Filmmaking
Filmmaking
-
Trailer Watch: The Skin I Live In
Here’s the teaser for Pedro Almodovar’s Cannes-bound The Skin I Live In. It’s been described as a horror film, and this clip does have a bit of Franju in it. (Click the headline if you can’t see the clip.)
-
THE ONLY CAT VIDEO YOU’LL FIND HERE
I know cat videos and the internet go hand in hand. But for years I’ve resisted. Until now. Because it’s amazing. Here, a cat being given a bath. (Click on the headline if you don’t see the video.)
-
Cannes : Films I’m Hoping Will Work Me Into A (Scentless) Sweat
The Australian-born critic Shane Danielsen wrote an amusing piece for Indiewire about this year’s Berlin Film Festival. He compared the smell outside some of the screening rooms to that of sperm. I remember it being stinky, but not that particular odor. Shane is, however, a reliable source. One of two things at Cannes that really gets on my nerves is the smell inside the press screenings, especially those that take place at 8:30 a.m. The 5000-seat theater is packed. No pun intended, but these projections are the pits, the lower depths of hygiene. Maybe it’s time constraints or perhaps cultural practices, but you […]
-
TRAILER WATCH: “MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE”
Less than one year after Sean Durkin’s short, Mary Last Seen, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival comes this new trailer for the feature that resulted from it. (Click on the headline if you don’t see the video.) Durkin was one of our “25 New Faces” of 2010, and now his feature, which premiered at Sundance, has its international premiere at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard section. From Jason Guerrasio’s interview with Durkin: I made Mary Last Seen to have something to send out with the feature script,” Durkin admits. But after taking a second pass at the edit […]
-
AMY SEIMETZ BEGINS “SUN DON’T SHINE”
From an email from director, actress and producer Amy Seimetz: I am making my next feature– Sun Don’t Shine. I have started a ChipIn site for it. 10% of the funds raised will be donated to a shelter for abused women and children in Florida, which I volunteered at in high school. Feel free to donate what you can or pass it along. You can read more about the film and donate here. …And yes– our donation to the shelter is a hint to the plot. Here’s more from the film’s website, which contains a blog with updates on the […]
-
Lord Byron — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Lord Byron opens on Friday, May 6, 2011, at the reRun Gastropub in Dumbo. Read Zack Godshall’s “Revolution and Apocalypse: The Lord Byron Manifesto” if you haven’t already, then visit the film’s official website to learn more.) Zack Godshall’s Lord Byron was not shot on the Canon 5D (aka, the everybody’s-using-it-so-you-should-too-consumer-grade-Digital-SLR-camera-of-the-very-moment !). Instead, Godshall used a Sony Z1U that he purchased all the way back in 2005 (the horror!). This means that the movie’s images were captured at a 29.97 frame rate, as opposed to the more cinematic 23.98. Which is to say that this 2011 narrative feature has a […]
-
The Madness Of Full Metal Jacket
“Matthew, don’t allow yourself to ask “Why is he doing this to me?” Wonder why is he doing this to himself.” The blown-to-hell chaos of productions like Apocalypse Now, Fitzcarraldo and Jaws are often evoked as legendary examples of disasters turned into classic motion pictures, but after reading Matthew Modine’s Full Metal Jacket Diary, I get the feeling that was par for Stanley Kubrick. It’s one thing to hear stray anecdotes about life on his films, but it’s something quite different to swim through a first-person account of an entire project — an account that isn’t even a memoir but […]
-
Zenith Creator Vladan Nikolic
As Vladan Nikolic’s Zenith continues its slow roll-out — finishing its U.S. screenings while premiering on Amazon and iTunes — I thought I’d post on the blog this piece on the film that originally ran in slightly different form in our Winter, 2011 issue. “What is Zenith?” was the question posed on About Top Secret and other conspiracy-related websites last Spring. Paranoid-minded posters jumped in and followed a breadcrumb-trail of online clues relating to everything from the Bavarian Illuminati and fluoridated drinking water to biochemistry and the New World Order. They clicked through a maze of 50 other websites (priestoftruth.com, […]
-
THE RETURN OF M DOT STRANGE
Out of all the 25 New Faces we’ve done in my time at the magazine one of my favorites is M dot Strange. The DIY whiz behind the animated feature We Are The Strange, M dot has been laying low the last four years. So I was ecstatic when he emailed me the first teaser for his next feature, Heart String Marionette. (He also sent an exclusive still from the film, which is above.) M dot hasn’t gone into detail about what the film is about, but watching this it looks like many of his trademarks are returning — demented […]
-
Director Alex Gibney on Catching Hell
Few documentary filmmakers’ careers are as fascinating to follow as that of Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), and that’s not just because of the consistent quality of his films, but because of the astonishing rate at which he produces them. In the midst of three other projects — an untitled Wikileaks documentary in pre-production; The Road Back, about Lance Armstrong, in post-production; and the newly completed Magic Bus, about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters — Gibney was at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival with his sports documentary Catching Hell, which […]
