For all the powerful imagery film can capture and create, sometimes it’s still the most basic, simplest shots that can convey the most meaning and resonate strongest with audiences. Take, for example, any shot of a lone figure— perhaps in silhouette, perhaps not — against a vast landscape, the only person in sight. It’s an image that’s been utilized time and again in films like The Revenant, Tree of Life, Gravity and even some not shot by Emmanuel Lubezki, as evidenced by the following montage from Nacho Ozores that has compiled four dozen examples from across cinema history.
Don’t get me wrong, though, not all these lone figures are lonely. Some are contemplative, pensive, resolved, introspective, and other such things that require loneliness. There are even moments of triumph inside loneliness, the celebrations we save only for ourselves. Ozores has found all of these, and the resulting video is an emotional pressure cooker that will sweep you through the spectrum and back again in its two-and-half-minute runtime.
There’s a complete list of the films used at the end, albeit in Spanish, but you should be able to figure it out even if you don’t speak Ozores’ language. The real communication here is visual, and it is a gorgeous conversation.
A harrowing and compelling short starring and directed by Josh Hutcherson
The most terrifying facet of extreme schizophrenia, I think, is the idea that the line between reality and delusion can at times not exist, that even though your senses might tell you something’s wrong or off, your mind won’t translate it into meaning. You learn you can’t trust yourself, basically, and that, to me, is the most frightening thing I can think of. We each are, at the end of every day, our only arbiters of the truth, and to learn you’re incapable of always telling or always accepting that truth from yourself must be its own kind of private hell.
Now, of course, I am describing an extreme sort of the disease, not everyone who suffers from schizophrenia suffers to that degree as there are in fact several medications that can help those afflicted lead normal lives. That however, is not how it’s manifesting for Travis, the teenage subject of the short film Ape, directed and starring actor Josh Hutcherson (The Hunger Games), who is battling his hallucinations for control of his reality, and short film shorter, he’s not winning.
Ape is a part of a really interesting project called The Big Script, which is a collaboration between Conde Nast Entertainment, Hutcherson’s own Turkeyfoot Productions, and Indigenous Media that aims to discover and bring to mass audiences “independently created content that can thrive on digital/emerging platforms” so long as that content is “driven by unique voices.” For this initiative five scripts about adolescent or young protagonists were selected from a pool of 2,000 and their writers were mentored through the filmmaking process. Ape was written by Jon Johnstone and marks Hutcherson’s first time behind the camera.
As a story, Ape is rich with depth and a keen understanding of its subject, and Hutcherson’s turn in the director’s chair looks like a triumph from every angle. He seems to understand story and performance are star here and treats the lens like a fly on the way, allowing the narrative to unfold before it. And speaking of that performance, this is a raw, battered role for Hutcherson and he tackles it head on. It’s almost difficult to watch at times, and I mean that as highest praise. I was reminded of Jake Gyllenhaal in Donnie Darko, or Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted; Travis is that same kind of character, not weak of will, not at all, but flawed of mind, a character who knows his condition and rages against it to the point of self-destruction. And also like those other roles, I think this is the best I’ve ever seen Hutcherson, and in a new light, to boot.
According to Variety Ape is being developed into a feature. Consider one ticket at least already sold.
One Perfect Pod is a new podcast channel from Film School Rejects and One Perfect Shot. This new channel will include, at the start, three shows in one feed. They are:
The Big Idea, hosted by Neil Miller. A weekly show in which we wrangle some of the industry’s most talented minds and discuss what’s on our minds as the biggest topic in the world of pop culture.
Shot by Shot, hosted by Geoff Todd and H. Perry Horton. A weekly deep dive into the brilliant cinematography we’ve celebrated for years via One Perfect Shot. Including discussions of films we love and chats with some of the cinematographers whose work we admire.
After the Credits, hosted by Matthew Monagle. A new kind of movie review show that explores our expectations and how they impact the way we feel about what we ultimately see in theaters.
To get all three shows, you need only follow whichever of these links corresponds with your favorite way to get podcasts. Or stream the episodes by show below.
In the first episode of After the Credits, host Matthew Monagle is joined by Film School Rejects critic Rob Hunter to discuss The Belko Experiment, the James Gunn written and produced office building Battle Royale successor. In the first segment, they discuss their expectations before seeing the film, then come back in the second segment to review the film and see how their initial thoughts may have changed.
One Perfect Pod was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Are these new pilots from Amazon trash? Of course they are! Here’s a guide.
Just Robb Stark over here, wearin’ shades in outer space
Crowds may not be able to fund things, but they can give opinions. Or, at the very least, that’s been the idea behind Amazon’s occasional Pilot Season, generating enthusiasm for their programming by giving ordinary folk like yourself the opportunity to watch pilots and say, gee, this blows and vote them a big n’ meaningful thumbs down. Last year, they took everything, so it might just be a load of promotional nonsense. But it might not.
So, what’s hip in this line of potential programing? Once canceled TV-hands like Steve Dildarian and Amy Sherman-Palladino return with their latest attempts to enthuse audience with binge-worthy hours of spectacle and movie men like James Ponsoldt and Kevin Macdonald try to get into this golden age of TV they’ve been hearing so much about. Three comedies and two hour long dramas and, aside from Ms. Sherman-Palladino’s return to New York fun, its an all-boys club of programming. That’s sad. But Robb Stark swings by as a priest in outer space. Decision 2017: you decide.
The Comedies
An everyday superhero, John Hawkes’ Master Legend is also a handyman.
Legend of Master Legend
If Atlanta were set in Las Vegas, it probably would not be called Las Vegas. That just wouldn’t seem, you know, true. It would probably be called The Legend of Master Legend and it’s not-quite divorced straight man would probably be John Hawkes working the costume circuit on the Strip. Amazon’s marketing wants to tell you that this Master Legend is a hero of sorts, at the crossroads precisely between the raving lunatic that certain folk’ll cross the street to avoid and the kind of guy that John Hawkes normally plays. The hero in grimy armor and all that.
For the purveyor of superhero comedies, The Legend of Master Legend is more Kick-Ass than Deadpool: Hawkes’ interests lay in shouting “ordinary” in your face and not “meta,” which is fine. His Master Legend wears a Dio shirt and informs tourists that he is “a real life super-hero, registered in two counties.” Which might as well be true, I guess: he’s based on some similarly-masked fellow that Joshuah Bearman profiled for Rolling Stonein those feel good days after Obama was elected and we liked to believe in people doing good things for the value of goodness. And like a bear chasing honey, such a real-life tale of sincerity could attract nobody else but Mr. Sincerity himself, James Ponsoldt (The Spectacular Now, The End of the Tour) on his second tour helming a pilot: he gave an airy touch to “Plan B,” Aziz Ansari’s opener for Netflix’s Master of None.
So, how does Ponsoldt communicate how much we should care? Anjelika Washington’s turn as Master Legend’s daughter with a crush on the local blonde cheerleader (or volleyball team captain or whatever). We’re crushed. It’s great. Having a superhero for a dad might not be as cool as it seems. The point, I know.
Corporate America blows.
The New V.I.P.’s
There’s a moment some people consider witty, in the finale of the first season of HBO’s Silicon Valley, where a bunch of penises are drawn on a board and men have dicks, right? And they have the capacity to draw them crudely, when directed? And penises, right? It’s this kind of barren absence of humor that dogs Steve Dildarian’s attempt to sell an adult animated series to Amazon’s steaming market. The whole peppery joke-a-minute thing that Bojack Horseman does on Netflix only works when, you know, some of them land. Here’s an example: Bud (Matt Braunger) realizes he works in a crummy establishment when they decide to start paying him in Pesos. Because corporate moved to Mexico. Because outsourcing? Because Mexico? Whatever.
Set among the employees of vaguely evil corporation that feels part of the same conglomerate that people seemed to enjoy in Better Off Ted, Dildarian (The Life & Times of Tim) trades in the I’m-so-intelligent-because-I-watch-TV jokes you can find exercised with Jay Leno-like corporate perfection on any Seth MacFarlane production every Sunday night. So, why potentially tune into this piece of flaming mediocrity? Creed Bratton! The elusive and eponymous Office-star voices one of Dildarian’s boring B-characters and manages to give it a few inches of life, doing all he can with a comic pause or two. At least he’s trying.
Adam Rose doing that sitcom thing of pretending he can’t get laid. Natalie Morales features.
Budding Prospects
Don’t get me wrong: I’m cool. I love drugs. Ask anyone on my block and they’ll tell you: Andrew, he’s got the last pack of ‘ludes in lower Manhattan. But do they make great TV, these drugs I use all the time? Last year, we discovered that the hip show about drugs on a hip network (High Maintenance) was garbage and the garbage detective show on a garbage network (Search Party) was hip as hell. What do ya know. Pitifully, the latter fate awaits viewers tuning into Budding Prospects, manufactured by the team behind the somewhat-beloved Bad Santa (2003) and adapted from one of those thick ol’ T.C. Boyle novels you think about reading but never do (he’s a poorman’s Pynchon, really). Folly awaits Adam Rose, a lifelong bit-of-a-bit player, who takes the lead as the straight man among of group of dullards populated by Will Sasso and Joel David Moore, the latter’s appeal begins and ends with uncannily resemblance to Ross from Friends.
You can tell that Budding Prospects takes place in the 80s because Rose observes that Moore’s character “validates the Just Say No-campaign” and a prostitute blames “Reaganomics” for something. Whatever. Infinitely more interesting than any of this is Brett Gelman’s slick huckster and the wonderful Natalie Morales, who should be in all of this. Instead of Morales, we get a lot of boring white guys who smoke pot. “We have nothing to worry about,” Moore glibly says at one point, setting off some kind of Chekov’s gun if I could bring myself to care. Straight white guys in Reagan’s America. What they hell do they have to worry about, indeed.
The Dramas
Back on Earth, the future blows in 2032.
Oasis
The premise is not particularly boggling: you are called to a strange place by a fella you haven’t seen in years. This dude, you’ve had some kind of spat with in the past, but he needs you now. So, you travel to this faraway space, perhaps as far away as outer space, and when you get there, what-do-you-know, your chum is nowhere to be found. He just left, like, a week ago. In this way, exposition is kept to a tactful minimum and every detail is tantalizing. Stylistically, the pilot for Kevin Macdonald’s Oasis is meant to give us the feeling of early Lost, that first season and a half of not really telling us anything but keeping us on the edge of our seat for a reveal that we knew, in our hearts, was not coming.
