We recommend better movies with Goldie Hawn, Amy Schumer, mother/daughter relationships, South America kidnappings, and more.

The movie that finally brought Goldie Hawn back to the big screen after a 15-year hiatus and the sophomore starring vehicle for Amy Schumer is an often funny but still quite mediocre effort for such an exciting-sounding project. The actresses appear in a pre-show spot before the movie thanking audiences for seeing it in a theater, but Snatched isn’t essential viewing in any format and definitely isn’t theatrically necessary unless you just want to laugh with a crowd.

The following dozen movies are more vital. Most of them are better works from the director and cast of Snatched, while others are better takes on the same themes and settings. You don’t have to see the new Hawn and Schumer team-up, but you do have to see these:

Mildred Pierce (1945)

Arguably the greatest film dealing with mother-daughter conflict, Michael Curtiz’s adaptation of James M. Cain’s novel stars Joan Crawford in an Oscar-winning performance as a woman who does everything she can for her kids yet winds up with a spoiled jerk of an eldest child. Ann Blyth’s Veda is not so dumb nor so kind as Schumer’s Emily, and things between the two women don’t work out quite as heartwarmingly as they do for the ladies of Snatched. Todd Haynes’s recent miniseries remake is also worth seeing.

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Cactus Flower (1969)

Hawn’s first big movie role, which broke her out into serious stardom and netted her an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, is in this classic rom-com co-starring Walter Matthau and Ingrid Bergman. The newcomer was somewhat typecast as the sort of ditzy blonde she’d been playing on TV’s Laugh-In, but it’s not a thin characterization. Hawn, like Marilyn Monroe before her, knew how to do dumb intelligently. How she put up with Schumer’s obnoxious idiot version while making Snatched is beyond me.

Related Product:

Cactus Flower

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Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)

Want a great movie in which people trek through the Amazon rainforest? Werner Herzog’s first pairing with actor Klaus Kinski, about a conquistador’s search for El Dorado, is so crazy that none of the lost in the jungle humor in Snatched lands with any weight if you’re familiar with it. Never mind that the new movie is just a stupid comedy. It’s also such a blatant vacation project, especially compared to Aguirre, which was actually filmed in harsh Peruvian locales rather than safe Hawaii.

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Aguirre, The Wrath of God [Blu-ray]

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Grosse Pointe Blank (1997)

Oh, Joan Cusack, what are you doing playing a character whose tongue is cut out? Your voice is a big part of why you’re so amazing. Well, you’re good mostly silent in Sixteen Candles, but that was before you vocally shined in Broadcast News, Working Girl, My Blue Heaven, In & Out, and of course the Toy Story sequels. I love your expressive face, but I prefer your speech to go with it. And in Grosse Pointe Blank you don’t need fake acrobatics to be a ferociously awesome part of a post-military mercenary duo.

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Grosse Pointe Blank (15th Anniversary Edition) [Blu-ray]

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Ratas, Ratones, Rateros (1999)

There’s not much of Ecuador in the spotlight of Snatched. In fact, much of the movie is set in Colombia. But it does depict the nation as a dangerous place outside the gates of resorts. Well, Ecuadorian cinema, like much of South American film, isn’t that much better for the country’s reputation. At least those films that break out on the global stage as its national cinema representatives. Still, of that sort of thing, Sebastian Cordero’s early work deserves to be seen. This gritty crime film and Cronicas, in particular.

Related Product:

Ratas, Ratones Rateros

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Manda Bala (2007)

Brazil is another country whose national cinema is unfairly focused on crime and other bad things. But again, much of that negative representation is done very well, at least. This documentary, which is actually by an American director (Jason Kohn) but fits the classification as a Brazilian co-production, is probably the best film addressing the issue of kidnappings in South America. There’s also Sequestro, the Netflix series Captive, and My Kidnapper, which is relevant in being about tourist victims in Colombia.

Related Product:

Manda Bala

DVD | WEA

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The fan-made trailer to end all fan-made trailers.

Idon’t normally run with a lot of fan made trailers here, the kind of things that turn comedies into thrillers or thrillers into comedies, not out of a lack of respect – that stuff is hard to do and highly entertaining when done well – but because stuff like that usually goes up everywhere at once and I like to save the few spots I have every day for lesser-seen efforts. Sometimes, though, you come across something ingenious that you’ve never seen anywhere else, and protocol gets broken.

Such is the case with It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad Max Fury Road, a mashup of the two titular movies – one a bumbling ensemble comedy from Stanley Kramer and the other a post-apocalyptic free-for-all from George Miller, in case you don’t know – that was made a couple years ago by Ezequiel Lopez and quietly racked up a quarter-million hits on Vimeo without me knowing about it.

Using audio from Fury Road paired with images from …Mad World, Lopez has crafted an ingenious hybrid of two films that you would assume have nothing more in common than their names, but, man, you’d be wrong. Greed, loyalty, resilience, doubt, and faith are key elements of both stories, and though Kramer is admittedly nowhere near the action director Miller is, both films exhibit a breakneck pace that’s vital to their respective emotional successes.

To even think to pair such divergent films together is a stroke of genius, but to do it so masterfully in terms of content and context results in some next-level shit no description can do justice, you just have to experience it for yourself. So press play.

Evan Katz’s second feature lets Nikolaj Coster-Waldau shine all too briefly.

Writer/director Evan Katz’s debut film Cheap Thrills is a strange, malevolent, masochistic, and wickedly cruel black-humored drama that you couldn’t look away from. Even if the film wasn’t for you, its potency made Katz an unavoidable new voice whose bleak outlook on humankind was more than clear. His sophomore effort, Netflix’s Small Crimes, sees him tie a bit more plot to the tortured skeleton of humanity he enjoys so much. The film is a crooked crime drama with the winding plot of a noir sobered by a stylistic realism.

Vulnerability to unsavory whims and desperation remain at the forefront of the film, which follows ex-cop Joe Denton (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), fresh on parole, as he returns home seeking redemption. Not that he’ll find it in Katz’s film. Like many ex-cons, the outside isn’t what Denton imagined. His dreamed-about real world in all its wood paneling and pastels shines brightly in contrast to the nightmarish dark and heat of its crime-ridden night. The conversations and dialogue have the strained come-and-go of regular folk discussing things they’d rather not, especially from Denton’s parents, played excellently by Jacki Weaver and Robert Forster.

Denton’s an embarrassment to them and worse to his ex-wife and two kids. Things seem bad but the underworld he’s tried to leave can always make things worse by enclosing him once again. This underworld is represented by a motley cast of talent. Macon Blair (a co-writer of the film) is a great mopey sidekick, Gary Cole a delightfully corrupt cop that has Denton by the balls, and Pat Healy a psycho rich kid – all map out a dirty little world with its dirty little people. The only light, ironic for a crime story, is the saintly Molly Parker playing a nurse seduced by Denton. She’s all wide smiles and trusting eyes, her home a soft sweet alternative to the slimy slide of the outside world’s plotting.

This plotting involves Cole’s dirty cop forcing Denton to finish the job he went down for all those years ago, offering Denton both access to his estranged children and the chance to simply stay alive. Win-win. It’s slimy and charming but definitely not funny. Dated only by its ‘80s musical Ford Taurus commercial, Small Crimes exists in a timeless bubble of grimy Americana whose charms and slime all seem to coalesce around one central figure. Katz finds his fascination in the overly-plotted, complicatedly put-upon man, obscured and deferential to his past and problems. An old blood trickle stained on a car window daggers across Denton’s face, a man that can’t escape the violence pointedly foregrounded in his tightest shots.

