Amy Adams and Steve Carrell also in negotiations.

After a string of blockbuster comedies starring Will Ferrell — Anchorman, The Other Guys, Step Brothers — writer-director Adam McKay side-stepped a little a couple years back with The Big Short, an ensemble flick about the real-life housing bubble collapse of the mid-2000s. The film earned the best reviews of McKay’s well-reviewed career, and wound up with five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, and one win for McKay’s screenplay (with Charles Randolph).

It shouldn’t be surprising then that for his big screen follow-up, McKay would return to the ripped-from-the-headlines genre, this time tackling a biopic of one of the most shadowy and misunderstood figures of this century to-date: Former Vice President Dick Cheney. And the cast he’s building? Start polishing the Oscars.

According to Variety’s sources Bale is on board to play Cheney, while Amy Adams is in talks to play his wife, Lynne, and Steve Carrell is in talks to play Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. McKay will once again write the script and is hoping to start shooting “in the spring for an awards-season push.” If that’s this spring, better sign those contracts fast.

This would be Bale and Adams’ second time as an onscreen couple, after American Hustle, and the second collaboration between Bale and Carrell, who were in The Big Short together. Given the age of the actors, expecting a sweeping life story that starts in the early 70s with the Nixon administration and carries through the second Bush administration.

Calling it now: the scene where Cheney “accidentally” blasts that dude in the face with a shotgun while quail hunting is going to be the funniest of the year.

In other news and points of interest…

…Aziz Ansari’s Netflix series Master of None is a little over a month away from dropping its second season on May 12th, and to tide us over, here’s the second trailer…

…after new broke the other day that Sylvester Stallone had withdrawn from the fourth installment of The Expendables, a franchise he originated, co-star Arnold Schwarzenegger has spoken out about whether or not he’s staying with the film…

…Spike TV released the first trailer for its biographical documentary I am Heath Ledger…

…producers of Ghost in the Shell finally admitted that casting a while person in the lead might have hurt their box office…

…and Eric Roth, Oscar-winning screenwriter of Forrest Gump, has come aboard to pen Denis Villeneuve’s take of Dune.

Over in our corner of the internet we had a lot of really interesting posts go up yesterday, including a preview of Ben Wheatley’s Freakshift, an exploration of Douglas Sirk’s melodramas, a list of monster team-up films inspired by Colossal, filmmaking tips from Mark Webb, director of Gifted, and the latest episode of the Shot by Shot podcast featuring a discussion of the cinematography in Martin Scorsese’s Silence and an exclusive interview with the film’s DP, two-time Oscar nominee Rodrigo Prieto.

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.

Christian Bale in Talks to Play Dick Cheney for Adam McKay was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Some fine original works are going even further out of style.

Remakes, they tell us, do no harm to the original works. The first movie will always be there for us to enjoy. I admit, I’m one of “they,” constantly defending the idea, particularly when the new version has something fresh to say while using an old framework. Fright Night recycled a horror classic and set it in the context of the housing crisis. The RoboCop redo takes on the issue of drones. But both of these performed poorly in all regards compared to their predecessors, and that was fine. Diehard fans of the originals just went on being diehard fans of the originals, no problem.

There are surely fans of the 1979 caper Going in Style but not on the same level. Despite receiving positive reviews and being a modest box office hit, the movie hadn’t had much of a legacy until Warner Bros. announced a remake five years ago. The new version is receiving mostly negative reviews and is not expected to perform as well in theaters. Chances are, the remake will not go out in style, instead becoming as forgotten as the original. If the title is thought about after this year, though, the newer version will be the one recalled by more people. Is that harmful to the better original? Maybe.

At least for a short time, the original Going in Style, which was directed by Martin Brest and stars George Burns, Art Carney, and Lee Strasberg as three bored old men who decide to rob a bank, gets some attention. Curious movie fans with enough time on their hands may be alerted to or reminded of its existence and then give it a look (it’s only $2 to rent on Amazon, albeit in standard definition). And film critics who haven’t seen it or want a refresher will watch it in order to reference it and maybe compare it to the remake in their review. Maybe they’ll recommend it in addition or instead.

The new Going in Style probably could have been a remake in idea only, thereby honoring the original’s good name. Its plot is changed enough. Directed by Zach Braff, this time the elder trio of robbers is played by Michael Caine, Alan Arkin, and Morgan Freeman, and now they’re given a more substantial and contemporary reason for their crime: the company they worked for was bought, and their pensions were lost in the deal, so they’re out to score only the exact amount they’re owed. The remake sounds more in tune with last year’s acclaimed Hell or High Water, but comedic.

The difference between the original and the remake is almost as significant, maybe more so, than the difference between the 1987 teen movie Three O’Clock High and Fist Fight, the recently released comedy that has been acknowledged as inspired by, if not directly sourced from, the former. Three O’Clock High remains a rather obscure work but at least its title wasn’t tarnished by Fist Fight when the new movie came and went with little interest or acclaim. Derivative comedies should do as Fist Fight did, because their premises can be so basic yet pliable. Look at how many movies essentially rehash Some Like It Hot yet manage to not be official remakes.

A lot of people going to see Going in Style this weekend don’t and won’t know it’s even a remake, nor will they care. This happens more often than you’d think. For all the complaints about how many remakes there are these days, few of the objectors even know the half of it. I try to highlight both the known and obscure at the start of the year — my 2017 guide shows that other lesser-known movies with new remakes include 1932’s Broken Lullaby and 2013's The Dinner (as the smaller-scale films Frantz and The Dinner, respectively). Not everything is nostalgia bait a la Beauty and the Beast; it’s likely that a majority of the lackluster box office gross for CHiPs came from people who weren’t even aware, let alone fans, of the TV series it’s based on.

When Remakes Can’t Escape the Original

Even if I tell you that the original Going in Style is worth checking out in place of the remake, if you’re not interested in a caper involving old guys robbing a bank anyway, you’ll probably just ignore both. It’s not quite like the pleas to support an anime feature deserving of mainstream recognition particularly to squash its racially insensitive live-action remake, as in the case of Ghost in the Shell. And it’s not as exemplary or essential as Sleepless Night, the French thriller remade this year as the already forgotten Sleepless. The original Going in Style is very good but not requisite.

When Obscure Movies Become More Obscured by Bad Remakes was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s a rhetorical question, as this excellent video proves.

Seems like every time a television series ends, the same question pops up: what are the greatest TV finales ever? But for some reason the opposite isn’t true: when new series start, you never see an abundance of “best pilots ever” lists.

If you had asked me that latter question up to January 20th, 2008, I would have told you Twin Peaks has the best pilot in TV history, but that was pre-BB: pre-Breaking-Bad. Because as anyone who’s seen that pilot knows, it is instantly captivating, confounding, intriguing, and obsession-inducing, all thanks to a whip-smart script from creator Vince Gilligan that balances a simple if unexpected premise with a complicated sense of morality. This week, that script goes under the erudite microscope of Michael Tucker in the latest video from his Lessons from the Screenplay YouTube channel.

I know I have a tendency to get hyperbolic from time to time, but I don’t think any of you will hold it against me if I call Breaking Bad as perfect as television gets. It is nothing less than one of the greatest — if not the greatest — character arcs in the history of the medium, and it’s as narratively unpredictable as you could hope for while still adhering to a taut storyline (as opposed to something like, again, Twin Peaks). It is a fully-realized, fully-developed, fully-engrossing series, and everything it would become is sewn into Gilligan’s pilot, which Tucker analyzes like a scientist: precisely, knowledgeably, and seeking new discoveries.

When it comes to Tucker and his work, you guys know I’m a capital-F fan. Lessons from the Screenplay is a school of screenwriting into and of itself and though I’ve said it before and will likely say it again, I believe this is his best, most revelatory work to date. I promise you there’s no better way you could spend 11 minutes and 40 seconds today. A warning, though: if you’re anything like me, this is going to reignite your BB fervor, which could result in a 62-hour binge-fest.