Traveling to a faraway (yet breathable) planet and not the northern edges of Westeros, Richard Madden give us a solidly silent performance of male bad-assery. Much like Damon Lindelof and company, Macdonald (Last King of Scotland) knows how to get things moving. We don’t spend very long on poor, suffering Earth: quickly, we are on our way to a far off Oasis. It’s “the city of dreams,” one astronaut says. “More like nightmares,” another whispers under his breath. Science fiction, amirite? Another sci-fi trope: Madden plays a priest of some kind who finds he is needed desperately in a post-theist world, making Oasis feel a little like Book of Eli hiding inside Starship Troopers. A pack of astronaut pause to freak out over a copy of a certain book they haven’t seen in a long, long, time. It isn’t Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone.
Rachel Brosnahan’s Midge is obscenely likable in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
The other big league from a big name, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel comes to us straight from Amy Sherman-Palladino, well-known to most as the creative force behind Gilmore Girls. Accordingly, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is the only offering among Amazon’s five pilots to boast a single female protagonist. But what a protagonist! ‘Midge’ Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan, the crying star of the first two seasons of House of Cards) literally takes the stage from the very first shot, narrating the course of her life-so-far, in the midst of delivering her own wedding toast. Gilmore Girl-acolytes will be satisfied to know that Sherman-Palladino returns to her program’s stopping grounds of a well-saturated New York, New York, littered with details like sandwich fixings. More surprising is the calendar: its the late ’50s and, on their first date, her future husband (Michael Zegen) takes our hero to a comedy club and, who do they see but Lenny Bruce (Luke Kirby) himself, MC’d to the stage by none other than Gilbert Gottfried.
If those two names strike you as a little Jewish, than you’re on to something: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is Sherman-Palladino’s take on that half-century old genre that is the Woody Allen movie. Rabbi jokes abound. Pitched perfectly in between Radio Days (1987)and Café Society (2016), two of Allen’s better period pieces, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is peppered with an hour’s worth of tightly-written asides and eye-rolls. “I should be kissing the brisket,” Midge’s nebbish husband opines to his nebbish wife, after she cooks a brisket good enough to get him a decent time at a Greenwich Village comedy club. Oh, yeah. It’s a struggling comic story, a kind of Jewish-comic origin story, which we realize when Midge gets close enough to a mike after the doofus husband leaves her for the doofus secretary. Sad: their bickering is the best thing about Sherman-Palladino’s latest script. Midge is wonderful, the moment she realizes her husband is a hack is pure tragedy, the only second you will feel anything among these pilots. Midge is the kind of obscenely likable character you normally get in the movies, the kind who cares about the well-being of their doorman.
How ‘Edge of Seventeen’ spots the differences between teen angst and teen depression.
Edge of Seventeen’s Nadine is a character at war with herself. In one scene, Nadine (Hailee Steinfeld), nauseous from a night of binge drinking, leans over a toilet bowl. She mumbles, “I had the worst thought, I’ve got to spend the rest of my life with myself.” Usually, in teen dramas, people Nadine’s age drink at stylized house parties. Instead, writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig depicts Nadine and her best friend Krista (Haley Lu Richardson) content to be together. However, Nadine will soon be at war with herself and with Krista. Following the evening of teenage drinking, Krista begins a relationship with Nadine’s older perfect brother, Darian (Blake Jenner). In response, Nadine flirts with self-destruction as well as classmate Erwin Kim (Hayden Szeto). Edge of Seventeen has the kind of plot that can push a film into either of two categories: cliché driven drivel or a nuanced portrait of adolescence. Edge of Seventeen prefers the latter and finds both its head and its heart in Nadine.
Edge of Seventeen manages to draw the line between stereotypical teenage angst and depression. It’s at once a practical concern and a narrative one. Hair trigger moods and hysterical theatrics are par for the course in depicting teenage angst. Teen angst is separated from depression by the intensity, duration, and domain of the behavior and emotions.
Nadine’s feelings are intense. We first meet Nadine at her most theatric. She barges in on her history teacher, Mr. Bruner — Woody Harrelson at his peak sardonic — having lunch to say, “Look I don’t want to take up a ton of your time, but I’m going to kill myself. I just thought someone should know.” She wants to see if her statement elicits any response. Mr. Bruner, in turn, reads his “mock” suicide note chastising her for taking up his lunch hour with her suicide announcement. Nadine looks on in annoyance. The film then spends its remaining acts showing the build up to the exchange.
Some have criticized the conversation between Nadine and Mr. Burner as invalidating Nadine’s depression. They point to the exchange as ignoring the seriousness of teen suicide and depression. However, this view is inherently shortsighted. Mr. Bruner’s reaction is not meant to undercut Nadine’s threats. It’s an equally jarring statement meant to counter Nadine’s ferocity with a ferocity all its own. Nadine’s response to the fake note is a wry smile. Mr. Bruner knows something that many with depression know, sometimes when you’re sadder than sad, falling into hysterics is the only way to feel something. In a haze of “I want to watch the world burn,” you strike a match and hope someone is angry enough to pour the gasoline. It’s an unhealthy, unproductive action but it happens nonetheless. Anger done raw is better than dull sadness. Edge of Seventeen nails the fact that depression is not the absence of emotion it is the dominance of one emotion above all others and in doing so it dulls the entire range of emotion. Nadine threatening suicide in this conversation isn’t real contemplation. Her plans are comedic in their ridiculousness. No, Nadine is pinching herself to make sure she’s still alive. Mr. Bruner is subverting her expectations to ensure her that she is, and will be for some time.
The duration of Nadine’s emotional spiral is built within the narrative. Depression differs from general teen angst in its duration. Depression can take hold of one’s life for weeks or months. Angst is fleeting. Our one brief glimpse of Nadine at her best comes early in the film, presumably before Krista’s relationship with Darian sets Nadine off. We see her and Krista being the witty, symbiotic pair that the opening scenes of their childhood promised us. We see them share private jokes and funny quips. It’s a generic shot of teenage friendship as we all hope to remember it. Nadine with Krista in this scene is teen life without the B reel. However, this is short-lived. The Nadine that the narrative follows is not the Nadine trading explicit one-liners about Nick (Alexander Calvert) the Petland employee she lusts after. Instead, we see her sullen, sad, and combative. We see depression Nadine existing for weeks. Depression Nadine falls asleep in class, watches TV lazily in the living room, and calls Erwin a “really old man.” We see Nadine behaving badly.
Nadine’s behavior throughout the film is to watch someone acting out beyond the bounds of general angst. If a teenager talks back to her mother that is normal. If a teenager alienates her best friend, a potential friend, and her teacher that’s depression. As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow stated, “Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not, and often we call a man cold when he is only sad.” Nadine is cold. She threatens to tell all of Facebook that her mother plucks her nipple hairs in response to her mother’s suggestion that she and Krista drive to school together. Nadine forces her best friend Krista to chose between herself and Darian in the hallway in between classes. She verbally assaults Mr. Bruner by mocking his baldness and salary. Nadine is a character that shouldn’t be likable. She’s moody and tense. She says horrible things. Her reaction to even passive slights is volcanic. Nadine is a hyperbole and a half. However, she is also proof of the adage that hurt people, hurt people. She lashes out in response to things that highlight and deepen her unhappiness.
Nadine’s treatment in the narrative consists of one antidepressant (though the scene in which her and Erwin discuss her taking it is earnest) and a heartfelt midnight talk with her brother. In the scene with Darian, Nadine does what the most effective treatments for depression do, she talks about it. She airs her feelings and fears to her brother. In that moment, the two bond. As much as Nadine has been suffering through her depression Darian too has been suffering. Their mother Mona (Kyra Sedgwick) hasn’t managed to fully stand on her own feet since her husband’s death. She’s got her own issues to resolve. Mona depends on her children to be her support system, specifically Darian, and its causing the tension that Nadine feels. Mona has relied unhealthily on her son Darian to co-parent his sister. This sibling co-parenting has created a dynamic in which Nadine is set apart from her brother and its bred resentment. The major conflict is then resolved by an honest exploration of the dynamics of the family. It makes sense given that Nadine and Darian’s father, Tom (Eric Keenleyside) was the catalyst to the family’s further dissent into dysfunction. In the end, the dynamic between the family shows that Nadine is not alone in inner turmoil. Everyone in the Franklin family has a challenge ahead of them.
Edge of Seventeen validates the feelings of the viewer. It acknowledges that little voice in everyone’s head that screams that they are unworthy of the things they want. For some, that voice gets silenced. For others, its the dominant cry in their mind. What Nadine’s journey does is let the audience know that falling into the abyss of those feelings is a valid experience that needs to be talked about openly and honestly. In the end, that is how Nadine recovers and how many like her forge ahead everyday.
Plus: A news roundup, the best FSR articles, and five perfect shots.
It might be difficult to remember, but Robert Downey Jr. is not just Tony Stark. For the last decade the actor’s filmography has been dominated by the role, with a little Sherlock Holmes thrown in for good measure, but other than that there have been very few gigs the actor has taken outside the franchise world.
But now there comes word, via THR, that Downey has booked his first major non-Marvel role in a little bit, and it’s quite the departure: Doctor Doolittle.
You know the good Doctor, he who can communicate with the animals and uses this power to, I don’t know, doctor them? Rex Harrison (My Fair Lady) first brought the character to life on the silver screen back in 1967, and of course there’s the Eddie Murphy franchise complete with a couple spinoffs that started in 1998, but if the talent behind the camera is any indication, this is going to be a … unique take.
The film — which is tentatively entitled The Voyage of Doctor Doolittle — is being written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, Oscar-winning screenwriter of Traffic, as well as Syriana. Quite the departure.
These are really the only details provided at present, with the big question being: is this the start of a new franchise, or intended to be a standalone? Likely it’s the former — this is Hollywood, after all, if it ain’t broke sequelize it — but that will all depend on how Voyage is received. The other thing you might be wondering is, will this new version be a musical like the original? There wasn’t any mention of this, and I have a hard time imagining Gaghan whipping up some jaunty tunes, but with Downey’s pipes, don’t be surprised if that’s how it turns out.
