Thursday 31 March 2016
15 Good Movies to Watch on Netflix in April 2016
Warner Bros.
April showers got you down? No need to get pouty. Netflix exists, it’s full of movies, we’ve got a list of good ones that have recently been added, and May flowers are just around the corner. Hang in there. We’re going to get through this. As always, click on the films’ titles to be taken to their Netflix pages.
Pick of the Month: The Exorcist (1973)
There’s a reason that The Exorcist shows up at the top or very near the top of every list of the greatest horror movies of all time. Nuts and bolts, it’s basically the perfect example of how to properly structure a horror movie by introducing a small threat, gradually increasing it over the course of a film, and then paying things off only after you’ve milked all of the potential anxiety out of the situation. When things go bad in this film, they go horrifically bad too. There are so many iconic images in this movie that basically everyone in the world knows, and every one of them is so dang freaky and gross that they have no business being part of the mainstream consciousness. With The Exorcist, William Friedkin gave the bible belt its first dose of death metal awesomeness. Give it another watch if you haven’t seen it in a while. Hearing the first few notes of that iconic score will feel like slipping on an old glove. And isn’t that little Linda Blair just so adorable?
Entertainment (2015)
Gregg Turkington does standup comedy under the name Neil Hamburger, and if you’ve never seen his act, it’s a strange kind of performance piece where he attempts to get under his audience’s skin. From his material, to his look, to his delivery, everything Turkington does is designed to be as off-putting as possible, and if you’ve got the stomach to sit through it, it’s one of those things that’s fascinating to watch at first, then it goes too far and gets kind of upsetting, and then it eventually comes back around to being completely hilarious. Entertainment is a film that stars Turkington as his Hamburger character. He co-wrote it with Tim and Eric’s Tim Heidecker and The Comedy’s Rick Alverson, who also directs. These names are listed as a warning that this movie is completely ridiculous. From extended scenes where Turkington tries to out-awkward John C. Reilly, to strange bathroom encounters with Michael Cera, there are a ton of little treasures to be found here as long as you can endure the outrage-baiting inanity. Think you’ve got the patience to make it to the end?
Groundhog Day (1993)
Have we discussed Groundhog Day here before? It feels like it. It feels like this is one of those movies that’s constantly showing up on and then falling off of Netflix. That’s fine though, because there’s nothing wrong with a regular reminder that it’s time to rewatch Groundhog Day for the 1000th time. This is one of the very best comedies ever made, without a doubt. Anybody who argues otherwise deserves to get stuck in an endless time loop of their own. This is Bill Murray at his surliest and most curmudgeonly. It’s Chris Elliott at his most put-upon and door matiest. It’s Stephen Tobolowsky at his most Stephen Tobolowskiest. If Harold Ramis ever made a masterpiece, and he most definitely did, then Groundhog Day is it. Not even casting Andie MacDowell as the scowling female lead could sink this ship. Impressive.
Vertical Entertainment
He Never Died (2015)
If you’re a fan of anything Henry Rollins does, then you need to see He Never Died. It’s not the greatest movie in the world, but it’s an interesting enough mystery/noir/horror mashup, and it’s completely made by the fact that it has Rollins deadpanning his way through the film as the lead, Jack, who we don’t know much about, but who we know is immortal, is miserable, is always running afoul of various sleazy street thugs, and is very, very comfortable with casually doling out extreme amounts of violence. Is the prospect of Henry Rollins viciously bloodying up punks not your thing? Not to worry, because there’s also a subplot here where his loner character has to reconnect with an estranged daughter, and not only is the relationship actually pretty sweet, but Jordan Todosey also shows a good deal of spunk playing the daughter. She’s fun, and research tells me she was on a bunch of episodes of Degrassi, so it looks like I’ve got some Canadian angst to catch up on. Help me out with that, Netflix. All you have is episodes of Next Class, but she was on The Next Generation!
