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denimbex1986 · 9 months

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'For many, Oppenheimer is the movie event of the year. The new film by Christopher Nolan is a continuation of the director's admiration of IMAX cinematography. His commitment to shooting film on these heavy, expensive cameras has come to define his artistic style and as one of the true advocates of cinema. Nolan has practically made 70mm IMAX screenings, his preferred format of experiencing Oppenheimer, a household name. His pedantic approach to filmmaking at a populist level is why he is one-of-a-kind. When watching his new film on a glorious IMAX screen, 70mm or not, any observant viewer will take note of the constantly changing aspect ratios throughout Oppenheimer.

Why Does Christopher Nolan Love IMAX?

While the film was shot entirely on IMAX cameras, Oppenheimer shifts between two aspect ratios throughout the runtime, 2:20:1 and 1:43:1. The former is visualized as the wider, standard variation of screen formatting, with the top and bottom of the frame being cropped out, and the latter is the proportion that fills up a gigantic IMAX screen. The ratio frequently changes within respective scenes. No matter what aspect ratio the viewer is looking at, Oppenheimer is an exquisite picture, but there are few feelings more satisfying than when the larger-than-life IMAX screen that soars above you is filled from top to bottom with gorgeous film photography. Christopher Nolan's advocacy for IMAX filmmaking is passionate enough to earn him the title of the unofficial spokesperson of the format.

Since his no-budget debut, Following, and his ascent to blockbuster filmmaking with The Dark Knight trilogy and Inception, Nolan has reveled in manipulating the medium of film and its conventional story structures. The director never saw a narrative that couldn't be chopped up as a non-linear tale. His liberal use of coherent sound mixing, most infamously demonstrated in Tenet, is frustrating on a basic level, but as an artistic flex, it is commendable. The back-and-forth routine of the aspect ratios in his most recent film is another example of Nolan's unique sense of formalism. The shifting effect is ultimately unobtrusive in telling the gripping story of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) and his development of the atomic bomb, but it subconsciously adds a visceral element to an already exhilarating historical biopic.

'Oppenheimer' Shifts Between a Wide Screen & Full Screen in IMAX

The shifting aspect ratios are entangled with Nolan's distinct, operatic depiction of a man blessed with a brilliant mind who reckons with utilizing it for immoral means. The wide frame, at 2:20:1, resembles objectivity. This style is familiar with the rudimentary beats of a typical Hollywood biography--satisfying the historical backdrop of the film. The wide frame is meant to capture the moment and basic layout of a scene, including Lewis Strauss' (Robert Downey Jr.) cabinet appointment hearing and Oppenheimer's meetings involving government affairs such as meetings with Secretary of War Henry Stimson (James Remar) and President Harry S. Truman (Gary Oldman).

The tall, IMAX-friendly format, 1:43:1, is deployed to enforce the narrative device of following the Manhattan Project, the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, U.S. affairs with domestic communism, and the dawn of the Cold War through Oppenheimer's perspective. The screen expands its parameters as if it's mimicking the opening of the physicist's mind. By nature, the full-screen format represents the subjective--often when the titular character is reckoning with his ego as a brilliant scientist and guilt for the human atrocity that he is responsible for. Nolan sets the tone with the dream-like, contemplative shot of water droplets splashing in a puddle cutting to Oppenheimer staring at the ground. Anytime his power escalates, such as when he walks along the Los Alamos neighborhood and testing sight, the screen expands to evoke his larger-than-life influence.

In the dawn of IMAX, the format was primarily utilized for educational short nature documentaries viewed inside a museum. Based on the high-resolution pristine image of IMAX photography, and the scope of its lens, capturing vistas and animals around the globe was well-suited for this format. As Hollywood adopted the camera and projection, IMAX became, and remains, synonymous with big-budget action-adventure spectacle.

While Oppenheimer is a grand, epic vision with a heavy budget, and Nolan has engaged in spectacle-driven entertainment, the film exploits the advantages of IMAX uniquely. Rather than solely capturing picturesque vistas, Nolan sought to illustrate the emotional complexity of the story through the faces of his actors. The screen often widens when Cillian Murphy's face is needed to portray the pathos of the character and narrative. Utilizing the 1:43:1 aspect ratio to express the agony, remorse, and contemplation of the characters is in tune with the purposefully histrionic and weighty stakes of the film. Nolan, who expertly blends highbrow artistic craft with populous sentiments, finds the perfect collision of exceptional technical prowess with Shakespearean drama.

What Do 'Oppenheimer's Shifting Aspect Ratios Mean?

Christopher Nolan's manipulation of the aspect ratios in his recent smash hit signifies that this historical biopic is not beholden to the history of World War II and the creation of the atomic bomb. As previously stated, the film is dominantly told through the eyes of Robert Oppenheimer. As a filmmaker heavily influenced by Stanley Kubrick, Nolan's films are active in their engineered precision, although, like his influence, it would be misleading to refer to him as purely a cold and calculated filmmaker. Oppenheimer, however, is a far cry from Nolan regarding its lack of rigidness in storytelling. The perspectives of Oppenheimer and Strauss are unreliable but deeply personal. Furthermore, legacy and grappling with infamy is a major subtext of Nolan's film. The changing aspect ratios are emblematic of a looseness in the structure of the film and its characters.

The shifting of aspect ratios in Oppenheimer is an intuitive effect on an emotional and intellectual level. For one, it keeps the viewer focused, and the rush of being immersed in the full IMAX screen that towers over the theater floor is undeniable. From a cerebral perspective, since Nolan's storytelling and characterization are so active and vulnerable, the true meaning behind the aspect ratios is ultimately ambiguous. It is the viewer's prerogative to weave this effect into the greater fabric of the film. Compare this to Nolan's explicit reading of black-and-white photography versus color in the film.

At a macro level, removed from debatable underlying thematic ideas of the effect, swapping back and forth between a 2:20:1 and 1:43:1 aspect ratio creates a visceral viewing experience--something that Christopher Nolan has thrived in across three decades. The director executed the daring tight-rope walk act of crafting a meditative and downbeat biopic entangled with American history that simultaneously satisfies the primal enjoyment of a great thriller. Oppenheimer keeps viewers on the edge of their seats during the searing Trinity Test at Los Alamos and the title character's security clearance hearing. By expanding and enclosing the frame of the theater screen in the course of these events, the intensity only compounds.'

#Oppenheimer #Christopher Nolan #IMAX #Following #The Dark Knight Trilogy #Inception #Tenet #Cillian Murphy #Lewis Strauss #Robert Downey Jr.#Henry Stimson #James Remar #Gary Oldman #President Truman

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uomo-accattivante · 4 years

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The Dune trailer (1:37) releasing online on Wed., September 9!

Sources have confirmed to Inside The Film Room that the first official “Dune” trailer will be released online on Wednesday, September 9. The will come in the wake of a special, theater-exclusive teaser that is attached to screenings of “Tenet.”

A Canadian cinema employee shared the following details to ITFR. The teaser will run for one minute and 37 seconds and will give audiences around the world a glimpse of Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi world through the eyes of Academy Award-nominee Denis Villeneuve (“Arrival,” “Blade Runner 2049”).

But wait… There’s more! Not only did our source confirm the teaser’s existence and Warner Bros.’ plan for marketing the full official trailer’s release, but they have actually seen the footage – and so have I. It’s nothing short of spectacular and a true tease.

*Teaser Spoilers Below, Scroll Down For Non-Spoiler Section*

It opens with gorgeous, custom WB and Legendary logos that fit the gold and black aesthetic the marketing material has shown so far. Then, it hops right into an iconic scene fans of the novel will immediately recognize: the Gom Jabbar test. This scene takes place early in the novel and is the focal point of this teaser.

Before traveling to Arrakis, Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) is introduced to the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam (Charlotte Rampling). She asks Paul to place his hand inside a box that causes Paul to feel excruciating pain without physically harming him. The catch? He’ll die if he removes his hand. The Gom Jabbar is a lethal poisonous needle that Mohiam wears on her finger and presses against Paul’s neck during this test of his humanity, awarenesses and animal instincts. You’ll discover the reason for this test during his journey.

This is nothing short of stunning from a visual perspective. The set that Chalamet and Rampling sit in is enormous and circular, with beautifully ornate carvings in the walls and floor. Sunlight beams through a skylight, and the two characters are centered in the room. The Reverend Mother is wearing a complex gown. It’s almost terrifying how the black, netted material drapes over her entire body, from head to toe. She speaks with a taunting, almost mechanical voice, explaining the test to Paul – the poor boy is clearly in over his head.

As the test plays out and his fear and pain increases, the footage is intercut with a sweeping shot of Arrakis’ deep desert, with dunes as far as the eye can see. It’s exactly how you would imagine it. They’re bright yellow, and you can feel the sun through the screen. We also get quick, big shots of almost every cast member, making their faces obvious to viewers.

We see the door open on an aircraft and the Atreides men stand in their armor as the Arrakis sun shines onto them. Oscar Isaac looks absolutely regal and badass as Duke Leto Atreides. Rebecca Ferguson is hooded and smiling as Lady Jessica, and Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa) makes a quick appearance wearing a stillsuit. We also see Javier Bardem’s Stilgar remove his face mask to speak to someone and Zendaya’s Chani climbing over rocks with a group of Fremen.

