09.19.12 |
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The always dependable Karina Longworth outdoes herself on this extended Village Voice piece. Before it closed, its gigantic collection VHS taps and DVDs shipped overseas, Kim’s Video was a fixture of the NY film scene. Before torrents went mainstream, these guys had basically everything you wanted, especially for cult and foreign film selections. I remember hearing about the now famous South Korean film Oldboy playing over at Cannes…and two days later spotting it on the shelf under new releases at Kim’s (some clever attendant got a universal DVD overseas.)
09.10.12 |
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Excellent extended interview between Indiewire‘s Peter Labuza and Michael Slovis, director of photography for Breaking Bad. The show is already very cinematic with a film-like look, but this little exchange was a surprise:
[Show creator Vince Gilligan] said, “If you want to know where I’m coming from, and where my sensibilities lie, you should watch ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,'” which I’m incredibly familiar with and love as well.
Vince loves that movie so much that he and I, between seasons three and four, made a pitch to Sony and AMC to shoot the series in widescreen like a Leone movie, in 2.35 or what would be called Cinemascope. We wanted to do the whole series in that size frame. The two of us were arguing, saying, “If you want to be noticed, if you want people to see what’s going on, we’ll be the first! Everybody will see!” But they didn’t let us do it.
Breaking Bad in 2.35? The implications of that on TV would have been huge.
09.06.12 |
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Really interesting discussion over at Reddit on the evolution of long form TV narratives (e.g. The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad) and how they may “challenge” the power of a 1.5 to 3 hour movie.
09.04.12 |
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David Fincher, interviewed by Art of the Title:
I was eight years old and I saw a documentary on the making of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid…It showed the entire company with all these rental horses and moving trailers to shoot a scene on top of a train. They would hire somebody who looked like Robert Redford to jump onto the train. It never occurred to me that there were hours between each of these shots. The actual circus of it was invisible, as it should be, but in seeing that I became obsessed with the idea of “How?” It was the ultimate magic trick. The notion that 24 still photographs are shown in such quick succession that movement is imparted from it — wow! And I thought that there would never be anything that would be as interesting as that to do with the rest of my life.
Read the whole interview, it’s great. Art of the Title also delivers their usual top notch video excerpts alongside the article text.
08.28.12 |
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Paul Thomas Anderson’s most mature work so far, There Will Be Blood stands as one of the most critically acclaimed films of the 2000s. This Press Play video has seven minutes of very solid critical analysis.
08.23.12 |
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I’ve got something of a soft spot for the Lethal Weapon series, but man, author Walter Chaw just rips into it, and the results make for a pretty hilarious read (also sadly, true.) Chaw really hammers the buddy cop series undercurrent of sexism, racism and misogyny, such as in Lethal Weapon 4:
Murtaugh “adopts” an entire Chinese family he finds on a cargo boat, telling Riggs he did it because he wishes someone had done the same for his family back when they were slaves. There’s so much wrong with that, I can’t begin to tell you. Consider, too, that the way Murtaugh treats this family, how he knows they’ve been kidnapped by the sudden absence of Chinese-food smell in the house, is as dismissive and perfunctory as the evil Celestial villains who use them as hostages in some obscure plot.
Or consider Rika, Mel Gibson’s love interest in Lethal Weapon 2:
She’s a male fantasy, in other words–one of the ugly ones; I was reminded more than once of that scene from the same year’s Great Balls of Fire where Jerry Lee tells his child bride that she don’t move like a virgin. Dragged along and pushed around, Rika squeaks stupidly, flutters attractively, and perishes so that our hero can manufacture outrage at blonde Betty Boop’s passing, thus justifying all the sadistic bloodshed to come.
Chaw later summarizes a lot of the commentary tracks from director Richard Donnor. It’s not pretty:
The track is indicated by extended periods of silence, with Donner occasionally apologizing, “SORRY, I’M WATCHING THE MOVIE AND I’M REALLY ENJOYING IT!” You can imagine him at the early buffet, yelling at the soup. He’ll also take pains to trainspot the bumper stickers littered throughout: “WHAT’S THAT ONE? DOLPHINS? HAHA!” He misses no opportunity to praise the genius of Glover and Gibson, and, yes, he will sometimes stop and ask Hoffman what a character has said. If you can suffer through all of it, that will make two of us.
Read the whole article. It’s long, but well worth it.
08.22.12 |
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Wonderful Press Play video essay that breaks down the brilliance of Quintin Tarantino’s first feature, Reservoir Dogs. We’re now twenty years past that influential release, but having revisited the film fairly recently, it’s still as shocking and strong a film as a I remember first watching it back in the late 90s.
08.14.12 |
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I’ve already linked to a few of these extended back and forth conversations between NYT critics A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis; they are uniformly excellent. This week’s topic adds optimism to what tends to be a sore spot in the summer movie season: diversity. We’re finally seeing a lot more films this summer that appeal to multiple tastes, not just the hyper violent, lightweight teenage segment. I especially liked Dargis’s indie funding idea:
If I were running a studio (ha!), I would take the money that I’d set aside for the next bad idea (like a remake of “Total Recall”) and give a handful of directors, tested and less so — Todd Haynes, Barry Jenkins, Kelly Reichardt, Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, Aaron Katz, Benh Zeitlin, Damien Chazelle — $10 million apiece to make whatever they want, as long as the results come in with an R rating or below and don’t run over two hours.
08.10.12 |
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I had fun listening to hosts Tyler and David run through Nolan’s entire career. Look for some solid insights into the generally overlooked Insomnia and plenty of rants that pit the three Batman films against each other.
08.02.12 |
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Usually I’m not the biggest fan of list style posts, but The A.V. Club‘s work here is really useful. I’d recommend you do what I did: make a quick scan and add what looks interesting to your Netflix queue. There were a few big ones that were completely off my radar, like Once Upon a Time In Anatolia.