No release date, either, but as Downey has two Infinity Wars films currently in production, start thinking late next year.
In other news and points of interest…
…We finally got to meet the full cast of Fargo season 3thanks to a teaser released by FX…
…That scandalous Life/Venom rumor gets addressed by the former film’s director, Daniel Espinoza…
…and Tom Cruise has been preparing for one stunt in M:I-6 for a real long time.
If there is one show from last year I didn’t expect to see renewed for a second season, it’s The Circus: Inside the Greatest Political Show on Earth. Unlike neatly wrapped programs like Stranger Things and Fleabag, Showtime’s documentary series seemed to have a guaranteed stopping point. The Circus began with the intent to follow the 2016 presidential race, through the analytical coverage of John Heilemann, Mark Halperin, and Mark McKinnon, from the road to the Iowa caucus to Election Day.
Even while everything about the content of the show was insanely unpredictable, one thing was certain: the series finale would be the November 13th episode responding to the results of which candidate won the White House. The Circus was categorically a limited series, and as such was even nominated for a Critics’ Choice Award. It also spawned a nicely condensed and conclusive feature documentary that premiered at Sundance this year titled Trumped: Inside the Greatest Political Upset of All Time.
In the era of President Donald J. Trump, though, nothing is as it should be. This week, The Circus returned for a second season, and I admit I somewhat jokingly asked for it. Technically, I called for something related from the same people, maybe another “limited series,” not necessarily a second season under the same title:
Can there be a spinoff of The Circus recapping the Trump presidency weekly starting immediately? I need it. @MarkHalperin@jheil@mmckinnon
Trump hadn’t even become president yet, and I knew there’d be a lot of stuff to digest once he was in the Oval Office. Just as I appreciated The Circus summarizing and analyzing the events of the election as it went on, I knew I’d like a similar program doing the same for the events of the Trump Administration. More than any presidency in my lifetime, this was going to be one I needed to pay regular attention to. It’s true, for better or worse, that Trump’s actions command viewership. And there’d be much to watch.
“I do get good ratings, you have to admit that,” Trump can be seen saying at the end of a montage recounting his first 52 days in office near the beginning of the season premiere of The Circus — which is now subtitled Inside the Biggest Story on Earth. And it’s obvious that Trump’s oft-repeated claim is the very reason the series is back. We do have to admit that he’s a rating magnet, even if much of that is people hate-watching and/or out of fearful curiosity rather than from those who like what he’s saying and doing.
The Circus will continue to get good ratings because it will never run out of crazy Trump content to feature, and as Halperin says in the season premiere, “In Donald Trump’s Washington, every week ends on a cliffhanger.” Besides that reasoning for the series to continue, there’s the idea that it must still go on because the election itself didn’t quite end last November. Trump keeps on campaigning, holding rallies and constantly bringing up why he’s better than his opponent, Hillary Clinton, despite having won and been sworn in.
At the same time, however, the election does continue to be under scrutiny, with an investigation ongoing to determine if Russia meddled with the democratic process and whether or not anyone in the Trump camp colluded. Although we could tune in to the hearing on the matter yesterday and can follow Halperin (who was recently made senior political analyst for NBC and MSNBC) and Heilemann throughout the week in their various other platforms, it will be nice to have their and McKinnon’s weekly commentary.
And if they can get the kooky, fascinating, and terrifying character that is consultant Roger Stone back on, all the better, though he’s under particular examination right now for his ties to Russia. Stone was an occasional guest on The Circus last year — and is featured in Trumped — and offered a number of quotes that were prescient and are retrospectively of importance now. The Russia issue isn’t new, of course, and if you weren’t watching the series during its first season, there are some relevant episodes worth checking out.
The Russia story will be the big focus of the next episode, for sure, unless anything else of greater note happens between now and Saturday. That’s the thing about a series like The Circus — and actually, I’m not sure there is anything else like The Circus — is its makers never know what each episode is going to be until the weekly window is closed mere hours before an edited product has to be ready for broadcast Sunday night. For a description of what the production and editing is like each week, I recommend Heilemann’s interview by Thom Powers on the Pure Nonfiction podcast:
Surprisingly, the Circus gang do appear to plan stunts every once in a while, as if in the possibility that there will be a need for filler. Even when there’s not the need, though, things like this week’s stakeout of the Congressional Budget Office and the season one visit to London’s Embassy of Ecuador, where Julian Assange currently resides, do manage to find a slot. I’m not really always a fan of that Michael Moore style stuff with this series, as it feels less organic.
With its second season, it’s less predictable how and when The Circus will end. According to the announcement of the second season last month, the current run is focused on Trump’s first 100 days in office. That would presumably mean they’re only doing seven or eight episodes, as the president’s 100th day will fall on Saturday, April 29th. Compare that to 26 episodes last year. Of course, for many people, there’s hope that Trump won’t even last that long. The way things are going, it’s not unthinkable.
A new video sets the interpretations side-by-side.
In directing Fences, Denzel Washington took on a daunting challenge: explode a family drama conceived for the intimacy of the stage into the light-of-day, wide world of cinema. This might not sound like such a huge challenge, and to some it might even sound easier than rendering a story from a novel or other non-dramatic source, but the theater and the movie house are different places, and the stories told inside each of them benefit and suffer in ways because of these distinctions. For example, theater thrives off the immediacy of the performance and the presence of a live audience, as such making it more dramatic with large, bold performances, while cinema, removed from the audience and one-shot scenes, can focus more on the intricacies of character and narrative.
In the case of Fences, Washington managed to coax the best out of both worlds: the bombastic nature of the stage and the measured introspection of the screen. As offered proof, consider the following video edited by Ollie Paxton that places a pivotal scene from the 2016 film side-by-side with the same scene from a 2010 performance of the play, also starring Washington. It’s a scene of great emotion performed deftly on both occasions, but the distinctions between the two make for a fascinating exploration of the advantages and disadvantages of our various narrative media.
What is it? A sexy college professor seduces her student, and then people start dying horrible deaths.
Why see it? I’ve been a Sybil Danning fan for more years than I care to recall, but somehow this one slipped past me before now. I’m not sure what teen me would have thought, but as an adult I’m in awe of just how off the rails it gets from its very clear T&A origin. From the cover to the copy the film sells itself as just another sex flick, but while that element is here the movie shifts gears in the second act to include bloody, violent murders committed by a masked killer who talks like the creeper in Black Christmas. It’s a legitimately solid whodunit for most of its running time, and if it were more stylishly filmed you could make the case for it being an attempt at an American giallo. As it stands we’ll have to settle knowing that the killer also binds and gags a poodle to keep it quiet… Acting is rough throughout, but that’s a small price to pay for something this surprisingly satisfying. And honestly, the disc is alone worth the price for the new interview with Danning where she discusses her shift from serious Israeli films to Hollywood T&A in the ’80s with her usual candidness.
[Blu-ray/DVD extras: Interview with Sybil Danning]
What is it? A bunch of punks cause havoc in ’50s suburbia.
Why see it? Robert Altman’s feature debut comes to Blu-ray courtesy of Olive Films, and it opens with a warning for American adults to open their eyes. It’s an engaging little narrative that sees the “bad kids” corrupt a nice guy who’s sad about losing his girl before he finally comes to his senses. Action, suspense, and drama follow, and it’s easy to see Tom Laughlin moving from his character here into the world of Billy Jack. The film’s something of a time capsule too beyond its black & white ’50s setting, as it closes with a repeat wake-up call saying that we’re all responsible for what happens and that we should work together… and maybe start a church group… to resolve our concerns. Altman’s sensibilities came a long way after this one.
What is it? The 1966 mass murder in Austin Texas comes to life with eye-catching animation and human insight.
Why see it? Keith Maitland’s new documentary tackles one of the country’s many dark days with a creative and powerful style that blends archival footage, talking heads, and rotoscoped animation to tell the story of the day’s survivors. It’s an immediately compelling experience on the visual front, but more than that it offers a fascinating look into human nature as people recount their own acts of bravery and cowardice and how all feel guilt about those choices.
What is it? A group of young people tempt fate in their attempt to experience a ghostly legend.
Why see it? Horror movies based on local legends are a dime a dozen, but this recent Australian thriller deserves credit for telling more than just another generic tale. The legend involves a stretch of remote highway in rural Australia, and the film blends the alien and the supernatural to varying effect here. All of that said, the presentation is at times frustrating as so much of it relies on loud sound cues and harsh editing meant to capture flashes of nightmarish visions or shifting realities. The end result is a horror film that’s different while being neither fun nor scary.
What is it? A small Mediterranean island is home to locals and a temporary stop for illegal refugees making the arduous and deadly journey from Africa.
Why see it? Gianfranco Rosi’s timely and eye-opening documentary was a critical favorite last year winning major awards around the globe, and there are numerous moments throughout that sear images into your brain. The refugee crisis in general is one that ultimately affects us all, but the film’s focus on this one otherwise insignificant locale makes it all that much clearer. The film’s final act in particular presents the cost of these dangerous trips in contrast to the lives in progress on the island. That said, the pacing and time spent away from the refugees lessens the overall impact in some ways. There’s an artistic and thematic point to it, but it struggles to hold the attention at times.
What is it? A woman recounts her life and the daughter who abandoned her twelve years prior.
Why see it? Pedro Almodovar’s latest is his most critically acclaimed in some time, and that may have something to do with its more subdued and character rich focus. Julieta’s confusion over her daughter’s absence forms the crux of the story, and while it’s far from a mystery her discovery of the girl’s reasoning offers no ending. The main draw here are the twin performances of Emma Suarez and Adriana Ugarte as Julieta at different stages of life as they both inhabit the character’s grief with affecting performances.
What is it? A writer trapped in a seemingly perfect marriage becomes obsessed with a man suspected of killing his own wife.
Why see it? Patricia Highsmith’s novel comes to the screen with an engaging cast including Patrick Wilson, Eddie Marsan, Haley Bennett, and Jessica Biel, and there’s minor fun to be had in the subsequent twists and turns. They’re not always all that surprising, but Wilson and Marsan sell their respective roles here with perfection.
