Sigourney Weaver updates the long-gestating project from James Cameron.
People have been talking about Avatar 2 (and 3, and 4, and 5…) since before James Cameron’s first installment was even released way back in 2009, but in the eight-year interval all we’ve really heard about the project are excuses and other stalling tactics. Things seemed to get a little more definitive about a year or so ago when Av2 was given a Christmas Day 2018 release date, but only a few months ago word came that the film likely wouldn’t make that date, as it hasn’t even started filming yet.
But now, according to Sigourney Weaver, one of the actors in the film, Cameron and crew are finally ready to start cameras rolling … in a few more months … probably.
At a recent screening Weaver was asked about the film and said the following:
We’re starting! We’re starting training, and we’re starting … hmm, I probably can’t say anything. We will be actually shooting it by the fall.
Okay — a grain-of-salt reality check here. This is not the first time an Avatar cast member spoke erroneously about start dates. In 2015 Zoe Saldana said pretty much the same thing, indicating the film would start shooting in a year’s time, or as we know it now, last year. That obviously didn’t happen, but Weaver sure sounds confident, and with the particular about training, it would certainly seem as though her claim has credence. And while you might think that a fall 2017 production date could have the film ready for that December 2018 release, remember that probably 80% of whatever Avatar 2 is will be made in post, so add a year to the projection and that seems more likely.
No word on when Avatar 3, 4, or 5 will start production, but Cameron has said before he hopes to release them in 2020, 2022, and 2023, respectively. Time will tell.
…the first trailer for Aubrey Plaza and Elizabeth Olsen’s Sundance sensation Ingrid Goes West finally dropped…
…as did the first trailer for the restored version of The Graduate, which is being brought to 700 theaters nationwide by TCM later this year…
…and Twin Peaks co-creator, who last year released the found-document novel The Secret History of Twin Peaks, is apparently going to follow the third season with another novel, this one to be released on Halloween and entitled Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier.
Over in our corner of the internet we had a lot of really interesting posts go up yesterday, including some non-news news on the new Doctor Who companion, an analysis of the titles for American Gods, Jacob Oller’s review of the Netflix original movie The Discovery, a hilarious video examining for The Room director blocks a scene, and the newest episode of our podcast After the Credits.
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.
TO THE WONDER (2012) DP: Emmanuel Lubezki | Dir: Terrence MalickAKIRA (1988) DP: Katsuji Misawa | Dir: Katsuhiro OhtomoDEATH PROOF (2007) Shot and directed by Quentin TarantinoTHIS IS SPINAL TAP (1984) DP: Peter Smokler | Dir: Rob ReinerINFERNO (1980) DP: Romano Albani | Dir: Dario Argento
One of the greatest tricks Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has yet to play on audiences is the illusion that Birdman (OR: The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is a single-take film. A cursory watch of the film will convince you that it is an uninterrupted narrative stream in which every actor always hits their mark and every millisecond of timing works out perfectly. In reality, though, while the shoot was built on extended sequences, like Hitchcock’s Rope, another purported single-take film, there are cuts hidden throughout Birdman, places where Inarritu and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki trick your eyes into thinking the scenes are seamless when truly they are snippets so masterfully sewn together you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
Unless you know what you’re looking for, that is, like editor Harrison Edgecombe does; he’s put together the following montage revealing, in his own surreptitious way, the cuts in Birdman. You still have to work to see them, Edgecombe’s is an unnarrated video that relies solely on footage and audio from the film, but I promise you the cuts are there, in every fully-black screen, every seeming push zoom or whip pan, and every opening door.
It’s a treasure hunt to be sure, one where the valuables are the grace and wit with which Inarritu composes the fragments of his film, and the care he takes to try and convince us that the result is an unfragmented whole.
What is it? A bus driver writes poetry in his spare time about the world and stuff.
Why see it? The brief summation above is pretty much accurate in describing the whole of Jim Jarmusch’s latest, but it doesn’t begin to capture the warmth, humor, and humanity the film delivers. Adam Driver plays the title role and creates a character far removed from the easily antagonized and disgruntled ones he’s best known for. His Paterson is a simple man of simple pleasures, but while most films would mock or sideline him here he’s embraced. Even better, his demeanor and perception of the world are remarkably calming and infectious too. The movie feels like it should be boring you to tears, but the performances, the beauty, and the pure affection for life leave you feeling anything but.
What is it? A small Southern town has the misfortune of welcoming a malevolent demon into its midst, and only Dolph Lundgren can stop it.
Why see it? It’s always great when a movie surpasses your expectations, and Mike Mendez’s (Big Ass Spider!) latest does just that with a ridiculously fun mix of laughs, brutal violence, and gore. Lundgren is having a good time, and the feeling’s contagious watching him try to outsmart a demon that leaps from body to body, like Fallen, but in a very specific way — when the host body is killed the demon moves into the person who killed it. It’s clever and works to create some intriguing situations, and that element of smarts plays well alongside the humor and bloodletting.
What is it? A ragtag band of rebels join together to steal the plans for the evil Empire’s newest weapon.
Why see it? The first standalone Star Wars movie tackles the actual theft of the Death Star plans that leads directly into the opening of the first film (A New Hope), and while the ending is inevitable the journey is filled with intriguing characters and thrilling action sequences that excite and invigorate. Felicity Jones headlines a strong cast including Diego Luna, Donnie Yen, Ben Mendelsohn, Forest Whitaker, Mads Mikkelsen, and others, and they work together to bring something of a Dirty Dozen vibe into outer space. I would have loved a commentary for the film, but for now at least we’ll have to settle with an extensive set of featurettes exploring the characters, locales, and story.
What is it? Obnoxious young men make prank calls, but the tables turn when a sadistic killer targets them with games of his own.
Why see it? It’s undeniably impressive just how well the film recovers from its irritatingly obnoxious and terribly-charactered first act to become a thrilling and suspenseful little morality tale that owes a minor debt to the likes of Saw and Scream. But good lord is it a rough beginning. Directors Damien Macé and Alexis Wajsbrot do serviceable work early on, but just as the script picks up during the second act so does the direction. Suspenseful beats are played well through close-ups, smart reveals, and an appreciation of genre expectations that still allows for a surprise or two. We have a vague suspicion of the killer’s motivations before they’re actually shared, but it doesn’t hurt the film’s execution and momentum as it heads toward a solidly satisfying conclusion.
What is it? A young orphan finds joy amid the beauties of nature and the love of her grandfather.
Why see it? Johanna Spyri’s beloved novel has been adapted for the screen (big and small) dozens of times, and while this German production isn’t as personable or memorable as some of the better known ones (shout out to Shirley Temple) it’s still a solidly entertaining one. The landscapes and joyfulness are precious to behold even if the lead performance is maybe a bit too precious, and fans of the story will be well-served by this latest incarnation.
What is it? An office Christmas party gets out of control.
Why see it? Jason Bateman, TJ Miller, Olivia Munn, Kate McKinnon, Jennifer Aniston, and a bunch of familiar comedy faces appear in this new ensemble romp, but it’s never as funny as that cast promises. Far too many of the gags are obvious or amplified to extreme degrees for comedic effect, and none of the character moments or relations amount to anything either. These are reliable talents, but their collaboration is lacking a guiding hand ensuring that the story and dialogue are funny and in support of these performers.
What is it? A group of soldiers on the run take refuge inside an abandoned tank, but as the hours tick by the truth behind their enemy comes clearer.
Why see it? The horror at work here is every bit as psychological as it is physical as the situation and confined space leads to madness and murder. Something awaits them outside, but terrible things are at play inside as well. Performances are solid, but viewers never feel the claustrophobic terror of the characters despite their constant yelling at each other. Similarly, the jump scares that terrify them fail to frighten us, and worse, the end reveal feels a bit underwhelming.
What is it? A criminal in the hospital for surgery has his violent, trigger-happy friends attempt a rescue.
Why see it? In the grand tradition of John Carpenter’s Ghost of Mars and Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones comes a complete letdown from an otherwise master filmmaker. Johnnie To’s latest sets up a conflict in a hospital ward, but while the villain is suitably evil the hero cop and smart female doctor are absolutely worthless. Not even the action can save it, and that’s typically To’s go-to move.
[Blu-ray/DVD extras: Making of]
Also Out This Week:
The Evil Within, Invasion of the Bee Girls [Scream Factory], Psycho Circus, We Don’t Belong Here, We Go On, Youth in Oregon
We can learn a number of things from Disney’s smash animated hit.
Crowning Disney’s Zootopia my favorite film of 2016 has earned me a reasonable amount of polite mockery among the film fan community. Granted, there was a high number of outstanding motion pictures released last year, but unlike the traditional Disney tropes we’ve seen in offerings like Frozen or Moana (often retooled emotional beats from their classic animation era), Zootopia was somewhat of a unique offering for audiences who paid attention. Before we proceed, let it be on the record that it won every best animated feature prize on the awards circuit, held a near-perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes and was included in the American Film Institute’s top 10 films of the year. Thus, I’d like to believe that several film experts out there also saw something more in what appeared to be another run-of-the-mill kids movie.
The first half of the film carries what is perhaps the most overused of all family film clichés: that you must listen to your heart and follow your dreams no matter what. More interestingly, the second half dives into identity politics and the importance of tolerance in lieu of fearing those who are different. The political undertone isn’t subtle as both the presumed and surprise villains happen to be politicians. As demonstrated in several countries, one can rise to power by deceitfully promoting a doctrine of racial segregation as a supposed means to keep people safe. No need to provide an example of a reality show mogul who did just that because you’re all thinking of him already.
The two story elements cited above, along with impressively detailed execution, solid voice acting and memorable jokes that land, makes Zootopia a satisfying entry into Disney’s animated slate. What fascinated me about it, however, is the special connection that sparks between its protagonists — bunny officer Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) and con artist fox Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman). The banter that goes back-and-forth between the two and the choices they make that ultimately impact each other’s self-worth is perhaps the best depiction of a true friendship we’ve had on the big screen since 1969’s Midnight Cowboy.
Friendships in movies are often portrayed as the amusing and carefree by-product of wild adventures where a common addition of complimentary strengths takes place. On-screen duos who develop unlikely bonds will often annoy each other at first, find themselves in situations of extreme danger and ultimately prove to care for one another by the time the credits roll. That’s precisely what happens with Judy and Nick in Zootopia except for one important distinction: a deeply crafted exploration of vulnerability as an essential component to a lasting friendship.
When they confront each other in their initial conversations, the emphasis remains on their need to be respected. Nick brags about his encyclopedic knowledge of the city’s inner workings and his striving popsicle business, while Judy attempts to reinforce her authority as a police officer despite her lack of seniority and her less-than-intimidating frame. The key to their relationship comes later in the film as they slowly reveal their full selves to each other.
What Nick finds endearing about Judy is how completely out of reach her goals and aspirations are considering the limitations she displays on the surface, and while being forced to collaborate with her on a case, he slowly finds himself invested in her success. Despite his cynical ways, he stands up for her in front of the police chief to protect her dignity while she’s having a moment of self-doubt and humiliation in front of her peers. “Don’t ever let them see that they get to you.” he says to her, thus establishing that it’s acceptable to show vulnerability around him.
Judy reciprocates by inviting Nick to fill out an application and become her partner, which he finds deeply moving since he suffered from being rejected as a child and had considered himself a social outcast ever since. Like plenty of cynics out there, his slick and discouraging attitude had served as a protective shield to prevent him from further being hurt and Judy’s unshakeable optimism paired with her acceptance towards him slowly worked as a healing antidote to his emotional wounds. He incrementally reacts to her kindness by letting go of his hardened defense mechanisms and reintroduce his fragile self out into the world.
Just as Nick feels ready to accept her invitation and start seeking honest fulfillment out of his life while providing their friendship with more proximity, the two have a misunderstanding that sets them apart. At that moment, Judy realizes that her progressive attitude towards equality was rather conveniently progressive (like many so-called liberals in modern society) and that she didn’t fully accept him for who he was. She inadvertently ends up hurting him and goes on to offer him a heartfelt apology.
