue, recurring phrases, and familiar plot lines. This is not intended as a critique but rather a playful excursion through Sorkin’s wonderful world of words. Sorkin is a smart guy. When will he use the internet for his own witty riposte? […]
If you’re like me, you watched the product demo for Google Glass, found its hipster-targeting — learning about a new band from a street poster? — silly and didn’t think too much more about it. I mean, don’t we need to find a way to interact with our personal computing devices less, not more? But this morning after reading Jon Evans’ TechCrunch piece, “Heads Up! This Was Google’s Apple Moment,” I’m changing my mind. As a product category, Google Glass has a lot of potential — potential that’s fascinating and scary. In the fascinating category are some immediate uses for […]
Filmmaker, Doctor Who fan and internet addict Jeremiah McDonald was rummaging around in his closet and found a VHS tape of his 12-year-old self interviewing him in the future. That tape is now the past, so McDonald has returned the favor. Watch his incredible film below and think about what you’d learn from a similar encounter.
Second #6345, 105:45 Sandy, in her room, on the phone with Jeffrey after the naked, bruised, Dorothy has just revealed—in front of Jeffrey, Sandy, and Mrs. Williams—that Jeffrey “put his disease” in her. This frame comes from a shot that lasts just under one minute and that is so completely and dramatically sincere as to give lie to the notion that Blue Velvet is somehow a parody or an instance of postmodern Camp. Sandy’s question to herself when she gets off the phone with Jeffrey—“Where is my dream?”—offers a momentary gap in the film. For if most of the time […]