[Blu-ray/DVD extras: Featurettes]
Live By Night
What is it? An outlaw becomes a gangster against his better judgement.
Why see it? Ben Affleck stars, writes, and directs this Dennis Lehane adaptation, and it’s unfortunately his first misfire as a filmmaker. From Gone Baby Gone through Argo he’s shown a grasp of engaging tales and intriguing characters, but this movie shows neither. The only evidence of life here is found in an early car chase and a late gun fight while everything else just hangs there limply. The character work and story are endlessly dull, and while the film looks good it lacks energy and purpose.
What is it? Wealth and privilege lead a woman from romance to tragedy.
Why see it? Gorgeous European locales are the backdrop for a classical tale about lives of luxury and the struggles they make for themselves. They’re struggles faced by all classes of course, but they’re elevated here by the characters themselves who feel as if they’re above the fray even as they sink deeper in. Love, lust, and misjudgments of the heart care not about your bank account. For all the drama the film is fairly dry, but it livens up when Anthony Perkins is onscreen.
What is it? A deadly drug is ravishing the population of New Detroit, and only Robocop can teach the kids to just say no.
Why see it? Paul Verhoeven’s original Robocop remains a masterpiece of action/sci-fi satire, but the only element this follow-up manages to copy is the inclusion of rough stop-motion animation effects. They were an amusing touch in the original, but here they feel egregious in their overuse. Worse, the personality of the original’s villains is absent here as human cartoons replace them. It’s goofy when it should be smart, and none of the action/effects scenes rival the awe we all felt first watching the original. Even leaving comparisons off the table this is a slight film. Happily for those of you who disagree though, Scream Factory’s new Blu-ray is loaded with brand new special features.
[Blu-ray/DVD extras: New 2k scan, commentary, featurettes]
What is it? When New Detroit brings in a mercenary squad to gentrify the streets with violence Robocop steps up to defend the people.
Why see it? Everything I said about Robocop 2 above goes double here. Dropping the film to a PG-13 rating says it all really, and the mild action, crude effects, and overdose of compassion and unity make for the worst entry in the series. It all feels so damn cheap and underwhelming, and while there’s some charm to be found in Fred Dekker’s direction it’s clear he’s torn between honoring the Robocop legacy and delivering something on a budget and away from an R-rating. The results aren’t pretty. Again though, Scream Factory comes through with a bevy of new extras including a fun new commentary from the always entertaining Dekker.
What is it? A struggling theater owner creates a singing contest to drum up business.
Why see it? The folks behind the Minions and Despicable Me films deliver a new feature that posits a world populated by animals who are every bit as miserable as humanity. The only cure? The music in their souls. The film is heavy — and I do mean heavy — on the popular music cues, both in the “show” and throughout the film itself. It’s a fun movie at times, mostly due to visual gags, but it’s rarely all that funny. Happily that doesn’t get in the way of the heart though which comes to a head in the big finale which finds the characters paying off and coming into their own. It’s a small thing, but there’s also something to be said for the characters’ body sizes/shapes. Yes, I realize they’re animals, but having the lead females for example be talented, capable, and plus-sized (pig and elephant) is a good thing that the media rarely allows.
[Blu-ray/DVD extras: Mini-movies, music video, featurettes]
What is it? A teenager’s family is slaughtered by a ruthless serial killer while vacationing in Australia forcing her onto a path of revenge.
Why see it? Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek films are a mixed pair — the first is a terrifically brutal thriller while the sequel is a garbage fire of failed comedy and tone — and this series variation happily falls closer to the former. Stretching the story across multiple episodes is both a strength and a weakness though as the suspense snaps more than once knowing neither party can meet their fate yet as the season isn’t over. Still, there are real thrills to be found here in a slowburn tale of survival and revenge. I’m not sure if a second season is coming, but I’ll be watching if it does.
What is it? A German Shepherd moves from the poor house to the big house as one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.
Why see it? Set in the golden age of silent cinema, this “comedy” tells a tale of fortune’s peaks and valleys as Won Ton Ton finds a home with Madeline Kahn and Bruce Dern. The laughs just aren’t there though for too much of the film leaving viewers instead with a who’s who of cameos by past stars including Henny Youngman, Art Carney, Billy Barty, Jackie Coogan, Dorothy Lamour, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and more. If nothing else it’s fun spotting the faces.
[Blu-ray/DVD extras: None]
Also Out This Week:
Ali & Nino, Assassin’s Creed, Being There [Criterion], Evolution, Insecure — The Complete First Season, Master of None — Season One, Miss Sloane, Multiple Maniacs [Criterion]
According to the movies, death looks a whole lot like the DMV.
Beetlejuice (1988)
Applying to grad school can feel a lot like limbo. Like being stuck in a waiting room, clutching a call number with wingdings on it, praying you dotted all your i’s correctly. You’d be forgiven for thinking your curriculum vitae was being weighed on a scale against the feather of Ma’at, Egyptian deity of minimum GPA requirements. It feels just about as esoteric.
Divine judgement, like academia, has a bureaucratic bent to it; an adherence to policy and procedure at odds with any human tendency towards sense-making. That’s a particularly humorous metaphor: that complex administrative systems are as inscrutable and baffling as divine ones, that something so nefariously human could be otherworldly. It’s a relatable, “so taxes are like, literallyhell, huh?” The joke’s longevity extends at least as far back as Virgil’s Aeneid, where a spirit in the underworld is seen enumerating new souls on a stone tablet — a comedic bit echoed over two thousand years later in Disney’s Hercules. In this way, the bureaucratic afterlife is very effective as a quick gag. Abbott & Costello’s Time of Their Lives concludes with the punchline that heaven is closed for a statutory holiday. Likewise, Out of This World, a sales training video from 1954, features a Job-like bet between two celestial emissaries flanked by filing cabinets and productivity graphs.
There are, of course, more narratively significant comedic trends, one of my favorites being “bungled soul-reaping”: when someone is, through some obtuse heavenly clerical error, improperly “processed” by the Powers That Be. The cinematic adaptations of Harry Segall’s 1938 play Heaven Can Wait are stand-out examples. In Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), an officious angel known only as Messenger 7013 assumes that protagonist Joe Pendleton (Robert Montgomery) failed to survive a plane crash and preemptively follows procedure, escorting Joe’s soul to an hazy liminal way station, where a plane will take him to his “final destination.” When the heavenly records prove his death was a mistake, a disembodied Joe must restore cosmic balance and return to earth by possessing a freshly-dead corpse…hijinks ensue. The 1978 Warren Beatty remake follows a nearly identical premise, only with 100% more sweatpants and football.
There was, somewhat confusingly, a different Heaven Can Wait in 1943, unrelated to the Segall play, directed by urbane comedy maestro Ernst Lubitsch. Helpfully, Lubitsch depicts yet another humorous wrinkle of the bureaucratic afterlife: divine judgement as a familiar, hyperbolically tedious judicial process. Lubitsch opens with a deceased Henry Van Cleve, who approaches hell’s reception desk, where he must petition for his admittance into the underworld he thinks he deserves. There’s a similar celestial legalism in the Albert Brooks comedy Defending Your Life (1991), which envisions purgatory as a court system where defendants plead their case in an effort to qualify for the next stage of existence. There’s even a Tom and Jerry short, “Heavenly Puss,” in which a deceased Tom is faced with his lengthy record of misdeeds, and is told he can only board the train out of purgatory (purr-gatory?) if he can get Jerry to sign a document saying he forgives him.
Likewise, in “One for the Angels,” an early episode of the Twilight Zone, a warm-hearted if otherwise unremarkable salesman named Lou is visited by an angel of death. As his goofy on-the-nose name would suggest, Mr. Death (played by a deliciously dry Murray Hamilton) is a stock image of a corporate grim reaper: meticulously dressed, by the book, and fluent in legalese. When Lou asks if he’s a census-taker, Mr. Death smiles impatiently; he’s on a tight schedule, and must get to the inevitable business of Lou’s “departure.” Like many romantic depictions of celestial bureaucracy, Mr. Death’s obstructionism acts as an opportunity for Lou’s to demonstrate his humanity — though, because it’s the Twilight Zone this ultimately proves somewhat bittersweet.
Thinly-veiled contempt: a triptych
It goes without saying that a bureaucratic afterlife is gallows humor. And while I don’t doubt that juxtaposing the sacred and the corporate is funny, I do find it strange that, on the whole, on-screen depictions of a bureaucratic afterlife are so light-hearted. There is a subtle nightmarish implication to the bureaucratic afterlife; a kind of disorienting, menacing complexity that haunts an otherwise cute and tongue-in-cheek joke.
Beetlejuice’s afterlife quite explicitly addresses this: it is a bureaucratic haunted house, complete with waiting room, vouchers, caseworkers, and my personal favourite, the file pile. The call numbers have no meaning; there are spatially improbable corridors populated with exorcised souls; and the wait times take centuries. Where the bureaucratic chaos of comedies like Heaven Can Wait and Defending Your Life results in confusion that ultimately gives way to self-discovery and romance, the administrative tone in Beetlejuice is genuinely frightening. Sure, the macabre sight gags are hilarious, but this is an afterlife of profound and frustrating stasis. It’s like being immortal and shot out into space with only a TPS report to keep you company. While it’s implied that the receptionists and clerks have been assigned these jobs as a form of Dante-like contrapasso for committing suicide — at least they have something to do, some purpose beyond just, you know, aimlessly waiting. You can hardly blame Adam and Barbara for summoning an unhinged bio-exorcist — at least he’s guaranteed to spice things up and introduce some conflict!
An unnerving thing about the bureaucratic afterlife is that it is hopelessly full of hope. Which is to say, that theoretically, if you just follow the rules you’re promised eternal rest— where in reality, you don’t stand a chance, not really. As we’ve seen, the bureaucratic afterlife is far from infallible or unbiased, let alone efficient (efficient bureaucracies are a whole other breed of terrifying). And even if you make it onto the paradise train, there’s little to suggest there won’t be more forms to fill out, more wait times, more trials. It’s a surreal landscape where you find yourself up against a nightmarish force that doesn’t necessarily lend itself to preconceived notions of how the world works. Even in romantic comedies like Heaven Can Wait, there is a sense of pointless striving in the face of bleakness; of doing push-ups in the fog of limbo while an angel shouts terms and conditions at you because it’s all a dream, and you’ve got a big football game coming up and what do you mean I’m dead.
