Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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The Questions You’re Asked at Film Festivals: On the Meanings and Evasions of Movie Small Talk
Every week I send out an email editor’s letter that isn’t published here on the site. Our weekly newsletter also includes lists of movie openings, festival deadlines and other, hopefully useful, information. I often use the newsletters to riff on ideas or try out topics that might later make their way to the site or print magazine, and I always ask for feedback. A couple of weeks ago I wrote the below piece on the four questions you get asked at film festivals, and it prompted a smart reply from filmmaker and script doctor Fernanda Rossi, printed her with permission. […]
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Report from Big Sky: Tips on Documentary Pitching
Given the recent Presidential threats to refugees and immigrants, it seemed only fitting that The New Neighbors Project: Self-Directed Stories from the New American West, which aims to put cameras in the hands of refugees and immigrants in Montana, won the inaugural pitch competition for Tribeca Film Institute’s IF/Then Pitch competition during the recent 14th annual Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Missoula, Montana. Directed and produced by Bryan Bello, The New Neighbors Project plans to create a series of short documentaries through workshops which teach refugees media production skills so they can direct their own stories. Developed by Tribeca Film Institute (TFI), IF/Then is designed to support short […]
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Five Questions for The Last Laugh Director Ferne Pearlstein
Originally published during the Tribeca Film Festival, where the doc on humor and the Holocaust had its premiere, here is Paula Bernstein’s interview with director Ferne Pearlstein about The Last Laugh. The film is opening in theaters today and plays in New York at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas. There has been no shortage of documentaries about the Holocaust but, until now, none of them have featured Sarah Silverman, Chris Rock and Louis C.K. In Ferne Pearlstein’s The Last Laugh, which premieres today at the Tribeca Film Festival, she delves into the history of humor about the Holocaust, exploring the ethical questions […]
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The Yakuza, Interiors and Chilly Scenes of Winter: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Picks
Sydney Pollack’s The Yakuza (1975) is an idiosyncratic but fascinating blend of incongruous tones made all the stranger by the difference in sensibilities among the men behind the camera. The film started as a script by brothers Paul and Leonard Schrader, who sold it for a boatload of cash thanks to the high-concept premise: an ex-soldier from the U.S. travels to Japan and infiltrates the underworld in a mash-up of the American action flick and the Asian martial arts film. Once Pollack came on board to direct the movie became something less commercial but, in its way, more compelling; uncomfortable […]
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Bleak Moments: Ronald Bronstein on Frownland
This interview with Frownland director Ronald Bronstein (a 2007 25 New Face) by fellow 25’er David Lowery was originally published in 2006. It is being reposted this week as Frownland receives a rare NYC screening this coming Sunday at the Alamo Drafthouse — projected by Bronstein himself. Click for tickets. Traveling on the festival circuit and spending days in darkened theaters, one grows accustomed to the ebb and flow of certain trends in independent film. Talkative, shakily digital twentysomething dramedies; sensitive tone poems; documentaries both edgy and lyrical. Then a film like Ronald Bronstein’s Frownland comes out of nowhere and […]
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Moonlight Scores a Record Six Independent Spirit Awards, Including Best Picture and Best Director
Moonlight was the big winner at the 2017 Independent Spirit Awards, held this afternoon in Santa Monica, CA. Barry Jenkins’ incisive and complex dramatic triptych won a record six awards, including Best Feature, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Editing and the Robert Altman Award for its ensemble performers. In this acceptance speech for the Best Director Award, Jenkins confirmed the film’s budget — $1.5 million! — and thanked “anyone whose name was on a call sheet on those 24 hot-ass days in Miami.” The only other multiple winner was Robert Eggers’ 16th-century supernatural horror film, The Witch, which […]
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23 Paces to Baker Street, Mildred Pierce, Linklater and Almodovar, and More: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
In a career-spanning interview with Polly Platt for the DGA oral history series, director Henry Hathaway dismissed his 1956 thriller 23 Paces to Baker Street as a throwaway, one of those studio assignments he took without much relish. It’s yet another example of why filmmakers cannot be trusted when it comes to their own films, for while the material is slightly shopworn (and owes an enormous and obvious debt to Hitchcock’s Rear Window), Hathaway frames it with meticulous care and artistry. The movie follows Van Johnson as a blind playwright who thinks he overhears a crime being plotted; after the […]
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~29 Movies Shot on 35mm Released In 2016
This is my third time rounding up the previous year’s US theatrical releases shot in 35mm, and this year’s number is substantively lower than 2014 (39) and 2015 (~64). This seems like an anomaly, not a permanent trend: following the high-profile push by J.J. Abrams et al. to force studios to pony up for a certain amount of Kodak celluloid for the forseeable future, the company seems solvent enough (and they’re bringing back Ektachrome!). Some celluloid regulars (Spielberg, Nolan, Abrams, Tarantino) sat the year out, while Woody Allen jumped to digital, and there are fewer straggler releases that were completed three […]
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Catching Bullets in the Rye
Hitler believed that movies were much better for propaganda than books or newspapers. He thought a pictorial presentation of an idea could reach more people, faster, with no effort needed on the viewer’s part. His minister of Nazi propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, emphasized the escapism aspect of film. Goebbels wanted movies that were big and loud and glamorous, and that would be distracting to the population, with dark subliminal messages wrapped inside the pizzazz. Researchers recently reported that the rate of gun violence in American PG-13 motion pictures is now higher than that of R-rated films. When we see these gun […]
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Kubrick Connections in One Million Years B.C. and Two for the Road; Plus Edge of Seventeen and the Pure Cinema Podcast: Jim Hemphill’s Home Viewing Recommendations
Don Chaffey’s One Million Years B.C. (1966) is probably best remembered for its iconic poster image of scantily clad cavewoman Raquel Welch, but revisiting it via Kino Lorber’s excellent new Blu-ray release reveals it to be a far more — and in some ways less — interesting film than that. Less in the sense that it doesn’t really deliver the sexy goods promised by the famous marketing, but more for film buffs who will delight in the movie’s multitude of connections to other, often wildly disparate, classics of the era. It’s a surprisingly experimental movie in some ways, telling its […]
