The Digital Camera Company That Oscar Nominated Filmmakers Prefer
Last week saw the release of RoboCop, a slick and technologically savvy re-imagining of the 1987 classic directed by Paul Verhoeven. With it’s combination of 3D holographic video screens and large scale multi-tier HD video screens present in every environment, from the corporate computer labs that assemble RoboCop, to the cable news channel studios that cover his exploits, to the sleek design of RoboCop himself, the new movie acts as yet another reflection of ourselves –
Joshua Oppenheimer on Chatty Killers in his Oscar Nom’d Doc The Act of Killing
When filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer set out to document the aftermath of what he calls “one of the biggest killings in human history,” he started with the survivors.
But it is the killers who speak in his Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing, a film that reinterprets the documentary.
“Documentary implies that we’re documenting a pre-existing reality, and I think we never are in nonfiction; we’re always creating reality with the people we film,”
The Movies Behind the Study That Finds Movies Might Save Your Relationship
Valentine’s Day is a marketing ploy developed by cynical advertisers whose only aim is to separate suckers from their money. Valentine’s Day is an opportunity to show the person you love how much they mean to you, regardless of its origin. Valentine’s Day is a 2010 Gary Marshall film starring two Jessica’s (Alba, Biel), Bradley Cooper, Anne Hathaway, and about four thousand other famous actors that you were either dragged to see or dragged somebody else to see.
How Matthu Placek Created the Single Take, 3D A Portrait of Marina Abramović
The synthesis of technology and art is at the very heart of cinema. Filmmakers are natural innovators. Whether they're working on a big budget film or a small independent, there has simply never been a film made in which the crew didn't have to surmount obstacles through ingenuity—be it with state of the art technology or a nuts and bolts solution.
The ingenuity, technical daring and beautiful beating heart Matthu Placek's 130919 •
Dinner & A Movie: 10 of the Greatest Dine-In Theaters in America
Whether you call it food and a flick or dinner and a movie, the trend of cinemas offering a full menu with a ticket to the silver screen is red hot right now. Some, like Brooklyn’s now famous Nitehawk Cinema, provide in-theater table seating and waiter service. Others are more casual with a buy-it-in-the lobby and carry-it-to-your-seat policy. Most, if not all, understand the value of a good libation. The ten theaters below run the gamut of service,
Sochi 2014 Olympics: 10 Essential Russian Films
Sochi may be hosting the Olympic Games—the resort city is also home to the Sochi Open Russian Film Festival, held annually in June since 1991—but it’s Russia’s regressive, shameful politics that have dominated the world stage while all eyes are on the host country. What better time to pay tribute to Russian filmmakers, past and present, who are responsible for some of the world’s best films — their achievements all the more remarkable because they’ve often worked under oppressive conditions.
Director Ritesh Batra on his Mumbai Set Love Story The Lunchbox
Writer/director Ritesh Batra is enjoying critical and viewer acclaim for his first feature-length film, The Lunchbox. The film, set in Mumbai, is a quiet love story that takes place mostly through hand-written letters. So it’s a surprise to find the Indian-born director and his film at the center of a fiery controversy over the current role and power of the Film Federation of India.
But the decision late last year by India’s official film body to select a lesser-known film with limited distribution,
How The Lego Movie Got Its Stop-Motion Look
When the trailer for The Lego Movie came out, the Internet was abuzz. The Lego characters had that signature stop-motion feel to them, moving in a slightly stilted manner. Was the movie filmed in stop-motion or CG animation? “There were a couple arguments that we all found quite humorous when we first put out the trailers. People on the Internet were saying they knew for a fact we were doing stop-motion,”
The Monuments Men Production Designer Jim Bissell Re-Creates a Ruined Europe
In The Monuments Men, art experts weave through battlefields and behind enemy lines in order to find art looted by the Nazis. Before he was a dictator, Adolf Hitler was an art student, and he planned to take the best art from the countries he conquered and assemble it in a museum that would rival the Louvre in Paris. It was the act of a lunatic, and The Monuments Men had to capture that scope.
Director Jehane Noujaim on her Oscar Nominated Doc The Square
An Oscar nomination can vault a young filmmaker into the big leagues. But for Jehane Noujaim, director of The Square, it means that her film might have the chance to be seen by many of the people who made it. The Square, a powerful, on-the-ground look at Egypt’s revolutionary uprising, was shot by Noujaim and a largely Egyptian crew on the volatile streets in and around Cairo’s Tahrir Square for more than two years.