Jafar Panahi’s Taxi (2015)
Filmmaker Jafar Panahi has been banned from making films by the Iranian government for a handful of years now, but he still keeps finding ways to get them made and get them out to the world anyway. His newest, Taxi, is filmed almost entirely from cameras mounted on the dashboard of a taxicab that Panahi himself drives around Tehran. People from all walks of life get in and out of his cab, they experience dramas big and small, some of them are clearly scripted while some of them seem like they could be improvised, and you’re never quite sure what is what, but everything that you see ends up being interesting. Even with such a simple premise, Panahi manages to make his movie layered with themes and Meta goodness. There’s all sorts of stuff in here about the importance of art, the nature of cinema, and how we should respond to censorship. In general, Panahi is just a really good filmmaker and he has about the biggest balls in the world.
Man Up (2015)
Man Up is a ridiculous farce. It does the whole romantic comedy thing, it has a case of mistaken identity at its center, none of its characters act like human beings so much as they act however they need to act in order for wacky hijinks to take place—and yet it’s not unpleasant to watch. Probably because it stars Simon Pegg (Nerd Movies) and Lake Bell (Indie Movies), who are both funny enough and charming enough that watching them play out some kind of modern version of an episode of Three’s Company becomes a good time spent relaxing in your couch groove. Mostly though, this thing is satisfying because the third act sticks to the tried and true romantic comedy format, which we’ve all seen a thousand times before, but which still works because sometimes solid story structure just makes sense.
Must Love Dogs (2005)
If you’re in the mood to watch a generic romantic comedy, and there are a lot of people out there who love watching generic romantic comedies, then you might as well watch one that stars Diane Lane. She’s basically an angel. She could make anything palatable, including Must Love Dogs, which is one of the most clichéd, basic bitch dating farces ever created by Hollywood. It all goes down smooth though, because Lane is there to ease the process, and because Christopher Plummer is there playing her dad, and because the two men she’s put in a love triangle with are Dermot Mulroney and John Cusack. The material these people are working with couldn’t be any more mundane, or even insulting in many places, but they’re all so damned charismatic while delivering it that you’re willing to give them a pass, for old times sake. Must Love Dogs is the very definition of a guilty pleasure.
How Everybody Wants Some!! Connects to Dazed and Confused
What is a “spiritual sequel”? Basically, it’s any work that seems connected enough to another but isn’t directly linked by characters or any sort of narrative acknowledgment. However, the rules are pretty loose depending on where you look. TV Tropes claims Richard Linklater‘s Dazed and Confused is a “spiritual successor” to George Lucas’s American Graffiti, but that’s just because they’re a similar kind of movie. Now Linklater has made Everybody Wants Some!!, which he has long referred to as a spiritual sequel to Dazed. And again, it would seem it’s pretty much just the same kind of movie, the soundtrack-heavy, people hanging out and talking kind.
Earlier this month, Linklater told Variety that he wasn’t sure what the term really meant. “I started calling it a ‘spiritual’ sequel, but I don’t even know if spiritual is the right word,” he admitted. “I used it as an orientation to the material, because Dazed was high school and this is college.” The idea reminded me of the difference between Teen Wolf Too and Teen Wolf, the former technically a sequel but following new characters, set at college instead of in high school and with a change in sport central to the story. Yet the Teen Wolf movies do share a couple characters, and its different protagonists are related, specifically as first cousins.
Perhaps the Everybody relationship to Dazed is more akin to that of 10 Cloverfield Lane to Cloverfield. Linklater can instead refer to it as an episode of an anthology film series and make more movies like those two set in other time periods and times of life. There could be one that’s set in an office where a bunch of co-workers play basketball or go bowling after work, and it’s the 1990s. Another could take place in the early 2000s in a retirement home and the characters are heavily involved in shuffleboard. If he does just one more, Linklater can call it a trilogy in the same manner as Edgar Wright’s “Three Flavours Cornetto” movies and Lars von Trier’s “Golden Heart” films.
