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Billy Wilder (Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment, Some Like It Hot) was both a great director and a great writer. In this video essay, Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou examine how Wilder balanced the verbal, dramatic, and situational ironies of his scripts with making it all work on the screen, emotionally and structurally.
Separated is the newest documentary film from Errol Morris. Based on Jacob Soboroff’s 2020 book Separated: Inside an American Tragedy, the film probes the inhumane family separation and immigration policies of the Trump administration. From a review in The Guardian:
The Trump administration’s southern border policy began with the dream of a wall in the desert and ended with the nightmare of family separation: children torn from their parents and loaded en masse into wire-mesh cages. It was inhumane treatment, which was precisely the point. The White House’s intention was to use terror as a deterrent and effectively write every parent’s worst fear into law. “When you have that policy, people don’t come,” Donald Trump said blithely. “I know it sounds harsh, but we have to save our country.”
Errol Morris’s forensic, procedural documentary walks us through the bureaucratic backrooms to show how the policy was hatched and implemented. It explains how its principal authors — Trump adviser Stephen Miller and attorney general Jeff Sessions — junked the pre-existing catch-and-release scheme (which had allowed migrants to remain in the country until their immigration hearing) in favour of a bold new tactic of forced separation and mass imprisonment. If Separated lacks the rueful exuberance that typifies much of Morris’s early work (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, even last year’s John le Carré film), that is entirely understandable. The material is sobering and the mountain of evidence needs unpicking. The film-maker handles his brief with the cold, hard precision of an expert state prosecutor.
From a Variety review:
“Harm to children was part of the point,” says Jonathan White, a committed public servant who saw his department, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, hijacked by a blatantly inhumane strategy that the Trump administration implemented for its deterrent potential. “They believed it would terrify families into not coming.” White isn’t exactly a whistleblower, although he comes across as no less courageous in describing a dictated-from-the-top family separation scheme for which he had a front-row seat.
And here’s an interview with Morris & Soboroff about the film:
For his second term, Trump and his team are planning a blockbuster sequel to these inhumane crimes entirely in the open: deporting up to 20 million people (undocumented immigrants, documented immigrants, and political opponents) with a minimum of due process, which will require a massive increase in the scale of the police state and concentration camps. That’s 6% of the US population. We don’t know if they will succeed but they will try. Those are the stakes.
It has been a week. It’s not going to fix anything, but maybe watching George Clooney chilling at the end of a movie will help you in some small way.
He has perfected the art of just chillin’ out silently for an extended period of time during the last shot of a movie while the credits roll…
(via laura olin)
Music By John Williams is a documentary film about the legendary composer who did the scores for Star Wars, Jaws, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, Close Encounters, Superman, E.T., Home Alone, Schindler’s List — seriously, one person composed all these?! — Saving Private Ryan, Harry Potter, Lincoln, etc. etc. etc. Oh, and the Olympic Fanfare and Theme that NBC uses for the Olympics.
Anyway, the documentary premieres on Nov 1 on Disney+.
London’s Design Museum is hosting a big retrospective of Wes Anderson’s work beginning in late 2025.
This exhibition will be the first time museum visitors have the opportunity to delve into the art of his complete filmography, examining his inspirations, homages, and the meticulous craftsmanship that define his work.
Through a curated collection of original props, costumes, and behind-the-scenes insights, including from his personal collection, this exhibition offers an unprecedented look into the world of Wes Anderson, celebrating his enduring influence on contemporary cinema.
Might have to make my way to London for this. (via daniel benneworth–gray)
For his first movie since 2019’s Parasite, filmmaker Bong Joon-ho is coming out with a sci-fi dark comedy film called Mickey 17. The trailer is above and the synopsis from Wikipedia is:
Wanting to get out of Earth, Mickey Barnes signs up to be an “expendable”: a disposable employee where after one iteration dies, a new body is regenerated with most of their memories intact. After one of his “multiples”, Mickey 17, unintentionally survived a human expedition to colonize the ice world Niflheim, he goes head-to-head with a new multiple, Mickey 18.
Mickey 17 will be out in theaters in late January. I found the trailer for this from Aaron Stewart-Ahn, who says:
David Zaslav’s Warner Bros has been trying to bury Bong Joon-ho’s sci-fi follow up to Parasite for over a year now, refused to let it play Cannes, and is now dumping it in January. Rumors are Robert Pattinson’s weirdo performance also bothered them which to me means it must be friggin’ awesome.
Per Wikipedia, production wrapped in late 2022 so yeah, it sounds like they didn’t know what to do with it.
