After her feature directorial debut The Fallout (2021), a film about a high-school shooting, Megan Park was feeling the weight of its emotional aftermath. “When you make a movie, you live in that world for years,” she tells Filmmaker at Sundance Film Festival. “I wanted an escape, and I wanted to be nostalgic.” So she went back home to Canada and started thinking about what became the genesis of My Old Ass, a bittersweet coming-of-age comedy, and, gradually, a reflective tearjerker that left Sundance audiences sobbing. “It was this idea of the last time your whole family sleeps under one […]
by Tomris Laffly on Jan 23, 2024Hawaiian shirts. Leather jackets. Go-go boots. These are just a few of the costume staples that leave a defining visual mark on Once Upon A Time … In Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino’s latest film in which real history is viewed through a fictionalized lens. We are in 1969, a year of change — both in Hollywood and the U.S. Think the start of the Nixon presidency, the eroding of the studio system before the artistically adventurous New Hollywood came to the rescue and yes, the Manson Family murders that claimed five lives, including that of a very pregnant Sharon Tate, actress […]
by Tomris Laffly on Aug 1, 2019Adapted by Charles Randolph and Adam McKay from The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, Michael Lewis’s behind-the-scenes book about the 2008 housing market crash, McKay’s star-stuffed The Big Short is a brilliant demystification. Two scenes, hilarious in completely opposite ways, take place in the middle of an otherwise enervating securitization session at the American Securities Forum in Las Vegas. Hold on: hilarious and securitization jammed into the same sentence? Most people don’t even know what the latter word means. When a term completely sidesteps consciousness, it is probably unavailable to the unconscious—site of the split-second manufacture of humor. To […]
by Howard Feinstein on Dec 11, 2015