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When director, producer, writer and overall Film Independent Arts Circle Member extraordinaire Thomas Mignone first moved to LA to pursue a career in film in the late Nineties, there was, well… a bit of a learning curve. “I didn’t even know what ‘P.A.’ stood for to be honest,” laughs the gregarious Brooklyn-born Mignone, speaking from the production offices of his current project, a biopic about pioneering Seventies and Eighties porn actress Vanessa del Rio....

THE WATCH For four glorious years, ESPN’s Bill Simmons-founded Grantland.com was inarguably one of the internet’s preeminent destinations for incisive writer-driven journalism and thoughtful critical analysis, focused in equal measure on the worlds of sports and pop culture. Unfortunately, parent company Disney ultimately shuttered the site in 2015, leaving fans (like me) of Grantland’s disparate constellation of howlingly funny and scary-smart commentators in flux. Happily, many of Grantland’s best and brightest have since landed at Simmons’ follow-up, The Ringer, where the project of turning a wry eye to the corporate-driven spheres of athletics, entertainment and tech continues unabated—including its own podcast network....

Steadily producing new episodes for over 10 years now, Battleship Pretension has carved out a unique niche within the ever-expanding world of online film chatter. Based in LA and helmed by pals Tyler Smith and David Bax (who honed their rapport together as film students at Columbia College Chicago) the show is a gloriously unwieldy, discursive entity malleable enough to approach a seemingly endless variety of movie-related topics from an equally extensive set of angles....

Why 24 frames per second, why not 23 or 25? Or for that matter, why not 10 or 100? What’s so special about seeing images 24 times per second? The short answer: Not much, the film speed standard was a hack. The longer answer: the entire history of filmmaking technology is a series of hacks, workarounds and duct-taped temporary-fixes that were codified, edified and institutionalized into the concrete of daily practice....

HARDCORE HENRY Subjectivity has a funny relationship to point-of-view (POV), which itself has a funny relationship with the cinema. Films that deliberately play with POV, such as 2016’s Hardcore Henry, can expose the nuance of the relationship between character and viewer, revealing how these relationships overlap and/or stand at odds. Non-Spoiling Plot Summary All you need to know about Ilya Naishuller’s Russian-import action flick Hardcore Henry is that practically the entire film is shot in first-person point-of-view—much like a videogame....

This is pretty strange if you consider the fact that music videos didn’t really exist until 1981 (when MTV launched) and ceased being totally relevant some time around 2006 (hello, Twitter). But for just over 20 years, music videos were the lingua franca of youth, connecting young viewers from all over the planet to the alien worlds of music, celebrity and—you guessed it—film. Those of us who watched MTV in the ‘80s and ‘90s did so constantly, seeing many of the same videos again and again and again until they all but fused with our DNA....

We’ve written a lot about our favorite film podcasts before, both in a previous Must-List and as part of our ongoing Podlight interview series. But that’s the great thing about online film discussion. There’s always so much more of it. So as long as there are new movies being made, there will be excitable panels of opinionated geeks with microphones and mixing boards to talk about them—often at odd angles or a specialized focus targeted at a niche audience....

Though situated roughly 40 miles away from the state capital in Des Moines, the rural, 5,000-person town of Winterset (county seat of Madison County) can nevertheless lay claim to multiple pieces of Hollywood history. It’s the birthplace of John Wayne, born Marion Morrison at 224 South Second Street in 1907. And more recently, Winterset was made famous as both the setting and filming location of 1995’s romance, The Bridges of Madison County....

C– to The Academy Which did not nominate a single film with a female protagonist for Best Picture—nor any female composers, cinematographers or screenwriters—as well as snubbing the unquestionably deserving Ava DuVernay in the Best Director category for Selma. The Oscars also excluded comedian and red-carpet fixture Joan Rivers from the ceremony’s ‘In Memoriam’ segment—an insult to the memory of a relentless rule-breaker, fearless boundary-pusher and hilariously unmerciful fashionista. (We’ll recuse ourselves from grading the Spirit Awards, but DuVernay did get a Best Director nomination; and the awards also recognized emerging female talent in our Best First Feature and Best First Screenplay categories....

Before collaborating with veteran filmmaker Spike Lee on last year’s BlacKkKlansman, Canadian-American cinematographer Chayse Irvin was perhaps best known for his work on Beyoncé’s 2016 Emmy-nominated visual album, Lemonade. Lee discovered the up-and-coming young cinematographer through his work with music video director Kahlil Joseph, which includes rapper Kendrick Lamar’s short film M.A.A.D and the 37-minute short film companion to UK electronic soul artist Sampha’s 2017 album Process. Nominated for a Film Independent Spirit Award and earning four nods at last weekend’s Golden Globes, Lee’s outlandish crime drama is based on a series of unlikely real-life events in early 1970s Colorado....