Small Crimes is almost entirely hinged upon Coster-Waldau’s beaten-dog performance of this down and out sadsack. The seemingly random and brutal protagonist beatings fit perfectly into the martyred noir detective role. He’s a guy more comfortable holding the bars of a fence than embracing the nature behind them. He mumbles and stutters, practicing his lines before conversations, nowhere near as smooth or smart mouthed as one of his ‘40s brethren. What he lacks in sharpness, he makes up for in earnest sleaze – a dedication to the Jimmy Buffett outfits and long-con selfishness that’s kept him on the wrong side of the law. And I do mean to imply that his short-sleeved shirts, dad-goatee, and baggy pants are criminal – they’re intentional to hide Coster-Waldau’s toned body from an audience meant to disrespect his abilities.

Denton takes a turn for the narcissistic and unpitiable that seems to undermine Katz’s suffering fetish, but then, towards the end, a lot of the film’s script seems to undermine its intentions. Over-explanation crops up where none was needed, making plain what was vague and alluring in the beginning, and dialogue that was once pained and realistic becomes on-the-nose accusations about emotional states rather than crimes. “You feel such-and-such way” is a boring way for us to learn or even confirm our beliefs that a character feels any such way.

There’s depravity that Katz wants us to believe lies inside all of us, but he never convincingly sets it up for some of the characters that take these turns. When it bubbles up in the least suspecting characters, it feels like as big a loogie in our face as the spit dripped into Denton’s coffee by a lawman. The turn to ridiculous exploitation, a genre schism that’s incongruity feels like a missed comedic opportunity than a triumphant climax is just the cinematic button on a competent crime story that’s lost its way. It’s too cute and has too many slick, tightly knotted ends for its loose, complex lead.

Not your typical spy flick.

It’s a scenario as old as the Cold War: a dapper-dressed secret agent infiltrates an enemy stronghold in search of a powerful object, only to find his way barred by a series of crisscrossing, high-intensity laser beams.

Once again this set-up has been employed in the film The Bronson Maneuver, which comes from Ryan Sluman, Joon Kim, Danny Dahlquist, and Mike McCain. The short is a blend of puppetry, animation, intrigue and humor that plays a helluva lot like a James Bond film starring Bruce Campbell, and you know I mean that in the best possible way.

Brief, abrupt and unexpected, The Bronson Maneuver is more than masterful animation, it’s a bite-size feat of comedy that comes out of left field to tickle your funny bone and upend the conventions of its supposed genre. Check it out and pass it on.

Nic Cage put so much work into landing a superhero gig…and then he got Ghost Rider.

“Yeah, I’m good. I feel like my skull is on fire, but I’m good.”

It’s been a few weeks since we’ve jumped into the mind of the one and only Nicolas Cage so I’ve had plenty of time to think about what film from his stacked catalog that I wanted to feature for this week. Naturally, I chose Ghost Rider.

Ghost Rider is the story of Johnny Blaze (Cage), a stunt cyclist who gives up his soul to save his stunt cyclist father (Brett Cullen). At the time of the transaction Blaze’s father has cancer and the purchasing party, a mysterious supernatural being named Mephistopheles (Peter Fonda), claims he can cure it. Mephistopheles holds true to that claim and cures cancer, but unfortunately, Blaze’s father ends up dying that same day in a terrible accident from a stunt gone wrong. Hey, Mephistopheles only said he’d save him from cancer, nothing about keeping him alive. You gotta read the fine print, Johnny!

Immediately after nothing really happens to Johnny. Mephistopheles prevents him from running off with his girlfriend Roxanne (Eva Mendes) which is a bummer but his soul seems to be fine. Johnny spends the next few years perfecting his craft and becoming a world famous stunt cyclist. People go nuts for Team Blaze and they should because Johnny is able to defy the laws of physics with some of his extreme stunts. He also enjoys Mountain Dew and Doritos, probably. This never actually comes up in the movie but I think we can safely assume.

Mephistopheles seems to be gone. Johnny doesn’t see him for a long time, but he does wonder if maybe Mephistopheles has played some role in his ability to bounce up, injury free, from accidents that would kill most mortal men. When Mephistopheles does finally show himself again it’s because he needs Johnny to stop Blackheart (Wes Bentley), who happens to be the son of the Devil. This is about the time when Johnny realizes that giving up his soul has turned him into Ghost Rider!

My Ghost Rider knowledge outside of the films is quite limited, so I have no clue how close the story in the movie parallels what fans know from the comics. I do know that the main baddie is named Mephisto in the comics, so not sure why it was changed to a longer name for the movie. I also know that Ghost Rider is one of the darker comic book characters which makes film adaptations hard since younger audiences tend to be the target demographic. Even without knowing much Ghost Rider was a movie I was super pumped to see in 2007 because…well, I don’t need to tell you why.

I saw the film in theaters and then before writing this piece I had probably seen it 2 or 3 more times over the last 10 years. My initial thought was it’s not very good, but it’s enjoyable. I still told people back in 2007 that it was a top 3 superhero movie because of Cage. I regret nothing. Watching it earlier this week and my general thoughts are roughly the same. It’s still not good and I still have a blast watching it, but I think I now have a better understanding of why it wasn’t very good and it serves as a pretty good example as to why movies are hard to make.

Sony produced the two Ghost Rider films and going into this first one they did have a pretty good track record with comic book adaptations. According to numbers from Box Office Mojo, Ghost Rider was the 43rd comic book adaptation to hit screens dating back to 1978. 6 of those 43 movies were Sony productions — Men In Black, Spider-Man, Men In Black II, Hellboy, Spider-Man 2 and Ghost Rider. At the time of Ghost Rider’s release, 4 of those 6 movies were in the top 9 highest grossing comic book adaptations of all time with Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 holding down the top spots. So the box office numbers were clearly strong for Sony at the time and the reviews weren’t bad either. Spider-Man 2 is still regularly brought up when discussing the best comic book adaptations of all time.

All the pieces and history were in place for a great movie. Cage as Johnny Blaze/Ghost Rider is awesome and the rest of the cast consisting of Mendes, Fonda, Bentley and freakin’ Sam Elliot is rad. I mean come on, this movie has Cage, Fonda, and Elliot! Those are titans.

So what the heck went wrong?

Hiring Mark Steven Johnson to write and direct was probably the first mistake. At least that was my initial thought. Johnson had only directed two films prior — Simon Birch and Daredevil — one of those is pretty good and the other not so much. Unfortunately, the bad one is the more relevant title. Still, I actually think Johnson does an OK job, at least from the directing standpoint. And after watching a bunch of the special features on the Blu-ray, of which there are plenty, I have more of an appreciation for what he did or at least tried to do.

Johnson had a big role in the casting of the film and there he succeeded. The cast is fantastic and I don’t think there’s any arguing that. Johnson also had a very intriguing vision he was going for, one that if successful would have been amazing. On some of the behind-the-scenes footage, Johnson discussed his influences for the movie. His goal was to make something that was a cross between a Spaghetti Western and a Hammer Horror film. Knowing that information upon revisiting the film and I could clearly see that influence in the final product. It doesn’t all work and isn’t executed perfectly, but I totally get that Spaghetti Western/Hammer Horror vibe and that’s pretty cool.

