Taiwan, Paris & the Presidio: A Global Village Creates Lucy
Filmmaker Luc Besson has a thing for dangerous women. In 1990 Besson gave us Nikita, a felon-turned-assassin in La Feme Nikita. Four years later he came back with The Professional, in which a young girl named Mathilda (Natalie Portman) is trained by professional assassin Léon (Jean Reno) after her family is killed in a police raid. And three short years after that, Besson created his most powerful woman to date, Leeloo (Milla Jovovich),
Monkey See, Monkey Do: Fifty Years of Politics Surrounding the Apes Franchise
The hype for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is unavoidable. Rave reviews are already flooding the internet and much has been made about the cutting-edge motion capture technology that renders the apes shockingly realistic, but the parallels of violence and struggles for peace have also captured viewers’ attentions. The Apes movies have always served as allegories, influenced by the political, social, economic and environmental issues of their times,
Summer’s Pleasant Surprises
For those in the film prognostication business, this summer’s been a bit baffling. Many people assumed Tom Cruise’s Edge of Tomorrow would be a bust, and, regardless of it’s box office numbers, the film has been a critical smash. And Emily Blunt, Cruise’s ass-kicking co-star, is perhaps the most unexpected action hero of the summer.
It wasn’t terribly surprising that X-Men: Days of Future Past would be so good,
Tech Evolution: The Wild Ambition of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
When director Matt Reeves took the helm on Dawn of the Planets of the Apes, he wanted his apes, which would far exceed their numbers in Rupert Wyatt's excellent 2011 Rise of the Planet of the Apes, to have an even greater level of emotional reality. Reeves was starting fresh with an entirely new cast of humans, but he retained some crucial actors from Wyatt's film, including performance capture extraordinaire Andy Serkis and two other notable ape performers,
On Set: The Crucial Role of the Production Assistant
When I was in film school all of my classmates had dreams of graduating and going on to edit a major action movie or write and direct the next AMC series. While those are great goals to work towards, the harsh reality is that production companies don't hire novices to fill major roles. You have to work your way up, and that usually means starting as a production assistant. And what you'll learn is the PA is both an absolutely crucial player behind the scenes of a film shoot and one of the hardest working members of the crew.
Comedy Power Couple: Ben Falcone & Melissa McCarthy Make Tammy
The Groundlings, the legendary improv group based in Los Angeles, recently celebrated their fortieth anniversary. This milestone coincides nicely with today's release of Tammy, a film created by two of their alums, Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone. The two met in the group (subsequently married), and are now poised to become the new power couple of comedy, joining Judd Apatow and Leslie Mann in the funny and married pantheon.
McCarthy and Falcone’s history of hysterical chemistry that began in the Groundlings and has carried on through the years in smaller projects,
Debra Winger & David Cronenberg Delight at Provincetown Film Festival
The 16th Annual Provincetown Film Festival (PFS) brought together iconic filmmakers, a beloved champion of LGBT rights (and much more), journalists and film lovers for another stretch of perfect weather and great cinema. Award winners David Cronenberg (Filmmaker on the Edge), Patricia Clarkson (Excellence in Acting), and Debra Winger (Faith Hubley Career Achievement) joined former congressman Barney Frank as some of the marquee names at the festival, along with, of course, John Waters, the festival’s guiding spirit.
Filmmaking on the Edge at the 2014 Provincetown Film Festival
The Credits is back at the Provincetown Film Festival, and we'd be lying if we said we weren't just a little bit thrilled. Last year, our first in Provincetown, was the type of introduction that will marry you to a place, and a festival, for life. We had the great fortune to spend some time with legendary filmmaker, writer, visual artist, wit and unofficial (but sort of official) Provincetown mayor John Waters.
So You Graduated Film School, Now What? A Recent Film Grad Explains
I remember spending most of the time leading up to graduation feeling like my education had been worthless. I went to a liberal arts college, majoring in film in a program that emphasized that only half of my education would come from a classroom. The rest would come from working on student films, shot exclusively on weekends. Admittedly, giving up all of those weekends contributed largely to my sense of semi-entitlement when I graduated, and I spent a lot of time in those first months wondering when (if ever) I’d have the chance to be on a set again.
Lions and Transformers and Giant Lizards, Oh My! Studios Taking to Tumblr
Adidas became the first major brand to build an advertising campaign on Tumblr, back in 2012, shortly after Tumblr announced they would be including paid advertising on their site. Today, the Adidas Tumblr page is a wonder of beautiful product shots, videos, artwork and what feels like an infinite amount of scrollable content.
