#simon did amazing the story was amazing despite the few american actors having to go up against literal legends of british tv

[bahoreal]

enjoyed wonka. my review is that timothy candelabra was not half insane enough. there was that Wonka Glint in his eye like twice but it felt forced. with paterson joseph and mathew baynton serving absolute evil chocolatier cunt opposite him it was like timmy was in a whole different genre. they were 100% committed, singing about chocolate fraud like if their fan dance wasn't sexy enough their chocolate monopoly would crumble and tim reacted like hwuh? like girl if you are not going to commit to the chocolate is life chocolate is love chocolate runs this damn town genre why are you here!

[photographerguide-blog]

<em>Black Panther</em>s Director of Photography Is a Cinematic Superhero

New Post has been published on https://photographyguideto.com/must-see/black-panthers-director-of-photography-is-a-cinematic-superhero-2/

Black Panthers Director of Photography Is a Cinematic Superhero

As Hollywood events go, there are few more congratulatory than film festival awards ceremonies, where everyone wants to cheer for the Next Big Thing before they get huge. Yet, at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the biggest applause at the awards show wasn’t for a director or actor—it was for Rachel Morrison, a director of photography on the festival jury. “Earlier this week,” host Jason Mantzoukas said while announcing her name, “she became the first woman ever to be nominated for the Academy Award for cinematography. Her historic nod is for last year’s Sundance hit Mudbound." Out in the audience, Morrison smiled sheepishly; at her side, fellow jurors Jada Pinkett Smith and Octavia Spencer whooped up a storm. The audience stood to clap.

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To Morrison, the entire scene was surreal. "That was the the first time it settled in," she says a few weeks after Sundance, talking about the film community's response to her groundbreaking nom. "The fact that everybody is cheering me on is moving."

Right now, to use Hollywood parlance, Rachel Morrison is having a moment. Not only is she currently the first woman to be nominated for an Oscar for cinematography, she’s also got another monumental movie coming out this weekend: Marvel's Black Panther, which might end up being one of the biggest comic book flicks yet. (That’s not hyperbole: It currently has a 97 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes and is looking at a $170 million debut that could break the President’s Day weekend record previously set by Deadpool.)

It’s been a long time coming. While the lack of gender parity amongst movie directors is known, the dearth of female cinematographers doesn’t get nearly as much attention—despite the statistics being even more striking. Only 4 percent of of the cinematographers working on the 250 top-grossing domestic releases of 2017 were women, a figure that was the same two decades ago, according to a study by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University. (By comparison, 11 percent of the directors for those 2017 movies were women.)

Historically speaking, of all the roles women can fill behind-the-scenes in filmmaking—writer, producer, director, editor, etc.—the numbers are lowest for cinematographers. So while there have been enough women hired as directors to get a scant few nominated for Oscars—Kathryn Bigelow is the only one to win, for The Hurt Locker—no female cinematographer has ever gotten a nod from the Academy.

"To see Rachel nominated in a technical category and to realize that in 2018 this is the first time any woman has ever been nominated in that category, is staggering," says Noah Harlan, a former film producer who worked with Morrison when she was a camera operator on the MTV reality series Room Raiders. "So when I think about my own daughters, the fact that I can say ‘Hey, that woman is an amazingly talented person, she did this gorgeous film in Mudbound and she did this amazing action film with Black Panther,’ it’s a really great thing. There’s not enough of those type of role models for young women."

What has caused this disparity beyond just sexism is hard to parse, but American Society of Cinematographers president Kees van Oostrum thinks it might finally be changing, albeit slowly. “The cultural thing is much harder to change and often not noticed by the person propagating it,” van Oostrum says. “In that light, [Morrison’s] Academy Award nomination is wonderful, because it breaks the culture more than anything.”

“Your movie becomes much more narrow-minded when you have like-minded department heads. Whereas if you can surround yourself with people who have been a mother before, been a grandmother before, you get a much broader and wide-reaching swath of human emotions.”

And breaking the culture is necessary. Cinematography, as much as direction, translates the emotions and intensity of a moment onto film. Having people with different life experiences—women, people of color, LGBTQ people, etc.—involved in a film means their eyes will see things someone else’s might not, and help those things make it into the frame. “Your movie becomes much more narrow-minded when you have like-minded department heads,” Morrison says. “Whereas if you can surround yourself with people who have been a mother before, been a grandmother before, you get a much broader and wide-reaching swath of human emotions.”

For years cinematographers came up through the ranks as third assistant directors who eventually got trained to shoot. Directors tended to be men, and often hired their (male) friends. And “there was this idea of ‘Oh, we can’t hire women because it’s a real physical job,’” van Oostrum says. All the reasons for not hiring women into the profession, he adds, are “easily refutable” but the issue persisted until film school enrollment exploded in the second half of the 20th century, offering opportunities for more people to get trained. Progress is still slow, but van Oostrum points out that female membership in ASC is on the rise—currently 16 of the ASC’s 383 members are women, up from eight in 2005—and film schools are educating female DPs in droves.

Morrison is testament to that, though she says she tries not to get bogged down thinking about the statistics or the fact that she’s an anomaly. “I’ve always tried to think of it as an advantage,” she says. “I get to stand out in the room.” Morrison got her degree in cinematography from the American Film Institute in 2006 and in the intervening years shot more than a dozen features, 10 of them in six years. She worked on the time-travel cult thriller Sound of My Voice and Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie. Then, a few years later, she experienced “director-DP love at first sight.” Ryan Coogler was looking for a cinematographer for his first feature Fruitvale Station, about the 2009 shooting of Oscar Grant by a transit officer in Oakland; Ilyse McKimmie, who runs the Sundance Institute’s filmmaker lab, suggested he connect with Morrison. “We just hit it off,” Morrison says. “The Skype interview went on for two and a half hours, and we laughed and cried. He felt like the brother that I’d always wanted and never had.”

