Getting More Immersed with Indiewire
Immersed in Blu-ray: Hitchcock and Bogart
Immersed in Books: Farber on Film
Laika’s stop-motion The Boxtrolls led ASIFA-Hollywood’s 42nd annual Annie Awards with 13 nominations, bolstering its chances for an Oscar nom, followed by DreamWorks’ How to Train Your Dragon 2 with 10 noms (both will compete for best animated feature). The winners will be announced Saturday, Jan. 31st, 2015 at UCLA’s Royce Hall at 7:00 pm. Read more
Without a doubt, the exquisite ballroom dance sequence from The Boxtrolls (a romantic interlude combined with a frantic chase and culminating with public humiliation) was the most difficult to pull off, particularly in stop-motion. It required special planning, some creative experimentation, and extra effort from all the departments. And the sequence is enhanced by Dario Marianelli’s pretty waltz (watch the exclusive “Let’s Dance” making of featurette below, with the David Bowie cover composed by McKenzie Stubbert). Read more
Watch an army of Woodstocks getting into the holiday spirit by decorating Snoopy’s doghouse in the first trailer for Blue Sky’s Peanuts (Nov. 6, 2015). Read more
Designing wormholes, black-holes and other space-time-bending phenomena was a first for production designer Nathan Crowley, who approached Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar like a kid in a candy store. Read more
Get a greater glimpse of Stephen Sondheim’s musical masterpiece, Into the Woods (Dec. 25), which explores the dark side of ”I wish.” Read more
While announcing that principal photography has completed for J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars: Episode VII, starwars.com let it be known that the complete title is The Force Awakens. Read more
One of the themes of Interstellar is rediscovering the spirit of adventure and invention from the 20th century. Watch this clip in which Matthew McConaughey finds out that the public school system has obliterated NASA from the history books by claiming the Apollo missions were a hoax to bankrupt the Soviet Union. Read more
USC 5D returned last Saturday with “The Rilao Project” at the 2014 Science of Fiction Festival, spearheaded by award-winning production designer and USC School of Cinematic Arts Professor Alex McDowell. I participated in the international one-day investigation, creating the fictional city of Rilao, a world build based on a mash-up of the DNA of Los Angeles and Rio. Read more
Just in time for Halloween, we have the psychological horror of two masterpieces to experience in digitally-restored Blu-ray: Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari from Eureka’s Masters of Cinema, and Jack Clayton’s The Innocents from Criterion. Read more
The new featurette for Into the Woods (Dec. 25) finally embraces its musical strengths and explains more about the fairy tale mash-up. We get to hear Meryl Streep’s Witch sing the sorrowful ”Stay with Me.” Read more