Tumblr now hosts nearly 189 million blogs comprising more than 83 billion posts, with more than 90 million posts created each day.
Damon Lindelof Returns to TV to for HBO’s The Leftovers
“Two percent doesn’t sound like much, but, two percent of the entire planet, of every person on it, that’s more than the world’s ten largest cities combined. That’s more than every death from every war in the 20th century. If every one of those people joined hands, they’d wrap around the world six times. It’s one hundred and forty million people. And like that…they were gone.”
The above quote comes from one of the clever,
Social Media Savvy Helps Fuel The Fault in Our Stars Excitement
Amid mutants, massive monsters and a horned and winged Angelina Jolie, a much quieter but no less anticipated film has been on everybody’s radar well in advance of it’s June 6 release—The Fault in Our Stars. Based on John Green’s 2012 novel, TFIOS centers on the story of Hazel (Shailene Woodley) and Gus (Ansel Elgort), two witty, irreverent teenagers who meet,
Comedy Central’s Growing Roster of Female Showstoppers
If you haven’t watched any of Inside Amy Schumer on Comedy Central, you should start doing so immediately. Far from coming out of nowhere (Schumer’s been on Comedy Central in several capacities over the years, and finished fourth on NBC's Last Comic Standing), there are still many people in the country who haven’t heard of her, so watching her show can feel like witnessing the sudden birth of the total comedy package—like a foul-mouthed,
A Million Ways to Die in the West & How the Western Was Won
A cowardly sheep farmer named Albert backs out of a gunfight (he’s never fired his gun), and his humiliated girlfriend leaves him for another man. Soon enough, however, a beautiful woman rides into town, and she begins to help Albert find his courage. What he finds, however, is that he’s falling in love with her, which would be all well and good if she weren’t already married…to a notorious outlaw. A notorious outlaw who, as he must,
Maleficent and the Strange and Storied History of Fairy Tales
This coming Friday one of the most eagerly anticipated films ever based on a fairy tale will be casting its spell on millions. We're talking about Maleficent, of course, Disney's fresh look at one of the most iconic villains of any fantasy or fairy kingdom, played by the seemingly perfectly cast Angelina Jolie. The production design looks lush, the effects superb, and the cast of the whole film a touch darker than we're used to with a Disney film.
Get Excited: Star Wars: Episode VII, the Coen Brothers as Writers for Hire & More
What do J.J. Abrams, the Coen Brothers, Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Ames and UNICEF have in common? Nothing, save for the fact that they're all apart of this round-up of things to be excited about. Let's have a look:
The Coen Brothers as the Best Possible Writers for Hire
Here’s the [true] story; one afternoon in May, in 1943, an Army Air Forces B-24 bomber crashes into the Pacific Ocean. Former Olympic track star Louis Zamperini,
Mutants, Maleficent & Tom Cruise: Summer Blockbuster Season is Upon us
Godzilla thrashes and trashes his way into theaters this weekend, marking the unofficial start of summer blockbuster season (you could argue The Amazing Spider-Man 2 kicked off the increasingly earlier start to tent pole season on May 2). In the coming weeks, some of the year’s biggest films are hitting theaters, including mutants, mutating robots, turtles who are also mutants, Maleficent, Tom Cruise, monkeys riding horses,
Cricket out of Water: The Sport Behind Disney’s Million Dollar Arm
It’s a story that seems tailor-made for film: the surprise twist is that it’s true. Million Dollar Arm, the latest feel-good sports flick from Disney, tells the tale of a down and out sports agent (Jon Hamm) who turned two Indian cricket players into Major League pitchers.
Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel were both seventeen years old, speaking no English and raised in villages without cellphones,
Looking Back at the Original Godzilla
In August of 1954, Toho Studios began shooting a film unlike any that ever been made in Japanese cinematic history. Three photography teams were required: a special-effects photography team to cover the film's star, a principal photography team to capture dramatic scenes between the rest of the cast, and a composite photography team who would help mesh star and cast into a cohesive whole.
That film was, of course, the original Godzilla,
Celebrating the Unsung Maternal Heroes of the Silver Screen for Mother’s Day
Mothers’ Day is this Sunday, and it’s come to our attention that, strange as it may seem, celebrities have mothers too. Some of them even have celebrity mothers. Though really, if you consider all the time, industry knowledge and innate talent that it takes to succeed in Hollywood, it makes sense that we see so many famous kids with famous parents (see Liza Minelli and Judy Garland) or sprawling thespian dynasties (see the Barrymores or Redgraves).