Some quick shots also include an ornithopter touching down in the desert and Paul stepping off. We also see Chang Chen as Dr. Wellington Yueh, Sharon Duncan-Brewster as Liet-Kynes and our first look as “Beast” Glossu Rabban Harkonnen, played by Dave Bautista. He looks almost painted white or covered in dust. There is also the quickest glimpse of a large character’s head emerging from a huge tub full of a liquid that had a similar color to Rabban’s skin. This character seemed to be Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård), and it was a perfectly grotesque moment.

Throughout the teaser, the intensity of Paul’s test build and builds with each new cast member that is introduced, finally culminating with an epic closeup of Paul in the desert in a stillsuit, walking among Fremen. The score really comes in as the title reveals itself, and I am almost certain this is a piece from Hans Zimmer himself. It sounded like a cross between “Blade Runner” and “The Lion King,” with a good amount of drums mixed in with some ethereal, synth vibes. It perfectly fits “Dune.”

The teaser finishes with the title reveal, followed by a stacked list of every cast member that fills the screen from top to bottom, and a stamp that says “FILMED IN IMAX.” This film wasn’t captured with IMAX cameras, so this could mean they’re going the “Top Gun” Maverick” route of having their digital cameras certified by IMAX themselves. I’d expect expanded aspect ratios for at least part of the film, if not the entire film, when you eventually see it in IMAX. The images themselves look unbelievably crisp and almost surreal in a way that’s hard to put my finger on. I don’t know what exactly Villeneuve and cinematographer Greig Fraser did here (anamorphic lenses might’ve done the trick), but if these simple character shots look this good, I can’t wait to see the big and complex stuff.

*No Teaser Spoilers Beyond This Point*

It must be noted the teaser closes with the phrase “ONLY IN THEATERS,” but this is nothing new. Despite their upcoming films having official release dates picked out, all of WB’s recent trailers have forgone these dates in favor of highlighting the theatrical experience and keeping their trailers evergreen in the event of a delay — they won’t have to release a new trailer just because the date is wrong. I actually recognized this pattern last week with “Judas and the Black Messiah” and “Tenet” and predicted that the new trailers for “Wonder Woman 1984” and “Dune” would also go this route. The absence of a date is not any indication that “Dune” will be delayed; this is simply the new normal in a pandemic.

So, we know it exists, but when and where will this theater-exclusive teaser be available? That is a little less clear. In social media messages posted yesterday, both the Facebook and Twitter accounts for Canadian theater chain Cinemark stated “the teaser trailer for ‘Dune’ will be debuted in select Tenet screenings starting August 31.” Additionally, the Twitter account stated “Warner Bros. has pushed back the date for the ‘Dune’ trailer.”

But despite being rated and ready for theaters when Canada and countries around the world show “Tenet” today, WB has asked for Cinemark to withhold the teaser until next week. The explanation for this is likely two-fold.

Firstly, the trailer for “The Batman” made an earth-shattering splash when it arrived on Saturday and is still dominating social media conversation. I suspect WB didn’t want one of their babies stealing limelight from the other. Despite this teaser being exclusive to theaters, news of it (and bootleg footage, no doubt) would have been all over social media the remainder of the week. Secondly, the first screenings of “Tenet” in the United States begin on Monday. It is entirely possible that WB wanted to wait until domestic public screenings began before allowing the teaser to show overseas, as well.

The final impression that I will leave you with is that this teaser did not disappoint me in the slightest. Although the 1:37 runtime whisked by in a flash, I could not have been more impressed with the look of this film and the way Villeneuve and company are capturing the world of Dune. This will blow every previous adaptation out of the water.

With all the cast members getting shown off, the music, the designs and tease of the official trailer coming soon, this is truly Warner Bros. and Legendary flexing their muscles. They know they have something special on their hands, and they want the trailer debut for this event film to be an event all on its own. With the marketing to this point having been basically nonexistent, I have to admit some concern was growing in me. That’s all gone now. I have no doubt in my mind that the official trailer that drops online on September 9 is going to melt faces and blow minds.

The wait is almost over, everyone. The sleeper has awakened.

“Dune” is set to hit theaters December 18, 2020.

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#oscar isaac #dune #dune 2020 #denis villeneuve #timothée chalamet #rebecca ferguson #jason momoa #josh brolin #zendaya #javier bardem #stellan skarsgard #charlotte rampling #sharon duncan brewster #chang chen #trailer

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new-sandrafilter · 4 years

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Confirmation of the upcoming theater-exclusive “Dune” teaser accompanying “Tenet” via the theater video system..

The wait is almost over, everyone. The sleeper has awakened.

“Dune” is set to hit theaters December 18, 2020.

insidefilmroom - EXCLUSIVE: ‘Dune’ trailer to release online Sept. 9

#timmy #timothee chalamet #dune 2020 #denis villeneuve

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the-working-class-guide-to-films · 3 years

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The Mauritanian

Films based on true life, when done correctly are perhaps one of my favourite genre of film. This is based on the life Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian who was accused of being involved in 9/11. He is arrested and then spends 14 years being held in Guantanamo Bay without charge. Tahar Rahim plays Mohamedou and Jodie Foster is the defence attorny, Nancy Hollander, who tries to prove his innocence. Luckily, this is a film based on a true life that is done incredibly well.

I enjoy these films because they open your eyes to the horror of what a country, a government can do on a person. Both the US and the UK have committed horrors. Without film, would this be as known. Maybe for those who study this stuff or have an interest. But for the general public, would it be such common knowledge that we aren’t the good guys. Without the film Official Secrets, I wouldn’t be aware of Katherine Gunn and what she uncovered. Without The Mauritanian, I wouldn’t be aware about what happens at Guantanamo Bay. This film will open your eyes.

The film itself is excellent. It has a good energy to it, the jumps in time are used appropriately and are clear. The use of changing the aspect ratio works to show this works really well. The story is full of enough information without getting bogged down in everything. I’m sure some might say it glosses over things, doesn’t go into enough depth, and that may be the case. But this is also a piece of entertainment and there is a good balance between the two. Technically it looks great and it also does some cool things that could easily have been ignored because it is a dialogue driven film. It has also has an impressive cast such as Benedict Cumberbatch, Shailene Woodley and Jodie Foster. But the stand out is easily Tahar Rahim who gives an incredible performance. Clearly this was a physical role but there is a good mix of emotions on display. For me, this is a superior performance to Oldman’s in Hank, but I know we can all pick holes in Oscar nominations. My favourite thing about this film though was the use of language. Some films are scared to not speak English for fear of alienating audiences. And whilst English was of course used, large parts of this film were spoke in French and Arabic. It just adds realism to the film which creates a much better film.

4/5 At times it can be a hard watch seeing what Mohamedou went through, but it is a powerful piece of cinema that should be watched. It isn’t boring and the high energy is consistent throughout the film. A great cast and a brilliant lead in Tahar Rahim.

#film #Film Review #movies #movie review #cinema #cinema review #new #the mauritanian #tahar rahim #jodie foster #benedict cumberbatch #shailene woodley #zachary levi #the Oscars #Amazon

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agentnico · 4 years

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Da 5 Bloods (2020) Review

WAKANDA FOREVER!!!!!!!

Plot: From Academy Award® Winner Spike Lee comes a new joint: the story of four African American Vets - Paul (Delroy Lindo), Otis (Clarke Peters), Eddie (Norm Lewis), and Melvin (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.) - who return to Vietnam. Searching for the remains of their fallen Squad Leader (Chadwick Boseman) and the promise of buried treasure, our heroes, joined by Paul's concerned son (Jonathan Majors), battle forces of Man and Nature - while confronted by the lasting ravages of The Immorality of The Vietnam War.

Talk about coincidental relevancy! The Black Lives Matter movement is in full swing currently (following the death of George Floyd), and non-other than Spike Lee releases a Netflix film about Vietnamese veterans, emphasising that it wasn’t only the whites who fought and died for their country during the war. On a serious note, racism was always an issue in the US, so movies like this should always be welcomed, with or without the movement. Director Spike Lee recently addressed the fact of his new film’s release timing accidentally coinciding with what is happening on the news recently in an interview with Variety, where he said the following: “I cannot take any credit for this. The film was shot when it was shot; it was ready to come out when it was ready to come out. And then the world changed for everybody. When something is repeated all the time it becomes a cliché … but that doesn’t mean it’s not the truth. And the truth I’m talking about is timing is everything. This film’s coming out at the right time for the world we live in.” Couldn’t have put it better myself, Mr Lee! This reiterates how severe racism is engraved in America’s DNA, especially that we keep coming back to this issue over and over again. You’d think that by now people would have learnt from their mistakes and would have become better. But as I said, it’s in the DNA of the US, and there is only so much that that can be changed unfortunately. History has taught us a lot, and sadly history tends to repeat itself. But let’s not talk about negatives. In this pandemic filled world where new films are such a rarity due to cinema closures, we actually have a decent film to talk about! So let’s talk about it!