Apollo 13: Survival is a documentary film that uses original footage and interviews to tell the story of NASA’s Apollo 13 mission, what went wrong, and how the astronauts returned safely to Earth. It’s now playing on Netflix.
Ezra Edelman’s OJ: Made in America is probably the best documentary I’ve ever watched — it’s a powerful and illuminating work. For the past five years, Edelman has been working on a documentary about Prince for Netflix that aimed to understand an artist who resisted being known for much of his life and career. Edelman got access to Prince’s archive and talked to many of the people closest to him.
But now Prince’s estate is objecting to the portrait of Prince painted by the film: a man of “multiplying paradoxes” who was a “creature of pure sex and mischief and silky ambiguity [but] also dark, vindictive and sad”. Sasha Weiss wrote a fantastic article about the documentary, Edelman, and Prince for the New York Times Magazine.
When the screening ended, after midnight, Questlove was shaken. Since he was 7 years old, he said, he had modeled himself on Prince — his fashion, his overflowing creativity, his musical rule-breaking. So “it was a heavy pill to swallow when someone that you put on a pedestal is normal.” That was the bottom line for him: that Prince was both extraordinary and a regular human being who struggled with self-destructiveness and rage. “Everything’s here: He’s a genius, he’s majestical, he’s sexual, he’s flawed, he’s trash, he’s divine, he’s all those things. And, man. Wow.”
I called Questlove a few months later, to see how it had all settled in his mind. He said he went home that night and spoke to his therapist until 3 a.m. He cried so hard he couldn’t see. Watching the film forced him to confront the consequences of putting on a mask of invincibility — a burden that he feels has been imposed on Black people for generations. “A certain level of shield — we could call it masculinity, or coolness: the idea of cool, the mere ideal of cool was invented by Black people to protect themselves in this country,” he said. “But we made it sexy. … We can take dark emotion and make that cool, too.”
The night of the screening, he said he told his therapist, was a wake-up call: “I don’t want my life to be what I just saw there.” It was painful, he said, to “take your hero and subject him to the one thing that he detests more than life, which is to show his heart, show his emotion.”
Ever if you’re not a particular fan of Prince, it’s worth reading the whole thing.
I just got back from the XOXO Festival and one of things that happened was that Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou showed their new short film The Second and their first new Every Frame A Painting video essay in eight years!! And now the video essay is on YouTube:
It’s a quick one about the sustained two-shot, a type of shot that was used a lot in the olden days but still has its uses today — and gives actors room to actually act.
So happy to see Ramos and Zhou back at it. I’m not sure if I should even say this, but they indicated during their XOXO appearance that there will be more to come (in fewer than 8 years).
Here’s my post about them shuttering the channel and a few of my favorite videos of theirs.
Artist and illustrator Andrew DeGraff makes maps that show where the characters travel during movies — imagine Billy’s trail maps from Family Circus but for films like Back to the Future, The Breakfast Club, Pulp Fiction, and Mad Max: Fury Road.
DeGraff collected these maps into a book called Cinemaps: An Atlas of 35 Great Movies.
Saturday Night is a forthcoming movie directed by Jason Reitman about the premiere of Saturday Night Live.
At 11:30pm on October 11, 1975, a ferocious troupe of young comedians and writers changed television — and culture — forever. Directed by Jason Reitman and written by Gil Kenan & Reitman, Saturday Night is based on the true story of what happened behind the scenes in the 90 minutes leading up to the first broadcast of Saturday Night Live. Full of humor, chaos, and the magic of a revolution that almost wasn’t, we count down the minutes in real time until we hear those famous words…
According to Wikipedia, Succession’s Nicholas Braun (Cousin Greg) plays both Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson in the film. (via @ernie.tedium.co)
In this video, Evan Puschak takes a close look at the iconic chase scene in Point Break to see how director Kathryn Bigelow uses POV shots to help put the viewer right into the action in a way that is incredibly immersive. Oh, and there a surprise appearance by Disneyland’s Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.
Confession: I have never seen Point Break. Guess I should watch it now?
In this visual essay (and video embedded above), Alvin Chang shows how science fiction movies have gotten darker and more complex since the 1950s, when many movies were set in the present with a clear existential threat that was then overcome.
But these days, it’s much more likely that protagonists also have to overcome societal forces — political movements, systemic inequality, rampant capitalism. These are basically things that seem too big to fix.
It’s also far more likely that the narrative explores inner conflicts — moral dilemmas, identity crises, and wrestling with our understanding of what it means to be human. We don’t just face outside threats; we also face threats within ourselves.