P.S. — Want to read the pilot script for yourself? It’s right here.

‘Breaking Bad’ — Best Pilot Ever? was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

And how it’s set a new benchmark for Prestige TV.

I’m finding that writing about Big Little Lies is extraordinarily difficult, because an itemization of its merits as a piece of craft are inevitably going to sound like backhanded compliments, and I would want all of those merits to be taken very seriously. This itemization would also involve several uses of negatives as qualifiers, and that sets the wrong tone; if something “isn’t [conditionally positive quality],” isn’t that bad? Then there’s the “is it a movie or is it a TV show?” thing, which is becoming more of a thing, and proportionally pissing me off ever more with each recurrence, because (he said, betraying the hippie-dippiness of his arts and critical philosophy education) it’s all cinema, man. In the absence of any other opening gambit, let’s err on the side of being reductive: it’s good. It’s very, very good.

One of the major ways Big Little Lies arrives at this place is by being, in the most complimentary sense possible, the Platonic ideal of mid 2010s Prestige TV. It is just enough of a genre piece — the murder mystery — to have a built-in element generating suspense independent of other elements. It takes a clever enough spin on the established genre — the mystery here is who was murdered rather than who committed the murder — to avoid most slippery slopes (or broken top steps) leading to the pitfalls of cliche. The coup de grace, though, for which veteran TV writer David E. Kelley (working from the popular novel by Liane Moriarty) and director Jean-Marc Vallee in equal measures deserve credit, is in the coy downplaying of the genre angle in favor of the human drama in the piece, or in more practical terms, showcasing the performances.

That is, not to bury the lede, Big Little Lies’ biggest strength and raison d’etre, as an actors’ showcase. And, to be clear, not just any kind of acting showcase, but one for stars. There is a considerable, although not complete, overlap in the diagram of great actors and great stars. Not all great actors are great stars, and vice versa, and consistency is another question entirely. Acting is a deeply misunderstood art that everyone thinks they understand, and so blanket assertions that so-and-so is great are countered by “So-and-so? *scoff* You’re crazy!” So I’m not going to take that route. Instead, let me describe for you a short beat in which Nicole Kidman, as hot-shot attorney turned stay at home mom Celeste, looks at Alexander Skarsgaard, her blindingly handsome, increasingly abusive husband Perry, from across a room. The angle on Kidman’s face is a medium close-up, her head and shoulders in frame, her face angled slightly but essentially looking directly into camera. There are dozens of pages of inner monologue about the contradictions of her marriage, on her face, that register all within a manner of seconds. She blinks once, her eyelashes dipping to her cheek. Her face is still radiating the inner doubt. She blinks again. The inner turmoil is either gone, or, more disconcertingly, buried even deeper.

That’s how the fuck you do the thing. That’s just . . . goddamn . . .

And that’s just one moment. Big Little Lies is running over with them. Every character in it, down to bit parts, feels like a fully rounded person, and its fictional (apparently, very fictional) Monterey is a complete, fully dimensional world. (In fact, while hoping to outlast a particularly nasty case of writer’s block by pure attrition earlier, which is to say, playing Mass Effect: Andromeda, the thought occurred to me that I would play a Big Little Lies video game for months on end; this column was almost about that hypothetical game, if you need extra blessings to count.) It invites immersion, to have the audience on first name basis with its principal characters by the story’s close. It succeeds so well in this that, when the oft-nearly-forgotten murder mystery is resolved, the mildly creepy feeling “well, at least the right person died” sets in. And then is washed away, on a literal beach.

Big Little Lies, to address the caveats hinted at earlier, is not perfect. The poetic license taken with its setting, which is probably not that big a deal unless you’re from the exact place, is one thing. The fact that we get all kinds of time with and glimpses into the characters played by Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Shailene Woodley, and even Laura Dern’s smaller role, but so comparatively little of Zoe Kravitz’s, feels like a missed opportunity. It’s nearly the only one, though. The rest of the show (Film? Miniseries? Fuck it) is as good as this kind of thing gets.

I haven’t even touched on the editing, which isn’t all that radical (there’s another one of those caveats I didn’t want to lead with) in real terms but is the kind of garnish that sets Big Little Lies apart from other Prestige TV, which has mastered sheen but isn’t always as deft rhythmically. Vallee and editing quartet David Berman, Maxime Lahaie, Sylvain Lebel, and Jim Vega keep Big Little Lies dancing to a legato beat, with drum fills of flashback, dream fragment, and fantasized catharsis. It’s stylish without being ostentatious, which is a perfect touch for its medium.

And that medium is Prestige TV, often mocked for bellowing its intent and then delivering the goods with a clattering of broken plates, or hewing too close to a bland template of guaranteed success. Big Little Lies should be the form’s new aspirational goal. It’s at least trying to address its shaky areas, and while incremental change may not be the most popular thing these days, it’s better than no change at all. And that’s a good place to leave Big Little Lies, for now, on its beloved beach, warmed by the light of its stars, an ocean of promise to the west. The future. May it be bright.

Let’s Keep Talking About Big Little Lies was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

All the ways there are to see according to the Master of Suspense.

The cinema of Alfred Hitchcock is one of curiosity, nearly all his films are motivated by it, whether internal to a character — a curiosity about themselves — or focused externally — a curiosity about others or events. His characters want to know some truth, they want to discover the reasons behind things, or some hidden insight into motivation.

The most basic way Hitchcock visually communicates this sense of curiosity in his characters is through their eyes, specifically in how they peer, leer, peep, peek or look when they think no one is watching. In the following extensive and thorough supercut from our old friend Jorge Luengo Ruiz, the surreptitious gazes of Hitchcock characters from across the director’s entire filmography have been assembled to showcase the wide variety of silent ways Hitch had at conveying curiosity. Whether looking over the tops of newspapers, into keyholes or makeshift peepholes, and whether intending help, harm, or just looking to assuage their curiosity, all these gazes in their way progress the plot and themes of their respective films in ways no dialogue ever could, and serve as one more fascinating element in the Master of Suspense’s bag of cinematic tricks.

The Curious Gaze of Alfred Hitchcock: A Point-of-View Supercut was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Tarantino has promises to keep and miles to go before he sleeps.

“‘Death Proof’ has got to be the worst movie I ever make. And for a left-handed movie, that wasn’t so bad, all right? — so if that’s the worst I ever get, I’m good. But I do think one of those out-of-touch, old, limp, flaccid-dick movies costs you three good movies as far as your rating is concerned.” — Quentin Tarantino, 2012 (THR Round Table Interview)

It’s the ten year anniversary of the release of Death Proof, a gonzo experiment in meta-cinematic storytelling that puts all of Tarantino’s subtle nods and fetishes into the spotlight. It’s great. I’m not going to hear anybody trash-talking this joint. Okay, so Tarantino goes on to acknowledge in the interview he’s talking bullshit on himself to make a point. But, folks were real quick to agree that the flick is “just alright” and “certainly at the bottom” of his filmography. I can’t rank his films. Most of his characters may be smart-talking and groove-loving with the more-than-occasional foot fetish, but his films all feel so different when it comes to what makes them great and why.

Tarantino went on to share that he fantasizes that after his death some kid will stumble onto his work and start watching his stuff at random. He’s terrified of leaving a legacy marred by a lackluster over-the-hill movie for this kid to discover. He, of course, relates this in the most Tarantino way possible saying he just really wants all his films to keep that kid’s dick hard. Despite all the bombastic rhetorical choices, it’s obvious that he feels he has promises to keep to the cinema’s audience. His respect for cinema itself edges on fanaticism, where the unrealized potential of a dull film is a nightmarish demon waiting to destroy the director he wants you to see him as.

