Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Do Brands’ Lives Matter? Whiskey Fist Director Gillian Wallace Horvat on When Story and Advertising Collapse
In my new short, Whiskey Fist — premiering Friday, September 10 at SXSW — the characters work in front of a sign that reads “Brands’ Lives Matter.” The font is ripped off from Ed Ruscha and the fluorescent ombre background is purloined from posters of the kind stapled to telephone poles advertising local reggae or salsa concerts. Such an insidious combination of high and low appropriation characterizes the vanguard of marketing today, that joking/not joking tone that one would find flourishing in the branding firm where Whiskey Fist takes place. Branding’s sophistication is more seductive than ever, and even more […]
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Stitchers, Hooperman and Dennis Hopper’s Colors: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
I’d like to kick this week’s column off with a pair of television recommendations: one a smart and stylish contemporary series that’s currently streaming, the other a retrospective pick on DVD that deserves to be better known. Stitchers puts an ingenious spin on one of the most shopworn of all television genres, the procedural, breathing new life into the form via an elegant visual style and audacious premise. The show follows Kirsten Clark (Emma Ishta), a Caltech student with a medical condition that wreaks havoc on her sense of time. It also makes her a desirable candidate for a covert […]
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“Porn is Everywhere, Almost Like a Collective Unconscious”: Bruce LaBruce on his XConfessions Short Refugee’s Welcome
Bruce LaBruce is one busy renaissance man. The queercore icon — director of 11 features (not to mention numerous short films and music videos, and several theater works), visual artist and author — has now teamed up with Erika Lust’s XConfessions to release Refugee’s Welcome. The story of a Syrian refugee in Berlin who both suffers a hate crime and finds a poetic (and explicitly sexual) connection with a Czech punk, the short will be available on Eroticfilms.com (NSWF link, obviously!) on March 9th. (And today only for free — use the code BRUCE). Filmmaker spoke with LaBruce — who […]
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Blackmagic Announces Color Control Panels and URSA Mini Pro
Blackmagic announced some exciting new products last week; two control panels specifically designed for color correction work, a Linux version of DaVinci Resolve, and a new version of their Mini URSA camera, the Mini URSA Pro. Color Control Panels When Blackmagic acquired DaVinci Resolve, they took it in a new direction; they separated it from the expensive external control panel it had previously required, created Macintosh and Windows versions, released free versions, and greatly expanded the editing functionality of the application. In short, they seemed to be turning it away from a color editing powerhouse into an all-in-one production tool. […]
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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 […]