Perhaps the greatest display of vulnerability in any social construct consists of expressing how you feel after the other party has given up since you run the risk of never finding reciprocity. Too often we may realize that within our inner circles, others will feel compelled to distance themselves when things get messy or complicated for fear of being dragged down themselves. But Nick lets his guard down and admits how much she means to him and just when Zootopia was merely serving us more familiar tropes, it suddenly delivers a reflective moment of caring that feels genuinely earned.
When we come to think of friends we naturally click with, it’s seldom their strengths or accomplishments that makes them so endearing but rather their flaws and shortcomings. We are drawn to the few who can go beyond the cheerful facade we must constantly keep on display and reassure us that we aren’t the only ones coping with life’s struggles. We become closer to them by revealing part of ourselves that could potentially be humiliating to the world, let it be our unachieved dreams, our major regrets and failures, or a general sense of uncertainty about the future that simply makes us human.
If you take it as a figurative lesson in social psychology, Zootopia is bound to stand the test of time and eventually be hailed as an animated classic. As the film cashed in over a billion dollars worldwide, the prospects of a sequel are already in the works and many fans are already “shipping” the leads. In other words, they’re wishing for a romance to emerge between the two which is a direction I hope the filmmakers will choose to avoid. Instead, they should continue to celebrate the sheer beauty of a significantly more rare and precious kind of relationship that will further be tested in order to keep growing.
If you did see Zootopia last year and didn’t think much of it, you may want to revisit it a second time. I suggest you watch it with that one friend you will always care about, and who will always care about you.
You time is valuable, and so are both services for different reasons.
War Machine (Netflix)
Although there may be a competition going on between Amazon and Netflix for subscribers, the truth is that both company’s streaming services are essential for anyone who watches a lot of movies and TV and who wants to be part of the pop culture conversations as they happen.
There’s no denying that Amazon Prime is worth the $99/year, which not only gives you access to many movies but also a good amount of music streaming and digital media access, plus faster shipping for when you actually want some sort of physical product (you can also just get video content for $8.99/month, which oddly means paying more for less).
And Netflix is still a must-have for both its exclusive and nonexclusive content, though depending on one’s usage could be best for sporadic membership rather than continued subscription — now at $120/year, and no savings for loyalty, it’s obviously the much pricier of the two, for just video.
With both Amazon and Netflix being big dealmakers at Sundance and with both announcing new production deals and series all the time, if there is competition, it’s benefiting movie and TV fans in the quality and quantity and variety of fresh, original content available on a regular basis. Here’s what we’ve come to expect and can look forward to from each:
MOVIES
Original Narrative Features
The Wall (Amazon)
Amazon: Definitely the more prestigious of the two labels, especially with its Oscar wins for Manchester by the Sea, Amazon is going after more auteur filmmakers and other well-known directors.
They’ve got new movies coming from Woody Allen (Wonder Wheel), Leo Carax (Annette), Todd Haynes (Wonderstruck), Luca Guadagnino (Suspiria), Richard Linklater (Last Flag Flying), Lynne Ramsay (You Were Never Really Here), Liz Garbus (Lost Girls), Mike White (Brad’s Status), Susanne Bier (Tropicana), and Terry Gilliam (The Man Who Killed Don Quixote).
Plus these films that already have release dates: Terry Zwigoff’s Budding Prospects (in theaters March 17th), James Gray’s The Lost City of Z (in theaters April 21st), Doug Liman’s The Wall (in theaters May 12th), and Marc Webb’s The Only Living Boy in New York (in theaters August 11th).
Amazon also picked up some hot properties at Sundance, such as The Big Sick (out in theaters June 23rd), Crown Heights, and the latest collaboration of Gillian Robespierre and Jenny Slate, Landline (out in theaters July 21st).
Their issue for subscribers is that they are very much focused on theatrical releases, so if anyone wants to see something right way, they still have to go out and pay to see it. And that also goes for when these movies hit Amazon Video; they’re not immediately free for Prime members. The newly released Paterson, for instance, is currently a $6 rental, even if you have Prime.
Sandy Wexler (Netflix)
Netflix: The two biggest pieces of news for Netflix Originals lately has shown how wide-ranging the service is in terms of audience and appeal. One is the extended deal with Adam Sandler, adding four more movies on top of their original order of four. Sandler is so far responsible for Netflix’s two most popular originals ever. His third title, Sandy Wexler, hits Netflix April 14th.
The other big news item is the plan to finish and release the final film by Orson Welles, The Other Side of the Wind. Shot back in the ’70s, this will be a curiosity for the TCM crowd, for sure, but there’s no guarantee that it’s going to be a good movie just because it’s from Welles.
Their other original movies on the way include less famous names, though more women filmmakers. Already this year we got the latest from Emily Hagins (Coin Heist), plus a Bob Oedinkirk comedy (Girlfriend’s Day), and Sundance selections Burning Sands and The Discovery.
Soon we’ll see new work from Tamara Jenkins (Private Life), Angelina Jolie (First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers), Duncan Jones (Mute), McG (The Babysitter), David Wain (A Futile & Stupid Gesture), Mike Flanagan (Gerald’s Game), Joshua Marston (Come Sunday), and Tommy Wirkola (What Happened to Monday?).
And more already with release dates: Joe Swanberg’s Win It All (April 7th), Fernando Coimbra’s Sand Castle (April 21st), Spike Lee’s Rodney King (April 28th), Jeff Garlin’s Handsome: A Netflix Mystery Movie (May 5th), David Michod’s War Machine (May 26th), Bong Joon-ho’s Okja (June 28th), the Marlon Wayans-penned comedy remake Naked (August 11th), Adam Wingard’s Death Note (August 25th), the anime feature Godzilla: Monster Planet (November), and David Ayer’s Bright (December).
Some of those aren’t Netflix productions but were picked up at some point in their development or post-production. Joining them are the dramatic features acquired at Sundance: Berlin Syndrome (releases May 26th), Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower, The Incredible Jessica James, Fun Mom Dinner, Mudbound, My Happy Family, and Marti Noxon’s To the Bone.
Netflix also has a lot in the works coming in 2018 and beyond, such as Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, Jeremy Saulnier’s Hold the Dark, Gareth Evans’s Apostle, and Andrew Dominik’s War Party.
Of course, the great thing about all these releases for subscribers is they hit Netflix first and exclusively, save for something like Ana Lily Amirpour’s The Bad Batch, for which they only have VOD rights. Things could possibly change if the company wants a more competitive edge when it comes to Oscars, though, since they’re required to give contenders a theatrical push.
Documentaries
Long Strange Trip (Amazon)
Amazon: At Sundance, Amazon picked up the acclaimed City of Ghosts(in theaters July 14th) and premiered Amir Bar-Lev’s Grateful Dead film Long Strange Trip, which they also produced.
In addition to older original films like Gleason, Gimme Danger, and I Am Not Your Negro, the last of which is still in theaters, Amazon has a good bunch of essential nonfiction features (see the Nonfics list of 100 must-see docs), including Cameraperson, Stories We Tell, and a ton of Nick Broomfield films.
Also included are a bunch of World War II propaganda films, which is interesting because they offer many that Netflix doesn’t have, in spite of Netflix releasing a new documentary miniseries about such works (see below). For instance, Amazon has all seven of Frank Capra’s Why We Fight docs, whereas Netflix only has two of them.
The main issue with Amazon’s doc selection is they have too much junk mixed in, including informercials and others that probably shouldn’t be classified as docs or even as films, and subscribers likely have a harder time weeding through that stuff to find the good titles while browsing.
Get Me Roger Stone (Netflix)
Netflix: At Sundance, Netflix picked up more docs, including Casting JonBenet (releasing April 28th), Icarus, Chasing Coral, and Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press. They also just announced the timely doc Get Me Roger Stone (releasing May 12th), and the company recently revealed plans to produce and pick up many more nonfiction originals than they have been.
They definitely have more prestige when it comes to docs, having just won an Oscar for their short film The White Helmets. They also had another short, Extremis, and a feature, 13th, nominated this year, and in the past, the Academy nominated their doc features The Square, Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom, Virunga, and What Happened, Miss Simone?
Netflix also more consistently features new doc releases, as well as more must-see classics, currently including a number of Werner Herzog titles (see the Nonfics list of 100 must-see docs). However, more and more are disappearing each month. Also, as noted above, it’s weird they didn’t license more of the World War II films referenced in their new doc series Five Came Back, with their incomplete Why We Fight titles being particularly glaring.
They too have some junk mixed in and continually license very easily sold doc titles, such as those that appeal to specific niches and fandoms. They like foodie docs and true crime films and series, for instance. And if you’re simply browsing without looking for something specific, those basic and conventional nonfiction titles tend to have better placement.
SERIES
I Love Dick (Amazon)
Amazon: One of the graphs made for a CNBC report comparing Amazon to Netflix last year shows how each ranks with critically acclaimed series, and Amazon does have a few very notable titles, namely Transparent, The Man in the High Castle, and Mozart in the Jungle. Not on there but certainly noteworthy is their acquisition title, one of our favorites of last year, Fleabag.
There are also a few that aren’t as successful with the critics and awards groups, like Hand of God, but they do have an interesting process of sharing pilots with subscribers, who can then participate in choosing which go to series, meaning those ongoing shows are presumably going to be popular.
As we criticized recently, however, the latest batch of Amazon pilots are unfortunately not up to snuff. But the previous bunch were all selected for series, including The Tick, Jean-Claude Van Johnson, and I Love Dick, which is from Transparent creator Jill Solloway and debuts May 12th.
Like with their movie plans, Amazon is also very interested in auteur television. They’re not only continuing to work with Solloway, who additionally has a limited series about an all-women’s rodeo in the works, but also Yorgos Lanthimos, who is doing an Iran-Contra Affair show, Nicolas Winding Refn (Too Old to Die Young), Barry Jenkins (The Underground Railroad), and David O. Russell, who is doing a mafia-based series.
Also in the future, we can expect series based on Philip K. Dick’s work, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan books, and the movies Tremors, The Departed, and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.
Dear White People (Netflix)
Netflix: That CNBC graph shows that Netflix had the most acclaimed series of the bunch with Masters of None and a lot more series in general. They definitely seem to have the more talked-about shows, likely because more people have Netflix, and many of the series that wind up in the zeitgeist, such as Stranger Things, The OA, and now 13 Reasons Why, seem to drop out of nowhere.
Others have been big awards contenders, like Orange is the New Black, House of Cards, and The Crown, the prestige of which keeps them going strong with fans, and their continued seasons being among the most anticipated TV programs of each year. And like with their Welles acquisition, Netflix has also been favored for picking up TV orphans, such as Arrested Development, which could return, and the new Mystery Science Theater 3000 revival.
But Netflix also clearly has more series that aren’t acclaimed or award-worthy, like the very popular but very mediocre sitcom reboot Fuller House. We can add to that the latest Marvel series, Iron Fist, which is disappointing given that the MCU franchise shows on Netflix started out so promising. Hopefully for their sake and viewers’, The Defenders will turn things around.
As for the future, besides the hit series that will eventually have to end, Netflix has tons of exciting possibilities on the way, including the Mary Harron-helmed Margaret Atwood adaptation Alias Grace, the Cary Joji Fukunaga-directed Maniac miniseries, a reboot of Lost in Space, and shows based on Spy Kids and Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It.
Plus there are those with very near upcoming release dates: Dear White People, which is based on the movie (April 28th), Niki Caro’s “Anne of Green Gables” adaptation, Anne (May 12th), GLOW, from OitNB’s Jenji Kohan and based on the real-life women’s wrestlers of the 1980s (June 23rd), and the David Fincher-produced Mindhunter (due in October).
Netflix also tends to have decent nonfiction series, including the new Five Came Back and the true crime hit Making a Murderer, and quality animated series, which is fortunate for parents given how easily used and easily controlled the service can be for young children. Of course, the next big series at Netflix is probably, like Stranger Things, something nobody even knows about right now.
The game-changing series gets a succinct and gorgeous tribute.
If you missed Noah Hawley’s Legion on FX, you missed one of the greatest television series to come along since, well, Noah Hawley’s Fargo. Not only is Legion an inventive take on the Marvel Comics’ character it’s based on, it’s also a new kind of “superhero” story, one that places fragile humanity ahead of indestructible superhumanity, one that delves into the cursed psyche of the genetically blessed, one that emphasizes how not all heroes are born heroic, and one that reveals the power — great or small — derived from mastering our personal flaws.
