One year ago, Nicholas Rombes proposed “The Blue Velvet Project” to me at Filmmaker. For 12 months, three times a week, he would scrutinize a single frame from David Lynch’s modern classic, looking both inside and outside of its aspect ratio for correspondences, allusions and meanings. For Rombes, it would be another in his “time-based” critical film essays — appropriately so, for it was because of another of these columns, 10/40/70 at The Rumpus, that I discovered his writing in the first place. (In fact, I interviewed him previously about this other fascinating project.) Nick had contributed to Filmmaker before […]
Over the past few decades, film’s iron-clad grip on the motion industry has gradually been chipped away by emerging digital technology. Yet it hasn’t necessarily been a smooth transition. Traditional celluloid film has gone largely unchanged as a medium for a century and has been the canvas for works from Casablanca and Apocalypse Now to this summer’s blockbuster The Dark Knight Rises. As the saying goes: old habits die hard. In this case, for good reason, a film produces a picture quality, texture, and dynamic range unparalleled by digital. But digital technology has continued to make leaps and bounds in […]
Just announced is the full slate for this year’s NYFF, this year celebrating it’s 50th anniversary. Already announced were the opening, closing and centerpiece movies (Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, Robert Zemeckis’ Flight and David Chase’s Not Fade Away, respectively — all world premieres), and the rest of the lineup is as typically exciting and robust as it ever is, packed with auteur works culled almost exclusively from Berlin, Cannes, Venice and Toronto. Unveiling the summation of the best of arthouse cinema in 2012, Richard Peña, the Selection Committee Chair & Program Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, […]
(Beloved world premiered at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and was picked up for distribution by IFC Films. It opens theatrically on August 17, 2012. Visit the film’s website to learn more.) Beloved, the latest film from French writer/director Christophe Honoré, uses the history of the late 20th century as a framework for exploring the difficult love affairs of a mother, Madeleine (played as a young woman by Ludivine Sagnier and as an older woman by Catherine Deneuve) and her daughter, Vera (Chiarra Mastroianni). Like much of Honoré’s work, the movie is rich with allusions not only to literary and theatrical forms, but […]
Alex Buono is perhaps best known for his work with the Saturday Night Live Film Unit. He shot the current opening for SNL, as well as many of the fake commercials seen on the show, but his passion is documentary and making independent films. “I’m always trying to get the next one off the ground,” says Buono, “and SNL, as much as I like it, it’s a lot of fun and I really like who I’m working with, [but] it’s this great day job I do while I’m trying to get a movie [going].” Most recently, Alex worked on the […]
A time comes in an independent filmmaker’s career when he asks himself if it’s been worth it. That filmmaker is usually somewhere in middle age, reminiscing on the life he’s spent running down money, negotiating deals, adjusting to changing trends in the film world, and occasionally finding time to be creative and make a movie. I came to filmmaking late in life, directing my first feature at the age of 42. Before that, I’d been an actor in the theater for several years. Filmmaking was a way, I believed, to earn a living doing something that had a more permanent […]
Second #7097, 118:17 (Note: the final post in the project goes up Friday.) A confession, of a different sort, about how a movie saved a young man. Can a scene from a movie detour your life, turn you in a new direction? I think it can, in the same way that a book read and just the right age can, or a band can by the sheer force of its ideas turned sonic. (One of the self-imposed rules for this project was to avoid the personal, the anecdotal, but figuring this is the second-to-last post . . .) Blue Velvet […]
Chicken with Plums focuses on a deeply sensitive Iranian musician named Nasser Ali (Mathieu Amalric), and the film, from writer-directors Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, makes clear from the start that viewers shouldn’t be expecting anything like a storybook ending. Having watched helplessly as his violin is smashed before his eyes, Nasser decides he’s had it with this life. And so into bed he climbs, determined to die, lest he face another year with Faranguisse (Maria de Medeiros), the wife he’s never loved. As the days go by, his mind wanders from the past to the present, and to the […]
Perhaps it was no coincidence, then, that on the morning of my return flight from LGA, my stomach peppered on too little bagel and too much coffee, I came across the tidbit of news that traffic would be jammed due to an animal convoy truck that had crashed wide open, spilling several cows to run rampant across Dallas-Fort Worth. Several had been killed in the wreckage, a few had laid down to rest, and yet an even bigger number had mustered their courage to brave the zig-zagging pattern of screeching 18-wheelers and high tail it to the fields that must […]
Via the internets comes news of The Big Shot Movie Club, “a club for movie fans of all kinds.” The Big Shot Movie Club is Sarah Winshall and Julia Bembenek, and they write on their website: We will watch and discuss three movies we love every month relevant to a specific theme. The movies we watch will always be available online or at a your local video store. Hopefully, each month our loyal club members will learn about some lost gems and be reminded of their favorite classics as they watch and read and comment along with us. Coming up […]