#also i think that if your movies are all loosely connected it forces the filmmakers and writers to be more creative

[rickrosset]

Oscar Thoughts 2023

I'm bringing back my popular segment, Oscar Thoughts, mainly because I thought the Oscars were this past Sunday and they were not. Now, I have one more week to not watch any more movies from 2022. I'll just say it, it's March 2023 and I've moved on from 2022. I'm not out here wondering what the Best International movie is anymore. They could have sent screeners. Instead I watched Decision to Leave and moved on. Today, I'm discussing my rankings of the 2023 Best Picture Nominees. One thing to be clear about is my personal taste doesn't really align with a lot of other filmmakers. I like it when the movie is good and that's my main concern when I watch a film. 1. Tar - ****1/2 I love this movie and I'm surprised it never captured the Zeitgeist. There's nothing easy or straightforward about its approach to cancel culture and I think that's tough for some people. I love films about flawed geniuses (see The Social Network and Steve Jobs) and I appreciated the comedy and psychological thriller aspects more the second viewing. 2. Elvis - ****1/2 Because I know how much many people hate this movie, I have kept kind of mum on it but I really enjoyed Baz Luhrman's 'Elvis'. It felt like he finally had the material to match the incredible production design and bombastic, dizzying camera movement and constant cutting that has been his style since 1996's Romeo + Juliet (a junior classic for me). There's no defense for Tom Hanks' performance in Elvis but it's Austin Butler's world and everyone else is just getting by. A truly electric, hypnotic performance that could win an Oscar but could also lose to B. Fraser (whale gang) or Colin Farrell (still owed for his work in 2006's Miami Vice). 3. All Quiet on the Western Front - ****1/2 An instant modern war film classic that's score is still blaring in my brain. 4. Top Gun: Maverick - ****1/2 Recognizing the achievement that is Top Gun: Maverick is hard for some people because they don't view it as an Oscar movie. To them, I say what the fuck is going on with Avatar 2 then? Tom Cruise, Joseph Kosinski, Chris Macquarrie and Jerry Bruckheimer nail the landing with the sequel that ties up all the loose ends and raises the bar on aviation filmmaking. Are you not entertained? 5. Women Talking - **** Superbly acted film from one of my favorite actors from my youth, Sarah Polley (The Sweet Hereafter). I wanted to enjoy this movie more but it's a tough subject matter and it's mainly desaturated, washed out images of people talking in a barn. 6. The Banshees of Inisherin - **** To be clear, I enjoyed Banshees overall and found it funny, which is still the main goal of comedies. I've never seen In Bruges but I can't say I've ever been a Martin McDonagh fan. He's always ready to beat you over the head with symbolism and in this film, he ponders what creators owe fans and what it means to be an artist through the backdrop of an Irish isle during Civil War. Exceptional performances by everyone involved. It's just not one of my favorite films of the year. 7. The Fabelmans - ***1/2 I'm not here to throw shots at the King (Spielberg). He's made another technically brilliant film examining his own backstory in heartbreaking detail. My biggest issue with this film and other Spielberg works is I have very different sensibilities and attitudes toward the American Dream. I hated high school and I didn't care what anyone thought about me and I handled my parents divorce much differently. Spoilers: Young Steve, you broke the code (IYKYK). 8. Triangle of Sadness *** If you always wanted to know what a European version of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" would be, then here is your chance. I enjoyed director Ruben Ostlund's Force Majeure but TOS is a lot more overtly disgusting. It's not until the final act, which is basically a 5 star movie in itself, that I connected with the material. 9. Everything Everywhere All at Once *** When this movie wins Best Picture, it will become the first winner that I'll have walked out on in theaters (don't worry, I went back the next day and nearly walked out again but then bought two beers and just accepted that I wasn't into the film but it deserved to be finished). Here is my LB review that I've never wavered from "There’s a lot of 5 star moments in this movie and a lot of 1/2 star moments. I was exhilarated and also bored. The comedic moments often didn’t work for me. Daniel’s, I get it, you’re into butt stuff. I’m going to give this movie three stars because it’s not really for me but I’m glad I saw it and I’m even more happy to know movies like this can still get made. That said, I never need to see this movie again." 10. Avatar: The Way of Water - *1/2 SPOILERS: James Cameron starts the movie with the bad guys that are killed off in the first movie just being brought back into the Avatar world and basically tells the audience, I'm going to run it back and you're going to lap up these animated visuals like the little puppies you are. I was immediately out on this movie and wanted to walk out but instead went to concessions, bough two IPA's (it was in Texas and yes, there's a pattern here) and went back and watched the Swiss Family Cameron whaling adventure. Cool. 

#Oscars #oscars 2023 #oscar thoughts

[mianwo]

extremely lukewarm take but i am now a firm believer that the least annoying way for multimovie franchises to exist is a la the mission impossible movies or the conjuring movies... basically theyre all loosely connected/have the same main characters, and the plots are a bit repetitive but thats fine! because each movie could also be wonderful standalone and you dont need to watch 20 other movies and tv shows just to get context for them! you go in, you know youre gonna watch ed and lorraine conjuring beat the shit out of some demons or youre gonna see tom cruise do some sick stunts and spy shit and explosions and its just a fun time.

and honestly ive enjoyed watching the conjuring and MI movies way more than the recent stuff that marvel is putting out and ill be the first to say the writing is better too. i dont think superhero fatigue is real bc i dont think "superhero" is a genre but I DO think were all just tired of needing to sit through an entire backlog's worth of movies just to get context for stuff. like I didn't even watch antman or dr strange and while I still understood the plot to infinity war and endgame well enough it just seemed strange and asspully and lazy just to see these random characters show up and do whatever it is they do

#aud.txt #tbh this is the same way a lot of video game franchises work too #also i think that if your movies are all loosely connected it forces the filmmakers and writers to be more creative #like in terms of writing and characterization and etc

[letterboxd]

Heart Beat.

Minari’s film composer Emile Mosseri (also responsible for the Kajillionaire and The Last Black Man in San Francisco scores) tells Ella Kemp about his A24 favorites, Nicholas Britell’s friendship and the boldest Paul McCartney needle drop in movie history.

What do you think a broken heart sounds like? How about a warm, beating one? It’s something that Emile Mosseri has been thinking about for a while now. The past two years have seen him complete a hat-trick of beguiling, transporting scores for Plan B movies: Joe Talbot and Jimmie Fails’ The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Miranda July’s Kajillionaire and now, the film voted the best of 2020 by our community, Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari.

What binds these scores together is a delicacy that knows when to break free and turn into something altogether spectacular. But on Minari in particular, Mosseri is in full bloom, working for the first time in a way he’d always dreamed about. While The Last Black Man in San Francisco saw him compose to a loose edit, and on Kajillionaire he worked to a locked cut, Chung gave him the freedom to write music directly to Minari’s script. “It was a dream to work this way on Minari,” Mosseri says. “It was so beautifully written and so visceral.”

‘Minari’ composer Emile Mosseri.

Minari is an intimate portrait of a Korean family making their way in rural America, and the composer was interested in “trying to figure out musically how you can feel connected to your deepest childhood memories”. These memories belong, in the film, to David—a tiny king played by eight-year-old Alan Kim—as he comes to terms with his new life on a small farm in Arkansas, as his family strives for their own version of the American Dream.

The Yi family is made up of David and his sister Anne (Noel Kate Cho), their parents Monica (Han Ye-ri) and Jacob (Steven Yeun) and their grandmother, Soon-ja (Youn Yuh-jung). It’s a personal story for Chung, one that Mosseri felt honored to be a part of. “It’s a very intimate story with these five characters, which takes place mostly in this small mobile home—but emotionally, it’s very epic.”

There was something about Chung that had caught Mosseri’s attention early on. “I had met him at the LA premiere of Last Black Man,” Mosseri says, “and I sent him the Kajillionaire score.” Mosseri was already familiar with the filmmaker’s work: “His first film, Munyurangabo, is incredible.” He calls Chung “very open, but also sly” in terms of hitting the right notes and “gently steering the ship”. The partnership between composer and director was about working on “a more emotional level,” Mosseri says. “There was never any talk about what we wanted stylistically.”

The ‘Minari’ ensemble cast.

The result is a film graced with music at once lush and raw, grandiose and vulnerable. Mosseri is keenly aware of these nuances, and always made sure to walk the tonal tightrope in the writing process. “There aren’t sad cues and hopeful cues,” he explains. “Every cue has both feelings. Each musical moment dips in and out of the hopefulness and joy of a family, and then the pain and frustration and dissonance that they hold.”

The way Mosseri’s music swells and flows often feels intangible, magical, even—which comes more from knowing what to avoid, rather than acting with too much forced intention. On his first film, Mosseri brought brass and strings to the streets of San Francisco, and with Miranda July, he worked old Hollywood glamor into the concrete blocks of Los Angeles. Here, we twirl through the tall grass as gentle acoustic guitars and elegant string sections sigh and sway, while the Yi family work through their growing pains.

“We didn’t want to hear Korean music when you see Korean characters, and we didn’t want twangy music when you see an American farm,” Mosseri explains. “We wanted to come at it from the side somehow, in some way that’s unexpected.” ‘Rain’, his collaboration with Minari star Han Ye-ri, which features on the official soundtrack, encapsulates this juxtaposition. It’s an epic lullaby of sorts; Han sings in Korean to a gentle guitar; a pleasing swell of synths climbs alongside her voice. The effect on the listener is as if liquid love is trickling from every vein. “I wanted this score to feel like it had a warm, beating heart.”

Two of your three feature films to date have been released by A24, and so we must ask: what are your favorite A24 film scores? Emile Mosseri: Three come to mind. First of all, Anna Meredith’s score for Eighth Grade. It’s so adventurous and unexpected and fresh and just brilliant. It’s so pure and out-there. It also does this impossible thing of being hip and exciting and deep, but also hilarious. The pool-party scene fucking kills me.

Then there’s Under the Skin by Mica Levi. I remember seeing that at the Nighthawk theater in Brooklyn and feeling like it was the best score I’d heard in as long as I could remember.

And then of course, Moonlight. That film got under my skin in a way I didn’t see coming. I saw it by myself in a theater, after hearing all the hype for months and months. When a movie has that much hype you can get a bit cynical and it can distract you, so I went in a bit guarded, but I left the film destroyed. For weeks and weeks it resonated with me in a way that was so profound, and a large part of that is due to Nick [Britell]’s music. And the film is just perfection.

Scarlett Johansson in ‘Under the Skin’ (2013), scored by Mica Levi.

You’ve been described as Nicholas Britell’s protégé more than once… It’s funny, I think that came from me being a fan of his and saying nice things about his music. I met him at Sundance two years ago when Last Black Man was premiering. I went with my wife and my brother and I was so excited, I’d been waiting for this moment for so long. We walked in and Nick and Barry [Jenkins] were walking in behind [us]. And there was also Boots Riley, Kamasi Washington… all these people I looked up to. I hadn’t considered that I would see this film in the room with them, and it was the first time I was hearing the final mix and just agonizing.

Nick was incredibly generous and said great things about the score and was super encouraging, and he became a friend and mentor. But I’ve never studied with him or worked with him. Although, if you’re a fan of somebody’s work, you’re a student of any of these composers that you admire. Anything you watch and listen to, you absorb.

What was the first film that made you want to be a composer? It was Edward Scissorhands. Danny Elfman’s score was the first one that made me realize that this was a job. I’m always attracted to big, romantic melodies, and over-the-top sweeping stuff—but done tastefully. In that score, he sets the high-water mark for me. It’s so unapologetically romantic.

And then there are other obvious ones like The Godfather. It’s maybe a dorky choice because it’s the most famous movie ever, but it really is the best. And that got me into Nino Rota, and from there I found [Federico] Fellini and all these movies through Nino, the composer. And then I got really into the score for La Dolce Vita and more movies that he’d written for, which are so beautiful.

The ‘Edward Scissorhands’ (1990) score was an early inspiration for Mosseri.

Which films, new to you, blew you away in 2020? Take Shelter by Jeff Nichols blew me away. It unfolded in a way that was intoxicating and really exciting, and it just really stuck with me.

What’s been your favorite needle drop on screen this year? Aside from Devonté Hynes’ score being stunning, there’s an amazing piece of music placed in an episode of Luca Guadagnino’s We Are Who We Are. They use a Paul McCartney song called ‘Let Em In’, and they dropped it in this incredibly tasteful but unexpected way, in a really dark, emotionally loaded scene. It worked in such a beautiful and graceful way. It’s because it’s the most cheery McCartney, it’s full-blown upbeat and poppy McCartney. And this is the darkest-of-the-dark human pain, and it lands in this way that is such a bold choice, such a powerful move.

What should people listen to after watching Minari? One record I’ve been listening to a lot recently is Jeff Tweedy’s Love is the King. It could be a good companion to Minari. I’m a huge fan of his and it’s a gorgeous record. It’s very stripped-down and emotionally raw, and it’s both hopeful and heartbreaking.

Which filmmakers would you love to work with next? I’m always afraid to answer this question because there are so many filmmakers I admire. There are filmmakers I grew up with loving their films—working with Miranda was that for me. Spike Jonze or Yorgos Lanthimos are directors in her world that I also love and would love to work with. But there’s so many others. Derek Cianfrance is amazing and he works with different composers. I love his choice of collaborators musically. I love that he used the late great Harold Budd to do his shows [including I Know This Much is True], and then Mike Patton, and Grizzly Bear… the music is always incredible in his projects, but he doesn’t have a go-to person. His films are so heartbreaking and powerful and really, really raw. He’s fearless.

I feel very lucky that I’ve worked on these three films which are all very much like somebody’s ripping their heart out and putting it on the screen. I feel like Derek Cianfrance does that in his films too, in this unapologetic, super-vulnerable way of just ripping his soul out and putting it out for everyone to see. It’s incredibly appealing to find those projects, because they’re really rare.

