After a major bidding war, Zach Cregger’s Barbarian follow-up Weapons landed at New Line and now we have a few major updates. With a shoot set to kick off this July, Production Weekly reports Rooney Mara will star in the project and they’ve revealed a logline: “A multi and inter-related story horror epic centered around witchcraft and missing children.” The film was previously described as being tonally in the vein of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 epic Magnolia, so expect many more cast members to join the ensemble.
After Netflix announced August Wilson’s Broadway play The Piano Lesson is getting the big-screen treatment a few years back, we’ve now gleaned more about the players involved. Production Weekly reports that Malcolm Washington, Denzel Washington’s son, will direct the adaptation, while John David Washington and Samuel L. Jackson will reprise their roles. Here’s the official synopsis:
At...
After Netflix announced August Wilson’s Broadway play The Piano Lesson is getting the big-screen treatment a few years back, we’ve now gleaned more about the players involved. Production Weekly reports that Malcolm Washington, Denzel Washington’s son, will direct the adaptation, while John David Washington and Samuel L. Jackson will reprise their roles. Here’s the official synopsis:
At...
- 3/9/2023
- by Leonard Pearce
- The Film Stage
In light of SXSW’s cancellation, a private “homespun” screening of the only local production in the festival’s narrative line up, Caleb Johnson’s The Carnivores, was arranged at its cinematographer’s (Adam J. Minnick) Austin residence on the night it was scheduled to premiere. The event hoped to encapsulate the spirit of the festival all at once. Upon entrance, invited press, programmers and audience got their photo taken on a polaroid against a classic yellow backdrop and laurels. That polaroid fit snug inside an imitation festival badge. After attendees stuffed themselves with Tacodeli they dragged over the red carpet to their seats […]...
- 3/26/2020
- by Aaron Hunt
- Filmmaker Magazine-Director Interviews
In light of SXSW’s cancellation, a private “homespun” screening of the only local production in the festival’s narrative line up, Caleb Johnson’s The Carnivores, was arranged at its cinematographer’s (Adam J. Minnick) Austin residence on the night it was scheduled to premiere. The event hoped to encapsulate the spirit of the festival all at once. Upon entrance, invited press, programmers and audience got their photo taken on a polaroid against a classic yellow backdrop and laurels. That polaroid fit snug inside an imitation festival badge. After attendees stuffed themselves with Tacodeli they dragged over the red carpet to their seats […]...
- 3/26/2020
- by Aaron Hunt
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
IndieWire reached out to the directors of photography behind the scripted narrative features that were set to premiere last week at SXSW to find out which cameras, lenses, and formats they used, and why they chose them to create the looks and meet the production demands of their films. Here are their responses.
“The Carnivores”
More from IndieWire'Dark City Beneath the Beat' Review: Tt the Artist Remixes Baltimore Into 65-Minute Club BangerMemo to Distributors: Buy These 2020 SXSW Movies
Dir: Caleb Michael Johnson, DoP: Adam J. Minnick
Format: Xavc S
Camera: Sony a6300 & Sony a7R III
Lens: Contax Zeiss Photographic Lenses, 28mm, 50mm, 85mm, & 135mm.
Minnick: We wanted a very precise look with choreographed camera moves to come out of a 12-day-shoot, so we knew we were going to be flying. We didn’t even slate. This set-up allowed for a light and versatile two-camera system to create a one-of-a-kind texture and maximum flexibility.
“The Carnivores”
More from IndieWire'Dark City Beneath the Beat' Review: Tt the Artist Remixes Baltimore Into 65-Minute Club BangerMemo to Distributors: Buy These 2020 SXSW Movies
Dir: Caleb Michael Johnson, DoP: Adam J. Minnick
Format: Xavc S
Camera: Sony a6300 & Sony a7R III
Lens: Contax Zeiss Photographic Lenses, 28mm, 50mm, 85mm, & 135mm.
Minnick: We wanted a very precise look with choreographed camera moves to come out of a 12-day-shoot, so we knew we were going to be flying. We didn’t even slate. This set-up allowed for a light and versatile two-camera system to create a one-of-a-kind texture and maximum flexibility.
- 3/20/2020
- by Chris O'Falt
- Indiewire
Dim echoes of David Lynch and early Roman Polanski abound throughout “The Carnivores,” a fitfully fascinating mix of teasing narrative opacity and stylized psycho-thriller atmospherics. The shot-in-Austin indie feature, originally set to premiere at the cancelled SXSW Film Festival, instead had a March 14 unveiling at a private event in the Texas capital city attended, according to a press release, by “the film’s crew, cast, friends & family, and prominent members of the Austin film community.”
