Showing posts with label dunkirk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dunkirk. Show all posts

Saturday, March 3, 2018

the 2017 jdb awards


picture

"The fact that the entertainment industry is not necessarily inclusive of the African-American experience is a similar form of neglect and is a symptom of a deeper problem. I wanted to make a film that acknowledges neglect and inaction in the face of the real race monster. In the process, I wanted to give a horror movie to everyone, but really to black audiences, who are loyal horror fans. We watch movies, screaming, “Get out!” in dark rooms at this screen that we cannot affect. It’s a symbol for that, which stops us from action." -Jordan Peele











nominees









director

Jordan Peele, GET OUT


"There’s so many things that have to happen for me to just do my job. To do acting. There’s so many pieces. So many stars have to align.  But a major piece (that) has to be there for me to do my job is belief and someone believed in me... I don’t know why we live in a world where because of who I am and the hue I have people don’t. And that’s tough. So when Jordan did it meant the world to me and I just didn’t want to let him down." -Daniel Kaluuya






nominees

Paul Thomas Anderson, PHANTOM THREAD
Greta Gerwig, LADY BIRD
Luca Guadagnino, CALL ME BY YOUR NAME
Andrey Zvyagintsev, LOVELESS







actor


Timothée Chalamet, CALL ME BY YOUR NAME


"There is a universally human quality to Elio... There’s a tension on the surface of his existence, and he’s in a transitionary period in his life, becoming a man and dealing with feelings of sexual impulse for the first time. It felt rare to read a story about a young person who’s this complex. It’s no surface representation of what young people are. And as an actor, you seize that kind of opportunity." -Timothée Chalamet






nominees

Daniel Day-Lewis, PHANTOM THREAD
Adan Jodorowsky, ENDLESS POETRY 
Daniel Kaluuya, GET OUT
Robert Pattinson, GOOD TIME








actress

Cynthia Nixon, A QUIET PASSION


"What’s amazing about A Quiet Passion is that we’re showing Emily in very different stages of her life. We begin with her youthful optimism and hope and we just follow her until the end of her life, when she’s already bitterly disappointed and in terrible pain, suffering from a horrible illness. There are a lot of different Emily Dickinsons out there. She and her poetry have such a following that it’s easy to find different camps of people who feel that they know Emily so well. But each of them knows a different version of their favorite poetess." -Cynthia Nixon





nominees

Vicky Krieps, PHANTOM THREAD
Saoirse Ronan, LADY BIRD
Meryl Streep, THE POST
Daniela Vega, A FANTASTIC WOMAN







supporting actor

Armie Hammer, CALL ME BY YOUR NAME




"I'm not gonna lie, dancing scenes are pretty tough. ... It's really funny about filming a dancing scene because most people who aren't in the business don't realize that there is absolutely no music going on. If you're lucky, you get a click track that just is literally just clicking so that you can keep a rhythm of what you're doing. But then having no music, being completely sober, having everyone stare at you — it does not for an easy scene make. ... And I'm 6'5", so I feel like I'm ... flailing more than anything else. But so much of that scene was about watching someone be totally enraptured and just lost in a moment and enjoying themselves, because that's one of the things that Oliver is able to do that Elio really appreciates." -Armie Hammer







nominees

Willem Dafoe, THE FLORIDA PROJECT
Garrett Hedlund, MUDBOUND 
Barry Keoghan, THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER 
Michael Stuhlbarg, CALL ME BY YOUR NAME








supporting actress

Laurie Metcalf, LADY BIRD



“I loved that it was a very balanced relationship, that one of them wasn’t just a monster,” Metcalf said. “I think she’s being a great mom and doing everything within her powers to help her child succeed... It’s all coming from a positive place. It’s just a moment in their lives where there’s so much miscommunication and frustration and tension that everything escalates too fast.” -Laurie Metcalf



nominees

Joanna Bacon, A QUIET PASSION 
Kirin Kiki, AFTER THE STORM 
Melissa Leo, NOVITIATE
Lesley Manville, PHANTOM THREAD







