Filmmaking
Filmmaking
-
TRAILER WATCH: “YOUNG ADULT”
Here’s the new trailer for Jason Reitman’s follow up to Up in the Air. Titled Young Adult, it was written by Diablo Cody and stars Charlize Theron, who is the recipient of an IFP Gotham Tribute Award this year.
-
COCK OF THE WALK: THE NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL (PART THREE)
Three films, three male protagonists, all of whom fall for extended periods of time from their elevated perches. In this, the final installment of my coverage of the 49th edition of the New York Film Festival, we see how their descents are manifest in the newest works of three proven talents — okay, all of them men: British director Steve McQueen, the American Alexander Payne, and Frenchman Michel Hazanavicius. Michael Fassbender’s sexually obsessed Brandon, a seemingly calm, self-contained Manhattan business exec who keeps his personal life to himself in McQueen’s Shame (pictured above), would have been a much more challenging, certainly […]
-
The Blue Velvet Project, #26
Second #1222, 20:22 A bug man, a Jehovah’s Witness, and an anonymous cleaning man converge in the frame. It is near this point that Blue Velvet begins trembling under the weight of its own narrative expectations: what will Jeffrey find in Dorothy’s apartment? Will he get caught? What does Sandy really think of what’s happening? The framing follows the elegant horizontal lines of Jeffrey’s convertible, and the movement over the next few moments will follow the direction of the car, from right to left. Sandy holds copies of Awake! magazine, slipping into the role of Jeffrey’s accomplice and the religious […]
-
“TAKE SHELTER AND WEEKEND” — A HAMMER TO NAIL REMINDER!
(Visit the official websites for Take Shelter and Weekend to find out when they will be playing on a big screen near you.) Though I often complain about how content oversaturated and short-attention-span diseased our lives have become and how these factors have directly hindered the ability for any independent film to gain even a fraction of legitimate theatrical traction anymore, the truth is that at Hammer to Nail, we share in the guilt. We post reviews on/around the day of a film’s initial theatrical release in either NY/LA and don’t continue to remind readers when these films open in […]
-
“CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN” IS ALWAYS A GLASS MOSTLY EMPTY: ON “THE IDES OF MARCH”
Note: the following piece contains spoilers. One time in my fleeting youth, I encountered George Clooney in the Warner Brothers screening room on 53rd Street after a National Board of Review screening of Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German. This is before I had, despite my ongoing poverty and lack of renown, spent ample time around movie stars and the merely sort-of famous at sundry locations, both foreign and domestic, becoming relatively at ease in their strange company. I still often felt not unlike the protagonist of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, as he follows William Holden through a blustery New Orleans afternoon, sensing some […]
-
STEVE JOBS, 1955 – 2011
R.I.P., Steve Jobs. Below, his 2005 Stanford University commencement speech.
-
The Blue Velvet Project, #25
Second #1175, 19:35 Confession: the first time I saw Blue Velvet—and each subsequent viewing has only reinforced this—I’ve always felt that when Jeffrey pleads with Sandy at this moment (“Sandy, let’s just try the first part”) he’s talking about sex. What sort of plan is Jeffrey hatching, and is Sandy agreeing to? In their classic 1969 essay “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni ask whether it’s possible for any film to escape the ideological boundaries of its making. While most films, they argue (Marxist cultural determinists that they were!), can never break free of the gravitational forces of ideology, there […]
-
EASTERN PROMISES, WESTERN AVOWALS: THE NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL (PART TWO)
That undefinable thing called texture: It is a principal difference between cinematographic imagery from West and East. For starters, take a look at the wall show of French celebrity photos in the Walter Reade Theater’s Roy Furman Gallery, faces and torsos foregrounded with little or no regard for light or materials, and complete disregard for context. Then take a look at the stills pictured here from the four films reviewed below. In the Canadian/British A Dangerous Method, by David Cronenberg, and the American Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene, they are basically head shots, not particularly interesting, and they tell you little […]
-
A DAY OF EMERGING VISIONS
On the A train headed back to Williamsburg after a full day of Emerging Visions, Andrew Bird playing on my iPod. The day began with breakfast at Lincoln Center’s new Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center. One of my favorite moments of the day was at the breakfast when each of us had to introduce ourselves. We had to say what our craziest moment as a filmmaker was. I was reminded of the time I took the G train in the middle of the night wearing a prom-style dress while shooting a music video. The ultimate destination was Coney Island, and […]
-
IFP’s EMERGING VISION’S PROGRAM — THE DAY OF…
The day started off with a nice boost to my ego: another filmmaker and fellow blogger had recognized the masterful wit in my first blog entry and approached me about it. He noted that he was normally the funny one, and would now step up his game. I am competitive by nature so this was music to my ears: bring it! Only now I have to be funny again, which may be easier said than done. We began the day with the standard fare – introductions with a filmmakers’ twist: we were tasked to name our craziest venture as a […]
