Posted on Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 by Peter Sciretta
Retro Whale has created a series of art based on the favorite filmmakers of film geeks. She has created quirky little portraits of 20 great filmmakers, which you can purchase as art prints, magnets, or 4×4 clapboard coasters (which are wall mountable).
Posted on Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009 by Peter Sciretta
/Film reader and Brazilian artist Mario Graciotti has created a few series of posters I wanted to showcase on the site. The posters showcase the films of Paul Thomas Anderson, Alfred Hitchcock, and Pixar Animation Studios. Check out some of Graciotti’s minimalistic posters, after the jump.
Posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 by Peter Sciretta
It took five years between Punch Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood, but we won’t have to wait until 2012 to see Paul Thomas Anderson next film. That’s right, the filmmaker has decided on his next project, set it up at Universal, and cast Philip Seymour Hoffman, who has played supporting characters in most of Anderson’s previous films, in the lead role. So what is it about? It’s a $35 million period drama in which Hoffman will play a master of ceremonies nicknamed The Master, “a charismatic intellectual who hatches a faith-based organization that begins to catch on in America in 1952.”
Posted on Thursday, August 27th, 2009 by Peter Sciretta
Earlier this month, we posted a video of Quentin Tarantino listing off his top 20 movies to be released since he became a filmmaker. The video was actually party of a special series on the British television channel Sky Movies. Tarantino presented some movies of his choice films including Taxi Driver, Sunshine, There Will Be Blood, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and even his own Death Proof, accompanied by short sit down introductions.
What follows after the jump is Tarantino’s 10-minute review of Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. Of course, Anderson is one of Quentin’s good friends, so the review is glowing. But Tarantino’s insights are always worth my time. Check out the review after the jump.
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With only two feature films and one TV show to his name, writer/director Jody Hill, is now synonymous with ignoring the boundaries and “genre rules” of modern comedy and creating anti-heroes that laughably burble with nihilistic rage, scary faux pas and hot-air egos. But there is also an internal depth to these macho doofuses played by Hill’s longtime pal and writing partner, Danny McBride, and comedy star Seth Rogen, to surpass the high art of a perfectly-timed and pronounced “fuck.”
Hill’s work on Observe & Report, The Foot Fist Way, and his cultural breakthrough, HBO’s Eastbound & Down, contains more glass-darkly social commentary and life-lived expression than the work of any hotshot young novelist in recent memory. Rather than document the cold realities and indulgent pleasantries of another big city with bright lights, Hill is set on exploring the very place that so many creative-types vacate upon the arrival of their first Visa card or college acceptance letter: the American South. Moreover, as many middle-class and broke white American males face sobering, if inevitable, realizations and disillusions about the future, laughing at Hill’s moronic, unhinged versions as they champion outdated movie/sports star heroics atop small-town kingdoms is like homemade medicine. When it comes to countering the monotony of the average day-to-day? Eastbound is harder to beat still. The sight of Kenny Powers “dancing” in a middle school gym under the influence of eggrolls and ecstasy or ejecting a topless broad from his Jet Ski is priceless. Like cheetah-spotted gold or “a bulletproof tiger, dude.”
A native of North Carolina, Hill is the latest progeny of the North Carolina School of the Arts, alongside McBride and creative partner Ben Best, fellow EB&D director David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express), and EB&D cinematographer Tim Orr. In the first part of my interview, we discuss the show in-depth, including some of the surprising and vile admissions and special features on the Season One DVD. We also talk about what it’s like to be a young director coming from, and staying in, the South, why so many comedians today are from there, and why the region was overdue for a proper comedic depiction.
Hunter Stephenson: Hey Jody, how are you?
Jody Hill: Hey Hunter. Good, good, good. Hey man, I wanted to say that I was sorry I wasn’t there when you visited down in Wilmington [Eastbound & Down set, 2008]. I remember the piece you wrote, and it sounded like a really good time. [laughs] Sucks I couldn’t there, man; I was editing my film (Observe & Report), and Warner Bros. wouldn’t let me go. When you have to do a director’s cut, they want to lock you up for 10 weeks. [laughs] Everybody said they had a blast…and I was editing.
Yeah. I expected to interview you there. And I didn’t know about the change, that David Green was now directing the majority of the episodes while you were in L.A. But it all worked out, he killed it. My first question: Legend has it that when you, Danny [McBride], and Ben [Best] first conceived of Kenny Powers you were sitting in a kiddie pool in North Carolina drinking beers. [laughs] Is that accurate?