I saw Death Proof for the first time last year. It was one of those films where I got it in my head that I had already seen it and that I hadn’t cared for it. If it’s that easy to get a so-so opinion of a piece of work into the zeitgeist, maybe there’s something to the idea of always hyping your own work? I’m an easy mark, though, so maybe that’s just me. Any road, I decided to give it another go and figured out real quick I hadn’t actually seen it before. Here’s the thing. I’m not a kid. Tarantino is still kicking around. This movie ain’t flaccid. From the gravelly coarseness of Stuntman Mike, rendered impotent by a world indifferent to him, to the literally inimitable Zoe Bell performance in the second half, this movie is all eggplant emoji. Or, really, it’s all Tarantino id in the foreground. Death Proof is exactly what it’s like to watch and think about a movie in Tarantino’s head.

Death Proof was originally released as a single bill, double feature with Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, under the name Grindhouse. So, it’s no big leap to think of it as Tarantino’s full-fledged embrace of grindhouse cinema, with all it’s flaws and meanness and exploitative nature on display. My goodness though, he’s in there doing a lot with the set up. The first half of the movie is him playing around with all the presentation, chop-shop nature of grindhouse. It has damaged frames, burn marks, mixed up title cards, missing footage, dorked up audio, and more. Anything you could think of that distinguishes those films as low-budget, mean cinema, he did it.

It’s a weird, meta-cinematic space. I’m watching this story about a disgusting serial killer but I’m also watching this movie as though it were created in a long gone era. Presumably by some alternate timeline version of Tarantino where he came into his own back in the days of exploitation cinema. What if this Grindhouse Timeline Tarantino stumbled onto some forgotten, little seen movie about a murderer featuring the gnarliest car-as-a-murder-weapon murder scene he’d ever seen? How would he add onto that? Well, he’d get his new potential victims and prepare to shoot an irresponsibly dangerous series of stunts. But, that isn’t a whole movie.

This is grindhouse, though. So, first off, he’d rip that original movie right off. Literally. He’d run down the best 35mm copies of the original he could find and chop it up. Is the actor who played the original Stuntman Mike available for a long shoot? No? Cut out all of his back story. Focus on the first group of women, their foibles, and their ultimate gruesome murder. Gotta keep that murder. In fact, chop it up so you see that impact over and over and over because that shit is money. Hey, now he’s got half a movie full of salacious moments, nasty ends, and a madcap series of stunts planned to put butts in chairs. What can you do to add something to that? Revenge of the victims. Fuck the man. But, Grindhouse Timeline Tarantino never makes the film.

So, we’ve got one half of a movie made by Grindhouse Timeline Tarantino. After the interlude to the second half of the film, Tarantino switches to black and white for the opening scene. It connects Stuntman Mike to the new story, but also acts like a transition to modern Tarantino engaging with the material. Look, I don’t want to get all wonky with this, but we’re getting to Russian Matryoshka nesting doll level of meta-cinematic space. Our Tarantino “discovers” Grindhouse Timeline Tarantino’s work and builds upon it. It’s like he’s saying, hey everybody. This is what I’m about. This is what I do. I want to stand on the shoulders of the nastiest, meanest most unrecognized filmmaking giants out there.

He wants to be classic. And cool. The transition complete, the story pops to color. No more damaged frames. No more bungled audio or missing footage. We get a straight up forty-five minute short film where Zoe Bell comes to Tennessee to test drive a Dodge Challenger from Vanishing Point. And, along the way, to play an insane game called Ship’s Mast where she rides on the hood of the car at an insane pace. Stuntman Mike comes crashing into the party and nearly kills them all. After their first duel ends with the parties crashing off the road, Mike gets out of car and clearly feels alive for the first time in a long time.

What separates this Tarantino from Grindhouse Tarantino? Stuntman Mike is the victim this go round. Grindhouse Tarantino is a mean bastard. This group, deliberately similar to the first group, meets Stuntman Mike on his turf. And, while the ride is terrifying, their first encounter ends with Stuntman Mike catching one in the arm from Kim’s roscoe. He speeds off, weeping like a child. The climactic moment of their story is Zoe Bell leaping out of the grass, as playfully as a child, delighted to discover she’s alright. The final arc of the movie isn’t an arc at all. It’s a straight line to the revenge of the victims. They chase him down, out-drive him, wreck his car, and beat his ass to death in the middle of the road.

The film has great characters, an insanely daring performance from Zoe Bell, a terrifically gross Kurt Russell performance, and some really gorgeous shots. It’s meta-cinema nature appeals to me. But, you know. That leaves the movie feeling as though it’s a bit all over the place. In every other film, Tarantino is about pastiche and homage. And maybe turgidity? His work constantly points to the filmmakers he considers great. In Death Proof, we get to see Tarantino create a full-on maybe-see-a-doctor turgid pastiche of grindhouse cinema. It’s gnarly, but makes for what feels like a unique story construction. He’s operating so deeply and unrestrained inside his own wheelhouse that it feels like he’s operating outside of his comfort zone. It verges on out of control. But, my goodness it’s fun. I do know this. If Tarantino is genuinely worried about the lasting ability of his filmography to cause priapism, Death Proof ain’t gonna let ’em down.

The Case for ‘Death Proof’ as Essential Tarantino was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

‘Bokeh’ Is Devastatingly Beautiful and Beautifully Devastating

If you have to be depressed and alone somewhere there are far worse places to go than Iceland.

Isolation can be a terrifying experience. The feeling that you’re all alone in the world is frightening even in a metaphorical sense, but to realize that you’re quite literally alone? That no one — stranger or loved one alike — is going to be there for you? It’s the makings of a nightmare.

Jenai (Maika Monroe) and Riley (Matt O’Leary) at least have each other when the rest of the planet’s human population suddenly disappears. Or do they?

The young couple have come to Iceland for a vacation away from the bustle of life, and they’re floored by the island country’s endless beauty. They interact with the locals, get busy in hot springs, and strengthen the love they feel for each other. The vacation ends early one morning when they awake to discover the town is empty. The world seems no better off as live broadcasts cease, phone calls and emails back home go unanswered, and they’re at a loss as to what exactly is happening. If a plague, where are the bodies? If alien abductions, where are the ships? If the rapture, well what are the odds that they’re the only two unworthy souls on Earth?

As days and weeks pass, the pair move from searching for answers to finding ways to stay alive. They can’t get back home, food is a finite resource on the island, and their future is uncertain. Beyond mere survival though, the two find themselves struggling with the reason behind their shared isolation and what it means to each of them.

Writers/directors Geoffrey Orthwein and Andrew Sullivan deliver a feature debut with Bokeh that’s one part Icelandic tourism video, one part extended Twilight Zone episode, and one part existential exploration of our core beliefs and truths. It’s a beautifully-filmed look at personal themes both important and uncomfortable, and the end result is a film that resembles an engaging dream every bit as much as it does a harrowing nightmare.

The term “bokeh” is from photography and refers to the blurred, out-of-focus parts of a picture. It’s guaranteed to be a double-edged sword of sorts as some viewers will turn it around onto the entirety of the film itself — “The story lacks focus!” — but they’ll be missing its actual application here. Iceland is an effortlessly attractive place to the eye, and cinematographer Joe Lindsay translates it directly to the screen offering mind-blowing landscapes and stunning natural wonders alongside the human element. Within that picture we’re meant to stay on the young couple, and their reality and situation is crystal clear. They’re in love, they’re hopeful, and they see a future, but this event throws it all into disarray.

Their reaction towards and journey through dealing with the situation probably falls along lines similar to what most people would experience. Fear, confusion, awe, a celebratory attempt to make the best of things, and the eventual crushing weight of reality. The film isn’t all that interested in providing answers, and that uncertainty — that blurriness — is yet another of its strengths.

It’s an intimate tale, remarkably so for a film about the disappearance of humanity, and as Jenai and Riley struggle together and individually viewers will see themselves in these moments. Some will lean towards her approach, one fueled by past religious upbringing and conviction as to its meaning, while others will side with Riley’s more nihilistic, “we’ll never know” interpretation. Both are as right as they are wrong.

