Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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War of the Worlds, Time after Time and Legacies: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
In the 19 years since 9/11, no American director has responded to and examined the causes, impact, and aftermath of that day as rigorously and repeatedly as Steven Spielberg, which is ironic given how rarely his films are actually set in the present day. With a couple notable exceptions, all of Spielberg’s films since 9/11 take place in either the future (Minority Report, Ready Player One) or the past (Munich, Lincoln, Bridge of Spies, etc.). Yet his work couldn’t be more relevant or engaged with contemporary social and political issues; every single one of Spielberg’s post-A.I. movies is as much […]
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Maniac, Flashdance and Fatal Attraction: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Picks
In late 1979, Joe Spinell was a successful character actor who had appeared in major films by Coppola, Friedkin, Scorsese and Mazursky, but he wanted to go beyond supporting work to make a name for himself as a horror icon. His friend William Lustig was a 24-year old movie fanatic who had directed a couple of adult films and was hungry to graduate to mainstream features. Joining forces with producer Andrew Garroni, Lustig and Spinell scraped together $48,000 and started making Maniac, an extremely unpleasant – and extremely effective – study of a psychotic loner on a killing spree. They […]
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Canon Reformation (4): Vanilla Sky, Dig!
Low on the list of “unexpected things in the last two months that wouldn’t have occurred under pre-pandemic circumstances” but still notable: Rachel Handler publishing a long interview on Vulture with Cameron Crowe about Vanilla Sky. This is an infamously unloved movie, the beginning of Crowe’s decadent phase when he (unjustly) became something of a punchline, and regardless any retrospective defense/look back would logically happen next December, in time for the 20th anniversary. The current prompt, of course, is the eerie opening of Tom Cruise running through a totally empty Times Square, which, as they say, hits different now: “We were […]
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The Great Escape, “Tell Me” on Criterion Channel, and More: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
The Great Escape was a dream project for director John Sturges for years before the success of The Magnificent Seven finally enabled him to make it in 1962, and the countless hours he spent thinking about and planning the WWII epic are evident in every flawless shot. The true story of a group of Allied officers who plan and execute a daring escape from a Nazi POW camp, The Great Escape is an exhilarating celebration of ingenuity and skill by a director who honors his characters with some awfully impressive skill of his own. The movie is 172 minutes but […]
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Sundance Institute Announces 22 Documentary Fund Grantees
The Sundance Institute announced today the 22 projects from filmmakers all over the world that will receive funding from its Documentary Fund. Filmmakers from 19 countries with projects in all stages of production will receive unrestricted grant support totaling $525,000. “At Sundance Institute, we know that these unprecedented times demand creative and nimble support,” said Documentary Film Program interim Director, Kristin Feeley, and Documentary Film Fund Director, Hajnal Molnar-Szakacs in a press release. “We’re fortunate to have a collaborative and strong network of partners that allow us to ensure material support for these filmmakers as they develop bold new work, […]
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Watch: David Lynch’s 2015 Short Fire (Pożar)
David Lynch has kept typically busy during his quarantine, giving interviews about abusive workplaces and alluding to a variety of personal art projects he’s focused on. Just posted online to his YouTube channel, the animated short film Fire (Pożar) is not one of those projects but a 2015 short previously only shown at a USC concert. “The whole point of our experiment was that I would say nothing about my intentions and [Polish-American composer] Marek [Zebrowski] would interpret the visuals in his own way,” Lynch said at the time. “So I say it was a great successful experiment, and I loved the […]
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Quarantine Reading: David Mamet’s Three Uses of the Knife
As a publication about film, we find ourselves in the peculiar position of publishing during a moment when theatrical access to movies, and their ongoing future, is as much in question as everything else. During this suspension of normal filmwatching habits, we’ve reached out to contributors, filmmakers and friends, inviting them to find an alternate path to the movies by participating in a writing exercise engaging with any book about or lightly intersecting with film, in whatever way makes sense to them. Today: Brendan Byrne on David Mamet’s Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama. The […]
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Are Virtual Theaters Here to Stay?
When Toby Leonard, programming director at Nashville’s Belcourt Theatre, returned to the space for the first time since the COVID-19 shutdown began, a six-foot cardboard display for Never Rarely Sometimes Always struck his eye. Eliza Hittman’s film was four days into the first week of a planned platform release before it was pulled from theatrical exhibition and hadn’t yet made it to the Belcourt, but its physical teaser remained. “How many of these things were there and how many did they send around the country?,” Leonard wondered. Then he took it down. As exhibitors and distributors initially adjusted to no theatrical releases for […]
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Writer/Director Lynn Shelton, 1965 – 2020
Lynn Shelton, who wrote and directed features including Hump Day, Your Sister’s Sister and Laggies, and who directed numerous television episodes, died yesterday in Los Angeles of a previously undiagnosed blood disorder. She was 54. Long associated with the Seattle independent film scene, Shelton began feature filmmaking in her mid-30s, after working in a variety of other artistic mediums. She told Filmmaker in 2012, “As far back as I can remember I always knew I wanted to be an artist. Finding myself smitten with nearly every creative medium in existence probably made the fact that I ended up deeply exploring […]
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King Creole, To Catch a Thief and Gunsmoke: The Complete Series: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
The conventional wisdom among cineastes is that Elvis Presley’s best movie was the Don Siegel Western Flaming Star (1960), mainly thanks to the fact that it was one of the few times the singer worked with an important auteur. While I bow to no one in my admiration of Siegel in general and Flaming Star in particular, it’s less a great Elvis movie than a great movie that has Elvis in it; for a terrific film by a terrific director that’s also a supercharged vehicle for what Presley did best, one need look no further than 1958’s King Creole, which […]
