Golden Globes Highlights: Moonlight, La La Land & Meryl Streep
If you didn't catch last night's Golden Globes, we've got you covered. It was an emotional night, highlighted by a big win for Barry Jenkins' Moonlight, a record number of Globes for Damien Chazelle's La La Land, and a stirring, eloquent, pointed speech from living legend Meryl Streep upon accepting her Cecil B. De Mille Award for lifetime achievement.
We begin with the fact that La La Land wasn't just the night's big winner,...
The Music of A Monster Calls Captures the Hope of Humanity
A Monster Calls is a simultaneously explosive and fragile tale that finds some of its most powerful moments in the quietest scenes. Celebrated composer Fernando Velázquez carefully molded the score to cradle audiences as the tender story unfolds. The film illustrates the imagination of a young boy coping with his mother’s illness, but Velázquez reveals how the story transcends the fairytale. “It’s a movie about why we do movies,” he explains. “We do movies because it’s a way of understanding the world and explaining the world to ourselves.”...
Moonlight‘s Breakout Star Trevante Rhodes Joins Shane Black’s The Predator
Trevante Rhodes is the third and final actor who plays Chiron in Barry Jenkins' phenomenal Moonlight. The character is portrayed at three stages of his life; as a child (by Alex Hibbert), as a teenager (by Ashton Sanders), and finally as an adult, by Rhodes. The actors get roughly the same amount of screen time, and each deliver astonishing performances, with Rhodes in particular soaring in a scene set in a diner that was so good,...
The Sci-Tech Awards Honor the Industry’s Wizards
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences just announced the recipients of its 2017 Scientific and Technical Awards. Among the thirty-four individual winners and five organizations honored are some of the tech brains behind several of our favorite films of the prior year. Having pioneered the CGI Studio renderer at Blue Sky Studios, Carl Ludwig, Eugene Troubetzkoy, and Maurice van Swaaij are included in the Technical Achievement Award winners — Blue Sky, it should be noted, offered a unique contribution in 2016 with its masterfully updated visuals in the The ...
Fences: a Critical Smash and a Boon for PA Economy
When Denzel Washington set out to adapt August Wilson's brilliant 1985 play Fences for the big screen, he brought along his co-star from the 2010 Broadway revival, Viola Davis (they both won Tony's for their performances) and set his film where it had to be; Pittsburgh's Hill District. "Fences" was the sixth part of Wilson's ten-play "Pittsburgh Cycle," an epic undertaking in which Wilson explored the evolving African-American experience, examining many themes, including race relations. When Washington decided he would be directing the big screen adaptation,...
Oscar Watch: Picking Three Actors for One Role in Moonlight
Yesi Ramirez knew she wanted to pick the actors for Moonlight as soon as she read the script — twice. "The first time I read the script I cried," she says. "The second time, I cried again." The Los Angeles-based casting director had never worked with Moonlight writer-director Barry Jenkins before, but she liked what she heard when they sat down for breakfasts to discuss the gay-themed Oscar contender that called for three actors to portray the forlorn "Chiron"...
Moonlight‘s Editor Joi McMillon on Cutting the Story of a Lifetime
Nominated for six Golden Globes, the stunningly beautiful, brilliantly executed Moonlight was one of the best films of the year. We've spoken to composer Nicholas Brittell, breakout star Janelle Monáe and cinematographer James Laxton about how they helped bring director Barry Jenkins film to life. The story, tracking three periods of time in one young man's life—as a child, a teenager and a grown man—was based on the play by Tarell Alvin McCraney called "In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue."...
Woody Harrelson Eyes Mentor Role in Han Solo Spinoff?
Woody Harrelson is no stranger to playing a mentor to troubled but potentially potent young fighters. His Haymitch Abernathy was a crucial mentor to Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) in The Hunger Games franchise, very often helping her stay alive amid not only the deadly games at the center of the film, but the equally deady politics that surrounded them. So Variety's exclusive that Harrelson is in talks to play Han Solo's mentor in Phil Lord and Christopher Miller's upcoming ...
Oscar Watch: Editor Expertly Shreds Time in Manchester By the Sea
Writer-director Kenneth Lonergan famously spent years in the editing suite trying to achieve perfection on his previous movie Margaret. He shot the film in 2005, delivered a much debated cut in 2008 and three years later watched the picture open in two theaters. Lonergan's comeback effort Manchester by the Sea represents an astonishing return to form, widely expected to land a Best Picture Oscar nomination on the strength of Casey Affleck's moving performance as a New England man haunted by his past...
Writer/director Mia Hansen-Løve on Things to Come
French actress Isabelle Huppert is reaping awards from critics’ groups for her roles in two films this year: Elle, from Dutch provocateur Paul Verhoeven, and the quietly poignant Things to Come, from young French writer/directer Mia Hansen-Løve.
While Huppert’s audacious performance in Elle jut might earn the actress her first Oscar nod, it’s the delicate blend of youth and wisdom, melancholy and joy, in Things to Come that may be the better showcase for her ferocity and vulnerability...