Actually, there already are three. Back in 2014, Linklater stated that Everybody (then titled That’s What I’m Talking About) is also a sequel to Boyhood. “I don’t know if one film can be a sequel to two different movies,” he says in an interview with Creative Screenwriting magazine, “but it begins right where Boyhood ends with a guy showing up at college and meeting his new roommates and a girl. It overlaps with the end of Boyhood.” Well, of course that makes sense because Boyhood is a very autobiographical movie, and so is Everybody. And so is Dazed. In fact, a lot of Linklater’s movies have some level of autobiographical element to them.
“When you’re a director, a little bit of you is in everything,” Linklater told Moviemaker magazine in 1995. “Dazed probably more so. I don’t know.” The more so is compared to his breakout film Slacker, which he says was more personal than autobiographical. It was more that he knew that world, but also he admits that a little of him is in a lot of the characters. The same is true of Dazed, and some have theorized he identified with the character of Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London) because he would take on that role during auditions for other parts. But he’s claimed he’s also Mike and Tony (Adam Goldberg and Anthony Rapp). And he acknowledged as early 21 years ago, “Probably the closest would be Mitch, the young guy. In ’76, I was going into high school, too.”
And Mitch is a baseball player, a pitcher. Now in Everybody there is a character named Jake who is going into college and he’s also a pitcher. The movie is set four years after Dazed, in 1980, the same year Linklater went to college on a baseball scholarship. “If you want to get technical,” Linklater says in the Variety interview, “if you think of the young guy Mitch in Dazed (Wiley Wiggins), it’s four years later if he had kept playing ball in that movie. Had I [made the movie] four years later, maybe it would have made sense to have Wiley in there.” And retained the name and had it be an actual sequel, it would seem.
Linklater stated at this month’s SXSW premiere of Everybody, “Almost everything in the movie happened in one way or another.” That’s close to what he said 20 years ago about Dazed being his “most autobiographical moment to moment.” So why not just name the Jake character Mitch? Linklater even cast an actor, Blake Jenner, who looks like someone you could believe is Wiggins’s character four years older (with a touch of young Matt Dillon mixed in). Maybe it’s for the same reason he didn’t name Ethan Hawke’s character in Before Sunrise Mitch, even though he is also somewhat based on Linklater — or, at least his experience is based on one had by Linklater, albeit in Philadelphia rather than Vienna.
We could almost connect all of his movies as a sort of Linklater Cinematic Universe based on the fact that so much is at least semi-autobiographical, starting with his first feature, 1988’s It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books, where Linklater himself stars as a guy trying to find himself, inspired by his own soul searching in the mid-’80s. He put some of his baseball background into his remake of The Bad News Bears. He also told Sight & Sound the character Amber (Ashley Johnson) in his fictionalizing adaptation of the nonfiction book “Fast Food Nation” is autobiographical. And his documentary Inning by Inning: A Portrait of a Coach is at least a very personal project, one that Linklater has said is about himself as much as about subject Augie Garrido.
In Before Sunset, Hawke’s character is a writer, and he says something to a reporter that is very similar to what Linklater told Moviemaker in 1995. He paraphrases Thomas Wolfe: “He says that we are the sum of all the moments of our lives, and that, uh, anybody who sits down to write is gonna use the clay of their own life, that you can’t avoid that.” The character’s book is based on the experience he has in Before Sunrise, which is based on an experience Linklater had in real life (sadly the basis for Julie Delpy’s character never showed up to a screening of Before Sunrise because she died in a motorcycle accident before it came out). So all of Linklater’s movies, if they’re written by him, are connected in a way through the clay of his life.
But if he once recognized Dazed as his most autobiographical, then did so with Boyhood (which has a scene that really seems to overlap with Dazed) and now implies Everybody has that honor — Linklater even dated a girl from his college’s drama department, though it was much later than happens for Jake in the movie — they are the most unified. Mitch, Mason (Ellar Coltrane) and Jake are pretty much the same person, aligned in spirit. Other characters in Everybody will remind fans of characters in Dazed, but not in any substantial way. It’s not a spiritual remake. It’s not even a spiritual remakequel. But Everybody is as close to being a true sequel as many official follow-ups are.