In a nutshell, this is a quest film! Find a fallen comrade and do some good ol’ gold digging whilst they’re at it! As expected with these treasure escapades, things get out of hand. Straight off the bat, our four leads meet up at the beginning of the movie, and right away you sense the camaraderie between these guys. Through the solid writing and great acting, you truly get the feel that these are true friends who have been through a lot together, like, say, a war! You get to observe their friendship and their love for one another, and though each of them have their own ideologies and beliefs, they work naturally well together, and at the end of the day that is what friendship is. A group of different people who share something in common. That is a theme I’m sure everyone can relate to. That is unless you don’t have any friends, in which case I am very sorry to hear that. Wish I could help. Not even much for advice on that one. Maybe get out more? Honestly, I’m no counsellor, so not the best point of conversation on this topic. I can provide you with a pat on the shoulder and a “there there” if necessary, but that’s about it... Anyhow, friendship!! There’s a lot of it in this movie! That’s just one of the many profound themes applicable to humanity that are present amongst the scenes that play out before our eyes. Even with the Vietnam war aspect, from the trailer I thought this was going to be a war movie, but it actually isn’t. Don’t get me wrong, the war element is certainly present in flashback form, but otherwise it is a modern day set tale. So the war is done, but that is the thing, for these guys, this war never ended. They still suffer from PTSD, getting nightmares and constantly being haunted by past demons, and thus the horrors of war are constantly surrounding them. Again, a very timely theme that can resonate with a few, even as loosely as the idea of being tormented by the past. This makes the movie work really well. It feels real, as it is dealing with a lot of true to life human emotions.

I need to also mention the technical side, as the way this movie is filmed....it feels like a filmmaker who knows his chops! For example, the way aspect ratio is used in this movie to emphasise the time and place in certain scenes really helps in separating the different story elements and tones. The modern day plot-line is presented in normal scope 23.5 aspect ratio as well as 1.78, then the flashbacks that show the Bloods fighting in the jungles of Vietnam during the war are shown in 4:3 (basically a slightly widened square shaped, very old-school) ratio with a more grainy palette, that very much adds to the feel of the past. Heck, for many audiences this might not be a big deal, but I appreciated this cinema trickery.

As a whole this movie is a solid watch (and surprisingly intense with quite a few shoot-outs), and, like The Irishman last year, perfect for a streaming service like Netflix, as it’s a pretty long movie, reaching over 2 and a half hours, so it’s very comforting to split your viewing into two or three sittings. In terms of negatives, there aren’t many. As I said, it is a bit long, and 20 minutes could have been chirped off, and also at times the movie does come off a bit preachy and on-the-nose with some of its ideas, which seems to be a bit of a Spike Lee shtick, as I had the same little complaint with his previous directorial outing BlacKkKlansman (though, again, that was a very good movie too!), but never so much that it was beating you over the head with its messages. Though as previously stated, a lot of the themes and ideas are timely messages and thus I cannot really fault them. Also a shout-out to the entire cast, everyone is on their top game, and as I haven’t seen many of these actors before, I will definitely make sure to keep an eye out for them from now on, as these fellas have talent! Special applause goes to Delroy Lindo, who gives such a raw, emotion-filled, vulnerable performance, that I really hope The Academy consider him for an Oscar nomination at the ceremony next year. The film as a whole to be honest definitely oozes with awards potential. We’ll just have to see if these nominations truly come to fruition. Also those looking forward to seeing Black Panther himself, Chadwick Boseman, in this movie, just want to warn you, he isn’t in the film much. That being said, his role is very important and has a great impact on it’s characters. So don’t worry, you will still get your chances to scream “Wakanda Forever!” at the top of your lungs, you Marvel sycophants!

Overall score: 8/10

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adamwatchesmovies · 4 years

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The Best of 2019

What a year. By the time 2019 ended, I had seen over 130 new movies. It's actually probably closer to 150 but I lost count. There are a few titles I missed, such as The Dead Don’t Die, The Fanatic and Honeyland so obviously, this is not an all-encompassing, definitive list of 2019’s best, but it should give you a good idea of which films you need to check out if you haven’t already.

I usually like to save the #10 spot on my list for a movie that’s just for me. Normally, this would mean a giant monster movie, an off-beat creation nobody else saw, a comic book movie that spoke to my particular tastes or maybe a Canadian movie I know didn’t get the opportunity to shine like it should’ve. This year, that’s not happening. Trimming my list down to 10 was hard enough. I certainly wasn’t going to sacrifice one more to make it just 9. Let's dig in.

10. The Farewell

It’s been weeks since The Farewell and I’m still thinking about it. If I was put in the same position as Billi, I'm not sure what I'd do? Is it better to tell someone that's dying that their days are numbered, or should you spare them from that burden? Is it really them you’d be sparing, or is keeping the secret for your own selfish needs? Writer/director Lulu Wang asks serious questions about culture I had never contemplated before. There’s a lot for you here and even more if your family comes from mixed backgrounds.

9. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

I heard some complaints about Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks) not being the main character of this film by Marielle Heller, from writers Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster. It was the right choice. The plot has a cyical reporter meet Rogers and through their relatively brief interaction, learn what we knew going in. It delivers a moving character arc without having to stain its subject with flaws we didn't want to see. The quasi-meta presentation is what elevates it into top-10 status. That extra touch means it does a lot more than simply re-iterate what we saw in the 2018 documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor?.

8. Knives Out

Knives Out is one of the most entertaining films all year. There are no profound moments of meditation, no earth-shattering realizations about yourself, just a mystery to be solved. All the suspects are so intriguing they could be the stars of their own movies. Put together in the same house as a dead body and you’ve got no idea who did it. Its screenplay is excellent. The twists are juicy. Everything ads up in a satisfying manner. Rian Johnson is already working on a sequel. I can’t wait.

7. Apollo 11

There are few holdovers from the list I made halfway through the year, which either says something about the strength of the second half of 2019, or the weakness of the first. Either way, you’ve got to see Apollo 11. It’s the closest thing to going back in time and being there when man landed on the moon. The tension and anticipation are overwhelming. Knowing what happened doesn't matter. The way the footage is assembled is nothing short of incredible. Why this documentary wasn't present at the Academy Awards is beyond me.

6. Uncut Gems

Adam Sandler should’ve been nominated for an Oscar. He wasn’t. I’ll bet you dollars to donuts it's because of his association with all of those brain-dead Happy Madison Production comedies. His history with cinema shouldn't matter. The movie is what matters. The fact is, this was the perfect role for him. It isn’t even that Sandler’s doing something different, it’s that he’s being used to his full potential. If you weren’t glued to the screen, eager to see what’s coming next, this movie would have you jumping out of the window screaming - anything to escape the anxiety the Safdie Brothers serve up with devilish grins.

5. The Lighthouse

Next on my list is The Lighthouse. Right away, the aspect ratio and black-and-white cinematography lets you know you’re in for something different. You have no idea. What I love so much about this film is the way it handles madness. At the end of the day, I’m not sure if I could tell you if Robert Pattinson’s character was crazy, if Willem Dafoe’s character was the nutty one, or if they both were. It shows you just enough to make you doubt your own sanity. It’s also unexpectedly funny, which makes it feel oddly genuine. In one scene, Robert Pattinson's Ephraim Winslow gets a hold of the lighthouse's logs. In it, his boss, Thomas (Willem Dafoe) recommends Ephraim be disciplined for masturbating excessively. Considering Thomas has been cavorting with some kind of tentacle creature up in the lighthouse (at least that's what I think I saw, I'm not so sure anymore), all you can do is laugh. What kind of loony bin is this turning into? One I'm looking forward to revisiting.

4. 1917

Shot in a way that makes it all look like one take, 1917 is a technical marvel. It hooks itself up to your circular system and steadily replaces your blood with pure, undistilled stress. As you're about to flatline, it stops and gives you a breather. A shot of a meadow untouched by the ravages of war; a reminder of what the soldiers are fighting for and of how utterly devastating armed combat is on humanity as a whole. Gorgeous cinematography, powerful emotions, magnificent production values.

3. Joker

Along with Godzilla: King of the Monsters (a movie they basically made for me), this was my most anticipated movie of the year. To get ready, I watched Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, two Scorsese films Joker director Todd Phillips drew a lot of inspiration from. For some reason, it seems as though many critics took offense to the similarities. Sometimes I understand differing opinions from mine. This time, I don’t. It’s a great film that warns of the dangers of letting people like Arthur Fleck (brilliantly performed by Joaquin Phoenix) fall through the cracks. Left unchecked, he discovers that by doing terrible things, he becomes a “better” version of himself. It’s not a drama. It’s a horror movie that spins the familiar Batman archenemy in a new direction but also stays true to the character. There are several scenes in this movie that are going to be permanently imprinted in my brain. Those stairs. Need I say more?

Runner-ups

Avengers: Endgame

Even if every single Marvel movie going forward is awful, this caps off the whopping 22-chapter saga epically. A couple of aspects bugged me enough that it could only manage to make the runner-up list but it's a terrific film.

Booksmart

The funniest comedy of the year. I think back to Amy and Molly using their hairs as masks and still can't manage to hold back a few chuckles months later.

Toy Story 4

This one was hard to cut. The only flaw I could find was that it isn’t on the same level as 3… even though they’re both 5-star movies.

Midsommar

I’ve heard the extended cut is even better than the original. I wish I’d had the chance to see it in theatres.

Jojo Rabbit

Audacious and heartfelt. I loved those scenes of Scarlett Johanson being a mom. Her agent might've dropped the ball getting her cast in Ghost in the Shell but she sure knew how to pick great work in 2019.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Quentin Tarantino brings us back to a time when Roman Polanski was simply a good director instead of a convicted rapist, movie stars were untouchable, and the death of someone’s wife under mysterious circumstances was nothing to raise eyebrows about. It’s not a movie that screams “here and now”. If anything, it’s regressive. That said, I cannot deny the experience I had watching it. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime kinda thing and I doubt even Tarantino could pull it off again. I wonder how many people went in knowing what happened to Sharon Tate like I did.