In my opinion, the two biggest issues are that Ghost Rider is probably best suited to an R-rated movie and it should probably be animated. This is a darker, more violent character. And while the movie is certainly violent I think you’d see better results by pulling back the restrictions and really letting loose.

Going animated seems like a no-brainer to me. Ghost Rider is a dude with a head that is a flaming skull for crying out loud! That’s not easy to portray in live-action. It requires a ton of CGI that is very expensive. The CGI in Ghost Rider not only doesn’t hold up, which is sad because it’s merely 10 years old, but it didn’t look all that great back then. When your main character spends a large chunk of the movie being CGI and the CGI doesn’t look good, that’s a problem. You either need much better CGI or you can go animated. I’d go animated.

I’d venture to say most people would agree with the issues I’ve pointed out, but it feels like even more people view Cage as one of the main problems, if not the main problem. Ghost Rider, along with Wicker Man, seems to be the movies that shifted the general population’s view of Cage as an actor. Despite my admiration for Cage, I do get that, at least on some level. Wicker Man and Ghost Rider were back-to-back movies that not only failed to be successful but featured some insane Cage moments, even by his already insane standards. Even with that insanity, I think Cage is a damn good Johnny Blaze.

Cage was born to play Ghost Rider. His love affair with comics is well documented and if the massive tattoo on his left arm is any indication Ghost Rider is a personal favorite.

“I would play on my bike and I guess accept the postulate, when I was 8, that I was Ghost Rider,” Cage said on a behind-the-scenes Blu-ray feature. “You don’t get any cooler than a motorcyclist, stunt cyclist dressed head to toe in black leather with a flaming skull for a head. It’s a great, iconic visual image.”

Side note: I love that Cages uses the word “postulate.”

Johnny Blaze is a more complicated character than he appears on the surface. Once his father dies he sort of develops two different personalities. As a performer, he’s a showman, borderline cocky. But as a person he’s very brooding and why wouldn’t he be. He loses his girlfriend and father on the same day. You need an actor that can pull both these off at once. Cage is capable of doing so.

Then there’s the Cage style. Even those that hate Cage have to admit he has style and it’s perfect for Blaze.

“When you meet Nic and see the clothes he wears, he dresses like Johnny Blaze,” director Johnson quips on a making-of feature for Ghost Rider. “He has said to me before that this character is closer to anything he’s ever played to himself.”

The transformation scene is what seems to stick with people. Even if you haven’t seen the movie you’ve probably seen some portion of this scene. It’s the first time he turns into Ghost Rider. It’s been turned into countless memes and the GIF has been circulated all over the interweb.

Cage goes big in this scene, there’s no doubt about it. He makes all kinds of crazy facial expressions as he screams out. And it does look a bit silly but that doesn’t make it ineffective. He seems to be going through a painful experience that his body doesn’t understand. Reminds me a bit of David Naughton in An American Werewolf in London.

The issue with this scene and why it seems to get lambasted so much is more about the CGI and less about Cage. At least that’s what it looks like to me. This is the first moment in the film with heavy CGI use and like said it’s not great. What Cage is doing is pretty standard Cage. He’s basically been doing a variation of that since Valley Girl. And by that I mean he goes for it.

My final thoughts on Ghost Rider are it’s better than people think it is, but unfortunately, it’s still not very good. It’s entertaining and it has its heart in the right place but sometimes it takes more than that. Knowing how bad and how long Cage wanted to make a superhero movie does make this all the more unfortunate. I am able to take solace, however, in the fact that despite the film’s shortcomings it serves as another example of Cage leaving it all out on the line.

Cannes Film Festival is more accessible than you might think.

First off, yes, it’s just pronounced “can.” Don’t be intimidated by Cannes Film Festival’s seemingly impenetrable Frenchness or its audience’s reputation for viciously booing films – if you look at some of the films that premiered there, you’d realize Cannes often has the same taste as your grandma’s DVD collection. 2017 sees Cannes celebrating its 70th anniversary with a jury including Will Smith. Will Smith isn’t scary, right? His inclusion among judges like Paolo Sorrentino, Maren Ade, and Park Chan-Wook is indicative of how unexpectedly mainstream the fest can get.

There’s been a boatload of films that you’d never have guessed premiered at Cannes Film Festival and the knowledge that they did will serve you well at bar trivia. The following twenty movies all debuted at the festival, ironically sticking their noses up at the fest’s snooty reputation:

Dirty Dancing

In May of 1987, Dirty Dancing, the film that would make Patrick Swayze’s career, be the first to sell over a million copies on video, and go on to win the Oscar for best song premiered at Cannes. In context, it makes sense. The smash hit was supposed to be a tiny little indie angled to play for a weekend or two and then recoup costs on VHS. Then everyone watching had the time of their lives and here we are.

Shrek

Shrek became the first animated film to play Cannes since Peter Pan in the ‘50s. Shrek had the added honors of premiering at the fest and playing in competition (though perhaps unsurprisingly, it went home empty-handed). Its sequel Shrek 2 also premiered at Cannes a few years later and Over the Hedge showed at the festival the year of its release, making it quite apparent that the programming committee of the world-renown fest really digs Dreamworks’ reference humor.

Up

Up not only premiered at Cannes, it was the first animated film to ever open it, leading the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and winning the prestigious Palm Dog Award for Dug. The floppy, goofy pup bested Antichrist and Inglourious Basterds for the canine performance prize.

Moonrise Kingdom

Wes Anderson gets some kids down to their skivvies for this premiere film, making everyone uncomfortable with perhaps the most on-the-nose of his personal films. Anderson’s idiosyncrasies should be no surprise to anyone attending Cannes, but having an American director in competition for the Palme d’Or is always a big deal.

X-Men: The Last Stand

The worst of the X-Men movies premiered at Cannes, joining Finnish superhero film Rendel for the honor of colliding the most disparate film worlds at the festival. The whole cast attended the fest, on what must’ve been the most surreal vacation of their lives.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

Steven Spielberg’s Star Wars-crushing blockbuster started out by closing the 1982 Cannes gala and went on to run the year’s box office. Populist modern Hollywood escapism doesn’t seem like a tonal fit with the international tastes of a festival that prides itself on idiosyncrasy, but what’s more idiosyncratic than hosting the premiere of one of the most popular films of all time when nobody expects it?

Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith

George Lucas was honored at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival for his directorial career. You’d think that the awards body would try to rescind the award after his third and final prequel film opened the fest.

Ocean’s Thirteen

Speaking of thirds in popular American series that premiered at Cannes, Ocean’s Thirteen conned its way into the fest even as the weakest of the trilogy. Director Steven Soderbergh’s got some serious clout in France ever since his debut Sex, Lies, and Videotape won the Palme d’Or, so it makes sense that he’d have free reign to bring whatever goofy, star-stuffed heist movie he wanted to the festival.

Willow

Ron Howard’s fantastical George Lucas-penned film became a cult hit among children of a certain age and high fantasy dorks of an even more certain age. It also (allegedly) earned an unbroken two minutes of applause during the credits of its initial screening.