Junkfood Cinema Podcast: Goonies vs. Monster Squad
It’s time to settle an age-old dispute, to put an end to the squabbling and declare a winner in the ultimate clash of geek titans…no, we’re not talking about bloated blockbusters pitting dreary cape against dour haircut. This week, Cargill and I are heading back to the 80s and trading blows until we have a victor in the battle between The Goonies and The Monster Squad!
We will handle this election-style, breaking down the films analytically based on how they measure up across various vital criteria. From creators to cast, from production design to stakes, from monstrous henchmen-turned allies to monstrous henchmen-turned allies!
Who will arise victorious? What will be left of our shiny nostalgia when we’re through. Goonies never say die, and neither do we. So it’s time to nard up or shut up!
You should follow Brian (@Briguysalisbury), Cargill (@Massawyrm), and the show (@Junkfoodcinema).
On This Week’s Show:
- Pre-Ramble [0:00 – 2:08]
- Squad Goals [2:09 – 46:00]
- Truffle Shufflin’ Out [47:49 – 52:30]
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The Americans: Everything Is Horrible And We’re All Doomed
Welcome to Last Night on TV, our ongoing series that looks back at what happened on television the night before. If we’re going to stay up all night and watch TV, we might as well talk about it the next day.
We’re only three episodes into season four of The Americans and already the feeling of doom is palpable. Philip is sleepwalking through his multiple lives. Elizabeth is – gasp – having fun with capitalism. Plans are being made to assassinate members of the clergy. Biological weapons are leaking. No matter where Philip and Elizabeth turn, the options presented to them seem to put the lives and happiness of their children in danger. “For the last two days, I’ve had an alarm going off inside me,” Philip admits. “Run, run, run. And it’s not going off inside of you.” Buckle up, ladies and gentlemen, we’re in for a very tense season.
The previous episode may have born his name, but “Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow” truly belongs to the question of what to do with Pastor Tim. Now that we’re here, it’s kind of a relief to see this storyline in action. There were times in Season 3 where The Americans seemed unsure of how to handle Paige’s character. Too many competing plots points – from Paige’s blossoming religious identity to Philip and Elizabeth’s conflict over the Center’s recruitment mandate – all converged on how Paige processed the true identity of her parents. Rather than commit to a specific course of action, then, Season 3 put her into a kind of holding pattern, making her grief and confusion the sore spot at the show’s center that The Americans quietly plotted around. When the season ended with her telling Pastor Tim about her parents’ true identity, it seemed to back the storyline into a corner. Philip and Elizabeth could kill the pastor – thus alienating their daughter entirely – or the writers could speed up her recruitment process. Either way, she’s just along for the ride.
But then Pastor Tim told Alice, and Paige got pissed. It’s not surprising that Tim would tell his wife about the Jennings’s secret; they are married, after all, and The Americans has always presented the two as something of a unified front. It is Paige’s feeling of betrayal – an illogical and oh-so adolescent response to a complicated thought process – that gives the show its first chance at a Philip-Elizabeth-Paige collaboration. Suddenly we see Tim and Paige at odds and the latter hinting that she might be willing to manage a relationship for the sake of her parents’ continued safety. Most importantly, this dissatisfaction was in no way manufactured by either Philip or Elizabeth. Paige’s anger is authentic, and this anger opens the door to any number of interesting possibilities. It took almost an entire season, but Player Paige Has Entered The Game.
This episode also introduces another possible season-long arc in Elizabeth’s infiltration of the immigrant family she meets at Mary Kay. Last season it was Lisa (Karen Pittman) and her security clearance; this season, Young Hee (Ruthie Ann Miles) and her mystery objective. At worst, these espionage subplots go a long way towards demonstrating Elizabeth’s skill in the field and her softening towards American values. It’s also a neat flip of gender stereotypes within the spy genre: almost every operation that Elizabeth runs involves a slow and deliberate process of winning another person’s trust, while Philip is resigned to running the honeypot, again and again and again. Young Hee and her family represent something more than just friendship, though. Elizabeth is becoming intimately involved with people who made a choice to immigrate to America. Cracks are beginning to show in Elizabeth’s anger towards the West; this could be the interaction that nudges her over the edge.
