Columns
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The Blue Velvet Project, #6
Second # 282 An establishing shot of downtown Lumberton/Wilmington, showing the courthouse (from the back) in the mid foreground. In the previous shot, we have just seen Jeffrey for the first time as he walks through the field, wearing black. He stops, picks up a stone, and throws it as some junk. He then keeps walking, his back to the camera. At this point, we don’t know who he is or where he’s going. That shot is followed by this, at second #282, a static shot that lasts three seconds. When I began this project I wondered how frequently frames […]
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Hell and Back Again — A Hammer and Nail Review
(Hell and Back Again premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. Its official theatrical run begins at the Film Forum on Wednesday, October 5th. As a selection in the DocuWeeks 2011 program, it opens theatrically in New York City at the IFC Center on Friday, August 19th, and in Los Angeles at Laemmle’s Sunset 5 on Friday, Sept. 2nd. Visit the film’s official website to learn more.) In recent years American war docs have largely moved away from exposés on corruption and bad government policy. Instead, the focus has shifted to small, largely apolitical stories about life in the military and the human cost of war. Hell and Back […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #5
Second #235 What is this? Where are we? In a weird, dreamlike echo of the Amity Island billboard (defaced with the black shark fin) from Jaws, the Welcome to Lumberton billboard is a nest of contradictions. Instead of a shark fin, there should be a monster lurking in the background pine trees. The woman looks to be freeze-dried straight out of the Cold War, and brings to mind Shelley Winters as Charlotte Haze in Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962). Could the awkward wave of her hand be any more artificial or uninviting? For a moment, we seem to have gone back […]
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The Microbudget Conversation: The No-Budget Way
I am overwhelmed and excited by the response from our last post…this truly is the conversation in action, and the reason I wanted to start this column. We also just got the word that our panel for SXSW is up on their site and ready to vote for. If you want to see us bring the conversation to SXSW then vote here! Many thanks in advance! In keeping with the idea of necessity and budget constraints from Nicole’s piece, I present to you with Mark Stolaroff. Mark is the fella behind the No-Budget Film School in L.A. and he’s here […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #4
Second #188 Jeffrey’s father has just suffered a stroke while watering his front yard, and has fallen to his back, writhing in pain, the hose that he still holds—in a sad and funny and helpless way—spraying water all around. That shot is followed by this one, as the camera pans slowly down, the background a blur, capturing the water in mid-air as Bobby Vinton sings “Blue Velvet,” which he had released in 1963, several months before the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The song, written by Bernie Wayne and Lee Morris, dates back to 1950. Wayne was a prolific composer, […]
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Lady Vengeance: Interview with Guillermo Del Toro
Guillermo del Toro, best known for directing aesthetically impressive, intellectually thoughtful horror films like Mimic and Pan’s Labyrinth, steps into a slightly different role this summer by presenting Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, a remake of one of his favorite films as a child. I spoke to del Toro about his decades-long dream of bringing this film to life, the connection between horror and spirituality, and what makes a dark basement so damn scary. Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark opens in theaters on August 26th. Filmmaker: I wanted to start by asking how you began working on the […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #3
Second #141 Some considerations: • Frederick Elmes’s lush, Freudian colors. • The hyper-red STOP sign, a warning to the audience? • The Eraserhead-like hair of the crossing guard. • The second and fourth child, carrying the same sort of brown paper lunch bag that Jeffrey would use later to transport the scissored ear to Detective Williams. • The cultishness of the film, already gathering in the open-furnace sky in the background. • The fact of SCHOOL taking up the entire lower-third of the screen, and the fact that Jeffrey is “home from school.” • The trust of children. • The […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #2
Second #94: Lynch had been thinking about Blue Velvet since at least as early as 1973, and while his previous two films (Dune and Elephant Man) had been based on well-known stories, Blue Velvet was a return to the trembling, inner-psychic terrain of Eraserhead. In an earlier version of the script, Jeffrey’s mom and his Aunt Barbara pick him up from the airport after he’s forced to leave college because of the financial burden of his stricken father’s medical bills. As they drive into town, there is this exchange: AUNT BARBARA: They tore down the A & P, Jeffrey. Did […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #1
And so we begin our year-long journey through Blue Velvet, stopping every 47 seconds. Although released in the U.S. in September 1986, the film lingered at the dark edges of the imagination until the spring of the following year, when it was released on home video by Karl-Lorimar. The rapid ascendency of the VCR and the proliferation of rental stores (in 1980 there were only approximately 2,500 rental stores in the U.S.; by 1987 this had increased to over 27,000) meant that Blue Velvet found its way into the very same sort of leafy small towns as Lumberton. The titles […]
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Now it’s Dark… The Blue Velvet Project
Last year, after becoming a fan of Nicholas Rombes’s “10/40/70” series at The Rumpus, I did a short interview with him for the blog. I asked about his approach to film criticism, which involves extrapolating larger meanings from a film’s isolated moments. (His “10/40/70” series critiqued films by looking at the scenes occurring at those precise minute marks). His reply: When I first started teaching film in the early 1990s, we’d screen them on via VHS tapes playing on VCRs hooked up to TV sets. Pausing a film for an extended period of time to look at the composition of […]
