My Modern Metropolis has put together a list of 25 movie posters done in a modern/retro style: What these artists have done so well is take a particular scene or character and create a visual representation of the movie. Most of the time, rather than bombard us with visuals, they ask us to draw on […]
Admittedly, this L.A. Times article ventures a little bit into the type of gossip and dirt that we try to avoid here on Filmwell as much as possible. At the same, however, it delves into some of the intriguing methods and challenges faced by the crew of Fantastic Mr. Fox, as well as Wes Anderson’s […]
Earlier this year, my family took a long-awaited trip to Japan. I had been wanting to go to the “Land of the Rising Sun” for many years now, due in no small part to my love of that nation’s cinema (animated or otherwise), and the trip didn’t disappoint in the slightest. I joked with Japanese […]
Last week, the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) posted its complete line-up of films. As usual, it’s a veritable smorgasbord for cineastes and filmlovers, containing a diverse array of movies that span as many genres as they do countries. The fact that I won’t be at this year’s TIFF has not stopped me from pretending that I’m […]
From a 2005 interview with Xan Brooks for the Western release of Howl’s Moving Castle: Personally I am very pessimistic… But when, for instance, one of my staff has a baby you can’t help but bless them for a good future. Because I can’t tell that child, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have come into this life.’ And […]
For many people, the name “Hayao Miyazaki” is synonymous with the word “anime”. And understandably so: Miyazaki has been responsible for some of the finest examples of the artform, both in terms of aesthetics and storytelling, in the last three decades. But considering the fact that Miyazaki is nearing his seventies, and that he’s “threatened” […]
It’s a cliché to end all clichés: becoming a parent changes things. In my naiveté, though, I never really thought that the effect would extend to my movie-watching habits, to my cinéaste lifestyle. But with one child here, and another on its way, the truth is that my habits have irrevocably changed. All of that is to […]
From Sculpting in Time by Andrei Tarkovsky: I think that one of the saddest aspects of our time is the total destruction in people’s awareness of all that goes with a conscious sense of the beautiful. Modern mass culture, aimed at the ‘consumer’, the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people’s souls, setting up barriers between man and […]
Khoi Vinh discusses the minimalist narratives in Michael Mann’s films: With a nearly impudent disregard for common storytelling conventions, the director has in recent years taken to gutting from his works anything and everything that might be superfluous to the forward momentum of his core narratives. He affords his characters practically no backstory or prehistory, […]