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 ...
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 ...
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. ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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, ...
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 ...
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 ...
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, ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
