Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Week Four at the Edit Center
Monday brings more scene analysis! We watch three scenes: one from Fearless, one from Punch Drunk Love, and one from Mulholland Drive; all of them are specifically chosen not just for picture, but also for sound. The scene from Punch Drunk Love is one I remember especially well. Adam Sandler’s character discovers a lone harmonium in the street. It sits in near silence. Sandler stares at it. The silence extends and then is abruptly broken as a truck zooms by – but we see the truck approach way before we hear it … which is jarring in an effective way, […]
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ABEL FERRARA ON “KING OF NEW YORK” AND “4:44” AT THE NYFF
Perhaps the chilliest press conference I ever attended, one in which the conflicts of the movie seemed to drift right off the celluloid into the audience and then back onto the stage, occurred when Abel Ferrara’s The King of New York played the New York Film Festival in 1990. I was thrilled by the film, particularly its concluding adagio, in which Christopher Walken bleeds out in the back of a taxi cab stuck amidst the traffic of Times Square. The lights came up, and Ferrara, Walken, Wesley Snipes and some others from the cast walked onstage. The questions were contentious. […]
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IFP EMERGING VISIONS PROGRAM…REFLECTIONS
Now that I’m a seasoned blogger with two blog entries under my belt, this entry concludes my foray into this type of writing with my reflections on the Emerging Visions Program. Just as my first blog entry received positive feedback, a colleague praised my second entry. All this praise could go to my head, particularly since this last time he was so earnestly descriptive about the piece, calling it: “Wonderfully wonderful. Wonderful wonderful. Wonderfully.” He’s adorable – he’s European and is still mastering English adjectives. But his sentiment rings true. The entire experience was overwhelming, and I’m not sure I […]
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FASHION FILMS BENEFIT THE BELCOURT THEATER
The nD Festival, which brings together film, fashion and music, held its fashion show this week at the Belcourt Theater in Nashville. (Here’s a report from photographer Heidi Jewell.) The fest benefits the theater, and at the show short films by James Clauer, Kristin Barlowe and David McClister were shown. Each featured the work of one designer, and all three can be seen here. Embedded below is Clauer’s, a psychodramatic trip to the carnival outfitted by Steven Alan. Some of you will remember Clauer’s striking short, Aluminum Fowl, and his work on Big River Man. Reportedly, Clauer’s debut feature, When […]
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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.
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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 […]
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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 […]
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“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 […]
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“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 […]
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STEVE JOBS, 1955 – 2011
R.I.P., Steve Jobs. Below, his 2005 Stanford University commencement speech.
