Godzilla and King Kong in Alabama.

Director Adam Wingard works on big Hollywood movies, but he still calls Alabama home. So it wasn’t a huge surprise that he hosted a friends-and-family screening of his new blockbuster, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, last week at a Birmingham movie theater. I was maybe a little surprised to get an invite to the screening. Adam and I were friendly when he was living in Alabama. This was a couple decades (!) ago, around the time I was working on Hide and Creep. In fact, Adam edited the trailer for Hide and Creep. Around the same time, Chuck and I helped Adam out while he was shooting some footage for the opening credits of his movie Home Sick. I think that was his first feature. It was shot on 16mm film, and I had a 16mm camera at the time, so Chuck and I were basically his camera assistants for that shoot.

I’ve followed Adam’s career at the movie theater (I’ve seen at least four of his features at the cinema) but hadn’t seen him in person in years. So I was glad to get an invite to the Godzilla x Kong screening from a mutual friend of Adam’s and mine, Kyle McKinnon. (Kyle has done acting cameos in a couple of my movies, and he worked on the music for Adam’s home invasion movie You’re Next.)

Apparently Godzilla x Kong had its Hollywood premiere Monday March 25, and then Adam flew back home to have a premiere for his pals on Wednesday March 27. (I obviously should have posted this last week.) Not only did all of us who attended get to see the movie early, with the director, on a big screen, but the studio (Warner Bros.) made sure we all got popcorn, drinks, and Godzilla x Kong movie posters. As Alabama movie screenings go, it was pretty dang glamorous.

Director Adam Wingard addresses the audience at the Birmingham premiere of Godzilla x Kong.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ranking classic STAR TREK.

Image
The classic 1960s STAR TREK TV series is one of my favorite shows of all time. In the 1970s and ’80s, STAR TREK reruns were one of the best sci-fi things available. Especially to a youngster like me who lived in a rural area with no cable TV. I’m somewhat obsessive about the show. Especially now, since I have my DVDs of it ripped and readily available on my home media streaming server. Having watched every episode a few times (and favorite episodes several times), I have opinions. I decided I’d start making... The classic 1960s Star Trek TV series is one of my favorite shows of all time. In the 1970s and ’80s, Star Trek reruns were one of the best sci-fi things available. Especially to a youngster like me who lived in a rural area with no cable TV. I’m somewhat obsessive about the show. Especially now, since I have my DVDs of it ripped and readily available on my home media streaming server. Having watched every episode a few times (and favorite episodes several times),...
Read more

Some other reasons movies are so long these days.

Image
In the 1980s, CDs became the music industry standard for album releases. Even though CDs were smaller than the vinyl LPs they replaced, they could hold more music. A twelve-inch record can hold 45 minutes (give or take) of music, while a CD can hold more than 70 minutes of music. Some musicians decided that their albums needed to fill up a CD, even if they didn’t have 70 minutes of good music ready, and we got a lot of hour-long albums that would have been a lot better if they’d been edited down to 40 minutes. I’ve been thinking about the overlong albums of the ’80s and ’90s lately because of the overlong movies of the 2020s. I am certainly not the first person to complain that movies are too long these days. Vanity Fair published a piece on the subject last year. The Vanity Fair article mentions that producers and cinema owners and audiences complain about long movies. But those complaints don’t carry as much weight as they used to, and I can think of a couple of reasons for...
Read more

Shot on iPhone (and Panavision).

Image
Apple likes to brag that a lot of their commercials and promotional videos are “shot on iPhone.” But of course Apple can afford some wild accessories for their iPhones, including Panavision lenses! Stu Maschwitz wrote an excellent blog post about how one attaches a pro cinema lens to an iPhone. Blackmagic has created a dual-lens 3D camera for making immersive video for Apple’s Vision Pro VR goggles. I’m not that interested in VR, but I think VR goggles would be fun for watching old 3D horror and sci-fi movies like Creature From the Black Lagoon and It Came From Outer Space . And it might be fun to shoot a movie in the style of those classic 3D movies with this new Blackmagic camera. Ben Pearson wrote a lengthy and revealing article about the modern state of film scores over at Slashfilm . It was revealing to me, at least. Among other things, Pearson tries to figure out why we have fewer memorable musical themes in modern movies. No details yet, but apparently Kino Lorber i...
Read more