original screenplay

Jordan Peele, GET OUT



"The first time I actually put pen to paper to write this script was three years ago, so the whole idea was marinating for awhile. Then in the shooting of the movie and the drafts that went into shooting it, the last 5, 10% sort of came together. I pitched the movie before I wrote it, and I pitched the movie as you see it, except for a couple of real distinct differences. But that’s my style. I only actually put pen to paper when I know the big picture." -Jordan Peele





nominees

Paul Thomas Anderson, PHANTOM THREAD
Terence Davies, A QUIET PASSION 
Greta Gerwig, LADY BIRD
Kogonada, COLUMBUS






adapted screenplay


James Ivory, CALL ME BY YOUR NAME




"I just sat with the novel and I would just write out the script in longhand. I would just go through it bit by bit, scene by scene. Sometimes I would invent things. I mean the whole business of the statue that they find at the bottom of the lake, that's all an invented thing. You have to drop great chunks of things from the book and come up with other things. But it's a slow process.

I would basically just write in longhand, and after I got something that I liked, I would type that up on a typewriter. I never work on a computer. I can't write on a computer. It's just not possible for me to do that. And so gradually, bit by bit by bit, over many, many months, it all came together." -James Ivory






nominees

Hampton Fancher & Michael Green, BLADE RUNNER 2049
François Ozon & Philippe Piazzo, FRANTZ
Dee Rees & Virgil Williams, MUDBOUND
Aaron Sorkin, MOLLY’S GAME



ensemble

GET OUT



"Watching a film like Get Out, it’s clear that Terri Taylor put a tremendous amount of thought into each role, mirroring the director’s wit and darkly subversive tone with the actors she put forth. Anchored by a searing and inspired performance by Daniel Kaluuya, each actor walks the fine line between naturalism and absurdity. Their grounded performances disarm and create more dissonance as the audience is riveted to the unfolding twists and turns. From the opening scene, Lakieth Stanfield’s understated banter shocks us into a reality where things are not as they seem. Allison Williams’ lighthearted charm and effervescent chemistry with Daniel later makes the turn all the more devastating. The veteran heavyweight Catherine Keener stuns in a revelatory role, the unassuming Bradley Whitford leads us effortlessly, while the dynamic Caleb Landry Jones brings danger and LilRel Howery provides a crucial and comedic link. Each and every actor adds intrigue and heightens the unfolding drama without tipping their hand. And while they have very different backgrounds and styles, on screen the actors effortlessly inhabit the same shifting landscape and display both comedic and dramatic chops." -Sarah Finn






nominees

BPM (Beats per Minute)
LADY BIRD
MUDBOUND








foreign language film

LOVELESS



"I’m not a teacher, here to preach to viewers. I don’t really think about the lessons that people take away from watching my films. Just like any other film, Loveless is basically all the concentrated experience of somebody else’s emotions and reflections of life, which we offer to the viewer. They can sit on comfortable chairs and all of this is given to them on a plate but in a concentrated form. They can watch somebody else’s destiny, somebody else’s mistakes. Loveless, is all about how people communicate in their relationships. Of course it is then up to the individual, how they will take and use all the experiences they view and they will form whatever thoughts they want." -Andrey Zvyagintsev





nominees

BPM 
AFTER THE STORM 
ENDLESS POETRY 
FRANTZ






documentary

IN TRANSIT



"If life is a journey, we are all fellow travelers. When I have journeyed on trains, I have seen people come together who in no other way would possibly meet. On trains, we discover a unique intimacy, where normal conventions dissolve and we open our lives to complete strangers. Maybe it is because the train holds us in limbo, a moment of truth between stations.