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Follow Ella on Letterboxd

‘Minari’ is available everywhere in the US that movies can be rented, and screening in select theaters in the US and other regions. Listen to the official soundtrack and more of Mosseri’s film compositions in the official Spotify playlist via Milan Records. ‘Kajillionaire’ is available on VOD now.

#minari #letterboxd year in review #kajillionaire #the last black man in san francisco #emile mosseri #miranda july #lee isaac chung #a24 #a25 films #film composer #film soundtrack #film score #derek cianfrance #nicholas britell #nino rota #letterboxd

[back-and-totheleft]

Oliver Stone thinks Hollywood is crazy

Beginning in 1986 with the release of his films “Salvador” and “Platoon,” Oliver Stone kicked off a decade-long run of remarkable success. Many of the controversial and stylistically brash films that he made during this era were box-office hits and established Stone, who twice won the Academy Award for best director, as a bold generational voice. While films like “Wall Street” and “Natural Born Killers” didn’t have a particularly nuanced take on the rotten amorality at our society’s core, and the treatment of the country’s self-deceptions in “Born on the Fourth of July” and “J.F.K.” wasn’t especially subtle, no one could deny that Stone’s work spoke directly to America’s dreams and nightmares. Since then, though, the director’s standing as a finger-on-the-pulse filmmaker has been gradually subsumed by the image of him as a political provocateur, thanks to his documentaries about the likes of Fidel Castro and Vladimir Putin. But it’s the long lead-up to that golden year of 1986 that is the focus of Stone’s upcoming memoir, “Chasing the Light,” in which all his questionable bravado and self-admitted insecurity are on full display. “I never wanted arguments,” Stone says. “I never wanted to provoke. I was just seeking the truth.” You’ve made a lot of movies and documentaries based on other people’s lives. Did that experience help you tell the story of your own? 

Well, I thought of the book as having the structure of a novel. You set up a problem in the first chapter: The protagonist is in a box. He’s in New York City, 1976. He’s broke. He feels like a failure and has to take his whole life into account. Then the novel winds its way into the 1986 period. It’s a picaresque. It’s a bit like a Thackeray novel. Should I be reading into the fact that you’re calling your memoir a novel and referring to yourself in the third person? 

You can read what you want. It is “me,” but you have to distance yourself from yourself. That’s not to say you’re fictionalizing. If I write another book, which I hope to do, it’d be nice to get closer to where I am now. I’m not there yet. Making a film to close out your life? I don’t know. There might be a way. There have been some very nice farewell films. Mr. Kurosawa did “Rhapsody in August” — a very nice and gentle film. Would you close out your life with a nice and gentle film? 

You think I’m so ungentle? I don’t know if gentle is how I’d describe your sensibility. 

Fair enough. But even in “Natural Born Killers,” if you look closely there’s a tenderness there between Juliette and Woody. Or the Bush movie that I did, “W.”— at the end, it’s very tender with him and Laura. I know you’ve felt marginalized by Hollywood in the past. Do you still? 

I don’t think they think about me. I don’t feel bitter about it. “Savages” was my last movie in the mainstream, so to speak. I thought it was mainstream, and Universal did too, up until they distributed it. They decided to move it at the last second from fall to summer. So they put us in the middle of a schedule that was pretty tough. “Ted” was there. Remember that movie? It was hilarious. You don’t want to open against “Ted.” I do still get offered stuff, but I’m not inspired to make a movie. I don’t feel anything inside me, fire for going through that pain and misery. The last film I did was “Snowden.” It was so difficult to make. We struggled to get financing — I believe — because of the subject matter. But I’m still keeping my hand in with documentaries. I am working on two right now. One is on J.F.K. Since the film came out in 1991, there’s been quite a bit of new material revealed that people have basically ignored. It’s a hell of a story. “J.F.K.: Destiny Betrayed” is what we call it. Then I’m starting “A Bright Future,” which is about the benefits of clean energy, which includes nuclear energy. These are documentary subjects and aren’t necessarily going to be popular, but they’re important to me. Are you poking the hornet’s nest by going back to J.F.K.?

I’m not scared of that. I’m past that age. I don’t need to make a Hollywood movie. I don’t need to get the approval of the bosses.

Do you think you’ve made your last Hollywood film? 

I would have no problem doing another one, but I don’t feel it right now. Frankly, I did 20, and I got worn out. You had about a 10-year period, starting with “Salvador” and “Platoon” and going up to “Natural Born Killers” or “Nixon,” when your films felt like these major statements on the country and the culture. When that zeitgeist-y period ended, which it inevitably does for artists, did it change how you approached your work? 

I recognize the impact I had, but at the same time I enjoyed doing the films I did afterward. In 1999 I did “Any Given Sunday.” I get so much attention for that. “World Trade Center” was one of my most successful films financially. So the parade continued. The problem is in Hollywood. It’s just so expensive — the marketing. Everything has become too fragile, too sensitive. Hollywood now — you can’t make a film without a Covid adviser. You can’t make a film without a sensitivity counselor. It’s ridiculous. Why is that ridiculous? 

The Academy changes its mind every five, 10, two months about what it’s trying to keep up with. It’s politically correct [expletive], and it’s not a world I’m anxious to run out into. I’ve never seen it quite mad like this. It’s like an “Alice in Wonderland” tea party. In what respect? 

Oh, David, don’t go there. That’s going to be your headline. You know, I just read something about how films are going to be very expensive to make now, because you need to take all these precautions, and a 50-day shoot becomes a 60-day shoot, and social distancing for actors. That’s what I’m talking about.

Tell me more about your J.F.K. documentary. Is there a big revelation in it that you can share? 

I would be doing an injustice to say there’s one big one. There’s no smoking gun. It’s accretion of detail, David. Please watch the film when it’s out, and write me an email when you see it, and tell me if there’s cogency in it. Does it turn out that the bullet went back and to the right? 

We can make fun, but let me give you some quick points about what is in the documentary: There’s no chain of custody on the magic bullet, which is called CE-399. There’s also no chain of custody on this damn rifle, the Mannlicher-Carcano, which Lee Harvey Oswald was accused of shooting. I don’t want to go into the details, but we can’t account for who was in possession of the bullets and the rifle at various times. It’s a mess. Then we got more detail than ever showing that there was a huge back-of-the-head wound in Kennedy, which clearly indicates a shot from the front. It’s also clear that the autopsy from Bethesda, Md., was completely fraudulent. And there’s Vietnam. No historian can now honestly say that the Vietnam War was Kennedy’s child. That’s crucial. The last thing is the C.I.A. connection to Oswald. We have a stronger case, not only for post-Russia but also for pre-Russia. In other words, he was working with the C.I.A. before he went and when he came back. Those are the main points. I don’t want to criticize your paper, but if it was honest, it would be doing this work instead of just saying, “It’s all settled.”

But on some level you must know that we’ll never be able to tie up all the loose ends of the Kennedy assassination. So what do you want people to take away from your new work on this? 

Those who are interested will find it’s pretty clear that J.F.K. was murdered by forces that were powerful in our government. We point the finger at a couple of individuals. But I don’t want to get into that here. Now, why do I have to do this? I’m doing the documentary for the record so that you can see for yourself what the evidence is. That’s all. We’re just finishing it and beginning to show it. It will be out. Even if it’s on YouTube. Or in Transylvania.

So many of your movies, “J.F.K.” in particular, are about presenting counterevidence to the sort of officially sanctioned grand narratives that America tells about itself. Can you think of any areas where your belief in the importance of counternarratives might have been detrimental to your own political thinking? I’m thinking here about your series of interviews with Vladimir Putin, where it seemed that you were more interested in letting him lay out contrary perspectives to the popular American view of him rather than really challenging him on anything. 

I don’t think President Putin’s views from the 1999 period to the 2016 election period were ever presented honestly to the American public. The documentary is a great work of scholarship. It can be studied because he’s saying a tremendous amount that was fluffed off: “Oh, Oliver Stone is an apologist.” I’m not an apologist. I’m always probing, and that’s why he liked me to the degree that he did. He didn’t think I was a patsy. He was a very patient man. He reads. He prepares. He’s not like so many of our fool politicians, and that’s why he has lasted for 20 years. But the American press has demonized him. Even though he benefits from American destabilization and therefore tries to foment it? 

I don’t think he thinks that way. I think he sees American destabilization as a dangerous thing because he thinks about the safety of the world. If anything, he would like a balance of power to exist and he would like to have a nuclear treaty with us. It’s very difficult to talk when America doesn’t talk. It hasn’t been dealing honestly with him in a long time. Putin is obviously a canny politician. What do you suspect he believed he had to gain by talking with you? 

I think his intention, as he forthrightly says again and again in the documentary, was: Let’s talk. Let’s be mature. Let’s be adults in the room.

Could it have been something else maybe? There’s that term “the useful idiot.”

First of all, you should just look at the documentary.

I’ve seen it. 

Where is it clear that I’m an idiot? I think it’s a very articulate dialogue. I would also point out that when we started, which was in 2014 roughly, the relationship with the United States was not as bad as it would become. Things got much worse. In 2017, we went back to him, and you have on the record what he says about Donald Trump and the American election. I don’t think Russia has the desire or the money to spend on “destabilizing” an entire election. And how can you even compare it to what we’ve done in other countries? But two evils don’t have to be equal for them to both be evil. 

We’re getting too much onto Putin. That’s not in this book.

This is mostly related to the book: How present in your life is your experience in Vietnam? Is it still with you from day to day? 

It doesn’t disturb me. In the book I talk about everything that I felt over there and how strange it was. Vietnam influenced my work because of my feelings about war and peace in this country and militarization and where we are now. If I can do any good in this world, it would be to pass some of that message on to younger people so that they recognize where we’re going with continued militarization. But, no, the war doesn’t personally disturb me. I’ve reached an age of acceptance. I have a meta question for you: It seems, at least at this point in time, as though your political opinions have almost overshadowed your achievements as an artist. Does it bother you to think that your willingness to get into it about politics might ultimately obscure or distort your legacy as a filmmaker? 

I’ve negotiated my way, sometimes with great controversy, through life. My domain is wide. I enjoy give-and-take. I learn from people. I will continue not to run away from who I am. I’m going to own who I am.

-David Marchese, "Oliver Stone thinks Hollywood has gone crazy," The New York Times Magazine, July 10 2020 [x]

#oliver stone #The New York Times #david marchese #chasing the light #vladimir putin #jfk #a bright future #jfk: a destiny betrayed #the vietnam war #politics #hollywood #covid19

[starwarshyperdrive]

I’m concerned about the Star Wars canon

I’ve always been a huge Star Wars fan but didn't follow the old EU (extended universe) because it was too convoluted and well.. a bunch of gobbledygook (granted there were some good bits in it, who doesn’t love the Thrawn trilogy even though he is pretty much a different character now), so I actually welcomed the new canon. Start over with a clean slate and make sure everything is connected, makes sense and feels Star Warsy. So far the story group has done a decent job, even though there were some questionable bits and pieces. As hardcore Star Wars fan and apologist I can force myself to get behind a lot of things and I was cool with the Bendu somehow, but the Clone Wars Mortis arc, as well as space whales and the world between worlds really rubbed me the wrong way. A lot of people are celebrating Dave Filoni as savior of the true Star Wars spirit and he is certainly an inspired artist and nice guy but I once again have to wonder whether or not some of the comic bookish stuff REALLY fits the Star Wars universe. Yeah I know ‘it’s a huge universe bla bla’ but do we really have to accept everything?

Someone recently described hardcore fans (such as myself) as a ‘cult’ and Star Wars Celebration to a religious ceremony and if I’m being honest and self-reflective I can’t really argue against it, but that’s also why you always need to check yourself and not just ‘swallow’ everything without questioning it. Keep a critical eye. Things like time travel and other super hero stuff ( I haven’t seen any of the recent Marvel or DC movies) have no place in Star Wars. Of course Star Wars is for everyone, but does that then also mean we need a Star Wars romcom, a Star Wars coming of age movie ..or ..?  I don’t know..porn? Leave that to fan fiction. 

Star Wars was always more about mythology, some sort of buddhist Excalibur and I am seriously concerned that at some point the ‘people in charge’ will forget that and it will become a shallow bubble gum entertainment focus on ‘what is selling at the moment’. A good example are - again - all the super hero movies picking up on trends. I don’t want a Thor Ragnarok Star Wars movie with a Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack. Don’t make everything the same. Keep Star Wars unique. Keep ‘that Star Wars tone’.

‘XY doesn’t UNDERSTAND Star Wars’ is an overused and abused phrase and in so many ways pointless as there are many facets to Star Wars especially now that we have generations of fans who grew up with the prequels, the Clone Wars, Rebels or even Resistance - I should point out that I actually liked Resistance because it’s not tempering with the mythology - but the lore has been laid out in the original trilogy and everything needs to acknowledge that. We cannot have some Terminator-franchise kind of disaster a la ‘Ezra traveled back in time and actually was there with Yoda on Dagobah’ or what not. 

By now it’s common knowledge that - despite what they say - there has been no overall plan for the sequel trilogy, which is quite concerning and feeding into my concerns that it’s all downhill from here (after The Rise of Skywalker and the Mandalorian or course). I know a lot of people who vehemently defended The Last Jedi when it came out, mostly as a reaction to all the stupid hate it got for the wrong reasons and I am one of them myself, but most of them are admitting now that there is something off about the movie. It is written into a corner and not picking up on the clues given in The Force Awakens. It has some amazing scenes and I will keep defending it, but there are some scenes that just don’t feel right and leave a bad aftertaste. I frequently rewatch all the movies and besides Attack of the Clones it’s the only one where I think ‘Now I have to endure THAT bit again’. I go to a lot of Q&A and it’s interesting to see how people who have worked on the movie feel the same. Even if you 100% loved it and it’s your favorite movie ever, let’s be honest - the humor is completely out of place. Fart jokes in The Phantom Menace > Your Mom jokes. And it’s just too long. Of course we all want MORE Star Wars, but where does it end. Would you go and see a 6h movie? If you are a good filmmaker you should be able to say what you want to say in the same about of time as the other movies. But that’s just my personal 2 cents. It just felt like someone who was hellbent on doing his own thing for the sake of doing his own thing and not for the sake of the story. Don’t get me wrong. It was a great idea to (spoiler alert) kill off Snoke that casually, so the movie has redeeming qualities that save it for me. Then again, as a Star Wars fan I WANT to like it. I still watched it 13 times or so. I was in the room for the trailer reveal at SWCO. I want to take ownership and be part of the hardcore fan community, but they shouldn't bank too much on it. I still want a good movie. I’m not gonna be meek and mild about something contradicting the core mythology. Ryan Johnson is allegedly still doing his trilogy and then there is the Benioff and Weiss trilogy. They didn’t exactly do a great job wrapping up Game of Thrones and left fans in awe about how the show ended and have not really proven that they can handle a franchise well either. Will all off them have free rein and just go to town on a Star Wars story as they please? Am I the only one who finds this a bit odd?!

