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“Make a Documentary of What’s Happening in Front of You”: DP Phedon Papamichael on Shooting Aaron Sorkin’s Courtroom Drama, The Trial of the Chicago 7
After violence disrupted the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, eight defendants were arrested for conspiracy to incite a riot — an event dramatized in Aaron Sorkin’s new The Trial of the Chicago 7. They included the countercultural figures Abbie Hoffman (played in the film by Sasha Baron Cohen), Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong) and Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne). In The Trial of the Chicago 7, writer and director Sorkin recreates the chaos surrounding the six-month trial, mingling day-to-day testimony with flashbacks of protestors and police preparing for demonstrations in places like Grant Park. In addition to following the defendants, Sorkin […]
by Daniel Eagan on Oct 16, 2020 -
“One Thing I Learned From Michael Mann, You’ve Got to Have Rules”: Brooke Kennedy on The Good Fight
In the first episode of The Good Fight, a spinoff from and sequel to the acclaimed legal drama The Good Wife, liberal attorney Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) watches Donald Trump’s inauguration in horror. In the premiere episode of the series’ most recent season (season four), Diane wakes up to find herself in an alternate reality in which Hillary Clinton won the presidency. Both episodes – and the 38 others that have aired to date – exhibit a satirical sense as sophisticated as it is original; series creators Robert and Michelle King consistently engage with issues related to race, sex, gender, […]
by Jim Hemphill on Oct 16, 2020 -
“By Reconnecting Us To Our Humanity, I Believe Nostalgia Could Be the Very Thing That Saves Us”: Director Jenni Olson on Her Criterion Channel-Streaming Films
Like many cinephiles I know, I’ve found the Criterion Channel to be a sort of emotional life preserver during these anxiety-ridden times; while it’s nearly impossible to achieve a state of total calm, one can come close by revisiting old favorites and making new discoveries while browsing through the streaming service’s expertly curated selection. This month the programmers have given audiences a great gift by showcasing the work of Jenni Olson, a director who understands the restorative power of nostalgia and reflection better than any other – it’s a key component to her work, and one of many reasons why […]
by Jim Hemphill on Oct 16, 2020 -
Requiem for a Dream, The Haunting and Sergeant York: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
This month marks the 20th anniversary of the U.S. theatrical release of Requiem for a Dream, Darren Aronofsky’s visually dazzling and emotionally shattering adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.’s novel about doomed addicts. When it came out in 2000, Requiem for a Dream more than delivered on the promise of Aronofsky’s 1998 debut feature Pi, taking that film’s ambitious experiments with subjective point of view to a whole new level; in Requiem, Aronofksy utilizes split screen, speeded up and slowed down motion, multiple exposures, impressionistic digital and practical special effects, unnatural lighting and clashing color temperatures, extreme focal lengths at either […]
by Jim Hemphill on Oct 16, 2020 -
Pietro Marcello on Martin Eden, Influencer Culture and the Relationship between Art History and Shot Composition
Italian director Pietro Marcello has been making films since 2003, but his turn toward fiction films—first with 2015’s Lost & Beautiful and now with Martin Eden, an adaptation of Jack London’s 1909 novel—has gained him new admirers outside his home country and on the festival circuit. It is fitting, then, that just as his star is rising, he has crafted a cautionary tale about the perils of individualism and the ease with which it can swallow even the most idealistic artists. But Marcello’s adaptation is anything but straightforward. His Martin Eden takes place at an indeterminate moment in Naples, and […]
by Forrest Cardamenis on Oct 15, 2020 -
“You Have Nine Days to Make an Episode. Go!”: DP James Kniest on The Haunting of Bly Manor
With a list of credits that includes Annabelle, Hush and The Bye Bye Man, cinematographer James Kniest has spent a fair share of his career toiling in horror. “I somehow got into doing all these dark genre films and episodics, which I like a lot,” said Kniest, “but I often times say jokingly, ‘Can’t I just do a romantic comedy?’” The Haunting of Bly Manor fulfills half of that request. The second installment in Netflix’s Haunting Of anthology series, Bly Manor is a gothic romance that leans heavily into the latter. When the horror does arrive, it’s less jump scares and more […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Oct 15, 2020 -
Back to One Episode 129: Dylan Gelula
Dylan Gelula brings a captivating authenticity to her characters that makes them seem like they go on living outside the frame. Look at her work in Flower, Support The Girls, and First Girl I Loved, to name a few. Her latest performance as Maggie in the SXSW winner Shithouse is a revelation. It snuck up on me and left me moved and in awe. On this episode she talks about her instinctual, untrained approach to this craft that she claims she hasn’t fully wrapped her arms around yet. I ask her about some specific moments from Shithouse and about working […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Oct 13, 2020 -
Nomadland, Beginning and Slow Machine: The 2020 New York Film Festival
A glance back at the economic suffering of the post-crash Obama era that feels barely a day removed from the nation’s present multitude of crises, Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland is much more existential road movie than social tract. While it communicates something newsy about the pitiful state of things for the American worker, the story tracks an introspective quest, dramatized against the splendiferous, wide-open horizons of the American West. The odyssey of a Nevada woman who loses her home and takes to the road after the closing of her town’s gypsum mine, the film fits loosely into a body of work […]
by Steve Dollar on Oct 12, 2020 -
Graveyard of Honor, ivansxtc, The Gunfighter, The Pale Door: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
When director Kinji Fukasaku adapted the yakuza novel Graveyard of Honor for the screen in 1975, he was coming off of an extraordinary streak of Japanese gangster films that began with Street Mobster in 1972 and ended with New Battles Without Honor and Humanity in 1974. In between were six other yakuza pictures that transformed the genre in the same way that Francis Coppola reinvented the American gangster movie with the Godfather films. Like Coppola, Fukasaku was intent on deepening and critiquing the conventions he was working with, and in placing his stories at an intersection between myth and socioeconomic […]
by Jim Hemphill on Oct 11, 2020 -
Trailer Watch: David Fincher’s Mank
Netflix has just dropped the first teaser for Mank, David Fincher’s first film since 2014’s Gone Girl. Working from a script by his late father, Jack, Mank re-examines the writing of Citizen Kane. Its title hints at the presumed agenda, which is to re-litigate the issue of whether screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz was the true force behind Orson Welles’s debut. It’s worth noting that Jack Fincher never had a screenplay credited to him in his life, although his IMDb page claims that “He once wrote a Howard Hughes biopic before it was decided to go with John Logan [sic] script for The Aviator (2004) instead.” Mank is […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Oct 8, 2020