For over thirty years, it has been my dream to make a film about trains. Really, it is a film about the unity of humankind, in which viewers come to experience directly the feelings, hopes, and problems of others. And through this process of getting to know each other, we build the foundation for loving one another." -Albert Maysles







nominees

FACES PLACES
I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO
STRONG ISLAND
UNCERTAIN 





cinematography

Elisha Christian, COLUMBUS


"The deliberate framing by Kogonada and cinematographer Elisha Christian emphasizes the interplay of space, structure, and the human form. People pose against the buildings, amble through their interiors, stare up at facades. Sensitive to the way we move in and relate to our environment, Columbus evokes a modernism its practitioners intended—an architecture that may be imposing and grounded in the theoretical, but is ultimately inextricable from a community’s life." -Elbert Ventura






nominees

Roger Deakins, BLADE RUNNER 2049
Mikhail Krichman, LOVELESS
Rachel Morrison, MUDBOUND 
Alexis Zabe, THE FLORIDA PROJECT 




film editing

Lee Smith, DUNKIRK



"With the rhythms of the film, if you put it in the wrong place it felt forced. Where it landed was where it worked the best. And we always knew he had an emotional cannon to fire. But it was a cannon that the film needed right there. You had to have that emotional rush because otherwise the tension, I think, would have probably killed some people. (laughs) It’s the same with the boys when they land back on the beach and a soldier walks into the surf and the guys build the pier out of the trucks and the guys being washed back onto the beach. That in itself was a kind of break. It was tense, but in a different way. So it was intriguing how that needed to be very carefully placed." -Lee Smith







nominees
Robin Campillo, BPM
Maxime Pozzi Garcia, FACES PLACES
Gregory Plotkin, GET OUT
Lynn True, IN TRANSIT 




score

Jonny Greenwood, PHANTOM THREAD




"I spent a long time trying to work out how to avoid pastiche, but at the same time ensure the music was in keeping with the 1950s. I even explored so-called Brixotica (the U.K. versions of Les Baxter) and other British trends from that period. The problem was that there’s no way to use much of it without being tongue-in-cheek—and if Reynolds is anything, he’s not that. He’s not ironic in any way. So instead, I focused on what I imagined Reynolds would have listen to at the time, and settled on things like the Glen Gould recordings of Bach and some of the string-heavy jazz records from that decade, like Ben Webster’s Music for Loving." -Jonny Greenwood



nominees

Michael Abels, GET OUT
Adan Jodorowsky, ENDLESS POETRY 
Oneohtrix Point Never, GOOD TIME 
Philippe Rombi, FRANTZ





song

“Visions of Gideon,” CALL ME BY YOUR NAME




“I’ve always been resistant to work in film... I think it’s because I’m always a little suspicious of the role of music in cinema. But Luca is an exception, because he’s one of those rare directors who uses music and sound so fiercely and with such mastery that you cannot imagine the films without the music.” -Sufjan Stevens



nominees

"If I Dare," BATTLE OF THE SEXES
“Mystery of Love,” CALL ME BY YOUR NAME
"The Pure and the Damned," GOOD TIME
"Was He Slow?", BABY DRIVER





art direction / set decoration


THE SHAPE OF WATER


"It had these symmetrical fire escapes radiating both ways from a central red door high up... And the idea was that the space above the theater at one time would’ve been a grander place for parties and got truncated and split in half in the '20s or '30s when it became a movie theater. And her side was used for film canister storage, and there’s some remnants of that with some racks near her bedroom that she’s modified for her shoe fetish. And what we decided was that her room fell to disuse and the other side [where Giles lives] got used and renovated... We thought there might’ve been a small fire that made the roof leak and water permeates that. And so the room got shaped over time by water. And it rotted the floors and stripped off the hardwood, and and we allowed for the sub floor below to have gaps for the movie theater lights to emanate through the floor boards." -Paul Austerberry




nominees
THE BAD BATCH
BLADE RUNNER 2049 
ENDLESS POETRY 
MOTHER!





costume design


Mark Bridges, PHANTOM THREAD



"I simply adore Phantom Thread’s costumes in the way they display both a superior level of craftsmanship and tempered character development, but perhaps this is a good time to remember that not everyone is thrilled by the creations of ‘The House of Woodcock’. In some reviews and through telling twitter chatter, I noticed that the film’s fashion was found a bit too rigid (and somewhat safe and boring, too), unlike, say, the signature designs of Cristóbal Balenciaga and Charles James; two designers that are often cited as inspirations for Phantom Thread. First, allow me to speculate that ‘rigidity’ was precisely the point Bridges was trying to make with the fashion of The House. Considering how particular and set-in-his-ways Reynolds is (he puts great emphasis on his breakfast rituals and is particular about his asparagus, for instance), it makes sense that his severity that jails the co-habitants of his house would also restrain his designs, the compilation of which unmistakably represents a singular point-of-view. In other words, kudos to Bridges, Phantom Thread’s ‘The House of Woodcock’ costumes unambiguously represent the authorship of Reynolds Woodcock, with several details, silhouettes and even garments thoughtfully repeating over the course of the film." -Tomris Laffly






