Was it only last week that Sony announced the NEX-FS700, and had everyone wondering where this left the Canon C300? One week later and Canon has seemingly fired back a huge broadside, announcing not one, but two new cameras; the EOS-1D C, (a 4K video DSLR that Canon had pre-preannounced at the unveiling of the C300 late last year) and the C500, a true 4K version of the C300. Note that the C500 – like the C300 – will be available in two variants; one with an EF mount, and the other with a PL mount. For those who haven’t […]
Second #4794, 79:54 The gap between Frank and Ben, and the more radical gap between the viewer and Blue Velvet. For whom does Ben sing? He begins by singing for Frank, but then he seems to lose himself in “In Dreams,” the same way that Dorothy loses herself in her rendition of “Blue Velvet.” Ben’s face at this moment registers a catastrophic loss, his secret loss, and in this frame he’s more humanized than perhaps any character in the film. His eyes look away from Frank and into something even darker. In his book The Vital Illusion, Jean Baudrillard wrote: […]
Here’s a new video from Richard Kern, a celebration of West Coast punk/skate culture by OFF!, which features ex-Black Flag singer Keith Morris.
Four additional distribution outlets — Microsoft Xbox, SnagFilms, Sony’s Video Unlimited Service and VUDU — have joined the Sundance Institute’s Artists Services program, Sundance Executive Director Keri Putnam announced today. “Audiences are accessing independent films via a range of platforms and storefronts, which speaks to the need for filmmakers to make their work available in a variety of ways,” Putnam said in a statement. “Beyond that, the more options we’re able to offer our filmmakers, the better able they are to customize their self-distribution programs and work towards individual goals for their films.” Artists Services is a program helping Sundance […]
(Post Mortem world premiered at the 2010 Venice Film Festival. It’s being distributed by Kino Lorber Incorporated and opens at the Film Forum in NYC on Wednesday, April 11, 2012. Visit the film’s page at the Kino Lorber website to learn more.) There is such a thing as pitch black comedy, and then there is the work of Chilean director Pablo Larraín, whose warped sense of humor deserves its own adjective. Tar black, maybe? With his latest two films, Larraín has returned to his country’s unpleasant recent past to try to make sense of what transpired. In Tony Manero, the Pinochet […]
Signs are everywhere. ARRI’s ALEXA swept TV series production in the U.S. Canon harnessed Hollywood pomp to launch its C300. RED placed an eight-page glossy fold-out to tout EPIC in April’s Vogue (“The camera that changed cinema is now changing fashion”). Sony shipped no less than 100 F65s, the first Super 35 camera with an 8K sensor. A year ago, in “Does Size Matter?” I surveyed the still budding field of large-sensor cameras for Filmmaker and described the industry’s growing embrace of the 120-year-old Super 35 format. Not only were existing cine and SLR lenses given a new lease on […]
Second #4747, 79:07 You, in one part of your brain, know that Ben is not really singing at this moment. But then, Roy Orbison is not singing, either. He is dead, although he was alive at the time of Blue Velvet (and credited the use of “In Dreams” in the film to helping revive his career). You know it’s lip-synched, and yet somehow it’s not. It can’t be. If this seems like a contradiction, then consider that the entire scene is a special case of black magic, culminating in Frank’s literal disappearance from the screen in a few minutes in […]
They say you have to know the rules to break them. And Drew Goddard is a man very familiar with how to write for genre, collaborating over the last decade with some of the biggest names in American horror and sci-fi. In 2008 Goddard penned the screenplay to J.J. Abram’s found-footage monster movie Cloverfield, and before that he served as a series writer on television shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Lost, and Alias. So it should come as no surprise that his directorial debut, Cabin in the Woods, not only pays homage to the genre tropes implied in […]
Back in the day Filmmaker took note of Peter Christian Hall’s independent drama Delinquent, and more recently we’ve followed his move into fiction writing. Now, film and literature are combining for the promotion of his new novel, American Fever, a dystopic tale about avian flu. With book trailers a requirement for new books, Hall has decided to let fans create one for American Fever — and win $1,000 in the process. What’s cool is that filmmakers can read the book for free and score their trailer to original music by Gang of Four’s Andy Gill. From the site of Hall’s […]
Over the last century, as Hollywood matured as an industry, it grew increasingly more conservative. The movie business evolved from a maverick entrepreneurial venture, then an innovator introducing groundbreaking new technologies like sound and color, and finally to an evermore-cautious enterprise. One example of this conservatism is the studios’ reactions to the transition from analog to digital media. Last year, a coalition led by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the music industry and a handful of digital rights holders, including games companies Sony and Nintendo, launched a major campaign to fight “piracy” by restricting the Internet. However, in […]