Reverse Shot has announced a partnership that brings their curated video interview series to a global audience via Babelgum’s online platform and its free applications for Apple’s iPhone & iPod Touch and Google’s Android devices. Babelgum will be the new home of Reverse Shot’s “Talkies” and “Direct Address” videos, which feature candid, off-the-cuff interviews with celebrated and emergent figures in film. When we decided to branch out from printed criticism into video we wanted to set a new standard for web-based interview content. We couldn’t imagine a better home for the Talkies and Direct Address than Babelgum, which has proven itself a leader in publishing and promoting innovative online video content. So bookmark it now!
BABELGUM PARTNERS WITH REVERSE SHOT TO PRESENT EXCLUSIVE CONTENT ONLINE & VIA MOBILE
Reverse Shot Branded Channel Launches February 25th with exclusive interviews, including:
Acclaimed Actor Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds, Fish Tank)
and
Academy Award Nominee Christian Berger (The White Ribbon)
Said Karol Martesko-Fenster, SVP & General Manager of Babelgum’s Film Division, in the press release announcing this news, “We are thrilled to partner with Reverse Shot, one of the sharpest, most vital sites for online film reviews and now video, on developing and hosting this new series. As journalism increasingly moves from text to image, the Talkies and Direct Address formats raise the bar high, tapping into the specialty and indie creative talent pool with intelligence and professionalism, while retaining an unusual degree of creativity with respect to location, form, and conversational interest.”
In case you don’t know, Reverse Shot Talkies, previously featured on indieWIRE, is a series of unconventional, site-specific video interviews with filmmakers, actors, programmers, critics, and more. Informal, playful, and always revealing, Talkies are not just antidotes to the traditional Q&A format but also unique, self-contained short films. Past Talkies installments have featured internationally renowned filmmakers such as Pedro Almodóvar, Cedric Klapisch, Richard Linklater, and Atom Egoyan, as well as emerging indie auteurs like Andrew Bujalski, So Yong Kim, and Bradley Rust Gray. The latest episodes feature conversations with Academy Award winner James Marsh (Man on Wire, Red Riding), Academy Award–nominated cinematographer Christian Berger (The White Ribbon), and actor Michael Fassbender (Inglourious Basterds, Fish Tank). Earlier segments were featured by indieWIRE. Future segments will feature Claire Denis and Mathieu Amalric.
Reverse Shot’s Direct Address series, on the other hand, gives the viewer up-close access to some of international cinema’s most fascinating figures. Direct Address challenges interviewees to address the camera in tight close-up; these intimate videos expose subtle flickers of expression and reveal remarkable minds at work. Past episodes have featured Sally Potter (Rage) and Michael Haneke (The White Ribbon), and in-depth interviews with Catherine Breillat (Bluebeard) and Bruno Dumont (Hadewijch) are forthcoming.
We needed another delicate, comedy-tinged American independent drama about a socially awkward, emotionally stunted creative guy who has a hard time communicating with girls like a hole in the head. At the very least, what immediately sets the new film Easier with Practice apart from many recent installments in this ever-ready subgenre is that first-time director Kyle Patrick Alvarez knows where to point a camera. As overly self-aware and photo-album-ready as much of the film’s shots are, especially in its opening moments, it’s clear that we’re in the hands of a genuine moviemaker. Unfortunately it takes a little digging to get past the received indie mannerisms (disaffected people in frozen tableaux of American nowheresville) to find approximations of recognizable human behavior in the film, an adaptation of a fact-based short story about a passive young writer, Davey (Brian Geraghty), who begins a phone-sex relationship with a woman who one night randomly calls his motel room while he’s on a book-reading tour of the American Southwest. Read Michael Koresky’s review of Easier with Practice.
One of the first things viewers will inevitably remember from A Prophet is an early sequence in which the film’s young hero, Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) murders a fellow prison inmate, by extracting a concealed razor blade from inside his mouth with his tongue, and slicing open the unsuspecting victim’s throat. Notwithstanding the stygian brutality of this scene (from which a residual dread is likely to remain with the viewer throughout the film), A Prophet is ultimately as memorable for the responsibility it assumes, as it is for the savagery it depicts. At a time where an entire sub-genre of popular cinema exists only to invent more repulsive and cruel forms of torture, not once during A Prophet does the horror on the screen feel any less real than that of the chaotic world it succeeds in depicting with moral precision and intellectual honesty. Few will quibble against the consensus since Cannes ’09 that A Prophet is a gripping and exceptionally well-crafted crime film, but whether it represents a substantial step up for its director is more debatable. Read the rest of Julien Allen’s review of A Prophet.
In the first twenty or so minutes of Kimberly Reed’s marvelous documentary Prodigal Sons, the film’s director, who is also one of its main subjects, returns to her small Montana hometown to attend a high-school reunion. En route, she is reunited with her adopted older brother, Marc, with whom she casually mentions she has been estranged for over a decade. Soon, the first bombshell, uttered by Marc from the backseat of a car: his sister Kim, our narrator, used to be his brother, Paul. A third child, Todd, will waft in and out of conversation and the movie itself. Shot in perfunctory home video style with the occasional Big Sky Country visual interlude, these early scenes would seem to establish the film in predictable personal-diary doc territory—and though the structure and aesthetics of the film will not necessarily come to refute this impression, Prodigal Sons turns out to be so much more. Read Michael Koresky’s review of Prodigal Sons.
Once upon a time, Martin Scorsese’s occasional dabbling in genre filmmaking would come packaged with a twist. Indeed, looking back over his oeuvre, one can spot the musical, the sports picture, the comedy, the horror film, (and, yes, the gangster film). Yet the final product was so far afield from such strictly designated categories that one would never dare reduce them. New York, New York (perhaps the film that most baldly evokes common movie tropes) transcends imitation in its raw performances and abnormal scene duration, in the chilling brutality of its palpable, almost Cassavetes-like marital spats; Raging Bull, of course, never was your grandfather’s boxing picture, an intensely personal and nearly ethnographic dissection of a lone brute; The King of Comedy’s thin veneer of slapstick barely conceals some of the most terrifying pathologies put onscreen in the Eighties; Cape Fear’s monster slices through the screen with agonizing, suspenseful precision, yet it’s that rare depiction of a family’s dysfunction that truly frightens, wrenching ideas of good and evil out of their comfort zones. To praise these films is not to instantly assume that such genres necessarily need to be scrutinized or eviscerated, but to acknowledge Scorsese’s imbuing of common narrative fallbacks with his seeking, passionate artistry, which often has manifested not merely as technical bravura but as part of a individualistic journey, both through film and his own tenable life philosophies.
Of late, many of Scorsese’s most ardent admirers have been dubious, and his detractors have been able to add coal to their furnaces, perhaps because Scorsese’s relationship to genre seems to have altered. Read Michael Koresky’s review of Shutter Island.
Syndicate this site