30
Nov
This may have been a short workweek, but the chaotic world of gaming never rests. Read on for Kotaku’s top stories from Thanksgiving week.
Month: November 2024
30
Nov
Directors tend to use the same cinematographers throughout their career. And while Ridley Scott only began working with DP Jon Mathieson with 2000’s Gladiator, the two have had enough collaborations for Mathieson to know just how Scott operates. And apparently that’s not always for the better.
But first, some context. Jon Mathieson says that a two-hour interview he did – most of which wasn’t even about Gladiator II, as it was eight months from release – was cut down to just 30 minutes, leaving plenty of room for interpretation and out of context comments about both the film and Ridley Scott.
The most damning found Mathieson saying that Ridley Scott has grown lazy in his age, relying on post-production to handle any sloppy work he employed on the set of Gladiator II. “It’s really lazy…It’s the CG elements now of tidying-up, leaving things in shot, cameras in shot, microphones in shot, bits of set hanging down, shadows from booms…And they just said, ‘Well, clean it up [in editing].’…Look at his older films and getting depth into things was very much part of lighting. You can’t do that with a lot of cameras but he just wants to get it all done.” Here is where you should note all of the ellipses, strung together from The Telegraph in a way that helps highlight just how much these pieces were cobbled together.
GTo clear the air, Mathieson and the host of the podcast, Nigel Levy, sat down with Deadline ahead of Gladiator II’s second week in theaters. In his own statement, Mathieson said that he got to talking about the digital age of the film industry and the work that goes into it from the perspective of a modern cinematographer. “We talked about that and I said that people just come in the morning, switch the coffee machine on, switch the cameras on, say, what are we doing? Because the digital stuff doesn’t cost anything, but so you shoot a lot. And I saying that is that, and I said, this was the quote. I said, the industry, it’s really lazy. Lazy and sloppy are not two words I would ever put with this gentleman of a certain age and genius. But if you slide out — and you can hear it — you slide out a paragraph and put it right next to, oh, let’s talk about Rid and multi cameras. And he edits the piece down to 30 minutes…I could hear the blip of the sound. I said, well, that wasn’t said against that. That was probably said maybe 20 minutes later. However, this is what has risen to the surface. And I’m deeply regretful of that.”
For his part, Levy worked to salvage the interview, protect the marketing of Gladiator II and push for nothing but positivity for Ridley Scott. “One thing I was sure about was that John never intended to criticize Ridley. It does seem that bringing separate comments closer together might have made things ambiguous if people chose to take things out of context – which they did. I’m sorry John and I didn’t have a chance to go through it after my cutdown. In the end, some people have chosen to listen to it and imply things John certainly never meant…I’m sorry for any problems this has caused John, the film and Ridley Scott. He is, after all, a clearly brilliant film director.” Now, will Ridley Scott hire Jon Mathieson back for Gladiator III…?
The post Gladiator II DP walks back comments that Ridley Scott is “lazy” appeared first on JoBlo.
30
Nov
For a language that has long been thought to be going through an irreversible decline, the recent wealth of films in Ireland’s native tongue has told a very different story. Despite less than 2% of Ireland’s population speaking the language on a daily basis, the nation’s cinematic output has seen an enormous cultural shift towards its cultural and linguistic roots over the past few years.
The foremost example is Rich Peppiatt’s raucous musical comedy-biopic Kneecap, a smash-hit at both UK and Irish box offices this year. Kneecap had the prestige to go along with its buzzy word-of-mouth, sweeping nominations at both BIFA and the European Film Awards as well as being chosen as Ireland’s submission for Best International Feature at the Oscars. In fact, of the five Irish submissions so far this decade, Kneecap marks the fourth Irish-language film chosen to represent the country at the industry’s premiere awards ceremony; a marked change for a country that has championed just a handful of films in its native tongue (Gaeilge, to Irish people). Colm Bairead’s drama The Quiet Girl (An Cailín Ciúin) made history last year when it became the first of these submissions to secure an Academy Award nomination for Best International Feature, and again when it became the first Irish-language film screened at the Berlin Film Festival.
The earliest notable film focused on the Irish language was 1934’s Man of Aran, a documentary which boasts the unfortunate accolade of being the first-ever recipient of the grand prize for non-Italian films at the Venice Film Festival, the Mussolini cup. Whilst glimpses of the language appeared in films like John Ford & John Wayne’s The Quiet Man, the first non-documentary Irish feature film wasn’t released until Poitín in 1978. In the decades that followed, only a handful films with dialogue predominantly spoken in Irish were released.