Marriage story

It’s nothing but raw emotion and powerhouse performances in this drama about two people you love going through a divorce. I always make it my goal to watch movies all the way through without any interruptions. Several times throughout, I was tempted to hit "Pause" so I could catch my breath.

Internet lists are everywhere. You know why, don’t you? They suck you in and when you get down to it, most don’t require all that much effort to put together. Except when I make them, apparently. These bi-annual lists always turn out to be difficult to put together. 2019's proved particularly arduous. I’m fairly sure that my #3 movie belongs there. Out of all the movies on this list, it’s probably the one I’m going to go back to most often. The other two? I’d say that technically, one may be better than the other but I think the other one is “more important” so that gives it the edge. What I’m trying to say is, they’re all winners and on a different day, I might even swap them around.

2. Little Women

I have only seen three of the seven silver screen adaptations of Louisa May Alcott’s novel and I don’t expect any of the others to top this one. The secret ingredient to this one's success is Greta Gerwig. Writing and directing, she does so much more than merely translate the classic to movie form. She re-arranges the story to give the events a greater punch than they would if they were shown chronologically and puts a little more emphasis on a couple of key moments (that tear-jerking Christmas, for example) to crank up the emotion. She also makes it more modern without having to change anything about the setting or characters. Admittedly, the back-and-forth between the past and present is a little jarring at first - makes you wonder what Greta Gerwig could’ve done had she been given the de-aging budget Martin Scorsese was given - but that’s where the performances and costumes come in. It takes mere moments before you get what the movie is doing. I’ve said it already but it made me cry.

1. Parasite

To make this list, I didn’t go through all of my past reviews and check which ones were rated what. I thought back to which movies gave me the most vivid memories, which ones gave me the biggest reactions. I’m still not sure how I feel about the final final moment but there’s so much about Parasite that I admire. This would be a great one to watch with others just to see their reactions to the reveal about the bookcase.

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ww-1984-2020-premier-hd-2 · 3 years

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stretchjournalemerson · 5 years

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The Other Side of Perspectivism

By Graham Wheeler-Nelson

“Mr. Hannaford, is the camera a reflection of reality? Or is reality a reflection of the camera eye? Or is the camera merely a phallus?”

“Mr. Hannaford, is the camera a reflection of reality? Or is reality a reflection of the camera eye? Or is the camera merely a phallus?” These are the words of a spirited interviewer as he screams at a fictional movie director Jack Hannaford in Orson Welles’ posthumous opus The Other Side of the Wind. It was a film written and photographed in the early 1970s- a low budget passion project from acclaimed filmmaker Orson Welles, the director of Citizen Kane. According to Alex Ross from The New Yorker, the partially unedited film stock sat untouched in a French vault for decades due to a muddy legal battle only to be resurrected and released by the corporate giant Netflix earlier this month. The film focuses on the aforementioned Hemingway-esque movie director Jack Hannaford during the last day of his life through the lens of a myriad of journalists and rabid fans alike as they follow him through a fundraising gala- pioneering the recently cliched “found footage” genre.

The Other Side of the Wind takes a fresh perspective to the tired style of filmmaking known as found footage. Most contemporary found footage films consist of one shakily out of focus recorder, amature talent, and an abundance of jump scares. This is where Welles differs - his film takes the perspective of dozens of strangers, and builds a mosaic of the mysterious Hannaford. Instead of the camera being an invisible window through which the audience watches the narrative unfold, Welles opts to draw attention to the very way the audience is viewing the film - each journalist in the film uses different film stocks and camera equipment, resulting in scenes that frequently cut between 8mm, Super 16mm, 35mm, black and white versus color film, and different aspect ratios. Hannaford is a reclusive figure. The audience only knows as much as the journalists know as they view the film strictly through the eyes of said journalists. Because of this, the audience often gets conflicting information regarding exactly who Hannaford was behind the persona- never getting a “true” definition of Hannaford as a man.

This collection of viewpoints is known as perspectivism and it’s something American literary scholar Jane Tomkins was keenly interested in. In Tompkins’ seminal essay "Indians": Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History, she explores Native American interactions with Puritan colonists via similar means, attempting to paint a mosaic through a multitude of conflicting firsthand accounts. This leads to her poststructuralist thesis that “[t]he notion that all facts are only facts within a perspective has the effect of emptying statements of their content” (117). Tompkins goes on to describe what exactly this “emptying” really means, saying that because history is made up of nothing more than people’s biased interpretations and perspectives of events, it’s impossible to tell what truly occured. Tompkins also points out that this “emptying” does not strip all meaning out of everything, but just means that “you can't argue that someone else's facts are not facts because they are only the product of a perspective” (188).

It’s this concentration on perspectivism that The Other Side of the Wind is interested in. The mythical Hannaford acts as a stand-in for Tomkins’ Native American conflict. Nobody, not the audience nor Hannaford’s closest acquaintances, truly know him. The only information the audience receives about Hannaford is through second or third hand accounts that often contradict each other. Tomkins’ description of her understanding and synthesis of various texts even resembles the viewer’s experience of witnessing The Other Side of the Wind, saying she

was “believing this version up to a point, that version not at all, another almost entirely, according to what seems reasonable and plausible” (118). This is the poststructuralist mindset with which Welles approaches The Other Side of the Wind.

The signifier and the signified. The meaningless noise and the mythical concept. It wouldn’t be too controversial to say that Hannaford is the signified- the elusive notion of a larger-than-life Hemingway-esque director. If Hannaford the signified, then The Other Side of The Wind would be the sign. What connects the signified and the signifier and what provides meaning? It’s the whole of the connection between signifier and signified. If Hannaford is the signified and the film itself is the sign, then what would the signifier be? Would it be the real life director Welles? Or would it be the concept of character itself? The English Oxford Dictionary defines a signifier as “a sign's physical form,” so wouldn’t that make the real life film The Other Side of The Wind the signifier and the sign? Or would the signified be the emotions elicited from the film, the signifier be the means by which the film was made - the screenwriting, cinematography, performances, etc., and the film itself be the sign? That seems like the most reasonable conclusion.

This focus on perspectivism makes The Other Side of the Wind and Tomkins’ essay as emotionally effective and intellectually interesting as possible because that’s exactly how people interact. Nobody will ever know who a person “truly” is. The only way we know someone is through how they choose to express themselves, which oftentimes is not exactly who they really are. While the stakes are not as dire in The Other Side of the Wind compared to Tomkins’ examination of Colonial relations with Native Americans, their interest in perspectivism elevates and connects them beyond the subject matter.

The tools Welles uses in The Other Side of the Wind to highlight the subjectivity and perspectivity of the film- the continuously changing film stocks, breaking of the fourth wall, and the reflexivity of the main character being a clear author insert- also work to make the audience utterly aware that they are watching a film. This analytical and unconventional move is reminiscent of Bertolt Brecht, a German playwright and theatre director in the first half of the 20th century. Brecht spearheaded a style of theatre that does not aim to emotionally effect, doesn’t offer up some inane fantasy land, and does not aim to entrance the viewer in vapid escapism. Rather, Brecht devised a theatre space that purposefully isolates the viewer, a play that emotionally distances itself from the audience in order for said audience to retain their critical detachment. This is the “alienation effect.” According to TheatreDatabase.com, Brecht was skeptical of Aristotle's poetics and its attempts to “lure” the audience into an escapist stupor. Brecht didn’t want his audience to be emotionally engaged in his work- he demanded that they think.

This critical speculation makes itself evident in The Other Side of the Wind via adopting and adapting the “found footage” style to fit Welles’ dramatic and reflexive story. Most contemporary found footage films consist of one shakily out of focus recorder, amature talent, and an abundance of jump scares. This is where Welles differs- his film takes the perspective of dozens of strangers and builds a mosaic of the mysterious Hannaford. Instead of the camera being an invisible window through which the audience watches the narrative unfold, Welles opts to draw attention to the very way the audience is viewing the film. The audience can never truly be invested in the story within the story because it’s purposefully vapid and takes up a significantly small amount of screentime, but at the same time the audience fails to be emotionally involved with Hannaford’s arc because we know so little about him- and yet it’s a success. It’s strange to describe an audience failing to be emotionally involved in a text as an achievement, but it certainly is an achievement in the eyes of the alienation effect. This separation between audience and subject is critical to understanding how Welles transforms the cinema into a space for conflict. The contact zone was an idea first posited by Mary Louise Pratt, a professor at New York University. In a speech given to the Modern Language Association, Pratt describes the idea of a contact zone as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other” (34). The Other Side of the Wind creates a space where audience and film are separated and made into a contact zone. In most cases, the audience is working with the film in order to achieve an emotional and empathetic response, but The Other Side of the Wind forces the viewer to almost fight against it, to decode it, to attempt to understand what exactly it’s getting at though it never expects an emotional culmination. This isn’t necessarily a clash between cultures as Pratt describes it, but The Other Side of the Wind certainly creates a space where an audience has the unique opportunity to, “meet, clash, and grapple” with a work of art. The act of clashing with the text and setting up a space via Brecht-like techniques for an audience to confront a text in order to find meaning is something that not many films achieve. This is a rare experience that needs to be treasured.

#film #perspectivism #philosophy #graham wheeler-nelson #stretch2019

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letterboxd · 5 years

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David Lowery Q&A.