Punch-Drunk Love

Yes, Adam Sandler debuted a film at Cannes. Do you feel better about not being sure how to pronounce it now? All jokes aside, this is one of Paul Thomas Anderson’s most heartwrenching films, finding amazing depth and pain in an actor who’d become a self-referential joke in his own movies.

Frank Henenlotter’s tale of a boy and his penis-shaped parasite.

Brian (Rick Hearst) is a mind his own business kind of guy, but when he awakens one morning with a parasite he discovers a fresh interest in the neighbors and strangers around him. To be fair, his interest consists solely of whether or not they’d be good brain food for his new friend, Elmer the well-spoken and phallic-looking parasite.

Elmer (voiced by John Zacherle) needs human brains to survive, and in exchange, he squirts some blue sunshine directly into Brian’s own which immediately gives the man a high like he’s never experienced before. Colors, hallucinations and unfettered joy are the name of the game, and while he doesn’t exactly approve of Elmer’s murderous habits he’ll forgive just about anything to ensure his next fix. His girlfriend becomes concerned, the elderly couple next door want their Elmer back, and the weirdo on the subway with the basket in his lap looks a bit off, and soon Brian’s addiction becomes unsustainable.

Henenlotter’s Brain Damage, his second feature after his cult hit debut Basket Case, has all the goofy hallmarks of his filmography while adding a slight subtext of a far more serious nature. The “hit” that Elmer gives Brian could easily be that of heroin, crack, or meth, and the resulting damage to his life and to those around him is equally severe. Okay, maybe having your brains eaten out is a bit more severe, but you get the idea.

None of that is to give the impression that the film is all that serious though as it’s still a silly affair from beginning to end. A big part of that is due to Elmer’s personality and Zacherle’s calmly eloquent voice. It feels off when applied to the visuals, but that’s what makes the little beast so damn charming. He’s funny even while being a real threat, and his appearance as a dick-shaped creature with a brainy head and knowing eyes is equally to blame.

The film’s plenty gory as Elmer chews his way through his victims’ skulls dragging their brains out afterward and others meet equally grisly fates. Some of the optical work is understandably dated, but the messy stuff still looks good.

I still lean towards Frankenhooker as Henenlotter’s most enjoyable film, but Brain Damage has plenty of fun to offer genre fans who appreciate silliness as much as they do the bloody effects.

Arrow Video’s new release features a strong HD transfer of the film along with numerous special features including a trailer, photo gallery, booklet, and the following extras:

• Commentary with writer/director Frank Henenlotter
• *NEW* Listen to the Light: The Making of Brain Damage [54:13] – Crew members recall the film from its early beginnings through production.
• The Effects of Brain Damage [10:00] – Gabe Bartalos discusses his work on the film accompanied by on-set and behind the scenes footage.
• *NEW* Animating Elmer [6:40] – Al Magliochetti talks about his work as visual effects supervisor on the film.
• Karen Ogle: A Look Back [4:29] – The film’s still photographer, script supervisor, and assistant editor recalls the film’s production.
• *NEW* Elmer’s Turf: The NYC Locations of Brain Damage [8:48] – Michael Gingold takes a tour with Henenlotter of the NYC shooting locations. Sadly, Ted Geoghegan is absent.
• *NEW* Tasty Memories: A Brain Damage Obsession [10:00] – Superfan Adam Skinner shares his love for the film.
• Brain Damage Q&A [20:36] – Henenlotter sits down for a post-screening Q&A in 2016 to discuss the film’s origin and production.
• “Bygone Behemoth” [5:08] – A stop-motion animated short from Harry Chaskin featuring John Zacherle in his final screen credit.

Buy Brain Damage on Blu-ray from Amazon.

It’s all about the small moments in the ambitious and moving second season.

Charming. There are few shows airing today that, from top to bottom, are as charming as Master of None. The Netflix comedy returned for season 2 on Friday and continued to be one of the very best shows available anywhere. Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang have the ability to deliver poignant moments and then in the very next instance, turn on the fun.

Season 2 picks up after the breakup between Dev (Aziz Ansari) and Rachel (Noël Wells). Dev, a struggling actor, has taken some time following the relationship and decided to pursue his dream of making pasta in Italy. The first episode is a straight-up homage to the 1948 Italian film, Bicycle Thieves. It works to establish Dev’s new lifestyle and some of the faces that will be significant throughout the season.

More noticeable though is that the entire first episode is black & white and features significant usage of subtitles as Dev has become accustomed to using the native language. The biggest strength Master of None has its flexibility. The flexibility to mold the narrative into whatever is needed for a particular sequence and do some creative ideas like the one above. A hit television show playing on network television would never get to premier with a black & white episode with significant Italian dialog, but Master of None can.

In an episode entitled New York, I Love You, Dev and his friends step aside to let other stories shine in the limelight. Not only is this a break from the overarching narrative that has been set up throughout the season, but it also reminds us that Dev is just one man with issues and people everywhere have problems of their own. There’s also an incredibly amusing story here that, you guessed it, a comedy would never be able to get away with on network television.

In fact, the show plays with the idea of exactly what an episode of television is. A typical show runs exactly within its allotted time frame. Master of None can breathe and give more time to episodes that might need a few extra minutes. There is even an episode that runs an hour long, but it certainly earns its length. Many of the episodes in the show play like mini-movies in a sense. There is certainly a few season long developments that run the length of the season. One of them includes a new love interest for Dev in the form of his friend Francesca (Alessandra Mastronardi). The other is a new acting opportunity working the Chef Jeff (Bobby Cannavale). These two characters provide a lot of energy and conflict to the season, but there are also episodes that exist to tell one particular story. The aforementioned New York, I Love You is a magnificent example of that, and there are others that focus on series regulars, Eric Wareheim and Lena Waithe. Eric plays Dev’s best friend, Arnold, and he has his own episode in Italy that deals with a past love of his. Lena plays Denise, who gets to shine in a later episode entitled Thanksgiving, that takes place over the course of many years. 

Silence has a lot of meaning in Master of None. Nowhere is that more apparent than episode 5, The Dinner Party. Dev continues his dating struggles, but this one feels different. There’s real genuine affection here, and Dev has let it slip out of his grasp. A lesser show would quickly cut away to the end credits, but Master of None takes it viewers on Dev’s sad journey home. In the back seat of that taxi cab, Dev begins to realize so much about himself and his feelings, without even saying a word. These silences tell you more about the characters than any quick asides could do.

Perhaps more than anything else, the show delves into the modern dating scene. With Rachel out of the picture in season 2, Dev has to get on his feet and start dating again. An entire episode is dedicated to the difficulties of dating nowadays and just the kind of expectations people have. It might be easier than ever to find someone to go out on a date with, but it is just as hard finding a connection with someone. Even when you do find that special someone, text messages will become vital resources. Let it be known that anything less than a kissy face is unacceptable.

It is extremely rewarding when characters are created with this much warmth. Master of None does a fantastic job of developing characters and making us care about them. Dev, Arnold, and Denise feel like they could be our best friends and that makes the show tick. Even with an entire season of new episodes, it wasn’t quite enough time to spend with Dev and company. Master of None continues to be one of the gem’s on Netflix, and hopefully, Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang won’t make us wait as long for another season.