I trust JJ Abrams to do the right thing and I hope my trust is not misplaced. I think the allegations of The Force Awakens being a A New Hope reboot are misplaced as there are also a lot of similarities to The Phantom Menace, so.. if you’re a fan you know what comes next.. ‘it rhymes, it’s like poetry’. So it makes sense. So I think ‘he gets it’..

My main concern in the new canon overall. I made an effort to get all the publications of the new canon, but the books and comics already started to get weird again. Star Wars always had a slight alien but yet familiar vibe and some stories feature people smoking cigars, drinking coffee in the morning and doing other stuff never depicted in Star Wars before. How long until someone gets a Star Wars burger at Star Wars McDonalds or orders Star Wars pizza while watching Star Wars HoloNetflix. I’m sorry. That’s ridiculous. It’s not automatically Star Wars just because you use Star Wars terminology like death sticks or Nerf steaks. Watch the movies and make an effort.

 And now the novelizations of the movies are apparently not considered ‘hard canon’ anymore because the authors didn’t know the direction the next movies are going, so the clues and hints may be completely useless. So why do I force myself through some really not very good books then (others are great, no generalization here)? That’s quite alarming. Wasn’t the entire reason they got a story group to avoid that? What’s with all the loose ends?  That's also why I think they will shy away from using canon characters in the movies (for the most part). Its easier to have a self contained canon universe where you can introduce Purge Troopers in a comic and then have them in a video game. I once read an interview with one of the Star Wars authors who invented a character and then got told ‘give him that name / make him this person’ instead of having this particular character in mind from the start. This is how you lose consistency. I’m well aware that over hundreds and thousands of years that’s EXACTLY how ancient history was written, which is why there are flood legends all over the world and why Jesus and Mithras are pretty much the same person, but they DID NOT HAVE A STORY GROUP and ancient mythology hasn’t been written over a course of a few years.

At the same time it’s interesting how there seem to be purists who are very determined to bring that original Star Wars vibe back. Like Jon Favreau with The Mandalorian. And like I said earlier about Resistance. Its so much easier to do that if you stay away from the mythology. It’s really tricky and so much could go wrong. The stuff introduced in Rogue One like Guardians of the Whills and the temple of Kyber is a perfect example how it’s done. Some of the stuff in the Clone Wars and Rebels is the complete opposite, so I’m really curious to see how Dave Filonis involvement in The Mandalorian pans out. He is really great with stuff like Mandalorians, Clones and I even came to accept Ashoka after reading the book and seeing her all grown up as Fulcrum, but I’m very skeptical when it comes to his ‘mystical side of the force’ interpretations.

In conclusion I know that I sound like a preacher and George Lucas repeatedly stated it’s ‘just for 10 year old kids’ but tell that to all the dead Bothans.

Please just don’t ruin Star Wars.

#star wars #star wars movies #star wars theories #Star Wars The Force Awakens #star wars the clone wars #star wars the rise of skywalker #dave filoni #jon favreau #gareth edwards #the mandalorian #star wars rebels #star wars resistance #star wars fan #lucasfilm #story group #pablo hidalgo

[allthefilmsiveseenforfree]

Five Feet Apart

Have you the seen the movie about dying teens in love? No, not that one. This one, Five Feet Apart, about Stella (Hayley Lu Richardson) and Will (Cole Sprouse), two star-crossed 17-year-olds who both have cystic fibrosis and a burning desire to touch each other but they can’t due to the risk of contracting each other’s deadly germs. It’s like Romeo and Juliet but with phlegm. The title refers to the minimum safe distance they have to stay apart from each other (minus 1 ft for love). So will this doomed love story ensure this new genre of sick-lit is here to stay or is it destined to die just like these teens? Well...

If this is the standard, I think this microgenre is on life support already. I’d say this is simply a rip-off of The Fault in Our Stars, but that feels unfair. This almost feels like a rip-off of a rip-off, a dollar store version of the US version of an internationally renowned Italian art film, and as such I will be spoiling some plot points in this review so back out now if you’re sensitive to that kind of thing. Though there are a few strong performances from Richardson and her best friend Poe (Moises Arias), the world the film builds just feels too contrived to be convincing.

Some thoughts:

One of the only upsides I can see from this #chronicillness life is the overabundance of the comfiest looking sweaters I’ve ever seen. I’m obsessed with every sweater in this film. People shouldn’t have to be sick to be this comfortable in public.

The first time we meet Will, my notes just say “Wow this guy sucks” and “I have never been less impressed by a teenage boy.” I’m not 100% sure my opinion on him turned around that much by the end of the film. He never feels anything beyond a poorly sketched bad boy, revealed to have a soft gooey marshmallow interior when he falls in love. I am at least happy that their relationship grows and develops over weeks (and with nothing much to do in a hospital they spend a lot of time together), but he never feels that fleshed-out or real to me.

One thing I really appreciate in movies is when the filmmakers figure out nifty ways to drop a ton of exposition on the audience without it feeling like clunky exposition. Will checking out Stella’s YouTube page was a pretty clever way to do a huge info dump in an elegant way.

Parminder Nagra, aka my teen crush from Bend It Like Beckham, is playing a doctor now? Be still my heart!

I do love that Stella developed an app. Fuck yeah, women in STEM. 

Am I the only one who has a problem with how many HIPAA violations there are in movies now? Like, we are playing SUPER fast and loose with informed consent, no regard for patient privacy, disclosing information to other patients...is this hospital being run by animals? Is a horse loose in the hospital?

Barb (Kimberly Hebert Gregory) is an underserved character and her perspective is a valuable one. I appreciate that she speaks up and showcases her sense of responsibility and advocacy for her patients. It’s not just patients who experience terminal illness, and Barb is right to not let them forget that - until she is just completely fine with helping in grand romantic gestures for the ‘gram. Kind of disappointed with the evolution of Barb from “the voice of reason” to “the power of love conquers all” but maybe that’s just because I’m old and bitter and on the side of the parents in teen movies now. 

For being about teens in love, they’re not very funny. Love is funny and silly, even when it’s life or death stakes! Stella’s message high on painkillers post-surgery is by far the funniest part of the movie.

My biggest complaint by far is that Hayley Lu Richardson is luminous and full of dazzling energy on her own and Cole Sprouse has the screen presence of a limp piece of asparagus with an emo dye job. I just feel no connection between them at all, honestly, and I am on board with the story! I am bought in! And just...nothin’.

Oh and huge fucking shocker the gay best friend (Arias) is the one who dies and gets to be the poster child of tragedy porn so we can not only enjoy a Bury Your Gays moment but also not interfere with the heterosexual romance!

For example, this sexy poolside romp late at night in the hospital for their first date should feel like the swooniest most romantic thing and all I can think is “hospitals have cameras. Security guards are watching you awkwardly caress her body with a pool cue right now, or they will later.” And this slow undress doesn’t feel seductive or alluring, it feels so uncomfortable to me. Related: I am 100% sure you can’t go around hospitals popping balloons willy nilly. You guys, I don’t know how this entire romance inspires such cynicism in me when I am, by nature, the sappiest of saps! 

That being said, in this week’s Did I Cry? The answer is yes, yes I did, when she was in surgeery and when he made his dumb speech at the end which I actually fucking hated? Like all of the words were so stupid? But the feeling was right, so that was a very confusing and disconcerting way to feel. 

I will say - I appreciate a mainstream film like this presenting bodies that are sick, scarred, and chronically ill as desirable and sexy. Even if those bodies belong to conventionally attractive cis het white people, it feels like a step towards some more inclusive representation that I know is much needed. 

Also, I get the whole “taking a stand regarding my life and my health care decisions” thing regarding the lung transplant or whatever but I don’t care what your circumstances are or how invincible you feel DON’T FUCK AROUND ON ICE. 

It’s possible the root of the issues I had stem simply from a stumbling, bumbling transition from book to film. Like, from a narrative standpoint, I appreciate the symmetry - the drowning, the mouth-to-mouth, the tangled relationship between life and death - but I think it’s one of those things that works much better in book form rather than in a film. It all just feels so fake, so contrived, so OBVIOUS. When I think of some of the truly charming teen romances that have come out in the last few years, like Love, Simon or To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, I just know that there is still magic left in the genre, and it doesn’t have to feel this forced. If you’re already a fan of this story, I’m sure the film version will deliver what you want but if not...you’re probably ok staying five feet away from this one.

If you liked this review, please consider reblogging or subscribing to my Patreon! For as low as $1, you can access bonus content and movie reviews, or even request that I review any movie of your choice.

#119in2019 #five feet apart #five feet apart review #hayley lu richardson #cole sprouse #moises arias #kimberly hebert gregory #movie reviews #film reviews

[portfolioshowcase]

Interview, Autumn Durald - A Transforming Force

Hey, Autumn! Are you having fun shooting a western film? 

Unfortunately the western I was supposed to shoot at the start of the year was pushed. When we do start shooting it will be a wild ride. 

Are you doing things differently with this project or there are significant changes to how you shoot?

The short film has the same storyline so we already had a test run at the visuals. On the short film, I shot 35mm anamorphic and I flashed and pulled the film stock. I plan on doing that as well for the feature along with some other tricks.

As the imagery should tell the right story, and each story has it's own look, Do you think it's possible for a Cinematographer to have a particular visual aesthetic?

When I first started out I didn’t use to subscribe to this theory, however, I do now. I find that people often tell me that there’s definitely a particular visual style in all of my work. Which made me think more about other Cinematographers work I love, and now I can see why someone would say that. Every story has its own distinctive look, but a DP definitely brings their taste and eye to each project, and if you have a strong one then it shines.

How do you translate the combined vision of the writer and the director - on film? Have there been times when you went a little too adventurous?

All of my feature work, now six features have been with writer-directors. This makes it easy when talking to the director about the vision since he/she also wrote it. I wouldn’t say I’ve ever gone too adventurous, nothing the director and I didn’t dive into together. On the Arcade Fire “porno” music video/documentary film I shot for director Kahlil Joseph in Haiti we definitely did some adventurous things, but he is a very adventurous filmmaker so it’s par for the course when you shoot with him.

Do you feel that the courage to allow the moments of the characters and the overall atmosphere to be raw, not just as a form of a mental stimulation but more visible is something that makes increases the viewer's investment into the film? Can it increase the emotional magnitude of the film? 

Some stories should be told visually with a lighter touch, then the characters stand out the most. It’s not our job as Cinematographers to take our audience out of the story by showing how flashy our work can be or how cool our framing is. If our choices don’t suit the story and add depth to the emotional quality of the scene then we aren’t doing our job correctly. I don’t think an image has to be handheld and only naturally lit to feel realistic or raw. If those qualities are appropriate then great, but I do think you can manufacture a realistic tone through lighting it and keeping the camera more still.

When you are shooting, do you ever think about whether you would want the audience to be an experiencer standing by or let's say a third actor in the film? How do you experience the movies or photographs you reference to or enjoy?

Definitely depends on the project. I’d say for Palo Alto it was important to express intimately what these teenagers were going through and have you feel like you were a part of their world. We also chose not to shoot it in a gritty handheld doc style. I don’t think the camera work or look has to be loose for audiences to feel like they are apart of the scene. Gia and I favored a much more considered camera style and dreamy visuals, and we knew our audiences were sophisticated enough to relate. 

Coming back to your process, can you talk to us about how you transform the use of light according to specific scenes and according to the nature of the film? Can you please share with us some of your experiences over the years shooting and working with light? 

When I was at AFI (my graduate film school) my focus was always more lighting driven. The DPs that inspired me to choose Cinematography as a career had a very strong sense of light in their work. Gordon Willis, Harris Savides, Conrad Hall, and Michael Ballhaus. Sadly none of these DPs are with us anymore but their work is incomparable. So I made it a point early on in my career to learn lighting and what a gaffer does, and what they do well. I find the technical aspect of lighting intriguing and early on I always paid attention to what my gaffers and electricians were doing on set. When I read a script one of the first things I can visualize is how the light falls in the space or scene. I’m not sure why that is or when in my career this happened but it's something that becomes apparent first. After discussing the look with the director this definitely evolves, but I start from there. If it’s a period piece there are already some limitations set in stone depending on the genre. I favor using hard and soft light together in a scene. And most importantly where the light comes from should serve a purpose.

Can you share with us the experiences you went through in order to widen your vision, your imagination and your dreams? Is it exhausting to spread your wings in a society as it is?

The two most important things a good DP should draw from is her/his sense of taste and their confidence. When you have a good sense of taste and the confidence to carry it out that’s where the images speak for themselves. It can be exhausting at times to get the projects you want to shoot. This career has a lot to do with determination and patience. Since Palo Alto, I get offered a ton of coming of age films. That is not the only story I want to tell or can tell. So it takes some work convincing this industry that you can shoot a variety of genres. Putting in that work can be exhausting but you’re a better DP for it. I wrapped a film called Teen Spirit last summer, it was an amazing experience and probably the film that most widened my vision and imagination. The film turned into something so special that I couldn't’ have predicted that when I read the script. Those are the most enlightening experiences, when you work your ass off, along with your team, and your directors' vision shines and they ultimately put together a good film. Those experiences can be few and far between. That’s when you feel your wings spreading when everything just comes together and you're proud of the final film you shot. Finding directors to work with that inspire you and you trust to tell great stories is one of the most important things I’ve learned making films.

