How Critic Youn Sung-eun Found New Ways to Promote Korean film
What does a freelance film critic do when there are no films to release? For South Korea’s Youn Sung-eun, the situation forced her hand to dive into a new business venture earlier than she anticipated – only this time she’ll be the one creating the content.
“I’m not naturally an optimistic person, so I don’t think people will return to the cinema as they used to. I had been planning a new business for a while, but with the coronavirus situation,...
Mahershala Ali Shares an Illustration of Himself as Blade
Remember four and a half million years ago, last July, when Marvel revealed that Mahershala Ali would playing Blade in a new film about their half-vampire superhero? It was another lifetime and a very different world, but that doesn’t mean that Ali isn’t still hyped to play the character whenever we’re finally able to get back to making movies and enjoying a semblance of regular life. Ali shared an illustration of himself as the daywalking vampire-hunting superhero, and it’s a thing of streamlined beauty:
View this post on InstagramDirector & Executive Producer Lesli Linka Glatter on Filming Homeland’s Series Finale
Lesli Linka Glatter has spent the last several years being alarmed by what she’s heard in intelligence briefings. This doesn’t just set her apart from many of the current apparatchiks in Washington, but also from many of her fellow directors. Not because her colleagues lack the capacity to be alarmed, but because her work as a director and an executive producer on Showtime’s Homeland would bring her, on an annual basis, to something that series creators Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa would call “Spy Camp,” in the D.C...
New Wonder Woman 1984 Images & Posters Reveal a Summer Blockbuster Waiting in the Wings
New images and a new poster remind us that there is a world in which director Patty Jenkins and star Gal Gadot reveal Wonder Woman 1984 to us in a theater. Whether or not that world exists in 2020, well, that’s yet to be determined. The current release date for Jenkins and Gadot’s highly anticipated sequel is August 14, 2020, after the original release date of June 5 began untenable due to the coronavirus pandemic...
Composer Brandon Campbell on Scoring Netflix’s The Letter for the King, Hans Zimmer, & COVID-19
Composer Brandon Campbell remains busy despite the worldwide shutdown of just about every film and TV production due to COVID-19. “I’m doing alright, all things considered, ” he says. Although he can’t give us the names of his current projects, he’s got two he’s still scoring and a third that might follow. Campbell’s relatively full plate makes him one of the lucky ones in the film and TV world at the moment, but it’s still a precarious position...
Netflix Reveals the Trailer for Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods
The first glimpse at Spike Lee’s new feature Da 5 Bloods is here, and it immediately claims our attention as every Spike Lee joint does. Da 5 Bloods sees the tirelessly inventive, always curious Lee delivering a Vietnam war movie, a caper, and a story of brotherhood all in one. Lee directed from a script he co-wrote with Paul De Meo, Danny Bilson, and Kevin Wilmott. Wilmott recently shared an Oscar with Lee fro co-writing their excellent BlacKkKlansman with fellow scribes Charlie Wachtel and David Rabinowitz. ...
Devs Production Designer Embellishes Big Tech Aesthetic in Alex Garland’s Gorgeous, Beguiling Series
What if a Silicon Valley behemoth ran a top-secret project that threatened the well-being of unwitting civilians? That’s the not entirely outlandish premise underlying Devs, now streaming on FX on Hulu. Created by Ex Machina and Annihilation director Alex Garland, the sci-fi limited series largely takes place at a sleek big tech “campus” surrounded by woods.
The exteriors evoke Google, Apple, and Facebook headquarters, but the fictional “Amaya Corporation”...
How Snowpiercer’s Costume Designer Hopped On the Post-Apocalyptic Ride
Unlike Snowpiercer the train, which hurtles non-stop around the globe during a post-apocalyptic Ice Age, Snowpiercer the series has encountered numerous stops and starts en route to its May 17 premiere on TNT. Based on Parasite‘s Oscar-winning co-writer/director Bong Joon Ho’s 2013 film adaptation of a 1982 French graphic novel called Le Transperceneige, the TV version of Snowpiercer was initially developed by writer-producer Josh Friedman (Terminator: The Sarah Connors Chronicles,...
The Matrix 4 Cast Signs 8-Week Extension
At this point, all news surrounding the reopening of our economy, and film productions, in particular, is incredibly fluid. Yet a new report from Variety at least suggests that studios are seeing some potential to begin filming—or in many cases to resume filming—in the near future. Variety’s Marc Malkin has the exclusive that The Matrix 4 cast has signed eight-week extensions, keeping the actors available until at least July 6. That includes original Matrix stars Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss,...
Set Your Phasers to Spiritual—A Movie Watchlist For Contemplating The Big Stuff
Years and years ago, before “meme” wasn’t even a word, before the internet itself, I was teaching a college film course called Critical Approach to Cinema. The title alone stood as a warning that it was time to get attentive to the art of film.
One of the movies I showed the class was Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 2001: A Space Odyssey, and I knew that getting them to watch a film whose slow and deliberate unfolding of sound and image would require wholesale changes in their viewing reflexes...
