The art of Steadicam →
Really gorgeous ten minute supercut of some of the best Steadicam shots over the past forty years. As expected, Scorcese and Kubrick films are well represented here.
Really gorgeous ten minute supercut of some of the best Steadicam shots over the past forty years. As expected, Scorcese and Kubrick films are well represented here.
Very engrossing, well done retelling of how Tarantino’s breakthrough film was made, written by Mark Seal over at Vanity Fair. Take for instance, how they secured John Travolta for a starring role:
So, when he was told that Tarantino wanted to meet with him, he went to the director’s address, on Crescent Heights Boulevard.
Tarantino recalls, “I open the door, and he says, ‘O.K., let me describe your apartment to you. Your bathroom has this kind of tile, and da-da-da-da. The reason I know this is, this is the apartment that I lived in when I first moved to Hollywood. This is the apartment I got Welcome Back, Kotter in [the TV series that made him a star].’ ”
They talked until sunrise. Tarantino told him he had two films in mind for him. “A vampire movie called From Dusk Till Dawn and Pulp Fiction,” says Travolta, who replied, “I’m not a vampire person.”
Geoff Manaugh, writing on his BLDGBLOG (“building blog”) about Die Hard and architecture:
The majority of that film’s interest, I’d suggest, comes precisely through its depiction of architectural space: John McClane, a New York cop on his Christmas vacation, moves through a Los Angeles high-rise in basically every conceivable way but passing through its doors and hallways.
In light of the apparent mess that is A Good Day to Die Hard, it’s great to go back and revisit what made the original so amazing. Usually most attention is lavished on Bruce Willis and the tight direction, but Manaugh really illustrates a new whole angle I’ve never considered.
The whole film is a visual treat, but I remember seeing that opening sequence for the first time in theaters distinctly. I still occasionally pop in Run Lola Run‘s soundtrack today.
I’m not a filmmaker, nor do I have any intention of starting down that path, but I found these series of videos from lightsfilmschool.com pretty fascinating. The first video breaks down the 180 degree rule, a key guideline with two character film scenes. The second looks at various distances to shoot characters, introducing some terminology and motivations behind each distance.
Great series of images from Bond’s latest spawned from this Reddit thread. I’m rooting for Deakins, the look of that film honestly is at least half the reason I’d place it in my top five Bond films of all time.
The FontFeed‘s Yves Peters looks at typographic choices made on poster art for recent Hollywood releases. Interesting to see the ubiquitous Helvetica Neue put to both great (Zero Dark Thirty) and not so great (Django Unchained) use.
The A.V. Club‘s Todd VanDerWerff:
But I’ll still miss the idea of everybody watching everything together. With every new freedom comes a kind of loss, and sometimes, those can’t be quantified. We’ve been consuming content in serialized fashion for centuries now—people made weekly visits to theaters long before the novel was even a glint in Cervantes’ eye—and that habit will likely die hard. And maybe I’m being a stick-in-the-mud here, tied to a method of TV watching that was already in its death throes when I was a child. But when I can watch a great episode of TV with my watercooler—real or virtual—around me, that increases the value of it to me, increases the sense that I’m a part of something.
This is a long, long read, but it’s the smartest breakdown I’ve read of what’s really going on in Shane Carruth’s cult time travel film. Makes the wait for Upstream Color a lot harder.
If you’ve got twelve minutes and dig science fiction films, watch this Vimeo video essay by Steven Benedict. It jumps around in its coverage, but on a surface level it illustrates why Blade Runner still holds up as one of my favorite films.