Besides being a fascinating narrative game of Chutes and Ladders played on a Moebius Strip between two mirrors, and in addition to featuring career-altering performances from Dan Stevens (Beauty and the Beast), Rachel Keller (Fargo), Bill Irwin (Interstellar), Jean Smart (Designing Women) and Aubrey Plaza (Parks & Rec) — who is “Alex DeLarge,” “Hannibal Lecter,” “Darth”-fucking-“Vader” good here — Legion is also, for my money at least, the most visually dynamic drama currently on television, one that successfully manages to capture multiple realms of being — physical, metaphysical, and mental — in distinct yet complementary ways. I for one never found myself marveling at the “effects” of Legion, rather at the splendor of its universe in total, which is a credit, I think, to how the visuals integrated themselves into the storyline, and how they created the real environment of the series: the intangible, invisible mysteries of a mind in distress.
If you missed Legion, I implore you with all my meager credentials to leave here now and remedy that.
But if you have seen Legion, then like me you’re going to enjoy the hell out of the following tribute video from editor Adrian Conlon. Normally I don’t post tribute videos, as they don’t tend to offer any particular insight or delve into interesting techniques, but when a show is as captivating and masterful, both narratively and visually, as Legion is, really any chance I get to put some of it in front of your eyes, I’m going to.
Legion is currently available On Demand and over at FX’s website.It’s also available for pre-order at an awesomely-low price on DVD and Blu-Ray over at Amazon.
What the two alien invasion films tell us about existential questions.
Ever since H.G. Wells released “The War of the Worlds” in 1898, the alien invasion genre has become a vehicle for humanity’s fears, questions, and aspirations. Although at the time that novel was thought to be a metaphor for the superstitions of the Victorian age, the story proved universal enough to apply to any era; from anxieties about Nazism when Orson Welles read it as a radio play in 1938, to Cold War nightmares when Byron Haskin adapted it into a film 1953, to worries about the War on Terror when Steven Spielberg did the same in 2005. But beyond merely reflecting the terrestrial fears of any particular time, the genre also addresses more universal questions — about life, death, and humanity’s place in the cosmos. Two of this century’s best alien invasion films — M. Night Shyamalan’s Signsand Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival — take precisely this existential approach, but the two films arrive at very different answers to the grand questions they pose. Taken side by side, they represent opposite, if equally human, ways of finding meaning.
Both Signs and Arrival find their lead characters facing tremendous personal tragedy, a time when existential questions are especially salient. Mel Gibson’s Graham Hess is a former reverend who has lost his faith after the death of his wife, while Amy Adams’s Louise Banks is a linguist grappling with the premature death of her daughter. (We later learn that Louise’s daughter’s death occurs in the future, but given the structure of the film the effect is identical.) Already in these films’ respective setups, a dichotomy is posed: the man of faith in Signs, and the woman of science in Arrival. Moreover, each character is bolstered by a foil who crystallizes his/her crisis of meaning. In Signs, it’s Merrill Hess (Joaquin Phoenix), Graham’s reverential younger brother, who tells him, “one of the things I can’t take is when my older brother, who’s everything I wants to be, starts losing faith in things.” In Arrival, it’s Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), a theoretical physicist (and future father of her child) who tells her, “language isn’t the foundation of civilization, science is.”
Both films also stick rigorously to the perspective of their lead characters, filtering the global import of alien invasion through the prism of individual grief. They also distinguish themselves from a film like War of the Worlds in their humility of scale; rather than depicting toppling skyscrapers and exploding White Houses, they confine themselves to small, particular worlds. Shyamalan put it this way to the BBC:
“It’s about this little family living on this little farm and they see all these things on TV. For them, that’s what the world outside their farm is because they live a very isolated existence. We never leave the farm so we get sucked into their world. Mel’s character was a reverend and he’s having all these issues about faith and belief.”
“It’s an alien invasion, but told from an intimate point of view, by this person who’s in mourning and dealing with strong emotions in her life, and who suddenly is thrust into this momentous event. So it’s about aliens but also a mother-daughter story.”
Our perspective on the cosmic is always and inevitably our perspective on the personal. In the case of Signs, Graham has come to view his wife’s death as a symbol of the callous indifference of the universe. No loving God, he surmises, could allow his wife to be hit and killed by a sleeping driver. Her final words to him, a jumble of strange requests and cryptic phrases, epitomize the meaningless randomness of the cosmic order. He explains, “People break down into two groups…See what you have to ask yourself is what kind of person are you? Are you the kind that sees signs, sees miracles? Or do you believe that people just get lucky?” After his wife’s death, Graham’s perspective on the matter is solidified: “there is no one watching out for us,” he tells Merrill firmly.
But by film’s end, he makes a reversal. Confronted with a vindictive alien in the film’s climax, Graham recalls his wife’s final words, which prove to be prescient instructions of what to do to save his family. Vagaries of chance, like his son’s asthma and his daughter’s habit of leaving glasses of water around the house, prove to be Graham’s saving graces: the former prevents the alien’s poison from entering the child’s lungs, while the latter turns out the be the creature’s greatest weakness. The moment is less a defense of Christianity in particular than of faith in general. As Shyamalan put it in an interview with UPI, “For some reason, I just keep pounding away at this until I get it myself, which is kind of a guy waking up to his potential and who he is and the things around him.” Seen in this way, faith is not about belief but about perspective — choosing to see meaning, and thereby finding it. Before they learn that water is the aliens’ weakness, Merrill hears on the radio that the aliens were beaten back through “some primitive means.” One could argue this means was faith itself, humanity’s first method of coping with the hostility of our primal circumstance.
In Arrival, Louise’s transformation is less about finding meaning in death than about accepting it. When her fluency in the aliens’ time-transcending language allows her to see her daughter’s death in the future, she’s made vividly aware of the circumstance in which we all find ourselves. “You know you’re going to die,” Villeneuve explained to The Verge, “I know I’m going to die. I have three kids. What can happen right now? I need to trust life, I need to embrace life…That’s the way I see it, personally.” Villeneuve’s faith in life is less about “signs” than about presence; it’s a kind of Eastern/Buddhist compliment to Signs’ Western/Christian view. While in Signs the aliens are demonic representations of the hostility of the universe, in Arrival they are embodiments of both nature and mortality. “For me, the movie was about a woman having a new relationship with death and changing her perspective on her own life,” Villeneuve told The Verge, “and finding a new humility going through that process…being in contact with our finality, and being more in contact with our nature, I think we’ll find that humility.”
These philosophies are echoed the filmmakers’ distinct approach to the design of the aliens themselves. In Signs, the creatures are anthropomorphized, shaped like humans but with chameleonic skin and poison gas emanating from their wrists. They are the symbols of a natural world channeled through the lens of human anxieties, constrained by the human imagination. Just as ancient religions embodied the diffuse evils of nature into recognizable forms, so Shyamalan build villains that conform to his characters’ particular fears. It is no accident that the aliens’ language in Signs mimics the clicking vocalizations of ancient tribes, nor that what kills them is the same element that gives humans life: water. These aliens are primal manifestations of human fear.
In Arrival, by contrast, the aliens are unrecognizable in both physicality and language. They are embodiments of the mystery of nature, literally alien to human perceptual faculties. Villeneuve’s operating principle in their design was simple: death. “[Death] was the idea that inspired the way the spaceships would look, the way the aliens would look, the way they will express themselves,” he told Gold Derby. All elements, down to “the quality of their presence,” were tailored to this end. For a movie ostensibly about translation and understanding, the film ends with a great deal of mystery about the aliens’ origins. Their message, such as it is, reduces to an understanding of death’s reality. This alone, the film suggests, is enough to instill in one’s life a sense of preciousness and love.
Signs and Arrival may be very different films, but both are intimately concerned with the way humans make meaning of their fragile existence in the cosmos. While individual viewers may gravitate to one or the other perspective, both films represent the ways in which we as a species have learned to make sense of, and perhaps make peace with, our fragile existence. This is what stories in general and sci-fi in particular can offer: a human lens on cosmic questions. What you have to ask yourself is…what type of person are you?
One man’s letter of complaint is today’s side-splitting short film selection.
As the description of The Saurus tells us, this short film is the story of “a man with a robust vocabulary” who “must write a scornful letter to an old friend.” What the description doesn’t tell us, but we learn in the film’s opening moments, is that the old friend in question is Rexall Brand Anal Ointment, and the scorn derives from a dissatisfaction with the product’s effects. What follows is an uproarious seven-minute soliloquy of loyalty and disappointment, heartbreak and uncomfortable itching.
The Saurus comes from the mind of writer-director Drew Maynard, a Nashville-based filmmaker, and was selected for showcase by a score of film festivals over the last year, including this year’s SXSW in Austin and last year’s Nashville Film Festival, where it won the Tennessee Horizon Audience Award. Aaron Muñoz stars as our droll and disaffected narrator with the posterior problems, and his deadpan delivery and flat, almost expressionless ire makes the already-absurd concept of The Saurus into a delightfully delusional experience. Caleb Dirks provides the cinematography, which creates an air of sophistication, albeit silly, and the complementary original score comes courtesy of Markus Midkiff.
Treat yourself to The Saurus, it’s a wordy wormhole of hilarity.
P.S. The tone, atmosphere, and particular humor of this film reminded me of a feature film I hadn’t thought of in a while, Sol Tryon’s The Living Wake. Check that out as well if you can get your hands on it.
The European filmmaker directed a series of deceptively complex melodramas in the 1950s.
“This is the dialectic — there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art” — Douglas Sirk
Douglas Sirk was born in Germany in 1900, and began his career in the early 1920s working in theater. In 1922, he directed his first production — an adaptation of Hermann Bossdorf’s Stationmaster Death, and from then on he became one of the most respected theater directors in Weimar Germany. Then, in 1934, he took a job as a film director at Ufa, the biggest studio in Germany at the time.
In 1941, Sirk left Germany and began working as a director in Hollywood. His early films, such as the WWII drama Hitler’s Madman (1942) have largely been forgotten. These early films varied in genre — he directed war films (Mystery Submarine), historical dramas (A Scandal in Paris), film noirs (Lured and Sleep, My Love), and even a musical comedy (Slightly French). Even though these films did not achieve massive critical or commercial success, they still represent Sirk’s growing talent as a filmmaker working within the Hollywood studio system. By 1950, he had been signed to Universal International, and began working on films with bigger budgets and with A-list stars, such as Rock Hudson, Dorothy Malone, and Lauren Bacall.
From 1954 to 1959, Sirk directed a series of Technicolor melodramas for Universal that were considered “weepies” or “women’s pictures”. The most famous of these melodramas (and the ones I will be focusing on) are Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Written on the Wind(1956), and Imitation of Life (1959). The term “women’s picture” was used to refer to Hollywood melodramas, usually stories filled with romance, tragedy, soaring music, and lots of on-screen crying. It is a derisive term used to dismiss cinema thought to appeal to women, as these films are considered frivolous, unrealistic, and overly emotional. The way that melodramas/women’s pictures were looked down upon is similar to the sexist way that modern-day soap operas and “chick flicks” are dismissed and mocked, mostly by men.
However, as Ken Feil writes in his article “Ambiguous Sirk Camp-Stances: Gay Camp and the 1950s Melodramas of Douglas Sirk”, in the 1970s, critics began to re-evaluate Sirk’s films, elevating him to the status of brilliant auteur, rather than simply a director of worthless women’s pictures. Feil notes that these auteurist critics — such as Andrew Sarris of Screen magazine — focused on Sirk’s camerawork and editing, ignoring the female-centric stories and identifying only with the straight, white male director. By focusing only on Sirk’s technical brilliance, the 1970s critics engage with the misogynistic hierarchy that sees male auteurs as creators of “high art”, and women who enjoy melodramas as lovers of “low art”.
