Winter 2014
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Eyes Wide Shut
French director Alain Guiraudie’s first feature, the 2003 coming-of-age film No Rest for the Brave, opens in a nondescript bar in a sleepy town where Basile, the agitated protagonist, is recounting a strange dream to his friend Igor. The disturbed young man believes the dream carries a fatal warning: if he falls asleep again, he will die. What follows is a Buñuelian picaresque that is shot in the style of social realism but structured as a series of narrative ruptures creating the filmic equivalent of the surrealist game of exquisite corpse. Guiraudie has, over the past decade, continued to probe […]
by Paul Dallas on Jan 17, 2014 -
Down in the Valley
Trespassing tire tracks. Binoculars slightly out of place. Gun gone missing. Multiple clues confirming Mike Rust’s worst fears — someone had violated his home, a sanctuary nestled on 80 acres of wild land deep in south central Colorado’s remote San Luis Valley. Suddenly, two shadows buzz along the horizon. One man sets off alone in hot pursuit. It is the last thing he will do?? That was March 31, 2009, the last time anyone heard from this beloved 56-year-old hall-of-fame mountain biker. Evidence found, including a blood-stained gun butt and vest, suggests that Rust caught the perpetrators, a violent confrontation […]
by Chris Kassar on Jan 17, 2014 -
Act Break: Director Denis Villeneuve Talks His “Jaw-Droppingly Weird” Enemy
In his newest film Enemy, French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve immediately springs on us an omnipotent sense of dread. The chiaroscuro-tinged opening — a dynamo dream sequence in a film that feels like one long, unending hallucination — takes us inside an invitation-only sex club, populated by hard-looking, well-dressed men, one of whom is Jake Gyllenhaal. What are they watching? Scantily clad women doing seemingly erotic things that involve tarantulas. Bear with me. Soon we meet a pregnant blonde (Sarah Gadon) who’s waiting at home for her husband. Is it Gyllenhaal whom she’s waiting for? The next time he’s glimpsed, he […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 17, 2014 -
Set Smarts
Gadgets, now more than ever, are the enablers of DIY filmmaking. For the tech-savvy, even the most common of tools can play a pivotal role in elevating a project beyond its modest means. I’m not speaking solely of camera equipment and assorted gizmos, but rather the toolkit in your pocket: a smartphone. The following reports section highlights filmmaking-related apparatuses that are available with the click of a button to facilitate production. 1. MixBit (free) The brainchild of YouTube co-founders, MixBit allows you to record multiple clips as long as 16 seconds each and stitch them together for up to an […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Jan 17, 2014 -
Richard Shepard
Richard Shepard is back, not that you necessarily noticed he was away. Shepard is one of the most (unfairly) ignored of American independent directors. Maybe it’s because he was in “movie jail” after his debut feature flopped in 1991, or that he’s worked a lot in TV (recently helming episodes of Girls), or that he is very self-deprecating. (The New York City-based filmmaker’s official bio says that his most recent narrative feature, 2007’s The Hunting Party, “won no awards, made barely any money, but is the number one illegally ripped DVD in the Balkans.”) Shepard escaped movie jail with 2005’s […]
by Nick Dawson on Jan 17, 2014 -
Lose Lose
When I was a kid I hated videogames. Taking the controller at Pacman or Space Invaders or Frogger or whatever, I became nearly paralyzed with anxiety. The game started, and there you were: Go! Perform! Win! Within seconds, I’d lost. Game over. Total humiliation. Try not to let the other kids see your shame. I was also the kid who rarely did homework and responded to every failed test with, “I didn’t really try.” In other words, I’ve had a rocky relationship with failure in my life. Where was Jesper Juul when I needed him? Juul is one of the […]
by Heather Chaplin on Jan 17, 2014 -
I Am A Camera
About halfway through the documentary Tim’s Vermeer, the San Antonio-based inventor Tim Jenison is granted a private viewing of Johannes Vermeer’s “The Music Lesson” at its private exhibition site, Buckingham Palace. The Queen had originally denied Jenison’s request, but after a certain amount of cajoling she relented — although cameras weren’t allowed and Jenison’s collaborators, director Teller and producer Penn, of the anarchic stage magic duo Penn & Teller, were asked to stay behind. Jenison spends one half hour with the painting — the Vermeer work he’s been diligently replicating in his Texas studio — and emerges shaken. As Teller […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 17, 2014 -
Observe & Report: Godfrey Reggio, Jon Kane and Trish Govoni on “the Perfected Image” of Visitors
Alternately lulling and urgent, otherworldly and deeply intimate, visionary filmmaker Godfrey Reggio’s Visitors is a film like no other. With its 74 shots — most feature films have hundreds if not thousands — and exquisite black-and-white imagery, it is, as Reggio says, “the odd one in” in today’s multiplex environment. And even with its Philip Glass score — mournful, haunting and one of the composer’s best — it still feels radically different than Reggio and Glass’s previous collaborations, the poetic films comprising the “Qatsi Trilogy.” No less visually seductive than those works, the non-narrative Visitors uses its images — which […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 17, 2014 -
Super 8
1. WarpFilms10 The cinematic arm of ubercool British record label Warp has hit its first decade and is celebrating by issuing a 200-page coffee table book containing some of its greatest movies. The DVDs tucked inside include no less than three by Shane Meadows (Dead Man’s Shoes was the first ever Warp Films title), plus other excellent and diverse works such as Chris Morris’ Four Lions, Richard Ayoade’s Submarine, Paddy Considine’s Tyrannosaur, Ben Wheatley’s Kill List and Justin Kurzel’s The Snowtown Murders. 2. Milq The brainchild of Hear Music founder Don MacKinnon, Spectacle: Elvis Costello with… creator Jordan Jacobs, and Tomi Poutanen […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 17, 2014 -
Mumbai Masala
The way Ritesh Batra tells it, he used to be not very good at his job. The Indian-born writer/director had studied in the U.S. as an undergrad and ended up working at the financial consulting firm Deloitte, but though he “had a business background of sorts, I was a terrible, terrible consultant,” Batra says. “They call it ‘sitting on the bench,’ when you’re a bad consultant and they don’t want to send you to clients. I quit because I didn’t want to do something I was bad at all my life.” Batra, born and raised in India, had always wanted […]
by Nick Dawson on Jan 17, 2014
