I had a really great time at the cinema in 2014, and these are my top five favorite films.
I loved this film! I went to see it three times, it moved and inspired me, and even brought me to tears. Interstellar feels like a return to the cinema of the past. It’s full of grand imagery, thundering romantic music cues and features an epic science fiction adventure plot that has very real human stakes.
Water becomes beautiful at sunset and dusk. This film is made up of some test footage I shot for the company I work for, both at a Lake where I live and a bay up in Door County, Wisconsin. I used a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera and various retro 35mm film lenses.
Avengers: Age of Ultron
Avengers: Age of Ultron is as close as filmmaking has come to capturing the feel of reading a super hero comic book. It’s jammed full of thrilling action scenes, muddled plots and subplots, sci-fi techno babble, obscure character cameos, and iconic images. An elaborate fight scene near the end is staged in slow-motion, almost like the individual panels of a comic. It’s not a great film, and it’s certainly not as well conceived or paced as it’s predecessor, but it sure is a joy to behold if you’re a fan of the genre, and especially so if you like super hero comics.
The Holga is a cheap plastic film camera with a plastic lens that captures dreamy vintage images. I own both a 120 and 35mm Holga and I shoot with them extensively. Below is an image that I captured with my 35mm model.
The pine woods by the house where I grew up have always fascinated me. I used to go there by myself and wander for hours, padding quietly over the soft floor of needles through the gloom, staring at the crisscrossed fallen branches and the textures in the bark. The trees in this wood were originally planted for lumber, and they stand in surreal ordered lines, like the columns of an ancient church. They inspired me to write a narrative poem about vikings and a script idea that became my Senior thesis film. In high school I shot a silly horror film there, and I’ve returned several times since to shoot other projects. A while back I returned to these woods to shoot a short demo video with a Sony NEX 5 and a soft focus lens adapter. I love the look I got with this set-up, and I hope to recreate it for a future short film. For now, here’s the demo video.
It was extremely cold and windy yesterday, but nevertheless I headed to the beach to shoot demo footage with the Fotodiox ND Throttle, a lens adapter with a variable neutral density filter built in. This filter allows me to shoot stopped down even in bright sunlight–most of the footage in the video below was shot at f/2.8–giving me an extremely shallow depth of field.
One of my responsibilities as a video producer at Fotodiox is to demo new gear. It’s a valuable exercise because, along with creating demo images to promote our products, it helps me sharpen my photo and video skills.
I had the opportunity to teach a film acting class for an after-school drama group this winter, and the result is this film. I’ve always wanted to make an old-school science fiction film with miniature model work in it, so that’s the script I wrote for my class, with the cheesy title The Children of Space.
I went to school in Greenville, South Carolina, and one of my favorite pastimes was to wander the back roads of that town. Unlike the north, roads in the south meander wherever they will, backtracking and crisscrossing, delving down into ravines and climbing up sudden hills. A single turn off a main road would find me plunging into a vine-choked valley, creeping past a sun-baked cemetery, or wandering behind the walk-out basements of old YMCA gyms and tree-bound churches. Green streams trickled from old pipes through narrow crevices, Confederate soldier statues stared down from half-forgotten monuments, and red-brick ruins loomed in the thick brush.
Here are some mini reviews based on films I’ve watched on Netflix over the past year.
Her Master’s Voice
2012. Directed by Nina Conti
This is one of the most impressive documentaries I’ve seen, and one I’ve wanted to go back to again and again. Nina Conti is a skilled British ventriloquist who works wonders with a simple monkey puppet. She’s beautiful and sharply funny, and much of her humor is based on self-mockery, picking apart the absurdity of her art form. The man who trained her passed away shortly before this film was made, inspiring her to travel to a conference in America dedicated to ventriloquism that he always wanted her to go to, as well as a home for ventriloquist puppets whose owners have died–a strangely haunting place. She brings her monkey along for the ride, as well as a plethora of her master’s old puppets, all of whom she gives a voice to during her travels. The film is very intimate, composed mostly of shots Nina must have filmed herself, as she deals with her complex feelings for her old master by talking to his old puppets. We also get to see the convention and a couple of great interviews with Mrs. Conti’s fellow ventriloquists. Her Master’s Voice is both a deeply personal film and an informative glimpse at the odd world of ventriloquism. It’s slightly sad, very funny, and a joy to watch.
One of my biggest hobbies is collecting and shooting with vintage cameras. Antique and camera shops are a fine place to start when I’m looking to add to my collection, but my favorite haunts are rummage sales and thrift stores where I never know what gems I’m going to find, or how ridiculously under-priced those gems might be.
I haven’t done one of these in a while. I still owe you a Summer 2014 Films Part 2 review, but my computer recently crashed and I lost the file. Maybe I’ll post a re-write eventually. In the mean time…
Birdman
2014. Directed By Alejandro González Iñárritu
At its core, Birdman is an observation of man and his sense of worth. It repeatedly asks the question “Is it important to be important?” That question is dodged more than it’s answered, and the story often seems to be more interested in observing the intricacies of stage acting and actors, or mocking popular cinema, or naively criticizing critics. When it does get focused, it’s a fairly intense, emotional observation, with a camera that gets right up into actors faces as they wax eloquent or scream angrily. It offers few answers but raises a lot of engaging questions. The actors are all great. There’s a drum soundtrack that’s killer. It’s definitely worth a watch.
There’s a moment where I received an old camera in a musty box. It waited under my lecture hall seat and I opened it after in the crowded lobby, full of nervous energy and marveling at the weight of the thing. My friend was quickly informed and we toyed with it in his dorm room all that warm Autumn afternoon.
I think I’ve finally figured out what’s wrong with filmmakers–many of them just don’t have good sense. Picture this: it’s a year from now and you’re watching the new Star Wars film. There’s a scene where something stupid happens–I mean really stupid, like Chewbacca doing a back-flip in space and blowing Darth Vader’s clone away with a giant rocket launcher. You’re annoyed because this “just doesn’t feel like Star Wars.” Your friends laugh at you and say “of course it does! It’s a popcorn flick after all, what were you expecting? It’s pure cinema!” But is it? Would a film almost entirely devoted to action mayhem really be on par with Lucas’s original Star Wars classic? I don’t think it would be, and here’s why.
My friend Scott McElroy has created a strange character named Gary Fraptious. He’s a bearded, aviator glasses wearing 20-going-on-60-something with a thick southern accent who speaks mostly gibberish. Scott and I put our heads together a while back and decided to feature this character in a series of unrelated skits on our YouTube comedy channel. Here are a couple of our favorites.
The Aches recently entered NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert Contest, and they asked me to shoot two live performance videos of them to submit to the judges. Because I only have one Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera, and we wanted to capture the performances entirely live, I used my Canon T2i as a wide angle and reserved the Pocket for close-ups. I still have a lot to learn about the Pocket’s color science, and matching the footage from the two cameras was quite a chore, but I managed to get them pretty close. I used my Zoom H1 to record the sound. It’s a surprisingly great little audio recorder and the band was very happy with the quality I managed to capture. Below are both videos.
I’m thinking about canceling my Netflix subscription. Why? Why not a little history first?
Years ago people would dress up to go to a stage play. Attending the theater was a special occasion, a way to relax after a hard week, or even month of labor. With the advent of cinema nothing much changed. Most people treated movies like they treated theater—as a special night of entertainment. Going to the movies was still at most a once a week event, and people still dressed up.