Monroe and O’Leary are the film’s sole performers for most of its running time, and they do equally strong work convincing viewers of both their love for each other and their fight to resist falling apart. We’re with them every step of the way, from the joyous freedom of vacation through the pained reality that becomes their new normal. The film moves at a very deliberate pace, and its interest in human revelations over narrative ones might test some viewers, but the journey is well worth the patience required.

Bokeh is continually pleasing to the eyes even as it challenges the heart and mind, and while it’ll leave you with a desire to visit Iceland it suggests you may want to save some money by making it a one-way ticket.

Review — ‘Bokeh’ Is Devastatingly Beautiful and Beautifully Devastating was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Short of the Day

From writer-director Pardis Parker.

As a parent-to-be of two adopted children, I can tell you firsthand that home visits from social workers are stressful under the best of circumstances. Someone has come to your house, your sanctum, to evaluate and scrutinize every detail of it and you and gauge whether or not you’re a worthy caretaker, and you never really know what’s going to reflect poorly on you until it does. But if I were to make a list of things you don’t want to happen while entertaining a home visit, near the top without a doubt would be “guy shows up unexpectedly, covered in blood, with a dead cow he needs help milking.”

That’s the set-up for the riotously funny short film Two Men, Two Cows, Two Guns, from writer-director Pardis Parker: an older couple are entertaining a social worker looking into their care of Jake, a young boy. Greg, the father — who’s played by John Dunsworth, a.k.a Jim Lahey from Trailer Park Boys — is just trying to read the newspaper when said-unexpected visitor shows up. As you might expect, things go hilariously downhill from there.

If Parker’s name sounds familiar to you, likely it’s from Mideast Minute, the satirical Comedy Central news show which he created and stars in as anchor Jamsheed al-Jamsheedy. Two Men, Two Cows, Two Guns showcases the same sense of wry, deadpan comedy of the CC series, but with a narrative flair that makes one hope there’s a feature coming soon from Parker. Check it out, then jump to his website for a couple other great shorts.

‘Two Men, Two Cows, Two Guns’ is an Equation for a Darkly Farcical Film was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Should all adaptations of classic works be faithful?

In an interview with the BBC’s Hew Wheldon, Orson Welles set out his philosophy concerning adaptation, more specifically, his willingness to interpret and alter source material:

WHELDON: Do you have any compunction about changing a masterpiece?

WELLES: Not at all, because film is quite a different medium. Film should not be a fully illustrated, all-talking, all-moving version of a printed work, but should be itself, a thing of itself. In that way it uses a novel in the same way a playwright might use a novel — as a jumping off point from which he will create a complete new work. So no, I have no compunction about changing a book. If you take a serious view of filmmaking, you have to consider that films are not an illustration or an interpretation of a work, but quite as worthwhile as the original.

The “masterpiece” Wheldon is referring to is Franz Kafka’s The Trial, published in 1925. In it, an ambitious office worker is arrested on unnamed charges, prosecuted by an illogical and masochistic judicial system, and executed in a ditch — like Welles says: “Read the book sometime. It’s short.”

Welles brought The Trial to the big screen 1962, and it is, in every practical sense, an outstanding cinematic achievement (as well as Welles’ favourite among his own films). It is to Welles’ eternal credit that he is one of the few filmmakers — perhaps the only one so far — to successfully realize Kafka on-screen in a mainstream capacity. Kafka isn’t easy to film; his prose, while certainly visual, is intense, and his style is so unrelentingly personal that any narrative or tonal deviation is immediately suspect.

There is only one other film adaptation of The Trial. It was made in 1993 by David Jones and stars Kyle MacLachlan with a screenplay from Harold Pinter and currently boasts a well-deserved 33% on Rotten Tomatoes. And while there’s nothing particularly spicy about crowning Orson fucking Welles the superior filmmaker — setting these two adaptations alongside one another, charting their narrative and technical difference as well as their respective (in)fidelity to the source material, does yield some compelling insight into what it takes to realize Kafka on-screen; that such adaptation demands not only a baseline craftsmanship, but an artistry.

The divergent portrayals of the bureaucrat-turned-suspect Joseph K. are immediately striking. In Welles, K. is played by a squirmy and endlessly endearing Anthony Perkins, who twitchily oscillates from smarminess to rage, from vexation to defeat, his voice erupting in conjecture one moment, only to devolve into stuttered self-effacement the next. Critically, Perkins’ K. is not just some innocent pencil-pusher, or sheepish victim, but a (partially) willing servant of the system itself. In a rare Q&A session in 1981, Welles put it like this:

[K. is] not the poor little faceless accountant but a young man very anxious to get ahead in this awful world and is doing his best to do that and therefore is in a state of real neurosis because he is both terrified of, and anxious to, conquer the same thing.

For Welles, K.’s complicity in this irrational violent system is no small point, nor is it something passive; it blinds him to the uneasy way in which he interacts with women, to his cruelty towards his fellow accused, and to his own misplaced sense of entitlement. Gradually, K.’s initial righteousness contorts into inspired madness; not quite resignation, but something resembling understanding (“so I’ve lost my case, what of it!”). McLachlan, whose inactivity is more in line with the text, is comparatively one-note, consistently speak-shouting a bland indignation that never really amounts to much more than that. Consequently, Jones’ protagonist lacks the essential vulnerability that invests us in Perkins. It’s difficult to buy McLachlan’s gentlemanly K. as a man whose life is gradually corroding on all sides, let alone a three-dimensional character who is both oppressed by, and a member of society.

Like K.’s more pronounced complicity, the nightmarish quality of Welles’ scenery is thematically resonant: it is a deliberately fractured and confounding world. Unlike Kafka’s text, which anxiously represents the jumbled crush of a crowded human populace, the streets of Welles’ city are empty; an alienating and faceless extension of bureaucracy. It’s a landscape unfixed not only spatially, but temporally, straddling both a pseudo-Soviet modernism and a decayed and fetid 19th century aesthetic. These are improbable, paranoid spaces: the closet where K. finds the court officials being flogged is in his office building; the back door of Tintorelli’s water tower-based portrait studio which inexplicably leads to the law court office; a door in a seemingly abandoned apartment that gives way to a massive courtroom. These disorienting moments are also present in Jones’ Trial, but are undermined by the film’s firm rooting in 19th century Prague, and effectively amount to isolated incidents rather than an ever-present visual sense of un-reality. Meanwhile, space in Welles’ Trial, constantly alternates between the intimidatingly vast and the stiflingly claustrophobic, to the effect of literally inducing existential nausea in our hero. Jones’ K. also suffers from queasiness, but we never suspect that his surroundings are the cause. Not so in Welles, were it is as if the spatial illogic of Lewis Carroll (or H.H. Holmes) has been writ law, endemic of a systematic and impenetrable nonsense.

Welles’ uninterrupted tracking shots bare mentioning. There are two that come to mind: the first, where K. is navigating his office; and the second, when he assists a friend of his neighbour in moving a heavy trunk across a barren field. Both serve to further intensify our overwhelming sense of unease, presenting monumental spaces only to deny both the characters and the audience any escape, let alone climactic revelation, as with the final shot of Citizen Kane. Jones, unlike Welles, fails (outside of one underwhelming smash pan) to do anything remotely affected in terms of cinematography. In this way, where Welles’ dutch angles, abyss-like field of depth, and occasional frenetic shaky cam contribute to the disconcerting tone in an ampliative sense, not much can be gleaned from Jones’ film by looking at how it was shot; it’s the cinematic equivalent of trying to glean the distinct feel of a book by reading its wikipedia summary.

Jones’ Trial is, for all intents and purposes, the more “faithful” adaptation: K. brings the investigators his identification papers; he’s forced to wear a black jacket to his initial inspection; it’s made explicit that K. works at a bank; K. is lured to the Cathedral under the false pretence of taking an Italian client sightseeing. More notably, Welles’ film is bookended by two particularly glaring deviations: a prologue featuring the parable of the Law; and a decidedly heretical final scene. The parable, which tells of a man confronted and neutralized by the inaccessibility of the Law, is narrated by Welles and animated by Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker. Later in the film, Welles’ Advocate repeats the myth — another deviation, as this is properly the task of the Priest that K. encounters in the cathedral. While it differs from the source material, manipulating the placement and emphasis of the myth in this way is far from detrimental, rather, it becomes an ouroboros as ovular and dizzying as the Law itself.