Do you feel as more women come into filmmaking, they are going to bring an entirely new perspective to it and ultimately inspire a life from the heart than the mind? 

The best and most successful films ultimately all come from the heart. That’s why you feel so emotionally connected to them. Female filmmakers started making films in the late 1800’s. It’s only now we’ve decided to shine a huge light on the subject. If audiences were paying attention, female told stories and perspectives have been out there for a long time. Now this current light on female filmmakers is allowing more women opportunities which are allowing more of those stories to be told. Hopefully, one day making it more of an equal landscape, mainstream films directed by women and men. Instead of what we’re most used to seeing at the box office, female and male stories told by men. I appreciate both perspectives, I think it’s fascinating to watch a female protagonist directed by a man and then see one directed by a woman. This diversity is what makes filmmaking so fun. You don’t need to be a male to tell a mans story and vice versa. Just because I’m a woman doesn’t mean I can’t shoot a masculine film. One of my favorite lensed films is BLOW,  I remember the first time I saw it I looked up who the DP was. I was so delighted and inspired to see it was shot by a woman. Ellen Kuras is one of the reasons I thought I could even do this job when I finally decided to pursue it. Great cinematography or filmmaking shouldn’t see gender.

Before I ask you the last question, can you tell us, how would you compose silence? 

Not sure how I would go about that, but if I was brainstorming a way to do it, I would start by sitting in a room with a Rothko painting.

Lastly, what would you suggest or share with other cinematographers?

Find your own sense of visual style and taste and run with it. Great work comes from the soul and only you can tell that story. Don’t be too concerned with making everything so precious in the frame. When you do that it tends to draw you away from the actual story and also the other artists making the film with you. You learn more about your style, the way you shoot and telling stories by all your mistakes. Take those mistakes and learn from them, don’t forget them. I am fortunate enough to do this as a career and I love my job, but this job is nothing without the people I work with. Filmmaking is a team effort and without that support, we as DPs can’t carry out our vision. Always appreciate your hard working crew and figure out the best way to lead them. And last but not least, for all you girls who want to be DPs but are discouraged by the lack of diversity in the industry, just go out and do it. There shouldn’t be anything stopping you. If you have a unique perspective and can create beautiful images, that is enough to get your foot in some door. I hope seeing more female shooters now is a testament to that. 

Interview with Autumn Durald Arkapaw

WWW.AUTUMNDURALD.COM

www.instagram.com/addp

Interviewed by The Portfolio

#Interview #Cinemtographer #Palo Alto #Untogether #One and Two #The Good Time Girls

[joneswilliam72]

"What would've happened if Hitchcock made a movie in an Uber?" - Meet filmmaker Jeremy Ungar of Ride.

I caught up with filmmaker Jeremy Ungar for a chat on film, the rapid advance of technologies like Uber, influences, Michael Mann, filmmaking ISO and painting with light, lenses, and a realist visual palette (á la Edward Hopper) as it relates to his newest picture, Ride – out now on VOD.

 A struggling actor by day, James (Jessie T. Usher, Independence Day: Resurgence) pays his bills by driving people around Los Angeles for a ride sharing service.  His night starts out like any other, but he can’t believe his luck when he picks up the beautiful Jessica (Bella Thorne, Assassination Nation), and they immediately hit it off. His next fare, the fast-talking Bruno (Will Brill, The OA), convinces James to go back and invite her to join them for a wild night out.  But things take a shocking turn when Bruno, armed with a gun and a twisted idea of fun, forces them on a terrifying, white-knuckle ride that quickly spirals out of control.

Ride really would be the result of Mann’s Collateral getting a technological makeover and mentoring advice from Alfred Hitchcock. I highly recommend checking it out on VOD today and I hope you will learn as much as I did from this conversation with a gifted young creative.

Hi Jeremy. Welcome to The 405! How are you?

I'm good how about you?     

Oh not too bad. Getting right into it what was it that initially inspired you to write Ride?

Well, I'm really fascinated by these new – kind of newer – interactions that technology has created for us. That, you know, before Uber existed, before Tinder existed, if you said to someone "alright, there's this app and you're going to get into a stranger's car and then they'll drive you somewhere and you don't know them and you've not met them". You'd be like "um, there's no way I'm doing that ever."

Yep.

And the way that these quickly become such a part of our lives that  it's so commonplace people do it every day. And that was, I was really just doing that and I also really wanted to write something for myself because my background is in theater… so dialogue wasn't really concerned. I had these kind of charged experiences, most of them have been positives, in most case. I just started this, it's become this native unique space that's kind of right for drama. Then I started writing, you know, some possibilities of what should happen in the new world and I came to this kind of very strong, very manipulative, character and I was really drawn to dialogue that came out, I kind of surprised myself writing it. Then that was really made me dive into this as a project.

Cool. Yeah Bruno [Will Brill] was manipulative to put it lightly. Kind of going off of that, one thing that seemed to me to be very important for the movie, was pace.

Jessie T. Usher as James in the thriller “RIDE,” an RLJE Films release. Photo courtesy of Rob C. Givens.

I have to say I wasn't really seeing that 180 degree turn that happened about the time they get to the bar. You know, I was watching it wondering, what's this guy going to do, what's his end game, it just keeps wandering for most of it; but I was just wondering what were some of the tricks to sort of balancing the tension throughout the movie?

The pace of the movie is something that is really kind of interesting thing to me because, like I said, my background's in theater and you get a lot of long takes with this. When we shot on the process trailer – which is how we did most of the car stuff – you're strapped to a flatbed truck and you know you have your cameras mounted and you're driving. It really truly did seem like it was theater and we would do, you know, a sure five, ten minute take with two cameras.

Fascinating connection.

So that kind of locked into the pace, you get, just in directing in the scene as you shoot it and any chance you have to adjust that pace is by cutting to a different take. Which you also are locked into a really specific set of constraints because the car is moving, so you have to kind of match the speed when you cut. So it's a really kind unique set of challenges, but I like restrictions like that so it kind of gave me a lot of style and made this sort of a puzzle to put together.

A process trailer. Source:MovingPics.net

Necessity is the mother of invention.

And also we wanted to show that there was something mysterious, immediate and serious right there in the car with them and there is a sense that they are really doing this, because in a sense they are.

Oh, absolutely, I think that was communicated really well. And another thing I really liked about the movie was the realism in terms of the cinematography and the visuals. Kind of in the vein of Nightcrawler in that sort of neon grit.

Oh thank you, that was a huge point of reference for me.

Oh good. Yeah. I was just wondering, what was the process like in coming up with the visuals that you ultimately did?

I have directed this drama as a short to prove that I can do it as a feature.

Oh cool. I respect that proof of concept type of thinking.

In the short, we shot on a barge which was a really good experience. When I started talking with the DP who did the feature – a guy named Rob Givens – who proposed using the pass on a fairy cam. The thing that makes the camera unique is it has a flip flop hub in terms of the ISO. So it kind of belabors 800 which is standard. We did our movie at 5,000. We really tried to shoot the entire movie at 5,000 ISO.

Yeah. That's gonna dramatically increase the light that's captured.

Yeah. It resulted in us getting a lot more light in, but from a process perspective, we didn't have to use as many lights and we were able to be a lot more nimble, also in terms of just loving the lights of Los Angeles. I really wanted the movie to kind of feel like a full character in itself, and with that 5,000 ISO I feel you were able to see so much of the outside res that it really became a key part of our aesthetic.

Absolutely.

So that was one element of that and it also made the choices of cinematography easier. Rather than getting a third package of primes, prime lenses…

Yeah.

…we had our fairy lenses and they are Panavision C Series lenses, you know, they are hard to track down and expensive and so we opted for fewer lenses. In that restriction, in the moment, having those lenses that would give us a lot of the kind of horizontal flares and oblong bokehs and things that made, at least I hope. You remember in one space how visually varied the scenes were? It's the lenses and flares that tend to get that.

Will Brill as Bruno in the thriller “RIDE,” an RLJE Films release. Photo courtesy of Rob C. Givens.

Oh, absolutely. Switching gears to a question I like to ask everybody, what directors and films have been most influential on your development as an artist.

My favorite question.

Cool. A big one too.

For Ride specifically, I really I think maybe a core question is what would have happened if Hitchcock made a movie in an Uber? You know, Strangers on a Train was really a key point of reference for me and balancing the fact that the character named Bruno is a reference to Strangers on a Train.

Interesting. Yeah, Robert Walker's character. Makes sense now that you say it.

It just cycles round. It comes from Hitchcock being the first director as a kid that I watched that I found the movie so accessible and just loved it so much that that is probably really only the most secondary thing that made me become a film maker.

Yeah, Hitch is great. Vertigo would be a favorite of mine from him.

Then the other really big point of reference for Ride is this early Spielberg movie called Duel. Which is also all set in a car. And it's a super tense film. It's different because Duel is almost nonverbal and Ride is like a real dialogue. But I just feel that there is so much to learn from it in terms of how he dealt with the car and then also just building tension in a confined space. Spielberg was really a master of in that era movie. And that I hoped to really learn something from them.

Absolutely. You know another one that came to my mind when I was watching it was Michael Mann's Collateral…

Yes. Tom Cruise.

I loved Collateral. It was kind of unbelievable because it's so similar to Ride but I really didn't think about Collateral at all when I was writing Ride.

Oh really?

I didn't think a ton about Michael Mann. Yeah but I was like I mean I must have subconsciously been, but really it's interesting, I made a whole visual reference back to kind of outline the vision of what the future would look like and there are a ton of images from Thief.

Good one as well.

And so I was thinking intentionally about Michael Mann and probably Collateral was marinating in there but not one that I was at least telling myself to directly thinking of it. It just so happened that it... that you could definitely pitch Ride as Collateral and an Uber.

Yeah. You really could.

The other Michael Mann thing is I loved the movie Thief so much and the soundtrack of Thief was done by Tangerine Dream. And the soundtrack to my movie was actually done by Paul Haslinger who was a key member of Tangerine Dream.

Cool. Didn't realize that.

So I had something that really evoked that movie that was so inspirational to me and I loved so much.

Awesome, definitely. Our last question, what's next for you Jeremy?

There's another script that I am writing right now. That's also about our relationship with technology. It kind of gives more ... the amount of trust we put in technology and with devices and I think I really think our cell phones are really killing us but they are just so fun that we can't tell.

The next script is kind of very loosely about that same thing.

from The 405 http://bit.ly/2NbZOfh

[mrmichaelchadler]

Sundance 2019: Wounds, Greener Grass, Mope

It’s rare when a movie can make you laugh hard, and often, but also make you very afraid it’s going to scar you with an image that’s truly disturbing. Such is the game that Babak Anvari throws audiences into with his horror-comedy “Wounds,” his follow-up to 2016 Sundance favorite, “Under the Shadow.” Working with Hollywood actors, a larger budget and a more in-your-face sense of humor, Anvari’s film is an exciting answer to jump scare supernatural teen movies, toying with the filmmaking and narrative expectations while offering a whole lot of nasty, midnight-ready fun in the process. 

A bunch of dumb Millennials have awoken some evil spirits, and now they’re doomed. But Armie Hammer’s hilariously cranky bartender Will wouldn’t even know about this, if he hadn’t taken home one of their phones after they left in his bar one night. It’s a big mistake, because there is some extremely disturbing imagery on that phone (severed heads and EEK!) and those teenagers might be a part of some strange cult shenanigans. They might be coming after him, he might be seeing cockroaches crawling up his arm as he drives, etc. 

But then “Wounds” starts to focus more on one factor that’s clear about Will, and has nothing to do with the scary stuff: he’s a reckless jerk who has an open fixation on a woman named Alicia (Zazie Beetz) and he’s about to destroy his relationship with his girlfriend Carrie (Dakota Johnson). A metaphor comes to fruition within the Lovecraftian origins, and while the emotional aspects do not entirely connect to the weirder features, the overtly non-horror developments send the movie in a direction of unexpected bleakness, and it gets all the more nasty. 

Anvari embraces the inner troll of a jump scare to keep things particularly uneasy. As you’re afraid of what gnarly thing you might see next, while laughing about the absurdity of it all, sometimes Anvari will ruthlessly throw in a loud bang or an abrasive gross image to keep you attentive. In one of its stranger moments that worked well with my midnight audience, he slowly zooms in on a character’s horrifying face wound before cutting hard and briefly to a close-up of a very loud air conditioner, the audience affected as if it were some supernatural force. 

“Wounds” basks in that very playful nature, subverting expectations from one uneasy sequence to the next. One of my favorite choices: instead of accompanying unsettling conversations with a score it uses the sound design of what sounds like wind blowing in a tunnel to hell. Most of all, when you think you might learn more about just what the hell is going on with Will, those damn Millennials, and their freaky phone, “Wounds” treats those aspects like they’re just on the peripherals of the main horror story that’s especially disturbing in Anvari’s hands: a guy, his ego, and the stupid stuff he does. 

It’s no coincidence that “Greener Grass” is one of the silliest and most polarizing films that played Sundance this year. Inspired by 2015 short film of the same name, its wacky Adult Swim-ready, David Lynch-inflected ridiculousness is like a litmus test for different tastes. This one is for those who like their comedies extra wacky, and random, as if for no purpose than for seeing actors commit to a bit that does not exist with logic. 

At a soccer game, two women (Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe, co-writers and co-directors) are sitting down. One of them decides that they like the other’s baby. So, the baby is handed over and permanently owned, just like that. It’s a delightfully bizarre beginning, and comes with other vivid details. But over time, the suburbs and its off-kilter inhabitants aren't built so much as randomly implemented, even though there's a killer on the loose and some legitimately surprising twists in the story that it doesn't look back from (like a character transformation that goes unexplained). 