A video compares the oversized egos of Charles Foster Kane and Jordan Belfort

Ambition is a form of greed. A nicer form, to be sure, but at base the two are the same thing: drives to get what you want. Ambition is just the noble shade of greed, it’s a greed for things you should want: security, safety, success, comfort, happiness, et cetera. But so thin is the line between ambition and greed that in the pursuit of fulfilling the former people often stray too far into the realm of the latter, causing everything to come crashing down around them.

Take Charles Foster Kane, hero of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (heard of it?), who’s based on real-life ambitious person William Randolph Hearst. Kane wants power and respect, it is his ultimate ambition, but in its pursuit he becomes intoxicated by the early tastes and ends up getting everything he wanted then promptly losing it all.

Then there’s Jordan Belfort, played by Leonard DiCaprio in Martin Scrosese’s The Wolf of Wall Street and based on the real-life drug-guzzling, rule-breaking stockbroker by the same name. Belfort too just wants power, in the form of cold hard cash and all the luxuries it brings, and in his pursuit of wealth, greed once again takes over and perverts his ambition, turning him into a criminal.

Kane and Belfort are two sides of the same greedy coin, and to further elucidate this, observe the following video from Tim Gray which compares specific scenes from each film: the one from Kane where Kane is giving a pep talk to his new newspaper staff, and a similar one from Wolf in which Belfort is giving a congratulatory speak to his team of brokers. Note not just the character similarities, but the way both directors shoot their scenes, practically making preachers of their subjects, thus elevating their motivations – and deepening their eventual downfalls – to new levels.

Also a tale of the person-shaped thing that’s supposed to be Charlie Hunnam.

For this week’s One Perfect Pod review, Matthew chats with Mashable’s Angie Han to talk about her Guy Ritchie appreciation, breathy soundtracks, and all the slow-motion fighting in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.

Remember to rate and review One Perfect Pod in your favorite podcast app. It helps people discover us.

Don’t forget to follow host Matthew Monagle (@labsplice), guest Angie Han (@ajhan), and our pod (@OnePerfectPod) on Twitter.

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As far as sophomore slumps go, Amy Schumer’s isn’t so bad.

Following her breakout success with TV’s Laugh-In and then the 1969 movie Cactus Flower, for which she received an Oscar, Goldie Hawn continued to rise as a movie star through the next decade. But her second movie in a major role, There’s a Girl in My Soup, wasn’t as big a hit as her initial explosion into stardom and could have been labeled a disappointing follow-up in comparison. Now Hawn is the co-star of Snatched, a comedy primarily set up as a vehicle for Amy Schumer, and similarly it’s had an inferior showing for the younger talent, especially when looked at in the wake of her initial breakout success with her own TV series, Inside Amy Schumer, and the hit 2015 movie she wrote and starred in, Trainwreck.

Snatched opened over the weekend to the tune of $20M ($2M above estimation), and that’s certainly a good deal short of Trainwreck‘s debut of $30M. By all accounts we could consider the new release a sophomore slump. It’s also worth pointing out, though, that in addition to the distinction of coming out ahead of King Arthur: Legend of the Sword ($15M), the movie had the best opening for a comedy this year (not counting animated features or the funny Marvel blockbuster Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2). That’s sad news for the genre as much as it’s good news for Snatched, and it’s not exactly a triumph for a movie that cost too much at $42M, but it is nevertheless better than the mid-teens expectations of many a box office pundit.

Why the opening numbers of Snatched seem more of an issue than is probably the case is that Schumer hasn’t been having the best year in general. Her recent Netflix stand-up special received harsh reviews from professionals and subscribers alike, and she’s continued to be the subject of joke-theft accusations. On top of her legitimate problems with quality and reputation in her work that could have fans and media no longer celebrating her as the next big thing (as we all did two years ago), she also faces ongoing scrutiny from conservative press because of her political statements and from the corner of humanity (mostly on the internet) uncomfortable with her work and status as a feminist icon. Combine all this with the recent news that she dropped out of her most mainstream role yet, as the title character of a Barbie movie, and viewing her as a has-been is really easy to do right now.

Even if she were on a low point at the moment, we can’t go so far as to say goodbye to Schumer and her career any more than the industry is going to punish King Arthur helmer Guy Ritchie in any way for directing the first huge flop of the summer. Schumer may never repeat the peak levels of viral relevance she had with the third season of her show and with her ultimately unfulfilled Oscar buzz for her first movie script (it was nominated for a WGA Award, and she was nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance). She may have miscalculated the appeal of her character in Snatched (which like Trainwreck was under the supervision of a Freaks and Geeks vet — this time producer Paul Feig), but that’s an easy mistake.

And she does have a few movies on the horizon to look forward to, in part due to her involvement. First is Thank You for Your Service, due in late October. The PTSD-focused drama also stars Miles Teller and Hayley Bennett and is the directorial debut of Jason Hall and his screenwriting follow-up to his Oscar-nominated American Sniper. And it’s worth noting that Schumer donated her salary for the movie to veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. She’s also been cast in Rebecca Miller’s She Came to Me along with Steve Carell and Nicole Kidman. That and another vehicle, I Feel Pretty, the feature directorial debut from Mean Moms writers Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein, are currently in pre-production. And we’ll hopefully one day see the result of her BFF writing partnership with Jennifer Lawrence.

I expect that most responses to the box office for Snatched will be negative, with any notes on the final gross being better than both expected and initially estimated being chalked up to lack of other relevant choices for Mother’s Day moviegoing. And I await the think pieces on how Schumer is out of fashion. These are not totally unfounded takes, though we rarely see them so soon in a star’s career as we tend to with women. And they’ll be premature. We might not truly be in the era of Schumer, as we once thought, yet there’s no denying she captured our hearts and minds and funny bones with one movie and could certainly do so again. Maybe she needs to take some time and write another script and maybe she should re-team with Judd Apatow for it.

In other box office news in need of attention, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 ($63M) is still doing much better than the first movie and will reach a billion dollars much quicker globally, in part because it opened earlier in many of the big markets. As for King Arthur, its bombing will likely have no effect on Disney in either of the two ways it should. On the one hand, Ritchie is still helming their live-action remake of Aladdin, and no matter what happens, that will be a humongous hit. On the other hand, while King Arthur‘s dismal opening should make all of Hollywood stay away from the Round Table for awhile, if there’s one thing that could be the exception it’s Disney’s inevitable live-action remake of The Sword in the Stone.

This is where experts go when they want to know more.

Pardon the humble brag here, but I consider myself a bit of an expert when it comes to Twin Peaks. Over the last quarter-century it has been a quiet, and at times not-so-quiet obsession of mine. I’ve pored over the series in its entirely dozens of times, I’ve read all the criticism and tie-ins, I’ve analyzed nearly every single aspect, no matter how minute, from the influence of film noir (video coming later this week) and the impact of Cooper’s romantic life, to water- and food-based symbology. I’ve named pets after characters, broken up with girlfriends who didn’t “get it,” written countless posts and even a book, I’ve given up part of my flesh for a tattoo, and I live in a small, logging-based, rural town in Washington State, despite the fact that I’m not a logger and I was born and raised clear across the country in North Carolina. I’m not fucking around here, Twin Peaks is important to me.