Fruitvale Station went on to win the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at Sundance in 2013, and Morrison went on to work on more indie hits: Dope; What Happened, Miss Simone?; and eventually Dee Rees’ Mudbound, the wrenching film about post-World War II Mississippi that snagged her that aforementioned Oscar nomination.

Now, with Black Panther, Morrison is bringing her keen eye to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the first female cinematographer to do so. The blockbuster scale, thankfully, didn't translate into studio interference. “They give you a very big sandbox to play in,” she says, “and you can do whatever you want within that sandbox. I didn’t feel Marvel was helicopter-parenting us at all.” What Morrison is still adjusting to, though, is the level of hype her latest film is getting. Fans had waited a long time for a black superhero to carry an MCU film; the near universal praise for Black Panther indicates she and Coogler made something that will make them happy. “I was at the premiere,” she says, “and the energy was palpable through the entire movie. I was really proud at the end of it.”

And next month, she might be an Oscar winner. It’s an honor anyone in her profession would like to have, and if Morrison wins, she gets to make history. But being the first female cinematographer to be nominated for an Oscar wasn’t the goal. In some ways, it shouldn’t have been a milestone left uncrossed before her.

“There are a ton of women who have been doing amazing work for a long time; it’s unfortunate it’s taken this long [for a woman to be nominated],” she says. “For me, it’s always been about the work—it wasn’t about ‘Let’s go break some ceilings.’ I just wanted to tell an important story and do the best work I can. Everything else is secondary.”

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[weekendwarriorblog]

WHAT TO WATCH THIS WEEKEND 8/17/18 – Crazy Rich Asians, Mile 22, Alpha and More

I’m going to do things a little different this week, because one of my absolutely favorites from Sundance is coming out this weekend, and after seeing it again last week, it’s probably going to end up in my Top 5 for the year, and that is…

JULIET, NAKED (Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions)

I’ve been a fan of Nick Hornby’s writing for a very long time, but when I received a copy of his new book in 2009, I was immediately caught up in its story of a has-been musician, his diehard fan and his ignored wife. I was really excited to hear that it would be adapted by director Jesse Peretz, who had been making big waves (and got an Emmy nod) for directing shows like Girls, New Girl and GLOW. The general story revolves around Rose Byrne’s Annie, a woman living in a British seaside town married to Chris O’Dowd’s Duncan, an avid fan of an American singer-songwriter named Tucker Crowe. Duncan runs a website dedicated to his idol, but when he receives a previously unheard demo recording called “Juliet, Naked,” he gets into a squabble with Annie, because she is quite vocal about how much she hates it (mainly to get Duncan’s goat). When Duncan sleeps with a co-worker, Annie kicks him out, but then the real Tucker Crowe (played by Ethan Hawke) gets in touch with Annie (over her negative review of the rare demos), they begin a transatlantic correspondence that leads to them meeting and more. It’s another great story from Hornby in the vein of About a Boy and High Fidelity, one that creates an amazing portrait of this woman who feels she’s in a rut and how she connects with the famous musician who walked out of a concert 20 years earlier and has been raising a young son in upstate New York.

This is a fantastic romantic comedy from Peretz that’s produced by Judd Apatow and others with all-star writing team including Peretz’s sister Eugenia, Jim Taylor (Sideways) and his wife Tamara Jenkins (The Savages), who all did an amazing job adapting Hornby’s work.  

Here’s my interview with Jesse Peretz over at NextBestPicture... Enjoy!

INTERVIEW WITH JESSE PERETZ

Juliet, Naked will open in New York and Los Angeles on Friday, expand to more cities next week and then hopefully be fairly wide on August 31.

But that isn’t the only Ethan Hawke movie this week, nope. The actor is having quite a good year indeed...

On top of that, Hawke’s latest film as a director, Blaze (Sundance Selects), will be released in Austin on Friday, as it slowly rolls out to arrive in New York City on September 6 and then in L.A. later in September.

Blaze tells the story of Blaze Foley, played by musician Ben Dickey, who was the lesser-known blues singer who collaborated with his friend Townes Van Zandt. Not knowing much about the Austin native, this is a fascinating film by Hawke that shows a lot of his dysfunctional relationship with his Jewish writer wife (and the film’s co-writer) Sybil Rosen, played by Alia Shakat (who is simply fantastic in the role). Musician Charlie Sexton pulls off a respectable version of Van Zandt, and look for cameos by the likes of Sam Rockwell, Steve Zahn, Kris Kristofferson and Hawke’s long-time collaborator, Richard Linklater.

This is another great music-based film from Hawke, and a much better narrative feature than his earlier features, 2006’s The Hottest State and 2001’s Chelsea Walls. There’s also a connection between Foley and Hawke’s Juliet, Naked character, because the fictional Tucker Crowe similarly became the subject of urban legends after vanishing from the public eye following a concert. (Foley was actually killed in a scuffle after recording a live album at one of his club performances, which acts as the framing device for the film.)