Basically, all roads lead to purgatory. This is a terrifying notion because as far as afterlives go it sounds extremely boring. AndI can’t think of a more sure-fire way to incite atrophy in the human spirit than to deprive it of struggle and bamboozle it with absurd managerial jargon. I don’t know if one can imagine Sisyphus happy if he’s stuck waiting in a DMV for all eternity. Dude was lucky to get a bolder.
Though you might not be familiar with the term “whip pan,” I promise you’re familiar with the effect, especially if you’re a fan of the films of director Damien Chazelle. A whip pan is, as the name indicates, a type of pan shot, but one that moves so quickly from one focal point to another that the imagery between them becomes blurred. Primarily it has two functions: to indicate either a brief passage of time, or to emphasize a frenetic sense of action or motion.
I mentioned the name of Chazelle because in all three of his feature films to-date — 2009’s Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, 2014’s Whiplash, and of course last year’s La La Land — he’s made copious and effective use of the whip pan to a variety of effects, as evidenced in the following montage from editor Alejandro Torriggino that collects every pan from each film in one concise place.
If there’s a problem with the whip pan, I think, it’s that it’s such obvious flash of cinema, it stands the chance of pulling people out of the narrative by revealing the visual strings orchestrating it. In the capable hands of Chazelle, however, the director uses this artifice to his advantage, heightening our enjoyment of his stories for their allegorical as well as practical implications.
To my knowledge this is the first video I’ve seen dedicated to the whip pan, and it’s the perfect encapsulation of the technique and how it can benefit a film. Storytellers and filmmakers alike need to pay special attention to this one.
The best cinematic action of 2017 in three parts from the movies of SXSW.
It was heavier than I had anticipated. At the age of 16, if my memory serves me correctly, it was the first time I’d ever held a real gun. In the midwest, surrounded by a family full of avid hunters, this was a right of passage. At some point an uncle or two would want to show you the awesome power of a real firearm, both as appreciation for the weapon’s power and as a lesson in the seriousness of its deadly potential. The weight of the revolver in my hand brought both of these concepts to life with immediacy. It’s hard to hold a real gun and not be in awe and at least a little terrified. It’s a feeling I’ll never shake, perhaps one of those moments in which a teenager’s journey toward adulthood was accelerated a bit.
Despite the fact that I never took up the mantle of hunting for sport — or even firing guns at all — I’m long left with the indelible impression of that first encounter. The weight of it. The terrifying reality that when loaded, said weapon could take a human life. The tonal shift in conversation between myself and my general jovial uncle about responsibility and safety. This single experience may account for what I believe to be a healthy separation between the reality and the fantasy of action films. Because even though there’s plenty of joy for me in a shoot-em-up at any level, there’s never been any confusion as to what real guns can do. The only downside to this is that it’s hard to see any action movie living up to the awesome experience of firing a real gun. Because it’s all fake, after all. No matter how many squibs they employ or how much CGI blood is sprayed, there’s never been a film that has simulated the raw power of a simple firearm.
That was what I believed until recently. Because as I zipped through another fast and furious year of films at the South by Southwest Film Festival, I found three action films that will undoubtedly hang around my Best of the Year list for the next 9 months. And in our tour of these three fine actioners, we begin with one that did what I previously thought impossible, capturing some of that raw, harrowing power.
Free Fire
At the heart of Ben Wheatley’s single-location gun deal gone wrong shoot-em-up, there’s a brewing charm offensive. On one side, Armie Hammer plays a slickly dressed late-70s arms intermediary. The kind of guy who smells richly of beard oils and wisecracks his way into the most dangerous rooms on the planet. He’s clearly in it for himself as he leads a group of Irish freedom fighters (Cillian Murphy, Michael Smiley, Enzo Cilenti, and Sam Riley) in to buy guns from a zany South African dealer (Sharlto Copley) and his offbeat crew of associates. On the other side is Copley, often a cinematic airhorn of unintended camp and almost cartoonish desperation to be funny. Only here, in Wheatley’s carefully constructed 70s underworld, Copley is the perfect mix of skeevy and endearing. His character, Vernon, spouts platitudes like “Live and Vern” and goes on manic charm tirades. He’s exactly the sort of neurotic, unbearable presence that might be less than helpful if a gun deal should go wrong. So when it does go very wrong very quickly, he’s a delightful oasis of self-preservation. That is all to say that in a film where the likes of Brie Larson and Jack Reynor give splendid performances imbued with grit and wit, Hammer and Copley still steal the show.
But right, we’re talking about the awesome power of firearms and movie magic. Let’s not get lost in the personality, even though Free Fire is awash with it. The other thing Free Fire has in droves is gunfire. And not your average Hollywood gunfire that cackles around the surround sound lightly. This is chest-thumping, full-throat gun sound. Heavy, pounding shots that shake your core. It’s a brilliant bit of detail work from Ben Wheatley and his sound department, led by Martin Pavey. The kind of attention to detail that elevates the level of consequences that exist within this otherwise flashy, silly situation. Through this accomplishment in making the gunfire feel real (as opposed to simply looking real or sounding real), Wheatley and team add to the consequential nature of what’s happening. Sure, Armie Hammer has plenty of charming banter, but when someone pulls the trigger, the audience is given realism with immediacy.
These little combinations, that of technical details and fun performance-based story, make Free Fire a good ride. The kind that absolutely begs to be seen in the largest, loudest format possible. It’s that sonic movie magic that gives rise to something better than your average shoot-out.
Speaking of sonic movie magic…
Baby Driver
In Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver, we are presented with what is arguably the culmination of Mr. Wright’s early work. While technically The World’s End put his Cornetto Trilogy to rest, there’s so much stylistic residue in Baby Driver that it’s hard not to see this as an extension of, culmination of, and perfection of those early works. Take the fast-cutting, rhythmic sequences in Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz. Most notably, the sequence in Hot Fuzz where Simon Pegg’s Sgt. Angel travels to the country where his new job awaits. Wright uses Angel’s phone to show us how far out in the country we’re traveling, while using kinetic editing to move things along. We’re watching Simon Pegg ride a train with a plant, but there’s something almost balletic to the sequence. Wright goes a smidge further in a later scene where Nicolas wakes up and goes for a run, syncing the first part of the sequence to The Kinks’ song, “Village Green Preservation Society.” These are little bits and bobs of Wright playing with the idea of syncing his action to music.
With Baby Driver, he takes all of these ideas to the next level. His opening sequence shows us Baby (Ansel Elgort) driving the getaway car for a bank robbery perpetrated by hardened criminal types — Jon Bernthal, Jon Hamm, and Eiza Gonzalez. As the robbers get to robbing, Baby sits in his car listening to “Bellbottoms,” a song from The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. When it’s time to get away, the crew fly around the streets of Atlanta in perfect sync with Baby’s song of choice. It’s a sequence — and ultimately a movie — driven as much by the soundtrack as its own propulsive story, a story that involves danger, deceit, young love, and the ages old tale of how one simply doesn’t walk away from organized crime.
The concept of an action musical — think La La Land meets The Transporter — is something Wright played around with in the 2002 music video for “Blue Song” by Mint Royale. It’s a vibrant, fun way to shoot and choreograph action, though I’d imagine it is painstaking to get everything from screeching tires to gun shots to sync up perfectly. But it’s this level of attention to detail that will delight fans of Wright’s early work as well as those who would like to see him take the next step to something more grand. Somehow Baby Driver is both. And it has a cast that can light the world on fire. To the extent that a manic Kevin Spacey might be the fourth best performance in the film. Even though it doesn’t have all the familiar faces from Wright’s previous work, every fiber of Baby Driver feels like an Edgar Wright film in the most delightful way possible. I dare say that it might be his best film.
Atomic Blonde
Free Fire deals in charm and explosive sound work. Baby Driver innovates in a way that would make both Luc Besson and Jacques Demy proud. But our final action film, Atomic Blonde, does something that only a few very notable action movies have done in recent years: addressing the consequences of bludgeoning combat.
Director David Leitch (co-director of John Wick) opens his film in a cold, almost colorless bathroom with a 1950s decor. Inside a large white standalone bathtub full of ice is our pale-haired heroine, played by Charlize Theron. It could be one of those typical opening sequences — the kind that show our tough-as-nails hero getting ready to go out and kick ass. But it’s not. Atomic Blonde opens with long, patiently staged shots of Charlize Theron’s nude form, copiously covered with bruises and wounds. In its first five minutes, Atomic Blonde sets the stage brilliantly for a two-hour sprint of wanton violence by showing us the cost of all this punching and stabbing. If you spent any time considering what John Wick’s body might look like at the end of either of his two films, Atomic Blonde has your answer right up front.
The rest is an exercise less in “will she survive” and more in “how did all of that happen.” As Theron’s Lorraine, a Cold War era British spy on a mission in East Berlin to secure a missing list of double agents, fights her way toward her goal, that vision of her battered body stays with us. Right up until the end, we know that she’s in for more punishment. Which makes her wins that much more satisfying. Because if she survived to become one giant bruise, we can’t wait to see what the other guy looks like.
For Leitch, Atomic Blonde could have turned out to be a toiling exercise — a warm-up for his work on Deadpool 2 — but he really knocks it out of the park. The film has a mean streak of violence and an infectious vibe. It gets quality supporting performances from Sofia Boutella (Kingsman) and James McAvoy. And in the end, it delivers all the promise of “Charlize Theron gets her own version of John Wick” and then some, adding a bit of stylish dalliance into the world of espionage. That’s all to say that Atomic Blonde flat-out kicks ass. There’s no better way to put it.
As we move further into 2017, there are certainly plenty of potential action winners. There’s that Ghost in the Shell film, another Fast and Furious film, a new Alien movie, Wonder Woman, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, Blade Runner, the Kingsman sequel, and plenty more. Even Star Wars: The Last Jedi might deliver some great action beats. But it’s very hard not to think that we’ve barely reached the end of March and we’ve already experienced the 5 best action films of the year (if you including John Wick 2 and Logan). That might not prove true by the end of the year, but these films will certainly be hard to beat.
