Columns
-
One Perfect Place to Put the Camera: DP Adam Stone on Midnight Special
In the summer of 2005, with roughly $50,000 scraped together from friends and family, Jeff Nichols made his directorial debut Shotgun Stories not far from where he grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas. Two things haven’t changed since – Michael Shannon has been in front of the camera for every Nichols movie and cinematographer Adam Stone has been behind it. That includes Take Shelter, Mud, and now Midnight Special, which elevates Nichols to the studio realm with a tale of a father (Shannon) and his “special” son (Jaeden Lieberher) on the run from the government and a religious cult with […]
-
Doctor’s Order: The Innocents
Determinism or free will? I’m flummoxed. This is my second successive review of a film about nuns. The first was Zach Clark’s Little Sister, in which meek ex-goth Colleen Lunsford (Addison Timlin) is a novice in a New York City convent whose mother superior, like the newcomer herself, doubts the young woman’s faith and commitment to the order of the Sisters of Mercy. During a trip to the family home in North Carolina — half therapy, half reunion with a brother mutilated from combat — she appropriates the flamboyance and kitsch that had been a substantial part of their youth. […]
-
DP Paul Yee on The Fits, Achieving Close Eyelines and Getting an Unexpected Steadicam Bump
In the opening shot of The Fits, the slender frame of 11-year-old tomboy Toni glides in and out of a static medium shot as she counts off sit-ups while peering down the center of the camera’s lens. The image embodies the distinctive dichotomy of the film’s style – a mixture of neorealism and abstract lyricism that taps into the simultaneous horror and yearning of adolescence. The influence of neorealism is found in the cast of non-actors (led by Royalty Hightower as Toni) and the setting, a community center in Cincinnati where a mysterious wave of seizure-like fits strikes the dance […]
-
Colorist Bryan McMahan on Knight of Cups, Working with Terrence Malick and the HDR Future
The Horatio Alger myth for the Golden Age of Hollywood’s studio system involved a bright, ambitious lad working his way up from the mailroom or his post as a clapper boy. By the time Bryan McMahan entered the movie business in the late ’70s, that studio system had long crumbled, but his beginnings were every bit as humble. McMahan’s first gig was as a film lab janitor. Thirty-odd years later he’s Terrence Malick’s colorist of choice, having worked as either the digital intermediate colorist or the mastering colorist on The Thin Red Line, The New World, The Tree of Life, […]
-
“Whether It Takes One Camera or 12”: TV Director Anthony Hemingway on Underground and The People v. O.J. Simpson
Two of the best television series ever to tackle America’s endlessly complicated relationship with race premiered almost simultaneously in the first half of this year. First up was the FX series American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson, in which two of the greatest living American screenwriters, Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander, found their greatest subject in the tragicomic bouillabaisse of race, class, sex, and violence that was the O.J. Simpson trial. A darker and more unsettling – though no less entertaining and riveting – examination of the same issues could be found just a matter of weeks later […]
-
DP Philippe Rousselot on The Nice Guys, Learning from Néstor Almendros and Loving China Balls
Shane Black was just 24 years old when he sold the spec script that would become Lethal Weapon. Since then Black’s name in the credits – whether as writer or director – brings a certain set of expectations: tarnished, mismatched heroes (likely of the cop and/or private detective variety); a plot overflowing with set-ups and pay-offs, reversals, and sly humor; the subversion of genre tropes; and at least an 85 percent chance of a Christmas setting. Most of that checklist gets ticked off in Black’s latest The Nice Guys, a detective yarn in which a private investigator (Ryan Gosling) and […]
-
The Wrong Box: Zach Clark’s Little Sister, MoMA’s Sally Bergerless Doc Fortnight
“I needed structure!” says former goth Colleen Lunsford (Addison Timlin, star-to-be) in a revelatory moment in Little Sister, the latest feature by Brooklyn-based Zach Clark (White Reindeer, Vacation). It is one of two unaffected masterpieces (the other is Ira Sachs’s Little Men, which I’ll review when the increasingly daring Magnolia Pictures releases it) screening at BAMcinemafest (Jun 15-26) that I was fortunate enough to catch early — two for two! Colleen is exasperated trying to explain to her estranged, self-absorbed mom, Joani (Ally Sheedy, better than ever), why she left home to seek out spiritual redemption in a cloistered New […]
-
Les Affaires: Benoît Jacquot’s Diary of a Chambermaid
How to adapt a French epistolary novel relayed by a luscious servant from her point of view — itself a subversive proposition when it came out in 1900 — about the relationships she develops in assorted stately homes with both arrogant employers and beaten-down peers? To further complicate the project, how to insert into the mix a substantially larger contemporaneous issue: the shameful blemish on the national psyche that was the rabidly anti-Semitic Dreyfus affair? In the fourth movie version of libertarian author Octave Mirbeau’s groundbreaking Diary of a Chambermaid, director/co-screenwriter Benoît Jacquot has come up with some close-to-flawless strategies. The […]
-
Ted Kotcheff on Making First Blood, Changing Rambo’s Suicide Mission and (Not) Working with Kirk Douglas
Most filmmakers are lucky if they can master one genre in their lifetime, but over the course of a sixty-year career Ted Kotcheff has conquered several. He helmed a grimly funny suspense classic (Wake in Fright); a literate, witty Gregory Peck Western (Billy Two-Hats); fast and funny comedies (Fun with Dick and Jane, Who is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe); and dramedies where the laughs coexist with unsettling insights into the dark side of the human condition (North Dallas Forty, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz). All of his films are characterized by a vibrant pictorial sense – no one […]
-
A Miles Davis Fever Dream: DP Roberto Schaefer on Miles Ahead
Like many aspiring filmmakers, cinematographer Roberto Schaefer spent his youth fermenting his imagination by creating his own backyard epics. But unlike your typical kid – who concentrates on, depending on the era, recreating Harryhausen or Spielberg or maybe just blowing up G.I. Joes with M-80s on camera – Schaefer crafted abstract, experimental 8mm films. “I did do a couple of stop-motion things, but I was always more into art than movies growing up,” Schaefer said. “I liked going to the movies, but I wasn’t thinking about making movies like the ones I saw at the theater. I was thinking about […]
