“I like where we’re going with technology and global integration but the fact that corporations and dollars rule everything in our lives, I don’t like it. This isn’t the Hollywood I wanted to be part of. This isn’t the version of it that I saw when I was a kid…”District 9″ and every other movie is treated like fast food. It’s promoted relentlessly and then it’s gone. Everything is a flamethrower-intensity and milked for everything it can give and then it’s just chucked away. Everything is judged instantly, too. You …

Even the most cursory glance through director Neill Blomkamp’s early personal projects and advertising work unearths the visual and thematic roots of his first feature film District 9. In fact, “Alive in Joburg” is literally the short film upon which D9 is based. Dig around some more, through the Tetra Val short, the Nike Crab ad or the ‘Yellow’ spot for Adidas and it becomes apparent that there is a consistent “world” being explored in all of his work, at once familiar and extraordinary.
In anticipation of D9’s official opening …

It may be the defining position that this book had in my childhood. Or it might be a result of the fact that rumours of this Spike Jonze project have been piquing my interest for what seems like half a decade. Or perhaps I have simply been caught up in the momentum of the Arcade Fire soundtrack. But it took the trailer for Where the Wild Things Are to break me out of my tumbleweed blogging silence. Enjoy.

Just started getting into True Blood, Alan Ball’s latest HBO series about a telepathic waitress in Bon Temps, Louisiana who falls in love with a vampire. Like Ball’s previous project, Six Feet Under, the title sequence was created by the talented team over at Digital Kitchen and presents a perverse montage of imagery that perfectly captures the juxtaposition of sinister and spiritual underlying the American South. Better still is the “True Blood Featurette” that links from the same page which I can only assume is a director’s cut of the …

A current obsession of mine is the use of strictly defined colour palettes in films and television shows. Ironically this recent interest comes as a result of a late 90’s TV drama called “Once and Again” that my wife Jane has been watching repeats of on the PVR while she nurses our daughter. The thing is, I can always tell the show from the distinctly grey colour palette that runs through the majority of the scenes. Lighting, costume, and decor all contribute to this effect that is punctuated by out-of-scene …

Brilliant poster for the highly anticipated new film by Charlie Kaufman – writing and directing this time around – Synecdoche New York.
David Ehrenstein had this to say about the film:
“This film is a masterpeice. I am in awe. Charlie Kaufman’s previous screenplays indicated a very original and eccentric talent. Now directing his own screnplay for the first time he has upped the ante. It’s three times the size of all his other films put together and infinitely more complex. Imagine a jam session between Philp K. Dick and Raul Ruiz. …

“Working in the early 1960s with wide strips of cellophane packing tape, Brakhage captured fleeting things — among them, blades of grass, pieces of flower petals, dust, dirt and the diaphanous, decapitated wings from insects. His process revolved around using the tape to produce a series of facsimile filmstrips: wider than the elegant Super-8 that was his hallmark medium (Mothlight, a mere three minutes in length, was actually shot on 16mm) but long and geometric: they’re a suite of attenuated rectangular portraits. The idea of using adhesive tape as a …

The word “redux” is Latin meaning “brought back”. In cinema this has come to mean a reworking of a previously released film, as in the case of Francis Ford Coppola’s 2001 “Apocalypse Now Redux”. By creating a “redux” of a film, the director is in essence overwriting the original version, the new cut becoming the definitive cut. It is moreover a second chance to get it right, regardless of whether or not your audience agrees.
This is, of course, different than a “Director’s Cut” which is the way that a film …

Brilliant looking trailer for McG directed Terminator: Salvation

Trailer for Alex Gibney’s (The Smartest Guys in the Room, Who Killed the Electric Car) Gonzo.