As someone who had this movie recommended to me on two separate occasions, I’m somewhere in the middle on it. “Greener Grass” made me laugh hardest in the moments in which it was goofing on the pain within the relationships and how unhappy these people are—it’s a factor that provides truth and motivation to what amount to be many out-there sequences. But “Greener Grass” lost me in the moments in which it felt random for the pure sake of random, removed from the comedy of its characters. While it has solid character jokes and goofiness, the movie runs inert by its end, starting off strongly and unintentionally proving that the suburbs can sometimes be too easy of a target.  

Leave it to Sundance's Midnight slate to show me a film that isn’t the most challenging for its graphic sexual content and cringing treatment of women in the workplace, but for the tone in which all of it is told. “Mope” was one of the rare Midnight pics in the year’s selection where its taboo came from its focus on the world of sex, while telling the story of two porn wiz kids who want to become superstars of the biz, Steve Driver and Tom Dong. It’s a true story, and if you know what happens, you might be better prepped for “Mope” than I was. Even then, the movie plays out like it has a salacious true story that it can do whatever it wants with it, and which comes with shocking violence at the end to satisfy a Midnight crowd’s bloodlust.

Henke normalizes the grody nature of the porn world with a gripping opening sequence, in which Steve Driver (Nathan Stewart-Jarett), Tom Dong (Kelly Sry) and countless other men do one particular sex act with one woman, all accompanied by a synthesizer version of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” And soon the movie hits its stride, as a type of “Boogie Nights” by way of the Broken Lizard guys, where major sequences have a free-flowing nature to their raunchiness, cluing us into the industry with straight emotions. One of the more repeated jokes is that while they’re true film porn nerds, they’re still clueless about being sexy on camera, etc. 

Only days after watching “Mope,” did I realize that this is essentially “Pain & Gain” of the porn industry, in a bad way (“Pain & Gain” is a great condemnation that uses absurdity in its commentary, whereas “Mope” does not). But Henke does not have the sharpness of Michael Bay’s satire, instead bending this story for whatever purpose. When it wants these characters to be entertaining, it makes us adore them like a buddy comedy. But when it wants to cop to commentary on it, it does so with an abrasive cut to horrific news footage, and “Mister Superstar” on full blast by Marilyn Manson, by telling us that this was actually a nightmare. The actual scenes where there could be commentary on the business, and how these men are progressively removed from reality in a scary way, are presented as more matter-of-fact. 

Though I did laugh in the moments in which “Mope” was like a grimy workplace comedy filled with scrotum-kicking and goofy characters, and I felt for the giddy friendship of the two dreamers played by the intriguing Stewart-Jarett and Sry, the script did not share my appreciation. Henke’s script, co-written by Zack Newkirk, starts to slow the story down when it becomes about Driver’s instability, but even then, the shocking end to the story doesn’t seem characteristic. I was most disturbed by how this movie had encouraged me to have empathy for these characters, while this story didn’t have any of its own. 

from All Content http://bit.ly/2t5dW0D

[one-of-us-blog]

SPECTRE (2015)

Today Drew is forced to watch and recap 2015’s SPECTRE, the twenty-fourth and final (for now) James Bond adventure. 007 has been put through the ringer over the course of these last few movies, but now it’s all come down to this. Can Bond unmask the shadowy puppet master who’s been pulling the strings this whole time? Can he find out who’s been manipulating not only himself and MI6 but the whole world? When the time comes, will he want to?

Keep reading to find out…

Eli, I can’t believe you’ve done it, you madman! You can now say you’ve watched every single episode of The Golden Girls and The Golden Palace. What a coup! I’m extremely proud of you, and you’ve done an amazing job with your recaps over the years. I know you still have one more post to go, but you should give yourself a well-earned pat on the back! And hey, mister, this duo’s got two powerhouses and their names are You and Me!

Buttocks tight!

Screenplay by John Logan, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade & Jez Butterworth, film directed by Sam Mendes

We start off with a traditional barrel shot, which it feels like we haven’t seen in forever, and then we get a menacing quote about the dead being alive. We cut to an absolutely banging Día de Muertos celebration in Mexico City, where Bond, decked out in full skeletal garb, is led to a hotel room by a hot-to-trot Mexican lady. Bond’s only interested in her hotel room because he can use the window to get out on the roof, much to her disappointment. From the roof he can see into another building where a shady deal is going down. He snipes a few henchmen but then a bomb goes off in the room and the whole damn building comes crashing down, taking part of Bond’s hotel with it. I sure hope that lady got out in time! The man Bond was actually after, Marco Sciarra (Alessandro Cremona), survived the explosion, and Bond chases him out into the Black Parade. A helicopter is coming to collect Sciarra, but Bond boards it right after him and gets in an aerial fight with Sciarra and the helicopter pilot. Bond yanks a ring off Sciarra’s finger before kicking him out of the ‘copter to his death, then kicks the pilot out for good measure and barely manages to get the helicopter under control before it crashes into the parade-goers. Bond flies toward Mexico City proper and notices a stylized octopus on the ring he took off of Sciarra.

With that high-flying action behind us, we cut to our opening credits as Sam Smith, the first gay to ever win an Oscar, sings “Writing’s on the Wall”. A nude bond is felt up by some fiery ladies as a spooky octopus waves its tentacles around menacingly. Also, there’s some full-on hentai shit going on as some naked ladies get felt up by more octopi.

C’mon, I don’t need to be Samuel L. Jackson to know tentacle porn when I see it. In addition to this flagrant display of fetishes, we also get some call backs from the last few movies. We see smoky visions of Vesper Lynd and Le Chiffre from Casino Royale, Raoul Silva from Skyfall and even the late, great Dench-brand M. I guess Dominic Greene from Quantum of Solace was too busy to come in that day, huh? From here things get very amateur-filmmaker-going-into-their-first-year-of-film-school-with-a-big-chip-on-their-shoulder as Bond and a woman make their way through a motionless crowd of people and embrace while a massive octopus with a skull-with-eyes for a head looms over them and the nonexistent film strip melts. Bond prepares to shoot someone, but an adorable baby octopus envelops his gun and turns his bullet into ink, which zooms through a crowd of sexy naked ladies. We get shots of a board meeting overseen by a cecaelia and some body horror in the form of an iris made of tentacles (which is actually a pretty cool shot) before we head back to wear it all began with a nude Bond being felt up by some fiery ladies.

With that hour-long sequence behind us we jump to MI6 HQ, where Bond is getting reamed by M (née Gareth Mallory) over the destruction he caused in Mexico. Turns out Bond was going a bit rogue, and M has no idea what Bond was doing in Mexico City. Bond refuses to tell M what he was doing south of the border, and M takes Bond off active duty. Bond meets Max Denbigh (Andrew Scott), the head of the new Joint Intelligence Service whom Bond dubs ‘C’. C seems friendly enough, but M informs bond that he’s intent on dismantling the 00 program for good.

Miss Moneypenny catches up to Bond and delivers him a box of stuff MI6 managed to recover from Skyfall. Bond has Moneypenny deliver the box to his spartan apartment, where he shows her a tape from the late M telling him to hunt down and kill Sciarra. She also notes that he should attend Sciarra’s funeral, which is in three days. Moneypenny points out that the current M won’t sign off on that, but Bond’s not worried about that. He needs Moneypenny to do a little digging for him and investigate a name he heard in Mexico: The Pale King.

Moneypenny leaves and Bond sifts through the stuff from Skyfall, finding an odd, partially burnt picture of him as a boy with a mysterious man and an unknown young man. Bond heads to the Q Branch, where Q implants a tracker in his arm on the orders of M. Q then shows off an amazing new car, which it turns out is actually for the mysterious 009, and gives Bond a normal, totally non-gadgety watch instead. Bond convinces a reluctant Q to make his tracker go on the fritz so he can sneak off to Sciarra’s funeral and heads off to run some errands. He drops Moneypenny and a thank you note and a conspicuous cell phone, then breaks into Q Branch, steals 009’s car and a big gun.

He arrives at Sciarra’s funeral in Rome and immediately puts the moves on the dead man’s widow, Lucia (Monica Bellucci). Lucia rebuffs Bond’s advances, but he later saves her from some assassins at her house and she tells him her husband belonged to a shadowy cabal of businessmen before they fuck the pain away (Peaches. “Fuck the Pain Away.” The Teaches of Peaches, Kitty-Yo, 2000. MP3.). Lucia tells Bond where this shadowy cabal is meeting, and he heads that way despite her warnings that he’s definitely going to get killed. He uses Sciarra’s ring to gain access to the meeting, and he witnesses the group planning all sorts of untoward and illegal activities. Bond notices the chair at the head of the table is empty, though that soon ceases to be a problem as the head honcho (Christoph Waltz), shrouded in shadow, arrives and takes his seat.

The group moves onto discuss the death of Sciarra, and one of the businessmen argues that they should scrap the plot Sciarra was working on. That businessman is promptly killed by Mr. Hinx (Dave Bautista), a hulking beast with metal thumbnails that he uses to gouge out the unfortunate dissenter’s eyes. With that display of power over, the man in the shadows calls out Bond by name. He hints at a past connection with Bond, and reveals his face. Bond seems to recognize him, but he’s set upon by various henchmen and barely manages to make it to 009’s car. He sets off through the streets of Rome with Mr. Hinx in hot pursuit. Bond thinks this is a good time to give Moneypenny a call and finds out that the Pale King is in fact Mr. White (remember him?). He asks Moneypenny to look into a man named Franz Oberhauser, who’s supposed to be dead. With that out of the way Bond gets back to the whole chase thing, and finally gives Mr. Hinx the slip by using the ejector seat in 009’s car before he drives it into a canal.

In Tokyo, C is advocating the Nine Eyes program, which would unite the globe under unprecedented surveillance. M secretly votes against Nine Eyes being enacted, then he receives news about Bond’s car crash in Rome. He orders Q to track Bond down, and Q reports that Bond is in Altaussee, Austria. Bond’s tracked down Mr. White with Moneypenny’s help, and it’s finally time to give that wily rascal his comeuppance. Or, well, it would be if a gnarly case of thallium poisoning hadn’t done most of the work for Bond. White explains that Oberhauser has ordered his assassination because White had a problem with him taking their work, which was always pretty bad, in a much darker direction with a lot of innocent bystanders getting hurt. Bond demands to know where he can find Oberhauser, but White says Oberhauser is everywhere. Bond deduces that White is trying to protect his daughter; White tells Bond to find her, and if he keeps her safe she’ll take him to someone called L’Américain so he can find Oberhauser. White then eats a bullet from Bond’s gun, and Bond leaves.

Back in London, C reveals to M that he’s bugged Moneypenny’s phone so he knows Bond was headed to Austria. Right about that time, Mr. Hinx arrives at the dead White’s house. Bond arrives at the office of White’s daughter, a psychiatrist named Dr. Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux) Bond informs Dr. Swann about her father’s death, but she refuses to take him to L’Américain. Bond goes to a bar where he’s met by Q, who informs him that all hell is breaking loose in London. He tells him Franz Oberhauser is dead, and that he and Moneypenny are both going to get screwed if Bond doesn’t get his shit together and come home. Bond gives that idea a pass, and instead gives Q Sciarra’s ring to investigate. Bond is about to be escorted away by security when he sees Dr. Swann being kidnapped by Mr. Hinx and some nondescript goons.

Bond just can’t keep his feet on the ground in this movie, so he steals a little plane and pursues Mr. Hinx et al. Q, meanwhile, is having problems of his own. He’s been hacking away at the mainframe inside Sciarra’s ring, unaware that he was totally about to be assassinated by a pair of henchmen. He’s only saved by the arrival of a bunch of ski bunnies in the cable car he and the assassins are on. Bond uses his plane to crash one of the cars in Mr. Hinx’s entourage, and the sound of the explosion is enough of a distraction for Q to slip away from his would-be assassins and hide in a closet. After a rather rough landing involving a crash through a barn, Bond rescues Dr. Swann. She’s not thrilled about the idea of working with him, but he convinces her to tag along as he goes to meet up with Q.

Q’s managed to hack into the ring, which reveals that several important figures from past movies, including Le Chiffre, Patrice, Mr. White, Sciarra, Raoul Silva and Dominic Greene (who gets shown on Q’s screen but apparently doesn’t warrant being mentioned by name, which is really making him feel like the middle child of this criminal underworld), are all linked together by Franz Oberhauser. Q doesn’t know what this collection of hoodlums is called, but Dr. Swann does: SPECTRE. Oh shiiiiiii

Dr. Swann finally spills the tea on L’Américain. Turns out it’s not a person, but a hotel. Specifically a hotel in Tangier, Morocco, which is where Bond and Dr. Swann head while Q goes back to London. Dr. Swann checks into a room that her father would always check into, and Bond begins to dismantle it in search of some kind of clue or message while Dr. Swann gets shitfaced on wine like a soccer mom with a kid-free afternoon. After Dr. Swann passes out Bond gets a hot tip from a mouse he has an intimate moment with and discovers a secret room connected to the hotel room. The room is littered with pictures of Dr. Swann as a baby, as well as a VHS that apparently recorded Vesper Lynd getting interrogated, but more importantly it holds a set of coordinates which lead to Oberhauser’s base in the Sahara.

Back in London, C has gone behind M’s back and gotten Nine Eyes approved. He’s also gotten the 00 program shut down, which M is understandably not thrilled about. Meanwhile, Bond and Dr. Swann board a train headed for Oberhauser’s hideout. Bond tries to mansplain guns to Dr. Swann, but she’s a badass in her own right and doesn’t need any lessons from him. They begin to Bond, but this is interrupted by the arrival of Mr. Hinx. Mr. Hinx beats Bond’s ass up and down the train, but Bond and Dr. Swann working together are able to get him yeeted out of the train by a rope around his neck. They then have sex, because of course, before arriving at a deserted waystation on the Sahara. They have to wait a while, but eventually a car comes to collect them and takes them to a secret hideout located inside a crater.

