Behind The Camera with Steve Kim

"Remember me. Try your best. Maybe we can." "Come back and make up a goodbye at least. Pretend we had one." "I wish I'd stayed too. Now I wish I'd stayed. I wish I'd done a lot of things."  Charlie Kaufman is a brilliant writer. A type of writer who actors love to work with. Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Nicholas Cage, and John Malkovich are all actors who've worked with Kaufman. With  Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind which won Kaufman the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey bring Kaufman's characters to life.  The film features Clementine (Kate Winslet) and Joel (Jim Carrey) who go their separate ways only to find their paths entwine again. The second time they meet, however, they don't remember they were once together; they each underwent a medical procedure that deleted all memories of each other. This clever premise enables the film to raise and explore a lot of intere...

"I wanna know. I think. I mean, I want to ask you things. But I'm not sure you want that." "Sorry. What am I thinking? I'm thinking that I'm utterly selfish."  "Wherever my car will take me. West, soon. And I thought, perhaps, you might want to come with me. Would you?" Todd Haynes' Carol  is the best film I've seen in the theatre in the past six years. In fact, I went to go see it five days in a row the winter it came out. Todd Haynes hits the right note on so many things, stealing from the masters like Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, and David Lean. The acting in the film is also phenomenal. Rooney Mara, especially, is just perfect. She has a tremendously rare gift that eludes even many of the best in the business: the ability to pull in or shut out the audience so quietly at will. ("Quietly" meaning the subtlety in her inflections and facial expressions.) Be...

"This was a particularly bad case of somebody being cut in half." - Dewey Cox "You drove these, through the triangle of death?" - War Dogs "November is all I know. And all I ever wanna know." - Sweet November Sometimes passable movies rake in a lot of cash and sadly even achieve critical acclaim. The inverse is true as well. Solid movies fail to make much profit and receive lackluster or even acerbic reviews. Today's post will feature three movies in the latter camp. (I'm a big fan of life unfolding the way it is meant to.) Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story Dewey Cox  stars John C. Reilly and features some big names in comedy such as Paul Rudd, Jack Black, and Kristen Wiig. The story loosely draws from the lives of Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, Paul McCartney, and many others. As a result, the tone of the movie can feel too crowded at times. That said, the movie is a very smart satire of the biopic genre. ...

"You're gonna leave me? Cause I will leave you first." "When I said 'on my own,' I meant you and me. I always mean you and me." "I can put an end to all this right now all by myself. All I'd have to do is tell the truth." David Lowry, like Richard Linklater, has an understated style. And just like Linklater, Lowry isn't well known to the general audience despite his craftsmanship and artistry. So today's post will be dedicated to Lowry's debut feature, Ain't Them Bodies Saints . Ain't Them Bodies Saints  is light on plot but heavy on story, giving Lowry and the actors -- Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck -- ample room to breathe in their artistry. The film boasts many beautiful moments, but to me it's the first scene where David Lowry's camera work really shines through; his restraint, among many other choices in the scene, works to immerse the viewers in the perspectives of the two characters.  Scene l...

As the title suggests, this entry will mainly consist of me entertaining a few thoughts on a tentative sequel to Richard Linklater's Before Midnight , Before Twilight . It's very possible that this sequel will never happen. And it's also possible that it won't be titled Before Twilight . But given how Richard Linklater and Ethan Hawke have been floating around some ideas, I'd like to believe it's not too distant a possibility. Instead of focusing on the directorial execution in a film, which is what I've been doing here, I'll stick to the script for a change. Screenplays are less exciting to break down and feel (at least in my opinion) because words are first thought and then felt whereas images are felt instantaneously with no adulteration. But it'd still be fun to speculate on a "plot" and write out a scene or two that flesh out that speculation. Put another way, let's take a close look at what happened in Before Midn...

This past Christmas Eve, I left off with Truffaut's Jules et Jim  and promised to cover Jean-Luc Godard's Vivre Sa Vie . It's a bit overdue but now that I've temporarily forfeited some of my plans (goodbye Cannes 2019), I have a lot of time on my hands.  As a sidenote, I was so despondent during the month of January that I was crying a river during sleep every night. It wouldn't have been a problem but I have electrically heated pillows. So every night, I was constantly electrocuting myself. Getting back on topic... Jean-Luc Godard is perhaps my favorite director of all time and definitely my favorite French director above Truffaut and Bresson. In fact so much so that I was tempted to fill out all of the five recommendations from Godard's filmography. But that would have been a bit boring.  As I mentioned in Part I, Godard, like Antonioni, paints with the camera. His most recent work -- Goodbye to Language -- shows that even in his eighties, he can still ...