Movie City Indie Archive for January, 2012
Steadicam Op Vs. Director (language NFSW)
I doubt even Sundance 2012 will offer anything this tasty with the swears.
Tinker, Tailor, VFX
Strange and strangely pretty: “This is a video showing how The Chimney Pot created the VFX shots for the movie “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”. Great movie with great VFX 😉 All shots done in full 4K resolution at the Stockholm office. We did grade the movie as well.”
Joe Swanberg’s MARRIAGE MATERIAL (55’30”)
As a pre-t0-mid-Sundance tweak, Joe Swanberg offers a new medium-length feature through the end of January on Vimeo: it’s also to note the release of Silver Bullets as the first of his subscription series, “Joe Swanberg: Collected Films 2011” via Factory 25. Family issues emerge: “Emily and Andrew, a young couple living in Memphis, agree to babysit their friend’s 6-month-old for a day. The experience causes them to examine their own relationship and their feelings about marriage and children.” Produced, directed and edited by Joe Swanberg; photographed by Adam Wingard; written by and starring Kentucker Audley, Caroline White, Joe Swanberg, Kris Swanberg, Jude Swanberg, Adam Wingard, Amanda Crawford.” Swanberg corresponds with LAT’s Mark Olsen here.
Did David Fincher Rough-Draft His DRAGON TATTOO Credits In 1989?
So suggests feature and video director Joseph Kahn.
DVD: Godard’s FILM SOCIALISME
Eighty-one-year-old Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme is a disarmingly beautiful rash of video imagery that ranges from HD in gleaming blues on a luxury liner late at night to cell-phone images that stutter, blanch and bleed, accompanied by murmorous dialogues turning over familiar political idées fixe and the crisp musique concrète-style sound mixes of his work of the past three decades. The electric charge of the colors is splendid on Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray edition, released January 10. (The ship, the Costa Concordia, ran aground on January 13, killing several passengers and crew members; see image below the fold.)
Godard hectors and cryptographs, finding an expressive character for his digital video palette with a more refined touch a decade ago, as in his 2001 Eloge de l’amour, but with less engagement than in the recently-reissued Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980), shot on 35mm film, which works its metaphors of self-loathing, prostitution and misogyny with grave intentness. Film Socialisme is more like sketch comedy for a certain straineof cinephiles, far less dense than the obsessive and potted essay Histoires du Cinéma (also now legally available on video in the U.S.), those who react to colors and edits and gestural repetitions and thematic fixations, but not those who struggle to cipher a story from fragments. Godard’s latest fractured fairytales are also filmmaking as sculpture, expressive through collage and not the verities of theater and text, film as a corrupted dream. Read the full article »
Postering What Generations Have Demanded In 3D
Alluring! [Via IMPAwards.]
Diagramming Film Blog Ecosystems In A Single Screengrab
[Time Out.]
Michael Glawogger’s WORKING MAN’S DEATH Online
Michael Glawogger‘s epic documentary Working Man’s Death, on physical labor in the twenty-first century, is streaming in 22-minute episodes on Al-Jazeera and are embedded below. It’s stirring, stunning stuff. “In today’s technological age, is heavy manual labour disappearing or is it just becoming invisible? From the exhausted mine shafts of Ukraine to the bloody slaughterhouses of Nigeria, this series offers an unflinching portrait of physical labour in the twenty-first century, talking to the people engaged in this dreary, demanding and, often, dangerous work.” The veteran documentarian asserts, “Work is often difficult to see, and therefore difficult to depict. Physical labour is probably the only real kind of work.”
“Lions“: “In a crowded Nigerian slaughterhouse blood, fire and smoke are normal working conditions. We take a glimpse inside the bloody and frenetic activity of the Port Harcourt meat market in Nigeria. As one worker there explains: “My name is Ishaq Mohammed. My work day begins between six and seven am. Usually I get up at five in order to be at work on time. Killing goats doesn’t bother me. Before I slaughter a goat, I utter God’s name. Normally we slaughter 350 goats a day. Sometimes it’s only 300. Other days it’s only 150. But there are times when goats are in short supply. And then we might have no more than 10 or 15. And sometimes we even have no goats at all.”
“Heroes” (22’17”): “We follow Ukrainian miners as they go underground to dig the last pieces of coal from exhausted mine shafts.”
1 Comment »Trailering Béla Tarr’s THE TURIN HORSE
[Via The Cinema Guild.]
A Single, 48″ Firework Shell Blooms (42 sec)
[Via Torrez.]
Picturing Elizabeth Olsen In SILENT HOUSE
Scared yet? Maybe the trailer’s more forthcoming…
Read the full article »
Picturing Cinematographer Chris Menges On Set Of EXTREMELY LOUD…
A Local Hero in these parts; still shooting at 71.
What Did Glenn Close Look Like As Albert Nobbs In 1981?
“Glenn Close in a scene from the American Premier production of THE SINGULAR LIFE OF ALBERT NOBBS, the fifth and final Manhattan Theatre Club Downstage production of the 1981-82 season running June 7 – July 10. Photo credit: Gerry Goodstein.”
