This June, Establishing Shot will feature a miniseries we’re calling Here’s Looking at You, 2002 as we take a look back at films celebrating their 20th anniversary this year. Today, Laura Ivins makes us nostalgic as she reminisces about the rise of the DVD and the charms of the video store. In 2002, the DVD format… Read more »
In 1996’s Scream (Wes Craven), we learned the rules of the slasher genre. Depraved male killers stalk teenagers who get out of line. Only the virginal woman — the Final Girl — survives. All other sins will be punished, especially and particularly women who show their breasts and have sex. The term “Final Girl” originates… Read more »
What does it mean when a film is “handmade”? If we’re talking about experimental film, the term “handmade” usually refers to techniques like direct animation, processing film at home instead of sending it to a lab, or otherwise directly manipulating your negative or film print (bleaching, dying, etc.). Naomi Uman engages in all these techniques…. Read more »
*Contains spoilers! Watch the film before you read!* Keanu Reeves’ beard proved challenging for the animation team of A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater, 2006). It’s patchy and inconsistent, requiring a high-degree of detail work to capture the tonal and textural variations across the actor’s cheek. A Scanner Darkly is made in an animation style called… Read more »
In 1942, about a decade before she would step into the role of Lucy Ricardo, Lucille Ball was ending a run as “the RKO comedy bombshell” and moving up into MGM’s glitz-and-glam musical comedy world. The height of Ball’s Hollywood stardom was in the early- to mid-1940s, and yet her success in Hollywood cinema pales… Read more »
Contains some light spoilers, though I try not to give too much away. At first glance, Lamb (Valdimar Jóhannsson, 2021) is a film about grief so powerful it conjures the past into the present. Sheep farmers Maria (Noomi Rapace) and Ingvar (Hilmir Snær Guðnason) sit at their kitchen table, and Ingvar remarks, “They’re saying time… Read more »