Issues
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Mask Mandate: Writer/Director Tim Sutton on Funny Face
Every major city goes through extended periods of change. Since the turn of the century, New York City has been engaged in perhaps the most detestable metamorphosis. It’s increasingly become an unaffordable playground for wealthy elites, where longtime residents get bought out and relocated to satisfy greedy land developers’ dreams of additional luxury apartments. It’s in the brewing frustration (if not outright rage) of those displaced that New York–based writer-director Tim Sutton’s fifth feature, Funny Face, finds its inspiration. Set in Coney Island, Brooklyn, in the early months of 2019, the film follows Saul (Cosmo Jarvis), a socially awkward loner […]
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Talking about Film
While filmmakers attend festivals to show their work, network and see old friends, film scholars have their own, similar venues; namely, academic conferences. Instead of submitting films, scholars submit proposals to present papers or host workshops; these are either accepted or rejected. Scholars whose proposals are selected not only have more impetus to attend the conference, they also will be able to add the presentation to their CV and activities list for the year. More significantly, though, these presentations often serve as early drafts of book chapters or essays to be published later. As a result, conferences play a vital […]
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The Reopening Hunt: Resuming Production in a Time of COVID
Friday, March 13, 2020, two days after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, Jamin O’Brien had a check in his hand. The producer was headed to christen a new venture, an adaptation of the nonfiction bestseller The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace to be directed by Chiwetel Ejiofor. “I was literally going to deliver the deposit check for our production offices, which were going to open Monday, when we were shut down,” says O’Brien. Now, a little more than a year later, O’Brien is preparing to navigate the world of post-COVID film production for the first […]
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Echoes From the Past
In recreating in Mank the experiences from 1930 to 1940 that led screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz to write Citizen Kane, David Fincher has said his goal was to make a film that looked and felt of its era. But that fidelity only goes so far: On the visual side, Mank’s black-and-white look is captured in period-anomalous widescreen. Similarly, Mank uses a LCR (left-center-right) sound mix rather than pure mono. “We’re not trying to fool anybody by saying this is a mono mix,” says Fincher’s career-long sound designer Ren Klyce. “The goal was to make the film sound old-fashioned and from […]
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Liberties in the Room
The night after Cassius Clay clobbered Sonny Liston in their first bout at the Miami Beach Convention Center in 1964, the new heavyweight champion, who would later change his name to Muhammad Ali, celebrated his win in a hotel room flush with icons: his friends Malcolm X, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke. They stayed in a room at the Hampton House, a known safe haven for Black people during Jim Crow where social gatherings of various Black icons were not uncommon. Regina King’s feature debut, One Night in Miami, adapted from Kemp Powers’s one-act play of the same name, imagines […]
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The Other Horror in Zombie Movies
The asymmetries of combat in a zombie movie are unlike any other: One must shoot to kill because only one side fights—the other side is merely hungry. The fate of humanity hinges on an efficiently delivered death blow. Characters can outrun the monsters or grab a knife in the kitchen for self-defense. Or, if the movie was made in America, there’s probably a gun. Only one side can handle tools. It is right there on the movie posters in which actors typically appear with their primary weapons. Brad Pitt has an assault rifle on the World War Z (2013) poster, […]
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My Job During a Pandemic: Producing 100+ DVDs and Blu-rays in 2020
When I left Kino Lorber’s office on Friday, March 13th, I was expecting to return on Monday. I was wrapping up the DVD and Blu-ray of Jia Zhangke’s I Wish I Knew (2010), getting final proofs of Adam Nayman’s booklet essay and waiting for the test molds (the final check disc the replicator sends for approval before the title goes into manufacturing) to come in. But then the lockdown hit, and the scramble to improvise and adapt to the situation. One of my colleagues lives nearby our office, so he shipped the I Wish I Knew test molds to our […]
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Sundance Hits and Misses, Pandemic Edition
Yes, 2020 sucked. The worst year of our lives finally came to an end, and most independent films and filmmakers, like just about everything and everyone else, suffered. Grand Jury Prize winners were delayed, critics’ favorites were lost and buzzworthy breakouts, briefly the talk of Park City, remained in limbo, waiting for some nebulous future release date when movie theaters might re-open and vaccinated audiences might attend them. Normally, you could look back at a year’s worth of top Sundance titles, examine what became of them in distribution—as Filmmaker usually does—and glean some takeaways about the state of the marketplace. […]
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Last Call: Writer/Director Emerald Fennell on Promising Young Woman
“This movie is a tribute to the many genres I love—thrillers, rom-coms, horror,” says writer/director Emerald Fennell about her searing and fiercely confident debut feature, Promising Young Woman. “It’s a dark satire of those genres.” It’s also, says Fennell, a Western of sorts—a continually surprising movie about a woman on a journey of justice. Self-styled vigilante Cassie (Carey Mulligan) is a medical school dropout determined to teach entitled male predators a life lesson, a calling that honors the life of her best friend Nina, victim to a horrific case of sexual assault years earlier. An actor whose credits include The […]
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A Matter of Balance
Kristan Sprague first heard of Shaka King when they were both in high school, long before either entered the film industry. Though they had friends in common, they only got to know each other when they attended Vassar College and started filmmaking in earnest. Since then, Sprague has edited most of King’s work, from his early shorts to his independent debut Newlyweeds, and now their first studio feature, Judas and the Black Messiah. The film follows the real-life story of car thief William O’Neal (Lakeith Stanfield), who was hired by the FBI to infiltrate the Illinois chapter of the Black […]
