Columns
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How to Assemble a Rough Cut Two Days After Shooting Wraps: Editor Phillip J. Bartell on Miss You Already
Catherine Hardwicke’s razor-sharp blend of comedy and tragedy, Miss You Already, arrives on Blu-ray, DVD, and a variety of VOD platforms March 1. The story of best friends (played by Drew Barrymore and Toni Collette) struggling to deal with the fact that one of them has terminal cancer, it’s a film that walks a tonal tightrope: silly, devastating, sexy, angering, and bittersweet, the movie’s diverse range of effects is a testament to Hardwicke, her actors, and an ambitious script by Morwenna Banks. Pulling all of the elements together is editor Phillip J. Bartell, whose superb work on 2014’s Dear White […]
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Sex Ed: Stephanie Rothman’s The Student Nurses
During a moment of high drama in the very special cult item The Student Nurses, which runs in a restored version at the new Metrograph in New York’s Lower East Side for one week beginning March 11, a pretty young woman rudely dumps her frustrated doctor boyfriend in plain sight of the sexy roommates she trains with at a large LA hospital. On his way out, just before wishing a corny “Peace!” to the other vixens, who are seated side by side on the living room couch, he keeps the scene from wandering into the expected emotional terrain by lamenting to […]
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Making a Western in 31 Days: Jon Cassar on Forsaken
Director Jon Cassar breathes new life into the Western genre while honoring its traditions in Forsaken, a beautiful, haunting piece of work that will be released day and date on February 19. In a story reminiscent of Shane and Pale Rider, Kiefer Sutherland plays John Henry Clayton, a reformed gunslinger drawn back into action when he returns to his hometown and finds it under siege by an unscrupulous land grabber (Brian Cox). While sparring with Cox’s hired guns (led by Michael Wincott in a rich, thrillingly entertaining performance), Clayton also reconnects with an old love who has moved on (Demi […]
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Flesh and Blood: A War
Written and directed by Tobias Lindholm (A Hijacking), A War — one of the five nominees for Best Foreign Language Film — examines the divide between the military and domestic spheres in the life of Claus Pedersen (Lindholm regular Pilou Asbaek). He is unit leader of a small Danish NATO contingent in Afghanistan; his wife, Maria (Tuva Novotny), tries her best to hold down the home front, a battleground of another sort in which their three young children are non-lethal combatants. The separation of these domains becomes more and more clouded; the occasional satellite phone call is about all that […]
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Puppets and Pantyhose: DP Joe Passarelli on Anomalisa
Watching Anomalisa – the painfully human stop-motion animation film from co-directors Duke Johnson and Charlie Kaufman – the same thought flitted through my head as when I viewed The Revenant: “This is incredible, but it was probably a nightmare to work on.” Though free from the threat of hypothermia, the production of Anomalisa offered equally maddening difficulties. A tale of a depressed customer service guru (voiced by David Thewlis) and his fateful one-night stay in a Cincinnati hotel, Anomalisa took the greater part of two years to complete. Collecting mere seconds of usable footage per day, the film’s crew pieced […]
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Shooting a Movie in 25 Days for Blumhouse: Phil Joanou on The Veil
One of the best American suspense films of the last ten years sneaks onto VOD, iTunes, and Netflix streaming this week as director Phil Joanou’s The Veil arrives courtesy of Universal and Blumhouse. A movie in the subgenre that James Mangold once referred to as “the cinema of unease,” it’s a slow burn horror flick that skillfully utilizes the Blumhouse production model (which yielded The Purge, Sinister, and The Visit) to tell a slightly more ambitious – though no less unsettling – tale. Working from a subtle, complex, and ruthlessly original script by Robert Ben Garant, Joanou tells the story […]
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Prime Time: Jacob Gentry’s Synchronicity
Among Synchronicity director Jacob Gentry’s formidable gifts is a sharpened sensitivity to context, background, and setting that frees him to put in his characters’ mouths dialogue that might seem in the hands of less attuned writer/filmmakers overblown, at best chuckle-worthy in its impropriety. After all, even before being forged into a balanced partnership, these variables are already so complex. Consider the following line from the film as if it were a stand-alone: “Time is a great teacher that eventually kills all its students.” It does express a truism, but it also sounds, and reads, pretentious. One of several correctives would […]
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“The Grain of Super 16 Gives the Film Another Layer”: Edward Lachman on Carol
If cinematographer Edward Lachman was inclined towards chasing golden statuettes, he would shoot nothing but ’50s-era forbidden romances for Todd Haynes. Lachman’s initial film to match that descriptor – 2002’s Far from Heaven – earned his first Oscar nomination. This morning Lachman landed his second nod for his work on Carol, another ’50s-set romance, this time between an unhappily married New York housewife (Cate Blanchett) and a budding young photographer (Rooney Mara). Carol marks Lachman’s fourth film with Haynes, highlighting a five-decade career that includes collaborations with Robert Altman, Steven Soderbergh, Todd Solondz, Paul Schrader, Sofia Coppola, and a sizable […]
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David Bowie, 1947 – 2016
I’ve been listening to David Bowie’s new Blackstar all week, and its lyrical ruminations on mortality — some aching, some cheeky — are inescapable. Still, the idea that these were prompted by anything more than an impending 70th birthday didn’t occur to me. It seemed unbelievable that David Bowie would not be around for a little while longer. So, it’s a sad day to wake up to the news that Bowie has died. So meaningful, influential and vital through so many different periods of our lives. For me, the Berlin trilogy, my first arena show, The Man Who to Earth, […]
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Dancer in the Dark: Ross Partridge’s Gutsy Lamb
A minor blip on a warm Chicago afternoon. No one seems to notice that an 11-year-old waif, Tommie (a precocious Oona Laurence) is grabbed and pushed into a car by a stranger, the 47-year-old David Lamb (director Ross Partridge). Her pals — two seventh-grader girlfriends from school standing beside her — don’t even bother to report the feigned abduction, which is David’s twisted provocation after they dared the diminutive, eager-to-please child, decked out in attention-grabbing stiletto heels, to bum a cigarette from this complete stranger. Unperturbed, Tommie willingly accepts David’s offer of a road trip to rural Wyoming for nearly […]