In a very Dr. No-esque scene, Bond and Dr. Swann are greeted politely by Oberhauser’s staff and sent to bespoke swanky rooms (after Bond turns over his gun). In Dr. Swann’s room she finds a picture of herself and her dad, and in Bond’s picture he finds an unburnt copy of that picture that was recovered from Skyfall. Turns out the mysterious other young man who was standing with baby Bond and that unknown man was none other than a young Oberhauser. Dr. Swann and Bond are taken to meet with Oberhauser, who shows off the meteorite that made the crater he’s built his base in. He gives a heavy-handed monologue comparing himself to the meteorite before he gives them a tour of his facility. The tour culminates in a room full of people monitoring news stations and hidden security camera feeds, including one hidden in MI6. Bond deduces that C works for Oberhauser, and Oberhauser’s been striving to dismantle the 00 program.

Oberhauser describes himself as the author of all Bond’s pain and takes credit for the deaths of Vesper Lynd and the previous M. He confirms that Le Chiffre, Greene and Silva all worked for him, and then he plays a recording of Mr. White’s suicide to torment Dr. Swann. Bond is knocked out, and he wakes up he’s strapped to a chair as Oberhauser prepares to fiddle around with his brain. Also, just to give the game away, we get a shot of a certain signature white cat. Dr. Swann is forced to watch while Oberhauser drills into Bond’s brain, and when she demands to know why Oberhauser is doing this he launches into some backstory. Turns out the guy from the photograph is Oberhauser’s father; after Bond was orphaned at a young age Oberhauser’s dad took him in and asked Oberhauser to think of him as a little brother. Bond and Oberhauser’s dad formed a strong connection, so Oberhauser killed his own father out of jealously and faked his own death. As you do. He tells Bond that Franz Oberhauser really did die in an avalanche alongside his father, and the man now torturing Bond is Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Hey, it’s been a while (sort of)!

Blofeld begins to drill into Bond’s brain again, this time with the intention of destroying the part of his brain that lets him recognize faces. Why not! Bond is able to pass the watch Q gave to him forever ago to Dr. Swann, and it turns out there’s a bomb in that little sucker. Blofeld is caught up in the explosion but Dr. Swann is able to free Bond from his restraints and the two beat feet out of there. Bond sets off another explosion which destroys Blofeld’s entire facility, and then, because Bond’s feet have been on the ground way too long, he and Dr. Swann fly off in a helicopter.

Bond and Dr. Swann arrive in London, where they meet with M in secret. Bond lets M know that C is dirty, and they plan to take care of him. Dr. Swann can’t handle being part of all this cloak and dagger stuff anymore, so she peaces out while Bond, M, Moneypenny and Q head off to TCOB. This super squad lasts about a minute before the car carrying M and Bond gets t-boned. M manages to slip away, but Bond is taken prisoner. Q and Moneypenny pick up M while Bond manages to take out two goons with his head in a sack and his hands tied together. M and Q try to keep C’s Nine Eyes system from going online confront the traitor in his office while Bond navigates the ruins of the former MI6 HQ in search of Blofeld.

Bond finds Blofeld safely encapsulated behind some bulletproof glass. The explosion from earlier has given him his trademark scar and milky eye, and he informs Bond that he’s once again captured Dr. Swann. He’s wired the building with explosives, and Bond only has three minutes before they go TF off. Bond can either waste time trying to find Dr. Swann or he can save himself and escape. Blofeld triggers the countdown and heads out, leaving Bond to search for Dr. Swann. Q manages to keep Nine Eyes from going off, but M and C scuffle and C falls to his death. Bond catches sight of Blofeld getting away in a helicopter (the helicopter budget for this movie must have been off the chain), but he manages to rescue Dr. Swann and the two make it outside as the building explodes behind them.

Bond, riding in a speedboat, manages to shoot Blofeld’s helicopter out of the sky with a handgun. Let that sink in for a minute. The helicopter crashes, but Blofeld survives and escapes the wreckage. Unfortunately he scuttles right into Bond’s path, and Bond prepares to execute him. Blofeld urges him to finish it, but Bond declines and turns Blofeld over to M while he goes to meet Dr. Swann instead. Blofeld watches Bond and Dr. Swann walk away together as M informs him he’s being arrested.

Some time later, Bond arrives in Q Branch and gets the newly rebuilt old-timey car so he and Dr. Swann can drive off in style.

