the room
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The Whistlers, The Room, Marriage Story and Cannery Row: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
My first two recommendations this week are two excellent thrillers from last year that are newly available on DVD, The Whistlers and The Room. The Whistlers, which premiered in competition at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, is a gleefully twisty, darkly hilarious Romanian crime film that recalls movies like Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs in its jigsaw structure and fluid loyalties but finds a unique tone all its own thanks to director Corneliu Porumboiu’s approach. He adopts a whimsical attitude toward his eccentric group of cops playing both sides of the law and the criminals they’re […]
by Jim Hemphill on Jul 17, 2020 -
All the Magician’s Tricks: DP Brandon Trost on The Disaster Artist
In Wes Anderson’s Rushmore, Jason Schwartzman plays a precocious prep school student whose interests include staging age-inappropriate plays like Serpico. Rushmore’s crew had its own precocious teenager in 16-year-old Brandon Trost, who worked on the film as an assistant to his dad/special effects coordinator, Ron. “I grew up on set with my dad. I’ve never had a job outside of the film industry,” said Trost, who was working on set by the age of 12. “You would think that growing up in movies would ruin the magic for you, because you know everything that goes into putting a movie together. But […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Dec 19, 2017 -
ROOM FOR EVERYTHING
Peter Debruge in Variety gets to the bottom of an urban mystery (subscription required for link): what kind of movie that billboard on Highland in L.A. featuring a guy’s headshot and a movie title (The Room) is actually advertising, and how said movie has managed to run for years at the Sunset 5? The face on the billboard leers down over Highland, half-lidded and haunting in black and white. The image — actually the headshot of helmer Tommy Wiseau — has branded “The Room,” a self-distributed directorial debut so hopelessly amateurish that auds reportedly walked out during its two-week run […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 9, 2006