Written on the Wind
The critical re-evaluation of Sirk’s films continued throughout the 1980s, with feminist critics who began to shine a spotlight on these melodramas, and their female protagonists. Laura Mulvey writes that feminist critics worked to reclaim the genre of melodrama, with its focus on interiority, domestic spaces, and female sexual desire. Ken Feil notes that along with feminist critics, queer critics began pointing out the campy aspects of Sirk’s films, as well as the possible homosexual subtext surrounding Rock Hudson’s performances. What these critics did was bring attention to the subversive aspects of Sirk’s melodramas that are not immediately apparent. He covertly critiqued the Hollywood system from within, using over-the-top images, stories, and sounds to both distract audiences and call attention to the way Hollywood films work.
In 1969, Cahiers du Cinema critics Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni wrote their famous essay, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism”, outlining the different ways ideology works within cinema, and how directors and critics can work against it. They divided films into a number of categories, based on their relationship to the dominant ideology of Hollywood/America as a whole. Category A is the most common — these are films completely imbued with the dominant ideology, seemingly unaware of this fact. These films embrace the established mode of depicting “reality”, and are not critical or even aware of this fact. Category B denotes films which attack their ideological assimilation through both form and content (usually the content is political and the form is more experimental).
The most interesting category, and the one relevant to this discussion, is Category E. Comolli and Narboni write that Category E films seem at first sight to be firmly within the dominant ideology and under its sway, but on second glance are ambiguous and critical towards dominant modes of representation. These films throw up obstacles in the way of ideology, and cause it to swerve off course. The authors write that “an internal criticism is taking place which cracks the film apart at the seams” — if one looks at these films obliquely, one can see past the apparent formal coherence and see the “cracks”. Category E filmmakers corrode ideology by restating it in the terms of their films — they disrupt its reflection. Comolli and Narboni name Carl Theodor Dreyer, John Ford, and Roberto Rossellini as Category E filmmakers. Douglas Sirk fits perfectly into this category as well.
Magnificent Obsession
In 1954, Sirk directed Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson in Magnificent Obsession, which had previously been made into a film in 1935. This Technicolor drama tells the story of Helen Phillips (Wyman), whose husband dies of a heart attack due to the reckless actions of a local rich man named Bob Merrick (Hudson). He attempts to make amends with her but ends up accidentally causing her to walk into the road, where she is hit by a car and blinded. Since she cannot see, Merrick uses this to his advantage and becomes close to her, and the two eventually fall in love.
This is obviously a melodramatic story, and Sirk brilliantly directs this tale of betrayal, heartache, and romance. Wyman’s character, typical of a Sirk protagonist, is strong-willed and independent. Her resiliency and intelligence represent one of the “cracks” within this standard Hollywood picture. Sirk always makes sure his films focus on women who know what they want, follow their desires, and never give up or complain when extraordinarily dramatic things happen to them. Even though Helen was recently widowed, she allows herself to fall in love with the mysterious stranger she meets when she is blinded. This is undoubtedly a standard heterosexual Hollywood romance, but Sirk slightly subverts the norm by allowing his female character to be an agent of action and desire.
Mulvey notes that after the relative success of Magnificent Obsession, Universal International provided Sirk with bigger budgets and more creative freedom (well, Hollywood’s conception of “creative freedom”, anyway). Sirk’s next film was All That Heaven Allows, also starring Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson as Cary and Ron, respectively. Personally, this is my favorite Sirk film, as well as one of my favorite films of all time. Similarly to Magnificent Obsession, the film focuses on female desire and a woman falling in love after being widowed, although this time Wyman plays a character who is quite a bit older. It is totally subversive that Sirk made a film about an older, country-club attending woman falling in love with a younger man who works as her gardener.
Cary is the quintessential independent, strong-willed Sirkian woman. She faces ridicule and vicious comments from her affluent neighbors and friends, as well as her own children, who make her life miserable simply because she has chosen to spend her time with a man from a lower social class. Eventually she breaks things off with Ron, but only when her daughter claims it would ruin her life for her mother to marry a younger, poorer man. Here Sirk critiques expectations placed on women (specifically older women), as well as classist snobbery. He does so within the genre of melodrama, and therefore dialogue is delivered in a heightened manner, with lush orchestral music underscoring the most dramatic scenes.
Sorry ‘bout your life, Kay…
The film is also visually incredible. It is as though Sirk has turned the volume up to 11 on everything in front of the camera: the mise-en-scene is incredibly bright and rich, and on-screen, colors are almost saturated, such as Cary’s red lipstick and dresses, and the golden leaves on the tree in Cary’s front yard. The winter scenes are filled with deep blue skies and bright white snow. The lighting is often warm and colorful, such as in the scene where Cary’s daughter Kay (Gloria Talbott) cries to her mother, and the stained glass window in her room reflects colored fragments onto her bed and her walls. His frames are also full of mirrors, with characters seeing themselves and each other through their reflections. Sirk heightens everything to both dazzle his viewers and to call attention to the artificiality of this form of representing reality.
Written on the Wind: melodrama with subtext
The visual confections continue in Sirk’s 1956 feature, Written on the Wind. Perhaps even more melodramatic than Obsession or Heaven, this film tells the story of Texas oil baron Jasper Hadley (Robert Keith) and his spoiled, alcoholic children Marylee (Dorothy Malone) and Kyle (Robert Stack). Marylee has been in love with close family friend (and geologist for the company) Mitch (Rock Hudson) for years, and becomes wildly jealous when her brother marries Lucy (Lauren Bacall), who in turn becomes close to Mitch. All of the characters in this film are deeply damaged and tend to keep secrets from one another. Marylee is a drunken nymphomaniac who threatens to exploit Mitch after an accident causing her brother’s death. In one unforgettable scene, she frantically dances in her bedroom while draped in orange veils, as her weak, elderly father’s heart gives out. It is as though his children finally killed him.
Mirrors in this film represent characters’ secrets and multifaceted identities. Sirk focuses on the contrast between Marylee and Lucy, and the two are often seen in front of mirrors, or looking at each other’s reflections. This film is also filled with bright colors and melodramatic music and dialogue, as these formal aspects were becoming a standard part of Sirk’s filmmaking. This film in particular critiques notions of masculinity — Sirk calls attention to the way men are valued through their ability to father a child, and their professional ambitions. For example, Kyle is driven to drink and behave angrily and abusively because he cannot get Lucy pregnant. Although the story may seem over the top, the melodramatic content of the film reveals truths about the societal expectations placed on both men and women in 1950s American society.
Ed Gonzalez writes in Slant Magazine that Sirk’s background in German theater sharpened his ability to use Brechtian techniques of distanciation and alienation, particularly in 1959’s Imitation of Life. German playwright Bertolt Brecht believed actors should call attention to the theatricality of their performances, so that audiences would be emotionally removed and more likely to be critical of what they are seeing. As I have previously discussed, Sirk’s dialogue, actors, images, and sounds all work together to call attention to the artificiality of film, and Hollywood cinema in particular. Gonzalez writes that every image and line of dialogue in Imitation of Life has a double meaning, and beneath the glossy surface of the film lies Sirk’s critique of American society.
Imitation of Life tells the story of Lora Meredith (Lana Turner), an aspiring actress who struggles to take care of her daughter Susie (Sandra Dee). The film portrays various periods of Lora’s life and career, and focuses on her relationships with her various men, Susie, her incredibly faithful housekeeper Annie (Juanita Moore) and Annie’s daughter Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner). Gonzalez writes that Sirk brings attention to white America’s difficulty in relating to Black people — specifically Black women, in this case. Lora clearly loves Annie and Sarah Jane, yet, as Gonzalez notes, Sirk points out that this love is self-centered. Lora does not seem to know anything about Annie’s personal or internal life. The film also deals with Sarah Jane’s discomfort with her race — her mother is Black but her father was white, and her skin is light enough that she can pass for white, which she does at every chance she can.
Gonzalez notes that this film, and its characters, are obsessed with surfaces and appearances. He cites the opening credit sequence — diamonds falling from the top of the screen into a glass — as the perfect synthesis of this obsession with surfaces. Sarah Jane struggles her entire life because of her appearance and the political and societal implications of being a Black woman in 1950s America. In one heartbreaking scene, Sarah Jane’s white boyfriend becomes violent towards her when he finds out she is half Black. Towards the ends of the film, her mother forces her to look in the mirror at her reflection to help her accept her identity. Of course Sirk, a white male, cannot understand the experience of being a Black woman, but he clearly believed it was important to call attention to white America’s issues with race. What is seemingly a “weepie” or a “chick flick” features complex political issues beneath its dazzling surface.
Douglas Sirk directed some of the most fascinating, visually enchanting films of the 1950s. What sets Sirk apart from other directors of Hollywood melodramas is that Sirk meticulously crafted his films to feature covert critiques of 1950s American society. He focused his films on women, their interior lives and desires, and the expectations and pressures placed on them in both their domestic and professional lives. The rich and beautiful images almost break the fourth wall in that they are so over the top that they call attention to the constructed nature of cinema. Sirk was a master at critiquing the system he worked in from within. His films appear to be formally innocuous, but there is always more happening beneath the surface. Critics will likely be reading different theories and critiques into Sirk’s films for many years to come.
A fistful of monster mashes in the wake of Nacho Vigalondo’s ‘Colossal.’
This weekend Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal stomps into New York and Los Angeles to establish itself as the new King of the Monsters. While I am ready to hear your hyperbolic rants on how this kaiju fairs against the granddaddy of them all, I think it’s best if we avoid those comparisons, and simply appreciate how Nacho’s movie captures the somber drone of A Monster Calls while elevating to the heights of an epic genre party film. Like most horror geeks, I’ve always sided with the beasts. Part of that attraction certainly stemmed from my only-child status; the symbiotic relationship between Jack Kirby’s Devil Dinosaur and Moon Boy was painfully appealing to this basement bound TV brat. The other aspect was simply that lugging around a My Pet Monster could act as a talisman for the strength I feared was absent from my own persona. Who doesn’t love a friend who can and will stick up for you?
Watching Anne Hathaway’s discovery of her…special connection with that kaiju across the sea rekindled my deep-seated love affair with monstrous friendships. I’m not talking Howard the Duck and Lea Thompson here (although that fowl coupling holds a special place in my heart as well), but those unnatural, rather horrifying companions that occur in the weirdest of flicks (hmmmm…maybe I am talking Howard the Duck). King Kong is a safe bet. Picking Godzilla is easy, obvious, and not fun. The movies I selected below are buried deep in my being. By necessity, they are not the warmest of associations, but they’re all pairs that I’ve related to or desired at some point in my maturation. That sounds kinkier than I’d like, but I yam what I yam.
5. Gremlins (1984)
Owning any pet comes with a lot of responsibilities. Whether dog, cat, or snake, that creature’s life is in your hands. You feed it, you walk it, you vaccinate it, you monitor its breeding. You even scour the backyard for a safe place for it to take a squat. Plus, parents delight in leveraging your love for something cuddly with the threat of the pound or…gulp…greener pastures. You may fool yourself into the role of master, but your new best friend truly reigns over your daily chores. The nostalgic idealism of the Boy & His Dog BFF relationship is stretched into goofy and gooey glee in Joe Dante’s family friendly horror romp, Gremlins.
Not only does young Billy Peltzer have to worry about feeding and exercising his young Mogwai, he has to adhere to the 3 rules: no bright lights, don’t get him wet, and never, never, never feed him after midnight. And like the smartest of dumb kids, he fails all three resulting in a reptilian infestation that nearly consumes his absurdly quaint small town. While the brood of Gizmo run caca through the streets, Billy and his BFF unite through a sharp need for each other, and combat the Gremlins with the cinematic power of Snow White. As far as monster mashes go, Gremlins may not quite reach the titanic tag team levels of Mothra and Godzilla, but it’s a sweet bond that successfully mops up the unwanted progeny.
4. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
Tom Waits is a little less cuddly than Gizmo. Sure. But his Renfield in Francis Ford Coppola’s (not Bram Stoker’s despite the byline) Dracula is a limp sycophant desperate to please his master. Their team-up pretty much goes unnoticed by the bat-man, but I can’t help but sympathize with his fanboy preening. Gizmo gets to pack around with Billy like Yoda on Luke, but Renfield is dumped in the nastiest, slitheriest, buggiest of self-satisfied insane asylums. While he’s snacking on cockroaches, his buddy Dracula is too busy macking on his dead wife’s doppelganger.