And now, back to our previously scheduled wide releases, and how ironic that the proverbial “Dog Days of Summer” would begin last weekend with an actual movie called Dog Days, and it bombed? And a giant shark movie starring Jason Statham opened with almost $45 million… crazy times! Yeah, these last few weekends of August have never been known as a good time to release movies, and most movies that end up here are ones that studios just want to get off their coffers before their even slower fall months. That would normally be the case, but that is definitely not the case with…

CRAZY RICH ASIANS (New Line)

The first August anomaly is this romantic-comedy based on Kevin Kwan’s best-selling book, which is the first major studio movie since The Joy Luck Club25 years ago to feature a predominantly Asian cast. This one is about an Asian college professor who takes his Asian girlfriend to Singapore for his best friend’s wedding where she discovers that his family is super-rich and he’s a very in-demand bachelor.

The movie features an amazing cast that includes Constance Wu from the hit ABC sitcom Fresh off the Boat, veteran Chinese actress Michelle Yeoh, comic superstar Ken Jeong (Dr. Ken) as well as fresher talent like rapper Awkwafina, last seen in Ocean’s 8, Gemma Chan and newcomer Henry Golding as the male lead. The movie is directed by Jon M. Chu, who has directed an odd number of movies from G.I. Joe: Retaliationto Step Up 3 and the Jem and the Holograms movie, the latter a huge bomb despite being made for not so much money.

Crazy Rich Asians is a romantic comedy, and obviously, there’s a limited audience for the genre normally, but possibly even more when you have Asians in every role, because you’re never sure whether women of other ethnicities will be as interested in this as they might be with Valentine’s Day or other rom-com hits like The Proposal or Pretty Woman. Of course, we can also look at the long-standing legs of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which drew in a large Greek audience at first, but word-of-mouth helped lead it to $241 million domestic, the highest gross for a rom-com ever.

There haven’t been that many successful rom-coms in recent years unless you include Mamma Mia: Here We go Again or Greg Berlanti’s Love Simon, the latter which grossed $40.8 million opening in March with $11.7 million. Crazy Rich Asians is likely to sway more towards the former, I’d imagine.

What’s interesting and maybe not unexpected is that the Asian-American community has been rallying around the movie, whether or not they’ve read the book or even like romantic comedy films, with many entire theaters/screenings being bought up in advance. It’s likely the community realizes that Crazy Rich Asians will need to succeed if they’re going to see more Asians and Asian-Americans in significant leading roles. Even so, you have to remember that Asians only make up 6% of the U.S. population and maybe a little more in Canada, so how much impact can a movie have even if every single Asian person in the country goes to see it? I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

Crazy Rich Asians is opening on Wednesday, which kind of throws a wrench in trying to project how the movie might do, because a.) people who desperately want to see the movie might rush out to see it on Weds if b.) some might not even realize it opens on Wednesday and will wait for Thursday or Friday. (There weren’t any Tuesday previews to give us any sort of hint of what’s to come.) One presumes the point of the earlier opening is to help drive word-of-mouth for the weekend, although New Line also gave the movie sneak previews last Wednesday, which might do the trick.  Reviews are excellent with it currently holding a respectable 96% on Rotten Tomatoes but there are many more reviews to come.

Expect the movie to do big business on Wednesday and Thursday, possibly $9 to 10 million, and then another $20 million plus over the weekend, although it shouldn’t be surprising if it does more than $30 million in its first five days. After all, we’re definitely entering new territory here. Even so, word-of-mouth should help it over the rest of the summer and into September, so don’t be surprised if it ends up making close to $100 million or more, especially if it’s as good as I’ve heard.

MILE 22 (STXfilms)

A movie hoping to bring in the business that will have little to no interest in Crazy Rich Asiansis this new action-thriller from actor Mark Wahlberg and director Peter Berg, who now have made three movies based on real events: Lone Survivor (’13, $125 mil. Gross), Deepwater Horizon (’16, $61.4 mil.) and Patriots Day (’16, $31.9 mil.). That’s a fairly dramatic drop from their first movie to their last one, and Mile 22 is an original story not based on real events about a CIA task force who have to protect an asset from terrorists over the course of 22 miles. (And yes, that does sound a lot like the Bruce Willis-Mos Def movie 16 Blocksfrom 2006, thanks for noticing.)

Besides Wahlberg, it stars Lauren Cohan from The Walking Dead, John Malkovich (who also was in Deepwater Horizon), MMA champ and WWE contender Ronda Rousy, Indonesian martial arts star Iko Uwais (The Raid) and Berg himself. It’s a great cast but we’ve seen similar movies like this one with great casts that don’t do so well from Hotel Artemis earlier this summer to John Hillcoat’s Triple 9 in 2016, although both of them looked like they could be good.

Obviously, Wahlberg is going to be this film’s biggest draw, but his filmography has also run the gamut of hits and bombs. Last year, Wahlberg appeared in Michael Bay’s Transformers: The Last Knight, the comedy sequel Daddy’s Home 2 and the beleaguered Ridley Scott drama All the Money in the World, continuing his run of two to three movies a year with varying degrees of quality and success.

Like so many other movies in theaters and quite a few from STX, Mile 22 is a Chinese co-production, which doesn’t mean a heck of a lot for the film’s domestic success. Last year’s The Foreigner starring Pierce Brosnan and Jackie Chan is a good example as that topped out at $34.3 million domestic after a $13.1 million opening, although that movie did three times its domestic take overseas.

This might be why STX decided to dump the movie into late August, because maybe it isn’t as strong as some of the Berg-Wahlberg’s previous offerings, but is more of a throwaway action-thriller instead. The studio also isn’t screening for critics until Wednesday night, the day before it opens for Thursday previews, so I wouldn’t expect it to be one of “Da Bergs’” better-reviewed films.

