2014 Tribeca Film Festival at a Glance—5 Hot Docs
The 2014 Tribeca Film Festival begins its 13th season today with the world premiere of the Nas documentary Time is Illmatic. It’s a fitting opening film for the festival—the incredibly talented rapper, songwriter and actor was born in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, eventually moving to the Queensbridge Houses in Long Island City, Queens, where he would get a thorough education in hip hop. The film, by multimedia artist One9, focuses on Nas’s groundbreaking 1994 debut album, Illmatic, ...
Award Winning Documentarian Rachel Beth Anderson on Filming in Conflict Zones
Rachel Beth Anderson is a cinematographer-turned-director who has spent her career working almost exclusively in conflict zones. She was recently awarded the cinematography award for a U.S. documentary at Sundance, along with Ross Kaufman, for her work on E-Team, which followed a group of four Human Rights Watch workers documenting war crimes around the world.
Along with filming in Syria, Anderson has worked in Libya, Afghanistan,...
From The Dark Knight Rises to Divergent: Composer Junkie XL
Composer Tom Holkenborg goes by the name Junkie XL. He is a musician, producer, engineer and composer with a tinkerer's compulsion to experiment. His collaboration with the legendary Hans Zimmer on The Dark Knight Rises led Zimmer to recommend him for the recently released blockbuster Divergent. Holkenborg began his music career at the ripe old age of four, when he started playing piano at the behest of his mother, who classically trained him...
Cleveland’s Flexibility Gives Captain America its Punch
In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), and Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) spend some time at S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters, the massive flying aircraft carrier where this crucial agency at the heart of the Marvel Comics Universe deals with the paranormal and superhuman threats to America. This time they're dealing with a foe potentially more powerful than the Captain—the eponymous Winter Soldier.
When directors Anthony and Joe Russo were scouting for a location that could serve as the grand lobby of this flying strategic command center,...
Missing 87-Year old John Ford Film Upstream Found, Screened With Live Score
This past Monday, composer Michael Mortilla and Nicole Garcia brought a slew of instruments (a piano, violin, kazoo, handbell, even a bag filled with aluminum cans) and performed a live score accompanying a screening of the 1927 John Ford film Upstream. “My basic role is to provide a soundtrack for a film that never had a soundtrack,” Mortilla says. He and Garcia performed their Upstream score in front of a live audience in the screening room at the Motion Picture of Association’s headquarters on Eye Street in Washington D.C...
The Future of Mad Men‘s Secondary Characters
On April 13th, the seventh and final season of Mad Men premiers on AMC. It's been a long, wild ride. Just think, a mere six seasons ago Don Draper was happily married to Betty, Peter Cambell was a brash and ambitious young buck, Peggy was a secretary, and Sterling Cooper was still a thing. The world around them had barely heard of the Beatles. Who could have guessed then where they would be now? We won't even try to guess what will happen in Season 7,...
The Sports Coordinators on Upcoming Draft Day & Million Dollar Arm
Spittin’ and cussin’ and scratchin’ like a Major Leaguer doesn’t take a whole lot of skill for an actor. But hitting a home run when the director calls “action!” and making it look easy? That’s a whole other story. Enter the sports coordinator. These former top jocks train onscreen talent how to swing for the fences, catch a touchdown pass, or sink a game-winning jumper at the buzzer and convince audiences it’s athletically legit.
“I”m like a stunt coordinator but with sports,”...
Top 10 EDM Remixes of Songs from Movie Musicals
So you're watching a musical. This is great, you think. It's like a normal movie and a Broadway show put into a blender and turned into a delicious, nostalgic smoothie. But there's something missing, you think. Where's the drop?
Go figure, Disney has an answer to this insanely specific problem. Walt Disney Records announced recently that they are compiling an album of EDM remixes of Disney songs old and new, featuring such DJ superstars as Avicii,...
Captain America: The Winter Soldier’s Composer Henry Jackman on Scoring a Superhero
The versatile Henry Jackman follows his scores for Seth Rogan's apocalyptic comedy End of the World and the animated NASCAR-racing snail film Turbo with a full-on superhero, Marvel's Captain America: The Winter Soldier. He took time for an interview to talk about the superhero who finds himself something of a Rip Van Winkle, dealing with a world more than 60 years after he was frozen in WWII.
How do you approach a score for a superhero? ...
Game of Thrones: What We Learned From Season Three
Our beloved lunatics from Westeros are back for season four of Game of Thrones, which means it’s time for a refresher course on what the hell is going on in the Seven Kingdoms (and beyond). We all needed a breather after last season’s penultimate episode, “The Rains of Castamere.” That infamous hour of television delivered such a collective gut punch to the millions of fans who hadn’t read George R...