Director Caleb Michael Johnson, working from a script he co-wrote with Jeff Bay Smith, walks a tricky tightrope here, and occasionally — especially during his movie’s first act — seems perilously close to toppling into absurdity. Indeed, there are moments when he inadvertently cues memories of the hilarious remark by Janeane Garofalo’s veterinarian talk show host in “The Truth About Cats and Dogs”: “You can love your dog. Just don’t love your dog.
Director Caleb Michael Johnson, working from a script he co-wrote with Jeff Bay Smith, walks a tricky tightrope here, and occasionally — especially during his movie’s first act — seems perilously close to toppling into absurdity. Indeed, there are moments when he inadvertently cues memories of the hilarious remark by Janeane Garofalo’s veterinarian talk show host in “The Truth About Cats and Dogs”: “You can love your dog. Just don’t love your dog.
- 3/15/2020
- by Joe Leydon
- Variety Film + TV
“Chained for Life” opens with a long quotation from Pauline Kael, the point of which is difficult to disagree with: actors and actresses tend to be more beautiful than the rest of us. Though the reason for this phenomenon is simple enough — people enjoy looking at pretty things, including and especially other people — its effects tend to be more complicated.
One case in point is writer-director Aaron Schimberg’s film, which makes good on its epigraph by exploring our conception of beauty (among many other things) with unexpected tenderness — unexpected because, at first glance, it looks like an ill-advised riff on “Freaks” that could easily turn exploitative.
Alongside Jess Weixler (“It Chapter Two”), who’s one of countless thespians to demonstrate Kael’s point, the film stars Adam Pearson, a performer familiar both for his scene-stealing turn in “Under the Skin” and for a condition called neurofibromatosis, which covers his face in tumors.
One case in point is writer-director Aaron Schimberg’s film, which makes good on its epigraph by exploring our conception of beauty (among many other things) with unexpected tenderness — unexpected because, at first glance, it looks like an ill-advised riff on “Freaks” that could easily turn exploitative.
Alongside Jess Weixler (“It Chapter Two”), who’s one of countless thespians to demonstrate Kael’s point, the film stars Adam Pearson, a performer familiar both for his scene-stealing turn in “Under the Skin” and for a condition called neurofibromatosis, which covers his face in tumors.
- 9/10/2019
- by Michael Nordine
- The Wrap
Sitting on a couch playing video games can be a ton of fun. The experience, whether alone or with friends, has been a staple of adolescent and adult entertainment for over a generation now. Some look at it like the lark that it can be. Others, they see it as a detriment to society and part of humanity’s downfall. To some degree, that’s explored in Relaxer, an independent comedy hitting theaters this week. However, what’s more fully on display is a bizarre exercise in discomfort. It’s going to prove divisive for those who see it. This humble critic did not care for it one bit. In fact, it was an actively unpleasant experience. The movie is supposedly a comedy, set in the year 1999. With the impending potential Y2K apocalypse fast approaching, Abbie (Joshua Burge) is stuck on a couch, undergoing abuse from his older brother...
- 3/18/2019
- by Joey Magidson
- Hollywoodnews.com
“Do you feel like the story is exploitative?” a journalist asks actress Mabel (Jess Weixler) about the new film she’s starring in, early into Aaron Schimberg’s brilliant second feature Chained for Life. In a meta-melodrama that constantly seesaws between fiction and reality, sprawling across a labyrinthine and multi-layered narrative that seamlessly jumps from one textual plane to another, I found myself wondering whether the question was in fact leveled at Schimberg’s own work.
Chained for Life unspools as a film-within-a-film. It follows a thick-accented German director as he makes his English language debut in Us soil: an art-horror about a mad doctor and his patients, all displaying an assorted range of physical differences. Ostensibly in an effort to stay true to his subject, Herr Director (as per the film’s credits) has cast people with real-life genetic disabilities and irregularities–a giant, a little person, conjoined twins,...
Chained for Life unspools as a film-within-a-film. It follows a thick-accented German director as he makes his English language debut in Us soil: an art-horror about a mad doctor and his patients, all displaying an assorted range of physical differences. Ostensibly in an effort to stay true to his subject, Herr Director (as per the film’s credits) has cast people with real-life genetic disabilities and irregularities–a giant, a little person, conjoined twins,...