Remembering Carrie Fisher
To a generation that came of age in the ‘70s and ‘80s, she will forever be Princess Leia of the Star Wars films, with her iconic buns-like-headphones hairdo, wielding a blaster as she leads the rebellion against the Galactic Empire. To another, slightly older demographic, Carrie Fisher was synonymous with one of the last great Hollywood scandals. The daughter of actress Debbie Reynolds and pop star Eddie Fisher, Carrie Fisher became tabloid fodder at age three when her father left Reynolds to marry Elizabeth Taylor in 1959 at the height of Taylor’s fame...
Oscar Watch: Love & Friendship Designer’s Delicious Duds for Jane Austen Comedy
Jane Austen's fictional universe takes a turn toward the comedic with Love & Friendship adapted by Whit Stillman from one of her early works. The movie, released in May, is now earning Oscar buzz for Irish costume designer Eimer Ni Mhaoldomhnaigh and the splendid 18th century gowns she crafted for Kate Beckinsale as gorgeous widower Lady Susan.
Prepping in Dublin for the ten-week production, Mhaoldomhnaigh and her team of seamstresses outfitted Beckinsale/Lady Susan in tightly corseted silk dresses color-coded to reflect her progressive seduction of upper crust society...
Composer Jake Monaco on Building His Instruments, Scoring for Pixar & More
Composer Jake Monaco has worked on everything from big budget comedies like Keeping up with the Joneses, to children’s animations like Amazon’s The Stinky and Dirty Show and the recent Pixar short Piper. Nothing is off limits to Monaco in his search for the perfect sound- he explains how instruments made from everyday objects like vodka bottles, or a $6 wok from Ikea, help him hit the right notes.
How did you break into film/TV scoring?...
How Hacksaw Ridge‘s Production Designer Transformed Australia into Okinawa
Hacksaw Ridge Production designer Barry Robison has worked on films in Australia so often that he acquired dual-citizenship. Being familiar with the area gave him an advantage when working with Australian director, Mel Gibson. The setting, however, was unforgiving for a period piece set in America and Japan. Robison literally reshaped the land to take audiences back 70 years and thousands of miles away. The film garnered three Golden Globes nominations, and his rigorous research and scrupulous attention to detail earned him an Australian Academy Cinema Television Arts (AACTA) award for Best Production Design...
How Star Wars‘ Editor Prepared Passengers for Lift Off
Oscar-nominated editor Maryann Brandon came straight off Star Wars: The Force Awakens to prepare Passengers for lift off. A frequent J.J. Abrams collaborator — she also edited his Star Trek Into Darkness — Brandon has became Hollywood’s go-to editor for big space epics in part because she brings an exacting eye to action sequences. Her mantra: Make sure the audience understands what’s happening.
"I don’t just cut for the sake of spectacle,...
Arrival‘s Screenwriter on Crafting one of the Year’s Best Films
For sci-fi fans, there was something doubly wonderful about watching director Denis Villeneuve's Arrival; it proved that the most malleable of genres is still alive and well, and, confirmed that Villeneuve was absolutely the right choice to helm the upcoming Blade Runner sequel, Blade Runner 2049.
Ridley Scott's 1982 Blade Runner is one of sci-fi's most iconic films (coming just a few years after his equally iconic ...
Passengers‘ VFX Supervisor on Creating Zero Gravity Mayhem
A serene, unusual spacecraft drifts through space. The Avalon is on a 120 year course, carrying 5000+ passengers to a new colony, plant-like and twinkling on its exterior, silent and gleaming on the inside. Its well-stocked and highly-designed but empty chambers are reminiscent of another era’s grand hotel, devoid of guests, ready to close for the season, And then a hibernation pod malfunctions, and passenger Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) wakes up 90 years early. He will grow old and die before anyone else on the ship awakes,...
Molly Shannon on her Heartbreaking Role in Other People
For Molly Shannon fans (and we are legion), it's long been known the former SNL standout had acting chops that stretched beyond her iconic contributions to the show. But what contributions! Shannon became a featured player on SNL in 1995 and inhabited a few of the show's most memorable characters, including (of course) oddball Catholic school girly Mary Katherine Gallagher (Shannon took the character onto the big screen with 1999's Superstar), and, a personal favorite, Terry Rialto, the earnest co-host of "The Delicious Dish," who,...
Here’s Your First Look at Blade Runner 2049
Director Dennis Villeneuve obliterated any fears about whether he could handle tackling an iconic sci-fi film like the Blade Runner sequel with his deft work on the remarkable Arrival. That film, this year’s best sci-fi film by a wide margin, made it clear that the Sicario director took inspiration from the very best sci-fi directors, most notably Steven Spielberg’s work on Close Encounters of the Third Kind,...
Chopped & Screwed: How Moonlight Composer Morphed Acoustic Music into Rumbling Soundscapes
Composer Nicholas Britell played classical piano as a kid, attended Juilliard School's Pre-College program and studied music at Harvard University. But Britell brought an entirely different skill set to bear when director Barry Jenkins asked him to score coming-of-age Oscar contender Moonlight with "chopped and screwed" southern hip hop in mind.
What, exactly, is 'chopping and screwed'? "Basically, it’s when you slow down tracks so the pitch goes really low and you get these deep-end,...
