I haven’t revisited Alien for quite a while. But Ridley Scott’s classic has aged extremely well, and it’s influence on modern sci-fi and horror tropes is undeniable; smart analysis is always welcome. This video essay by Steven Benedict is exactly that; it hits on some major themes while not overstaying itself welcome.
A four minute super cut of scenes from Michael Mann movies? Count me in.
Film awards season is well behind us, but this Vanity Fair convincingly argues why the Oscars, and to a lesser extent most acting awards, tend to favor the relatable over the cool and unreadable.
This typographic blog post has already been passed around tech and design circles, but it’s absolutely worth a look if you haven’t seen it. The subject matter is 2009’s Moon and it’s cool to see a lot of futuristic fonts in discussion. You’ll probably learn something about Eurostyle; I had no idea there were variants (like Microstyle) that deviated slightly from the original typeface.
Six minutes of Criterion Collection staff making classic films gorgeous? Sold. Keep your eye on the whole Gizmodo video collection on Vimeo while you’re at it; it’s uniformly smart content.
Damon Houx of Badass Digest, describing the plot of Knock Off:
Marcus has to confront Eddy about the nanobombs in the knockoff product, and it gives Van Damme his finest acting moment to date, where he tells his semi-brother that he made a deal for him with the feds as he’s threatened with a gun. Sure, you could compare it to the “pull the strings” speech in Ed Wood, but Van Damme is fully committed. That scene then ends with Eddy being targeted by a missile which sends him flying outside, to die in a green flame explosion. It’s followed by an action scene starts where Van Damme and Schneider must escape from a fruit warehouse, which is a stunning set piece of claustrophobia as most of the fruit workers have long but dull knives, and the fruit around appears to be spiky pineapples (it doesn’t have the stems so I’ve never been sure) which makes even the fruit hreatening. The sequence ends with Schneider and Van Damme escaping and mumbling “Hoola, hoola hoola. Hoola hoola hoola.”
Completely unavailable via streaming rental. I’m not spending $8 to buy this one either. Unfortunate.
The sound and picture quality isn’t pretty, but it’s wonderful seeing Spielberg and a much younger Harrison Ford make history. It’s an hour filled with interviews and behind the scenes footage. Speilberg’s direction bits to the actors is especially interesting (via Jason Kottke.)
A.A. Dowd, The A.V. Club:
Taxi Driver is rarely as much fun as Goodfellas or Mean Streets or The Wolf Of Wall Street is. There are no iconic classic-rock montages, no Rolling Stones boogies. The ugly characters tend to be really ugly, not hilariously so. (Marty himself appears in a very unflattering cameo, oozing violent misogyny and racism from the backseat of Bickle’s cab.) Where many of Scorsese’s most popular movies unfold as a breathless series of great set pieces, Taxi Driver has a more cumulative brilliance; it’s a downward spiral into madness from the first frame onward.
We’ve all seen our share of “edgy” and “dark” films. It’s almost become a punchline in the independent theme, especially in the horror genre. But it’s hard to top the darkness that Scorcese nails so perfectly in Taxi Driver. What a film.
I’ve been linking lately to several of these Dissolve “keynotes”, where a movie of the week gets dissected and kicked off with an extended essay on the film’s themes and impact. And for good reason; the writing is uniformly excellent, and every so often there’s a selection that I’m already a huge fan of. Case in point, 1987’s violent, lurid action/social satire RoboCop:
The dualities of RoboCop are also reflected in the movie itself, a sleek hybrid of genres, creators, motives, and influences: hyper-violent 1980s action and dystopian science fiction, two American writers and a Dutch director, commercial savvy and artistic ambition, real-world blight and comic-book cartoonishness. Like RoboCop himself, the film is a complex organism that’s made to seem stark and simple, and it makes other Hollywood action movies look like ED-209—big, lumbering machines that look fearsome, but sputter, pop, and break down with alarming frequency.
Speaking of oral histories, Alex French and Howie Kahn over at Grantland put together an excellent history of how 90s indie cult classic Swingers came together. Almost all the major crew are interviewed: Jon Favreau, Ron Livington, Vince Vaughn and Doug Liman. The story where a pre-Bourne Doug Liman sneaks around state troopers illegally shooting a highway scene is a highlight.