On top of that, there’s also just too much competition for older males in theaters, so this might have a hard time doing more than $15 million this weekend, a third place showing, as it struggles to make $35 million by summer’s end.

(Note: I may run a mini-review and make a few changes above after I see the movie tonight.)

ALPHA (Sony)

The odd dog or wolf of the weekend is this big screen adventure epic set during the Ice Age starring Kodi Smit-McPhee (X-Men: Apocalypse), which looks a lot like Roland Emmerich’s 10,000 BC. Hopefully, it isn’t nearly as bad. (See my review below. It isn’t.)

Alphais the new movie from Albert Hughes, one half of the Hughes Brothers, who broke out with urban crime films like Menace II Society and Dead Presidents before making From Hell with Johnny Depp and The Book of Eli with Denzel Washington. After the latter, the two went their separate ways and after a couple failed projects, Albert decided to make this very different movie as his solo dramatic feature as a director. It’s a strange choice for sure, but Sony have doubled down by giving the movie an IMAX release to push its big-screen nature.

There should be enough awareness of this movie being that it was supposed to come out last November and then earlier this year – I was seeing trailers for this in front of Thor: Ragnarok in early November and over the Christmas holidays as well – but Sony clearly doesn’t have much faith in the movie as they moved it to the dumping ground of late August. The studio has also completely changed the marketing as the movie’s release neared, pushing it more for the wolves that might get women and kids excited to see it. Personally, I don’t see the switch in marketing gears helping much, as I was already tuning out about the movie after seeing the trailers too much last year. (Reviews, surprisingly, are STELLAR so far, but there are only eight on Rotten Tomatoes, so that might change?)

Although people might know about the movie, it really doesn’t look that appealing from the marketing, and it won’t help that schools have already started in many places cutting potential business for Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Frankly, it will be a shocker to me if Alpha makes more than $7 million this weekend even with the higher incent and price for IMAX tickets.

Mini-Review: When I was younger, I used to love watching pre-historic epics like 1 Million Years B.C. on television. Hopefully, some young boys and girls will be as inspired by watching Albert Hughes’ solo narrative debut as a director, but Alpha is definitely not the type of movie that should be watched on a television set.

It gets off to a rough start with young Keda (Kodi Smit-Mcphee) not living up to his chieftain father’s hopes as a warrior. When the tribe takes on a herd of buffalo, Keda gets knocked off a cliff and he’s left behind for dead by the tribe. Trying to survive, Keda faces off against a pack of wolves and one of the wolf pack is injured in the melée. The caring young man brings the injured wolf along on his journey of survival as the two of them work together to catch prey and survive. 

This is where Alpha picks up greatly, becoming tale of a boy and his “dog” survival tale that’s charming and heart-warming and not nearly as corny or obvious as the earlier storytelling might lead you to believe. (It doesn’t take long to get over the awkward decision to begin with the buffalo hunt, then cut back a  week as Keda is about to go over the cliff, and then show the buffalo hunt again, throwing Keda over the cliff for real the second time.)

If nothing else, one needs to commend the impressive job by Hughes and team -- from the animal trainers to the visual FX department, sound and music – for bringing this tale to life in a way that keeps you glued to the screen and benefits greatly from the IMAX 3D projection. It might be good to note that all of the film’s dialogue is in some ancient prehistoric dialect, so if your kids are too young to read subtitles, then they may get frustrated by not understanding what is being said.

Though there are problems in the first third, the fact is that if Terrence Malick or Alejandro Innaritu made this exact same movie, it would be thought of as a revelation. The late August release and lesser status of Hughes as a filmmaker will mean this film will mostly be overlooked, which is a true shame.

Rating: 7.5/10

Either way, this weekend could be a close call for #1 between Crazy Rich Asians and the second weekend of The Meg  as both are vying for somewhere in the high-teens to low-$20 millions. Even so, I think the marketing/hype behind the New Line romantic-comedy will be enough to push it over the top to win the weekend.

This week’s top 10 should look something like this…

1. Crazy Rich Asians  (New Line) - $21.5 million N/A 2. The Meg (Warner Bros.) - $19.5 million -56% 3. Mile 22  (STXfilms) - $15.3 million N/A 4. Mission: Impossible – Fallout  (Paramount) - $12 million -40% 5. Christopher Robin  (Disney) - $7.7 million -38% 6. Alpha (Sony) - $7.5 million N/A 7. BlacKkKlansman  (Focus Features) - $7 million -35% 8. The Spy Who Dumped Me  (Lionsgate) - $3.9 million -48% 9. Slender Man  (Screen Gems) - $3.7 million -67% 10. Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again  (Universal) - $3.5 million -40%

LIMITED RELEASES

While I gave some extra attention to Juliet, Naked above, there are a bunch of other limited releases worth checking out this weekend, especially as the wider releases become less interesting to the masses.

First up is The Wife (Sony Pictures Classics), an amazing drama starring Glenn Close as Joan Castleman, wife of the elderly reknowned author Joseph Castleman (Jonathan Pryce), as the couple travel to Stockholm for him to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature along with their son David (Max Irons). Joe can be a handful and Joan finds herself caught in the middle of a domestic feud between her husband and David, while a pesky biographer played by Christian Slater tries to get info from both Joan and David about Joe, a known philanderer. Directed by Swedish filmmaker Björn Runge, best known for his film Happy End, this is a terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside. The Wife will open in New York and L.A., and there will be QnAs in both cities on Friday and Saturday. Glenn Close and screenwriter Meg Wolitzer will be doing QnAs at the Paris Theater in NYC on Friday night after the 7:30 screening, while Wolitzer will also do a QnA on Saturday night. In LA, actress Annie Starke (who plays the younger version of Close’s character) will be doing QnAs on Friday and Saturday nights at the Arclight Hollywood and the Landmark.

