Winter 2020
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The Parasite Eight-Minute Meal
Bong Joon-ho’s class warfare thriller Parasite has already entered the food film canon, and its signature entrée sits in the dead center of the highbrow-lowbrow matrix. Jjapaguri (translated as “ram-don” in the subtitles) is a mashed-up concoction of two different types of instant noodles: jjapaghetti (an abridged version of the Chinese-Korean black bean noodle dish, jjajangmyun) and Neoguri (a brand of packaged spicy seafood udon). The dish is prepared in just under eight minutes in Parasite, as the wealthy Park matriarch, on the way home from a cancelled family camping trip, calls in an order to her new housekeeper. Against […]
by Kristen Yoonsoo Kim on Dec 10, 2019 -
Fast, Cheap and Good
“I’ve wasted the greater part of my life looking for money, and trying to get along… trying to make my work from this terribly expensive paint box which is…a movie. And I’ve spent too much energy on things that have nothing to do with a movie. It’s about two percent moviemaking and 98 percent hustling.” — Orson Welles I never heard “hustling” mentioned in film school, college theater or acting class. I agree with Mr. Welles about the two percent moviemaking part of the equation; it’s just that, for my kind of independent filmmaking, the other 98 percent is self-reliance. […]
by Mark Terry on Dec 10, 2019 -
Sonic Menace: Composer Mark Korven on Scoring Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse
Thunderous farts and the roiling sea, booming foghorns and the menacing squawks of predatory seagulls—the Melvillian world of Robert Eggers’s supernatural-tinged film The Lighthouse offers a composer many sources of sonic inspiration. Mark Korven, who reunited with Eggers following their collaboration on the director’s 2015 feature, The Witch, admits that the environment of the film dominated their early conversations. “We did discuss nature a lot,” he says, “and also the world the characters inhabited. There might be a rusty old cornet lying around the lighthouse or maybe a bashed-up accordion. Rob felt strongly about a brass score because there was […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 10, 2019 -
Memory Play: Producer Designer Barbara Ling on Conjuring Quentin Tarantino’s Period LA in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood
The credits of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood are filled with the director’s usual suspects. Cinematographer Robert Richardson, editor Fred Raskin and assistant director William Paul Clark are among the consummate craftspeople who have spent at least a decade collaborating with the auteur. However, Hollywood also features a significant contribution from a new initiate to the Tarantino film family—production designer Barbara Ling. While Ling doesn’t share any work history with the director, the two are connected in another way. Both grew up in the Hollywood milieu lovingly resurrected in Tarantino’s ninth—and, if you believe him, next […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Dec 10, 2019 -
Start Your Engines: The Sound Team of James Mangold’s Ford v Ferrari on the Thrill of the Race
Supervising sound editor Donald Sylvester was working on James Mangold’s Ford v Ferrari before shooting even started. “They had mocked up some of the races with visual effects and pre-viz,” Sylvester says, “proving that you can see the right scene, but if you don’t feel the cars, it’s hard to visualize.” The sound journey of Ford v Ferrari, from those early pre-visualizations to the Dolby Atmos-mixed period feature currently exciting audiences in theaters, is one involving the sound team’s intense collaboration with Mangold, careful consideration of POV and the interplay between internal and external space and perspicacious car collector detective […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 10, 2019 -
Allowing for Transitions: Editor Anne McCabe on the Restorative Rhythms of Marielle Heller’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
Marielle Heller’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood centers on New York–based journalist Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), who’s assigned to profile Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks) for Esquire in the late 1990s. For editor Anne McCabe, who cut Heller’s previous feature, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, and Beautiful Day, the process was fundamentally the same on both: She began cutting dailies on day two of production while working through familiar challenges. “Any movie I work on is a lot longer at the beginning,” she observes. “Almost always you’re working on the setup. There’s usually too much at the beginning, and you’re […]
by Vadim Rizov on Dec 10, 2019 -
Photographing Memory: DP Rodrigo Prieto on the “Three-Headed Monster” Used to Shoot Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman
Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, based on hitman Frank Sheeran’s (Robert De Niro) account of the murder of Teamster luminary Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), talks back to its characters’ memories as much as it does the director’s past films. It’s Sheeran’s perspective told from Scorsese’s, executed by his go-to cinematographer since The Wolf of Wall Street, Rodrigo Prieto. Sheeran confessed to murdering Hoffa, the dear friend he served as bodyguard. But Hoffa’s true cause of death is still subject to speculation, as are details of Sheeran’s recollection. “Some people are mulling over what’s accurate and what’s not accurate, and I don’t […]
by A.E. Hunt on Dec 10, 2019 -
Dressing for Business: Costume Designer Mitchell Travers on the Sharp Period Style of Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers
Hustlers, Lorene Scafaria’s adaptation (from a 2015 New York article by Jessica Pressler) of the real-life tale of savvy strippers scamming their wealthy clients in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, is one of the year’s top crowd-pleasers, and its giddy garishness is expertly manifested in the costumes worn by the all-female primary cast. Early on, veteran stripper Ramona (Jennifer Lopez) wraps her sumptuous fur coat around the considerably less confident Destiny (Constance Wu) in a moment of feminine bonding and reassurance. The scene has elicited spontaneous clapping from audiences—not just for Lopez’s considerable charisma, but for her unforgettably […]
by Abbey Bender on Dec 10, 2019 -
The Regretful Viewer: Memory and Anxiety at the Multiplex
Time carries forward, seemingly interminable, as we plunge into a new decade. But with each new marker, we are reminded that time itself is terrifyingly finite. The unknowable possibility of heaven or hell—or the more likely chance of stark nothingness—looms. With the unnerving fact of human mortality comes mournful reflection of why life transpired as it did, and what could have been—a mood and narrative spark defining part of the cinematic output of 2019. Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood is centered around two has-beens played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, relics of the Hollywood studio […]
by Beatrice Loayza on Dec 10, 2019 -
Are We the Baddies? Ecological Catastrophe, Complicity and 2019 at the Movies
“Are you worried about the future?” The question on everybody’s mind, posed repeatedly by Brett Story in The Hottest August, became a nagging chorus as she and her crew hopscotched New York to take the temperature of a city already experiencing the effects of climate change. (Shot in large part around neighborhoods hit by Hurricane Sandy, the documentary made its local premiere in June, just before the hottest month ever, full stop.) Day by day, interview by interview, Story found urban rituals and residents persisting uneasily—many of the people she met and interviewed seemed almost to gaze past her camera […]
by Mark Asch on Dec 10, 2019