If Kneecap’s success wasn’t proof enough that Irish-language films have mass appeal to audiences beyond those at home, that fact was on full display at this year’s BFI London Film Festival. Alongside a panel discussion on the role of Celtic language cinema, this year’s edition played host to two Irish-language features; Bring Them Down, a drama in the official competition starring Barry Keoghan and Christopher Abbott, and Fréwaka, one of several films vying for the title of the first Irish-language horror film.
Speaking after the film’s premiere, Fréwaka’s director Aislinn Clarke spoke about the importance of the genre filmmaking space in building Irish-speaking audiences.“Growing up as a Gaeilgeoir (Irish-speaking) horror fan, I never thought I’d see an Irish horror film”. Clarke fondly remembers an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer as her only exposure to Irish within the genre, where the supposedly ominous pagan incantation was, in actuality, a Dublin bus schedule (one can only assume she didn’t suffer through Donald Pleasance’s pronunciation of ‘Samhain’, the Irish world for Halloween, in 1981’s Halloween II).
Irish culture is uniquely suited to horror in many ways – Clarke notes we have “our own brand of Catholicism” thanks to centuries of druidic traditions meeting with national trauma, and that this “sudden wave” of interest in traditional Irish culture has coincided with a wave of more thoughtful, culturally-tuned horror. Fréwaka (Irish for ‘roots’) seizes upon what Clarke calls this ‘folksy’ vision of the nation’s past, to interrogate the contradictions of modern Ireland.
Irish-language productions need not be as restrictive for potential filmmakers as they first appear, either. Fréwaka was a bilingual production, with English-language scripts available for crew members who didn’t speak Irish, and plenty of English spoken on set.
Chris Andrews’ Bring Them Down went a step further, bringing entirely non-Irish actors like Christopher Abbott on-board. Neither Andrews nor Abbott spoke any Irish prior to production commencing, with veteran Irish-language actor Peadar Cox coming on board to help with translations and pronunciations. Abbott learned his lines phonetically, and Andrews never felt he was at a disadvantage at the helm: “I just directed emotion, and the rest fell together”, he said after the panel.
For filmmakers, the Irish language is no longer just a potential turn-off for audiences, in many cases it’s incentivized as a way to secure funding from Irish arts bodies. Indeed, in the case of Bring Them Down, the film wasn’t even initially conceptualized in Irish or even set in Ireland, it was written to be based in Cumbria. When location-scouting in the west coast of Ireland, Andrews met some local Irish-speaking farmers, and realized that by localizing the script he could not only tell their story, but also secure production funding from Screen Ireland/Fís Éireann.
At the Celtic language discussion, Andrews’ co-panellists represented voices from within the Scottish and Welsh filmmaking scenes. Elspeth Turner, a Scottish actor who largely works in her native tongue, noted that “we think we’ll only sell Gaelic-language films to the Gaelic diaspora, which just isn’t true…there’s this massive energy happening, we just have to keep going, making more.”
Welsh director Lee Haven Jones concurred, noting that just five Welsh-language films were produced in the 2010s, and the only two released since 2020 were both directed by him: “We need to embrace genre and be pragmatic, tell the types of stories audiences want to see”. By comparison, there were also just five non-documentary Irish-language films released through the 2010s, despite Ireland’s population being over double that of Wales. Since 2020 though, the output of Ireland’s native-language cinema has exploded, with most of the 10+ films produced so far this decade even getting theatrical or festival releases.
Gaelgóirs at home and among Ireland’s vast diaspora are still feeling the impact of their language’s newfound proliferation in cinema, but maybe the most exciting prospect is for the million or so children currently learning the language in schools. Irish children typically spend over a decade of their education studying the language, and the dearth of non-educational entertainment in Irish restricts any exposure outside of class. Beyond short films like Martin McDonagh’s Cáca Millis or dubs of animated films like Song of the Sea, there has been little in the realm of subversive or ‘mature’ entertainment young Irish people could use to hone their language. Whilst films like Kneecap or Fréwaka, or even seemingly educational fare like Famine-set thriller Black 47 aren’t exactly ideal classroom viewing, they offer a localized window into new genres and the wider world of cinema.