Welles’ conclusion is far more problematical. In both the original Kafka and in Jones’ film, K. is brought to a ditch, laid on his back, stretches his arms out to an unknown silhouette in a window, and is gutted by his executioners. There is, as is the case with most Kafka, no real sense of closure at the end of The Trial (one illicitly suspects because most of his works were unfinished, but that’s another story). In Welles’ film, the executioners are so unwilling to go through with the murder that they abandon K. in the ditch and toss in a handful of lit dynamite, which K. in turn picks up, and cackling, attempts (unsuccessfully) to throw back. When asked at the 1981 Q&A as to why he made such a startling alteration Welles responded thusly:

The book was written before the Holocaust…and I couldn’t bear for him to submit to death as he does in Kafka, masochistically…I had to let him shout out defiance until he was blown up.

Though the film cannot be reduced to a distinct political allegory, just as Kafka cannot be reduced to a prophet of 20th century totalitarianism, Welles, ever heretical, replaced that whimper with a transcendental bang.

This is often the loudest criticism levied against Welles’ Trial: that it is an ineffective adaption insofar as Welles eclipses Kafka. This criticism, and I’m in agreement with Welles here, fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of adapting literature (or any media) to film: “Every film is an original work. A film should never be an illustration of a book or of a play, it should be itself and it cannot be itself unless it is creative.”

Welles inserts himself into The Trial, as a narrator, a character, a director, and at one point, as an uneasy combination of all three: when the Advocate corners K. between a projection screen and recites a condensed version of the film’s opening parable. The Trial is, manifestly, Welles’ particular reading of Kafka, inflected with all his subjectivities, anxieties, and latent sentimentality. And this, adaptation that accepts and makes room for subjectivity and ampliative creativity, is the way to adapt Kafka, I think. To obsess over replication is to do the source material a great injustice; to represent it as sterile, and unnecessary. Jones’ may be the more “faithful” adaption, but as Roger Ebert notes: for all its fidelity, “it lacks the madness.” It’s somewhat naive and presumptuous to think such a gilded and infallible translation is possible; it’s not that Kafka is unadaptable, merely that adaptations ought to add something to the appreciation of the source material, rather than pointlessly parrot it back like inalienable gospel. More appropriate than, is Welles attempt — to cinematically express, with all the methods particular to cinema, his own contemporary interpretation of the Kafkaesque, however deviant.

Trials and Tribulations: The Art of Adapting Kafka was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s a feminist re-imagining in Netflix’s latest series.

Last Tuesday, Netflix released the first full-length trailer for their new series, Anne. Working with Canadian network CBC, the eight-episode series is an adaptation of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s early 20th century novel Anne of Green Gables. However, don’t expect this to be a word-to-screen adaptation; Anne’s showrunner and writer Moira Walley-Beckett (Breaking Bad) has said in a statement that she “wanted to chart some new territory,” admitting that the series “is not a period piece with a glossy veneer.”

For those unfamiliar with the novel off of which Anne is based, Montgomery’s work begins with the two siblings Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, played R. H. Thomson and Geraldine James in the series, who decide to adopt an orphan boy to help them with their farm, Green Gables, in the fictional town of Avonlea that’s located in Prince Edward Island, Canada. Except, the orphan boy turns out to be a girl, the titular Anne (Amybeth McNulty). The Cuthberts decide to keep her, and what follows is the growth of Anne from a girl to a young woman as we see her learn from her mistakes, have a novel-long rivalry, and make choices that will affect her future.

The trailer doesn’t show Anne’s physical growth (in the novel readers see her from age seven up to sixteen), so it will be interesting to see if they use McNulty’s real age (she’s 14) to their advantage and chart the growth of Anne over the eight episodes. Although, it’s more likely they’ll use its second season — if renewed — to portray Anne’s life. What the trailer does show, however, is that this is a modernised adaptation of Montgomery’s novel with an unapologetic and feminist Anne at its centre. With a focus on greenery and nature that clearly contrast the greyness of the classroom, the stylistic aspect of Anne is updated with both modern visuals and shots (note the classic coming-of-age staring-out-of-a-car-window translated to a horse-drawn vehicle,) yet is still able to convey the rural 20th century authenticity that is the reason why Montgomery’s work is so beloved.

What’s more, with its originality in its portrayal of the story, it’ll be hard to compare it to the much-loved 1985 television film that takes the book’s name. Instead, they can exist together.

Watch the trailer below and see the imaginative world of Anne of Green Gables translated to screen. The series will premiere on May 12. It’s so easy to love Green Gables, isn’t it?

Let’s Go to Green Gables with the New Trailer for Netflix’s ‘Anne’ was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How ‘Smurfs,’ ‘Ghostbusters,’ ‘Ghost in the Shell’ and more are keeping their brands alive after live-action disappointments.

As the live-action Hollywood version of Ghost in the Shell looks to lose $60m after audiences ignored it at the box office last weekend, Japanese publisher Kodansha and anime studio Production I.G. have announced a new animated project based on Masamune Shirow’s classic manga with Kenji Kamiyama and Shinji Aramaki on board as co-directors.

There are no other details, not even clarification on whether the plan is for a new anime series or feature, and this is something that has been teased since before the new movie’s release, but the timing of the greenlight announcement comes across as damage control, reminding fans that Ghost in the Shell will live on as a property more properly once again.

It’s also interesting that this is happening as the animated feature Smurfs: The Lost Village opens in theaters. Sony decided to reboot the little blue creatures in this format after the disappointing box office of 2013’s live-action/CG-animation hybrid The Smurfs 2. The studio had been well into development on a third movie in that series but decided to shut it down.

Sony has done something slightly similar since then, too. Following its disappointment with the performance of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, soon after making a deal with Marvel for co-production of another live-action reboot of the superhero franchise, the studio also announced an animated Spider-Man feature in development that they are exclusively producing.

Also at Sony, Ivan Reitman is making an animated Ghostbusters feature, which has actually been in the works since 2015 but will seem like another franchise change of course when it’s finished and released. Last year’s live-action reboot was another letdown for the studio, which so far doesn’t appear to be interested in continuing the property in that format.

The cycle may seem like just a trend for one studio at the moment, plus the Ghost in the Shell project, which likely would have gone forward regardless of how the live-action movie did. Paramount, which released the Ghost in the Shell remake, didn’t decide to make an animated G.I. Joe feature after canceling G.I. Joe 3 — they’re going with a live-action reboot instead.

And Disney certainly isn’t going to need to circle back and make more animated Jungle Book and Beauty and the Beast movies. Maybe one day they’ll run out of classics to adapt to live-action and then remake those movies, at least the less-directly translated (such as Maleficent), as animated features. It’d be like the cyclical trend a while back where movies became stage musicals on Broadway and then became movies again, with the songs.

Animation will always be something to fall back on, though, particularly for properties originating in that format or some other related medium, like children’s books and comics. Sony has plans for an animated Popeye almost 40 years after the relatively unsuccessful live-action movie of the same name (which was released almost 50 years after the first theatrical Popeye cartoon). And Universal has an animated How the Grinch Stole Christmas in the works almost 20 years after the release of its live-action movie (which was released almost 40 years after the classic animated version). Animation also just has more box office potential because it’s more kid-friendly.

Of course, some properties can have live-action and animated incarnations running simultaneously, such as in the case of Disney and Marvel running Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy cartoons on television while also producing movies with the same characters. And Warner Bros. and DC keep making animated Batman movies separate from live-action features.