Jody Hill: [laughs] Yeah, this was before we made Foot Fist Way or anything. We were trying to come up with ideas for shows. I was between jobs; I had been working this really shit reality show job, doing motion-control for Behind the Music and shit like that. [laughs] It was pretty lame. And so, yeah, we were in Charlotte, in the backyard of Ben Best’s house. And yeah, we were literally sitting in a kiddie pool with a case of beer. And Kenny was one of the ideas that, uh, we came up with. [laughs]
Posted on Friday, April 10th, 2009 by Hunter Stephenson
Weekend Update: Due to the amazing bitch-session in the comments: the following article is a combination free-form essay/review on the genius, relevance, and influences of writer/director Jody Hill and his works including The Foot Fist Way, Eastbound & Down, and his latest, Observe and Report. It also deals with the growing trend of incredibly dark and conflicted American male anti-heroes in movies and TV. Oh yeah, it’s also really, really, really long and I didn’t see a need to begin the piece with “If you were expecting Paul Blart, get ready for a crazy rollercoaster not suitable for the kiddies.” Because fuck Paul Blart. No one will remember that movie in five years, until the sequel is released and makes $200 million. My bad?
Let me preface this by saying that I now anticipate Jody Hill’s films more than any other working filmmaker with the exception of Paul Thomas Anderson. And on a particularly excruciating Monday, maybe Tommy Wiseau’s.
“You suck this gun like a dick and then this dick goin’ cum in your mouth and blow your brains all over the street!” – Danny McBride in Observe and Report, um, protecting his legacy
Generally speaking, there are two types of people, and as it lies, two types of moviegoers: Those who go to malls without a second thought and those who go into them only on the rarest of occasions, sucking on an imaginary Klonopin, those who walk around wondering how the fuck this and they and that sign came to be, pregnant with the speeding notion that a loon might as well destroy the entire fucking building or at least high-jack the “raffle car,” peel out through the entrance doors, and drive on to a fabled body of water.
Posted on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 by Peter Sciretta
Entertainment Weekly just published their list of the 25 Greatest Active Film Directors. It’s one of those really annoying slideshow stories, so we’ve done the legwork and printed the entire shortlist after the jump.
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Posted on Sunday, December 7th, 2008 by Peter Sciretta
In a previous edition of Big Directors Small Films, we took a look at Paul Thomas Anderson’s first film, a 1988 short fictional documentary that inspired Boogie Nights titled The Dirk Diggler Story. From there, Paul went on to attend New York University, but quit after only two days of classes. He became a production assistant on a bunch of made for television movies, television game shows and independent film projects. In this time he developed his second serious short film project made up of five vignettes set in a diner with Philip Baker Hall (who later went on to become a PTA regular) and Miguel Ferrer among the cast.
Cigarettes & Coffee premiered at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival, where he gained the attention needed to be accepted into the Sundance Institute’s filmmaker workshop program where he developed, adapted, and expanded the idea into his first feature film — Hard Eight. In this short you can see the early inspiration of Robert Altman, with Anderson cutting between three stories which somehow intersect. Many thanks to /Film reader Kendrick T who submitted the Vimo link over the weekend.
Posted on Saturday, October 25th, 2008 by Peter Sciretta
In this week’s Big Directors Small Films, we take a look at Paul Thomas Anderson’s first film, a 1988 short fictional documentary titled The Dirk Diggler Story. You might recognize the name in the title as the character that Mark Wahlberg played nine years later in Boogie Nights. The Dirk Diggler Story was very much like a first draft of that film. Some of the major characters in Anderson’s later second feature make appearances, including Reed Rothchild, Dirks best friend and sidekick, and director Jack Horner.
The film was shot on video and edited from tape to tape using two VCRs. Paul’s father, a professional announcer and “The Voice of ABC” in the 1970’s and 1980’s, provided the deadpan narration. This is clearly the work of a teenage PTA. I’m more impressed at the performances Anderson was able to get out of the non professional cast, and the amount of story Paul crammed into 30 minutes.
Michael Stein, who played Dirk in the documentary short, was given a cameo in Boogie Nights at a stereo customer. Robert Ridgley, who was Jack Horner in the short, also appeared in Boogie Nights, as the Colonel.
Posted on Friday, October 10th, 2008 by Peter Sciretta
A couple months ago Paul Thomas Anderson directed a stageplay in LA (which many described as a radioplay), which featured Maya Rudolph, Fred Armisen, and John C Reilly. There were only a few performances, so if you were there, you were there, but if you missed it - YOU MISSED IT.
Well it appears that PTA is back at it again. And if you’re in Los Angeles, you’re not going to want to miss this event. It’s basically a revised version of the show that PTA put on earlier this Summer. Jon Brion (I Heart Huckabees, Magnolia, Eternal Sunshine) is doing the music and Anderson wrote some of the material. So if you missed it then, you might not want to test fate again. Who knows if Paul will be doing this again. And aside from this, when are you ever going to have a chance to see a PTA production live and in person? The show is 8:30pm this Saturday night at Largo at the Coronet. Tickets are only $25.