nominees
Catherine Marchand, A QUIET PASSION
Pascale Montandon-Jodorowsky, ENDLESS POETRY 
Ann Roth, THE POST
Mary Zophres, BATTLE OF THE SEXES 





make-up & hair

ENDLESS POETRY







nominees

THE BAD BATCH 
LOGAN LUCKY
A QUIET PASSION 
RAW





sound

GET OUT



"As soon as I saw the dailies, I called the sound mixer and said, “I need a clean version of that teacup, so please go on set, take the teacup, and just stir the spoon around it.” It became this hypnotic sound we carried throughout. I wanted the sequence to work as a straight drama between Chris and Missy. And then, when it felt right — I think when Missy says, “What about your mother? Where were you when she died?” and he says, “I don’t want to think about that” — I cut to the teacup to show she’s turning the spoon, and then Chris acquiesces and says, “Home. Watching TV.” The teacup in that scene became a character." - Film Editor Gregory Plotkin





nominees

BABY DRIVER
BLADE RUNNER 2049
GOOD TIME
PHANTOM THREAD





sound editing

BABY DRIVER








nominees

THE BAD BATCH 
BLADE RUNNER 2049
DUNKIRK
MOTHER!





visual effects


BLADE RUNNER 2049



"We really wanted to use the new technology, but we also had miniatures, as a nod to the first movie, and to make it feel different. I did the same thing with matte paintings. We worked with Deak Ferrand from Rodeo [FX], one of the best matte painters in the world. It made the film seem warmer, and we really wanted the film to feel analogue.

We wanted to shoot as much as we could, and build as much set around the actors as we could, but we were limited by the size of our backlots, and the nature of what we’re doing is, no city looks like what we put in the movie. So we did massive amounts of work, and really, I think every wide shot in the film would be a visual effect. The point is that we had the new technology, but we consciously reined in our effects a bit, and I think we’re a better film for it. CG does shiny things well, but we didn’t like shiny things in our movie. We liked dirty, wet, grimy." -Visual Effects Supervisor John Nelson




nominees

OKJA
THE SHAPE OF WATER
STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI
WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES

Friday, September 29, 2017

10 favorite films so far of 2017

The studios' Oscar-hopefuls and festival darlings are about to ramp up and drop into theaters but before those make waves and suck up all the attention, I wanted to shout out some of my favorite films so far of the year.





AFTER THE STORM

Somber and dryly funny Japanese film about a faded writer turned private detective and compulsive gambler (Hiroshi Abe) who is struggling to deal with divorce and the gradually dwindling connection he has with his young son. Kirin Kiki as the protagonist's mother delivers a sly and moving performance. Known for his astute and thoughtful direction, the movie is helmed by Hirokazu Koreeda (Nobody Knows, Still Walking).




"I would say that After the Storm is much more informed by my personal life than my other movies. Much of it is based on memories of myself as a child. And then there’s the “How do I portray this?” approach, which is based on several things in Japanese tradition: the house, the way in which tatami is depicted. There’s a whole tradition of this and I certainly see myself as fitting in that history, the history of Japanese drama. I particularly relate to the films of Mikio Naruse and Shinichi Kamoshita, a person whose work I watched very much as a child, a director of family dramas for television. He’s about 80 now. And I feel more and more that I’m exploring Naruse, and feeling Kamoshita’s influence, in terms of how to create drama." -Hirokazu Koreeda






BATTLE OF THE SEXES

Emma Stone and Steve Carell are both excellent and engaging as the real-life dueling tennis stars. Alongside them are a game, eclectic ensemble in this rousing and touching sports drama based upon the famed and socially significant 1973 match. A crowdpleaser, yes, but one that rounds out its characters with insight and compassion and pays attention to detail in artful ways (Linus Sandgren's elegant photography and Mary Zophres' spot-on costumes are just some of the tech highlights).