Painting a Renaissance Masterpiece From Scratch for The Grand Budapest Hotel
Renaissance painter Johannes van Hoytl the Younger (1613-1669) worked in solitude. Known for his use of light and shade, as well as his attraction to the lustrous and velvety, the painter was particularly un-prolific and a financial failure. Yet, van Hoytl nevertheless produced up to a dozen of the finest portraits the world has ever seen.
He also never existed.
In 2012, director Wes Anderson approached 62-year-old British portrait artist Michael Taylor with a unique challenge: create a fictional Renaissance painting—not too Italian and with a bit of a northern spin—for his upcoming film,...
Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me Director Chiemi Karasawa’s Rising Star
Although she’s being heralded as a breakout director for the acclaimed documentary Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me, Chiemi Karasawa is no overnight sensation. The California native moved to New York the day after she graduated from Boston University’s film program and began working for a film producer. She apprenticed as a script supervisor, then worked for many years in that position on numerous films including High Fidelity, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3,...
Talking With Diego Luna About Directing Cesar Chavez
Directing his second feature, and his first in English, Mexican actor Diego Luna turned to one of the most admired figures in recent history: Mexican-American labor leader Cesar Chavez. In the 1960s Chavez co-founded the United Farm Workers, organized an historic grape boycott, and led a 300-mile march from Delano to Sacramento, California that drew global attention to the plight of migrant farm workers.
Michael Pena stars in the biopic that focusses on Chavez’s early years,...
Noah: Artistically Ambitious, Economically Advantageous
At first blush, it appeared that Noah represented writer/director Darren Aronofsky’s first real foray into pure big budget spectacle. The indie auteur that burst onto the scene with his twitchy, unsettling debut Pi, only to follow that up with one of the most breathtakingly devastating cinematic depictions of addiction in many years with Requiem for a Dream, was now going big budget CGI in the retelling of the Biblical story of Noah's ark on a grand scale...
CinemaCon 2014: 20th Century Fox & Warner Bros. Tout Strong Women, Big Monsters
Funny, smart and tough women abound in 20th Century Fox’s upcoming slate of films. Three of them will be making appearances today in CinemaCon to tout their films—Cameron Diaz and Leslie Mann for their revenge comedy The Other Woman and current Divergent star Shailene Woodley for the adaptation of the beloved YA book The Fault in Our Stars.
Cameron Diaz and Leslia Mann have proven their comedic acting chops time and time again,...
CinemaCon 2014: The High-Tech Moviegoing Experience
You’ve heard the logic before: high-definition screens and on-demand content have altered the moviegoing environment forever, creating a home entertainment experience that rivals a night out at the local movie theater. Of course, anyone who saw Gravity in IMAX 3D might beg to differ, but it doesn’t necessarily take a game-changing tour de force to pack an auditorium. Today, the local multiplex has done an impressive job of not just keeping pace but surpassing your trusty living room sofa,...
CinemaCon 2014: Sony Teases The Amazing Spider-Man 2 & More
What better way to enjoy Sony Pictures’ presentation than after a few cocktails? The studio is hosting a pre-event cocktail reception in The Colosseum Lobby at Caesar’s before they unveil their 2014 films. Classy. President, Rory Bruer is the man on hand to give folks a glimpse of everybody’s favorite web-slinger, as well as everybody’s favorite undercover cops, to name a few of the films that’ll be teased during their presentation.
Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) faces a host of super villains in The Amazing Spider-Man 2,...
CinemaCon 2014: Disney Unveils Maleficent, Million Dollar Arm & More
It's day three of CinemaCon and the schedule is packed. Alternative content and event cinema companies, fro Arts Alliance to Screenvision, will be hosting a special exhibit in the Palace Ballroom at Caesar's Palace this morning, followed by Walt Disney Studios exclusive presentation.
Disney Chairman Alan Horn and executive vice president of distribution Dave Hollis will host the presentation, which includes a screening of Million Dollar Arm presented in Dolby Atmos.
Along with Million Dollar Arm, ...
CinemaCon 2014: Universal Unveils Summer Lineup
While it’s an inexact science figuring out how much a festival crowd’s enthusiasm means for the future of a film, the screening of Universal’s Neighbors at SXSW must have delighted many in the studio. Hundreds of people waited patiently, in the rain, for roughly an hour to see director Nicholas Stoller’s movie and roared with laughter for just about all of its running time. Universal is offering a look at their summer slate today at CinemaCon, and will host a special screening of ...
CinemaCon 2014: A Brief History of Moviegoing
There's no substitute for watching movies in a theater. These days it's easy to watch the same film at home, but without the surround sound, the larger-than-life screen, the crowd around you making every emotion more intense and the tingle of excitement as the lights darken as you and all the strangers around you set off together on a journey into another world- it's not really the same film at all.
This week CinemaCon is taking place in Las Vegas...