“No better way to start a new year than with a new filmmaker,” Film Independent curator Elvis Mitchell said before last night’s Film Independent at LACMA screening of Mommy, the fifth feature from 25-year-old writer-director Xavier Dolan. Mommy was Canada’s official submission for the Best Foreign Film Oscar race this year, but in a bit of an upset, it did not make the nine-film shortlist. “For those of you who don’t speak Canadian,” Mitchell said, “there are subtitles....

When the initial run of ITV’s massively popular historical series Downtown Abbey bade adieu to American audiences in 2016 after six seasons on PBS, the Julian Fellowes-created drama was the public broadcaster’s highest rated drama in 45 years—with 9.6 million viewers tuning in to the series finale. Back at home across the pond, Downton likewise broke British cable viewership records, matched in recent history only by the BBC One phenomenon Bodyguard....

Which Sundance films made the biggest impression on you? “Rich Hill, which from one minute in I was a weeping mess, and Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter. I’ve grown up with [the filmmakers] the Zellners and I think their brand of filmmaking and storytelling is so unique and so visionary and I just adore them.” -Kat Candler, writer/director, Hellion “Sadly, I only had time to see seven narrative features, but I really loved Whiplash and I Origins....

Linda, were you able to find details on which makeup lines Tammy actually used in real life? Dowds: Actually, yes. In the documentary, she talks about some of the specific items she used for her lashes, which were Ardell individual lashes. She would put them on in a way that looked like little clusters and then add a lot of mascara on them. She stuck with those lashes until each one fell out, and then she would replace them....

This year the Los Angeles Film Festival has redoubled its efforts to showcase unique voices that will shape the future of film. “Our curatorial focus this year was to create a program of vibrant and diverse stories and storytellers who exhibit true and singular voices,” said Associate Director of Programming Roya Rastegar. To accomplish that goal, Rastegar and her staff assembled a team of programmers whose job it was to cull through the thousands of submissions, sacrificing their sleep, social lives and sometimes even their sanity....

In the scene, Julie Delpy’s Celine admits to Ethan Hawke’s Jesse that reading his book has ruined love for her. It’s the scene on which the rest of the movie hangs and it was shot in a moving car weaving in and out of traffic along the winding streets of Paris. “It looks really simple, but it really sucks when you can’t control all of the elements,” said Linklater. “The car was stopping, starting, turning corners, and there were cars in the back or no cars in the back,” added Adair....

Fact is, memorable film scores are frequently as iconic as the movies themselves. But what happens when a movie’s soundtrack is remixed, re-contextualized or completely removed and replaced with something else? How is a once-familiar film suddenly new or different once you’ve replaced its music with something totally new and unexpected? And what happens when that new, unexpected music is performed live? Film fans will know the answer when Bring the Noise kicks off next month on Saturday, January 28 at LACMA’s Bing Theater—the latest one-of-a-kind edition to our 2017 Film Independent at LACMA lineup....

When director James Mangold and his frequent costume designer Arianne Phillips sat down with Film Independent curator Elvis Mitchell at the Los Angeles Film Festival earlier this summer for the Costume Builds Character Costume Design Master Class, they made it clear that the strength of their relationship is based on valuing the other’s point of view and being open to what any given moment presents. “Every film has its own needs....

The film, starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone as a pair of star-crossed dreamers muddling through life in the City of Angels, is also something of a crypto-remake of French New Wave director Jacques Demy’s 1964 masterpiece The Umbrellas of Cherbourg—a fact Chazelle himself was only too eager to admit at a special Film Independent at LACMA screening of Umbrellas on January 5. Talking to Film Independent at LACMA curator Elvis Mitchell in a 40-minute conversation preceding the film, the director claimed to have seen Umbrellas more than 200 times....

Jenkins was joined on the February 2 panel by an eclectic group of showrunners representing four of the five 2022 Film Independent Spirit Award nominees for Best New Scripted Series: Blindspotting creators Rafael Casal and Daveed Diggs, Reservation Dogs creator Sterlin Harjo, and It’s a Sin series director Peter Hoar. Moderating was yet another scripted series veteran, producer and writer Wendy Calhoun. The result was a lively (LA Rams partisans Calhoun and Jenkins immediately began by razzing 49’ers supporters Casal and Diggs) and inspiring 90-minute conversation about creativity and authenticity....