November 29, 2020

Disney+ Salutes Chadwick Boseman with New ‘Black Panther’ MCU Intro — Watch

Chadwick Boseman would’ve been 44 on Sunday, if his life weren’t cut unexpectedly short back on August 28 after a private, four-year battle with colon cancer. In tribute to the actor on his birthday, Disney+ has revealed a revised Marvel Cinematic Universe intro ahead of “Black Panther,” which is currently streaming on the Disney platform. Stream the film on Disney+, and watch the new intro below.

The Walt Disney Company executive chairman Bob Iger teased the new introduction on Saturday, tweeting, “To all fans of #BlackPanther: watch the film on #DisneyPlus late tonight, for a special tribute to someone that was and will always be near and dear to our hearts.”

The updated intro includes the classic page-turning design that opens all Marvel movies, but now with new concept art, and images and footage from “Black Panther.” As Boseman also starred as T’Challa/Black Panther in “Captain America: Civil War,” “Avengers: Infinity War,” and “Avengers: Endgame,” footage from those films is included in the spot as well.

Even posthumously, 2020 remains a major year for Boseman. His short but unforgettable screen time in Spike Lee’s Vietnam War epic “Da 5 Bloods” as “Stormin’” Norman Earl Holloway, defines the arc of the entire movie. As leader of the title squad, Norman is killed in an early flashback sequence, leaving his peers to fulfill his legacy in search of gold — a treasure Holloway suggested they bury to fund Black Liberation.

Meanwhile, Boseman is getting Academy Awards buzz not only for that film, but for his searing turn in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” as a trumpeter scheming to steal the spotlight from Viola Davis’ title character. In his IndieWire review, Chief Film Critic Eric Kohn wrote that “he’s a natural as the movie’s central troublemaker, a sly source of entertainment until his subversive attitude becomes a liability.”

It was recently announced that the upcoming “Black Panther 2” will begin filming in July 2021.

Long live the King. #WakandaForever pic.twitter.com/uW1KisOkTq

— Marvel Entertainment (@Marvel) November 29, 2020

To all fans of #BlackPanther: watch the film on #DisneyPlus late tonight, for a special tribute to someone that was and will always be near and dear to our hearts.

— Robert Iger (@RobertIger) November 28, 2020

Source: IndieWire film

November 29, 2020

Mysterious Utah Monolith Evoking ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ Has Vanished

As mysteriously as it was discovered in the Utah desert on November 18, the 10-foot-tall, silver monolith evoking one of the most potent images from Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” has now vanished. According to a Facebook post from Utah’s Bureau of Land Management on Saturday, the puzzling structure was removed from “public lands by an unknown party.”

The Bureau added, “The BLM did not remove the structure which is considered private property. We do not investigate crimes involving private property which are handled by the local sheriff’s office. The structure has received international and national attention and we received reports that a person or group removed it on the evening of Nov. 27.”

The structure was discovered in the red rocks desert of southwestern Utah by helicopter pilot Bret Hutchings while on a sheep-counting mission. Hutchings told Salt Lake City broadcaster KSL-TV the object appeared to be planted by an anonymous person, with wildlife crew surmising the slab was constructed by an artist or fan of Kubrick’s science-fiction landmark. Hutchings quipped, “We were joking around that if one of us suddenly disappears, I guess the rest of us make a run for it…That’s been about the strangest thing that I’ve come across out there in all my years of flying.”

Hutchings added, “One of the biologists is the one who spotted it and we just happened to fly directly over the top of it. He was like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, turn around, turn around!’ And I was like, ‘What.’ And he’s like, ‘There’s this thing back there — we’ve got to go look at it!’ We were thinking, is this something NASA stuck up there or something? Are they bouncing satellites off it?”

Though Utah originally opted not to disclose the location to avoid attracting inexperienced hikers, the coordinates were eventually discovered, by hiker David Surber, who observed on Instagram that the structure was aluminum, not magnetic, and made of three pieces riveted together, with two rivets missing on the top. See below.

“Apparently the monolith is gone,” Surber later said on Instagram. “Nature returned back to her natural state I suppose.”

The New York Times reported that some speculated the monolith to be the work of sculptor John McCracken, who died in 2011. According to Patrick McCracken, his father told him in 2002 that “he would like to leave his artwork in remote places to be discovered later.”

It’s source, and where it lives now, remain a mystery befitting of Kubrick’s beguiling sci-fi masterpiece.

Source: IndieWire film

November 28, 2020

Glenn Close Says Gwyneth Paltrow’s ‘Shakespeare in Love’ Oscar Win Didn’t Make Sense

Seven-time Academy Award-nominee Glenn Close is back in the Oscar mix for her turn in Ron Howard’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” now streaming on Netflix. All eyes were on Close last year to finally take home Best Actress for “The Wife,” but alas that honor went to Olivia Colman for “The Favourite.” Speaking with film critic Peter Travers for his ABC News special “Popcorn,” Close had some candid thoughts about the Oscars, pointing to the Best Actress race in 1999 as an example that didn’t “make sense.”

“I honestly feel that to be nominated by your peers is about as good as it gets,” Close said. “And then, I’ve never understood how you could honestly compare performances, you know? I remember the year Gwyneth Paltrow won over that incredible actress who was in ‘Central Station’ and I thought, ‘What?’ It doesn’t make sense.” (The “incredible actress” was Brazilian legend Fernanda Montenegro, who won prizes from the Berlin International Film Festival, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and more for the film.)