Today’s short film comes from Peter Szewczyk, who some of you might know for his work in the field of visual effects: Szewczyk has worked on such groundbreaking films as Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, 2012, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Thor: The Dark World, and oh yeah, Avatar.
The following film, Dark Clouds, was made back in 2009 in Szewczyk’s spare time between the productions of 2012 and Avatar, and marks his first time in the director’s chair. It’s dialogue- and actor-free, environmentally-minded, and — as you’d expect given the director’s day job — visually dynamic and stunning. It’s also brief, just 1:45 seconds, but in that time it manages to pack a powerful punch and relay a vital message.
For more of Szewczyk’s directorial efforts, jump over to his Vimeo page to see the rest of his solo work.
We look to the best and brightest of television criticism and see what they have to say.
A few weeks ago, I realized that I hadn’t been living my best possible Netflix life. With a one-hour train ride to work each day — roughly two hours door-to-door — my daily commute provided me the perfect opportunity to try out a few television shows on my backlist. My freelance writing tends to focus on film criticism and film history; that means I tend to feel bad when I waste valuable movie-watching time on episodes of television shows. Put another way: two episodes of any hour-long show is time better spent moving one more classic or foreign film from my ‘to-watch’ list to my ‘watched’ list.
But while I have a hard-and-fast rule about watching movies on my phone, I have no such restrictions on consuming modern television in a handheld format. That’s where Netflix comes in handy. I can dig into television shows without taking away time I have earmarked for new (re: old) movies, a revelation that has come as both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, I’m watching more television than ever before; on the other hand, I’ve struggled to find a consistent jump-off point when I’m ready to leave a show. Despite a bad pilot, for instance, Santa Clarita Diet finally found its stride due to Timothy Olyphant’s stoner-comedy performance and Drew Barrymore’s surprisingly poignant turn as a zombie mom. And yet, when confronted with the well-respected first seasons of Into the Badlands and The Expanse — not currently available for download on Netflix but shows I’ve earmarked for future consideration — I was only able to make it about 15 minutes in before punting on each. And that doesn’t even mention The 100, a show I’ve long wanted to try out but one I’m really struggling to enjoy through three inarguably bad episodes.
All of which begs the question: when is the appropriate time to jump off a television show? In 2016, The Hollywood Reporter’s Tim Goodman argued that it wasn’t reasonable for most people to “watch four episodes of a show they don’t like just to get to the turning point that makes it good.” This would suggest that a television series that starts off weak — regardless of its eventual destination — isn’t worth the effort for most people. If that’s too vague for you, then perhaps you’ll enjoy Vox’s Todd VanDerWerff and his cardinal rule: “sometimes you’ll realize a show is just rubbing you the wrong way, or you don’t like the lead actor, or whatever. And if that’s the case, turn it off.” At VanDerWerff notes, there are “well over 400 scripted shows on TV” these days, each vying for our time and affection. If one show doesn’t hook you right out of the gate, you shouldn’t feel bad that you moved onto the next series rather than waiting the show out.
Streaming video providers like Netflix have even mathematically quantified the moment when audience members commit to their new series. In 2015, Netflix — which is notoriously finicky when it comes to releasing their in-house metrics — released a list of the episodes that effectively “hooked” audiences for each of their biggest shows. As noted by The Verge, Netflix keeps a list of the episode from each show that “kept 70 percent of people on board for the rest of the season,” ensuring that a show had hit critical mass. The eighth episode of Arrow; the second episode of The Walking Dead; the third episode of Dexter. For fans of each series, this list not only provides a mathematical proof for something they already instinctively knew, it also gives them a potential jumping off point for friends and family. If you don’t like Dexter by its third episode, you can say, then it’s probably not the show for you.
None of that really helps answer the central question, though: when should you quit a show that isn’t doing it for you? One of the ideas that repeats itself in each article — either explicitly or implicitly — is the idea of that thing that makes you keep watching. For The Hollywood Reporter’s Daniel Feinberg, that thing was James Spader, whose steady presence as the antihero of The Blacklist “can make up for a lot.” As mentioned before, I came dangerously close to quitting Santa Clarita Diet but refused to give up on the opportunity to watch Timothy Olyphant play a non-stoic sheriff for once in his Hollywood career. If you’re in need of a hard-and-fast rule on when to quit, you could do a lot worse than VanDerWerff’s helpful guide, but there is something to be said for hanging on as long as that something continues to keep you interested in. Maybe if more people appreciated the beauty that is Gerald McRaney, for example, we would’ve gotten more than a season and change of Jericho. One actor, one plot point, one piece of intrigue. Or, to invert it slightly: just as VanDerWerff suggests you should never feel bad about ditching a show, you should also never feel bad about hanging on for one small reason. After all, it’s your free time.
So will I continue to watch The 100 even as the show struggles to hit the bare minimums of character development and dialogue? As it turns out, Feinberg has given me hope. Sort of. “The first five or six episodes are genuinely awful,” Feinberg noted in his piece, “but enough people insisted it got better that I revisited and you know what? It did get better.” Later in this interview, he also notes that he never got farther than a “5 or 6” on the series and ended up bailing in Season 2, but the damage here has been done. Right now, The 100 is the perfect show for me to watch every morning while doing my best not to bump into the woman carrying three shopping bags worth of work supplies. As it turns out, that one thing that keeps me hooked is the promise that things do indeed get better.
Plus: News roundup, our best articles, and five perfect shots.
Though it wasn’t a deafening defeat, Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters wasn’t a resounding success, either. All sexist nonsense aside, the film performed only average at the box office, casting doubt upon the future of the new franchise it was supposed to kick off. And while it seems unlikely we’ll be seeing the women of last summer’s movie suit up again anytime soon, we do know that the show will go on, in a sense.
In an interview with io9, the original film’s director and new franchise producer Ivan Reitman admitted that while the future is still a little up in the air, he’s got a plan to get it going forward.
We jumped into an animated film [after the last movie] and we are developing [a] live-action film. I want to bring all these stories together as a universe that makes sense within itself. Part of my job right now is to do that.
This might seem like old news, but it isn’t. Yes, we knew there was an animated film being planned — there’s even a director, Fletcher Moules (Clash of Clans: Revenge), already attached — but since it was announced there really haven’t been any updates at all, so good to know that’s still in the work. This live-action property Reitman mentions, however, is new. There were all sorts of rumored films supposedly being considered — including a male-centric reboot with Chris Pratt and Channing Tatum — but rumors were all they turned out to be. Whether Reitman is talking about a sequel to Feig’s film or a return to the drawing board isn’t explicitly clear, but “all these stories” makes it sound like the latter. Time will tell.
As for the animated film, there’s no specific release date as of yet because, as Reitman said in the interview, “making animated films is hard,” but expect late 2018 or 2019.
In other news and points of interest…
…Penelope Cruz has joined the cast of the next season of American Crime Story;here’s who she’s playing…
And lastly, take a look at five of the most popular shots we tweeted over the last 24 hours. Want more? You know where to find us.
BLUE VELVET (1986) DP: Frederick Elmes | Dir: David LynchLA DOLCE VITA (1960) DP: Otello Martelli | Dir: Federico FelliniV FOR VENDETTA (2005) DP: Adrian Biddle | Dir: James McTeigueAMÉLIE (2001) DP: Bruno Delbonnel | Dir: Jean-Pierre JeunetIN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (2000) DP: Christopher Doyle, and others | Dir: Wong Kar Wai
How to make movies that win awards and break box office records.
Forget Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh. Bill Condon’s career really began with Gods and Monsters, for which he won the adapted screenplay Oscar. He would go on to receive another writing nomination, for Chicago, and over the past 15 years he’s directed award-worthy performances, some of them surprises, he’s drawn non-Twilight fans into that franchise, and he just released what’s looking to be the most successful musical of all time.
Obviously, after the massive opening weekend Condon had with Beauty and the Beast, he’s a filmmaker worth looking up to. He hasn’t always delivered hits or Academy favorites, but the director of such movies as Dreamgirls, Mr. Holmes, Kinsey, The Fifth Estate, and both parts of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn is a distinct talent in Hollywood, one who regularly makes a kind of pop prestige picture, or maybe it’s prestige pop.
Either way, the following advice is worth taking. We’ve rounded up seven lessons to learn from Condon going back almost 20 years, on writing, working with actors, and directing musicals. Be our guest and take a look.
Stick With What You’re Interested In
Condon’s filmography may seem like an odd mix, but for the most part even when he’s worked for hire on projects, he’s only written and directed material he’s passionate about. He realized the importance of this a while ago, as shown in this response to a request for screenwriting advice during a 2004 Washington Post readers Q&A:
You really have to stick with what you’re interested in. It’s a lesson it actually took me a while to learn, as I worked in more overtly commercial area to which I probably wasn’t that well suited, in the first part of my career. “Gods and Monsters” actually was the first personal movie that I made. It was satisfying on absolutely every level.
Never Stop Writing
Condon actually gave two pieces of screenwriting advice in the Washington Post Q&A, the other being on the importance of not giving up and just continuing to write until you break through, and even after that. He says:
Now that I’m old enough to have watched aspiring writers who either had careers or didn’t, I find that the successes have one thing in common and that is that they simply never stop writing. A script gets finished, it gets exposed as much as possible but it’s followed immediately by a new one and then another and then another. That seems to be how it really happens for people.
This is great advice, though not necessarily a tip he’s always followed himself. He does clearly continue to write, having worked on the script for the upcoming musical The Greatest Showman, which he didn’t direct, but here’s an interesting quote from two years earlier in a 2002 interview for Backstage:
I can say one thing but I think it might sound obnoxious. It’s a piece of advice I would find annoying to read because I have so much trouble with it. But it does feel like the people who do make it are the ones who never stop writing. They finish a script and they’re starting another, and six or seven or eight later, they hit and it just goes like wildfire. I can’t do that. I’ve got no discipline. I have trouble getting down to it. and I would have been discouraged by reading that. But it’s true.
I do think that’s so much a part of what being a director is — in working with actors — to really try and be sensitive to what each actor needs to get to where he wants to be.