Those animated versions are able to be distinct in that they’re made for TV or directly for home video (excluding the one-day theatrical screenings for Batman: The Killing Joke). But linked-up series and movies can exist, too. Disney has the animated Star Wars Rebels cartoon, which is part of the same canon as the theatrical live-action movies.

We’ll soon see if audiences are fine with also having two formats on the big screen, whether canonically connected or not. In addition to Sony having separate Spider-Man universes heading to theaters, one live-action, one animated, Paramount has been developing an animated prequel to its live-action Transformers movie franchise, as part of its expansion plans.

More animated fallbacks need to happen to prove the idea is in fashion. It won’t be surprising if the next Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie is another animated feature (for now, the property still continues to produce animated TV series). Perhaps Bourne, Independence Day, and Zoolander can continue in animation, even though that’s not their original medium.

The Movie Franchises That Died in 2016

If certain creative fans had their way, there would be animated continuations of Indiana Jones (watch this), The Terminator (watch this), Firefly (watch this), and Lost in Space (watch this) — the first two properties are instead expected to continue with live-action movies, while the last one is actually being rebooted as another live-action TV series.

Not that this looks like a fad so much as a typical cycle. Like the animated TMNT being made between live-action Ninja Turtles movie series and Batman: The Animated Movie released between the Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher live-action Batman franchises. There’s a good chance that in the future we’ll see live-action reboots of Smurfs and Ghost in the Shell, too.

Animation as a Fallback was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

An original OPS/FSR video essay.

Denis Villeneuve’s 2013 film Prisoners, written by Aaron Guzikowski, is a taut, labyrinthine thriller that doesn’t really resolve itself until the last 30 seconds before the screen goes dark. But I believe those last 30 seconds are an example of pitch-perfect screenwriting and cinematic storytelling, and just why deserves to be explored, which is exactly what I’ve done in the following video essay: break down the individual elements of the film’s final moments to reveal how they satisfy all the dangling plotlines and character arcs in one succinct, largely silent scene.

Naturally, spoilers abound, so if you haven’t seen Prisoners, a) for shame, and b) go do that then jump back here for some supplemental education. Then for more of our original videos, visit our Vimeo page.

Why the Last 30 Seconds of ‘Prisoners’ is Perfect Storytelling was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The zeitgeist of one of the 80s more insane buddy cop flicks.

Buddy cop movies are plentiful to be sure, in fact, when The Hidden was released in 1987, it wasn’t even the biggest buddy cop flick of the year. Ironically, The Hidden costar Michael Nouri turned down the role of Detective Martin Riggs in Lethal Weapon to star in this sci-fi actioner about an alien inhabiting the bodies of various law-abiding citizens and using their bodies as vessels to engage in brazen crime sprees.

If that synopsis doesn’t grab you, then you really should start evaluating your cinematic perspectives. To those of you who hear that logline and immediately begin prepping your The Hidden/I Come in Peace double feature, bravo. You’ll probably glean a lot from this week’s episode of the Junkfood Cinema podcast.

A common trope of sci-fi movies in which we, at least for a time, follow the exploits of the extraterrestrial, is the exploration of the idea of what it means to be human. Blade Runner is arguably the mother of this conceit (though if you ask about its mother it will shoot you dead), but even more recent films like Under the Skin and even Arrival have delved deep into the basic and most fundamental elements of humanity.

But where those films trade in lofty, universal themes, The Hidden is more interested in exploring planet Zeitgeist. Jack Shoulder’s film proposes the idea that the time and place wherein an alien lands will drastically alter that alien’s understanding of what constitutes a human. Were it to land in, say, Los Angeles in 1987, that alien might come to understand that it cannot be identified as a human being, unless it is blaring heavy metal, driving Italian sports cars, and constantly shoving mountains of pure cocaine up its nasal face hole. The Hidden is a commentary on the rampant excess of the 1980s, much like John Carpenter’s 1988 cult gem They Live, and presents an antagonist who finds comfortable purchase not only within the carbon-based lifeforms it inhabits, but also within the environment of the id-indulgent late 80s.

Of course, one needn’t paint The Hidden as as weighty a film as, say Under the Skin. In fact, what’s waiting under the skin of our rotating collection of unfortunate meat puppets is a giant slug puppet with a penchant for strippers, blow, and senseless violence. However, the idea that what is actually being hidden is the soul of person — behind the hollow, self-destructive pursuits — gives a little more gravitas to a movie that charmingly clumsily walks the line between high-art and low-brow.

To hear more about the out-of-this-world ridiculousness of The Hidden, download and listen to this week’s Junkfood Cinema. If you enjoy it, please share it around so that we may initiate our own invasion!

As a special treat, anyone who backs JFC on Patreon will have access to a weekly bonus episodes covering an additional cult movie, a new movie in theaters, or a mailbag episode devoted to your submitted questions! Have a couple bucks to throw in the hat, we’ll reward you!

On This Week’s Show:

• Appetizers [0:00–4:08]
• The Main Course[4:09–1:08:26]
• The Junkfood Pairing[59:09–1:09:53]

Want to check out this week’s movie AND support the show, rent/buy it from Amazon streaming via our link!

The Hidden

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‘The Hidden’s Meaning: What It Means To Be Human was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Production design, characters, and more come alive in new coffee table book.

Regardless of where you stand on Ghost in the Shell 2017’s story, performances, and overall existence, there’s one thing most of us can agree on — it’s one hell of a visually attractive film. From the character design to the look of the world itself, the various teams and talents behind the scenes succeeded in crafting and creating a high-tech environment infused with aesthetic appeal.

Fans of the film in general and of its visuals in particular will want to check out the new coffee table book from Insight Editions called The Art of Ghost in the Shell.

As they’ve done previously with films as diverse as Krampus, Pan, and The Jungle Book, the book pulls together a treasure trove of sketches, paintings, photographs (both from the film and behind the scenes), and ideas used by the filmmakers to design and build the world of the film. It’s broken into chapters focusing on individual characters, certain action sequences, the various costumes — including Major’s thermoptic suit — and more.

The text of the book, from writer David S. Cohen, details the production from its early days through its completion including interviews and quotes from various members of both crew and cast. Director Rupert Sanders first brought his vision for the film to the folks at New Zealand’s famed Weta Workshop back in 2014, and we’re made privy to the initial concepts and allowed glimpses of their evolution into what we eventually see on the screen.

The Art of Ghost in the Shell

The main draw of the book, as with the film itself, is obviously the images, but there are some interesting details to be found in the text as well. What are some examples you ask? Well…

• Much of the film was shot in New Zealand on Weta’s stages, and the fabricated city was nicknamed Wellingkong.
• The robotic geishas, one of whom transforms into a spider-like version, were initially going to be created digitally (via actors in green suits), but the folks at Weta convinced Sanders they could be done better through a combination of “acting, stunts, special effects makeup, animatronics, and puppetry.” Roughly 80% of what we see was shot live on-set.
• Michael Pitt, who plays Kuze, actually did some of his own drawings for the character’s look and even insisted on having silver-blue hair.

One detail that interested me (and maybe five other people) was discovering that Scarlett Johansson’s fight trainer on the film was Richard Norton. He’s done similar duty on several other films, but I’ve always loved him as an onscreen fighter — typically as a bad guy — in films like The Octagon, Gymkata, and Jackie Chan’s Mr. Nice Guy.

The Art of Ghost in the Shell is a beautiful book. From the glossy, textured cover to the thick, art-filled pages, it highlights the film’s beauty devoid of the elements the film itself gets wrong. Check out some of the two-page spreads below, and head over to Amazon to pick up a copy of the book to see many, many more.

‘The Art of Ghost in the Shell’ Highlights the Film’s Greatest Strength was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Step inside a wonderful cage where all your wildest fantasies become reality.

Earlier this week the esteemed and never grumpy Christopher Campbell brought to my attention a brand-new VR simulation called ‘The Cage Cage.’ At Cage my interest was piqued, but at double the Cage my full attention turned towards this new creation.

