Trailer Talk: We Evaluate What’s out and What’s Coming out
Trying to decide what film to see today? Well, we’ll evaluate your options based solely on the three minutes we’ve been given via their trailers.
We’ve already covered Oz the Great and Powerful with our interview with Gary Jones, costume designer extraordinaire, but here's a look at some other films in the theaters this weekend you can choose from (admittedly the first will be a touch hard to find).
Talking Points: Eleven Intriguing Items From the World of Film From the Past Week
Guess who’s having a better spring than you? Matt Damon, Bill Murray, Cate Blanchett, John Goodman, Bob Balaban and Jean Dujardin, who have all just begun shooting George Clooney’s latest directing effort, The Monuments Men. Based on a true story, it follows group of military operatives who go behind enemy lines to retrieve stolen art from the Nazis during World War II. With principal shooting to take place in Berlin, you can imagine the shooting scheduling won’t be so punishing that the group can’t spend weekends off at Clooney’s famous Lake Como castle.
Meet Gary Jones, the Man Behind the Fantastical Fashion of Oz The Great and Powerful
The clothes make the man, as they say. And in Disney’s Oz The Great and Powerful, director Sam Raimi (Spider-Man, The Evil Dead) and his team of designers found themselves with not just a man to make but a few fashionable witches, a carnival crew, some Munchkins and indeed a whole army of Winkie guards.
With Oscar® winner Robert Stromberg (Avatar,
We’re Fans of Fandor: New Streaming Platform Supports Creative Communities
Streaming content services like Netflix, Hulu, HBOGo, and AmazonInstant have made the impossible plausible: we can now stream movies on our phones, iPads, and portable gaming devices in the most unlikely of places. Whether it’s watching The Wizard of Oz in the backseat of a taxi or Avatar on a leisurely gondola ride through the idyllic Venice canals—so long as you have a working Internet connection, the limitations of where, when,
Hispanic Moviegoers a Big Part of Hollywood’s Future
When population numbers are taken into account, Hispanics make up the heaviest percentage of moviegoers today. They represent 18 percent of the movie-going population but account for a solid 25 percent of all movies seen in theaters, and their attendance numbers are only going up. Hollywood, of course, has taken note.
“The overall trend is that Hispanics remain the best movie-going customers,” said Ray Ydoyaga, an executive at Nielsen, who helped put together the analytics company’s annual 2012 American Moviegoing report.
Sony Pictures Classics Gives Woody Allen’s Latest To Rome With Love The Blu-ray Treatment
There is a scene in Robert B. Weide’s 2012 American Masters special, Woody Allen: A Documentary, in which Allen, sitting casually atop a bed in an unassuming guestroom that betrays the elegant townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that contains it, takes out an array of paper scraps encompassing a career’s worth of film plots. Or, for the most prolific force in cinema, releasing a movie a year for the past four decades,
Hearing Is Believing: MPAA’s TED2013 Master Class With Music Supervisor Randall Poster
Everyone knows ‘seeing is believing,’ but master music supervisor Randall Poster will tell you: what you hear in motion pictures is just as tantamount to the images whirring across the screen. Poster is one of the most sought after music supervisors in Hollywood (a sampling from his impressive oeuvre: Rushmore!, Velvet Goldmine, Boardwalk Empire) —and he brought his prowess to TED2013, where he hosted the dynamic MPAA sponsored-Master Class,
The Last Exorcism Part II’s Ashley Bell Shares Another Dance With the Devil
When we last saw Nell Sweetzer she was in the middle of the woods at the top of an altar giving virgin birth to a demon baby while the reverend who tried to save her soul suffered a fate that would make William Peter Blatty proud. If it made fans cringe, well, that was the point. Nearly three years and $68 million in box-office receipts later (against a budget of $1.8mm), The Last Exorcism has an awkwardly named but hotly anticipated sequel,
From Return of the Jedi to Jack the Giant Slayer, the Worlds of Production Designer Gavin Bocquet
Starting out as a draftsman on Return of the Jedi (1983), Gavin Bocquet’s career as a production designer coincided with the development and implementation of CGI technology into all spheres of the movie business. Bocquet was at the forefront of that revolution, working regularly for George Lucas, honing his craft on the TV show The Young Indiana Jones Adventures and the trilogy of Star Wars prequels. His career reflects the developing integration between practical production design and ever evolving CGI technology.
The Polymath: Chatting With John Ottman, Composer and Editor of Jack the Giant Slayer
Perhaps one of the most famous film sequences of the past thirty years was edited together in a living room using a splicer. By somebody who is also a composer. A composer who has gone on to score a slew of films (while somewhat begrudgingly continuing to edit, too), making him one of the few people in the film industry who is a professional at both of these demanding positions. John Ottman,
Lovesick: Comedian Natasha Leggero Knocks Our Socks Off in the Ben Stiller Produced Burning Love
Sixteen lovelorn bachelorettes bunk up in an L.A. mansion where they’ll compete for the heart of hunky firefighter Mark Orlando and, naturally, embark on some epic makeout sessions and drunken catfights along the way. If it sounds like the “plot” to just about every reality show out there, that’s because it is. But Burning Love, an instant cult classic that started as a Yahoo web series and began its TV run on E!