But for all my expertise, I am but a speck in the all-knowing eye of Joel Bocko, a devotee of the highest order who has applied his particular knowledge and insight to quite simply the most impressive piece of Twin Peaks criticism on the internet, a 28-part – that’s right, 28-part – video series entitled “Journey Through Twin Peaks” that is just that: an ideological and thematic exploration of the series and all its wonderful and strange nooks and crannies. I love these videos like they were a friend, and at the same time, I’m so damn envious of both Bocko’s intelligence and his editing prowess. Each chapter is as enjoyable as an actual episode of the show, but with all the intentional confusion avoided and in fact elucidated upon. Bocko knows all the secrets, all the stories, all the significance, and he’s sharing every single bit of it here. If you too want to consider yourself a Twin Peaks expert, you can’t until you have Bocko’s videos under your belt.

Now, being 28 parts, each running between roughly four and 15 minutes, there’s a lot to get through. That’s why I’m posting this on the Monday before next Sunday’s season three premiere on Showtime. There has never been a better time to sit with these, and there never will be. You can go in completely, one hundred percent blind, and in a fraction of the time it would take you to watch the series in full you can get up to speed and then some.

For the sake of space I’ve only embedded the trailer and chapter one below, but just hop over to YouTube for the rest. If I had three thumbs, they’d all be turned up but that still wouldn’t be representative of how highly I hold Bocko’s work. This is end-all, be-all stuff right here, and you simply have to see it. Start immediately.

‘Out of Blue’ will star Patricia Clarkson, and marks the ‘Dreams of a Life’ director’s first attempt to break America.

Carol Morley, director of 2011’s empathic part-drama part-documentary Dreams of a Life and more recently 2014’s quietly compelling The Falling, is returning to filmmaking.

Based on Martin Amis’ neo-noir novel Night Train, Morley’s film will focus on Detective Mike Hoolihan as she’s called to investigate the shooting of black hole expert Jennifer Rockwell.

The film, called Out of Blue, will begin production in Atlanta, Georgia later this year. Patricia Clarkson (Shutter Island, The Green Mile) will star as Hoolihan, while Morley continues her role as writer-director in helming the screen adaptation of Amis’ novel. With the BFI, BBC Films, and Morley and long-time producer Cairo Cannon’s production company (CAMP) behind the film, it’s looking like Out of Blue could be Morley’s biggest film yet.

While the introduction of Clarkson’s talent to Morley’s onscreen enigmatic worlds is exciting enough, Out of Blue will also feature Toby Jones (most recently seen in Sherlock), Mamie Gummer (The End of the Tour, The Good Wife) and Teyonah Parris (Chi-Raq). Having discovered breakout talents such as Zawe Ashton (the star of Morley’s Dreams of a Life) and Florence Pugh (The Falling, but who you will most likely recognize from this year’s Lady Macbeth), this is arguably Morley’s most well-known cast to date.

It’s also her most American cast, which hopefully means Morley’s work will reach a larger audience.

The film’s producers, Luc Roeg (We Need to Talk About Kevin) and Cannon, have said, via Screen Daily:

“Carol has written such an original and distinctive screenplay that Out Of Blue will be sure to consolidate her reputation as one of the UK’s most dynamic directorial talents. Patricia Clarkson is an actor we have always admired and we know her Mike will be an iconic character, a complex woman on screen to watch again and again.”

Morley’s feature films each explore the complexity of being either a woman or a young woman. In The Alcohol Years (2000), the director presents refreshing honesty in searching for a past self lost to alcohol. The film is a poetic experimentation of the documentary form, often calling to question ideas of identity and the self. Dreams of a Life chronicles the mysterious death of Joyce Vincent; a woman left dead in her bedsit for five years. The Falling, Morley’s most successful fictional film to date, uses mystery and mass hysteria to explore the complicated, messy years between being a young woman and a woman.

What each of these films has in common is not just their focus on womanhood, but the fact that they are jigsaw puzzles. When watching her oeuvre, the viewer comes to realize that Morley’s films are pieces of a puzzle, attempting to decode one small mystery of what it means to be a person, or, more specifically, a woman, on Earth.

Out of Blue will be the next piece of Morley’s jigsaw, and let’s hope it’s a big piece.

There are more than mere surface connections here.

When director David Robert Mitchell released It Follows a few years back, he accomplished something pretty amazing: a horror film that felt simultaneously familiar and unique, one that trod well-known ground by a new path. It Follows is a slasher film without the slasher, it’s a tale of a supernatural boogeyman with no static form that conjured comparisons to some of the greatest films of the genre, most notably John Carpenter’s Halloween. This connection was intended, as evidenced by certain elements Mitchell employed like the score, the visual style, and even the name of his lead character, “Jay,” a nod to Halloween heroine Jamie Lee Curtis.

But this isn’t to say that it Follows is derivative of Halloween, or even a direct homage. Certainly Mitchell was keeping Carpenter in mind while making his film, but the strongest connection between the two isn’t something you can see or hear, it’s a feeling, one elicited by atmosphere. By this criteria, It Follows’ greatest strength isn’t its ability to mimic the films that came before it, rather its ability to use these films as foundation and build upon them something we recognize but at the same time something we’ve never seen. It’s like returning to your hometown after a few decades away: you know exactly where you’re going, you just don’t know what you’re going to find when you get there.

In the following comparative video from Alessio Marinacci scenes from both It Follows and Halloween have been intercut to reveal their atmospheric kinship and how each creates it. More than a look at mere surface connections, this video plumbs deeper into intention, reaction, and emotion to link the two films.

Two shorts for the price of one: free.

Today, David Lowery is a filmmaker on the verge of greatness. His debut feature, St. Nick, stirred waves in the American independent scene, and his follow-up, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints was a full-on country-noir masterpiece that catapulted Lowery onto the A-list and helped forge a fascinating collaborative relationship between the director and actors Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara, all of whom have reunited for one of this year’s most highly-anticipated and innovative features, A Ghost Story. Outside his smaller work, though, Lowery has been moving up through the Disney ranks: last year he directed the live-action update of Pete’s Dragon and next on his slate he’s giving the same treatment to Peter Pan.

But a decade ago Lowery was like a lot of you: just a guy with ambition, a vision, and a Vimeo account. Looking through the 38 clips, short films, trailers and whatnot on his page, you can infer the story of Lowery’s ascent from indie editor to a writer-director of the first degree, and the short film series Boycrazy – written by and starring Alexi Wasser – is an excellent look at a director transitioning from short work to longer; St. Nick was made the same year.

Four episodes in one film, Boycrazy is the anecdotal story of one young woman’s navigation of lust, sex, and consequences, all brought to beautifully-flawed life by Wasser, who demonstrates every tick on the emotional spectrum between independent and dependent in seven short and captivating minutes.

Daring, hilarious, tragically relatable – who among us hasn’t used mail to extract ourselves from a one-night stand? – and ultimately charming, Boycrazy showcases the talents of both Lowery and Wasser, the latter of whom has gone one to create the internet talk show Lexi in Bed, the Nerdist podcast Love, Alexi, and a new short film by the same name that I’ve included below as well.

How Sense8 became as perfect a summation of the Wachowskis’ art as we’ve yet had.

There’s a moment toward the end of the second season of Sense8 (now streaming on Netflix) where one character says to another, “I’ve listened to you talk about circles about what’s right and proper, why you have to do this or shouldn’t do that. I don’t give a shit about any of it. I don’t care about rules, or what’s right or wrong. What matters to me is this: us. The right now. And I know you feel the same.” The identity of each character I’ll conceal for those who haven’t finished (or, horror of horrors, started) Sense8, but the relevant facts are these: (a) it’s one of the sexiest things I’ve ever seen on screen and (b) it’s as perfect a summation of the Wachowskis’ art as we’ve yet had.

