Showing all posts about film
100 years a film by John Malkovich locked in a safe for 100 years
12 August 2022
Written by American actor John Malkovich, who also stars with Marko Zaror and Shuya Chang, and directed by Robert Rodriguez, 100 Years, teaser/trailer, is a film made in 2015 that will not be released — all things remaining equal — until 2115.
The only physical copy of the movie was placed in a time controlled safe at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016, which apparently will not open until Monday 18 November 2115. While details of the plot remain sketchy, it seems a certain brand of cognac features prominently.
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entertainment, film, John Malkovich, Robert Rodriguez, trailer, video
Trailer for Blaze a film by Del Kathryn Barton
2 August 2022
Sydney based Australian artist Del Kathryn Barton has turned her hand to filmmaking. Her debut feature Blaze, trailer, which premiered at this year’s Sydney Film Festival, tells the story of a girl, Blaze (Julia Savage), who retreats into an imaginary realm after witnessing an act of violence.
Although she has made a couple of short films previously, Barton is probably best known for winning the Archibald Prize for portraiture in 2008, with her painting You are what is most beautiful about me, a self portrait with Kell and Arella.
Looking at the trailer though, I couldn’t help but thinking Blaze — which opens in Australian cinemas on Thursday 25 August 2022 — is like one of Barton’s artworks come to life.
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Del Kathryn Barton, entertainment, film, Julia Savage, trailer, video
Restored colourised 100 year old film of well known cities
30 July 2022
Taking one hundred year old film footage found in the Prelinger Archives, YouTuber NASS has added colour and ambient sound to create an eight minute slice-of-life glimpse of cities across Europe and America, as it was in the 1920s.
New York, Chicago, San Francisco, London, Berlin, Stockholm, Copenhagan, Amsterdam, Nice, Geneva, Milan, and Venice, are featured, along with Paris, and some aerial footage of the French capital. Today that would be as simple as sending a drone up, but one hundred years ago the undertaking would have required a little more planning.
The novelty of being on camera, in an age when cameras were still something a novelty, is also apparent. In one segment a police officer appears to be amused at being filmed, as does a boy in another part of the clip. Today a film crew on the street would probably go virtually unnoticed.
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A trailer for Not Okay a film by Quinn Shephard
30 July 2022
What’s a wanna-be writer who no one takes seriously, who also aspires to be an influencer, despite only having a handful of followers, to do? Fake it, of course. Fake it til she makes it. What else?
But.
Be careful what you wish for. Twenty-something New Yorker Danni (Zoey Deutch), finds she has bitten off more than she can chew when a faux trip to Paris goes horribly awry, in Not Okay, trailer, the second feature of American actor and filmmaker Quinn Shephard.
This is one I’ll be looking out for on streaming (no word to date of an Australian cinematic release).
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film, Quinn Shephard, trailer, video, Zoey Deutch
A trailer for The Princess a documentary by Ed Perkins
27 July 2022
Directed by British documentary maker Ed Perkins, The Princess, trailer, which opens in Australian cinemas on Friday 12 August 2022, looks at the life of Diana, Princess of Wales.
Made up mostly of archival footage, in a similar style to Asif Kapadia’s 2010 documentary Senna, The Princess also examines the lasting influence Diana’s life, and death, had on the British monarchy.
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documentary, Ed Perkins, film, history, trailer, video
Where the Crawdads Sing adaptation fails to impress critics
23 July 2022
Where the Crawdads Sing, the 2018 debut novel of North Carolina based wildlife scientist Delia Owens, was a hit on Bookstagram, but the recently released film adaptation is not faring quite so well.
Both the major film review aggregation services, Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, score the Olivia Newman directed feature forty-two and thirty-five out of one hundred, respectively. In other words, readers of the book loved the story, but film critics are far from impressed by its big-screen counterpart.
Carlos Aguilar, writing for The Wrap, described the adaptation as bland and mediocre:
Submerged in the muggy waters of the North Carolina marsh — which per the voiceover, is not a swamp — British actress Daisy Edgar-Jones tries to save “Where the Crawdads Sing,” the film adaption of Delia Owens’ best-selling novel, from drowning in its own bland mediocrity.
Rachel LaBonte, film writer for Screen Rant, notes that while the adaptation is largely faithful to the novel, much of the book’s tension fails to transpose to film:
Additionally, in its attempt to bring as many book moments to life as possible, the movie finds itself grappling with a few awkward moments that, while reading fine on the page, don’t exactly translate well to a visual medium.