Meanwhile, old storylines chug away in the show’s periphery. Stan continues to circle in on Martha (“WHY DID YOU SAY THAT NAME?!”), even trying to enlist his colleagues in a surveillance operation to find the cause of her overnight rendezvous. Back in Russia, Nina deals with the fallout of trying to pass along letters from Anton Baklanov to his son. Nina’s story in particular has been a bit of a question mark these past two seasons. There is value in expanding the story to include locations within Russia, and Nina’s machinations have always served as a nice counterpoint to those of Philip and Elizabeth (her life falls apart while theirs continues undeterred). To a certain extent, though, Nina feels like a character – and Annet Mahendru an actor – that the writers are loathe to get rid of, and I can’t say that I blame them for the indulgence, especially if the show chooses to focus less on the Russian embassy in her absence.
Despite the fact that The Americans has never been particularly dependent upon cliffhangers, “Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow” ends with a doozy: Gabriel, potentially infected with an air-born pathogen, and Dylan Baker’s William reluctantly enlisted to administer medicine and quarantine Gabriel’s apartment. Much like in real life, the threat of nuclear war has been a dark cloud hanging over the heads of the characters, but it was in many ways a conventional threat. People build bombs, people point them at enemies, and people pull the trigger; as long as Philip and Elizabeth do their jobs well, these people can always be coerced or eliminated. Biological warfare is something else entirely. There’s something unnerving about the thought of contamination – dying slow and in a great deal of pain – that makes it hard picture either side in a war worth supporting when these options are in play. The vials of germs offer a literal depiction of the unseen problems threatening to tear Philip and Elizabeth’s world apart, but they also speak to their irrelevance. What is the point in traditional spycraft in a world where the contents of a mint container will indiscriminately kill thousands?
So many questions raised for next week’s episode. Will Gabriel live? Does Nina stand a chance at trial? Will the Center move forward with the assassination of Tim and Alice? And, most importantly, will Henry ever forgive his parents for bailing on the EPCOT trip? Poor kid only has Strat-o-Matic Football and video games to keep him occupied while everyone else around him is doing their own thing. Then again, that pretty much describes my own adolescence, and I thought I was having a grand old time. You do you, Henry. You do you.
For more TV reviews, check out the Last Night on TV archives.
Cannes 2016. The Poster for Critics' Week
Cannes' Critics' Week (La Semaine de la Critique) has revealed its 2016 poster, featuring an image of Jessica Chastain in Jeff Nichols' Take Shelter, which premiered in this section in 2011. (Nichols' next film is rumored to be playing in competition in Cannes' Official Selection.) Now all three major sections of the Cannes Film Festival have released their posters: Directors' Fortnight and the actual 69th Festival de Cannes.
The Forgotten: E.A. Dupont's "Atlantic" (1929)
Joop van den Berg's 1929 poster for Atlantic
E.A. Dupont achieved early fame for Varieté (1925), a grimly saucy slice of Weimar doom and spiciness, and followed it up with prestigious British productions Moulin Rouge (1928) and Piccadilly (1929), the latter starring Anna May Wong—but just as his career was on the upswing he fell prey to the advent of sound, producing a big-budget version of the Titanic disaster in English and German versions.
Cinephiles of my generation grew up on myths of the stilted early talkies, and the few movies from this era readily available and frequently aired, like Universal's Dracula and Frankenstein, always did seem a little stiff at the knees, tending to lurch rather than glide as the late silents and late thirties films could. But we now see that there was much elegant filmmaking in the pre-Code era, and that Tod Browning and James Whale's films, though frequently brilliant, were also unusually stagey. But the gulf between the cinema of 1931 and that of just a couple of years earlier is colossal. As I've said before, a 1929 movie moves like a 1931 movie played underwater. Atlantic almost makes this simile literal truth. As the ship fills up with ocean, the actors face off in agonizingly flat two-shots, staring hard at each other, then manfully averting their eyes, pausing, giving utterance to lines like, "Who can say?" and "God have mercy on us!" and then lapsing into glowering silence again.