A terrific doc worth checking out is Megumi Sasaki’s A Whale of a Tale (Fine Line Media), which opens at the Quad Cinema in New York and then in L.A. on August 24. If you liked the Oscar-winning doc The Cove, this is sort of a follow-up as the filmmaker travels to the town of Taiji in Japan where the dolphin killings continue. AP journalist Jay Alabaster has embedded himself in Taiji since The Cove came out and along with Sasaki, they document the town’s attempts at making necessary changes without giving up their legacy of “whale-hunting” that’s hundreds of years old. This is the type of movie that might make you question your own ecological leanings even as it gives a fairly well-balanced overview of the situation, particularly between the townspeople of Taiji and the world at large.

Another worthwhile doc is Bing Liu’s Minding the Gap (Hulu/Magnolia), a very personal look at the life of the filmmaker over 12 years living in Rockford, Illinois, focusing on two of his skateboarder friends’ whose upbringings affect their lives, including 23-year-old Zack whose relationship deteriorates after the birth of his son, and 17-year-old Keire trying to deal with the death of his father. The film won a jury prize at Sundance for Breakthrough Filmmaking with Steve James acting as exec. producer. It will get a theatrical release at the Metrograph on Friday as well as being available on Hulu before screening on PBS POV in 2019. (I want to add that this is a fantastic film well worth seeking out... Liu is an amazing new and young filmmaker to watch.)

After premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival, the self-explanatory doc Ed Sheeran: Songwriter (Apple Music/Abramorama) will open in select cities. I never got around to watching it, but I’m not really a fan of Sheeran other than him helping to bring the Electric Light Orchestra back together for the Grammys. It opens at the IFC Center on Friday, in L.A. on Aug. 24 and then will be available on Apple Music starting Aug. 28.

A venerable horror franchise returns with its 13th(!) installment Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich (RLJE Films), co-directed by Sonny Laguna and Tommy Wiklund from a script by S. Craig Zahler (Brawl in Cell Block 99). It stars Thomas Lennon from the State as Edgar, as a recently-divorced man who returns to his childhood home where he finds an evil-looking Nazi puppet in his brother’s room. For this one, the unmistakable Udo Kier plays the evil puppet master André Toulon, and it also stars Charlyne Yi, Barbara Crampton, Jenny Pellicer and Nelson Franklin. I hope to watch it soon, but I’ve heard some atrocious things about the overt racism in the movie.

As far as other and hopefully tamer genre films, if you’re in New York City, you can see The Ranger, the directorial debut by Larry Fessenden’s producing partner Jenn Wexler, when it plays at the IFC Center, following its Closing Night premiere at What the Fest?! and Fantasia in Montreal. It will also screen in L.A. on Sept. 7. It stars Chloë Levine as Chelsea, a girl who hangs out with her punk friends who get in trouble when her boyfriend stashes drugs in her bag, so they head to a cabin in the wilderness where they encounter a ranger. It premieres on Thursday night with many QnAs with Wexler, producer Heather Buckley and the cast over the weekend.

A movie that premiered at Sundance that I wasn’t that into was Jeremy Zagar’s adaptation of Justin Torres’ novel We the Animals (The Orchard), about three young boys going through their adolescence under the gaze of parents (Raul Castillo, Sheila Vand) who have their own tumultuous relationship, and are trying to protect the youngest Jonah from heading the same direction as his older siblings. It opens in New York Friday at the Angelika and Landmark 57 West, then will expand to L.A., San Francisco, Boston and Philadelphia next Friday. Although I wasn’t a huge fan of the movie, it is a nice fictional counterpart to Minding the Gap.

Ricky D’Ambrose’s Notes on an Appearance (Grasshopper Films) deals with the disappearance of a young man named David and the two people who go looking for him but become diverted by the strangers they meet on the journey.  It opens at New York’s Film Society of Lincoln Center on Friday.

Opening in New York and L.A. on Friday and on Demand Sept. 4is Josh Crockett’s dark comedy Dr. Brinks & Dr. Brinks (Gravitas Ventures) about estranged brother and sister who reunite after the death of their parents.

Based on Lois Duncan’s Y.A. novel of the same name, Down a Dark Hall (Summit/Lionsgate Premiere) stars AnnaSophia Robb as Kit, a difficult girl set to a boarding school to deal with her temper via the headmistress Madame Duret (Uma Thurman) and the other four young women. Also starring Isabelle Fuhrman from Orphan, it opens in select cities, On Demand and on iTunes Friday.

Emmanuel Finkiel’s Memoir of War (Music Box films), opening in New York this Friday at the Film Forum and Film Society of New York and in L.A. at the Laemmle Royal and Regal Edwards Westpark 8 next Friday, adapts Marguerite Duras’ novel The War: A Memoir, and it stars the ever-present Mélanie Thierry as Duras. In 1944, Duras was a Resistance member along with her writer husband Robert Antelme. When he is sent to the Dachau concentration camp, she becomes friendly with a French collaborator (Benoît Magimel)to get information to help her group. (Interesting fact: Duras was the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour.)