My first step was to visit TheCageCage.com and so that’s what I did. Upon my arrival I was greeted with a wonderful picture of Nicolas Cage and the following note: “This is a VR simulation of what it’s like to be trapped in a cage and forced to watch Nic Cage movies.”

This is exactly as it sounds. ‘The Cage Cage’ places you in the center of a cage and you’re surrounded by a wall of Nicolas Cage clips.

As I tried to take this all in I was overwhelmed with a wave of emotions. Watching Nic Cage movies from within a cage? I’ve been doing that for years! Naturally my first thought was to sue the buffoons responsible for biting my style but before I could send the goons over to rough ‘em up something caught my eye, something that made my blood really boil.

Rereading the description of ‘The Cage Cage’ and I noticed this: “forced to watch Nic Cage movies.” Forced?! Excuse me? Anyone that has to be “forced” to watch Nic Cage movies doesn’t deserve the pleasure and satisfaction of watching Nic Cage movies. These people are not allowed in the cage and instead will be placed in a box and tossed out at sea.

In an attempt to place my rage in check I decided to put in a little research to see how ‘The Cage Cage’ came to be.

“My friend Chris Baker and I were throwing around the idea a while ago, as we very much enjoy the work of Cage,” says Mike Lacher, the co-creator of ‘The Cage Cage’ along with the aforementioned Baker. “Beyond the title being funny, we thought it would be a great test of endurance to be surrounded by Cage. Recently I figured out how to make VR stuff on the web, so I hacked it together in a few hours and was pretty pleased with the result.”

Lacher’s story is one of two friends, screwing around and trying to have a little fun. Baker agrees for the most part, even if the details are a little fuzzy.

“I don’t exactly remember the specific genesis of the idea, but it was concocted while we were working at Buzzfeed, and originally we had conceived of it as a physical installation,” Baker told me. “Something really artsy and intolerable. Mike ported the idea over to VR.”

It seems that not only did Lacher and Baker peer into my life to share with the world what I do, but they did so on Buzzfeed’s dime. How interesting.

While I do quite enjoy the way ‘The Cage Cage’ turned out, I would have much preferred that “something really artsy and intolerable” option. Even though it hasn’t come to that yet, Baker does fully understand the magnitude of what they have done so far and isn’t shy about discussing it’s importance.

“It seems to me that every once in a great while, let’s say every few thousand years or so — Greece in 2000 B.C., 16th century Florence, the late 18th century America — pure genius just kind of presents itself for reasons not wholly known to mankind. This is one of those moments,” the arrogant Baker happily boasted.

With a better understanding of how ‘The Cage Cage’ came to be, I decided to dig a little deeper into the minds of Lacher and Baker to see where they personally stand when it comes to Nicolas Cage and his movies.

“Are there real Nic Cage fans? Like true fans,” Baker wondered after I asked him his true feelings on Cage. “I’m not sure.”

I was dumbfounded by this response, as here I was a true, die-hard Cage fan asking one of the creators of something wonderfully Cage-related and this was the answer I received? Unacceptable, but I chose to let Baker carryon.

“He immediately makes almost anything watchable,” Baker continued. “But he’s not exactly getting me out of my house and into a theater. I’m going to assume that’s true for most people,” Baker wrongly assumed.

“That said, there are a few standout performances that I will gladly defend in casual conversation and often do: Adaptation, Lord of War, Bringing out the Dead,” Baker explained in an effort to redeem himself. “I do like him when he’s used ironically by the filmmakers themselves, but only in the right way. There have been a few misses on this front in the last few years. Kick Ass being one of the most egregious offenders.”

Baker’s thoughts on Cage as an actor left me a bit confused and unsure of how I should feel about him. His website is ilovechrisbaker.com, but can I truly love someone that isn’t all in on Cage? I’m not sure. Lacher on the other hand, he was out to win my heart.

“I love a supercut of Nic Cage freaking out as much as the next internet user, but I do honestly love his work,” Lacher said, proving he’s a smart and trustworthy person. “Face/Off, Con Air, Raising Arizona, Adaptation, and National Treasure are some of my favorite movies. Writing him off as a schlocky actor ignores what a bizarre genius he is. I think some people think he “ruins” movies he’s in with his choices. But look at movies like The Wicker Man and Bangkok Dangerous and Next. Those movies would be boring without him. He elevates tired premises and bad writing to a level of the sublime.”

Baker and Lacher’s overall opinions on Cage may differ to a certain degree, but ultimately both have an appreciation for the Oscar winner. At the end of the day that’s all that you can ask, but I chose to ask more.

If you were privileged enough to spend your remaining days in a secluded cage, safe from all the world’s distractions and enjoying just one Cage flick, what would it be? That question isn’t as easy it sounds. You can’t just pick his best film, you need his most watchable.

“Gone in 60 Seconds,” Baker listed off as his selection. “There is something really watchable about that movie.”

That’s an admirable choice and one I can respect. I consider it to be mid-tier Cage, but it ranks high on watch-ability. Cage, cars, Master P? Everything you need wrapped into one movie!

“Face/Off is hard to beat for me. I also love Con Air,” Lacher told me before settling in on a final answer. “National Treasure is less good than those, but something about it is very rewatchable. Maybe I’d choose that. I fucking love when they use the hair dryer on the Declaration.”

It’s fitting to me that ‘The Cage Cage’ became a thing shortly after I proposed Nicolas Cage Appreciation Day. It’s the perfect solution for the Cage fan with a lot on their plate. Let’s say you’re too busy to properly celebrate #NicCageDay with a Cage marathon. Instead you can strap on your VR headset, spin around in an office chair and experience 360 degrees of Cage!

How would the creators of ‘The Cage Cage’ celebrate Nicolas Cage Appreciation Day, I wondered. Luckily, I also asked them.

“We should organize a mass-synchronized movie day where we all stream his movies on Netflix at the same exact time. Like a distributed movie date,” Baker suggested as a possible idea for #NicCageDay. “Then talk about it online together. Or maybe we’ll just build the physical version of ‘The Cage Cage’ and start locking up people.”

Good ideas, Baker, good ideas. You may not be so bad yet.

“I’d probably celebrate #NicCageDay by trying to make Cage-like choices in my own life. Like at work, I might try suddenly screaming during a meeting,” Lacher stated, showing a willingness to think outside the box. “Or adopting a performative southern accent with my loved ones.”

Mike Lacher and Chris Baker have done a delightful service for the entire world. ‘The Cage Cage’ will live on forever, allowing people to experience the virtual warmth of being engulfed in a Cage circle. If we play our cards right maybe, just maybe we’ll get the physical thing some day.

The Tao of Nicolas Cage: The Cage Cage was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A new video painstakingly recreates shots from the anime in the real world.

Is it too late to talk about the utter shitshow that is the live-action remake of Ghost in the Shell? What’s that? Oh, it is? Dead horse, you say. All right, well, how about I talk about the original, beloved anime version? Specifically how well it captured the reality of Hong Kong as a place and a character.

A pause: before you start angry tweeting me, I know Ghost in the Shell is a Japanese film set in Japan, but when making the film, director Mamoru Oshii used Hong Kong as his visual inspiration for the fictional city of Niihama, even going so far as to recreate actual landmarks. So we cool? Okay.

In future-set dystopic films like GitS, environment is everything. Blade Runner, Children of Men, even Brazil — all these films like GitS don’t have a fraction of their base emotional atmosphere without their overpopulated, sun-blocking, smog-choked and neon-drenched metropoles that serve the dual purpose of illustrating man’s continued dominance over nature, as well as the ironically dehumanizing effects of said dominance.

Hong Kong is especially adept at illustrating this dichotomy, being one of the most densely populated places in the entire world, some 7+ million souls crammed into a little more than 400 square miles, or less than half the size of Rhode Island, which makes it the perfect representation — or so filmmakers seem to think — of what our overcrowded future is going to look like. Ghost in the Shell in particular made use of Hong Kong/Niihama as a kind of god-like character, one who is always there, always looming, always looking down on the action and events transpiring within her borders, effecting them and those who enact them with her ceaseless sensory assault, all light and sound and kineticism. As a result, not only does GitS nail the feel of Hong Kong, as mentioned above it was also boldly straightforward in capturing the look of the place, as proven by the following, fascinating video which pairs visual sequences from Oshii’s film with real world clips from Hong Kong that are near mirrors to the animated frames.