The year Paltrow won, she was also up against Cate Blanchett in “Elizabeth,” Meryl Streep in “One True Thing,” and Emily Watson in “Hilary and Jackie.” Miramax-backed “Shakespeare in Love” was, ultimately, the toast of the night, winning Best Picture in what many considered an upset over “Saving Private Ryan.”

Close added, “So I think who wins has a lot of things to do with how things have been, you know, whether it has traction or whatever. Publicity, how much money did they have to put it out in front of everybody’s sight. I have to be philosophical about it, if I was upset about it.”

Close said she’s taken her Oscar losses in stride. “I’m very proud of the times that my peers have felt that my performance was worthy of attention,” she said.

Along with “The Wife,” Close has also been nominated in acting categories for “Albert Nobbs,” “Dangerous Liaisons,” “Fatal Attraction,” “The Natural,” “The Big Chill,” and “The World According to Garp.”

In the Peter Travers interview, below, she also revealed a film version of stage turn in “Sunset Boulevard” is also still in the works, and that it could begin production next summer.

Source: IndieWire film

November 28, 2020

Cinematographer Bradford Young Embraces the Dark Side of Digital

In the early days of Hollywood’s adaptation of digital cinematography, there were those artists, like Michael Mann and cinematographer Dion Bebe, or David Fincher and Harris Savides, who explored the unique properties of the medium, rather than simply try to make it look like celluloid. Even in 1080 HD-shot movies like “Zodiac” we saw how in low light and a night setting we could peer into this low contrast edge of exposure. While digital couldn’t, and still doesn’t, approach the incredible dynamic range that film negative can produce in rounding out an image’s highlights, there was incredible latitude filmmakers could find in the “toe” of exposure of a digital file.

There is one cinematographer, in particular, who has not only continued to explore the dark edges of the digital image, but used it as a canvas to paint. Bradford Young’s remarkable body of work this decade started off shooting on film, hardly a medium he’s sworn off, with staggering-looking indies like David Lowery’s “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” and Dee Rees’ “Pariah.” It was Rees’ portrait of a 17-year-old African American embracing her identity as a lesbian, where we see how Young comes alive in night — not in some “Blade Runner” neon-lit way or low-key noir contrast, but in depth, color and texture. In both films, Young pushed himself to experiment with under-exposure and low-con filters, searching for his own flavor of the milky blacks of Savides’ best work. It’s a look so many DPs tried to imitate, especially in commercials, but few made it their own like Young.

On “Mother of George,” due to budget constraints, he found himself shooting on the Red One camera. One of the most striking and unique-looking low-budget films ever made, Young tried doing some of the same things, but with an incredible overhead lighting scheme he found ways to make colors pop and dark skin glimmer. The glowing beauty and life radiating from inside the darkness of the immigrant characters’ struggle was pure Young.

Young has talked about how shooting digital has given him the confidence to go further, having a calibrated monitor and carefully pre-planned LUT he knows just how far he can push it and etch out glowing pockets of light. In many ways digital has become as much a mindset as a medium for him.

Donald Glover has remarked how so often on film sets there is a disconnect between what one experiences on set with the bright cinema lights, and what ends up on camera, at which point, looking at the final image, that artificially lit-world in retrospect makes sense. Yet when Glover walked onto Young’s set for the first-time the world felt like “real life” to him. What’s remarkable is that set was “Solo,” a Star Wars movie.

Young’s evolving practice has meant pulling, as much as possible, the apparatus of filmmaking off the stage — if actors fall in and out of the often practically lit set, so be it. Yet, while the set of “Solo” might have felt realistically lit, there is an endless array of pockets of light give the film a sense of night-time wonder in the otherwise bleak setting. Young’s images maybe dark, both in look, and sometimes emotional content, but they are alive. Those glowing pockets he and his long-time colorist Joe Gawler have learned they can etch out of a RAW digital file.

“I would say Brad has the most committed negative of any DP that I get to work with, there’s not a lot of latitude, but he and I have found this fun space to play in the dark that most people won’t go,” Gawler told IndieWire. “People that are familiar with my work with Brad come to me, ‘Oh, I want you to do what you do with Brad,’ and I start to go there on their footage and they all get scared. They can’t do it and end up back off. Brad’s not afraid of anything, so he makes these bold choices, but as an overall piece everyone responds to it. It’s a gift.”

That boldness is not simply aesthetic, it’s personal. Young is committed to the vision of long-time collaborators like Ava DuVernay (“Selma,” “When They See Us”) and Andrew Dosunmu (“Mother of George,” “Where Is Kyra?”), but more than most cinematographers he doesn’t hide that his cinematography is a form of self-expression. For example the one light-bulb lit apartment in which we are forced to search the frame for Kyra (Michelle Pfeiffer) is as much about Young creating “a more antagonistic relationship with the system” at a dark time in America, as it was Dosunmu’s exploration of how the system has worn out his depressed protagonist.

“There’s something about his work, there’s a spirituality to it and what he’s trying to communicate, what he’s trying to create as an artist,” Dosunma told IndieWire. “Brad got into this because he wanted to use those tools to express something personal for him. He’s very adamant about being on a job or shooting things that he’s able to communicate with his community of filmmakers and beyond, it’s absolutely necessary for him.”

For Young, the first African American to be nominated for Best Cinematography for his work on “Arrival,” his work is not simply artistic expression, but exploration of the form and how it has been used to portray minorities by a dominant white culture. His practice, at the moment not simply being about finding a style in the dark side of digital, but deconstructing and repurposing the extreme power, that has been use historically both for good and bad, of the tools of his trade. —Chris O’Falt

Source: IndieWire film