"I think [the movie] caught the essence of the time, the essence of my life, and what I was dealing with. I think the movie caught the essence of what Bobby Riggs was going through, too. I think they caught the essence of what we were dealing with on and off the court — off being probably more interesting in some ways, I think. I thought Steve Carell did an amazing job of capturing the different layers of Bobby, and the authenticity and accuracy of him as a human being. And I think Emma captured who I am. It's kind of eerie actually. If I have my head down, not watching, just listening to the dialogue, her voice sounds exactly the same [as mine]. I don't enunciate well; she got it just right. And she got the phrasing, the tempo, all that in my speech patterns. She must have worked really hard on that." -Billie Jean King






DUNKIRK

Extraordinarily atypical of the traditional rah-rah war film, director Christopher Nolan and editor Lee Smith shape the complicated story of Dunkirk through separate points-of-view. It has the burnished look of a traditional picture but it's a bizarre piece, with a lucid, mostly dialogue-free narrative. It's also strangely distant from the subject matter with gorgeous visuals shot on 35 mm and a thrumming Hans Zimmer soundscape. The sense of wide-spread suffering is overshadowed by themes of isolation, small scope incidents of violence and the coalescing of disparate lives.




"It was very carefully orchestrated. Literally the film was always designed to be the third act of a movie. You drop into the action from the first frame, no backstory. There was no let up in the sense of dread, just this burning desire for survival without all of the exposition and the dialogue that would normally be attributed to a World War II film. We didn’t have the ability to crosscut between the war room and the generals and all of the traditional stuff you’d have in a war movie." -editor Lee Smith







ENDLESS POETRY

At 88, Alejandro Jodorowsky, best known for his acid westerns like El Topo, is frankly still doing whatever he pleases in his late career with this daring and vibrant autobiographical tale of his life in Chile. It's a messy movie with occasionally beautiful and sometimes garish visual imagery. Sometimes brash and brazen and occasionally a sentimental, meditative sojourn on mortality.




"I am not speaking in reality of myself... I am mixing art creation with real life... I'm not working with rationality, but with emotionality, to show the viewer his or her capacity for sublime feeling… in this case of me and my family, it is a public display of family therapy. And that is real. Not the film." -Alejandro Jodorowsky





GET OUT


Jordan Peele's perceptive, funny and masterful horror film is the best, complex and layered of the genre since The Silence of the Lambs. But it's also just a flat-out great picture overall, with a great ensemble and technical bravura--brimming with Peele's sobering, witty and ingenious ideas. As we watch young Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) stuck in the woodsy, remote enclave of his girlfriend's (Allison Williams) seemingly genial family, peculiar incidents begin to stack up until the twisty, breathtaking climax that cements the picture as one of the most subversive popular entertainments of the decade so far.



"The gestation period for this idea kind of spanned several years, and I think one of the most important milestones in that process was just realizing that every true horror, human horror, American horror has a horror movie that deals with it and allows us to face that fear, except [that] race in a modern sense, hadn't been touched. It really hadn't been touched in my opinion since Night of the Living Dead 50 years ago. Maybe with the film Candyman. That to me, I just saw a void there. So it really started with this notion of like, this has to be possible, let's figure it out." -Peele





IN TRANSIT

Absorbing doc weaves in and out of the lives of various passengers as they ride along the Empire Builder. A celebratory documentary, skillfully assembled  and a fitting swan song for legendary and groundbreaking filmmaker Albert Maysles.




