Winter 2018
-
Outta Respect: Remembering the Goodfellas Diner
“We tried to do everything we could.” “What do you mean?” “You know what I mean. He’s gone. And we couldn’t do nothing about it.” So kicks off an iconic sequence in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, the emotional summit of a movie that’s basically one iconic sequence after another: the moment on the pay- phone when Jimmy “The Gent” Conway (Robert De Niro) hears his old friend Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) has just been whacked. Jimmy doesn’t just hang up — he bashes the phone into the receiver, finally stomping the booth into the ground between muffled sobs while the film’s narrator, […]
by Steve Macfarlane on Oct 31, 2019 -
In the Light of History: Rachel Morrison on Shooting Mudbound
With Rachel Morrison the first woman cinematographer nominated for a Best Cinematography Academy Award, we’re running today online from our current print issue David Leitner’s interview with her about shooting her nominated film, Dee Rees’s Mudbound. When Dee Rees’s Mudbound premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, the director was returning to the fest six years after her feature debut, Pariah, launched there. The same year also marked DP Rachel Morrison’s first feature to be included in the festival, Zal Batmanglij’s Sound of My Voice, and she returned the following year with Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station; Mudbound is her eighth […]
by David Leitner on Jan 23, 2018 -
Holiday Recommendations
Trust, as in all things, is important in film-going. I trusted my best friend Tim when, in middle school, he told me to see The Net. I trusted Janet Maslin when she raved about The Straight Story. Elaine famously trusted Vincent the video store clerk when he recommended Pain and Yearning (a fictitious title) in Seinfeld. But in this golden age of technology and information hoarding, more and more entities are demanding, and abusing our trust. I am of course referring to the A-word — algorithm. Now, I’m not going to say all algorithms are bad. I trust Rotten Tomatoes, […]
by Charles Poekel on Dec 14, 2017 -
Disquiet
“There’s an ambition that comes with wanting to work for Harvey Weinstein. Every day that I worked for The Weinstein Company I woke up with fear. You rationalize it as normal, that this is the dream we all want to be a part of; thinking you have to act a certain way, even though it’s an outdated way, an old way of doing business, but still how TWC operated. You begin to feel that hopeless, dreamless Hollywood factory. The culture was just so toxic. Everyone was scared, nervous, anxious, and now we’re confronting not only the sexual violence but the […]
by Taylor Hess on Dec 14, 2017 -
DIY Is Not Dead
A number of people in the independent film world have been saying lately, “DIY is dead” — more specifically, that do-it-yourself (DIY) distribution and marketing is dead, that it’s no longer useful or practical. As a filmmaker and distribution consultant who has been accused of being a proponent of DIY, I thought it important to respond to this claim because it can be harmful to our community in a variety of ways. DIY is a concept, a philosophy, a prime motivator. It’s a phrase with a lot of historical power and roots in the punk rock movement of the 1970s, […]
by Jon Reiss on Dec 14, 2017 -
Keeping Print Criticism Alive in the Digital Age
As Filmmaker contemplated its 25th year of print publication, we took note of a younger generation of filmmakers and critics investing their own new energies into the form. One is SVLLY(wood), a “biannual multimedia experimental print and digital magazine, geared toward building a new cinephilia through diverse themes and leftist ideology.” Here, its editor and founder, Rooney Elmi, explains the magazine’s creation. SVLLY(wood) was created on a whim or, as stated in our inaugural bulletin: “This magazine is the creation of the goals, ideas, ramblings, heartache, desire, and — most supreme — sheer optimism for carving a subversive current in […]
by Rooney Elmi on Dec 14, 2017 -
Traditional Teaching Ends Here
This is a secret: For the past seven years, each fall semester, the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California (where I work) has hosted an alternate reality game called Reality Ends Here for the incoming cohort of freshmen students. It is completely unacknowledged by the faculty; participating students get no credit for playing; no school equipment can be used to make projects; and to play usually means to collaborate, not hone your own individual career trajectory. And here’s another secret: The game may be home to some of the best teaching and learning in the entire […]
by Holly Willis on Dec 14, 2017 -
American Head Trip: Joshua Oppenheimer Talks to Errol Morris About his Netflix Docudrama Hybrid Wormwood
Recounting a recent conversation, Errol Morris says that he’s happy his friend understood Wormwood, the documentary filmmaker’s epic new work, as “an essay on ‘doing history.’” “I think it’s a lot of things, too,” Morris goes on to say, “but I like to hear that it’s about my obsessions with epistemology.” Obsession and epistemology—doesn’t the latter usually require the former? It certainly does in these reality-challenged times, when the act of landing on some honest reckoning with the social and political record requires a scrupulous method, unrelenting tenacity and, indeed, some small degree of obsession. All these qualities have been […]
by Joshua Oppenheimer on Dec 14, 2017 -
Legacy
storyteller stôrē tel r noun 1. a person who tells stories 2. a liar I thought we’d take a quick detour into something that came up during Bradford Young’s interview last issue. I feel like so many of the ideas he talked about warranted their own dedicated roundtable conversations, but one thing that really struck me was the notion of legacy: the idea that what we do, here and now, has a far greater shelf life than any of us may want to accept. And this doesn’t just apply to people with kids. We all are constantly weaving the very […]
by Sean Porter on Dec 14, 2017 -
Clothes Make the Man: Costume Designer Mark Bridges on Phantom Thread
His last narrative feature, Inherent Vice, focused on disheveled hippies in 1970s Los Angeles. With his latest, Paul Thomas Anderson has swung to a wildly different milieu. Phantom Thread concerns Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) — a near-monomaniacal designer working during couture’s greatest age, the early 1950s — and Alma (Vicky Krieps), the young woman who is sucked into his orbit. With Anderson goes his longtime costume designer, Mark Bridges, here given a dream assignment: not only to design his own couture visions but also to dress the entire world that surrounds them. The film is about an artist, and Bridges’s […]
by Farran Smith Nehme on Dec 14, 2017