A few more odds and ends…

Shirley McLane and Gina Gershon star in a modernized live action adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid co-directed by Blake Harris and Chris Bouchard. Not sure what more can be said about that.

Opening in New York at the Cinema VillageFriday before its digital release on Sept 4 is the doc Davi’s Way (2B Films) about Italian-American Robert Davi, a Frank Sinatra enthusiast and stylist who prepares to recreate Sinatra’s famous 1974 concert at Madison Square Garden.

Actor Peter Facinelli makes his directorial debut with the dark comedy Breaking & Exiting (Kali Pictures / Freestyle Digital Media), starring Milo Gibson as house thief Harry who stumbles upon (film co-writer) Jordan Hinson’s Daisy and tries to save her from herself.

Not a ton of repertory things on my radar other than a Winona Ryder retrospective at the Quad Cinema called “Utterly Winona,” including all her great movies from the ‘80s and ‘90s. I guess there’s a Truffaut retrospective at the Metrograph, but you know what I always say: Truffaut... Tru-cares? (I don’t always say that so don’t write me angry letters Truffaut-fans. I don’t mean to cause a Trufuffle for anyone.)

Last but not least, streaming giant Netflix offers the Spanish film The Motive from Manuel Martin Cuenca based on the novel by Javier Cercas, about an aspiring writer who seeks inspiration for his novel by manipulating lives.

[movietvtechgeeks]

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Lena Dunham ready for 'American Horror' Story plus Blac Chyna free

