Jackie
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Watch: “Not Another Camelot [How We Got from Jackie to Melania]”
Kevin B. Lee’s latest video essay is a desktop documentary taking a look at media perceptions of first ladies from Jackie Kennedy onwards. The short was commissioned by this year’s Rotterdam International Film Festival to show prior to screenings of Jackie. It ends, as it must, with Melania Trump.
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 6, 2017 -
Keystone Cop: Why 1.66 and 1.78 Aspect Ratios Are Often Misprojected (And How to Fix That)
Jackie, Fox Searchlight’s best hope for 2016 Oscar glory, will be improperly projected throughout the world. There will be the usual projection mistakes and corporate carelessness that have become the norm in today’s multiplexes, but Jackie’s 1.66 aspect ratio will be presented keystoned more often than not: instead of a narrow rectangle that is 1.66 times longer than tall, the tops of the image will either curve inward or outward in relation to the screen. It’s an easily corrected mistake that is being ignored because of laziness. Since most projection booths are devoid of projectionists who can fix the problem, […]
by Sergio Andrés Lobo-Navia on Jan 18, 2017 -
Omnipresent Poet: How Pablo Larraín Captured the Essence of Neruda Without Simplifying His Humanity
Reconciling the flawed humanity of a person with their extraordinary deeds means accepting that both vice and virtue can coexist. Ditching the narrative shackles of biographical films that aims to encompass the entirety of a person’s life, even if that means just piecing together a sequence of significant events, Chilean auteur Pablo Larraín inventively designed an iridescent impression of his homeland’s most notable artist, Pablo Neruda, which captures his essence without simplifying his humanity. No stranger to revisiting Chile’s most scabrous historical passages through a fictional lens that neither condemns nor absolves, in Neruda Larraín presents the man as a masterful poet, lazy communist, seductive […]
by Carlos Aguilar on Dec 28, 2016 -
Trailer Watch: Pablo Larrain’s Jackie
Pablo Larrain’s Jackie is one of my favorite films of the year. You can read my interview with the director in the current print edition of Filmmaker, and you can see more of the film in this new trailer, just out from Fox Searchlight. It’s more revealing than the earlier teaser trailer Stephen Garrett wrote about here, and, in some ways, quite different in tone, foregrounding the political mythmaking element of the story. Check it out above.
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 14, 2016 -
History in Under 90 Seconds: Critiquing the Barry and Jackie Trailers
Stephen Garrett’s “The Art of First Impressions” is one of Filmmaker‘s most widely read articles, an insightful and incisive guide to making a great movie trailer. We’re happy to have Garrett, who is not only a critic but also the founder of the trailer and marketing house Jump Cut, back writing for Filmmaker, beginning with a regular series on the creative direction of today’s most noteworthy trailers. This first installment begins with Garrett examining teasers for two films about political figures acquired by their distributors out of the Fall festivals: Barry and Jackie. — SM Despite a punishing election season […]
by Stephen Garrett on Nov 2, 2016 -
A Woman Above Everything Else
The camera pushes tight in on Natalie Portman’s distressed face, a layer of 16mm grain putting a slight filter on her perfect features. From the very beginning, we’re too close; the customary distance from an iconic first lady is gone. Also missing are biographical flashbacks, or early happy moments, or pretty montages locating Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy within the tapestry of her husband’s life and administration. No, Pablo Larraín’s Jackie, which follows the first lady in the days following John F. Kennedy’s assassination, begins in a kind of emotional media res, a heightened state accentuated by the dark chords of Mica […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 20, 2016 -
Trailer Watch: Pablo Larraín’s Jackie
Revealing enough but not too much is this first teaser trailer for Pablo Larraín’s Jackie, for me, one of the best films of the year. Natalie Portman stars as the widowed First Lady, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, in the days following her husband’s assassination. In addition to being a bold psychological portrait, it’s also a clear-eyed dissection of the Camelot myth, referenced here, ironically, through Richard Harris’ singing.
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 5, 2016