“I think everyone in the industry at this moment is saying let’s take a step back and look at what our film sets look like and make sure that we’re not missing out on something.”

Writer-director-editor David Lowery has worked with Robert Redford twice (Pete’s Dragon and The Old Man & the Gun), and helmed A Ghost Story, which has become a much-admired slow-burner within the Letterboxd community.

We caught up with the Texan filmmaker at the recent Big Screen Symposium in New Zealand (organized by Script to Screen) for a lengthy chat about everything from taking Geena Davis’ advice on writing crowd scenes, to the fact that everyone is wrong in thinking A Ghost Story was filmed in 4:3 ratio, and how that film funded his wife’s debut feature, which in turn now sees her directing a stoner sequel to Home Alone with Ryan Reynolds.

David Lowery is a tease. On his laptop, which sits in plain sight, is an up-to-date spreadsheet of every film he’s seen, in what format, and where. (If it’s in bold, he saw it in a cinema.)

Lowery is a prime candidate for Letterboxd membership, and we tell him so. He agrees (“Letterboxd would be my favorite site if I wasn’t a director”), but will continue to hold out. “I love film criticism, I think it’s a beautiful art-form. I make movies to be part of the conversation about movies.

“But it’s also a conversation that, once I’ve made the movie, I can’t partake in anymore. Some filmmakers can read about their own work and are fine with it. But for me, I get too caught up in it and it’s important for me to keep those blinders on and to not engage with the discussion about my movies because I’ve had my say. The movie is what I’ve had to say and after that I find it almost inappropriate for me to continue the discourse.”

So we tell Lowery that, ever since A Ghost Story was released in 2017, the film has made a nice home for itself at Letterboxd, with its fair share of fans and repeat viewers (“That’s amazing to hear!”). We wonder how he feels about the slow-burning reaction to the film?

“I’m doing a lot of press for The Old Man & the Gun right now and going to a lot of screenings, and the common refrain is ‘The Old Man & the Gun’s great but, man, A Ghost Story is something else!” And I’ve become aware that that might be the movie that defines me more than any other and that’s fine because it’s the movie I’m the most proud of. I certainly know that it has struck a chord.”

David Lowery with Casey Affleck on the set of ‘A Ghost Story’.

Letterboxd: In your Big Screen Symposium keynote, you talked about how A Ghost Story came out of a sort of existential crisis in which you realized you might not become the world’s greatest filmmaker, or the best, so you were questioning why you made films at all. A Ghost Story came from wanting to make a small film about what a life means. An act of anti-legacy, if you will. But the film has become accidentally beloved, which means that, in fact, you’ve possibly created a legacy after all.

David Lowery: What a fascinating paradox. I mean the only thing I can say about that is that there’s no way to plan that. There’s no way for me to set out to make a film that will work the way A Ghost Story worked and it would be foolish to try to do so.

All I can do is make the movies the best that I can. I know that The Old Man & the Gun will be beloved by certain people but it won’t have the effect that A Ghost Story did. But I wouldn’t have known that two years ago. I wouldn’t have known that these two films would both function in such different ways. I would have probably assumed The Old Man & the Gun would be the more important one because of Robert Redford being in it. But A Ghost Story was the more important one for me to make, that’s certainly true, and maybe there’s something to be found in the fact that when you feel so compelled to do something it is because the subject matter at hand is more universal than you might understand in the moment.

A Ghost Story is a strange film, in that it washes over you, as opposed to something like Pete’s Dragon which is very much a dive-in fantasy-adventure.

I like to think of my movies as bodies of water, that’s a great metaphor for them. And I really like my movies to be lakes that just sort of ripple outward and sometimes they need to be diverted into streams or rivers or freeze in the glaciers.

Pete’s Dragon certainly is the most propulsive body of water that I have constructed so far in that the story moves along at a certain clip—and it needs to because it’s a certain type of movie. But A Ghost Story is a small pond that a rock got thrown into and that’s a type of experience that I really value when I go to the cinema.

It’s a very, like, wishy-washy metaphor but it really works for me, I really think about the way my movies move in terms of a natural flow and very often those flows calm down to just pure stasis and there’s great beauty in that.

You also made some really specific artistic decisions in the film. Was it shot in 4:3? [Lowery shakes his head firmly.] No?

It’s basically technically 1.33:1 but there’s a millimeter of difference between that and 4:3.

So how do those technical artistic decisions link in with the storytelling?

They were very intrinsic. I think the very first line, let me see. If I open up the script for A Ghost Story… [Lowery fires up his laptop.] I’ve been telling people this but I don’t actually know if it’s true or not… [Opens a draft of the script.] Yeah, so the first line of script says the whole movie will be shot and projected in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio. And that’s been there from the very beginning. So those things are very conscientious. Or, if I go down here, like, let’s see, yeah, like I’m getting very specific about “camera pans left”. “We hold for a long time.” I think there was a draft where I actually wrote that we hold for an entire minute. I get very technical.

Well then, we need to talk about pie.

Yes.

Four minutes of pie. What does it say in the script about that? Does it say “Rooney Mara eats pie for four minutes”?

I mean it’s pretty specific [reading aloud]: “She walks past the ghost, she enters all in black, she goes to the sink, sees a pour-over filter, takes out the coffee grounds, throws them out, turns on the sink, rinses out the ceramic filter, lets the sink run for too long. Then she grabs a fork and knife and returns to the table, cuts a piece of pie and hungrily eats it down and then she eats the rest of the pie straight out of the dish.”

A Letterboxd exclusive! The pie-eating scene from ‘A Ghost Story’ as seen on Lowery’s laptop.

When you’re getting that specific in your writing, what’s going on in your head? Are you seeing it?

Definitely I am seeing a version of it, I mean if you look at what’s written there it describes her sitting down at the table. But when we got it together to shoot the scene, Rooney wanted to sit on the floor and that made perfect sense, emotionally speaking, and so we refocused the scene to that, but even when she was sitting at the table, still the language and the grammar was going to be the same.

What is the process of developing the scene once you have your actors attached? Because once an actor is on board, they bring their own sense of their character to a scene. Once they read the script—no matter when filming starts—the work begins, doesn’t it?

It really does, it really does. I mean, A Ghost Story was so fast that there wasn’t much time between Rooney reading the script and her showing up to shoot that scene, like, it was very quick. A couple of weeks, I think.

Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck in ‘A Ghost Story’.

Why so fast?

I just didn’t want to wait to make the movie. I mean we had one week of prep for the whole film. We planned it around Pete’s Dragon so I knew that Pete’s Dragon would finish on June 10th and I think on June 17th we started shooting A Ghost Story. And here and there on weekends I would fly to Texas to look for the house and then Jade, my production designer, got there a little ahead of time to start fixing the house up because it was in a state of disarray. But certainly there was not that much time to think things through. We didn’t really have a plan in place. We didn’t even have an assistant director until a day before we started shooting. It really came together very quickly.

In a way that’s even more extraordinary in terms of the way that that film is still growing and finding its audience.

I mean it was interesting looking at that page in the script [the pie scene] and seeing how thoroughly descriptive it was—and if you look at the whole screenplay the movie is very close to it. But at the same time we were just fumbling in the dark every single day and trying things out and just really looking to figure out how to make it, how to cut to the core of what we felt we were after. And we could never put a name on that. We never knew exactly what we were after, but we were collectively working towards it.

Intermission: here’s a Letterboxd list of David Lowery’s five favorite ghost films.

During your Big Screen Symposium keynote, you took time to talk through the first scenes of your new film, The Old Man & the Gun, and the long process of finding a strong opening, in which the relationship between Forrest (Robert Redford) and Jewel (Sissy Spacek) is established. You took a lot of inspiration for this from the diner scene in Michael Mann’s Thief.

When you have more preparation time with your actors, how does that affect the script’s development? What is the process between the draft you send them and the final version that gets filmed?

For example that scene in the diner that we talked about yesterday at the panel, that seemed to not change. That was, I wrote it and that’s what we shot, and [Redford and Spacek] illuminated it but they worked with that material.

But then there are other scenes that they had a lot of input on and Sissy, I give her all the credit for a jewelry store scene in the movie that she latched onto early on. It was a very short scene in the script and she saw a way in which to expand it that she felt was necessary for the character. It was 100% right, she was 100% right about that and it’s one of my favorite scenes in the movie—but it wouldn’t even have been in the movie had it not been for her.

Robert Redford and Sissy Spacek in ‘The Old Man & the Gun’.

Presumably A-list actors are often looking for ways to expand their scenes, but for female actors, who continue to be under-represented in strong roles on screen, it’s even more important?

Definitely, definitely, definitely. That’s an interesting perspective. I hadn’t thought about it from that perspective. Because I always feel like I’m asking the actors to do too much, like, “that big scene? Let’s get rid of that so you can take a break tomorrow.” I mean, I never do that, but in my mind I always feel like I need to remove scenes so they don’t have to work so hard. I always want to give them a break because they’re doing so much.

But certainly, especially a movie called The Old Man & the Gun that’s about men, it was great to find any opportunity in that film to give precedence to the female characters. And so I’m so thankful that Sissy took that opportunity. She has great scenes in the movie. She’s in quite a bit of the film but she really used that scene to define who her character was for her. And then because it worked for her it works for the audience as well and for me.

Spacek and Redford in ‘The Old Man & the Gun’.