Now that her show Girls has wrapped up, actress and outspoken starlet Lena Dunham is moving on to her next TV-related project. This week, it was announced that Lena has officially joined the cast of the one the most popular shows currently on TV. On Wednesday, Ryan Murphy, who is the mastermind behind the show American Crime Story, which airs on FX, tweeted out about Lena joining the cast of ACS. In the joyful tweet, Ryan posted, “Thrilled that my talented friend Lena Dunham is joining the AMERICAN HORROR STORY family. Always wanted to work together, and now we [are]!” Ryan Murphy, Twitter post: https://twitter.com/MrRPMurphy/status/887844862426468352 In addition to Lena, there are several other new stars that have been cast for the show’s upcoming season (which remains still, for the most part, under wraps). In fact, Ryan Murphy previously revealed that Scream Queens actress Billie Lourd would be joining the cast, as well as comedian Billie Eichner. Stay tuned for more details about the exciting new season of American Horror Story. In a brand new interview with People magazine, reality TV starlet Blac Chyna got candid about the relief she felt after ending her rocky relationship with Rob Kardashian. As you are probably well aware, Blac Chyna and Rob Kardashian’s romance was far from one out of a fairy tale. While the duo was quick to get engaged and have a baby together (a little girl named Dream), they were constantly fighting and breaking up. Over the last few weeks, the level of animosity between them bubbled to an all time high, as Rob took to his social media to completely slam his ex and post revealing photos of her for all of his followers to see. In her interview with People, Blac Chyna explained that there was “absolutely no” way that she and Rob would get back together. She stated, “I’m glad I’m relieved of [Rob], but damn, why did I have to get relief in this way? I feel like God does certain things – not to hurt you, but to show you your true strength. I fee like, if I can come out of this, I can come out of anything.” The cosmetic line creator went on to talk openly about her two young kids, King Cairo and Dream, who she shares with rapper Tyga and Rob, respectively. Chyna gushed, “I’m not going to take something that happened to me in the past into my future. First and foremost, I’m going to make myself happy because once I’m happy, then Dream can be happy and then King can be happy and then everybody else around me can be happy.” Later in the interview, Chyna slammed her ex (Rob) for posting revealing photos of her on social media in an attempt to shame her. The starlet ranted, “Words are words, but once you start posting actual pictures, then that’s just not right. It’s actually against the law. If I was to go and do a very artsy, high-end photo shoot exposing my breasts, that’s my choice. This is my body. It’s my right. Once somebody else does it, it’s just not right. I’m hoping that somehow, someday, this will let [more people] know, ‘Don’t do it.’” While Chyna has gone through a lot over the past few weeks, she is not going to let this whole scandal force her into hiding. The star told People, "When somebody that's actually been the closest to you says these things, other people are going to believe it. But the people that I actually care about, my family and friends, they're all I worry about. I'm not going to sit here and hide in my house over somebody else being hurt or jealous or insecure." Seacrest in! Ryan Seacrest will be back hosting "American Idol" when it returns for its first season on ABC. Kelly Ripa made the announcement on Thursday's "Live with Kelly and Ryan," which she has co-hosted with Seacrest since he joined her in May. "I am happy to confirm ... that Ryan Seacrest is returning as the host of 'American Idol,'" said Ripa as the studio audience whooped. Seacrest said he was excited to be doing it again. "I don't know if you've ever been in a 15-year relationship and then, for a reason that you really don't know, you break up," he said. "I thought, 'Gosh, it would be great to get back together at some point.'" Seacrest had a grand history with "Idol" during its smash-hit run on Fox from 2002 through 2016. Reclaiming that job now gives him an additional role in the Disney family, which owns ABC and produces the syndicated "Live." His potential return to "Idol" had sparked much speculation since ABC announced in May that it would revive the talent competition. The program airs from Los Angeles and "Live" airs weekday mornings from New York. But the 42-year-old Seacrest is no stranger to a packed work schedule and cross-country flights. "You can have all the tickets you want," he told Ripa, "and you can come back and forth with me any weekend." Seacrest will also continue his syndicated Los Angeles morning-drive-time radio show, as well as a nationally syndicated Top 40 radio show, from his iHeartMedia studio in the same Manhattan complex where "Live" is telecast. He also hosts and executive produces ABC's annual "Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve with Ryan Seacrest," and is a busy producer of series in which he doesn't appear, including "Keeping Up with the Kardashians" and its many spin-offs. ABC Entertainment President Channing Dungey called Seacrest's talent "limitless, and I can't think of a more appropriate person to honor the 'Idol' legacy as it takes on new life than the man who has been there through it all." On Fox, "Idol" dominated TV in the 2000s and minted stars like Carrie Underwood, Jennifer Hudson, and Kelly Clarkson, while making its judges, such as Randy Jackson and Simon Cowell, household names. It was the No. 1 series for nine years, peaking with 30 million viewers each episode in 2006. But by its last season the average audience had dipped to 11 million and skewed older, and NBC's "The Voice" surpassed it in popularity. Fox eliminated it. Even so, in today's television world, an audience of 11 million would rank it among TV's top 20 shows, a fact that clearly didn't escape ABC's notice. On the final Fox edition, a hopeful Seacrest told viewers, "Goodbye - for now." The nationwide search for the first ABC-aired "Idol" begins next month. ABC has not announced a premiere date. Oscar and Grammy winner Common surprised a group of New York students by donating $10,000 to help their teachers buy supplies like calculators and science kits. The rapper-actor partnered with the nonprofit AdoptAClassroom.org and Burlington Stores to give Renaissance School of the Arts in Harlem the funds on Thursday. Students cheered loudly after they learned the musician was at their school. Common was on-site with his mother, Dr. Mahalia Hines, an educator and member of the Chicago Board of Education. She said she remembered spending her own money to buy essential materials for her classroom. Common encouraged the students to keep their grades up and to persevere - in school and in life. Burlington has been raising money from its 599 stores to help other schools, asking customers to donate $1 or more. La La Anthony and Carmelo Anthony are going through a turbulent time in their marriage, but she claims they remain close. The “Power” actress opened up about her strained marriage — the two separated in April after he allegedly cheated and impregnated a stripper — and said she’s focusing on herself rather than her marital problems. “I’m having a good time. I’m living my life,” she said on “The Breakfast Club” Wednesday. “Hell, I’ve been through a lot, so I’m just enjoying it; having fun and just really happy about where my life is right now.” But when asked whether she’d move to Houston should Melo get transferred to the Rockets, La La stood firm on her love of New York. “I’m not moving anywhere,” La La declared. “I don’t know about those trick questions, but I’m staying in New York. “We’re not at that place right now,” she added when further prodded about whether she’d move with him if he moved. Despite it all, La La is keeping her head held high by focusing on the other important things in her life. “It’s good to have something to focus on. Whenever things are going crazy in life I usually put my energy on [my son] Kiyan and my work, which is what I’ve been doing,” she explained. “Kiyan has been doing amazing. He’s killing the basketball scene in a way that just blows my mind and my work is going great, so that’s where I put my focus.” The rest of the goings on in her life will figure themselves out, she said. “My [relationship] status right now is putting myself first, which I always say … whatever’s meant to happen will happen.” Until then, she’s not worried. “He’s my best friend. When you’re with someone for 13 years since they were 19 years old, and you have a 10-year-old child, you’d hope that you guys would be cool,” La La told the radio show. “We are the best of friends.” Following his controversial guest appearance on HBO’s “Game of Thrones” Season 7 premiere, Ed Sheeran has been making waves on social media. After his ill-timed deletion of his Twitter account, followed by its almost immediate return, the singer is shedding some light on the issue. Sheeran took to his Instagram account on Wednesday to address some reports that he deleted his Twitter account in the wake of the negative backlash his appearance on “Thrones” received from fans. “Last I’ll say on this,” he wrote. “I came off Twitter Coz [sic] I was always intending to come off Twitter, had nothing to do with what people said about my game of thrones cameo, because I am in game of thrones, why the hell would I worry what people thought about that. It’s clearly f—-g’ awesome. Timing was just a coincidence, but believe what you want.” The idea that Sheeran’s Twitter deletion had nothing to do with his “Thrones” appearance might seem convenient, but the singer did previously rail against the social network while speaking to The Sun. He told the outlet that he only uses his Twitter now to post his Instagram photos and finds it nothing but a place for people to say “mean things.”  

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<em>Black Panther</em>s Director of Photography Is a Cinematic Superhero

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Black Panthers Director of Photography Is a Cinematic Superhero

As Hollywood events go, there are few more congratulatory than film festival awards ceremonies, where everyone wants to cheer for the Next Big Thing before they get huge. Yet, at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, the biggest applause at the awards show wasn’t for a director or actor—it was for Rachel Morrison, a director of photography on the festival jury. “Earlier this week,” host Jason Mantzoukas said while announcing her name, “she became the first woman ever to be nominated for the Academy Award for cinematography. Her historic nod is for last year’s Sundance hit Mudbound." Out in the audience, Morrison smiled sheepishly; at her side, fellow jurors Jada Pinkett Smith and Octavia Spencer whooped up a storm. The audience stood to clap.

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To Morrison, the entire scene was surreal. "That was the the first time it settled in," she says a few weeks after Sundance, talking about the film community's response to her groundbreaking nom. "The fact that everybody is cheering me on is moving."