Ultimately, today’s sci-fi stories are far more likely to be a commentary on current social issues. These might be critiques of political ideologies, runaway capitalism, irresponsible innovation, human apathy, or eroding mental health.
(via studio d)
British designer Hayden Wills has created some cool moving posters for Studio Ghibli films like Howl’s Moving Castle, Spirited Away, and The Wind Rises.
You can see more of Wills’ posters on Behance, download the collection on Steam, or learn how to make your own moving posters in Photoshop.
See also Moving Film Posters. (via @0xjessel)
As if we needed more reasons to love her, Ayo Edebiri is a total film dork. First, there’s the account on Letterboxd — her review of Empire Strikes Back: “this movie is great but I was really shocked by how ugly Yoda was sorry if that pisses anybody off but I had only seen baby Yoda and adult Yoda is fucking busted”. And recently, she totally nerded out in the Criterion Collection closet.
The actor shares her love for sexy and stylish heist movies like Charade and Thief; praises the work of Juzo Itami (whom she calls “the G.O.A.T.”) and his wife, Nobuko Miyamoto; and talks about the African American surrealist imagery in To Sleep with Anger.
So infectiously joyful! As one of the YT commenters said:
Between the prepared list on her phone and the Radiohead t-shirt I feel like this was the closest the comments section has been to having one of us in the closet
For National Geographic, Tony Hale (who played Fear in Inside Out 2) talks to psychologist and author Dr. Lisa Damour about Pixar’s new film, her role as a consultant for the filmmakers, and what science says about the emotions in the movie. From The Kid Should See This:
By blending Pixar’s storytelling with scientific expertise, the Inside Out films and this discussion help make the complex topic of emotional development approachable and more familiar. They offer viewers of all ages vocabulary to better understand and express their feelings, while normalizing the intricate emotional experiences we encounter throughout life.
I have heard a lot of good things about Damour’s books from other parents, particularly Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood and The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents.
Vox also has a really interesting article on the science of the emotions of Inside Out 2, with quotes from Damour and emotion scientist Dacher Keltner.
One of the things that happens when people become teenagers is that their brain becomes more sophisticated, and it allows for self-conscious emotions. Before age 13, kids are concrete in their thinking. They can’t always see things from another perspective. Then around 13 or 14, the ability to picture oneself on the outside, to imagine different scenarios, arrives as a result of brain development.
With that arrival comes the ability to be embarrassed and to imagine what other people think of you. Or to have envy, to want something somebody else has and to want to know why you don’t have it. Ennui is so funny and wonderful and really maps onto the natural disdain and over-it-ness teenagers can have for everything. Then, of course, anxiety is a major player in this movie. What anxiety requires is the ability to imagine and anticipate. Fear is our response to the threat right in front of us, whereas anxiety is picturing things that might happen.
See also The Making of “Inside Out 2” episode of Damour’s podcast.
As the parent of two teens and also as someone who perhaps remembers a little too much what it felt like to be a teenager, I found Inside Out 2’s portrayal of the emotions (and how to manage them) to be really convincing. (via the kid should see this)
Ok, this trailer for Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II really got me wound up. Denzel Washington, Paul Mescal, Pedro Pascal, Connie Nielsen — I am here for all of it. November 22 can’t come soon enough (for several reasons…)
Members of the original cast of The Avengers (Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, Jeremy Renner, and Mark Ruffalo) reunited to dub the movie in the Lakota language.
Mark Ruffalo and members of the initiative sit down with us to share the story of this amazing reunion and its very special cause. From the recording studio to the big screen, we explore this important cinematic milestone and celebrate the release that took over 15 months, 62 Lakota-Dakota language speakers, and the original Avengers team to come together and Assemble!
More details from the Lakota Times:
On June 14th, 2024, Disney plus will release the Avengers film that will be dubbed in Lakota. Cyril “Chuck” Archambault, Ray Taken Alive, Dallas Nelson, Lawrence Archambault along with the Lakota Reclamation Project, Grey Willow Studios, students from McLaughlin school, elders from the Standing Rock community and many others have all worked very hard together to complete this project.
A couple of years ago, Ray and Chuck talked about the idea of dubbing the Avengers movie. From there, Chuck spoke with Mark Ruffalo about the idea and Ruffalo said he will get back to them about it. Several months later, a meeting was set up with Marvel and Disney to discuss this idea. Not only did they approve of the project, but Marvel and Deluxe studios helped them through it.
From there, they were able to receive a grant to help with funding, within the budgets they made sure that the Elders would be the highest paid in the project.
Here’s the poster for the Lakota dub, which is now streaming on Disney+ (change the language option to Lakota).