Dupont has managed to extract from his actors, or perhaps implant into them, alarmingly rigid performances, every grain of their celluloid being clenched in un-dynamic tension. Even for British characters in a British film, they seem inhumanly stiff. At least the Titanic itself can bend in the middle.
It's all the more baffling when you see that Dupont is surrounded by deft Hitchcock players, including John Longden, the hero of Blackmail, Donald Calthrop, the villainous blackmailer, and Joan Barry who re-voiced that film's Czech leading lady, Anny Ondra. Future Hitchcock blonde Madeleine Carroll appears as an incompetent brunette, dragging out every speech as if attempting to educate a class of drunken pre-schoolers.
(The German version has Fritz Kortner, Francis Lederer, and another Hitchcock blonde-in-waiting, Lucie Mannheim, Carroll's co-star in The 39 Steps. The drama must have a bit more spark in it, surely?)
But Dupont hasn't forgotten everything he knows about cinema: in fact, he's attempting to learn something new. His opening scene begins with a ludicrously long, long shot of card-playing passengers, extended to the point where you might think the director is asleep in his chair. But it would be unfair to ascribe this to the technical limitations of the period: Dupont seems to be trying to exploit the possibilities of talking pictures in an extreme way, reducing his first scene to illustrated radio. Later on he attempts to cover group dialogues with hilariously crammed compositions, the actors thrusting their heads at each other as if trying to biologically merge like the bluebloods of Brian Yuzna's Society. It's film grammar on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and I find it fascinating in a strenuous sort of way.
Like other films of this transitional period, the movie keeps switching frame rates, and non-dialogue scenes have clearly been shot mute. Sound editing was primitive, and sound mixing non-existent, so that when a character shuts a door, the band music from the next room cuts off with a single splice, just like in The Blue Angel.
Despite all this, Dupont does manage to move events to a striking climax, away from the talkie stuff. The Keystone cops movement of the terrified passengers imbues their frenzy with added desperation. Recovering some of his "unchained camera" skills, Dupont mounts his tripod in a rocking lifeboat, inducing both high anxiety and mal de mer. And the whole silent-movie sequence is overlaid with a wild track of hellish screaming, which grates on the nerves and is only made worse by the band playing on with warbly sound-on-disc tunelessness. It's easily the most unpleasant Titanic sinking on film.
Dupont even surpasses this terror at the very end, as the last stranded travelers pray in the flooded lounge. The lights go out, and cries of alarm are heard during close to a minute of pitch blackness, gradually drowned out by roaring waves. It's terrifying, more than a little depressing, and it goes beyond any concept of sound cinema into pure sound alone.
The Germans sank the unsinkable again in 1943, in Herbert Selpin's epic Titanic, making opportunistic play of the fact that the White Star Line, which skimped so fatally on lifeboats, was Jewish-owned. By that time, Dupont was enduring a dozen years of unemployment after slapping a member of the Dead End Kids who mocked his accent. For that, they should have given him a bloody Academy Award.
The Forgotten is a fortnightly column by David Cairns, author of Shadowplay.
Watch This: Proof of Concept for Sci-Fi 'Rise' Starring Anton Yelchin
"You lost the war before it was even declared, Colonel." This is awesome. While this is a fantastic 5-minute sci-fi short film, it's also an impressive proof-of-concept created by filmmaker David Karlak called Rise made to get his project into development. David sent an email out informing me that he has been working on developing Rise at Warner Bros since 2012 and they just now allowed him to debut this short to the world. The story is about sentient robotic beings created that become more advanced than the human race and end up fighting against human beings. This has outstanding VFX and will definitely get your attention.
Synopsis for Rise from Vimeo: In the near future, sentient robots are targeted for elimination after they develop emotional symmetry to humans and a revolutionary war for their survival begins. Rise is a proof-of-concept short film created by David Karlak (on Twitter @DavidKarlak). The short stars actors Anton Yelchin and Rufus Sewell, though we're not sure if they will end up being in the feature version of this. The short film was made public this week despite Karlak working on developing it at WB since 2012. Seems similar to Blade Runner or even Chappie in a way. For more info, visit the official site or the Facebook page.