For someone who has worked on very different kinds of movies with very different kinds of performances, including five he directed to Academy Award nominations, Condon is unsurprisingly focused on his individual actors’ needs. The below tip may seem rather accommodating, but keep in mind that two of the mentioned stars garnered Oscar nods, and one of them won.
We rehearsed solidly for two months, and then there are people like Eddie (Murphy) who didn’t like to rehearse. But he’d come to the recording studio and pre-record songs, so that became a way for Anika [Noni Rose], for example, who acts all of her scenes opposite him and who craves rehearsal, to kind of sneak in rehearsals because she’d just hang out and she’d short of push through and get to know him, and they wouldn’t literally do scenes, but they’d get to know each other and start to talk about the movie…
I think one of the things a director has to be sensitive to [is] the needs of the actor, and in this case with Jennifer Hudson, it really was that kind of specific, making it real, until she really got comfortable with it. It was like, “Lift the glass there, turn the thing,” that sort of thing at the beginning, and then she would find it on her own. So to go from that extreme to the Eddie Murphy extreme, which is fort of just you give him one idea like that this number’s a nervous breakdown on stage, and he says, “Okay, I got it,” and he goes and does it, and then there are little adjustments you make. You need to be open to whatever an actor needs.
Directors Can Be Emotional, Too
Condon isn’t the first filmmaker to show a sensitivity to the actors in that way, but he is a rare breed of director who discusses sensitivity to the material. He was asked by Twilight fans at the 2011 Comic-Con about whether it’s difficult to let go of emotions when directing emotionally draining scenes. Here’s what he replied (via ROBsessed):
Well you have to because you’re on to the next one either an hour later, or the next day, but man, absolutely, there were all these things along the way that you just have an adrenaline rush when you finally get there and get through it because so many things could go wrong. Like the childbirth, I keep going back to it, but that was unbelievably intense. Taylor, his heart is pouring out of him, but Rob, you see this where he’s trying to bring her back to life and the anguish of it and the panic of it all, and then Kristen just giving it all. In the way that you’ll see, all the effort of giving birth but she is the best dead person I’ve ever seen (everyone laughs) and that’s not easy because there were takes that were a minute long and she never blinked, she never seemed to breathe, I don’t know how she did it but that cold area was very intense. And at the end of the shoot in Louisiana we’d been shooting for four months already, kind of tired and everyone is worn down, all of our defenses were down and it was also one of those things where you get there and you do it, and it lifted everybody up for the rest of the shoot because it just felt like something real had happened. That’s the thing that is great on a set, when you know something real has happened, it’s when the crew is suddenly incredibly quiet and everyone is paying attention, is sort of like you know it’s happening right in front of you and everyone’s aware of it, you know.
Always Follow Your Own Vision
Whether he’s adapting a hit stage musical to the big screen or remaking a hugely popular animated feature as a live-action movie or taking over a franchise like Twilight, Condon has had to be mindful of fans. But not so much that he loses his own focus and vision, especially when he’s also a fan of the source material. He recently addressed fan ownership, particularly for Beauty and the Beast, in a recent interview for The Hollywood Reporter:
It’s a double-edged sword. The great thing about that is that there are so many people who are so eager to see the movie, and that’s what you crave as a filmmaker, that there’s an audience waiting and committed. But in terms of expectations, you can only make your personal version of what this is. Because I feel like I’m such a true fan of that original film, I could only use myself ultimately as a gauge. But I think, for example, there would have been people who would’ve preferred that kind of Austrian-curtain yellow dress for Belle [that she wore in the animated movie], but we couldn’t do that and stay true to the period.
In the below interview from 2012, Condon acknowledges the difficulty of focusing on what connects him to something like Twilight while also not wanting to disappoint the fans.
Musicals Need to Keep Moving
With a lot of musicals, the numbers kind of stop the show, interrupting the narrative for a bit of song and dance and then picking things back up afterward. Condon is a believer in musicals that keep moving. He told the South China Morning Post in 2015 after he wrapped on the Beauty and the Beast shoot:
I think in movies, the secret is that you can never stop. You can never let a song just settle in; it’s got to push the story forward. You have to be somewhere different at the end of a song than when you started.
He thinks this sort of movement keeps people who don’t usually like musicals and get bored during most numbers interested. He similarly says, “The basic rule becomes the characters should wind up at a different place from where they began.” in a 2006 Baltimore Sun article on him reinventing the musical film.
You know, I always quiz people, those unfortunate souls who don’t like musicals and ask them what is it about them? And one thing they always say is that, oh, God, you know, here comes another song and we have to wait for two minutes now until the story, you know, picks up again. And I think one of the — one of the things that, you know, I tried to do here is keep the story going through the songs, you know. So it becomes this seamless thing. And you’re sort of not aware of when the music starts and stops.
Musicals Are All About Transitions
Also in the Charlie Rose interview, and very closely related to the last piece of advice, he says the most important thing he learned about directing musicals from Chicago director Rob Marshall is how the “transitions in and out of songs are almost as important as what happens within them.”
Interestingly enough, on the audio commentary for the movie he does with Marshall, he says it differently as: “Musicals are all about transitions. How you get in and out of numbers is more important than what happens inside of them.”
Chicago was like a crash course in getting inside a musical. Just things that now seem obvious that you don’t really know until you’re in it. One of them is that musicals are all about transitions: how you get in and out of numbers is more important than what happens inside of them. In Dreamgirls, for example, the first time Eddie Murphy sings, you have him teaching the song to his three new backup singers, and suddenly he takes one step back and a curtain comes in behind him and then you swoop around and you’ve made a transition to him on the stage. You could do it in a cut, but there’s something about taking you from one place to another with theatrical devices that’s really thrilling.
There’s also a detailed and illustrated example of this point in a 2007 DGA Quarterly article focused on the “Steppin’ to the Bad Side” number in Dreamgirls. Here’s the sequence in full:
What We’ve Learned
From the more common writing tips to the specific rules for directing actors and making modern musicals, Condon’s advice is both inspirational and instructive. And he makes dabbling in many different pots sound like nothing, so long as you find something of interest in each project and in such a variety of work.
A few of his tips are about pushing forward, whether it’s the idea of always writing the next thing or finding ways to keep the narrative moving, especially in a musical. More generally, he recommends serving your own interests and vision and serving the actors very personally so that they may in turn serve that vision, as well.
Why the Greek director’s tragicomic sensibility is perfect for the subject matter.
Not to be outdone by Netflix’s upcoming string of auteur dramas, Amazon Studios just announced that director Yorgos Lanthimos will be reteaming with The Lobsterstar Colin Farrell for an upcoming original series. The topic? The Iran-Contra Affair. For those of you (like me) who are too young to remember, the so-called Iran-Contra Affair was a scandal that occurred during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, in which administration officials conspired to sell weapons to Iran (against whom there was an arms embargo) in order to funnel the profits to a right-wing Nicaraguan army known as the Contras (to whom Congress had forbidden funding). The initial plan was to use said profits to negotiate the release of several hostages held by Hezbollah, but then Colonel Oliver North got involved and devised a plan to use the money to also fund the Contras. Farrell will be playing North.
If all of this sounds like an ill-conceived international screw-up, that’s because it was. Needless to say, the plot was soon discovered, leading to an investigation and eventual criminal charges for North. A series of televised hearings followed, which entranced the nation much like the Watergate hearings had years before. One need look no further than this brief clip of North from his hearing to get a sense of the role Farrell is tackling. Most of the charges were eventually dismissed for the former colonel, who now hosts a show on Fox News. Such is the tragicomic cycle of political theatre.
Thankfully for us, tragicomedy is Lanthimos’s specialty. The Greek director arrived on the international scene with 2009’s Dogtooth, but his English language debut, 2015’s The Lobster, solidified his place as one of cinema’s most unique, challenging, and hilarious voices. That film took place in a dystopian society in which single people are forced to find a mate within 45 days, lest they be turned into an animal. Lanthimos’s bizarre, brutal lens on the material captured perfectly the absurdity and agony of modern romance. To watch the film is to spend two hours caught between laughing, crying, and cringing. It’s what the truth feels like when laid uncomfortably, uncompromisingly bare.
Now, in collaboration with writers Enzo Mileti and Scott Wilson, Lanthimos is turning that incisive eye on the political sphere. Much as he used a dystopian future in The Lobster to comment on romance today, Lanthimos is now using the not-too-distant past to comment on contemporary politics. “Although based on relatively recent history,” he told Variety in a recent statement, “[the script] feels very fresh and relevant to our times.” Twenty years later, many of us remain glued to our television screens, watching hearings on Russian interference in the election or the confirmation of Judge Gorsuch — laughing, crying, cringing.
Like romance, politics is often treated onscreen with a grandeur and artifice that few of us recognize in our day-to-day experience. Politics as we know it doesn’t resemble The West Wing any more than our love lives resemble La La Land. But what makes Lanthimos’s voice so well-suited to the subject is his ability to criticize sharply without falling into cynicism. Straight parodies like Oliver Stone’s W. or Armando Iannucci’s In the Loop expose the many ways government falls short of our expectations, but they fail to capture our genuine sadness in the face of unmet hopes. Though events like Iran-Contra provide ample fodder for satire, they also show how thoroughly, tragically human our politicians are. Lanthimos is the perfect filmmaker to capture this duality.
The new series will mark the Greek filmmaker’s third collaboration with Colin Farrell, who will next star alongside Nicole Kidman in Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Though known as brooding action star in films like S.W.A.T., The Recruit, and Total Recall, Farrell has come into his own as a master of perfectly pitched comedy, honed in his collaborations with Martin McDonagh (In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths) as well as in Horrible Bosses. The role of Oliver North falls somewhere between the extremes of Farrell’s past roles: a swaggering military man who falls into farcical error. The choice to cast Farrell in the role was, Lanthimos suggests, in part suggested by Ben Stiller and Nicky Weinstock, who will be executive producing the show for Red Hour Films. After starring in the disappointing sophomore season of True Detective, Farrell is sure to impress in his return to the small screen.
The script remains in development, so it’ll be a while before we get to enjoy this series. Thankfully, we’ll have another Farrell-Lanthimos film to hold us over in the meantime. And, of course, there’s always the news.