The End

~~~~~

Man, I know I’ve complained about how long these movies can get before, but I really wasn’t prepared for this puppy. To start off with some things I liked, I thought Mr. Hinx was a neat henchman and it feels like it’s been a long time since we had a good goon with a physical quirk like his metal thumbnails. It was fun to see some gadgets at play, and in a lot of ways this movie felt like a nod to classic, cheesier Bond films as opposed to the grittier, more realistic movies that have preceded it. I liked Dr. Swann a lot, and I appreciated that M, Q and Moneypenny all got stuff to do instead of just meeting with Bond before he jets off on his adventure and they’re left in the office. Now, I’ve got to comment on Blofeld… First of all, it’s neat to have him, and SPECTRE, back in the game after such a long absence. But why they heck did they need to make it so he and Bond grew up together? And Blofeld has built this entire criminal empire just because he had daddy issues and he was jealous of Bond? There has to be more to him than that! Also, I hated that Silva got turned into a henchman for SPECTRE. It was pretty blatantly stated that both Le Chiffre and Greene were part of a larger organization so I don’t mind them getting retconned into Blofeld’s agents, but Silva’s vendetta against the late M felt so personal and it doesn’t make sense to me that he was working for someone else. A lot of this movie was fun and I enjoyed most of it, but if I think about the motivations behind it all for even a little bit then the whole thing comes apart. This isn’t the worst Bond movie by any means (lookin’ at you, Thunderball), but it feels like it did a disservice to its immediate predecessors and didn’t come anywhere near the heights of Casino Royale or Skyfall.

I give SPECTRE QQQ on the Five Q Scale.

I can’t believe it, but there aren’t going to be any new recaps after that! We did it, Eli! Well, almost. Eli’s going to do a final post recapping his thoughts on his time spent with the Girls in The Golden Girls and The Golden Palace, and after that I’ll put up a post summing up my final thoughts on the James Bond franchise.

Until then, as always, thank you for reading, thank you for joining us on this wild ride and thank you for being One of Us!

#One of us #james bond #007

[letterboxd]

Chameleon.

For Japanuary, J-horror auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa talks to Aaron Yap about upending genre expectations with his dreamy new travelogue To the Ends of the Earth, the unconscious connections between his films, and how it’s time for a proper evaluation of Robert Zemeckis.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s continued, uncontested position as a horror auteur isn’t unjustified. Emerging as a key voice in the J-horror boom of the late ’90s, Kurosawa hypnotized us with his chilly, haunting, atmospheric—and often apocalyptically tinged—visions of baffling serial killers, ghosts in machines, insidious doppelgangers and vengeful apparitions.

Bong Joon-ho once called Kurosawa’s 1997 mind-bender Cure one of the greatest films ever made. Pulse, his terrifyingly prophetic 2001 film, for my money—and many Letterboxd members’—might still be the creepiest of all contemporary horrors. “It is the only film I’ve ever seen in which every single shot feels genuinely haunted,” writes Connor.

Rarely behaving in a traditional scary-movie fashion, Kurosawa’s idiosyncratic horror films often test our expectations of genre, then deliver beyond those boundaries to probe his recurring themes: identity and isolation, humanity’s relationship to technology and nature, and deep-seated anxieties that nibble away at society’s crumbling fabric. Pulse, besides being an exercise in deftly crafted dread, is a great, telling, melancholy movie about the overwhelming loneliness of the digital age.

Yoko (Atsuko Maeda) and her travel show crew in ‘To the Ends of the Earth’.

However, the general focus on his horror “side” tends to eclipse a filmography that’s far richer and more versatile than he’s usually given credit for. Over the past two decades, we’ve seen him seem forge a thrillingly chameleonic, unpredictable path that’s included an ecological thriller (Charisma), an Ozu-esque family drama (Tokyo Sonata), a metaphysical romance (Journey to the Shore) and an alien invasion sci-fi (Before We Vanish). No one is really doing it like Kurosawa, and To the Ends of the Earth is arguably his most exciting and enigmatic left-turn yet.

To the Ends of the Earth is a commissioned piece to celebrate the diplomatic relations between Japan and the Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan, but that doesn’t diminish that it’s unmistakably a Kiyoshi Kurosawa film, not a tossed-off, exoticized, postcard-pretty travelogue. His signature languorous pacing, shrewdly slippery tonal calibration, and acute spatial sensitivity are at full bore, servicing a loosely plotted tale of TV travel show host Yoko (former J-pop singer Atsuko Maeda) and her crew attempting to complete shooting an episode in the Uzbekistan capital of Tashkent.

If anything, this movie should really confirm him as a filmmaker of bold, fictive playfulness in a comparable register to Jacques Rivette, Olivier Assayas and Christian Petzold—something that 2013’s hour-long, similarly fish-out-of-water head-rush Seventh Code, also starring Maeda, hinted at. In To the Ends of the Earth, gentleness, compassion and dream-like bursts of song and fantasy percolate through a disquieting maze of displacement—cultural, artistic, gendered—and the result is an adventurous, unpindownable, thoroughly humanistic work of curiosity and imagination.

Some years ago you did a “double feature”-themed interview with the Belfort Entrevues Film Festival where you revealed the sources of inspiration for some of your films. What film, if any, was a chief influence for To the Ends of the Earth, and can you tell us in what way? Kiyoshi Kurosawa: When I make my work, I often consciously refer to films from the past, but that’s usually the case with genre films. For example, Cure was greatly inspired by The Silence of the Lambs. However, To the Ends of the Earth is not a genre movie, so I wasn’t consciously thinking of any specific films. However, the composition of the story, that the main character appears in every scene, is based on films by the Dardenne brothers. Viewing their films The Child and Two Days, One Night, it’s clear to see how the depiction of just one person can turn trivial incidents into something serious and suspenseful.

Atsuko Maeda and Kiyoshi Kurosawa on the set of ‘To the Ends of the Earth’.

Watching Bright Future, To the Ends of the Earth and Creepy back-to-back recently, I noticed several parallels and motifs which may or may not be intentional. For example, a jellyfish makes an appearance in a scene on TV in Creepy, or there’s a TV report of a blaze in To the Ends of the Earth that momentarily hints at a bigger natural catastrophe that echoes the jellyfish swarm in Bright Future, or other apocalyptic moments in your films like Charisma and Before We Vanish. Do you find that some of these motifs work on a subconscious level for you, or were some of them intentionally threaded in? It’s a very interesting point. Some of them were intentional and some were not at all. It’s true about jellyfish, they appear in both Bright Future and Creepy. However, this is the first time I’ve noticed. The endings of Charisma and Before We Vanish were already written in the script by necessity, so of course, it’s intentional. The depiction of the blaze on TV in To the Ends of the Earth was introduced to show something happening in Japan while the main character is taking a small adventure in Uzbekistan. I wanted to show that her boyfriend was in some kind of crisis there. While the fire on the TV is merely an accident, it does appear apocalyptic. I may have overdone that a bit. Perhaps some kind of unconscious thinking was at work.

That amusement park ride scene in To the Ends of the Earth has stayed with me in the way it suggests terror out of something seemingly mundane. What are some scenes from other films that have stayed with you? The amusement park ride scene wasn’t introduced to express terror. What I wanted to show was how crazy the assignment is and Yuko’s professionalism. She takes on the assignment without fear. This may have been a bit overdone as well. However, I thought that Atsuko Maeda, who didn’t hesitate to actually ride it three times, was a real professional. Apart from that, if I think about the movies that force people to experience horror, what comes to me are Roger Corman’s Pit and the Pendulum. Tobe Hooper’s The Funhouse, George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road. I also remembered the episode in Freddie Francis’s Torture Garden, where a grand piano has a will to kill people, which was great.

Your films tend to be very location-based; environments and spaces appear to play a significant part. The pandemic has been the ultimate test of our relationship with spaces and each other. How has the pandemic impacted you as a filmmaker, and are there themes and ideas that you are interested in exploring further as a result of Covid? As you pointed out, when I make a movie, I pay great attention to the location. The moment I find a good location, I feel that the script will be transformed into a movie. It is the moment when fiction and reality are fused. It’s hard to say anything though, I haven’t made a movie since the pandemic started. What I can say, at least, is that sitting in front of the computer at home is not cinematic at all. So far, I don’t feel that something new will be born from it. What should I do? After all, I feel that a movie can only be made by going out in the city with a camera after utilizing the best epidemic prevention system possible.

If you had to pick a film that’s a personal favorite, which would you pick, and why? It's too difficult a question. Japanese movies and foreign movies have different viewpoints. Also, there are completely different categories of movies [that] greatly influence me when I make films and the movies I saw when I was young that make me nostalgic. It’s impossible to choose just one. But, well, the one that comes to mind is Sam Peckinpah’s The Ballad of Cable Hogue, which is both nostalgic and heavily influential for me.

You’ve spoken about your fondness for American filmmakers like Tobe Hooper, Robert Aldrich, Steven Spielberg et al. Are there new, or more recent American filmmakers and films that have caught your attention or that you’re particularly excited by? I don’t know much about young American directors, but what I always care about is Alfonso Cuarón. Of course he is not a new, young filmmaker, but an auteur. Also, since this is a good opportunity, I’d like to mention Robert Zemeckis. He made such masterpieces as Cast Away and What Lies Beneath around 2000. For some reason, he has never been properly evaluated at all. For a time he was devoted to animation. However, he made a spectacular return to live-action films with Flight and continues to shoot unique masterpieces like Allied and Welcome to Marwen. Of course, not many people appreciate these works. However, he does not seem to care about public opinion at all and continues to boldly shoot new works. Perhaps Zemeckis is the American film director who makes the most authentic films today.

What are your movie-watching habits like? Do you continue to watch movies on physical media or prefer streaming these days? What was the last movie you saw in a theater? Basically, I like to watch movies at an ordinary movie theater in the city the most. When I can’t go to the movie theater, or even though I know the film is going to be boring but I have to watch a movie for business, I have no choice but to watch it on DVD or Blu-ray. Of course, I also use VOD once in a while. The last movie I saw in the theater, as of today, was the Japanese film The Voice in the Crime. I saw that just yesterday. I saw it with my wife at a cinema complex in Shinjuku, Tokyo. It was the latest work by the director who made the previous masterpiece Flying Colors, and I expected much from it. It was speedy and quite well done until the middle of the film, but by the ending, it was too boring. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a good movie.

What’s a memorable film-related moment from your childhood, perhaps something you experienced with family or friends, or a film that scared you or made you cry? The movies that my generation often watched growing up were mainly monster movies. The most unforgettable one was Matango. Like Godzilla and Mothra, it was directed by Ishirō Honda. I went to see this movie with my friends. It had a rather cute touch in the promotional materials depicting a mushroom with a monstrous appearance. However, the content was completely different from a normal monster movie. Shipwrecked survivors on an uninhabited island encounter monstrous mushroom creatures washed up on the shore. These are not unknown creatures such as Godzilla or Mothra, but the horrifying ending of a human being. The characters are being infected, changing one another into mushroom humans. All of us children trembled from the bottom of our hearts. In retrospect, the work is an extreme horror aiming along the same line as [Howard Hawks and] Christian Nyby’s The Thing from Another World. It was probably the first time I encountered horror which was not “to escape from destruction” but “when a human being becomes something not human”.

Is there a filmmaker or film you think about a lot that you don’t get to talk about much and would like to show some appreciation? I haven’t talked much about the Battles Without Honor and Humanity series directed by Kinji Fukasaku. I don’t know how well this series of Japanese movies is known abroad, but when I was a high-school student I saw this and quickly became a big fan. I’ve watched a variety of yakuza movies since then, and it’s safe to say that nothing beats this series. As the title suggests, the films depict a yakuza world without “Jingi” (yakuza’s moral code), and it was really humorous and exciting to see the betrayals and the destruction. After I saw this, all those traditional yakuza movies dominated by the strange ideology of “Jingi” looked like a childish fantasy.

Related content

The Japanuary Challenge 2021

Explore more J-horror, ’80s J-horror and ’90s J-horror

Follow Aaron on Letterboxd

‘To the Ends of the Earth’ is available for rental in the US via distributor KimStim. From February 5-25, Japan Society’s virtual cinema hosts ‘21st Century Japan: Films from 2001-2020’, featuring films from Hirokazu Kore-eda, Naomi Kawase and Takashi Miike, the online US premieres of Sion Sono’s ‘Red Post on Escher Street’ and Yukiko Mishima’s ‘Shape of Red’, plus a special focus on Kiyoshi Kurosawa (‘Bright Future’, ‘Journey to the Shore’, ‘Real’).

#Kiyoshi kurosawa #to the ends of the earth #j-horror #j-horror films #japanese films #japanese cinema #japanese horror #japan society #japanuary #letterboxd #sion sono #tokyo sonata #robert zemeckis #aaron yap

[theconservativebrief]

Jared Kushner loved Michael Moore’s health care crisis documentary Sicko. He loved it so much that he threw an after-party for it following the film’s premiere in 2007. The future son-in-law of and senior adviser to the future president effusively praised Moore to a reporter, singling out the filmmaker’s ability to construct a compelling argument and bring important issues in American life to light.

A clip of Kushner’s salute to Moore appears early in the documentarian’s latest feature, Fahrenheit 11/9, which made its debut at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival to an exuberant crowd on Thursday night. Red bandanas were handed out at the door — late in the film, Moore calls for audiences to readopt the red bandana as a symbol, in the spirit of those worn by miners in support of unions in the 1920s — and someone in the crowd shouted, “Michael for president!”

The thing is, Kushner was right. Moore argues for his left-leaning political views passionately and forcefully, often building his case by mixing damning archival footage and expert interviews with his own goofy antics and sly commentary. The effect is something of a gale force, sweeping you along and compelling you to nod your head, without a lot of time to wonder what’s been left off the screen.

It’s effective, and Moore’s sources as embedded in his narrative are generally reliable. But it can feel loose and free-associative in some ways, and Moore’s injection of his own persona into his films — especially the smug snark of his commentary and the affected cluelessness he uses as an interview technique — can get old very quickly.

So his films are by turns convincing and infuriating, and more recent offerings have inspired tepid reviews even from critics who share his political views. His 2017 one-man Broadway show, The Terms of My Surrender, leaned into the worst of these tendencies and garnered flat-out bad reviews, in a city where his political leanings might be assumed to be shared by most of the audience. With Moore, mileage greatly varies.

In particular, self-mythologizing has always been his Achilles heel, so there was a great deal of eye-rolling among critics in June, when the title of his next project was announced to be Fahrenheit 11/9 — a reference to his 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, which criticized the George W. Bush administration and the War on Terror. That film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and became the highest-grossing documentary of all time. Was Moore really about to draw a comparison between the events of 9/11/2001 and 11/9/2016 — the day after Donald Trump was elected America’s next president?

He was. But the film is much better than the baggage that comes with its title might imply. Moore still suffers from bouts of self-aggrandizement and snide generalization. But they feel jarringly out of place, and in a good way. That’s because, for a great deal of the film, Moore cedes the floor to people whose voices are not as easily heard, or who have had to fight to have a voice at all.

Fahrenheit 11/9 is a sweeping broadside against Trump, to be sure — not an original approach in documentary filmmaking these days. But it also does what few political films seem willing to do in the Trump era: It powerfully (if unsystematically) dismantles idealistic notions about how much better things were before Trump took office.

The film’s news peg may be the current administration, but its target is self-satisfied liberals who more or less trust the system. Early on, Moore even implicates himself, offering up a series of mea culpas for people he’s hobnobbed with in the past — Kushner, Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, and Trump himself (on Roseanne Barr’s talk show, no less).

And when Fahrenheit 11/9 does turn to the election itself, it’s less interested in Trump as cause and more as symptom of nationwide disillusionment, money-driven elections, and a resulting apathy about the political process. (Forty percent of eligible Americans didn’t even vote in the 2016 election.)

Moore sprays water from Flint, Michigan, on Gov. Rick Snyder’s mansion in his new documentary Fahrenheit 11/9. Courtesy of TIFF

Moore goes after everyone close to the president, even insinuating early on that there is something very inappropriate about his relationship with his daughter Ivanka. He even winds up not just comparing Trump to Hitler, but layering one of Trump’s speeches atop video of one of Hitler’s. But he reserves his most angry, pointed, and well-constructed criticisms for what he paints as a toothless, crony-driven Democratic establishment and — in a turn that might surprise some viewers — Barack Obama, and particularly Obama’s visit to Flint, Michigan, in 2016.

Moore is from Flint, and the best sequences in Fahrenheit 11/9 are about the city’s ongoing water crisis as well as the political situation that led to it, as more or less engineered by Republican Gov. Rick Snyder, whom Moore repeatedly calls a “criminal.”

At the Fahrenheit 11/9’s Toronto premiere, there were audible gasps in the theater many times, but perhaps the loudest one came when the film detailed how Snyder ordered that the water supply for Flint’s General Motors factory be switched back to clean water because it was corroding auto parts — while leaving the population with a contaminated supply that the government continued to insist was totally fine to drink, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

The Flint section of the film is infuriating but also illuminating; Moore lets whistleblowers, doctors, residents, and local law enforcement vent their anger while also drawing a line between Snyder and Trump that is, at minimum, disturbing.

But he has a larger point. There’s optimism woven throughout Fahrenheit 11/9, borne out of Moore’s conviction that on the whole, the American people (“us,” as he says in the film’s narration, knowing who his audience is) hold progressive views that are more in line with the left-leaning end of the political spectrum than anything Trump represents. (He supports this belief with a raft of polls on health care, taxes, gun control, immigration, abortion, and other matters, mostly from 2018.)

If democracy worked in America, he suggests — if people really felt that their vote meant something — then perhaps the nation could travel down a path that would lead somewhere positive.

Moore dutifully attacks the idiosyncrasies of the system, like the Electoral College and the Democratic Party’s system of superdelegates. But he seems pretty sure that it’s actually activism from the bottom up that will change the country. And so in addition to his own activism in Flint, he spotlights the Parkland, Florida, teens and the March for Our Lives movement and the teachers’ strikes that began in West Virginia and spread to other states.

Is he right? It’s too early to tell. After infusing a solid stretch of Fahrenheit 11/9 with hope, clearly seeking to inspire the audience to actually believe things can change, Moore returns to a more somber tone. He reminds viewers of the apparently enlightened and free-thinking historical context into which Adolf Hitler stepped, less than a century ago, and his thesis is clear: It — meaning the dehumanization of large groups of citizens and devotion to a charismatic strongman leader — can happen here, and it may already have happened.

As a film, Fahrenheit 11/9 is flawed. The movie feels at times more like a crash course in what’s happened since 2016, a kind of “worst hits” album desperate to hit every possible point and draw them all into a unifying theory.

We get Trump, Steve Bannon (“I don’t agree with [Moore’s] politics,” Bannon is shown saying, “but I think he makes a great film”), birtherism, the Central Park Five, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, Mark Halperin, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Roseanne, “the media” (and especially the New York Times), Trump’s “treasonous” meeting with Putin in Helsinki in July 2018, Bill Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Flint, Parkland, Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Colin Kaepernick, Nazis, and Gwen Stefani, whom Moore insists is the reason Trump ran for president in the first place. (It was, according to Moore, Trump’s discovery that Stefani made more money on The Voice than he did on The Apprentice that made Trump announce his candidacy, to goad NBC into seeing how popular he was. It backfired, but the wheels started turning.)