You also talked a bit about making sure that not everybody on your set looks like you. Would you elaborate on that?

I mean it’s certainly something I took for granted for a long time, it just wasn’t something I thought about and I certainly wasn’t working entirely with men. I’ve been surrounded by wonderful female collaborators since day one, but I think everyone in the industry at this moment is saying let’s take a step back and look at what our film sets look like and make sure that we’re not missing out on something. Missing out on the opportunity to collaborate with people who have different perspectives or can bring something new to the table and who might not have had those opportunities in the past because there is a tendency to just go for what’s familiar. You go for what feels familiar and often what feels familiar is yourself.

So, in spite of the fact that I have always worked with wonderful women and wonderful collaborators who I would never want to make a movie without these days, I definitely am looking at the wider body of our crews and making sure that they’re reflective of the world around us. I think that’s what everyone is doing and that’s a beautiful thing.

And I’m not perfect in it, no one is, but to just all of a sudden have that be part of your process when you’re putting a movie together is very… it’s a wonderful thing. It’s a really exciting thing because all of a sudden you just see the ways in which your movies are going to get better.

Do you write it into your scripts or do you say to your casting agents, “Anyone, this could be anyone”?

I say “anyone” but I’ve also learned that it’s important to write it into the scripts too, because there is that tendency with casting—and it’s nothing against the casting directors—but they assume [that because] I’m a white guy that I’m going to want to see a bunch of white people. So I’m now very consciously writing into the scripts making sure that there’s that diaspora represented on the screen as well.

I wish I could just say it’s open to anybody but I found that if I don’t inject that into the screenplay then I’m only going to see a certain number of actors who all look a certain way. Maybe if I want to be truly color-blind I would in an ideal world not have to do that, I would just see everybody, see actors of all ethnicities, of all creeds, of all colors and I’d get to pick the best actor. But that’s not where we are right now and it’s very helpful in terms of moving the needle to actually go into the screenplay and make sure that you specify that someone is not Caucasian. Or even “not male”.

In The Old Man & the Gun there are a lot of characters in the movie who in the script were ‘bank manager number one’, ‘bank manager number two’, ‘bank manager number three’, and something that was very important for me to do was to give them all names, and then as we were casting to never bring in actors for any specific part. I just said bring in a bunch of actors, I’m not going to tell you who they’re for I just want to meet a bunch of people. And in doing that I met lots of men, women, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, I met everybody.

And then I could just start filling the cast in that way but I just never had people audition for any specific role because that way you free yourself from those expectations and no one knows who you’re bringing these actors in for. The casting director doesn’t know who you’re actually looking at them for and the actors don’t know either and so it just liberates you a little bit. You can’t do that for every part but it was really great on Old Man & the Gun to be able to do that and it’s beautiful to just fill a movie with people who don’t look the same, there’s just something so special.

It’s possibly making a bit more work for yourself?

It does, but that’s good work. It’s good work. Geena Davis said something about how when you write, in terms of getting more women on screen, when you write a crowd scene just write into the script “50% of this crowd is women”.

And that is one of those things that you wish you didn’t have to do but it makes everything work, it makes it so much easier because then the assistant director will read that and was like, “oh we need to have 50%”. They’ll take it literally because that’s their job, to take everything literally and then you wind up with a crowd scene of extras, 50% of whom are women.

And does also reading something like that flip a switch in your brain that maybe wasn’t flipped?

Definitely. I mean it’s very important to be open about the fact that that switch had not been flipped, I just took for granted the fact that I work with a lot of great women. But I certainly never thought about it in a cultural perspective and I never thought about from a woman’s perspective. But now I am and I feel like I’m a much better person for doing so.

Lowery and Redford on the set of ‘Pete’s Dragon’.

A nerdy question: in your wildest dream when you began being a filmmaker could you have imagined making not one but two films with the great Robert Redford?

No. But also because when I first started making movies those weren’t the movies I was interested in, you know? I wanted to make, from an early age, Star Wars movies, so I didn’t even become aware of Robert Redford until I became aware of the Sundance Film Festival when I was 11 or 12 or 13.

And so for me the goal was always to be associated with him through his festival. The goal for me to be a part of what he’d created. His films came later. I got to know him more as a director than as an actor because I saw A River Runs Through It and Quiz Show, I think the first thing I saw him in was The Horse Whisperer. It was only later that I got to know all those early classics. I saw Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid shockingly late in life… So working with him twice now I recognize the weight of it but it certainly wasn’t on my checklist of things to do. It’s really been a nice surprise to fall into alignment with him in the way that I have.

What’s the best thing about working with him? What do we not know about the way that he works that you would like people to know?

I feel like everyone sort of expects this and it’s not going to be a surprise but that it’s just so laid back and fun. He just really likes to have fun. He's very, very playful and that twinkle in his eye that we know and love on the big screen is there when you're working with him because he loves doing what he does. And he doesn't take himself seriously. He takes the work seriously but he doesn't take himself seriously and neither do I and so I think one of the reasons we get along so well is because we both are just having fun doing it.

Intermission: here’s David Lowery’s five favorite Robert Redford performances (plus one more).

You directed one of the great recent live-action family films, Pete’s Dragon. What are your earliest movie memories?

Well, I grew up without a television. My parents wouldn’t let us have a TV and so my earliest memories were going to the cinema and I saw Pinocchio and E.T. Those were the first two films I saw and I was obsessed with them. But I didn’t have a way to watch them again so we’d go to the library and at that time you could get storybooks of movies like Star Wars or for E.T. there were storybooks that had lots of photographs in them and so I would just get those books and read them repeatedly. I didn’t even see Star Wars for a couple of years after I had become aware of it. I knew the entire story but it was just through the books.

And finally one day my grandparents taped it off the television and showed it to me. I finally got to see it but I knew the whole story backwards and forwards at that point.

I remember wanting to see Clash of the Titans. I was really into Greek mythology and so I knew that Clash of the Titans was a Greek mythology film and had Medusa in it and so finally we rented this TV and VCR and I went and got Clash of the Titans from the video store and just watched it four times. Like, I just watched it over and over again because I knew that I only had that one weekend to see it.

When you were making Pete’s Dragon was there a sense that you wanted kids to have a similar experience?

Definitely. I just really tried to make a movie that I would have loved when I was seven. That was the barometer. I feel very in touch with me as a seven year old! I feel like I ceased to mature at the age of seven and so it’s not hard for me to tap into that mindset and I just would think about the things that I liked and often what I liked at seven years old were the movies that would scare me. Or that would provoke some emotion in me that I didn’t know how to handle.

I was terrified of Ghostbusters. I had seen the beginning of it at a friend’s house and it terrified me but I couldn’t stop thinking about it and so that was like a really exciting thing to me. The idea of finding that balance of fear and scariness to inject into a movie that would have hooked me at that age, even though it would also have traumatized me to a certain extent. And then also making sure that it was a movie that I as a 37 year old would also really, really like.

Angela (Maia Mitchell) and Jessie (Cami Morrone) in a scene from ‘Never Goin’ Back’, written and directed by Augustine Frizzell.

Since we’ve talked quite a bit about women in film, could you please pimp your wife Augustine Frizzell’s new movie?

Never Goin’ Back? It just came out in the States on Amazon Prime, I think it’ll be on DVD at Christmas. It’s based on her life. When she was 15 she moved out on her own with her brother and just had the most uproariously ridiculous experience as a young, underage teenager living on her own as an adult and it could have gone horribly wrong. It involved everything that you have seen in movies like Thirteen, where it’s just drugs and darkness and terrible things, but for some reason not only did she emerge from it unscathed but she looks at it with a sense of humor.

So she wanted to tell her story as a comedy as opposed to being the typical cautionary tale for young people. She was like, “We were really having a lot of fun back then. We were doing things we should not have been doing but it was a lot of fun, we were being idiots but there’s something glorious about that and the fact that I emerged as a fully formed adult who hasn’t killed too many brain cells, there’s something valuable about that.”

And so she wanted to make what is essentially a Superbad-style comedy for teenage girls. Some of the things that she did I am just like, “Seriously? That really happened and you are the person you are now?!”

And it’s great… I could go on with the long version.

Go on! We are all about husbands using half their interview time to talk about their wives.

She made the movie in 2014. Just jumped right into it, she got a grant the same way I got a grant from the Awesome Film Society to make my first film St Nick. She got a couple of grand together and made a version of the movie that she wasn’t happy with.

She made it right before we came here to New Zealand [to make Pete’s Dragon]. So she finished it, got on a plane to New Zealand, edited it and I remember around Christmas of that year watching the first cut. It was good, there was good stuff in it, but she was not happy with it. She felt like she hadn’t quite done what she wanted it to do. And so we started talking about re-shooting part of it or re-shooting the things that weren’t working.

And at a certain point she just decided, “I’m going to remake the entire thing. From scratch.” So she turned the feature that she had made into a short film.

And that film placed at SXSW and a couple of other places, and then she rewrote the script and recast it and when we made A Ghost Story and sold it to A24, we took proceeds from that and just put it right into her movie and used that to pay for her film. So she made the same film twice and the second time it worked, it was exactly the movie she wanted to make.

And now she has a career as a director and she’s about to make a Ryan Reynolds movie. It is a sequel to Home Alone. The working title that was announced under is Stoned Alone.

