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Flipping the Script: Mary Harron Interviews Radha Blank About Her Spirited and Wise New York Comedy, The Forty-Year-Old Version
In Radha Blank’s witty and winning feature debut, The Forty-Year-Old Version, the writer/director adopts a semiautobiographical persona: a hardworking middle-aged playwright and high school teacher who, between hustles to get her latest play produced and after the death of her artist mother, takes to open mic nights as neophyte rapper RadhaMUSprime. Onstage and in the studio with a handsome beats-supplier-turned-paramour, she raps about aging, ambition and life in New York with all the emotional honesty that’s slowly and painfully being drained from her latest play, a Harlem-set gentrification drama mounted by a patronizing white theater producer. Scanning Blank’s own biography—she’s […]
by Mary Harron on Oct 28, 2020 -
Building the Best Future
We tend to think of the institutions and corporations that govern our working lives as solid and immutable, but extraordinary circumstances will always force them to be flexible—and right now the COVID-19 pandemic is revealing a lot about how, when and whether these entities are able to flex to meet the needs of our times. This is a good moment to ask serious questions: How can our institutions rise to these challenges? Are the working assumptions that underlie the film industry the right ones—the ones we need? We need to make sure we aren’t just issuing rally cries to save […]
by Esther B. Robinson on Oct 28, 2020 -
The Diagetic Prototype
“I want an app like Tinder that we can use to end genocide,” said Luis Moreno Ocampo, former first prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), in fall 2019. The Argentine lawyer was visiting the University of Southern California from Harvard, where he was a Senior Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. He was in town to coteach a class with USC professor and documentary filmmaker Ted Braun, perhaps best known for his 2007 film Darfur Now, on the ways in which storytelling can affect our understanding of political issues. I first met Ocampo in 2008 when […]
by Holly Willis on Oct 28, 2020 -
“The Set was a Circle with the Floor and Mirrors Rotating”: Jan de Bont on The Haunting
Before he became a director, Jan de Bont was the cinematographer on some of the most visually intricate, elegantly lit movies of the 1980s and early ’90s, including Paul Verhoeven’s The 4th Man and Basic Instinct, John McTiernan’s Die Hard and The Hunt for Red October and Ridley Scott’s Black Rain. When de Bont made his directorial debut in 1994 with Speed, the film’s kinetic energy and precise attention to light and composition were no surprise; what made the picture a classic was how finely attuned the visual choices were to the nuances of performance. Speed made Sandra Bullock a star, […]
by Jim Hemphill on Oct 27, 2020 -
Drive-Ins, Sawed-Off Campers and Virtual Premieres: The 2020 Camden International Film Festival
Eight months since the pandemic forced (most) film festivals to pivot to video – striving, with varying success, to replicate their in-the-flesh experience via various digital platforms – some surprisingly viable models are coming to a laptop near you. One of them is the Camden International Film Festival, which engineered its annual autumn camp for non-fiction filmmakers, fans, industry and its coastal Maine community Oct. 1-12 by mixing an extensive online operation with a nightly drive-in, each matching the festival’s signature creative flair to the unique necessities of presenting a ton of films and workshops amid a global health crisis. […]
by Steve Dollar on Oct 27, 2020 -
Back to One, Episode 131: Ṣọpẹ Dìrísù
English actor Ṣọpẹ Dìrísù has two major releases happening in the States this month, the intense and compelling Gangs of London on AMC+ and the profound and unsettling horror film His House on Netflix. Taken together, they offer an apt representation of the impressive range of this great actor. We talk about his approach to the physicality required for the instantly famous epic fight scenes in Gangs of London, and what on-set elements helped his process. He takes us back to his time at the Royal Shakespeare Company and how being seeped in that material affects his approach to other […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Oct 27, 2020 -
The Quest, Amazon Women on the Moon and Pierrot Le Fou: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
Brian Trenchard-Smith, who began making movies in the 1970s as part of the Australian New Wave that also included Peter Weir and George Miller, is not only one of the most talented and entertaining directors of his generation but one of the most versatile; his output includes lyrical children’s films and lowbrow sex comedies, disreputable exploitation flicks and tender romances, documentaries and low-budget disaster movies, and episodic TV episodes ranging from Flipper and Mission: Impossible reboots to the ’90s guilty pleasure Silk Stalkings. A filmmaker who freely admits that he never met a green light he didn’t like, Trenchard-Smith is a craftsman whose best work […]
by Jim Hemphill on Oct 23, 2020 -
“I Don’t Have the Prosthetics Team Sacha Baron Cohen Does”: John Wilson on his HBO Show How To with John Wilson
In his short films, compulsive shooter John Wilson combines a nervous voiceover with impossible amounts of nonfiction footage; the joke often alternates between the unexpected metaphorical/pun juxtaposition of dialogue with shots selected from his vast archives and sometimes nerve-wracking encounters with assorted eccentrics. That seemingly free-form structure, in which Wilson’s voice ties many disparate elements together, was established in shorts with titles like How to Walk to Manhattan and How to Keep Smoking. Now it’s been expanded in the six episodes of the first season of his HBO series, How to With John Wilson. Nathan For You’s Nathan Fielder is an executive producer, and the […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 22, 2020 -
“Everyone Should Take an Editing Class, Even Actors”: Rich Newey on Killing Eleanor
I first became aware of director Rich Newey’s work a few years ago when I caught his “Dreamland” episode of the sci-fi series Stitchers; working from an audacious script by Lynne E. Litt, Newey deftly juggled styles and tones with an inventiveness and confidence that led me to seek out his other episodic work on shows like Blindspot and The Fosters. I was consistently impressed by both his precise, expressive visual style and his sensitivity to dialogue and performance, skills on prominent display in his terrific new feature Killing Eleanor. The film tells the story of Natalie (Annika Marks), an […]
by Jim Hemphill on Oct 22, 2020 -
“The Camera Gives Me Permission to Feel the Things I’m Always Pushing Down”: Writer, Director and Actor Cooper Raiff on Shithouse
Shithouse, Cooper Raiff’s profanely-titled first feature, chronicles an inspired romance between two young souls on disparate higher education voyages. Told with real insight about college-age characters and their flawed relationships, the picture earned 23-year-old Raiff—a softhearted wunderkind who wrote, directed and starred in the film—the Grand Jury Award at this year’s pandemic-impacted SXSW. Life between dorms and parties doesn’t exactly suit shy freshman Alex Malmquist (Raifff), who’s most comfortable seeking advice from an adorable childhood plush animal he’s brought from home. Though he puts in some effort to adapt to dorm life, he still yearns for the comforting embrace of his protective family. […]
by Carlos Aguilar on Oct 21, 2020