Acting insane can result in some treacherously embarrassing over-the-top outings, but Tom Waits has never understood subtlety. While Gary Oldman relishes the latex and costumes, Waits owns Francis Ford Coppola’s movie for the few minutes he occupies. The Renfield/Dracula pact is barely a side note in the screenplay, and it scarcely moves the plot forward, but you can’t deny the unfaithful honesty one-sided romance.
3. The Monster Squad (1987)
Reaching back into the same toy box that attracted Francis Ford Coppola, Fred Dekker’s The Monster Squad frolics with the Universal Monsters with a degree of comic book abandon that simply was not prevalent in the 1980s. Oh you bet it’s eager to replicate the Spielbergian success of The Goonies, but The Monster Squad (like Renfield) is mostly concerned with paying homage to the beasts. Six kids square of against a Dracula more likly to toss a stick of dynamite under your car than suck your blood. Since none of them can drive, they’ll need a little help to take down the army of the undead. You’ve got the scary German guy, the hot (maybe) virgin sister, and that shutterbug traitor called Frank a.k.a. Frankenstein’s Monster.
Tom Noonan is more tower than man, and I’m pretty sure no actor has gone more method than when he slapped on that Frankenstein skin. Commentary tales from the set confess of child actors quaking in their trailers as Noonan refused to break character on set. More power to him. Whatever had to happen to emotionally commit young Ashley Beck as Phoebe the Feeb to this giant monstrosity was a wondrous decision. Noonan’s stuttering whimper of a “Bogus” to Beck as he pulls Dracula into the time vortex during the climax will put a lump in your cynical throat.
2. Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
To escape the horrors of the Spanish Civil War you too would pretty much believe any fairy tale a goat man told you in the forest. A terrifying fantasy is infinitely more appealing than a stepfather who opens his beer bottles on the faces of his subordinates. The faun forces his way into Ofelia’s life by constructing a series of hoops to jump through. He demands a magical key from the belly of an engorged toad, and a dagger ripped from the table of the child-eating Pale Man. It’s Alice through Pinhead’s looking glass. Why question such absurdities as a hallucination when your reality is exploding in body parts?
By the time Ofelia finds herself at the center of labyrinth, the faun’s demand for virgin blood actually amounts to tremendous relief. Or at least you will feel that way after you’ve wiped away all the tears. Guillermo Del Toro is the true beast in this story.
1. Godzilla vs. Megalon (1973)
I totally understand that at the top of this article I stated, “picking Godzilla is easy, obvious, and not fun.” So what? I gotta speak the truth, and the truth is that the single greatest monster movie team-up occurs in Godzilla vs. Megalon. It’s a battle royal of kaiju insanity. By the thirteenth film in the franchise, Godzilla could not simply stomp around Tokyo. The all-out rumble became the rule of thumb, and in siding with the humanoid robot Jet Jaguar against the beetle-god Megalon, Godzilla found his wackiest and his most impossibly cool compatriot. Godzilla is usually a good, clean fighter, but Jet Jaguar has no qualms when a cheap trick will get the job done. Taking on both Megalon and Gigan, Jet Jaguar uses his floodlight vision to blind his opponents. This dirt-in-the-eye gag buys him time while he awaits Godzilla’s backup. Eventually vanquishing the two villains to their corners, like the best of friends, Godzilla and Jet Jaguar embrace in a manly forearm clasp. Victory!
Are these the greatest monster movie team-ups? Obviously, yes. But if you disagree please select your preferred combatants in the comments below.
Rejoice: Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg To Adapt Another Comic Property, This One From ‘The Walking Dead’ Creator Robert Kirkman
It’s called ‘Invincible,’ and it’s headed to the big screen.
Fresh off the success of Preacher, the Vertigo comic they adapted into a television series for AMC, THRis reporting that writers, producers, and directors Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (Superbad, This is the End, The Interview) are heading back to the funny-book mine for their next big-screen project, and the vein they’re tapping is Robert Kirkman, creator of The Walking Dead.
See, though Kirkman is best known for his zombie drama, shortly before he started publishing TWD he released Invincible, about teenager Mark Grayson just trying to survive adolescence with two big asterisks attached: one, he’s superpowered, and two, so’s his pop, in fact he’s the most powerful being on the planet. Rogen and Goldberg will be writing, producing, and directing this upcoming adaptation. Here’s what Kirkman had to say about the news:
“For nearly a decade I’ve had to endure the ‘what about Invincible?’ question as fans have watched The Walking Dead grow into the multimedia monstrosity it has become over the years. The answer was always that we were waiting for the right team to partner with. That team has arrived! The esteemed misters Goldberg and Rogen have proven themselves to be top-notch directors with a keen collective eye for stunning visuals after slumming it by writing hit after juggernaut hit.”
“Invincible’s surprising, edgy, shocking, and oftentimes blood-soaked story couldn’t be in more capable hands. With the team of Rogen, Goldberg and Universal, I’m very confident this will be another superhero movie, in a long line of superhero movies that continues to prove that it’s a viable, thrilling genre that will keep people coming to the cinema for years to come.”
And then Rogen and Goldberg’s thoughts:
“No matter how much damage it causes our bodies, minds, and our most intimate relationships with those we love, we will not rest until Invincible is as great a movie as it deserves to be.”
Invincible has been publishing since 2003 and is currently on its 133rd issue. No timeline for this project was mentioned, but likely production will start after Rogen and Goldberg wrap on their latest effort, the Hulu comedy series Future Man.
In other news and points of interest…
…did you catch the post-credits scene during the Legion finale? It’s a gamechanger. Check it out here…
…what about the new teaser for Marvel’s The Defenders? Netflix finally let us know when they’re going to be releasing the superhero team-up series…
…Blumhouse has launched a new TV Studio and will be producing a series based on The Purgefor Syfy…
…and poor Shia LaBeouf: only one person showed up to watch his new movie Man Down in England.
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.
ZOMBIELAND (2009) DP: Michael Bonvillain | Dir: Ruben FleischerMISSION: IMPOSSIBLE — ROGUE NATION (2015) DP: Robert Elswit | Dir: Christopher McQuarrieTWIN PEAKS (S1, EP2) (1990) DP: Ron Garcia| Dir: David LynchFALLEN ANGELS (1995) DP: Christopher Doyle | Dir: Wong Kar WaiLAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962) DP: Freddie Young | Dir: David Lean
For the third episode of Shot by Shot, the official cinematography podcast of One Perfect Shot and Film School Rejects, myself and OPS Founder Geoff Todd talk Martin Scorsese’s latest, Silence, and the Oscar-nominated cinematography of Rodrigo Prieto, who joins the show in the second half to give an exclusive interview about the challenges and triumphs of shooting the film.
If this is your first listen to the show, the format’s simple: each week Geoff and I each pick a few shots from a certain film and discuss their effect and significance. Already we’ve done episodes on 2001: A Space Odyssey and Mad Max: Fury Road, and next week we’re tackling Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, so there’s never been a better time to start following, which you can do on Twitter @OnePerfectPod and Facebook at facebook.com/oneperfectshot, and the two of us on Twitter: @TheGeoffTodd and @HPerryHorton. And if you like what you hear — spoiler alert: you’re going to — be sure to subscribe in iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss a single episode of us or any of the other shows in our family of OnePerfectPodcasts.
Check out our latest episode at the link below, as well as the shots discussed this week.
Silence will be on Blu-Ray and DVD on March 28th, and will be available on Digital HD two weeks before that on the 14th. For more information, please visit www.SilenceMovie.com
“You might ask why we are doing this commentary track.”
Cathy’s Curse (1976)
Commentators: Simon Barrett (filmmaker), Brian Collins (critic/author)
1. This original cut features opening text that Collins (who also creates credits for TV/film) apparently recreated, and they’ve finally given Barrett the opportunity to read all nineteen words. They’re not present in the longer director’s cut. “I’ve never seen the longer cut,” says Barrett “and I won’t because I’m patriotic.”
2. The onscreen text was added by the distributors to explain the footage they cut for its release.
3. Barrett (and Collins?) recorded a “fan” commentary for the films years ago.
4. Barrett wonders about the Venn Diagram including people who are fans of the film and happen to know who both he and Collins are. “It’s like two specks that you can’t tell if they’re the same or not.”
5. “You know and I know that I’ve had a nervous breakdown” is Barrett’s favorite line from the film. “That is such great exposition because it’s just like brutal.” He refers to it whenever a film includes a line of dialogue that none of the characters need to hear but that’s instead meant solely for the audience.
6. Collins agrees with one of the cuts made to this version (but restored in the director’s cut), and it’s the bit where Cathy goes upstairs and opens the attic door. The longer version sees her trying to open every door in sight — like five or six of them — before settling on the attic door.
7. The film first came to Collins’ attention back in 2007 when he was running a site called Horror Movie A Day where he watched and reviewed a horror movie every day. It was before the age of instant streaming via Netflix and Amazon so he often had to dig deep for titles to cover. “So I bought this budget [DVD] pack called the Chilling Classics Set from Mill Creek,” he says, and it’s what he used as a quick go-to when he didn’t have another title at the ready.
8. They love noticing little details that were never visible before until Severin’s sharp new transfer. One example is the painting with the girl’s eyes that glow… when they’re not lit it’s very clear that there are light bulbs present.
9. In case you’re wondering why the neighbor is still pleasant even after Cathy tries to blind one of her kids Barrett has the answer. “It’s because they’re Canadian.” He’s right of course as this is a fine example of Canuxploitation.
10. Barrett is most definitely called by Criterion from time to time to contribute a glorious commentary to one of their releases, but he’s like “Fuck you, I’m really busy, I’m really fucking busy, and I have my own life.” He’s happy to accept when Severin calls though.
11. They mention that director Eddy Matalon is also doing a commentary — “a professional one” — but it’s absent from the disc. We do get an informative interview with him though.
12. Their friend Evan Katz (writer/director of Cheap Thrills) texts to say hi around the 28:14 mark.
13. Neither of them understand the scene where Cathy makes her mom’s food rot via a stop-motion shot, but they like it and jokingly acknowledge it could have been an inspiration for Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead. It also makes them think of a film called Don’t Go to Sleep which I haven’t seen but happily agree in their assessment that Severin should restore and release it.
14. They theorize that the script may have been written in French and then translated literally into English. Barrett also thinks it was edited by bears.
15. Barrett expects that no one will listen to this track, so no one tell him about this.
16. Collins hopes the Blu includes a stills gallery highlighting some past VHS/DVD including one of his favorites showing a “sexy goth girl on the cover… sharpening a machete. What movie are you advertising here?” It doesn’t, but curiosity was piqued so I proceeded to spend more time than I probably should have googling images in search of the one he describes. You’re welcome.
17. The topic of good/bad commentaries leads quickly to John Carpenter who they correctly acknowledge is terrific on these tracks when paired with Kurt Russell. “But his In the Mouth of Madness commentary is just… plot explanation and like, how does that light work.” This is correct.
18. Barrett is surprised to see some “kind of nudity” at the 1:07:15 mark as it’s never been all that clear previous to this restoration. He points it out at the risk of becoming the next Mr. Skin and immediately apologizes.
19. Have a burning question or criticism about Barrett’s Blair Witch reboot that he won’t reply to you on Twitter about? Well today’s your lucky day. He’ll ignore your requests “unless you can show me a photograph of you holding a Blu-ray copy of Cathy’s Curse, the Severin version, with something proving the date in the background, then I will answer all of your questions about the Blair Witch.” Please note this does not include an answer as to what the lights are at the end. “But anything else.”
20. An anonymous crew member contacted Collins via his HMaD post on the film, and he shared that the movie was a Canadian tax-shelter production. It’s a fascinating moment in genre history leading to films as beloved as My Bloody Valentine and The Changeling. Read more about it here.
21. They pitch themselves as being available for future commentary tracks on restored genre pics, and if we’re lucky Severin or some other specialty label will take them up on that.
Best in Context-Free Commentary
“There’s no moment in this film where a character says the word ‘bitch’ and it’s not funny and good.”
“I talk about Cathy’s Curse a lot in meetings.”