Right now, to use Hollywood parlance, Rachel Morrison is having a moment. Not only is she currently the first woman to be nominated for an Oscar for cinematography, she’s also got another monumental movie coming out this weekend: Marvel's Black Panther, which might end up being one of the biggest comic book flicks yet. (That’s not hyperbole: It currently has a 97 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes and is looking at a $170 million debut that could break the President’s Day weekend record previously set by Deadpool.)

It’s been a long time coming. While the lack of gender parity amongst movie directors is known, the dearth of female cinematographers doesn’t get nearly as much attention—despite the statistics being even more striking. Only 4 percent of of the cinematographers working on the 250 top-grossing domestic releases of 2017 were women, a figure that was the same two decades ago, according to a study by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University. (By comparison, 11 percent of the directors for those 2017 movies were women.)

Historically speaking, of all the roles women can fill behind-the-scenes in filmmaking—writer, producer, director, editor, etc.—the numbers are lowest for cinematographers. So while there have been enough women hired as directors to get a scant few nominated for Oscars—Kathryn Bigelow is the only one to win, for The Hurt Locker—no female cinematographer has ever gotten a nod from the Academy.

"To see Rachel nominated in a technical category and to realize that in 2018 this is the first time any woman has ever been nominated in that category, is staggering," says Noah Harlan, a former film producer who worked with Morrison when she was a camera operator on the MTV reality series Room Raiders. "So when I think about my own daughters, the fact that I can say ‘Hey, that woman is an amazingly talented person, she did this gorgeous film in Mudbound and she did this amazing action film with Black Panther,’ it’s a really great thing. There’s not enough of those type of role models for young women."

What has caused this disparity beyond just sexism is hard to parse, but American Society of Cinematographers president Kees van Oostrum thinks it might finally be changing, albeit slowly. “The cultural thing is much harder to change and often not noticed by the person propagating it,” van Oostrum says. “In that light, [Morrison’s] Academy Award nomination is wonderful, because it breaks the culture more than anything.”

“Your movie becomes much more narrow-minded when you have like-minded department heads. Whereas if you can surround yourself with people who have been a mother before, been a grandmother before, you get a much broader and wide-reaching swath of human emotions.”

And breaking the culture is necessary. Cinematography, as much as direction, translates the emotions and intensity of a moment onto film. Having people with different life experiences—women, people of color, LGBTQ people, etc.—involved in a film means their eyes will see things someone else’s might not, and help those things make it into the frame. “Your movie becomes much more narrow-minded when you have like-minded department heads,” Morrison says. “Whereas if you can surround yourself with people who have been a mother before, been a grandmother before, you get a much broader and wide-reaching swath of human emotions.”

For years cinematographers came up through the ranks as third assistant directors who eventually got trained to shoot. Directors tended to be men, and often hired their (male) friends. And “there was this idea of ‘Oh, we can’t hire women because it’s a real physical job,’” van Oostrum says. All the reasons for not hiring women into the profession, he adds, are “easily refutable” but the issue persisted until film school enrollment exploded in the second half of the 20th century, offering opportunities for more people to get trained. Progress is still slow, but van Oostrum points out that female membership in ASC is on the rise—currently 16 of the ASC’s 383 members are women, up from eight in 2005—and film schools are educating female DPs in droves.

Morrison is testament to that, though she says she tries not to get bogged down thinking about the statistics or the fact that she’s an anomaly. “I’ve always tried to think of it as an advantage,” she says. “I get to stand out in the room.” Morrison got her degree in cinematography from the American Film Institute in 2006 and in the intervening years shot more than a dozen features, 10 of them in six years. She worked on the time-travel cult thriller Sound of My Voice and Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie. Then, a few years later, she experienced “director-DP love at first sight.” Ryan Coogler was looking for a cinematographer for his first feature Fruitvale Station, about the 2009 shooting of Oscar Grant by a transit officer in Oakland; Ilyse McKimmie, who runs the Sundance Institute’s filmmaker lab, suggested he connect with Morrison. “We just hit it off,” Morrison says. “The Skype interview went on for two and a half hours, and we laughed and cried. He felt like the brother that I’d always wanted and never had.”

Fruitvale Station went on to win the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at Sundance in 2013, and Morrison went on to work on more indie hits: Dope; What Happened, Miss Simone?; and eventually Dee Rees’ Mudbound, the wrenching film about post-World War II Mississippi that snagged her that aforementioned Oscar nomination.

Now, with Black Panther, Morrison is bringing her keen eye to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the first female cinematographer to do so. The blockbuster scale, thankfully, didn't translate into studio interference. “They give you a very big sandbox to play in,” she says, “and you can do whatever you want within that sandbox. I didn’t feel Marvel was helicopter-parenting us at all.” What Morrison is still adjusting to, though, is the level of hype her latest film is getting. Fans had waited a long time for a black superhero to carry an MCU film; the near universal praise for Black Panther indicates she and Coogler made something that will make them happy. “I was at the premiere,” she says, “and the energy was palpable through the entire movie. I was really proud at the end of it.”

And next month, she might be an Oscar winner. It’s an honor anyone in her profession would like to have, and if Morrison wins, she gets to make history. But being the first female cinematographer to be nominated for an Oscar wasn’t the goal. In some ways, it shouldn’t have been a milestone left uncrossed before her.

“There are a ton of women who have been doing amazing work for a long time; it’s unfortunate it’s taken this long [for a woman to be nominated],” she says. “For me, it’s always been about the work—it wasn’t about ‘Let’s go break some ceilings.’ I just wanted to tell an important story and do the best work I can. Everything else is secondary.”

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