Sonic Manipulation: Deborah Stratman on her Foley Artist Doc Hacked Circuit
Hearing is believing—this is one of the points Debroah Stratman makes with her fantastic short film about foley artists, Hacked Circuit. While we often associate our eyes as the prime mover in our emotions when we watch a film, it’s our ears, Stratman argues, that moves us to really feel.
Stratman has made some very intriguing documentaries in her career. Hacked Circuit is her 28th film, her third at Sundance Film Festival.
Ilan Gabai, FX Technical Director of Rio 2, Talks Digital Wonders
Typically, the job of digital effects animator does not require previous experience working with live explosives. But it certainly looks good on a résumé.
Ilan Gabai, an effects technical director (FX TD) with Blue Sky Studios, can claim that experience. The 33-year-old grew up in Israel and served three years in his country’s defense forces where he handled grenades, mortars, and RPGs. “I got to blow up a lot of things during my training,”
Sundance: Getting Low Down With John Hawkes & Elle Fanning
Elle Fanning is fantastic in Low Down, a film filled with superb actors. Fanning holds the center of a film as loose and atmospheric as the music it portrays, playing Amy-Jo Albany, the daughter of the brilliant, smack addicted jazz pianist Joe Albany (one of the best character actors in the business, John Hawkes.) It’s a beautifully shot film by experimental filmmaker and cinematographer Jeff Preiss about a perfectly ugly situation.
Novelist Joyce Maynard on Jason Reitman’s Adaptation of her Labor Day
Joyce Maynard is a rarity in the movie world: a writer who’s thrilled with the film adaptation of her novel. Maynard’s “Labor Day” was adapted for the screen and directed by Jason Reitman. It’s about a reclusive single mother (Kate Winslet), her 13-year-old son (Gattlin Griffith) and the escaped convict (Josh Brolin) who hides out in their rundown New England house and creates, at least for a long weekend, an unorthodox family that fill a need in all three people.
Writer/Director John Slattery on Scouting, Casting & Shooting God’s Pocket
If you’re going to peel yourself out of bed at the crack of dawn to attend a screening, it might as well be of John Slattery’s feature length directorial debut, God’s Pocket. Adapted from the novel by Peter Dexter, Slattery has recruited fellow Mad Men star Christina Hendricks as Jeannie Scarpano, and a slew of heavyweight male actors to inhabit the insular, violent, and often very funny world of the titular South Philadelphia neighborhood where the film is set.
Sundance: Film Scholar Noah Isenberg on One of 1st Indie Filmmakers, Edgar G. Ulmer
Long considered as something of a guilty pleasure among filmmakers, critics, and fans, director Edgar G. Ulmer finally gets the attention and scholarship he deserves in Noah Isenberg’s new book: Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker At The Margins. Ulmer was ambitious, and a teller of tall tales about his career: it might never be possible to untangle fact from fiction on his early years in Vienna and (maybe) Berlin.
Sundance: Kristen Wiig & Bill Hader Dig Deep in Craig Johnson’s The Skeleton Twins
You go in to The Skeleton Twins expecting to laugh because it stars Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader, and you do, you laugh quite a lot. But then you end up feeling almost blindsided by this bracing look at adult lives gone horribly awry, a story of estranged two siblings who have been so thoroughly messed up from the suicide of their father and their own failed lives. Craig Johnson has created something remarkable here,
Sundance: Trouble in Texas in Jim Mickle’s Thrilling Cold in July
Director Jim Mickle is back at Sundance for a second year in a row with the dark, thrilling Cold in July, based on the novel by Joe R. Landale. After serving up last year’s compelling cannibal family film We Are What We Are, Mickle seems right at home in this neo-noir set in a small Texas town sometime in the 1980s.
Cold in July wastes no time plunging you into an ordinary man’s extraordinary dilemma.
Sundance: Steve James’s Doc Life Itself Captures Spirit of Roger Ebert
For half of the history of cinema, Roger Ebert has been writing about film. This point is made by Richard Corliss, the Film Comment critic, who wrote the infamous piece “All Thumbs,” arguing that the Siskel & Ebert show, along with the rising culture of 'rating' movies with letter grades or thumbs, was damaging true film criticism. That this same man is such a big presence in James' documentary tells you that the scope of the subject's career is too big,
Sundance: Aubrey Plaza’s Deadly Turn in Life After Beth
Last year we interviewed Jeff Levine, the director of Warm Bodies, a zom-rom-com (excuse us) about a young woman and the zombie she falls for. The premise was fresh and the execution commendable. Julie (Teresa Palmer) finds herself falling for R (Nicholas Hoult), a zombie who still seems to retain some flicker of his sweet human soul.
In writer/director Jeff Baena’s directorial debut, Life After Beth, that premised is tweaked slightly,