- 12/21/2018
- by Leonardo Goi
- The Film Stage
What if the “freaks” had made Tod Browning’s “Freaks”? That seems to be the guiding impulse behind Aaron Schimberg’s second feature “Chained for Life” as he follows his intriguing 2013 black-and-white dreamscape “Go Down Death” with an even more challenging mix of outre form and content. Easier to admire than to love, this fascinating meta-narrative involving a film crew making a quasi-horror movie about physical disabilities keeps viewers at a deliberate distance — the better to make us question the nature of what we’re seeing (and thinking).
In another era, “Chained for Life” might have found a place on the midnight movie circuit — albeit a temporary one, as the film (presumably named after the cheesy 1952 exploitation vehicle for Siamese twins Violet and Daisy Hilton) is a mite too intellectual in appeal to have rivaled the likes of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” or “Eraserhead” (a film to which “Chained...
In another era, “Chained for Life” might have found a place on the midnight movie circuit — albeit a temporary one, as the film (presumably named after the cheesy 1952 exploitation vehicle for Siamese twins Violet and Daisy Hilton) is a mite too intellectual in appeal to have rivaled the likes of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” or “Eraserhead” (a film to which “Chained...
- 7/27/2018
- by Dennis Harvey
- Variety Film + TV
After a man opens his life up to a pair of indie filmmakers, Actor Martinez cunningly navigates between documentary and narrative to question its star’s true nature, as well as the concept of self-presentation in life as well as film. Arthur Martinez first appears in Nathan Silver and Mike Ott’s new film as the subject, but through the co-directors’ persistent manipulation, Arthur seems increasingly at the whim of this fascinating, perplexing film experiment.
From the opening frame, co-directors Ott and Silver appear on-screen to interrogate Arthur. They’re out of focus and their voices are laid on top of the opening shot in a way that alludes to their influence on the rest of this film; though Ott and Silver won’t always be visible, their presence adds a layer of subjectivity to any character’s portrayal. Mostly, that character is Arthur.
Designed to fudge the gaps between fiction and reality,...
From the opening frame, co-directors Ott and Silver appear on-screen to interrogate Arthur. They’re out of focus and their voices are laid on top of the opening shot in a way that alludes to their influence on the rest of this film; though Ott and Silver won’t always be visible, their presence adds a layer of subjectivity to any character’s portrayal. Mostly, that character is Arthur.
Designed to fudge the gaps between fiction and reality,...
- 4/23/2016
- by Zachary Shevich
- We Got This Covered
If you've had the privilege to see a film lensed by D.P Adam J. Minnick, you'd have recognized an eye disciplined by the story it's telling rather than by personal inclinations or some sybaritic style that steals from the story. Buzzard, was shot super raw and cold on a 5D, The Alchemist Cookbook was shot formally composed with a warm palllete on an Alexa, and Actor Martinez (Us Premiering this April at Tribeca) was shot with Altman inspired slow zooms on a Red Epic Dragon. The aesthetic decisions and stories speak for his adaptability and understanding of the form. And, his latest release, The Alchemist Cookbook, which hit SXSW hard when it world premiered, has audiences, critics, and filmmakers predominately sitting on the 'loved it' side of its divisive disposition.
We were fortunate to talk with the cinematographer on how the hell the team pulled it off.
Could you...
We were fortunate to talk with the cinematographer on how the hell the team pulled it off.
Could you...
- 3/26/2016
- by feeds@cinelinx.com (Aaron Hunt)
- Cinelinx
I was graced with the opportunity to talk shop on The Alchemist Cookbook, a SXSW gem that saturated all three of its screenings with starved festival foodies, with writer/director Joel Potrykus. Buzzfeed has genred it horror, but I'd be damned before I stuck the film a label. Joel and I talk a little about what happened behind the scenes on this divisive, unignorable beast, of a film. Take a look.
Joel lays it out for us:
So I was here two years ago with Buzzard, and it got a great reception... And the one place we knew this could exist at is, again, South By Southwest. Because it’s super uncommercial, and not at all for the mainstream and I’m super stoked to bring it here. I wanted to do something totally different from Buzzard. No white people, no cities... But, people tell me, it still has the...
Joel lays it out for us:
So I was here two years ago with Buzzard, and it got a great reception... And the one place we knew this could exist at is, again, South By Southwest. Because it’s super uncommercial, and not at all for the mainstream and I’m super stoked to bring it here. I wanted to do something totally different from Buzzard. No white people, no cities... But, people tell me, it still has the...
- 3/18/2016
- by feeds@cinelinx.com (Aaron Hunt)
- Cinelinx
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