Wednesday 30 March 2016
First 'War Dogs Trailer Has Jonah Hill and Miles Teller Running Guns
Formerly known as Arms and the Dudes, the first trailer for the dark comedy War Dogs has just arrived. The Hangover franchise director Todd Phillips is at the helm of the film which sees two twentysomething men (Jonah Hill and Miles Teller) getting caught up in the insane world of arms dealing, only to land them in the Middle East. This looks like it's going to be a riot, something akin to The Wolf of Wall Street meets Charlie Wilson's War. Just the prospect of Jonah Hill and Miles Teller in a movie together had me sold, but this looks pretty spectacular. And hey, Bradley Cooper is in it too. Watch now!
Here's the first trailer for War Dogs from Warner Bros. Pictures:
Based on a true story, War Dogs follows two friends in their early 20s (Jonah Hill and Miles Teller) living in Miami Beach during the Iraq War who exploit a little-known government initiative that allows small businesses to bid on U.S. Military contracts. Starting small, they begin raking in big money and are living the high life. But the pair gets in over their heads when they land a 300 million dollar deal to arm the Afghan Military—a deal that puts them in business with some very shady people, not the least of which turns out to be the U.S. Government. Todd Phillips directs War Dogs and Warner Bros. releases it August 19th.
6 Filmmaking Tips From Jeff Nichols
Jeff Nichols may not be a high profile filmmaker. He didn’t immediately go from indie breakout to tentpole director (though he was in talks to direct Aquaman at one point). Instead, by staying small he’s been able to maintain control. All the way from inception through post-production. He writes his movies, he directs his movies and he gets final cut on his movies.
That hasn’t held him down as an artist. His latest, Midnight Special, is his first studio picture, and he didn’t have to compromise his control to get there. It helps that his movies, which also include Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter and Mud, are very good. And for Warner Bros., it also helped that he knew how to make a marketable genre film for very little money.
Eventually Nichols will wind up doing something much bigger, and he’ll probably still have relative freedom and authority. Many filmmakers would love to get to that point. Well, he makes it sound kind of easy. Maybe it is if you have the talent. Either way, if you’re interested in reaching his ever-escalating level of success, check out the six pieces of advice culled from interviews below.
There’s Still a Benefit to Going to Film School
Nichols studied film production at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, graduating a few years behind David Gordon Green and his posse, including Jody Hill, Danny McBride and Craig Zobel, and a few years ahead of Aaron Katz and his collaborators. Like them, Nichols met a lot of people there whom he continued to work with professionally after graduation.
He explains here why he’s glad about his choice to go to UNCSA, from a 2013 interview with Crave:
I needed it. I found value in meeting all these people. They’re all my crew. They’re my creative collaborators and that’s worth paying for. And the bonus is, then they show you the lingo and everything else because yeah, sure, don’t go to film school, okay, that’s fine. Go make your movie, that’s fine too, but then if your movie’s good, then you’re going to be stepping up into more of a mechanism that’s reflected of how typical movies are made and it helps to have that knowledge. But whatever, there are a million ways to skin a cat.
Building such a team also keeps him in check as a filmmaker. Yes, he’s in control of the movie and it’s primarily his vision and baby, but he believes in filmmaking as a collaborative art and dismisses the idea that he’s an auteur. He talks about having this kind of core team — not just made up of old classmates, but that’s where it begins — in a recent interview with The Verge here:
Anyone who knows anything about making movies knows that that’s not how it works. I’ve had Chad Keith as my production designer from Take Shelter, and he did Midnight Special and he just did Loving, and he influences so many things about the way we make films. Adam Stone has [shot] all my films, and now I have Erin Binnick, who is my costume designer on Midnight Special. These are people who I hope to carry with me for my entire professional career. You can’t underestimate the impact they have when you [ask their opinion] on set, and they’re like, “let me think about that,” and they give an honest answer, because they’ve been with you forever, so they aren’t trembling in their boots because “Jeff Nichols The Auteur” is about to squirt out an amazing idea. They get it. I’m just Jeff and we’re just trying to make something honest.
