Columns
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Pod Wants to Know You
Cinematic innovation is often driven by creative needs. The desire to help viewers connect to stories has resulted in the development of new camera systems, visual effects processes and advancements in audio capture and presentation. Stanley Kubrick’s determination to shoot by candlelight, in order to be authentic to the 18th-century setting of Barry Lyndon, birthed the Zeiss high-speed prime lens. A frustration with the state of theatrical sound in the early 1980s inspired George Lucas to develop THX to ensure pristine audio playback in theaters. When James Cameron wanted a realistic look for Pandora in Avatar, he innovated “performance capture” […]
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Load & Play
Side Effects Open Road – May 21 Perhaps Steven Soderbergh’s swan song as a theatrically distributed director (his Liberace biopic with Michael Douglas and Matt Damon will premiere on HBO this spring), Side Effects is a masterfully made noir thriller, although one that, at least initially, obscures its genre coding by deploying a setup that has “mental illness TV movie of the week” written all over it. Rooney Mara is a depressed, downwardly mobile young woman whose formerly high-rolling financier husband (Channing Tatum) went to jail for insider trading. When she goes on some new antipsychotic for her clinical depression […]
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Super 8
1 This Long Century Tucked away in a remote corner of the Internet is THIS LONG CENTURY, a remarkable collection of artistic contributions from some of the great creative minds of our time. Founded by New Yorkers Stefan Pietsch and Jason Evans, the website gives its mission statement as: “Bringing together such intimate work as sketchbooks, personal memorabilia, annotated typescripts, short essays, home movies and near impossible to find archival work.” The more than 200 luminaries who have shared their work include Luc Sante, Vivienne Westwood, Richard Hell, Albert Maysles, Kelly Reichardt and Miklós Jancsó. 2 Drag City books Drag […]
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Story as Software
We are swimming in a sea of data. In 2012, Facebook passed the one billion-user mark, 48 hours worth of new video was uploaded to YouTube every minute and Apple received their one-millionth app submission while the Android store listed more than 600,000 apps with more than 20 billion installs. These stats represent an incredible amount of online activity with a decent percentage attributed to a rise in smartphone and tablet usage. Fame and riches await those who can effectively capture and monetize even a small percentage of this activity. In April, Facebook announced that they were acquiring Instagram, a […]
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Zero Dark Thirty and the New History
I saw Zero Dark Thirty twice. The first time, the auditorium was nearly full. The second, about a week later, there were only two other people. But both times, the auditorium felt empty, as if, in commanding the attention of its viewers, the film left no room for thought. Whether Zero Dark Thirty endorses torture or not has been much discussed elsewhere, and that discussion and debate has, in its own way, framed the very way we think about the movie. And yet there is another form of torture depicted in the film and that is the torture perpetrated by […]
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Load & Play
Citadel New Video – January 29 A cousin of sorts to 2011’s Attack the Block, Irish writer/director Ciarán Foy’s Citadel ruminates on the sad lot of a new widower, caring for the prematurely born young child he lives with in a soon-to-be-demolished British suburban housing project. Little does he know that the hooded gangbangers who attacked his deceased wife with syringes and continue to hound him from afar are, in fact … wait for it … goblins! Skating around (or perhaps right through) some pretty ugly ethnopolitical undertones (the movie was clearly made pre-Trayvon), Citadel has the savage intensity and […]
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Transcendental Oneness
Maybe it was the weather. It was a warm night. Perfect Los Angeles, balmy, the reason people put up with that town. I was in Culver City. It was the second night of IndieCade, and I was half an hour away from finding myself having what I can only describe as a transcendental experience. IndieCade is the game world’s Sundance; I know I’ve written about it before in these pages, but bear with me. I was walking around with one of my favorite game designers, Jonathan Blow, (Braid and, forthcoming, The Witness) At some point, we became aware of a […]
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Hits & Misses
Back to reality. That may be the best way to describe both the status of our global economy and the previous 12 months in independent film. Little irrational exuberance; no breakout blockbusters; but a few profitable indie films, perhaps countable on one hand, that stand out as carrots for hundreds of others to try to reach out and emulate. Calmer heads prevailed at Sundance 2012 as sellers and buyers got down to the more complicated business of the current indie marketplace, with its delicate mix of theatrical and VOD platform releasing. No one was throwing money around like it was […]
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Super 8
Flicklist The Digital Age is a double-edged sword in terms of creative content: it has exponentially increased the accessibility of creation and consumption but also led to a flooded and overwhelming marketplace. Co-founded by Ted Hope, Brian Newman and Antonio Kaplan, Flicklist is a new iPhone app aimed at streamlining the search for films that you’ll love. Simultaneously allowing you to compile your own lists of cinematic recommendations, as well as follow the tastes of people whose opinions you trust, Flicklist creates an interactive social-media platform around movies and then alerts you to their availability, whether online or at your […]
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Locarno Film Festival
What to say of a film festival at which the most highly anticipated — and, as it turns out, best — entry is an 83-minute-long documentary about fishermen with no real dialogue or narration that was shot on a dozen GoPro cameras, many of them tethered to a commercial fishing boat? A number of things come to mind, all of them complimentary, but what first bears mention is how well matched the 65th Festival del Film Locarno and Leviathan were for one another. Had it premiered at Cannes or Toronto, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s film would likely have been […]