It’s hard to pin down exactly what is driving the newfound passion for the Irish language on-screen in recent years. Is it a byproduct of increased overseas obsession with the country in the wake of cultural phenomena like Sally Rooney’s books, or the presence of stars like Paul Mescal plastered across Times Square? Or perhaps it’s the culmination of many generations of emigration, resulting in an international community pining for the culture they left behind. Regardless, Ireland’s cultural caché overseas is finally beginning to trickle back to its own native film scene, and as the saying goes, ‘is fearr go mall ná go brách’: it’s better late than never.
The post The unlikely rise of Irish-language cinema appeared first on Little White Lies.
29
Nov
If you, or the severed you who binge-watches television, need a refresher on Apple TV+’s breakout hit Severance, two of the main men behind it have you covered. Debuting on January 7, ten days before the show’s second season debuts, Severance executive producer Ben Stiller and the show’s leading man Adam Scott will…
29
Nov
If you, or the severed you who binge-watches television, need a refresher on Apple TV+’s breakout hit Severance, two of the main men behind it have you covered. Debuting on January 7, ten days before the show’s second season debuts, Severance executive producer Ben Stiller and the show’s leading man Adam Scott will…
29
Nov
Yesterday, I wrote a story about how one of my favourite Thanksgiving movies, Dutch, seems to be nearly impossible to find nowadays, with the out-of-print DVD and Blu-ray pretty pricey and the movie not streaming at all on any service (although some readers noted it used to be on HBO Max). I’ve written at length about movies that are hard to find, but just how popular some of the missing titles are shocks me. It’s gotten to the point where niche titles, or at least ones with some kind of cult behind them, are often easier to find than formerly popular ones. Consider the fact that just today, Michael Mann’s The Keep, which never even got a DVD release, has just been announced for 4K Blu-ray. I was pondering this very thing when I received a text from a friend of the site, Paul Shirey, who used to be our editor-in-chief back in the day. He noted that yesterday he wanted to watch the 1996 movie Ransom, with Mel Gibson (and directed by Ron Howard), but was unable to find it anywhere. Indeed, a quick search shows the movie isn’t streaming anywhere, nor is it available for digital purchase. It was released on Blu-ray around 2011 (for its 15th anniversary), but it’s long out of print, and it seems the easiest (and cheapest) way to see it now is via the old DVD.
While Gibson’s stock has diminished in recent years, it can’t be denied that the man made his share of classics. Thankfully, many of them are pretty easy to find. But Ransom, which was phenomenally successful when it came out, seems to have vanished. That’s pretty wild, considering it made over $300 million worldwide in 1996 dollars. It’s a famous movie, with Gibson’s “Give me back my son” line being a famous catchphrase in the era.
If you don’t remember Ransom, it’s a pretty gritty thriller in which Gibson plays a multi-millionaire whose son is kidnapped. When his attempt to pay the ransom fails, he instead uses the money they requested as bounty on their heads, much to the shock of his wife, played by Rene Russo. Gary Sinise memorably played the movie’s bad guy, and it’s easily the most violent movie Ron Howard ever directed.
Many view it as a classic, which makes the fact that it’s so hard to find pretty puzzling. About a decade or so ago, it would have been unthinkable that a movie as popular as Ransom would be so hard to see unless you pirate it. But, nowadays, where studios often let their biggest hits sit on the shelf gathering dust (for whatever reason), it seems to be a thing. Some may say it’s because Disney, who owns the rights, may not want to be associated with Gibson, but I doubt that has anything to do with it. They also have the rights to another classic Mel Gibson movie, Signs, and that movie is everywhere.
What other movies are surprisingly hard to find? Let us know in the comments!
The post Where’s Ransom? The Ron Howard-Mel Gibson thriller is another hard-to-find movie appeared first on JoBlo.
29
Nov
Yesterday, I wrote a story about how one of my favourite Thanksgiving movies, Dutch, seems to be nearly impossible to find nowadays, with the out-of-print DVD and Blu-ray pretty pricey and the movie not streaming at all on any service (although some readers noted it used to be on HBO Max). I’ve written at length about movies that are hard to find, but just how popular some of the missing titles are shocks me. It’s gotten to the point where niche titles, or at least ones with some kind of cult behind them, are often easier to find than formerly popular ones. Consider the fact that just today, Michael Mann’s The Keep, which never even got a DVD release, has just been announced for 4K Blu-ray.
