Columns
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What’s In My Instapaper: Game of Thrones, Bitcoin, Video Game Death, Chloe Sevigny and More
Here are my weekly Sunday morning links. A sophisticated discussion of videogames and violence is contained in Adi Robertson’s “Death is Dead: How Modern Videogame Designers Killed Danger” at the Verge. The article quotes David Cage, whose Beyond: Two Souls is premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival this year, proclaiming, “If the character doesn’t hold a gun, designers don’t even know what to do.” That leads to a discussion about the relationship of death to videogame narrative: But unlike Cage, most of the writers giving talks at GDC don’t come into a game with complete control. They’re brought on to […]
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Kiss of the Damned — A Hammer To Nail Review
(Kiss of the Damned world premiered at the 2012 Venice Film Festival. It becomes available on VOD on March 28, 2013, and opens theatrically on May 3rd. Visit the film’s page at Magnet Releasing to learn more. NOTE: This review was written in conjunction with the film’s North American premiere at the 2013 SXSW Film Festival.) One of the most accomplished and engaging North American premieres I saw at the 2013 SXSW Film Festival was a genre film, the first fiction feature by Xan Cassavetes. Xan is the daughter of cinema legends John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands. Her first film, Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession, was a documentary about […]
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What’s In My Instapaper: Jason Molina, Google Reader, Female Road Narratives and More
I discover the links for these weekly columns through one source: Google Reader. Well, last week, Google sent the beloved Google Reader to its graveyard. I didn’t initially understand how difficult it will be to replace Google Reader until listening to last week’s Accidental Tech Podcast, even as the show’s Marco Arment believes that Google’s departure from the RSS space will be a good thing in the long run. Still, the shutdown has prompted a lot of press, and not all in the tech field, questioning our dependence on Google given their penchant for launching and shuttering services. For Google […]
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Gimme the Loot — A Hammer To Nail Review
(Gimme the Loot world premiered at the 2012 SXSW Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize. It was picked up for distribution by Sundance Selects before landing a coveted slot in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard. It opens theatrically in New York City on Friday, March 22, 2013. Visit the film’s official website to learn more.) Writer/director Adam Leon’s Gimme the Loot is set firmly in present-day New York City, in the comparatively still rough-and-tumble Bronx. It is filled with curse words. There are drugs. There is thievery. And yet it’s just so gosh darn adorable. How is that […]
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What’s In My Instapaper: Veronica Mars, Bollywood, and More
Jon Taplin is in India, where he attended the Big Bollywood Conference and thought about filmmakers, their content and the country’s class and religious divisions: Mumbai is a big confident city with some of the wealthiest men in India building houses that would have embarrassed the Maharajas for their opulence. I heard that there are more than 100 members of Parliament worth over $1 billion. This may of course be an urban myth,but the perception that the powerful live in a different world seems well founded. Of course this is no different than the U.S., but what does stand out […]
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Shooting With John: Loves Her Gun
On this special episode of Shooting With John, we shoot M1911’s with Geoff Marslett and talk to the crew of Loves Her Gun about the role guns play in cinema. Check out Loves Her Gun this week at SXSW: Monday, March 11th 1:45PM – 3:24PM Topfer Theatre at ZACH Tuesday, March 12th 11:15AM -12:54PM SXSatellite: Alamo Village Friday, March 15th 4:00PM – 5:39PM Topfer Theatre at ZACH
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Kodak Cinema Tools, a Free App for Filmmakers
Kodak has updated their free iOS app Cinema Tools to add a simple Aspect Ratio feature. Using a default picture, or one loaded from your photo library, you can choose from 2-perf, 3-perf, 4-perf and 16mm motion picture film formats and then choose between 2.35:1, 1.85:1, 1.18:1 (16×9) or 1.33:1 (4×3) aspect ratios. The image is then cropped to display the results. Unfortunately, you can’t choose a focal length for the imaginary lens, so the tool is very limited. (For a better web-based example that covers digital cameras, check out AbelCine’s Field of View Comparator.) While several of the tools […]
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Shooting with John: Lauren Wolkstein
The concept was genius, yet a bit insane. Get a bunch of indie film nerds together (who have never met before) to travel to upstate New York for the weekend and shoot some target practice – with assault rifles. None of us had ever shot a gun before, let alone an AR-15. We were terrified. Well, I can’t speak for the rest of the group, but I was terrified. However, there was a catch, and I didn’t know this until I arrived for the target practice: we had to be interviewed immediately after firing the rounds, with the assault rifles […]
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Electrick Children — A Hammer To Nail Review
(Electrick Children world premiered at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival and was picked up for distribution by Phase 4 Films. It opens theatrically on Friday, March 8, 2013. Visit the film’s official website to learn more.) Oh, to read the description of a movie and go into it with one’s thickest guard up, anticipating some exercise in “indie quirk,” only to realize within seconds that, shame on you, that assumption couldn’t have been further from the truth. Rebecca Thomas’s debut feature, Electrick Children, shut me up right quick, for it becomes immediately evident that this is one of those lovely […]
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Filmmaker Announces Collaboration with MIT Open Documentary Lab
Should filmmakers learn to code? That’s the question posed by MIT Open Documentary Lab’s Sarah Wolozin in her introduction to a 12-part series beginning today at Filmmaker. And, amidst all of our discussion in our pages about DSLR cameras and crowdfunding and audience engagement strategies, it’s a question that we’ve contemplated too. We wouldn’t think of telling a director he or she doesn’t need to know anything about lenses, or sound design or dramatic lighting. So, as filmmaking begins to embrace transmedia — extending story beyond the film frame — why shouldn’t producers and directors know something about the tools […]