A Look at how our Oscars Social App Fared Predicting the Oscars (Spoiler Alert: Very Well!)
Tom O'Neil, of GoldDerby.com, got 91% of his predictions correct, according to this round-up by Slate on the most accurate (and inaccurate) Oscar prognosticators. We're not offended we weren't on their list (sniff), but we did want to settle our own accounts and see just how we fared with our social media and critic tracking app, powered by some very big brains (namely our quant, Edward Cook) over at Brandwatch.
Qualcomm and Paramount Release New Star Trek App for Smartphones
Star Trek fans who caught the Super Bowl were likely thrilled by the debut of Paramount’s new innovative smartphone app for the highly-anticipated Star Trek Into Darkness, which opens May 17th, with advance screenings in IMAX for the app's users on May 15th. It’s the official spot for Trekkie fans to gain exclusive access to content, info, and giveaways related to J.J. Abrams’ upcoming action thriller.
Offering a high-tech app alongside any franchise in the sci-fi realm is a no-brainer,
Can We Predict The Oscars? Social Media Reveals Who The Public’s Rooting For
They are known as quants (short for ‘quantitative analyst), and their undisputed supreme leader, at least in the public’s perception, is Nate Silver. You’ve heard of Silver, the man who went from relative obscurity before the 2008 presidential election to a household name thanks to his pinpoint accuracy predicting the last two presidential elections.
Quants are not just employed to help us figure out who the next Commander in Chief is going to be,
Meet Lucy Alibar, Oscar Nominated Screenwriter of Beasts of the Southern Wild
It’s not often you hear an Oscar nominee recount her road to recognition as a rapid one, but that’s just how Lucy Alibar describes it. Turning her one-act play Juicy and Delicious into Beasts of the Southern Wild with co-writer and director Benh Zeitlin, the first-time screenwriter won her film a spot in more than twenty film festivals including Sundance, Berlin, Deauville, and Cannes—the last of which she paid her own way to by selling everything from chocolate peanut butter cookies and homemade gelato to postcards and hugs on Indiegogo.com.
Celebrate The Other Oscar Nominees – You Know, The Ones Ryan Seacrest Likely Won’t Interview
Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director–these might be the most anticipated categories of the Oscars, but this year, let's celebrate the other half. After all, the year's best films wouldn't stand a chance without the genius nominees in less-publicized realms like Production Design, Cinematography, Makeup/Hairstyle, Sound Editing, and Visual Effects.
Here at The Credits, we love all parts of film, which is why we created this infographic to celebrate the many industry icons who are making big waves (but perhaps not big red carpet debuts) at this year's 85th Academy Awards.
An Evening With George Stevens Jr., Celebrating his Honorary Oscar and his Remarkable Career
George Stevens Jr. has lived and breathed films since he was a child. His father, the legendary director George Stevens, instilled in Steven fils a love of story. It was a teenage George Jr. who paced around his father’s bed one night, excitedly telling him the truncated story of a book he had read that his father should turn into a movie. That movie turned out to be the legendary western
Talking With Malik Bendjelloul, Director of Oscar Nominated Documentary Searching for Sugar Man
A surprise hit at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, where it won both the Audience Award and a Special Jury Prize for Best International Documentary, first time filmmaker Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugar Man opened last summer to strong critical reviews and robust commercial success. The story of singer-songwriter Rodriguez, from his late 1960s emergence from the streets of Detroit; his startling and strange success in South Africa during the waning days of Apartheid in the 70s and 80s;
An Evening with Dror Moreh, Oscar Nominated Director of the Documentary The Gatekeepers
Dror Moreh’s stunning, sobering documentary The Gatekeepers is told from a remarkable point of view, or views, rather. Moreh managed to get six former directors of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, to speak to him for hours–on the record. The Shin Bet is, as the Los Angeles Times described the organization, "a combination of the CIA and the FBI.” The agency was created after the Six Day War of 1967,
From Anna Karenina to Selina Kyle, a Look at Film’s Best Dressed Characters
Don’t ask a costume designer if clothes make the man. They’ll tell you—and most of us wouldn’t disagree—that some of the greatest roles—think Annie Hall or Richard Gere’s American gigolo—have been defined as much by their clothes as their lines.
Personal style can also be a narrative device in its own right. Think of last 2011's hit film Drive. The trappings of Ryan Gosling’s nameless anti-hero—his perforated leather driving gloves,