That’s all crammed into about two hours, and the whiplash is considerable. It’s possible that Moore was trying to mimic the chaos of the news cycle over the past couple of years, but much of the film doesn’t stick so much as leave you with a lot of feelings.

At times, it seems as though some important issues have been wrapped into an argument against Trump because Moore isn’t sure people would have cared otherwise. (Whether or not he’s right, I can’t say.) I especially found myself wishing that, given Moore’s stature among socially conscious audiences as well as his personal connection to Flint, that he had spent less time writing clever zingers about the president and instead made an entire feature film about Flint alone, digging more deeply into its problems and their potential solutions.

Michael Moore speaks with Parkland teenager David Hogg in Fahrenheit 11/9. Courtesy of TIFF

Still, whenever he steps out of the way and hands over the microphone to those without household name recognition, Moore is an effective filmmaker. He knows who to talk to, and he doesn’t focus only on the big names. Voters and public school teachers in West Virginia; an Iraq war vet and various left-wing candidates running for Congress (including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib); the last living Nuremberg prosecutor; whistleblowers and doctors and parents and residents in Flint; and many more individuals who don’t grab headlines quite as easily as Trump are all part of Fahrenheit 11/9. With their aid, Moore weaves a tapestry not of hope, but optimistic outrage.

Fahrenheit 11/9 is not going to convince any Trump loyalists to reconsider. But it has no interest in doing that. #NeverTrump conservatives aren’t likely to watch the film either, even though it may offer them some surprising common ground, despite the fact that Moore’s critique of the Democratic Party comes from his democratic socialist views.

Instead, the film concentrates on not letting its more natural audience off easy. It criticizes the easy generalizations, ahistoricity, and even tribalism of a liberal audience (the critiques of Obama and of Clinton, in particular, don’t hold anything back). It suggests the country is a wreck not because of those other people out there, but because the people in the theater itself aren’t even committed enough to their own ideals to get uncomfortable and do something — unlike, for instance, the West Virginia teachers who stayed on strike after their union leaders came to a compromise they wouldn’t accept, or the teenagers who organized the March for Our Lives.

Moore with a group of teens who organized the “March for Our Lives” in Parkland, Florida. Courtesy of TIFF

That means there’s something in this film to irritate everyone. And it’s certainly true that a more focused approach may have ultimately been more effective at dismantling his opponents. After all, everything Moore says has been out there, publicly reported by “the media” for years, and it’s the barrage of information that has sent a lot of people into a spiral of apathy, overwhelmed by everything that needs doing and everything that is awful. Do we need more outrage in 2018?

Moore thinks America does need more outrage — but more focused outrage. It’s useless to hate on Trump, he posits. What we need to do is to “get rid of the whole rotten system that gave us Trump,” as he declares toward the end of Fahrenheit 11/9. And that effort, to him, will start with the “real” America, the people to whom he’s increasingly handing the microphone.

Fahrenheit 11/9 premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and opens in theaters on September 21.

Original Source -> In Fahrenheit 11/9, Michael Moore spares no one — especially self-satisfied liberals

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

[nixonsmoviereviews]

"Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over"- A frustratingly mediocre follow-up to the legitimately amusing franchise.

Robert Rodriguez is honestly one of the most frustrating figures in Hollywood that one could follow and be a fan of. From his humble beginnings as a low-budget action director on films like "El Mariachi", to the slick and stylish effects-extravaganzas like "Sin City", Rodriguez has proved time and again that he's a grand storyteller and a valuable member of the filmmaking community. Yet, for every major breakthrough he's played a part in, and for all of his remarkable high- quality releases that wow both critics and audiences alike... there's at least one if not not more significant and wince-inducing missteps that make you question your fandom. For every "Desperado", there's a "Machete Kills"... For every "From Dusk Till Dawn", there's an "Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl." And for every "Spy Kids", there's unfortunately a film like "Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over." While I was never quite the target audience for Rodriguez's manic and wild kids-film series, I still could definitely not deny its imagination and creativity. The first two chapters, flawed though they may be, are fine and entertaining features that to this day still thrill and wow children the world over. The same could not be said of the third chapter. Released in the early 2000's when Rodriguez was experimenting with the new digital technology that would become a hallmark of his more recent work, "Game Over" is a frustratingly mediocre follow-up to two otherwise good films, and I think it's pretty clear what the problem is- Rodriguez doesn't really seem to treat this round of "Spy Kids" as anything more than a sophisticated tech-demo. It's not really a movie so much as it's an 80-minute experiment that our writer/director is using to test the bounds of green-screen filmmaking and low-cost visual effects. It's cold, methodical, clinical and frankly boring. Juni Cortez (Daryl Sabara) has retired from the OSS and now lives a quiet life as a child private investigator. However, when he learns that his sister Carmen (Alexa Vega) has been captured and is evidently imprisoned in the Beta of an upcoming virtual-reality video-game called "Game Over", he is forced back into action! He must infiltrate this new game- created by a dastardly villain called "The Toymaker" (Sylvester Stallone), to save his sister and perhaps the world once again! Along the way, he will encounter new friends and allies, and also call on the help of returning characters to stop The Toymaker's evil plans... Honestly, it's really hard to discuss the merits of the film because there's so little happening. Yeah, there's the shell of a plot and one or two minor beats of character establishment and development, but its only there to justify the constant and consistent sequences of green-screen "action." It's obvious that Rodriguez is simply using the film as a platform to play around with his new digital "toys", and the movie suffers for it. The actors appear lost in most of the scenes (presumably because they are, as they awkwardly walk around in front of a blank screen), and what little story there is comes off more like an afterthought than a focus. What makes it all the more confusing is that just a few years later, Rodriguez co-directed the excellent "Sin City", which similarly used a near-exclusive "green screen studio" approach, but it worked. Maybe his experience and mistakes with this film helped him to learn what to do and what not? Really, the only thing I can address is the quality of the effects and the nature of the action, and that is what just barely salvages the film. While the digital animation is pretty low-quality, it works as it was attempting to emulate video-games, so it gave it a sort-of appropriately-dated quality that I enjoyed. The action can be dull quite often, but a few sequences do adequate jobs at wowing the audience, so there's some fun to be had with the video-game concept. I also felt the early use of "modern 3-D" was charming, and while it mainly consists of throwing something in the audience's face every few minutes, it worked well enough. I might not be a fan of the old-fashioned Red/Cyan glasses approach, but the 3-D gave it a sense of kitschy fun. I also did enjoy the rampant cameos of characters from the previous films, and I think they'll likely delight young children. As it stands, "Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over" is a disappointing and forgettable sequel in the franchise, and won't likely win any new fans. Its just a series of loosely-connected CGI action set-pieces with a paper-thin plot to tie them together. But I think there's just enough dumb fun to be had with just enough key sequences that massive fans of the first two might wanna consider giving it a shot at least once. Everyone else need not apply, though. It gets a below-average 4 out of 10 from me.

#imdb #movie #film #review #adventure #family #comedy

[movietvtechgeeks]

Latest story from https://movietvtechgeeks.com/wind-river-mudbound-hero-shine-day-3-2017-sundance-film-festival/

'Wind River,' 'Mudbound,' 'Hero' shine for Day 3 2017 Sundance Film Festival

Day 3 of the 2017 Sundance Film Festival saw some buyer action as Netflix scooped up the Jeff Orlowski, Chasing Coral documentary which looks at the state of the world’s coral reefs. This was the filmmakers follow-up to Chasing Ice, which looked at the melting ice caps. Chasing Coral had a lot of interest and bidders but Netflix made it’s second purchase this year being the highest bidder.

Wind River made news before the festival began after the Weinstein Company decided not to distribute it making worldwide rights go up. It was easily one of Jeremy Renner’s best films, but it still hasn’t been picked up yet.

Mudbound

For the second time in her rising career, director Dee Rees brought the house down at an Eccles Theatre premiere. Following her debut feature, Pariah, which played opening night in 2011, she came back with a primetime Saturday night bow of Mudbound, an ambitious but assured film about two families living uneasily on the same Mississippi farm during the tumultuous 1940s. The Jackson family works tirelessly and thanklessly as sharecroppers on land owned by the McAllans, Memphis transplants who struggle to adjust to the hardships of rural life. When World War II breaks out, one young man from each family leaves for an extended period of time, and then they both return as changed people to a culture of racism and degradation that hasn’t changed at all.

Suitable for a film that offers six distinct points of view, the post-screening Q&A allowed the cast and crew to describe their own personal connections to the material, as well as to one another. Author Hillary Jordan said that her novel, which was adapted for the screen by Virgil Williams and Rees, was loosely based on her own family, whose stories of owning a farm in the Deep South were passed along to her when she was growing up. Rees said, “There was a lot of there there” in Jordan’s book, and she was eager to “explode it out” for the screen. That partly included imbuing the material with her own family history.

“My grandmother was born in 1925 in Louisiana, and her parents were sharecroppers. She said she wasn’t going to be a sharecropper, that she wanted to be a stenographer,” Rees said, a detail that made its way into the film. “My maternal grandfather fought in World War II, and my paternal grandfather fought in Korea. Both men were from the country—one from rural Tennessee, the other from Louisiana. They both went away and came back and didn’t quite get what they should have gotten.”

Jason Mitchell, who plays Ronsel, a decorated sergeant in Europe who suffers racist abuse the moment he returns home, also connected deeply with the material, and with Ronsel’s resilience in particular. “I’m from the Deep South, my grandfather fought in the Korean War, and I always wanted to do a movie like this,” Mitchell said. “But I never wanted to do it with a character who put his head down, who ran and was afraid. I feel like there’s so much more to stand for as a black man even if it means your life. So when I saw this character I was like, yo. It blew my mind. The character felt right, and I think we did something right.”

Actresses Carey Mulligan (whose career took off in Park City in 2009 with her turn in An Education) and Mary J. Blige (the singer-turned-big-time-actress, thanks to this performance) talked about how they finessed playing characters who operate with a certain degree of mutual respect despite an obvious power disparity. The two had never met before working on this project together, and Mulligan said that on the first day of rehearsals, Rees put them across a table from each other, looking each other in the eye, “and it was awkward.”

“Right, because you were so tight,” Blige said, eliciting laughter from the audience. “It was very real. She didn’t come in trying to be my friend. She came in just like I came in, like, ‘Who are you?’ And then you’re like, ‘Oh, I love you.’ You know how it goes.”

“It got less awkward and then it felt very real, and interesting,” Mulligan said. “Mary is always really, incredibly truthful to act with. She’s just open.”

“As women we have a bond. This thing that people understand about each other—what it takes to be a woman,” Blige said. So we understand each other, and that’s what makes us connect. And that’s where the chemistry comes from, because automatically, if another woman is not being catty, and she’s open, the relationship is going to just fly.”

When a member of the audience asked Rees what advice he had for filmmakers just starting out, her answer resonated with what she accomplished with this film. “Don’t start with a message. Start with character. Start with a character that won’t get out of your head,” she said. “When you start out trying to leave a message I think it pushes people away. The thing I liked about this film was the opportunity to look at all of these relationships, these families constantly bouncing off of each other. Find characters that you love, find material that you love, and keep finding the core. That’s what makes people feel something.”

Wind River

Having written the much-praised screenplays for Sicario and Hell or High Water, Taylor Sheridan makes a persuasive debut as director with Wind River, a sometimes stark, often brutally violent mystery about the search for the killer of a young woman whose body was found on a Native American reservation in the snow-covered mountains of Wyoming.

In his introductory remarks at the premiere of the crime drama on Saturday, Festival director John Cooper confessed his surprise about the director’s work—it is so accomplished, he couldn’t believe Sheridan didn’t already have dozens of films on his résumé.

In some ways, Wind River, which is titled after the rugged reservation on which it takes place, serves as the completion of a trilogy of Sheridan’s previous work exploring the American frontier. Cory Lambert (Jeremy Renner), a wildlife tracker haunted by the death of his own daughter years earlier, is forced to team with a rookie FBI agent (Elizabeth Olsen) to uncover the truth about the young woman’s murder. Sheridan has again created a forceful drama melded with memorable characters, realistic dialogue, and scenes that go in unexpected directions, often resulting in explosive violence.

Sheridan explained that he chose to make his helming debut with Wind River because the story is deeply personal to him. “I was trying to find an entertaining way to highlight atrocities that exist in an area in the world that most people don’t know about, where some very dear friends of mine have suffered,” he revealed. “I couldn’t risk another director interpreting that vision differently. If it failed, it had to fail on my shoulders, and if the mission was misinterpreted it would be because of me.”

He succeeded, it seems. Actor Gil Birmingham, who plays the father of the murdered woman and is one of many Native American actors in the cast, noted that he appreciated that Sheridan’s film addressed a rarely discussed statistic that approximately 2,000 Native women have gone missing or have been murdered during the past decade. “The resources to solve these things [were] reflected in the film in a very realistic way,” he stated.

The Hero

It’s a role that only Sam Elliott could play, and director/screenwriter Brett Haley confirmed that he and co-writer Marc Basch wrote The Hero specifically for the legendary mustachioed actor, noting, “There’s no other man on earth who could’ve played Lee Hayden.”

After a decades-long career as a Western movie star with an iconic voice, Lee finds himself doing radio commercials for barbecue sauce and not much else, besides smoking weed with his friend and drug dealer, Jeremy (Nick Offerman). But when he finds out he has pancreatic cancer, he goes in search of a way to make meaning of his life before he dies. He dreams of making one final movie; he tries to patch up his relationship with his long-estranged daughter, Lucy (Krysten Ritter); and he begins dating a much younger woman, Charlotte (Laura Prepon).

The age disparity between Lee and Charlotte is reminiscent of Haley’s previous film, I’ll See You in My Dreams, about a friendship between an older woman and a younger man. After the premiere screening of The Hero, Haley explained that he is drawn to stories about older people in part because of the ageism in Hollywood and in the world. He also told the audience that he didn’t want this romantic relationship to be seen as the typical scenario in which an older man goes after a younger woman.

“Marc and I really tried to make this a specific relationship. …It challenges you and it might be like, that’s weird, that’s different, but that’s what I want you to be thinking about. Why is it so weird or different? … I try not to judge too much and I try to just ask questions.”

The premiere drew many of the Festival’s more grownup crowd, and several attendees thanked Haley for his depiction of aging people, complimenting him for beautifully capturing something that is rarely seen on screen, and something that spoke to them directly. Elliott, in turn, expressed gratitude for the opportunity to play a role like this, which doesn’t come around very often.

Haley revealed that he didn’t just have Elliott in mind for the movie; he also wrote the part of his ex-wife for Katharine Ross. And he was lucky enough to get every one of his top choices for the other main roles in the film. When the cast members were asked why they were drawn to this project, Nick Offerman joked, “Brett got a hold of me and said, ‘Would you like to play Sam’s boyfriend?’” and with that, he passed the mic.

The Yellow Birds

Four years after his acclaimed debut film, Blue Caprice, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, French filmmaker Alexandre Moors returns with his follow-up, the intense Iraq War drama The Yellow Birds. Based on a novel by Kevin Powers, which was adapted for the screen by David Lowery and R.F.I. Porto, The Yellow Birds tracks two young men, Murph and Bartle (Tye Sheridan and Alden Ehrenreich), from boot camp to battle ground, where they face extreme combat, tragic losses, and the unpredictable behavior of their sergeant (Jack Huston). Thanks to recurrent flashbacks, it becomes apparent that Bartle is holding onto a secret from the final days of deployment, a secret that might help explain why his fellow soldier has gone missing.

During the post-screening Q&A, Moors said that when he read Powers’s book, he “was crying by page ten.” When asked how he accomplished the realistic battle scenes, he said his goal was less realism than communicating the strong emotional impression the powerful material made upon him. “I wanted sometimes to go beyond reality,” he said. The war scenes were shot in Morocco, with the cast and crew relocating to, and immersing themselves in, the remote desert region.

“It was hard as hell to shoot,” Sheridan said. “But I’m so happy we shot it there. At times I did feel that isolation, being in a foreign land, and not speaking the language. I think that really translates to the screen.” Sheridan also described several nights during which the actors pitched their own tents and camped out under the desert stars.

“We went to a boot camp for about two weeks, which got us into a pretty tight unit,” Huston added. “It gave us the slightest glimpses into what it might be like to prepare yourself for war, and gave us a newfound respect for guys who actually go and do fight.”

“For those two weeks during boot camp, we just became brothers,” Sheridan said. “It’s easy to see how you can form those bonds when you have nothing but the guy standing to your right or your left.”

Chasing Coral

Five years after Chasing Ice, his documentary about melting glaciers, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, environmental activist/filmmaker Jeff Orlowski returned to Park City with another, equally valuable nonfiction film about climate change. Chasing Coral records underwater expeditions by a group of divers, photographers, and ocean scientists who set out to provide visual proof of coral bleaching, the destruction of coral reefs.

Orlowski creates a stunning narrative that focuses on Zackery Rago, a self-proclaimed coral nerd, and Richard Vevers, a former ad man who left his advertising career to become an underwater photographer, traveling to reefs around the world over the course of three years. The two team with various marine biologists and battle technical malfunctions and nature to record the unprecedented 2016 coral bleaching event at the Great Barrier Reef’s Lizard Island off the coast of Australia, ominously noting that 22 percent of the reef died during 2016 due to global warming and pollution.

Utilizing the first time-lapse camera to record coral bleaching, the film offers visuals of rarely seen underwater life that are breathtakingly beautiful.

Following the screening, the film’s team of scientists joined the director on stage and were unanimous in their praise for the documentary and the possible impact it will have on taking their decades of work to the next level. “This has to be the path that will get attention from the world,” one said.

Orlowski stated that he hopes Chasing Coral will serve as a call to action and plans screenings of the film in cities around the country. “We want this film to be a tool,” he said. “With our resources and team, we hope to develop the infrastructure to support campaigns in cities and states across the country. We want to go broad with existing groups and really deep in places where we can have the most meaningful impact and leverage.”

Chasing Coral was picked up by Netflix after a rather heated bidding war kicked in after it’s premiere. Orlowski commented, “This project has been a labor of love for so many years. We wanted to make sure that our film found the right home, especially given the global scale of this story. In partnering with Netflix, we’re excited about working together to make a huge impact around the world.”

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