From the very beginning, the Wachowskis’ films have luxuriated in words, images, and—come to think of it—everything in a big, goofy, emotional way. Their written text doesn’t always land gracefully, their visuals can tend toward a flatness more befitting a comic book panel than a cinematic image, and their plots can take longer to explain than they do to play out. And yet. And yet.

I might as well admit what the above makes fairly obvious, which is that I am thoroughly and completely in the tank for the Wachowskis, despite periods of doubt, even periods of not liking some of their movies. The Matrix came along at exactly the right age for me to fall wholly under its spell, and how could I not, it being a compendium of all the finest things in life: cyberpunk, Yuen Wo Ping, Keanu. All the mildly wanky college student bookshelf-raiding, semi-gratuitously dropping in Baudrillard and Lewis Carroll and all that? I was a college student, that shit ruled. The sequels? Fuck you, they did too. I wavered a bit on the sequels, actually, but these days I can bore the shit of you for hours on end about why they’re Actually Good. Now would be a fine time, except instead it’s the time to talk about how the Wachowskis literally saved my life once.

When Cloud Atlas came out I was at a low point, both personally and professionally. The personal stuff was nothing new, which ironically was the reason its sting was so acute: the idea that I was going through the same boring shit as anyone else—unlucky in love, aging with excessive speed, powerless to change—made me feel dull and irrelevant. Professionally I had suffered a series of rejections and reversals that, taken individually, were not all that bad, but taken sequentially with no intervals of relative prosperity, had become an avalanche. The brief summary is that I had abandoned a career as a working artist due to burnout, and the new one I’d embarked upon, criticism and journalism, was stalling out. I was vividly without money in the most expensive city in the world. I woke up one day knowing I had to go to a matinee show of Cloud Atlas to review it, which was because I wasn’t important enough to get a press screening invite, which is a dumb thing to get sad about on its own but see the previous mention of an avalanche. And it was my birthday. And I was alone, and I had almost no money, which led me to the first time that my brain ever fully, and sincerely formed the thought: “I want to die. I no longer want to be alive.”

Something, maybe shame or not wanting to let down the one editor I had left as a freelance writer, got me out of the house and up the street to where the movie was playing. If I had had to take the subway that day I wouldn’t have made it. Having to walk to the theater meant that I had to do something. One foot here. The other in front of it. Repeat. The walk, twenty minutes in real time, seemed like years. I’d read Cloud Atlas. It was unfilmable. People I knew hated it. This was going to suck. Why the fuck did I ever stop acting. Why hadn’t I done the honorable thing and ended it all after (redacted major outlet that drunkenly threw around money) turned me down? Why. Any of this. Why.

Eventually, I got to the movie theater, paid most of the money in my checking account to see a movie I was reviewing for the price of the ticket plus enough money to eat for a couple days, and sat down. I couldn’t begin to describe what happened over the next two-and-a-damn Cloud Atlas was long hours, but the movie answered my question. Why? This. This colossally ambitious and silly thing that no sane person would possibly undertake except fuck sane people, they didn’t make Cloud Atlas, so what the hell do they know. I tried, the next day, to sum the movie up. What I should have written was “Cloud Atlas saved my life,” so I’m correcting that error now.

Speaking of which, it’s about time to get around to what the hell Sense8 has to do with any of this. Its entire subject matter is the sense of connection to other people, of never being alone, of exulting in love and sex and adventure. Then randomly everyone whips out guns and starts shooting. There are gangsters. There are sinister organizations. There’s an evil white guy in a suit (a villain eternal, the Final Boss). But all the good people are beautiful and queer and have each other’s backs. It’s silly, and even dumb sometimes, but I’m silly and dumb sometimes.

The feeling that someone out there gets you, on a level inexpressible in words, in anything other than a smile and a wave, really, is a beautiful feeling, and it gives warmth, and light, and life. I’ve spent this piece talking in circles about art and life, and thinking about how I have to write this, or shouldn’t write that. I don’t give a shit about any of it. I don’t care about the rules, or what’s good arts criticism or bad art criticism. What matters to me is this: the Wachowskis’ divine ability to sustain a heightened exalted present tense. The cinema of right now. And I hope you feel the same.

Did Donald Trump leak Pirates of the Caribbean 5, too? Probably not, but someone did.

Forget about what may or may not have been said to some Russians in the Oval Office last week, as we’ve got a real problem on our hands. Hackers have reportedly stolen, nay, Pirated, a copy of Disney’s upcoming summer blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales and are now attempting to hold it for ransom.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the hackers claim to have relieved Disney of a copy of the film and have demanded “an enormous amount of money” in the form of a Bitcoin payment. To its credit, Disney has reportedly refused to pay the ransom and is currently working with the FBI. Luckily the FBI doesn’t have a whole lot else going on right now, so this should be resolved in plenty of time for Captain Jack Sparrow to return to cinemas next Friday.

Here’s what these pirates of Pirates have overestimated:

1. How little anyone who knows how to use BitTorrent probably cares about the next Pirates movie. Seriously, my grandparents will see the film in theaters because they remember a time before Johnny Depp was awful. There’s no way they’re going to download it illegally.

2. Disney’s willingness to pay them off, which would set a dangerous precedent for the future. Hollywood does not negotiate with terrorists. Did they not see Tropic Thunder?

3. Our government is not great at a lot of things, but they are very good at finding and prosecuting 12-year olds who downloaded a bunch of bootlegged music in the 90s. So the likelihood that they will jump to protect the IP of one of the 30 largest companies in America is high.

As we’ve said on this site in the past, piracy is wrong. Even piracy that allows us to make jokes about how pirates pirated the latest Pirates movie is wrong. What’s worse is online thieves who attempt to ransom a movie no one cares about back to a studio that literally prints its own money with Dumbo’s face on it. We’re living in the age of idiocy, from the top on down.

Today in Pop Culture History

The first Academy Awards were held on this day in 1929. Wings won Best Picture.

Megan Fox was born 31 years ago today, while Pierce Brosnan was born 64 years ago. By Hollywood standards, they should now star in a romantic comedy together.

Top Gun debuted on this day in 1986. It was a breakout hit for producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who would go on to produce the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.

What You Need to Know Today

Zack Snyder has confirmed the development of Wonder Woman 2. In related news, water still wet and ice still cold.

After 6 seasons, CBS has finally canceled the Kat Dennings-led show, 2 Broke Girls. Elsewhere, NBC has uncancelled its time travel show Timeless and Fox renewed The Exorcist.

Claire Foy, the star of Netflix’s The Crown, is reportedly the frontrunner to play Lisbeth Salander in Fede Alvarez’s The Girl in the Spider’s Web, the follow-up to David Fincher’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo remake.

Two new documentaries, one about Ingmar Bergman and another about Orson Welles, have been announced for tentative 2018 releases.

ICYMI

Our own H. Perry Horton has begun a week of Twin Peaks content with a definitive video guide to the series. Stay tuned for more, including damn fine cups of coffee.

The Cannes Film Festival gets underway this week, which led us to string together a list of movies you didn’t know (or don’t remember) premiered at Cannes.