For the inaugural episode of our Shot by Shot podcast, Geoff Todd — One Perfect Shot founder — and myself decided to swing for the fences by tackling what we both consider to be a film that has some of the absolute best cinematography ever captured on film: 2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick and shot by both Geoffrey Unsworth and John Alcott.
In many ways, 2001 is the film that attracted popular attention to cinematography, so we thought it was the perfect place to start this new podcast, which each week will be looking at the perfect shots of a different film. Below you’ll find a link to the podcast and the six shots Geoff and I selected for discussion. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, Soundcloud, or wherever you listen to podcasts so you don’t miss a minute of the good stuff; next week we’re talking Mad Max: Fury Road.
What does a French billionaire want with James Franco?
The sun sets over these last and barren weeks of madness we call March. What remains of snowfall turns into slosh as students blink slowly into sobriety. “Spring Break, Spring Break, Spring Break forever,” an icy voice chants. But good news: that creepy voice just might have its demands met. A mysterious streaming platform called Blackpills has, per Deadline, now committed to distributing a scripted micro-episodic series based on Harmony Korine’s 2012 hyper-stylized meditation of life, love and spring break that starred James Franco, Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens.
The production company behind Spring Breakers, Fernando Sulichin and Chris Hanley’s Muse Productions (Buffalo ’66, Virgin Suicides), are more than thrilled. Hanley excitedly tells Deadline that the proposed micro-episode format is “the future of digital media.” Korine, on the other hand, has asserted his lack of interest in the project: busy, as he is, in gathering funding for various movies that have yet to see the light of production. Beach Bum, the latest, just tapped Matthew McConaughey as a lead and allegedly begins shooting in July.
But Korine also had little interest in attempts to make a more conventional Spring Breakers: The Second Coming, which had begun development back in 2014. In his wake, Jonas Åkerlund, who once made a few music videos for Beyoncé, was set to direct and noted novelist Irvine Welsh on hand to write. It already had a plot involving its titular vacationers doing “battle with an extreme militant extremist sect that attempts to convert them.” Activity around the sequel seemed to fade shortly after James Franco lambasted any Spring Breakers sequel that did not have Korine as its head as a “poison ship” and predicted that “it will be a terrible film, with a horrible reason d’être.”
While Franco has not yet commented on the potential of a Spring Breakers series, also sans Korine, its unlikely he will come on board given his upcoming work on Alien: Covenant, a starring role in an adaptation of sleazy pick-up book The Game, or maybe that doctorate in English Literature I don’t believe he ever got around to finishing at Yale. It’s worth noting that one of the most beloved examples of a TV series spun out of a movie, Larry Gelbart’s M*A*S*H, literally had other less famous people playing the same characters on the smaller screen. If the production team has any sense, they’ll get Pitchfork-reviewed rapper Riff Raff to take Franco’s role, since he believed Franco’s character was based on him, anyway.
A more interesting question would be: what is Blackpills? Their website reveals nothing more informative or less ominous than a floating logo on an otherwise black page. But last year, Video Inkhad reported that “For months, murmurs of a new French buyer and millennial distribution platform have been circulating the industry.” The buyer turned out to be Xavier Niel, a billionaire who founded France’s fourth-largest mobile carrier and, for some reason, once bought the rights to the Frank Sinatra song “My Way.” The ‘millennial distribution platform’ that he had cooked up was called Blackpills. Helming this millennial falcon is a fella by the name of Daniel Marhely, who founded something called Deezer, which is like Spotify but French.
Billing itself as a ‘mobile-first streaming destination,’ Blackpills hit the ground running last year with a 13-episode series called You Got Trumped, written and directed by Canadian comedian Derek Harvie (Freddy Got Fingered) an imagining, back in October, the first hundred days of a hypothetical Trump presidency. While the writing is pretty trash, it is very well produced for a web-series (Video Ink reported that Blackpills was shilling something like $100,000 per three or four-minute episode). They even got a mildly respected Canadian comedian, Ron Sparks, to play Chris Christie, who one imagined would have been compensated for his early support and not currently hoping to land a gig on sports radio. It’s also kind of surreal to watch, given it currently being the first hundred days of a Trump presidency. Knock yourself out.
A hypothetical Trump cabinet in Blackpill’s You Got Trumped, starring John Di Domenico.
Watching these bad Trump jokes on YouTube, you might wonder whatever happened to the whole ‘mobile-first’ element of the story. The riotous success of (fake) President Trump was supposed to lay the ground work for Blackpill’s January rollout but that obviously didn’t happen. Now, it appears, the very-edgy website is planning on using a Spring Breakers adaptation as a jumping off point along with a curious holster of series from other odd ends of the cinematic universe. These include a series called Killer’s School helmed by Luc Besson (Lucy) about kids who to become killers and Junior by Zoe Cassavetes (Broken English). All of these are being marketed as cool, edgy ‘mobile native’ miniature-length serials; meat to be consumed, I take it, while on the go like a meal compressed in snack bar form. However, as The A.V. Club notes, at least one of the features that Blackpill claims to be dishing out, Sebastien Landry’s Game Of Death, already played at last week’s SXSW, leading some to wonder if the format will just be an odd and chunky way of distributing movies. Weirder still, Blackpills just signed a deal with Vice to exclusively distribute their content via their video hub. Which means the whole mobile thing might not be working out.
The whole mini-episode format, as a way to reach millennials with those silly attention spans that can no longer handle the old-fashioned twenty-two minutes, has an interesting history. While websites like YouTube and its clones have built empires of bank by hosting viral short videos and series, the internet teams with the corpses of its failed peers. AOL famously tried to get back into the game of being cool by launching a bevy of short ten-minutes or less programs, one of which starred Steve Buscemi and won an Emmy. Now they vaguely hope Netflix will buy it off them. Even the less-lame Verizon’s attempt at short, edgy fun, Go90 — home to Megyn Kelly’s show about casual sex and journalism that I reviewed — is now being referred to as “pretty much dead.” Will Blackpill, with a name that immediately brings to mind some lost misogynist subreddit, win the hearts and minds of our diminished attention spans? Can a mini-episode, mini-Spring Breakers really out-preform this gif?
“I wanted somebody to plausibly just beat the shit out of me.”
Live By Night (2016)
Commentator: Ben Affleck (director, writer, actor), Robert Richardson (cinematographer), Jess Gonchor (production designer)
1. “Hey this is Ben Affleck,” he says, and he sounds exhausted.
2. The opening title sequence was meant to establish Joe Coughlin’s (Affleck) backstory “so we could get going with the film right from the jump.”
3. He wanted the opening robbery to be done in one shot “without feeling like it was one shot so that it wasn’t self-conscious and we weren’t pointing to the fact.”
4. The eternally great Titus Welliver appears briefly as the man in the barbershop chair shot in the back of the head. “I cut out his other scene.”
5. The woman who stabs a guy at the 5:25 mark is a stunt performer who doubles as Black Widow in the Marvel movies. He stumbles a bit saying the word “Marvel.”
6. “Sienna was great, and she so doesn’t look like Sienna in other movies.” This is actually the moment I realized that was Sienna Miller here as Emma.
7. The falling snow is done via CG, and when one of the guys compliments its look and how it even appears to land and melt. “Yeah, the first time it didn’t,” says Affleck suggesting he had words with the effects folk, “but by the time it was finished it landed.”
8. Affleck cast Italian actor Remo Girone as the mob boss saying he “liked that he wouldn’t be known to American audiences so he might be a little more scary and foreboding.”
9. The big puddle they drive through at 17:17 which splashes up is a CG effect. They don’t explain why it was added, but it’s one of many digital touches during the car chase. “We did a lot of digital clean ups with this because we’re driving by places and there’s all kinds of signs and there’s traffic lights and bullshit like that we had to take out, so it was very arduous.”
10. The fuel tank in these cars was placed towards the front “so they were prone to catching fire.”
11. The original cut ran around two hours and fifty minutes.
12.Chris Messina gained forty pounds to play Dion Bartolo.
13. The exterior porch scene at the dance hall on the river in Florida was originally meant to be shot on a real exterior, but the bug situation made it impossible so they used a green screen instead.
14. He says shooting a scene with a burning cross and Klan members in their hooded uniforms made him realize how terrifying the real thing must have been.
15. The bit between Joe and Dion arguing about who shot who was improvised.
16. They neglect to mention the guy who looks like Wes Bentley sitting in the front row of Loretta’s (Elle Fanning) first sermon, but they do point out Taylor Swift’s brother, Austin Swift, who plays her friend Mayweather at the second.
17. He says he would have dialed back the commentary regarding the power struggle between white Protestants and immigrants had he known that Trump would be elected. They recorded the commentary on his inauguration day.
18. “I never mentioned it to you,” says Richardson, “but you know that’s a green screen out that door.” Affleck responds with a shocked “Out what door?!” before laughing about it. It’s a very visible green screen (once it’s been pointed out) over Graciela’s (Zoe Saldana) shoulder during her talk with Joe around the 1:37:00 mark. Visible as in no image has been laid over it. “It just plays as night.”
19. Joe’s reunion with Emma originally showed her with much heavier make-up, but audiences “were really like freaked out by it.” He says it was authentic to the period, but they ended up toning it down digitally.
20. This is Affleck’s favorite of his own movies. “Everything about it was so much harder to do and required so much more elaborate work.”
Best in Context-Free Commentary
“I didn’t want to have them say ‘live by night’ here so they just said ‘sleep by day’ and let the audience fill in the blank.”
“This is the most realistic part of it which is how impossible it is to get these cars to get in the right gear. You had to vaguely guess where the gear was.”
“I thought if we had someone from the Marvel Universe it would help our box office.”
“I was never a fan of the prison cap, but they told me it was realistic.”
“If you don’t know what to do always start the scene reading the paper.”
“I really love this movie.”
“Trying to get this kid to play with me was like the hardest part of the movie.”
Final Thoughts
Live By Night is Affleck’s first real misstep as a filmmaker in many ways as he allows the narrative to drag and meander a bit too much. We don’t get as close to these characters as we need to for their eventual story turns to pay off, but there’s no denying Affleck’s passion for the project. His commentary reveals both a love and knowledge of films — as well as the abundance of CG work in the film, most of which is seamless — and hopefully he jumps back in the director’s chair soon.