“This movie could absolutely be studied in like screenwriting classes because it does do a lot of things.”
“We’re drinking by the way.”
“Cathy is kind of my hero.”
“That’s such a great reaction to your daughter teleporting.”
“Anyone in Cathy’s Curse feels like they could die at any time or like they could live truly forever and the movie would show it in real time.”
“This scene goes on for like an hour and a half if I remember correctly.”
“He’s British or he’s acting.”
“I meant to mention this earlier, but ut oh we’re done — ”
The actual filmmakers are typically the best options for a commentary track, but there are exceptions. Films like this one — highly entertaining but not necessarily well made — don’t need a director relaying anecdotes or technical details. Instead you really want a fan of the film, someone unrelated to its production, whose love for it translates into interesting and humorous thoughts. Collins has long been the film’s #1 fan and most vocal supporter, and he has a lot to offer. Similarly, Barrett’s appreciation for the movie is clear, and he’s quick with humorous asides. He’s the guy you want with you when a film hits a lull, and hopefully we’ll hear more from both of them in the future.
You needn’t be gifted or amazing, just follow this advice.
Whatever your opinion of his Amazing Spider-Man movies, there’s no denying Marc Webb’s proficiency as a director. He’s been filming in some capacity since he was a kid and spent many years after college honing his craft helming music videos (regular clients included Green Day, Ashlee Simpson, and My Chemical Romance) before making his feature debut in 2009 with the hit romantic comedy (500) Days of Summer.
Now, following his two Spidey installments, he’s back to directing smaller movies, two of which arrive this year: Gifted, which opens in theaters on Friday, and Amazon’s The Only Living Boy in New York, which first hits cinemas in August. In the following collection of tips to aspiring filmmakers, he shares advice on working on different scales, making mistakes, the importance of collaboration, and giving actors freedom.
1. Always Be Creating
Webb apparently believes in the “ABC’s” of directing (and being an artist in general). In a 2012 video for AskMen, he shares five filmmaking tips, one of which is the common suggestion for aspiring directors to just start making stuff — and then always be making stuff.
With digital technology, you can go out and make films. I would just say go and make films. Always be making something. Whether you’re shooting or in pre-production or editing, you just gotta always be making something.
This shouldn’t be surprising given he’s been busy nonstop since college, directing music videos, then movies, working on pre-production for films he didn’t wind up doing (like The Spectacular Now), committing years to a superhero franchise, directing and producing TV (including Limitless and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), and now having two new movies in a single year.
Here is that AskMen video, in which he also goes on to tell of his own origins as a filmmaker as a kid with an 8mm camera:
2. Respect the Cycle of Superhero Reboots
What might seem a specific tip isn’t, not these days, and it surely won’t be in years to come. Webb’s work was and continues to be situated in a context of preexisting and previously planned Spider-Man movies as well as another reboot following his own. It’s important to recognize and respect the history and future, preferably by communicating with others in the cycle.
For example, before taking on the Amazing Spider-Man franchise, Webb needed to get the blessing of the Spider-Man trilogy director Sam Raimi, along with its star, Tobey Maguire. He told The Telegraph in 2012:
It was very important for me to make sure I wasn’t stepping on any toes. They were both incredibly generous and I feel they had finished the stories they wanted to tell and for me it was too exciting an opportunity to pass up.
And of course Webb had to go to the source of the material, Stan Lee. “I wanted to get his blessing and to ask him questions that I thought were very important,” he says in the Telegraph interview, “but the first thing he said was, ‘What’s my cameo going to be?’”
I had lunch with him very early on, and one of the things he said was: “Put yourself in Peter Parker’s shoes — and whatever you would do, he would do. It’s all about relatability.”
Since leaving Spider-Man behind, Webb has also talked to Spider-Man: Homecoming director Jon Watts and passed the advice forward. From a brand new Collider interview, Watts says, bringing it all back around:
I know Marc Webb from music video days, and he gave me the best advice. He was like, “Just make sure to get lunch with Stan Lee. Definitely enjoy yourself.”
This tip could actually be extended beyond the arena of superhero movies, too. In a 2012 article on Hollywood mentorships, Webb is mentioned as having been very helpful to at least one aspiring filmmaker. “Marc Webb took me out to lunch and we talked music videos,” says director Jeff Stewart (Powerman 5000’s “Wild World” video). “He invited me to spend a lot of time on his sets and ask him whatever I wanted.”
3. Action Scenes Must Be Character-Driven
Relevant to Lee’s tip that the audience needs to relate to Spider-Man in spite of his being a superhero, Webb approached blockbuster filmmaking as still being very much about character development and point of view — in every type of scene, including those where spectacle would seem to be the focus and drive.
From the Huffington Post interview, discussing the Williamsburg Bridge scene in the first Amazing Spider-Man:
Weirdly, in the action, the same principles apply as in the other scenes. An action scene, at its best, has an emotional undercurrent. It’s about character development. At the beginning of the scene, Peter Parker is motivated primarily by vengeance; his crimefighting is incidental. At the end of the scene…there’s a reconciliation…the like of which Peter Parker realizes he’s never going to have. Andrew does a beautiful thing, he tilts his head to the side, and you realize there’s a kid behind this mask, envying that experience, envying that moment — but also letting it go. It’s one of my favorite moments in the movie, because there’s a real emotional connection to the action.
Webb believes the evolution of video games proved that people want to relate to characters even in action situations — to be in their shoes. During a keynote conversation he took part in at the 2014 SXSW Film Festival (via IndieWire), he explained:
In the popular games of the time, you could see the entire universe you were playing in. Your experience was more abstract. And then there was pitfall with Super Mario Bros. where the game-play was still that big thing, but you closed in the space. When that happened, sales skyrocketed, because the experience was more emotional. Your experience became more personal. Then first person shooters came around, and you were the point of view, and sales jumped again. It was a eureka moment for me, cause [(500) Days of Summer] is told all from one person’s point of view. Even the little fantasy sequences were renditions of his emotional life. That lesson has stayed with me through Spider-Man. Based on the idea that you want to give inner life to the character. That’s always a compass for how I shoot I scene, my work with the actors. It’s all about connecting the thought process of a character to the audience.
4. Be Your Own Critic
Of course, between his two Amazing Spider-Man movies, Webb realized spectacle still needs to be the greatest aspect of certain parts of a superhero movie. From the SXSW talk, he discusses how he didn’t take enough risks on the first one and why he had to go bigger with the second:
I hadn’t worked on that scale before. There was a moment deep in the post-production process where a giant lizard was chasing a man in a leotard, and I was like, “This is not grounded…I wanted [The Amazing Spider-Man 2] to be big. I wanted it to express that feeling you have when you read the comics. I didn’t want to shy away from that.
Similarly, around the same time, Webb admitted to Rolling Stone to making mistakes on the first Amazing Spider-Man:
I wasn’t efficient, and I made a lot of mistakes, honestly…Philosophically, the grounded quality of things was important for the performances, but I think it limited some of the visual effects. I wasn’t as confident in the process of animating Spider-Man. But there’s this idea about mastery: You just want to get better at all the things you do.
It’s not rare for Webb to recognize when he’s been wrong. His second piece of advice in the AskMen video is to be self-critical, in a constructive way:
I think it’s important to analyze your work, and be self-analytical without being self-loathing. I think it’s very important to criticize your own work, because people get really protective of it, and that’s not the best way to improve.
And he later doubled down on this tip in a 2014 fan Q&A on Twitter:
5. Collaboration is Key for Artistic Freedom in a Studio Production
“Find collaborators that you find are supportive and interesting and are going to add value to your professional life,” Webb says in the AskMen video, as his third filmmaking tip there.
Now the amount of access there is to equipment makes filmmaking an intuitive process that everybody has access to. The best part has been this spirit of collaboration with those artists who are trying to make something interesting and beautiful, and there is an intuitive, instinctual thing that happens that doesn’t feel corporate and doesn’t feel procedural.
You gotta keep being able to push forward, and you have to allow for moments of inspiration along the way, and if you can maximize and capitalize those moments, you’re in a much better position to create a piece of art that feels exciting and new and thrilling.
You can watch some of that interview and behind-the-scenes footage in this report on the video:
6. Give Actors Control
Related to his tip on collaboration is Webb’s approach to actors, to whom he grants a good deal of control. His many years directing music videos gave him experience with the technical side of filmmaking, but he hadn’t really worked with actors prior to (500) Days of Summer. So he let them do their own thing, and it worked. He revealed this in the SXSW talk:
When you’re trying to get a certain thing from an actor, you have to cede a bit of control. Otherwise, they lose the sense of authorship in their performance. What I’ve endeavored to protect as I’ve done bigger films, is to create an environment and let the technique take a backseat to the realness of a performance. My eyes opened when I did that movie.
Obviously that means he allows for improvisation. Going back to the issue of spectacle versus character in the bigger films, here’s what he said during an interview for Newsarama while promoting Amazing Spider-Man in 2012:
Of course it’s important to have that spectacle. I love that, it’s a blast, it’s fun! But you need to build it on a foundation of humanity. The biggest part of that is casting. And once you’ve found these incredibly talented people, I wanted to exploit it if I could. If you have Emma Stone in a movie, you need to let her be funny!
And boy did she… Andrew and Emma, they took the script and they would find what was under the surface and shine on top of that. There were so many things , so many moments that they improvised that made those characters really come to life.
There’s that scene in the hallway where he says, “Well I could, or we could,” and she’s like, “Yeah, either one!” But theres this line where she says, “You were touching up stuff?” And he’s like, “I’m not going to answer that.” Totally improvised! I was sitting behind the monitor, and I was like, well that’s kind of dirty but that’s amazing! It’s kids, it’s how they are.
Then there’s this moment where she grabs her folder and spins around — you cannot write that. Those things emerge when you have the spontaneity and you have two actors that are alive and in the moment.
Webb often admits that he’s not a funny guy, so ceding control and allowing for improvisation is important for him as far as directing comedy. He acknowledged this to Backstage back in 2009:
You can direct somebody to be funny; you can direct timing. But it helps if they have that gift already. And I think most comedians are intuitive, which is why they make good actors. You can tell immediately if somebody has that gift.
What We’ve Learned
Marc Webb is probably best suited for smaller-scale work, though there is still something to be learned here about making big blockbusters more relatable and focused on characters. You just need to improve on his attempts. He’s still learning, himself, and he fortunately will let criticism and self-criticism guide him in his improvement as a filmmaker. The above are mostly lessons he’s able to share with other filmmakers through his own discovery and experience of them.
And on top of them, he has a couple bonus tips involving personal enjoyment and health. First, in the AskMen video, he says to remember to have a pint every once in a while, but don’t drink too much, and in a 2012 Vanity Fair interview, his advice to someone reviving a franchise is: “Have protein in the morning; eat a hard-boiled egg in the morning. Try to exercise. Go out to dinner every once in awhile.”
Let’s take a few minutes to reflect on what could have been.
After two years of speculation, it seems like the question of who will be the seventh actor to take on the iconic role in the long-running film series will have to go on the back burner. Last Monday, the New York Post gossip section published an article citing multiple sources that reported that current Bond actor Daniel Craig is in the final stages of negotiating a return to his most iconic role. If true, it would mark a pretty serious change of tune for Craig, who, in an oft quoted Time Out interview from October 2015, responded to the question of his returning to do another Bond movie thusly: “I’d rather break this glass and slash my wrists. No, not at the moment. Not at all. That’s fine. I’m over it at the moment. We’re done. All I want to do is move on.”
In spite of Craig’s attitude towards returning to his best-known role, the possibility of his return hardly comes from nowhere. While Craig might be more than ready to consciously uncouple from the franchise, the feelings are decidedly not mutual. As Bond co-star Naomie Harris told the BBC this past February: “We, as a cast, collectively want him back. I know that Barbara and Michael — our producers — desperately want him back, so I think the only person that needs persuading is Daniel.” Former James Bond actor Pierce Brosnan — who was Craig’s current age (49) when he starred in his last Bond film, Die Another Day — also supported Craig’s returning as Bond in an interview released yesterday, saying that Craig should “go for it.”