And, like, that is nothing that she could have ever planned for but because she’s a female director who made a really bawdy comedy, people reacted to it in a way that they wouldn’t have had a guy made that film. And I’m her husband so it’s easy for me to say this, but I’m just so proud of her for sticking to her guns, realizing that she could do better, making the film a second time and she’s reaping the rewards of having stuck to her intuition and not put a lesser, inferior version of the film out into the world.

As a collaborative partnership, you also did something really important, which is reinvest the money from your film into her film.

Our marriage luckily is founded on a mutual love of movies and so every decision we make about everything comes back to that love of movies. So it just made sense that if she had a movie she wanted to make I would do anything I could to make that happen. And that was one really efficient way to make sure her movie got made more quickly.

I’ve read the script and I don’t want to say too much about it, but as a fan of the first two Home Alone movies, I think this is a great follow up.

Because we’re at an event that is all about story and script, whose scripts have you studied closely or do you go back to again and again?

I go back to scripts that feel really messy, so I love Paul Thomas Anderson’s movies. He’s my favorite filmmaker but I also love his screenplays because they are just full of mistakes.

The Punch-Drunk Love script was published with all of the revised pages so it’s this multicolored document, and you see in that the process of revision that he goes through, and the process of intervention. It’s full of typos and they are so sloppy, but you see the things that matter to him like the fact that he will always randomly imprint that he’s dropping what lens he wants to shoot a shot on.

The Phantom Thread screenplay is also full of typos, and I read an interview with Daniel Day Lewis where he said that he loves the typos and tries to incorporate them into the dialogue. So if there is a typo in the dialogue he’ll make that part of the character because it just amuses him so much that the scripts are so sloppy.

So those are scripts that I like to go back to, just because it’s refreshing to look at something that is not perfect on the page. Out of that miasma they’re able to pull these movies that are just so, in my opinion, brilliant.

It shows a process where he’s obviously in a hurry to get the ideas out rather than to get them perfect.

Yes exactly, exactly. He doesn’t spend too much time polishing it. He just gets it out there on the page, he’s like, “we’re going to be able to make a movie from this document, but this document itself does not need to be perfectly refined. The refinement will come later.”

Last question: A24. Letterboxd members love the indie film production and distribution company. What have you personally gained from being in “the house of A24”?

I guess a lot of cool points, maybe? I don’t know! As someone who is a fan of studio logos there’s always like this certain thrill you get when you see a logo appear on screen that promises something. And you don’t have that that often any more. I feel like there was a period where like Lionsgate used to do that. I remember the old Lionsgate logo that was just the constellation. And you knew it was going to be a certain type of movie. There was like this really weird Canal Plus one that had these weird sounds and it was very strange.

So with A24, in spite of the fact that they make so many different types of movies, they all are within a certain scale. A scale that allows for there to be something, not subversive, but just surprising. They can take more risks and so even if you don’t know what the movie is, you know there’s a possibility for it to go in a direction that you can’t anticipate and that’s exciting.

They also are just very creative about how they get the word out about their movies and that contributes to that sense of culture. I don’t have much social media, I have Instagram and that’s it. But I know they’re very active on social media, and they don’t take themselves too seriously and they make everyone feel part of that. They’re very inclusive.

And so it’s easy to feel as a film fan, not just as a filmmaker, but as a fan, that you are part of a movement when you go see one of their movies or when you talk about one of their movies. There’s a scary aspect of it which is you wonder how long it can last? Because as a company they’re going to need to grow and I know because I’m continuing to make movies with them that they recognize that themselves, and are looking for ways to do that without changing what makes A24 so exciting.

I feel very grateful to have a front-row seat as a fan to see how they’re continuing to make movies, how they’re continuing to evolve, and I look forward to being part of that process myself.

Our thanks to David, Big Screen Symposium and Script to Screen. Here are seven recent films from filmmakers that David Lowery thinks you should watch next.

#letterboxd #interview #director #filmmaking #david lowery #robert redford #sissy spacek #a ghost story #a24

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fuzz1912 · 2 years

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The Life and Times of the Big iMac

While announcing the new headless Mac Studio last week (the mythical midrange workstation catering to creative professionals that it seemed Apple would never release) and its accompanying 27 inch Studio Display, Apple very quietly confirmed that these would ostensibly be replacing the now-discontinued larger 27 inch iMac and iMac Pro (collectively the “Big iMacs”, with apologies to McDonalds) that those same professionals had leveraged for over a decade. And yet Big iMacs had also found a home on the desks of hobbyists such as myself and content creators of various levels throughout recent years. Some of us will miss the Big iMac, but the writing has been on the wall for some time that it no longer has a niche to fill in Apple’s product line.

History of the Big iMac

When Steve Jobs introduced the Macintosh at the 1984 Apple Shareholders meeting as the friendly computer that said “Hello” to you, one of the first reassuring visuals a user would see following the boot up chime was the “Happy Mac” - a stylised version of the computer itself with a smiling face over the screen (as opposed to the “Sad Mac”, made infamous on Sex and the City). This anthropomorphised icon persisted throughout the era of classic MacOS, even as the shape of the Macintoshes it featured on changed and started to resemble their beige pizza box-shaped PC cousins.

It wasn’t until Jobs’s triumphant return to Apple in the late 90s that a true successor befitting the Happy Mac arrived - namely, the original iMac G3, with its candy-coloured chassis surrounding a dominant 15 inch CRT display and prominent “chin” featuring its optical drive and speakers. Here was another computer whose screen and chin once again resembled a face smiling back at the user. In fact, the ejecting optical drive even went so far as to resemble a tongue blowing a raspberry. Despite a temporary reversion to a slot-loading drive, the tongue took on even more prominence in the successor “sunflower” iMac G4, which also came with an articulating neck to hold the “face” above its “torso” (though let’s not take the analogy too far in this instance!).

The iMac G4 debuted in January 2002 with a 15 inch LCD screen, but it was quickly followed in July by a 17 inch model. While the PC industry was only just beginning a painfully slow transition from hulking 4:3 CRT displays to thinner LCDs, Apple had already taken two further steps forward - offering a much larger (for the time) 17 inch display, with a more visually pleasing “widescreen” 16:10 aspect ratio and a “high-definition” resolution of 1440x900. Naturally, these features were initially marketed at “prosumers” and creative professionals, leveraging Apple’s “digital hub” strategy of making the desktop computer a central repository for photos, videos, and music. These customers typically could not necessarily afford Apple’s 20 inch or 23 inch Cinema Displays or the PowerMac G4s and G5s that went with them. Very briefly towards the end of its life, a 20 inch iMac G4 joined the line - then a behemoth size for an all-in-one.

The 20 inch display would seem less oversized in the 2004 iMac G5, which is the direct ancestor of all modern iMacs - featuring a widescreen LCD display and a seemingly superfluous “chin” that has housed various components over the years, in a package that “floated” off the ground thanks to a rigid, tiltable rear stand. The iMac G5 and its first Intel successors would continue to come in white plastic 17 and 20 inch models, until the 17 inch was phased out in 2006 and replaced by another behemoth “Full HD” 1920x1200 24 inch model - finally offering prosumers and creatives a screen that would allow them to natively view (and better deliver) HD content.

By the time the iMac moved to a unibody aluminum enclosure in late 2007, peak iMac had been reached - this same basic model would lead a long life, morphing through ever-thinner enclosures and “retina” resolution displays. Its product range would only see one further change is screen sizes - a bump for each model to 21.5 and 27 inches, respectively, in late 2009. These Small and Big iMac sizes would persist for almost 12 years.

The Swiss Army knife of computers

Of course, the lure of an enormous 27 inch desktop display was too tempting for me, and I found myself amongst the early adopters of the original Big iMac in 2009. Thanks to a strong Australian dollar almost at parity with the USD, the price of entry was not much over AUD 2000. For this, the Big iMac brought a considerable amount to the table: most visibly, an enormous 2560x1440 LED display that would comfortably fit full HD content and editing workflows, at a time when most commonly available displays were barely cracking 20 inches, at lower resolutions, and lesser LCD and display technologies. The Big iMac also came with then-higher end Core 2 Duo processor options (though still largely based on mobile chips) as well as two key distinctions from the Small iMac: user-upgradable RAM slots and the ability to use the display as a monitor for other computers in “Target Display” mode.

Together with the availability of progressively better processors over the years (eventually moving across to Intel’s main i5/i7/i9 desktop CPUs) and an eventual doubling of the resolution to a 5120x2880 “retina” 5K standard, these features made the Big iMac an increasingly cost-efficient proposition for content creators and creative professionals. Having set up several of them for editing workflows across a number of feature films, television series, as well as hours of ancillary and online content, I can attest to the fact that Big iMacs were cheap enough to buy and spec up for even single project use, offered great value for money when amortised over several projects, and could easily be repurposed later for less-intensive desktop work.

This became all the more significant as the Mac Pro found itself at a lengthy crossroads, when the move in 2013 to an “innovative” cylindrical chassis (referred to by some as a nuclear reactor, but more ubiquitously as a “trash can”) created a thermal ceiling that Intel’s workstation-class processors and modern graphics cards could not stay within. The resulting lack of updates to the Mac Pro over 6 years made the Big iMac even more obvious as the flexible and modern option for creative workflows. Some customers responded by leveraging Apple’s use of an Intel architecture and building cheaper “Hackintoshes” using off-the-shelf parts.

