Here’s an interesting piece by Yossi Alpher, one of the victims of Sasha Baron Cohen’s latest guerrilla-filmmaking outing. Titled Bruno, it follows Cohen’s narcissistic, very gay German fashion reporter as he once again interviews unsuspecting experts, in this instance about the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Though you’d think folks would be on to him by [...]
Yesterday, I posted a clip from Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) that showed the dialog scene from a classic Hollywood perspective. The conversants are established half-facing each other, and after a master shot, the dialog proceeds in shot/reverse-shot fashion, with alternating takes shot over the shoulder of the actors. The lighting is [...]
Watching Wong Kar Wai’s My Blueberry Nights, I got to thinking about what David Bordwell and others have called the “Classical Hollywood Style.” It refers to a collection of techniques or rules that work together to enable smooth, unobtrusive film-making that does not call attention to itself.
Here’s a scene from Hitchcock’s North by Northwest [...]
OK, let’s get the obvious out of the way: Norah Jones can’t act. She is beautiful, and she can sing like an angel, but she can’t act. She’s inexpressive, a blank canvas, a tabula rasa. And when she is called upon to emote, she’s too obvious, like a kid who’s been [...]
Take two Irish hit-men — one twitchy, the other sentimental — and one ferocious Brit, and what do you get? Besides a civil war, I mean? In Bruges, of course: the debut feature by London-born Irish playwright Martin McDonagh.
The two hit-men, Ray and Ken, are played by Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson. [...]
Editor’s note: before being produced by a Romanian company, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days was pitched to a Hollywood studio. Here’s an account of the meeting, taken from a clandestine tape recording made by the executive.
The vice-president for development sits across a big desk from the producer. His chair is slightly [...]
Nobody was better at composing for the 4:3 frame than Akira Kurosawa. Like many of the directors of the day, he routinely used normal to slightly wide lenses; with the advent of widescreen, he abandoned them in favor of telephotos, and rarely looked back.
Here’s a scene from Ikiru (1952) that illustrates. The protagonist [...]
In 1939, The Rules of the Game was such a failure with the French public that they threw chairs at the screen and set newspapers alight in the theaters. It wasn’t much more popular with critics, and in 1940, director Jean Renoir fled Paris to make films abroad. He ended up in — [...]
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