NY Times critic Maya Phillips wrote about seeing her anxiety reflected in Pixar’s Inside Out 2.
When an emotion takes over in the “Inside Out” movies, a control board in Riley’s mind changes to that feeling’s color; Anxiety’s takeover, however, is more absolute. She creates a stronghold in Riley’s imagination, where she forces mind workers to illustrate negative hypothetical scenarios for Riley’s future. Soon, Riley’s chief inner belief is of her inadequacy; the emotions hear “I’m not good enough” as a low, rumbling refrain in her mind.
I’m familiar with anxiety’s hold on the imagination; my mind is always writing the script to the next worst day of my life. It’s already embraced all possibilities of failure. And my anxiety’s ruthless demands for perfection often turn my thoughts into an unrelenting roll-call of self-criticisms and insecurities.
And yet — Anxiety isn’t the villain of this movie.
A cursory spin around social media reveals many other people who identified with that aspect of the film.
I really enjoyed this movie and loved that they didn’t make Anxiety the villain. It would have been so easy to do so — Hollywood has a habit of really dumbing things down, especially in movies aimed at kids. The filmmakers seemed to understand that anxiety is the flip-side of a coin that includes some mixture of watchfulness, anticipation, and exhilaration. That emotion can be useful to people, until it spins out of the control as in the movie and then it wreaks havoc.
Wallace & Gromit are returning for a feature-length film later this year — and so is Feathers McGraw, the scofflaw penguin that made off with the wrong trousers in, um, The Wrong Trousers. Here’s the premise of Vengeance Most Fowl:
In this next installment, Gromit’s concern that Wallace is becoming too dependent on his inventions proves justified, when Wallace invents a “smart” gnome that seems to develop a mind of its own. When it emerges that a vengeful figure from the past might be masterminding things, it falls to Gromit to battle sinister forces and save his master … or Wallace may never be able to invent again!
Timely! Vengeance Most Fowl will debut on BBC in the UK in late December and at some later date on Netflix in the US and elsewhere.
A 4K restoration of Akira Kurosawa’s epic Seven Samurai is heading to theaters this summer. The film screened at Cannes in May and screenings in the US start in July:
Janus will open the restoration on Friday, July 5 in New York at Film Forum after which a Los Angeles premiere will take place at the American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theatre on Sunday, July 7. The film will open wide on Friday, July 12 in Los Angeles at Laemmle Royal.
Here’s the official poster for the restoration:
On a personal note, I’m pretty disheartened there’s a 99% chance this won’t be playing anywhere near me in Vermont. Run Lola Run was rereleased in theaters last week and I couldn’t find it anywhere within a reasonable drive. And the nearest IMAX is 2h15m away. I’m thankful that I can get all sorts of culture pumped into my house at gigabit speeds, but per contemporary wisdom, “we’ve got Seven Samurai’s 4K restoration at home” is just not the same.
YouTuber Nerrel takes James Cameron to task for releasing 4K remasters of Aliens and True Lies that have been, well, ruined by using AI to clean them up.
The best 4k releases tend to follow a pretty simple template: clean and scan the negative, repair any obvious signs of damage, and restore the colors to match the original grading, with as little meddling beyond that as possible. The process should not be about modernizing the style or forcing film to look like digital video. 35mm film was capable of incredible picture quality, and 4k is the first home format capable of delivering most of that detail — that should be enough. A well done 4k is like having a pristine copy of the original negative to watch in your own home, with the full data from that celluloid — grain and detail alike — digitally preserved forever. And that’s the problem with deep learning algorithms — they can’t preserve details. They make their best guess about what an object is supposed to be, then pull new details out of their digital assholes and smear them across the screen.
If Hollywood and one of its best directors don’t care enough about their movies to do them right, how are they supposed to convince us to care about their movies?
The first Black Barbie doll was created and sold in 1980. Black Barbie, a documentary streaming on Netflix later this month, tells the story of how the doll came to be and the impact it had on a generation of young people who were able to see themselves in a doll with the same color skin, perhaps for the first time.
The trailer opens with this line: “If you’ve gone your whole life and you’ve never seen anything made in your own image, there is damage done.” Which is then echoed later in the trailer when a little girl is describing her Barbie: “Really pretty, and has lochs, just like me”.
Shonda Rhimes produced the film and was recently on the Today show talking about the importance of representation. And here’s a tour of Sonya Larson’s collection of 1000+ Black Barbie dolls.