Apple on the other hand leaned the Big iMac into this “professional” identity in late 2017 by creating a sleek special edition black iMac Pro. The iMac Pro was a stop-gap solution using Intel Xeon processors with a greater number of cores than their mainstream products, as well as workstation grade graphics cards. This decidedly “Professional” iMac would also have a starting price of USD 5000 to match. But some of its benefits - primarily in terms of better processors and graphics, as well as some improvements in display technology - would also find their way back to the Big iMac as well, which once again proved itself to be the better value proposition.

And yet with greater power and performance being pushed through an unchanging thin chassis originally designed for laptop grade chips, the Big iMac (as well as the iMac Pro) would eventually start to suffer from the same thermal dissipation issues that hampered the development of the trashcan Mac Pro. It could no longer be all things to all people - and high-end professionals were finally offered a new pathway in 2019 with the release of a new, highly customisable and upgradable Mac Pro tower. Starting at an eye-watering USD 6000, with a matching Pro Display XDR for a further USD 5000 (without even a stand, that would infamously cost an additional USD 1000!), these machines were clearly targeted only at the very top end - beyond the reach of all but the most well-resourced creative studios, and certainly not for hobbyists or anyone looking for cost-effective solutions.

Apple silicon transition

With the long-awaited transition from Intel to Apple silicon in 2020, the game changed. At the loss of native interoperability with Windows, Apple was finally freed from the thermal performance shackles imposed by Intel. As they had been doing for mobile devices for a decade, Apple’s M1 chip leapfrogged the performance per watt offered by Intel’s laptop and desktop chips. The initial batch of M1 Mac Minis and MacBooks Air and Pro displayed single core performance significantly higher than even the highest-end of its predecessor Intel Macs, and were surprisingly competitive on multi core performance as well. These were soon followed by a thinner 24 inch M1 iMac (with a 4.5K display in a thin and colourful chassis, now housing all of the computer components in the iMac’s “chin”), and two new and slightly thicker 14 and 16 inch MacBooks Pro featuring even more powerful M1 Pro and M1 Max chips with up to 10 CPU and 32 GPU cores.

Based on performance benchmarks, the basic M1 chips found in the Mac Mini, MacBook Air and iMac offer 45% better single core performance than the previously top end Big iMac, and come within 7-17% of multi core scores of the highest customised 10 core Intel i9 CPU for around a third of the price. The multi core performance of the M1 Pro and M1 Max in the new MacBook Pros are on par with the highest end iMac Pro and lower end Mac Pro (for less than half the price). Only the uppermost 16, 24 and 28 core Mac Pros outperform the M1 Max - and leaked benchmarks of the new M1 Ultra featured in the Mac Studio suggests its performance will best even those by up to 30% (again, at a fraction of the price). With Apple being able to deliver this level of performance on its own silicon, one would assume their eventual Mac Pro replacement will easily fit in well above all of these at a price to match.

What all of this means is that the 27 inch Big iMac that was all things to all people is no longer required. Consumers have a more than capable laptop in the M1 MacBook Air, a headless desktop in the M1 Mac Mini, and a perfectly adequate all-in-one 24 inch M1 iMac. These models also provide sufficient performance for prosumers and hobbyists (which I unashamedly count myself amongst), though I think there may be room for the M1 Max from the MacBooks Pro to find its way into in the Mac Mini and iMac for these users as well. The Mac Studio provides options for creative professionals and content creators, and can be paired either with Apple’s new Studio Display or any number of similar (and more cost-effective) displays from other manufacturers. Finally, while the days of high-end professionals needing to spec out a 27 inch iMac or iMac Pro had already ended with the introduction of the 2019 Mac Pro, even this niche of the market is presented with options for now given the stellar performance of all of the M1 chips (especially the Mac Studio’s M1 Ultra). And it won’t be long before the Apple silicon replacement for the Mac Pro makes them an even more compelling offering.

These days the same AUD 2000 required for the Big iMac in 2009 will get you the 24 inch M1 iMac, which now sits alone in Apple’s all-in-one range solely as a consumer-focused model. Until the release of that 27 inch Big iMac in 2009, the 24 inch model had been the bigger model - but now it is the one standard size that fits all, neither Big nor Small. There may yet be a larger version of the new colourful iMac, featuring an Mx Pro chip. But with the Mac Studio providing a clearly differentiated option for creatives, no longer will we find the same Big iMac on the desks of hobbyists and professionals alike. We mourn the end of the Big iMac, the Swiss Army knife of computers, but the Mac lineup is just fine without it.

#apple #imac #mac studio #imac pro

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pristine-services · 2 years

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The latest technology in smart TVs, Is it available In India?

Television technology has undergone a major transformation in recent years. There are lots of technologies that came up in recent years like QLED, OLED, webOS, Android OS, Ulta HD's, 4K-8K tv's which make your decision tough.

With the arrival of smart TVs, users now decide what they want to watch, when they want to watch, Recording serials, and much more. In this post, we will discuss the latest technology in the TV sector, how it changed the viewing experiences enormously? Is it available in India?

8K: Future Of The HD television

Over the years, the resolution has been playing a major role in the improvements in TVs. It drastically evolved from HD to 8K. let's take a brief look at how to resolution changes over these years.

The first-come HD TVs or High Definition TVs have a resolution of 1280X720 ie 1280 horizontal pixels and 720 vertical pixels. Pixels are the smallest unit of the dot which changes their color according to the content. With the arrival of big-screen like 5o" and so on this pixel resolution has become outdated. It looks so grainy and distorted pictures on such a big screen.

Above HD in Full HD, you can expect bare minimum resolution in new and Big Screen LED's Tv. Its resolution of 1920X 1080 pixels. After that Full HD technology was suppressed by 4K technology with a resolution of 3840 X 2160 pixels. Technically 4K resolution is truly 4000+ pixels horizontally but it is used only for cinema setup and not for ordinary or General purpose tvs. You will notice that on the consumer's basis vertical pixels is the same I.e 2160px only horizontal pixels are cut down by 256 pixels because the TV has an aspect ratio of 16:9, to meet these criteria, horizontal pixels are cut down by 256px.

TVs with 8K resolution come out. If you are a techy geek you will notice that it's not again 8K(8000px) it's less than 8K but that's how marketing strategies work. To enjoy the 8K resolution, the screen size should not be less than 55'. 8K TVs are truly premier and manufactured only by reputed brands like LG, SONY, SAMSUNG, AND PANASONIC, especially in India. Before you decide to buy the 8K bandwagon, you need to be aware that very few shows provide 8K content, in fact, 4K content is still not so common in India, Only Netflix shoot 8K resolution videos.

QLED Vs OLED, Which one is better?

Two Technologies revolutionized in-display i.e QLED and OLED. If you are a techy geek you will know that QLED is actually New display technology whereas OLED is the upgrade version of existing LED displays technology (LCD display with LED backlight).

OLED stands for Organic Light Emitting Diode. OLED it's having organic material which glows when the current passes through them. The main difference between LED and OLED is that OLED glows individual pixels which gives the greatest contrast and excellent color while ordinary LED Glow Full Panel. With OLED it discovers true blacks as the pixels turn off completely which is not possible in ordinary LED TVs.

LG is the precursor of OLED tvs. It's supplying OLED to other brands like SONY, PANASONIC, Philips, etc.

OLEDs are 1000 times faster than LEDs and they would not be getting blurred with fast-moving images. If you want true color and perfects blacks with high contrast images then definitely go for OLED as it emits 1000 nits but it is less than QLED. QLED displays 2000 nits.

The major drawback of OLED is that color burns. If you watch a TV channel or content which has static images like a logo then due to overheating it burn your screen. Burning of the screen is occurred due to the statics element being continuously watched for hundreds of hours.

another major drawback in QLED and OLED TVs is that due to the slim body it's they merge the main screen and back panel hence only power supply issues can be solved or repairable but another problem that occurred in TV's repair services is not repairable

Samsung is the only brand which not deal with OLED technology, Maybe it is not convinced by it unless it discovered its own QLED technology.

QLED stands for Quantum dots LEDs that are nano-sized semiconductors crystals. They have good light absorption and emitting capacity which gives you vibrant pictures. QLED gives you 2000 nits which give you very sharp pictures as compared to OLED, this means no matter how bright your room is, you can still enjoy the pictures without compromising its quality.

Conclusion

So we cover up all the latest technologies in TV sectors. If you want contrast Images then go for the OLED, QLED surprised OLED and gives you sharp picture quality and durability as compared to OLED. In India, Andriod TV is in the Boom hence so many companies like Motorola, Mi, TCL, OnePlus, RealMe, Thomson, and Sony provide android tv. Only LG and Samsung stick with their own TV OS, like webOS and Tizen OS. If you are looking for the latest technology then definitely go for QLED and OLED both are good and it all depends on your budget which should be bought.

If you want to more information regarding TV’s and other home appliances please comment/call or visit our website. If you want any Home appliances repair services, Projectors repair or new or TV’s repairs services or interested in buying a new one especially in Pune, Maharastra please visit Pristine Services.

8K: Future Of The HD television

Over the years, the resolution has been playing a major role in the improvements in TVs. It drastically evolved from HD to 8K. let's take a brief look at how to resolution changes over these years.

QLED Vs OLED, Which one is better?

LG is the precursor of OLED tvs. It's supplying OLED to other brands like SONY, PANASONIC, Philips, etc.

Samsung is the only brand which not deal with OLED technology, Maybe it is not convinced by it unless it discovered its own QLED technology.

Conclusion

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