Craig’s Bond, as we first saw him in ‘Casino Royale’
The next James Bond film, which is still in the nascent stages of pre-production, will be the 25th in the Eon Productions-backed James Bond series, which began in 1962 with Dr. No (three other James Bond films — Casino Royale (1954), Casino Royale (1967), and Never Say Never Again (1983) — were made elsewhere). If Craig does indeed return, it will be his fifth outing as Bond, following Casino Royale (2006), Quantum of Solace (2008), Skyfall (2012), and Spectre, (2015). Prior to Craig, James Bond was portrayed by Pierce Brosnan (four films), Timothy Dalton (two films), Roger Moore (seven films), George Lazenby (one film), and Sean Connery (six Eon films, one non-Eon produced).
While 2015’s Spectre was generally regarding as underwhelming, many fans would still be happy to see Craig return as Bond. In fact, some would probably like to see Craig return for that very reason: one more film would give him a chance to go out with the sort of bang he arrived with— Craig’s first outing as bond, Casino Royale, is widely considered one of the highlights of the Bond series — instead of a whimper. It also, of course, would mean at least a few more years of waiting for those looking forward to Craig’s being replaced.
That said, let’s take a moment to reflect on some of the previous forerunners and most prominent fancasts, and bid a somewhat premature adieu to the 2015–2017 James Bond speculation season. Who knows? Maybe we’ll see one of them in Bond 26…
Tom Hardy
‘Inception’
Pros: While Hardy’s most prominent roles in recent years, from Bane in The Dark Knight Rises to Max in Mad Max: Fury Road and James Delaney in Taboo, have been of the grim, grimy, mumbly sort, Hardy has demonstrated himself fully capable of portraying both the charm and cheekiness that characterizes 007 while also retaining an aura of danger — he can pull off a suit and a pithy one-liner with equal aplomb. Also, perhaps he could bring frequent collaborator Christopher Nolan along with him.
Unofficial Audition Tape: Inception. If “you mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling” isn’t the stuff Bond one-liners are made of, I don’t know what is.
Idris Elba
‘Luther’
Pros: He’s got the talent, the charm, and the established star power. As he mentioned in an interview: “If human beings want to know if there’s any connectivity between all of us, the one thing I’ve heard around the world universally is that, ‘You’ll be great at James Bond!’” Elba seems to be the people’s choice for Bond, and in this case “the people” includes Steven Spielberg (and Pierce Brosnan and Kanye West). Also, emails from the 2014 Sony Pictures hack reportedly demonstrate that the studio saw Elba as an ideal successor to Craig.
Cons: Age, potentially. Elba is currently 44, and the series will want to probably want to keep their next Bond around for at least a few films. Elba himself has mentioned it as a possible issue. But then again, Roger Moore was 58 when he passed on the Bond mantle, so…
What Does He Think?: After multiple years of speculation, Elba has grown understandably tired of the rumors — especially with how the case for his casting is often presented in reductive terms: "I’ve always detested the phrase, ‘black Bond.’ I just don’t understand it… [w]e don’t say, ‘white Bond,’ we just say, ‘Bond,’ so it suddenly becomes a black man and he’s a ‘black Bond.’ So I hate that phrase and it’s a rumor that has gotten out of control basically — but that’s all it is. There’s no truth in it whatsoever.” That said, Elba mentioned in the past that he would “absolutely” take the role if offered to him.
Unofficial Audition Tape: Luther
Aidan Turner
‘And Then There Were None’
Pros: Best known for playing “the hot dwarf” Kili in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy and Captain Ross Poldark in Poldark, Turner isn’t quite as well known as the others on this list, but that’s not necessarily a disadvantage. He hasn’t given us a role quite as directly comparable to Bond, but he’s shown enough versatility to demonstrate he’d be up to the challenge. Also, former Bond actor Roger Moore gave him a vote of confidence, so there’s that.
Cons: A good portion of his fanbase might not recognize him without long hair or a tricorn hat.
What Does He Think? Turner has refused to comment on the possibility, and not in the Tom Hardy wink-wink-nudge-nudge way.
Unofficial Audition Tape: And Then There Were None (2015) comes closest.
Tom Hiddleston
‘The Night Manager’
Pros: Before 2016, Hiddleston was, for many, the epitome of cool, suave Englishman with a slight air of mystery.
Cons: 2016 happened. Between his highly publicized “whirlwind romance” with Taylor Swift perhaps best encapsulated in that cringeworthy photograph of Hiddleston wearing an “I ❤ T.S.” shirt at a Fourth of July party and his equally cringe-inducing Golden Globes acceptance speech, Hiddleston went from obvious choice for 007 to highly unlikely in a rather spectacular fashion.
What Does He Think? In an interview with the Sunday Times, Hiddleston said of the Bond franchise: “I simply love the theme tune, the tropes, and the mythology. I love the whole thing. If it ever came knocking, it would be an extraordinary opportunity. And I’m very aware of the physicality of the job. I would not take it lightly.”
Unofficial Audition Tape: The Night Manager. It’s literally been called “a six-episode Tom Hiddleston audition to be the next James Bond.”
Gillian Anderson
‘The Fall’
Pros: Twenty-five films is a lot for one character. Some would say it’s time to shake things up (pun absolutely intended), and recasting the notorious womanizer as a woman would be a definite way to do so. (Other popular suggestions for a female James Bond include Priyanka Chopra, Emily Blunt, Hayley Atwell, Rosamund Pike, Emilia Clarke, and Gugu Mbatha-Raw).
Cons: Regardless of whether or not it would even be a good idea, it is, in all honesty, a pipe dream (at least for now). Last year’s Ghostbusters showed that the controversy stirred up by gender-flipping iconic film roles isn’t necessarily the kind that translates well at the box office. If next year’s Ocean’s Eight does well the whole concept of the gender-flipped reboot might earn some plausibility, but until then, expect your James Bond to come with a Y chromosome for the foreseeable future.
What Does She Think?: Anderson tweeted a fan-made poster of herself as Agent 007, so it seems like she’d be down with the idea.
How one DP captured and defined the juxtaposition of glamour and grime.
Like most major metropolitan areas of the United States, Los Angeles is a juxtaposition of fortune and failure. It’s a city where lifelong dreams are made and crushed every hour of every day, a city that’s home to some of the wealthiest people in our culture, and simultaneously a city that has one of the largest homeless populations in the country. It’s a city of angels and devils alike, the two often co-mingling so even the salvation in Los Angeles seems to come with tinges of sin. On screen, this translates to a landscape that’s both glitzy and grimy, a place of promise and also a spiritual purgatory.
These reasons and more are why not only is Los Angeles the capital of the American filmmaking industry, it’s also the setting for so many films. In Los Angeles — more so than in New York City, or Chicago — the potential for immortality is higher than anywhere else, but with that comes an equally great potential for personal destruction; either you eat L.A., or L.A. eats you.
For my money, L.A.’s best era at the movies was the late 80s-early 90s. That’s when filmmakers like Michael Mann (Thief), William Friedkin (To Live and Die in L.A.), John Singleton (Boyz n the Hood) and othersreally played with the off-balance meshing of the city’s two sides. But that’s from a narrative perspective. From a visual perspective, the cinematographer of this era who perhaps best captured the contradictions of Los Angeles was undoubtedly Robby Müller, as proven by this new montage by Philip Brubaker for Fandor.
In addition to To Live and Die in L.A., Müller shot three other films set in L.A. during the late 80s: Alex Cox’s Repo Man, Barbet Schroeder’s Barfly, and Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas. What makes this lineup interesting, as Brubaker deftly points out, is that each of these directors was from a different country and only one, Friedkin, was an American. But despite these multiple and dominantly-international perspectives — Müller himself is Dutch — Müller managed to make Los Angeles into “an archetypal American city of dreams,” as Brubaker puts it, by repeating specific visual patterns and cinematographical techniques over the course of these films.
The Los Angeles of Müller has a legacy that can be seen both visually and narratively in more recent films like David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler, and Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon — that of a city with the personality of a pusher, a charming surface masking a dark, predatory heart. Chances are most readers are more familiar with these films than Müller’s earlier work, but if true, that’s something you should remedy immediately, and I’m pretty sure that about four minutes after you press play below you’re going to agree.
A preview of this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival.
The Cinema Travellers
With nationalism on the rise there is a palpable hunger for art than connects nations and peoples. No art form bridges cultural divides like film. The programmers at the San Francisco International Film Festival (rechristened “SFFILM”) have always taken on this mission with enthusiasm and a keen eye for quality. SFFILM celebrates its 60th birthday this year and is the longest running film festival in the Americas. It is precisely this year’s slate of foreign films that poignantly illustrate the capacity of cinema to speak universally.
A perfect example is the extraordinary The Cinema Travelers — Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya’s indescribable real-life ride-along with the travelling tent theaters of India, alive but struggling in the most remote of remote corners of that huge country for more than 70 years.
In focusing on two tent cinema operators and their milieu, on their struggle to assemble audiences in the tiniest, dustiest and poorest places imaginable while performing CPR on their ancient, almost unbelievably rickety and still arc-lit projection equipment, Abraham and Madheshiya capture not only a nail-biting story of survival in a changing world, but also an affectionate homage to the beautiful and timeless details of the dying old-school art of exhibition.
The Cinema Travelers grants its viewers access to a time and place that we would otherwise never see, and connects to a larger context — the universal sleight of hand and suspension of disbelief that is core to cinema, gathering us to “look out of one window” together for a moment as one human race.
Again and again it is this (some would say receding) ideal of human connectedness that characterizes this year’s best. In Sieranevada, the last installment of Cristi Puiu’s Bucharest-based trilogy, the acclaimed director represents the state of Romania’s society based on a single claustrophobically confined location shoot.
The film unfolds in a modest city apartment where an extended clan has gathered for a memorial service honoring patriarch Emil. Focusing on Emil’s oldest son Lary, Puiu uses this protagonist as an entry into the chaos and turmoil of family gatherings. Niece Cami brings a severely drunk friend who throws up in the bathroom. A brother goes on and on with his 9/11 conspiracy theories. Lary’s sister gets in a heated argument with Auntie, who robotically praises the dated values of Communism over the garish irrelevance of monarchy.
Through these and other exchanges, Puiu’s characters reveal the bi-polarity of belonging in multiple worlds; sex, notions of family and filial bonds, nationality and nationalism, religious and political ideologies — and the practical necessity, sometimes willing but mostly forced — of compromising one’s soul in order to “belong” where even light hearted affiliations are treated as absolutes.
Importantly, Sieranevada takes its viewers so close as to feel a part of the clan. The camera is crowded out and has to peer over heads and never gets a clear view. It’s a cinematography elbowing its way into the narrative with uncomfortable proximity.
Ma’ Rosa
The astounding and miraculous Ma’ Rosa(its Philippine director Brillante Mendoza is a legend) captures a haunting almost anime panorama of a moral and cultural decay co-inhabiting the closeness of a tight, loving family. It is at once set in a world of delinquency, drugs and corruption while at the same time zooming in tight on a small house and an even smaller store, in a little neighborhood packed with humanity, down a tiny, teaming dead-end of an alley, where Ma’ Rosa rules her few square feet of Manila with a foul-mouthed, comic and steady staccato that any great leader would take notice of.
That momentum smacks into a horrible, slow motion wall of pain after she and her husband are arrested for drug dealing, an enterprise that we suspect became necessary as Rosa’s income from her store fell behind her family’s growing needs — two young sons, a daughter in college, a drug addled husband.
And so when corrupt police demand bribes for the couple’s release, it’s Rosa’s children who must raise the money by whatever means necessary, and the camera follows them. Its an epic and flawlessly acted tale — Mendoza literally pulls us along through the abyss of a brutalized, immoral corner within a corner of the world — but without simplistic moralizing and artificial pathos — at once compassionate, empathetic and ruthless as to the ordinariness of evil in a community on the verge of losing control.
The Future Perfect follows the eighteen-year-old Chinese immigrant Xiaobin’s arrival in Buenos Aires to join the family. There, unbeknownst to her parents (who show no desire to integrate into Argentine society), she takes Spanish lessons and dates an Indian tech worker. Xiaobin’s Spanish emersion classes rely on role-playing of mundane, basic scenarios. Director Wohlatz utilizes this stripped-down formula of the language exercise as a template for the plot, with nearly every exchange being conducted in a formalized manner.