I was pondering this very thing when I received a text from a friend of the site, Paul Shirey, who used to be our editor-in-chief back in the day. He noted that yesterday he wanted to watch the 1996 movie Ransom, with Mel Gibson (and directed by Ron Howard), but was unable to find it anywhere. Indeed, a quick search shows the movie isn’t streaming anywhere, nor is it available for digital purchase. It was released on Blu-ray around 2011 (for its 15th anniversary), but it’s long out of print, and it seems the easiest (and cheapest) way to see it now is via the old DVD.
While Gibson’s stock has diminished in recent years, it can’t be denied that the man made his share of classics. Thankfully, many of them are pretty easy to find. But Ransom, which was phenomenally successful when it came out, seems to have vanished. That’s pretty wild, considering it made over $300 million worldwide in 1996 dollars. It’s a famous movie, with Gibson’s “Give me back my son” line being a famous catchphrase in the era.
If you don’t remember Ransom, it’s a pretty gritty thriller in which Gibson plays a multi-millionaire whose son is kidnapped. When his attempt to pay the ransom fails, he instead uses the money they requested as bounty on their heads, much to the shock of his wife, played by Rene Russo. Gary Sinise memorably played the movie’s bad guy, and it’s easily the most violent movie Ron Howard ever directed.
Many view it as a classic, which makes the fact that it’s so hard to find pretty puzzling. About a decade or so ago, it would have been unthinkable that a movie as popular as Ransom would be so hard to see unless you pirate it. But, nowadays, where studios often let their biggest hits sit on the shelf gathering dust (for whatever reason), it seems to be a thing. Some may say it’s because Disney, who owns the rights, may not want to be associated with Gibson, but I doubt that has anything to do with it. They also have the rights to another classic Mel Gibson movie, Signs, and that movie is everywhere.
What other movies are surprisingly hard to find? Let us know in the comments!
The post Where’s Ransom? The Ron Howard-Mel Gibson thriller is another hard-to-find movie appeared first on JoBlo.
29
Nov
Thanksgaming 24 continues into Bleak Friday, to bring joy and light into the darkness. Here are another 20 games you’ve almost definitely never heard of before, but each offering something unique, special, or outright bizarre. Get your wishlist-clicking fingers ready.
29
Nov
Thanksgaming 24 continues into Bleak Friday, to bring joy and light into the darkness. Here are another 20 games you’ve almost definitely never heard of before, but each offering something unique, special, or outright bizarre. Get your wishlist-clicking fingers ready.
29
Nov
At the end of September, JoBlo Media and Octane Multimedia teamed up to launch a new YouTube channel named JoBlo TV, which hosts multiple feature films to watch for free throughout the week. The genres we’ll be focusing on at JoBlo TV are Action, Horror, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Thrillers – and the free movies we shared this week were both sci-fi action thrillers!
The movies are Wu Lin: The Society and Solum, and here’s some information on both of them:
Directed by Johnny K. Wu, who also crafted the screenplay with Andras Zold, Wu Lin: The Society has the following synopsis: During a global pandemic in the year 2050, two detectives investigate a series of strange murders. They soon discover that a mysterious ninja who is connected to a dangerous cult may be responsible. In the future, revenge has no limit. The film stars Jerry Sur, Thomas H.F. Gassaway, Pauline Nowakowski, Kyle Houstyn, Kyle Znamenak, Yvonne Yorke, Ern Gerardo, Matt Kane, Seth Bellinger, Zenobein Adams, Jennifer Anderson, James Bellanca, James Gappy Burney, Keith Collins II, Alex Daniels, Lou DeNardo, Larry DiBartolomeo, and Krista Dotson.
Directed by Diogo Morgado, who wrote the screenplay with Pedro Morgado, Solum shows us what happens when a reality show on an inhabited island where eight contestants must fight for their survival becomes more than it appears to be. Maria Botelho Moniz, Carlos Carvalho, Francisco Froes, Luís Lourenço, Anna Ludmilla,Catarina Mira, Diogo Morgado, Gonzalo Ramos, Cláudia Semedo, and Darwin Shaw star.
To follow our JoBlo TV releases, click over to the YouTube channel and subscribe! We also recently launched a new page at JoBloYouTubeNetwork.com, where you can access all of our YouTube channels from one place.
The post JoBlo TV roundup: This week’s free movies are Wu Lin: The Society and Solum! appeared first on JoBlo.