"After many months of negotiating permission with Amtrak, our small crew was given full access to film on the Empire Builder, Amtrak’s busiest long-distance route. We took three round trips from Chicago to Portland/Seattle and back, finding all of our subjects spontaneously on these trips. Our Story Producer Martha Wollner and an Associate Producer were tasked with canvassing the train as soon as we boarded, and they would begin meeting passengers and getting a sense of who might be interesting on camera or at least willing to participate. They would then pass along the passengers’ info and location to one of our four to five cinematographers who would also themselves meet passengers as they explored the train. Sometimes we’d be able to record several hours of someone’s story and sometimes we’d only have captured several minutes of footage before the passenger had to disembark at their stop." Co-Directors Lynn True and Nelson Walker





LOGAN LUCKY

I was surprised how much I loved this shaggy, ramshackle NASCAR heist yarn. Much is owed to Channing Tatum's charismatic lead and Adam Driver's eccentric supporting turn as his one-armed brother. The blend of droll comedy, and slowly-paced observation with energetic slapstick works well under Steven Soderbergh's beautifully-attuned direction.




"If it weren’t different enough, then I don’t think it would have appealed to me. It fit in this place where I was excited by the inversion that was necessary. They have no technology, no money. They are not criminals. One of the biggest differences between Logan Lucky and an Ocean’s film is in the Ocean’s films they’re already criminals. They’re already con men. This is their world. They’re multi-generational recidivists. And here you have to watch a group of people kind of learn... how to put a job together. There are a lot of trust issues involved because some of these people know each other and some of them don’t. -Soderbergh






PERSONAL SHOPPER


Writer / Director Oliver Assayas has a way of hooking us in with dreamy imagery and taut plot-lines that often unravel in unexpected, quizzical ways. Entertaining, slick ghost story / thriller / psychological drama with a bewitching lead turn by Kristen Stewart.




"On Personal Shopper, I was like, "oh man, this is going to kill me, I can tell." I have experience with loss. I don't have experience with mourning death. I think there are few catalysts that send you unanswerable, existential questions that are very necessary. But not satisfying because there's no resolve, but they're very necessary to move forward. It's either traumatic, traumatic events such as death and loss on a grand scale, or extreme physical anxiety. I'm so physical that I'm often times really limited by it, and it starts a thought process for me that absolutely is the same one that Maureen has, which is, "is this fucking real? I don't even know if I can go on, I might actually just not be able to go on." So that, I knew, is painful and scary, and the only way that we could do it for real is if you abandon all of your default facets, and you actually become honest about how incapable and unknowing we are, rather than relying on all of these constructs that you've built in order to move on. It alienates you immediately, you become like a foreigner in the entire world." -Stewart






A QUIET PASSION


I gasped early on with a brilliant use of time lapse in the portraits of family members (the luminous photography is Florian Hoffmeister) and for the remaining run time, I was entranced. This unhurried, aching Emily Dickinson biopic features a mesmerizing Cynthia Nixon, not to mention great supporting players (especially Jennifer Ehle and Joanna Bacon). Directed by Terence Davies; his rich and witty script pierces.



"When I’d written the script, I thought, “We’ve got to have that 10, 15 minutes, however long it goes, to introduce all these people, but also to lay down the template of the film, the nature of her relationship to religion and her family.” But it couldn’t have been a long, gradual “they grow up and get old” — it would have taken too long and we simply didn’t have the money, it was as simple as that. So what is the simplest way of doing it? When I looked at the photographs, the simplest way to do it was track in on them as they aged. It was succinct — and it was cheap. There were just two tracks, one when they were young and one when they were old. When we did it, we told the actors, “You mustn’t blink.” We did Cynthia last, and she said, “Sorry, I’m a blinker.” I said, “Well, try your best.” And at the end of the track on her, she just half-blinked." -Davies






UNCERTAIN

A good pairing with another humanist documentary--In Transit--Ewan McNicol and Anna Sandilands bring us to Uncertain, Texas. Lush, green and beautiful-looking, we meet a scattering of townspeople hanging by a thread as the socioeconomic and environmental changes continue to shift. It's a poetic, metaphorical film, with deep insight into redemption, American poverty and the human condition.





"The biggest challenge in making “Uncertain” was that for a really long time we didn’t know what the film was about exactly. We knew is that we had these great characters, with extraordinary stories in an incredible place. Our instinct was to keep filming. We could feel it, but we couldn’t explain what the story was. It was about a year into filming when it really started to cohere. Oh the irony of making a film called “Uncertain” and being uncertain what your film was about." -McNicol & Sandilands