From Public Health to Film, How Thai Filmmaker Nirattisai Ratphithak Found His Path
Like nearly every other industry, the filmmaking world has undergone an unprecedented global shutdown due to the coronavirus pandemic. We’ve been talking to filmmakers all over the world to find out how they’ve been handling the stoppage in work, making the most of their quarantine, and their hopes for the future. Those interviews have included chats with Indian filmmakers Tannishtha Chatterjee and Priyanka Singh, and Filipino filmmaker Keith Sicat.
Today,...
The Boys Costume Designers Carrie Grace & Laura Jean Shannon – Part II
In part 2 of our interview with the costume designers for Amazon Prime’s anti-hero superhero series The Boys, Laura Jean Shannon and Carrie Grace talked about the mechanics as well as the artistry involved in creating the superhero costumes—and the titular Boys’ more regular-guy clothes—for the hit series. Each super-suit requires a ton of work and enough duplicates that the actors and stunt performers can keep looking good. Season 2 of The Boys will be available later this year...
Dressing The Boys‘ Wholesome Hero Starlight With Costume Designers Carrie Grace & Laura Jean Shannon
A comic book artist has the luxury of creating superhero costumes that have to meet just one standard—looking cool. But when it comes time to translate those looks to screen, the costume designer has challenges that require more than imagination and a pencil. Superhero costumes worn by actors have to look real, even in hi-def. They have to withstand action scenes and they inevitably have to be cleaned and repaired afterward. But they can’t appear too brand-new;...
Director Matt Wolf on His Uncannily Timely Documentary Spaceship Earth
Spaceship Earth tells the fascinating, timely story of eight men and women who, in 1991, stepped into a sealed replica of Earth’s ecosystem to live a fully sustainable life for 24 months. Their world was called Biosphere 2, engineered by inventor/investor John Allen, and the experiment in which they participated, deemed a global media phenomenon. Spaceship Earth is available now on Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play, FandangoNow, Vudu, DIRECTV, DISH, and longtime NEON partner Hulu.
Spaceship Earth’s director Matt Wolf (Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project) was just a young boy when the “biospherians” began their historic research and had no memory of it...
Hamilton Movie Will Premiere on Disney+ a Full Year Earlier Than Planned
Good news is few and far between these days, so we’ll take it where we can get it. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is good news. The movie version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton is arriving on Disney+ a full year (and change) earlier than originally planned. Hamilton will now stream on July 3, 2020, instead of the originally slated release of October 15, 2021. Miranda himself shared the news on Twitter:
It’s only a matter of time…...
With Her Amazon Directing Gig on Hold, Indian Filmmaker Tannishtha Chatterjee Embraces Other Creative Pursuits
It’s often two-thirty in the afternoon before actor, writer, and director Tannishtha Chatterjee finds time to turn her attention to creative pursuits. “Till lunchtime…I’m cooking, cutting vegetables, cleaning, dusting and bathing Radhika.”
Radhika is Chatterjee’s four-and-a-half-year-old daughter. For the last six weeks, it’s been just the two of them tucked away in her Mumbai apartment. “She’s actually become quite independent in the last one and a half months. She’s learned many new things. Because she has to. Which is a good thing!...
Erica Mūnoz on Producing & Starring in HBO’s Undocumented Immigrant Story Long Gone By
Just premiered on HBO, Long Gone By is the story of the hardworking single mother and undocumented immigrant Ana, played by Erica Mūnoz, who is trying to create the best life for her brainy teen daughter Izzy (Izzy Hau’ula) in their adoptive small town of Warsaw, Indiana. When a deportation order demands Ana return to Nicaragua, it puts not only her own future in jeopardy, it makes Izzy attending Indiana University nearly impossible. Because of her immigration status,...
Caitlin Moran on Adapting Her Own Novel How to Build a Girl
The girl in Caitlin Moran’s rowdy coming of age comedy How to Build a Girl, which the popular British author adapted from her 2014 semi-autobiographical debut novel, is so uniquely larger than life that finding the right actress proved problematic — at least for a while. The film is now available on-demand.
“We scoured Britain trying to find a British actress who could do it,” says Moran from her home in London where she’s “been in lockdown for weeks so just talking to another human being that isn’t someone I gave birth to or someone I married is a genuine thrill,” she says...
Composer Vivek Maddala Underscores Discrimination in Asian Americans Documentary for PBS
The versatile composer Vivek Maddala recently shifted gears from his zany Emmy-winning music for Cartoon Network series The Tom and Jerry Show to score PBS’ somber documentary Asian Americans (debuting May 11). A musical prodigy, Maddala enrolled in Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music at age 15 with dreams of becoming a jazz drummer but switched to electrical engineering at Georgia Tech before earning a graduate degree in applied physics. “I’d been the hotshot drummer in my home town but when I got to Berklee in the late eighties,...
Andy Serkis Reveals Interesting Nuggets About The Batman
Like every other major production, filming on Matt Reeves‘ hotly-anticipated The Batman was suspended in mid-March. Reeves and his talented cast and crew had begun production in London and had filmed around 25% of the total feature before production had to be shut down due to the spread of the novel coronavirus. The Batman is now slated for an October 1, 2020 release date—which we argued was the perfect time to unleash the new Batman on the world...
