Frame Grabs

July 3, 2008

I've spent the past few days collecting missing imagery for the film. This first one is a temporary background plate. I'll replace it in the fall, when the trees match the rest of the film. Hopefully the red shopping cart will still be there.

Posted by David Lowery at 1:04 AM | Comments (0)

Slow As Malaria?

July 2, 2008

Ciao sold out all 1400 seats of the Castro Theater in San Francisco last weekend, in spite of one local rag's claim that it was as "slow as malaria." Wow. I think that's a bad thing? Regardless, it was followed yesterday by this really terrific review in Variety. No guesses as to what the pullquote from this one will be.

Meanwhile, there are two really amazing developments with Yen's film that I'm going to have to stay hushed up about. Needless to say, the film's journey is proving to be full of surprises.

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Speaking of reviews, I've two new ones at Hammer To Nail: one of the award winning short film The Execution Of Solomon Harris and the other in which I try to pinpoint the strange discontent I felt at the end of Ramin Bahrani's Chop Shop. And while you're out reading, stop by Short End Magazine, where Noralil Ryan Fores has a great conversation with Mike Brune, who's epic The Adventure is still probably the best (live-action) short film I've seen all year.

There was something else I was going to link to, but I don't remember what it was.

Posted by David Lowery at 11:07 AM | Comments (0)

Lush, Green

June 29, 2008

The other night, I had an allergic reaction to something I ate, and my throat closed up. By the time it finally untwisted on Saturday morning, my vocal cords were strung out and strangled, and my voice was reduced to a raspy warble. Which didn't stop me from meeting up with Clay and having a light lunch of tropical vodka cocktails. After all, what's better than getting slightly inebriated on a hot summer afternoon? I'll tell you: getting slightly inebriated on a hot summer afternoon and then going to shoot green screen sequence for your movie!

Shooting on green screens can be exhausting and frustrating - hence the need for libation - but I still get a little bit giddy about them. There's an old photo in some old book depicting an ILM effects technician holding two TIE Fighers on rods in front of a blue screen, shooting a sequence from one of the first Star Wars films. This image and all the possibilities it represented set my young imagination alight; it encapsulates, in way, quite a bit of what made me want to be a filmmaker in the first place. I couldn't find that picture on the internet, so I had Clay pose in a rough estimation, seen above. We were shooting paper airplanes instead of spaceships, but as far as the technique goes, it turns out there's not that much difference between the two.

After we knocked out the shots, we went to another watering hole for mojitos, compelled by the ingering after effects of Colin Farrell's irresistibly guttural testament to the Cuban cocktail in Miami Vice (which I'd just rewatched a few days earlier). Shortly afterwards, Toby and I hopped in the car and took off to Austin, where we met up with friends and went out for margaritas, which didn't do my absent voice any favors but certainly kept the day on target.

Posted by David Lowery at 11:20 PM | Comments (2)

Under 100

June 24, 2008

I'm really bad about taking breathers. As in: I take too many of them. I finally returned to St. Nick the other day, exactly a month after finishing the first cut, and after a full day of procrastination via reading, working on a script, working on a play, napping, comparing clips from both film versions of Henry V on YouTube and watching the last half of Jackass 2, I opened up the file and promptly cut out seven minutes.

I've really got to get moving on this thing. Tomorrow: animation!

Posted by David Lowery at 1:55 AM | Comments (3)

Boring Movies about Balloons

June 21, 2008

Yen and I went to see Hou Hsiao Hsien's Flight Of The Red Balloon the other day, during its brief North Texas run. Two or three shots into it, I leaned over and whispered "how'd they do that?" in regards to the amazing choreography of that titular dirigible within Hou's long, gracefully mobile shots. Ah, the mechanics of whismy - which through the magic of meta makes whimsy that much more marvelous. I honestly don't care how Hou pulled it off, only that he did - but that he did at all sets my imagination alight all the more. I think it might just be the a series of very sustained happy accidents (some anecdote from David Mamet's Bambi Vs. Godzilla, in which he drove himself nuts trying to deduce the manner in which a filmmaker had managed to get a cat to do something in a very specific way, springs to mind), which, if so, is just as much a testament to Hou's skill - that he can roll with the unexpected with as much grace as the precise arrangements of time and space in which he composes his tableaux.

The film itself is a joy, delineating in blissfully uncertain terms the divisions between art and life, between wonder and routine; is is a magnificent see-saw act, with a mother on one end and her child on the other, each working to maintain their balance while tipping too far in the other's direction. It's set almost exclusively in a single, tiny Parisian apartment, and the way Hou, with his trademark roving lens, navigates this cramped space and all the people that come and go within it is as dazzling as any other virtuoso action sequence one might come across in the theaters this summer. As the credits were rolling, Yen asked if we should be worried that this was our idea of a good time, as if that might speak poorly for our chances of sustaining a career in this field. Heck, I'm already more broke than the day I was born; sticking to my guns isn't gonna do me any worse than it already has.

Posted by David Lowery at 3:31 PM | Comments (1)

Fincher for Christmas

June 20, 2008

It's taken a good month for the trailer to David Fincher's The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button to officially make it from the big screen to the internet, but now it's finally available in a variety of HD formats. It looks gorgeous, tantalizing; there's something both precious and gutturally unsettling about it - the latter due largely to the uncanny special effects that have placed Brad Pitt's face on the body of a septuagenarian toddler. This is going to be one beautifully freaky Christmas movie - and to top it off, the score is by Alexandre Desplat. I can't wait.

But that's all six months away. In the meantime, Jonathan McNicol is serializing the F. Scott Fitzgerald novella upon which the film is based, releasing a chapter a day in elegantly designed PDFs. It'll be a fine way to begin the day for the next two weeks. Thanks to GreenCine Daily for the link.

Posted by David Lowery at 11:57 AM | Comments (0)