Yesterday we featured two short films from Alexi Wasser, whose podcast “Love Alexi” is one of my own personal favorites.

Shot of the Day

This morning I’m feeling the side effects of working out yesterday for the first time in a long time. In this shot from Steven Soderbergh’s 2013 film, Rooney Mara is feeling Side Effects from something slightly different.

SIDE EFFECTS (2013) Shot and directed by Steven Soderbergh pic.twitter.com/JktRIhRAEM

— One Perfect Shot (@OnePerfectShot) May 16, 2017

A look at how Laurence Bennett built Bernie Madoff’s world.

Trying to kill a few hundred innocent civilians to make a point about human nature don’t stop little imitations of Heath Ledger’s Joker from showing up every Halloween like little weeds growing under the pavement. But our cinematic love for antiheroes crosses less frequently into the world of high finance; far more often a movie like Martin Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street is going to be called a “sleazy glorification” of something vile than most blood-stained Hollywood spectacle. Such was the challenge facing Barry Levinson (Diner, Good Morning, Vietnam) in adapting “The Wizard of Lies,” Diana B. Henriques’ untangling of Bernie Madoff’s $65 billion dollar heist, considered, by many, to be the biggest Ponzi scheme in human history.

Madoff’, even more so than Jordan Belfort, is a different kind of Wall Street villain. He does not tell us ‘greed is good’ in the ripped body of Michael Douglas nor does he literally beat the poor to death in the also-ripped personage of Christian Bale. He doesn’t even, per Leo DeCaprio’s Jordan Belfort, seen abandon the old lady for blonde model played by Margot Robbie. Like the blood transfusion myths of old, we imagine Wall Street to be a heathy and virile place, fueled by the drunken blood of decomposed bodies climbed to the top.

And in that moral universe, Bernie Madoff presents something of a conundrum: a conservative family man, he applied himself to his Ponzi scheme much like just another guy on the daily grind. Master of the subdued sociopath, Robert DeNiro delivers one of his most downtrodden performances yet, rarely has the world of a cunning scam artist looked so grim. Michelle Pfeiffer plays the wife, whose struggles feel no different from those of the innocent investors who lost oh-so-much bread.

And behind the struggles of that world is the work of Laurence Bennett, long time set designer behind the gritty and morally delicate worlds of Paul Haggis’ In the Valley of Elah and Crash. “I’m drawn to stories about social justice,” Bennett told me. I wondered how he approached a more ordinary-looking evil.

So, tell me about how you approached creating the world of Bernie Madoff. 

We wanted to use the set to encapsulate fragments of a scheme that we wanted to audience to know had been going on for years. And, from the beginning [of Wizard of Lies], the story is told in these fragments and ultimately nobody, at the end of the day, is sure how or why Madoff did these things. Barry [Levinson] wanted it to be a mystery. And, so, styling it as a mystery was really key, for me, to approaching all the different fragments of the script. There’s a real edge, I think, to the visuals I did. There’s an uneasiness. And there are themes of concealment and exposure constantly emphasized.

Wall Street, especially an insidious version of it, exists in the cinematic imagination. Were your visual cues different?

Oh, we didn’t look at Wall Street movies at all. For my own visual sources of inspirations, I looked at 1950’s color photography. People like Saul Leiter. And particularly the work of Ernst Haas, who worked a lot in New York in the 60s. I was looking for things with selectively saturated color. With rich velvety blacks. And lots of shadows. And, for that reason, someone like Bertolucci and especially The Conformist was a go-to place for thinking visually about it.

What elements of the set did you feel like were essential to tell that story?

The emotional cores of the movie were Madoff’s penthouse, on the Upper East Side and his offices. In real life, Bernie had three floors in the Lipstick building in Midtown. It’s a pretty flashy place. And no one knew that one of the floors, the 17^th, was off-limits to everyone except the very few people in his inner circle, not even his friends were even allowed in there. And it was there where he would manufacture all the trades that churned out these billions of dollars in fake transactions. So, when we built out version of that set, we built all of those behind the scenes stuff on the same floors and the offices.

Since the Madoff scandal is still somewhat recent history, were you able to use any of the real-life locations for the movie?

The one place where we were able to use the real legitimate place where it actually happened were the FBI’s field office in New York, over at the Federal Plaza. Somehow, the location manager was able to talk them into letting us shoot in the building, but on a different floor from where Madoff was actually intervened. But it was still stylized exactly like the FBI’s real offices. And if felt pretty fantastic, to bring him [Robert DeNiro] into the actual building that Madoff was arrested in and recreate the room where he was held and where he was handcuffed to the wall.

Madoff remains a large presence in our imagination of financial scandal. Do you feel like the world of Wizard of Lies will give us a definitive telling of that event?

I think it’s the definitive physiological look at the scandal. In terms of the nuts and bolts, what was really interesting to me was that, throughout, Bernie was deceiving people and doing unconscionable things with other people’s money, but he seemed to have the feeling that he was entirely allowed to do what he did because other people we so damn greedy. In Wizard of Lies, you seem sort of play coy, how he was able to convince people to let him use huge amounts of their money, hundreds and hundreds of millions, by making them so hungry for these impossible returns that he was promising. For just more and more money. And he seemed to think they were all, invariably, just greedy rich people.

But the movie makes the decision to namely look at his family members and not the larger spread of the scandal. 

Yeah, Barry and Sam [Levinson] know that there are tens of thousands of people who were damaged financially by the collapse of Madoff’s scheme. But, by looking at it on the level of one family, just Madoff’s, we felt like we could focus more closely on the people actually involved, the events of their lives and how they led up to it. You can’t really do that when you’re looking at ten thousand people, and that’s so dispersed and diffuse and you don’t get the emotional palette you get when you have a handful of people.

One of the things that really struck me when I was in the movie is much we do all know about the tragic consequences the befall Madoff’s family. And I think that makes the movie more personal in scale because the mysteries are much more interior. They’re all in Madoff’s head.

The movie, from what I understand, had been in production for some time?

It comes at a very interesting time in our society and I think the timing of the release brings up resonances that are going to feel incredibly powerful. We finished in a year and a half ago and I think, you know, HBO held it until they thought it was the right time to release it.

Wizard of Lies airs this Saturday on HBO.

Considered one of the greatest, if not THE greatest, of all-time.

Winning one Academy Award is the culmination of passion, practice, and patience. Winning two Academy Awards is all those things plus growth, the pushing past comfort zones into new territories. Winning three Academy Awards is a feat reserved for those we consider absolute and ultimate masters of their professions, and wining three Academy Awards in a row is a something reserved not just for masters, but pinnacles, apex practitioners.

Cinematographer Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki is one such pinnacle, having won three consecutive Oscars for his work shooting Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity (2014), and Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu’s Birdman (2015) and The Revenant (2016). As such he is unparalleled in his field, a director of photography as identifiable as any director, an artist known for his graceful, stark realism and his ability to find the breathtaking and meaningful in the mundane.

In the following video essay from James Hayes of Film in the Making, the artist and the practitioner in Emmanuel Lubezki are given equal due through an examination of his aesthetic and the techniques he employs to accomplish it. What it reveals is a man who not only reflects our world but interprets its many wonderful mysteries through the silent and deafening power of the moving image. This is an elegant and informed tribute to just such a cinematographer.