By using structure of language classes to permeate the narrative, a freshly intimate and authentic immigrant experience emerges. The conceptual twist, already indicated by the emphasis on grammar in the title, is that with every new tense Xiaobin learns, a hypothetical future appears as a quartet of drastically different endings. Anything could happen.
The Ornithologist
The Ornithologist, is João Pedro Rodrigues’ magical-realism depiction of the voyage of young Fernando, who mysteriously transforms into a revered Catholic saint in a poetic, homoerotic, darkly comedic and often blasphemous riff on the life of St. Anthony of Padua.
Initially on an ornithological field trip to research black storks in remote northern Portugal, the handsome Fernando’s encounters begin to echo elements of a Saintly journey — resurrection (from a kayak accident by the assumed good graces of two women) then rituals both demonic and sensual, sacrificial and sage, right up until the surprising climax, when Fernando emerges anew, played now by the director himself, underlining the extent to which a movie is also a personal journey for its director.
Kirill Serebrennikov’s The Student tells the story of a young radicalized Christian in Putin’s Russia, offering a different and alarming take on religious awakening. Whereas Rodrigues negotiates questions of personal and spiritual desire, Serebrennikov’s protagonist Venya shows a relationship with dogma that is fundamentalist and literal.
By quoting Biblical passages without context, Venya is able to justify to himself and often others any behavior, and ominously gains attention and power from the authenticity of his mania. As Venya’s spiritual awakening spirals, the school authorities acquiesce to his hectoring, changing school policy, insisting, among other things, that creationism be taught alongside evolution.
Serebrennikov weaves the tricky subtexts of religion and ideology, taking not-so-subtle aim at the State, it’s current chief apparatchik Mr. Putin, anti-Semitism, homophobia and group-think, all in a timely but also expertly acted drama.
Drug strife and corruption in the Philippines, Putin’s Russia, Immigration and integration, journey’s of self-discovery, and even the future of cinema itself — all on display at this year’s superbly programmed SFFILM.
In just over 100 seconds, writer-director Ninian Doff manages to blend fantasy, reality, and comedy into a particularly British short film he calls Cool Unicorn Bruv. I don’t want to go too deep into a description, like I said it’s a short short, but basically one guy’s (Alex Harvey) trying to sell a sweet bike to another guy (Nathan Bryon) when a third guy (Abrahim Jarmin) comes up with a unicorn (Chrystal) and cocks it all up.
Besides being an excellent primer on just what a unicorn can and can’t do, power-wise, Cool Unicorn Bruv is a dry, droll, tongue-in-cheek comedy that starts delivering from its first seconds right through to its muted climax. Doff has made a score of visually dynamic music videos (that you can and should watch on his Vimeo page) but this brief sketch reveals he’s adept at narrative storytelling in the same way someone like Michel Gondry or Spike Jonze is. More please.
Even at its best, thirteen episodes seems to drag out the action.
I have a confession to make: I still haven’t finished Iron Fist. In fact, I haven’t even progressed past the second episode. Sure, life got complicated for me and I haven’t had much time to spare for a show that I’m not completely in love with but the problem goes beyond four episodes of “But I’m Danny Rand!” or hectic schedules and instead has everything to do with Netflix’s thirteen episode order for its Marvel series. The truth is it’s too much and every single series, even the stronger ones, have been strained by too many episodes.
Now, let’s get something out in the open. I love The Defenders but they’ve always been sort of the B-league of the comics. Hear me out, here. Prior to the onslaught of successful (and even less successful) Marvel/Sony/Fox films, if you had asked someone unfamiliar with comics to name some Marvel characters, who would they have listed? The Hulk, Captain America and the X-Men seem likely. Iron Fist and Power Man? I doubt it. Did Frank Miller have an incredible run with Daredevil? Fuck yes. Would non-comic book fans even know who he was prior to Ben Affleck donning the suit? Eh.
The Netflix series have truly transformed these characters for non-comic book fans. They’ve done a great job of introducing and establishing The Defenders, both individually as well as small teases of what will come collectively, their New York City and the many allies and villains that inhabit that world. Overall, the shows have done their job by expanding the fan base, getting fans to carry over to other shows and even breaking the internet where Luke Cage is concerned. But there are moments in each series, from the strongest to the weakest, where it becomes evident that thirteen episodes hampers the storytelling and the overall impact of each show.
Arguably, Daredevil is the most “A-list” of these Marvel Netflix series and as a result the thirteen episodes arc just barely works for the character. In Season One, there was enough world and character building, plus set up for the second season and shows still to come to make it work. We’re given flashback that fill us in on Matt’s childhood accident and his relationship with his father and mid-way through the season we meet his former mentor, Stick and get a little tease of their past relationship. It’s a lot of establishment but for the first show out of the gates, it’s necessary if not tedious at times. When we finally get filled in on Wilson Fisk’s past, it’s only the strength of the character and a phenomenal performance by Vincent D’Onofrio that keep us grounded in yet another flashback.
In Season Two, with the series already established, we really dive into the complexities of Matt’s life as Daredevil and how this intersects with his job, his relationships and his city. The past comes back in the form of Elektra, things get complicated with Karen and Foggy and then there’s Frank Castle blasting his way through Hell’s Kitchen. And Kingpin returns and Madame Gao and Stick and The Hand…it’s a lot. I can’t really complain about Season Two because I did love it but I also recognize that I wouldn’t have been mad about this being split into two mini-seasons. Yes, the binge watcher in me would’ve hated to wait but I also feel like there’s so much that I missed the first time around because I had to binge through thirteen hour-long episodes.
Still, as far as the Marvel series go, Daredevil is the strongest series and the one least hampered by the series length. Sure, a lot gets crammed in and there’s still plenty of flashbacks to go around but the narrative never feels thin or drawn out for the sake of extending a plot line across two episodes. It’s when we wade into the remaining Defenders that things get dicey.
Now, I loved Jessica Jones and I do count it as one of the strongest of the Marvel shows but I do think we see the plot stretch itself thin, particularly leading up to Jessica’s final showdown with Kilgrave. This isn’t to say Jessica Jones was bad, in factdid a lot of things really well, particularly diving into the PTSD that comes from sexual assault and making social commentary on men asking women to smile. But there’s still a sense that things could have been wrapped up sooner; Jessica imprisoning Kilgrave seems a bit pointless and futile, Trish’s bad romance with Simpson drags out the hint that he’s Nuke and it shouldn’t take ten episodes to reveal that Jessica’s blood could be used as immunization against Kilgrave’s powers — especially when it winds up being another dead end. Sure, I’m nitpicking and the series is pretty kickass but trimming it down to eight episodes probably wouldn’t have erased much except some of the less compelling subplots that don’t serve much of a purpose outside of filling time.
And Jessica’s complicated paramour? One of the ways Luke Cage was able to outshine Daredevil was by establishing Luke’s Harlem as a very real place with a strong sense of community and a storied and important history. It’s something we never quite feel with Hell’s Kitchen, even though we’re told how important it is to save from Kingpin. It’s also what helps us, perhaps unknowingly at first, become truly invested in the dealings of Black Mariah and Cottonmouth. But — and credit is surely due here to the Academy Award winning Mahershala Ali — Luke Cage faltered by killing off it’s best villain midway through the season. It was hard to get invested in Diamondback, who literally shows up with a bang, because he’s such a stark difference from Cottonmouth, who seemed like a true threat and danger to Luke.
Sure, multiple villains in a single season feels like a proper comic book arc but if a single season can be mentally split into two halves (Daredevil Season Two, Luke Cage) then perhaps two different seasons is the better route. I won’t speak on Iron Fist without finishing it but perhaps not all Marvel series are made equal. If Danny Rand is really reliant on the source material that pairs him with Luke Cage, perhaps the character would do better with a tight eight episode season instead of thirteen episodes of a solo series. As much as I love binging a new Marvel show in a single weekend, most of the series would be better served by less episodes, which allow for tighter stories, less filler and dead end plotlines and a hell of a lot less time wasted watching Danny Rand lethargically convince people he’s still alive.
Fans of the rom com-subverting Wright film will fall in lesbians with Colossal.
Colossal, Nacho Vigalondo’s excellent genre-bending monster movie, seems to focus on the central relationship between bar-dwelling characters played by Anne Hathaway and Jason Sudeikis before being subverted by the film’s utter cleverness into something much darker. In this way, it’s similar to one of my favorite Edgar Wright films and, I predict, will attract and hold the same kind of dedicated cult following.
Wright, in his relatively brief directorial career, has become the master of comedic-genre films that recognize and embrace their traditional tropes while subverting expectations of cliched romance. In fact, Wright’s said in an interview that each of the films in his Cornetto Trilogy is a Trojan horse: “genre films that have a relationship comedy smuggled inside a zombie movie, a cop movie, and a sci-fi movie.” Hot Fuzz loves its action-oriented police thrillers in all their convoluted bromantic glory while The World’s End enjoys the group dynamic of aged college friends through the Twilight Zone filter of an alien invasion. Shaun of the Dead is perhaps his only truly romantic film, a movie with a rocky relationship at its core that drives the protagonist in all his plotted actions and eventually ends in reconciliation.
But none of these are the movie I’m thinking of. They’re all too honestly focused on healthy relationships or, at least, relationships that become healthier over time. I’m thinking of a film far too technicolor to be as mean as it is and too light to include its gut punches.
I’m thinking of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.
Scott Pilgrim is a movie, like Colossal, that’s central relationship is a misdirection. Scott (Michael Cera) must fight off evil exes in order to sustain his romance with Ramona (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). But it’s never quite clear why any of this is happening or what Ramona thinks of it all until the end. Colossal also starts you off simple: Hathaway’s character is going through a messy and complex break-up but not an unfamiliar one. Then the film slowly evolves. It’s a genre film masquerading as a rom-com, waiting to burst its kaiju dorkiness and subversive humor from the chest of its relationship like a xenomorph.
Both films speak the language of romantic comedies — the meet cutes, the awkward flirting, the small fights, — only to break it, bend it, and distort it through their native tongues. Scott Pilgrim is a hyper-kinetic marriage of teenage daydreaming, slacker garage rock, and an adolescence spent on video games while Colossal takes two parts dark, alcoholic mumblecore humor and one part broad Godzilla cartoonishness, then shakes well.
When we finally realize that perhaps Mr. Pilgrim isn’t suited to love the equally ill-prepared Ramona (whom he barely knows), the film’s protagonist earns the Power of Self-Respect (a sword) to use in the final confrontation. Meanwhile, we earn a new appreciation for a film much deeper than your average overly-stylized teen romp.
Similarly, when Sudeikis begins shifting away from his nice guy persona and more towards an internet “Nice Guy” persona (in all its desperate, suppressed, angry creepiness), we realize Colossal’s central relationship isn’t the dramatic element worth saving — it’s the manifestation and continuation of abuse that generates the monster in the first place. It’s not the silver lining, it’s the metaphorical threat creating its kaiju like the hydrogen bomb did with Godzilla.
While Hathaway is a phenomenal presence in the film, Sudeikis shifts so effectively that we can’t believe we didn’t see it coming. It’s the same feeling in Scott Pilgrim when we realize that the lead duo only just hooked up and perhaps this relationship is all being blown far out of proportion. Wright uses this for laughs, bittersweet as they may be, but Vigalondo twists the knife. This isn’t fun anymore, but it’s breathlessly compelling.
These films subvert our facile genre expectations (“oh, I hope they get together”) with humor, violence, and unexpectedly dark themes all done so well that they become brilliant juggling acts of multi-level pleasure. I want my id’s cake but I’d like to eat it with a fork and knife.
Colossal gives me monster movie homages and belly laughs while furthering intelligent commentary about male expectation and masculine fear of feminine greatness. Scott Pilgrim plays with medium so freely and flexibly that it’s a wonder it holds together as a movie, but all in the service of damning a fantasy relationship made up in the mind of a selfish twenty-something. Both beautifully undermine romantic expectations to further their love of specific genres, creating winning mash-ups that will live on in the dorm rooms and apartments of tastemaking nerds for years to come.