Meanwhile, Leigh Monson, writing for The A.V. Club, was more positive, lauding Daisy Edgar-Jones’ portrayal of protagonist Kya, the so-called “Marsh Girl”, although she found the pacing of the film at odds with the novel:
The weakest link in the cinematic adaptation is the courtroom procedural that feels crowbarred between bits of Kya’s history. In a novel, chapter breaks can signal a natural demarcation between disparate story beats, but in a two-hour film, the transition between scenes should feel more natural, or at least thematically interconnected. Courtroom scenes pop up without warning, and they only function in parallel to, and never in conjunction with, the flashback scenes that proceed or follow them.
The consensus among critics mirror LaBonte and Monson’s thoughts, the film closely resembles the book, yet doesn’t quite excite in the same way. A case of so close, yet so far, perhaps. It seems there are some novels that are simply best not adapted to film.
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books, Delia Owens, film, Olivia Newman
A trailer for Nope, the 2022 film by Jordan Peele
22 July 2022
Nope, trailer, being released in many parts of the world today, is the third feature of American actor and filmmaker Jordan Peele, and is being billed as a sci-fi horror comedy:
After random objects falling from the sky result in the death of their father, ranch-owning siblings OJ and Emerald Haywood attempt to capture video evidence of an unidentified flying object with the help of tech salesman Angel Torres and documentarian Antlers Holst.
But what does the title Nope mean? That, nope, there are no aliens in the film, because they don’t really exist in the first place? Nope, I don’t think so.
Peele chose Nope as the title because he wanted to acknowledge movie audiences and their expected reactions to the film. He also said, however, that he had considered titling the film Little Green Men to reference a theme in the film about humanity’s “monetization of spectacle.”
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film, Jordan Peele, science fiction, trailer, video
4k restoration of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors films
12 July 2022
Late Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy of films, Blue, White, and Red, have been given the full 4k restoration treatment.
Released in quick succession between 1993 and 1994, and starring Juliette Binoche, Julie Delpy, and Irène Jacob, the trilogy became an arthouse sensation, with Red, the third and final film in the series, collecting a coveted Metascore of one hundred.
The trilogy looks absolutely stunning in 4k, if the trailer is anything to go by. This I’m looking out for.
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film, Irène Jacob, Julie Delpy, Juliette Binoche, Krzysztof Kieslowski, trailer
A trailer for Clerks III by Kevin Smith, Clerks meta sequel
8 July 2022
Clerks III, trailer, billed as the “meta sequel” to the dark 1994 comedy Clerks (and Clerks II from 2006), is being released in the United States in September, with Kevin Smith returning to direct.
Clerks III sees the original gang, Dante Hicks, Veronica, Jay, and Silent Bob, reunite after Randal Graves suffers a heart attack, and asks his friends to make a tribute film about the convenience store where they first met nearly thirty years ago.
I have to say I’m not sure about Clerks III. This could be because the scenes presented in the trailer seem overly contrived (even though maybe they’re meant to be), or the choice to film in colour, in contrast to the black and white of the first movie, Clerks, feels out of place.
But let’s see.
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Book detective Toby Wools-Cobb will help find that lost book
1 July 2022
It sounds like a scene from Adam Brooks’ 2008 film Definitely Maybe, where Ryan Reynolds’ character trawls through American bookshops, searching for a particular copy of Jane Eyre. But for Launceston, Tasmania, based bookshop owner Toby Wools-Cobb, it is something the self-professed book detective does all the time.
Mr Wools-Cobb uses the investigative skills from his career as a librarian and the archaeological expertise from his studies in Egyptology to find copies of books from his shop, Quixotic Books. Special algorithms help him scan the millions of titles listed in publisher databases, but he also must understand the “life cycle of books to figure out where they may have ended up”.
Some of Wools-Cobb’s clients are people who sold a little-known book, perhaps at a garage sale, and are trying to locate it years later. And incredibly, he often succeeds in tracking down a copy.
“I managed to find some information that the author had partnered with a book chain to do a promotion,” he said. He tracked down the shop and asked the staff if any promotional stock had been left behind in the storeroom. “They were saying, ‘Oh, we don’t have it in stock on our system’, but sure enough, they go out and sheepishly come back and say, ‘We’ve got a whole box of them’.
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