There’s Also a Benefit to Just Doing It
As Nichols says above, there a million ways to skin a cat and you can just go make your movie instead of attending film school. Either way, he does think just going out and shooting something yourself is important. Here’s what he told Indiewire back in 2008 as his critically acclaimed and award-winning debut feature was about to open in theaters:
Pick a date and start shooting. The most important thing I did for Shotgun Stories was to set a start date when I had nothing to go on. It forced me to make decisions and it added momentum to a situation that otherwise wouldn’t have had it. A lot of low budget filmmaking is about creative compromise. Picking a start date initiates that process and adds accountability to all involved.
In the much more recent video below, Nichols talks about how he’d have liked to work in the studio system of the 1940s and 1950s, but the world we live in now is very different. “I’m a director because I directed a movie,” he says. “And if I have any advice for people it’s, ‘Go write something; go direct it. If that’s what you have a desire to do, go do it. If the movie stinks, just put it on the shelf and try to do it again.’”
First 'Ben-Hur' Trailer: Chariot Racing Is the Only Way to Get Revenge
It's time for another epic where a slave has to take down the Roman empire a notch by getting revenge on someone who betrayed them. Ben-Hur is a new adaptation of the classic novel by Lew Wallace about two brothers who take their rivalry into the arena of chariot-racing. Judah Ben-Hur (Jack Huston) was meant to be a prince, but his brother Messala (Toby Kebbell) betrayed him by accusing Judah of treason. After a bout with slavery, Judah is back, but now the only way to really get vengeance is to take him down in a chariot race so Rome's best can see him stripped of his glory. It's Gladiator, but with more chariots. Watch?
Here's the first trailer for the remake of Ben-Hur from Paramount Pictures:
Ben-Hur is the epic story of Judah Ben-Hur (Jack Huston of "Boardwalk Empire"), a prince falsely accused of treason by his adopted brother Messala (Toby Kebbell), an officer in the Roman army. Stripped of his title, separated from his family and the woman he loves (Nazanin Boniadi), Judah is forced into slavery. After years at sea, Judah returns to his homeland to seek revenge, but finds redemption. The new adaptation of Lew Wallace’s novel, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ also stars Morgan Freeman and Rodrigo Santoro (300). Paramount Pictures releases the epic late this summer on August 12th. Interested at all?
'Alice Through the Looking Glass' Trailer: It's a Race Against Time
Let me just say that I was not a fan of Tim Burton's rehash of Alice in Wonderland in 2010. It felt like more of the same gothic circus junk that Burton has pushed before, but without any of the originality that made some of his earlier work great. However, the new trailer for the sequel, Alice Through the Looking Glass, has my full attention. Maybe it's Jefferson Airplane's track "White Rabbit" that's making everything work better than it should, but this is a very well-cut trailer. Maybe director James Bobin is what this sequel needed to make Wonderland, and hopefully Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter, interesting again. Watch!
Here's the new trailer for Alice Through the Looking Glass from Disney:
You can still see the first teaser trailer for Alice Through the Looking Glass here, plus the Super Bowl spot.
Directed by James Bobin (The Muppets) with a screenplay by Linda Woolverton (Maleficent, Alice In Wonderland, Beauty and the Beast), the film "revisits Lewis Carroll’s beloved stories with an all-new new tale that travels back to Underland—and back in Time." Sacha Baron Cohen as Time and Rhys Ifans as the Mad Hatter's father Zanik Hightopp, join the returning cast, which includes Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter – Hatter Tarrant Hightopp, Anne Hathaway as the White Queen – Mirana, Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen, Mia Wasikowska as the title character of Alice Kingsleigh, Matt Lucas as Tweedledee and Tweedledum, with Stephen Fry as the Cheshire Cat, and a score by Danny Elfman. Disney will debut Alice Through the Looking Glass in theaters (in 3D) on May 27th early this summer.
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