I was a little too young (and culturally sheltered — like I’d never heard of New York magazine) in 1985 to really understand what the heck the Brat Pack was (not to mention what the name was referencing), but as a child of the 80s, I obviously grew up watching movies and TV shows that featured these actors. According to Wikipedia (which is a good read if you’re unfamiliar with the whole thing), here are some of the actors that were in the Brat Pack (or Brat Pack-adjacent): Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Rob Lowe, Andrew McCarthy, Demi Moore, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy, Tom Cruise, Charlie Sheen, James Spader, Robert Downey Jr., John Cusack, and Matthew Broderick.
The Brat Pack moniker was coined in a 1985 New York magazine article and it stuck. And according to some of the members, it ruined lives, careers, and friendships. Now one of the group members, Andrew McCarthy, has directed a documentary about the group: Brats. From Deadline:
Brats looks at the iconic films of the 1980s that shaped a generation and the narrative that took hold when their young stars were branded the “Brat Pack.” McCarthy reunites with his fellow Brat Packers — friends, colleagues and former foes, including Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Ally Sheedy, Emilio Estevez, Jon Cryer, Lea Thompson and Timothy Hutton, many of whom he had not seen for over 30 years — to answer the question: What did it mean to be part of the Brat Pack? The actor-filmmaker also sits down for a first-time conversation with writer David Blum, who fatefully coined the term Brat Pack in a 1985 New York Magazine cover story.
That trailer definitely hooked me in. Brats will be available on Hulu on June 13.
From Life magazine and photographer Ralph Crane, a gallery of outtakes from the filming of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes in 1972.
The Century City mall, selected for its futuristic appearance, was a primary battleground in the plot. LIFE staff photographer Ralph Crane came to the set and took pictures of the costumed actors in the mall, trying on shoes and making eyes at the lingerie store display, as well as eating in the mess hall with their masks half off. The pictures make for easy laughs, capturing the kind of shenanigans that help liven up a fourth Apes film in as many years.
(via daniel benneworth–gray)
Two of my biggest childhood touchstones were Sesame Street and the Muppet Show. The creative spark behind both shows was Jim Henson, the subject of a forthcoming documentary directed by Ron Howard. From the press release:
Produced with the full participation and cooperation of the Henson family, “Jim Henson Idea Man” is an unprecedented, intimate look at Henson’s illustrious, revolutionary career and complex personal life. Using never-before-seen personal archival home movies, photographs, sketches, and Henson’s personal diaries, as well as interviews with those who knew him best, the film is the definitive portrait of one of the world’s most inspiring and iconoclastic creators.
Jim Henson Idea Man will be available to stream on Disney+ on Friday. (via the kid should see this)
From the SoundWorks Collection, this is a 30-minute featurette on the sound design of Dune, in which the film’s sound teams talks about how they created the sounds of the Arrakis desert, the sandworm, ornithopters, spice, and the voice of the Bene Gesserit.
That’s something which - I learned a trick from Lee Scratch Perry, who I worked with in Switzerland about 10 years ago. He’s the pioneer of dub reggae, which must be the genre of music with the most bass. And one of the tricks that he used was to record a bass line and then to play it back through a huge speaker in a room that’s resonant…and record that. So it enhances the resonance of the bass. You also hear something of the shaking of the room. So that was one of the tricks that we used to give a sort of a very tactile sense to this spiritual adventure that Paul’s going on.
There are several other videos on this topic should you desire to rabbit-hole: The Sounds of Dune, How The Sounds of Dune Were Made, Dune Sound Design Explained, Director Denis Villeneuve and Sound Team on Dune, and Dune: Part Two | Deeper into the Desert: The Sounds of the Dune:
Queendom is a documentary film by Agniia Galdanova about queer Russian activist and performance artist Jenna Marvin and her unusual form of protest against the war in Ukraine and Russia’s treatment of LGBTQ+ people. From a short review in the Guardian:
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February last year, some brave souls took to the streets of Moscow to voice their horror at the war, and were met with batons and police brutality. Radical queer performance artist Gena Marvin took a different approach. Wearing platform boots, body paint and wrapped in barbed wire, she walked the streets of Moscow in a stark, silent statement against the war. To call Gena a drag artist fails to capture just how subversive and courageous are her public “performances”. Her otherworldly costumes, created from junk and tape, show the influence of Leigh Bowery; her fearlessness evokes the punk provocation of Pussy Riot.
Marvin’s performances can be intense — check out this video from Paris in 2022. France had just advanced into the semifinals of the World Cup and she went out on the streets dressed in an all-black costume straight out of Alien or Pan’s Labyrinth:
Queendom opens in theaters and will available on streaming on June 14.
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