The video comes from Edwin Lee, and content aside, I think the best part is how Lee made the effort to get the camera angle of his real-world shots to match that of the film. There are times I honestly couldn’t tell which was which, even knowing that all the real shots are in the top half of the video and the anime shots are in the bottom half. This is, quite simply, a breathtaking feat of editing and a revelatory look at the connection between not only art and life, but our present and our likely future.

Dueling Metropoles: Comparing Niihama from Oshii’s ‘Ghost in the Shell’ with Hong Kong was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How important is resemblance, really?

As we mentioned in our newsletter yesterday, Christian Bale is reportedly in talks to star as former vice president Dick Cheney in an Adam McKay helmed biopic, alongside Amy Adams as Lynne Cheney and Steve Carrell as Donald Rumsfeld. The news, broken by Variety, has lead to a host of reactions across the internet, including a number of Dark Knight and American Psycho related jokes because, you know, duh. Front and center in many of these reactions is speculation (though in some cases, anticipatory salivation might be more accurate) over how Bale will transform for the role.

After all, Christian Bale is known for physical metamorphoses that rank just below those of caterpillars on an impressiveness scale; he famously lost 60 pounds for his role in The Machinist (bringing the 6' actor to a skeletal 120-ish pounds), and afterwards went directly to Batman Begins, eating and weight-lifting his way to 220 pounds, which was, as the story goes, a little too much, so Bale slimmed down a bit before filming started because that’s practically his superpower. With all the talk of weight gain and prosthetics and wigs that has gone on since this news started making the rounds, one gets the sense that if Bale doesn’t end up within spitting distance of being Cheney’s twin, people will be disappointed.

But might this focus on likeness miss the point? In fact, the question of likeness as a value only really comes up when we talk about biopics when the subject’s image is one with which the public is highly familiar. After all, no one really comments on the fact that Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe have very little resemblance to Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn, and Mary Jackson, because most people didn’t even know they existed, not to mention what they looked like, before Hidden Figures was released.

However, if Eddie Redmayne didn’t actually look remarkably like Stephen Hawking, you could probably expect a few more grumbles, because Hawking and Albert Einstein (and perhaps Neil DeGrasse Tyson) are about the only scientists a sizable portion of the general public would be able to identify in a line up. So if biopics about relatively unknown subjects can be easily enjoyed without the question of resemblance coming into play, why should we let it be such a distraction when it comes to more familiar faces?

As incredible as it is to see Daniel Day-Lewis practically resurrect Abraham Lincoln or Marion Cotillard’s transformation into Edith Piaf, are there occasions when a passing resemblance might work better than an uncanny likeness? Besides, as anyone who’s ever met someone who reminded them of someone else, without actually resembling said person, knows, the most significant elements of capturing the likeness (or essence, if you will) of a person can have little to do with things like height, weight, or facial structure.

That said, here are thirteen examples of casting choices for current or historical figures that worked in spite of limited physical resemblance (in no particular order), in honor of the 13% approval rating Dick Cheney had leaving office:

The main cast of ‘I’m Not There’

Why They’re Here: Six very different actors play six characters, none of whom are named Bob Dylan but whom are all nonetheless Bob Dylan. It’s frequently featured on lists of the best biopics ever made. Cate Blanchett’s performance in particular is nothing short of legendary.

Paul Dano and John Cusack as Brian Wilson, ‘Love and Mercy’

dWhy They’re Here: The actors do not especially resemble Wilson — or each other, for that matter. Yet the movie works nonetheless.

Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy, ‘Jackie’

Why She’s Here: Director Pablo Larraín has been very vocal in interviews that Portman was the only actress he could imagine playing the former First Lady — not because she particularly resembles her, but because of a certain je ne sais quoi; a mysterious aura that Larraín considers fundamental to Kennedy’s persona which Portman shares. While the originally cast Rachel Weisz (way back in 2010, when Darren Arronofsky was slated to direct) easily bears a closer resemblance to Kennedy, after seeing the finished product it’s hard to imagine anyone else pulling off the role quite like Portman, resemblance be damned.

Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash, ‘Walk the Line’

Why He’s Here: If you look up “best biopic performances” you’ll get a number of lists, many of which will feature Phoenix as the iconic musician. None bother mentioning that Phoenix only bears a passing resemblance to the singer, or that it’s far from Phoenix’s most transformative role — he looks far more like himself as Cash than he does in, for example, Her. Again, though, his performance is brilliant, so who cares?

Reese Witherspoon as June Carter, ‘Walk the Line’

Why She’s Here: Ditto.

Brad Pitt as Jesse James, ‘The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford’

Why He’s Here: The film remains a career highlight for both Pitt and co-star Casey Affleck, but while Affleck somewhat resembles Robert Ford, Pitt does not resemble James in the slightest, nor were any efforts made to force a likeness — not even the styling of his goatee. However, considering the tale of idolization and envy told by Assassination, having Pitt look like the world-famous movie star he is instead of transforming him into the likeness of an outlaw whose image is far less well remembered than his name is not just a defendable course of action, but arguably the better one.

Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette, ‘Marie Antoinette’

Why She’s Here: We only have portrait paintings to give us a sense of what the infamous French queen looked like, nonetheless, that’s enough to know she didn’t look at all like Dunst. Love it or hate it, if you think accuracy in any way, shape, or form is the intention of Sofia Coppola’s colorful romp through a decidedly un-fun period of French history, then you either haven’t seen it or entirely missed the point.

Michael Fassbender as Steve Jobs, ‘Steve Jobs’

Why He’s Here: When very similar films released in close proximity, like Jobs (2013) and Steve Jobs (2015), one very often tends to come out on top to the point where the loser very quickly fades from cultural memory. Such is the case here, with Steve Jobs the undeniable winner — even though few efforts were made to make star Michael Fassbender look more like the Apple Inc. co-founder while Ashton Kutcher’s resemblance to the man is decidedly uncanny. Additionally, the limited resemblance didn’t stop Fassbender’s acting from garnering a fair bit of praise.

Michael Fassbender as Bobby Sands, ‘Hunger’

Why He’s Here: Yet another well-crafted biopic in which Michael Fassbender looks like Michael Fassbender. Albeit, thanks to the weight he lost to convincingly portray a hunger striker, a very hungry Michael Fassbender. Though to be fair, most people outside of Ireland (and I’m sure a good number of people in Ireland) have no idea what Bobby Sands looked like. But even as someone was familiar with pictures of Bobby Sands, I didn’t feel like the film suffered at all for it. Besides, Hunger was released back in the pre-X-Men days when most viewers wouldn’t know Michael Fassbender from Adam. A transformation from a relative unknown into another relative unknown would be a lot of work with very little reward.

Colin Firth as George VI, ‘The King’s Speech’

Why He’s Here: If one were looking through an encyclopedia and came across an entry for “Posh British Man,” one would all but expect to see a picture of Firth, and probably Benedict Cumberbatch. That said, Firth doesn’t actually look all that much like George VI, but that didn’t stop him from picking up an Oscar and most of the other movie acting awards known to man for his performance.

Helena Bonham Carter as Queen Elizabeth, ‘The King’s Speech’

Why She’s Here: Considering the sunken-eyed, Victorian Gothic aesthetic of Carter’s Harry Potter character Bellatrix Lestrange, also favored by her frequent collaborator and then-partner Tim Burton, Carter arguably looks more like herself in The King’s Speech than viewers were used to seeing.

Robert Downey, Jr. as Charlie Chaplin, ‘Chaplin’

Why? This might seem out of place, considering Downey’s Chaplin is often featured in lists of most uncanny biopic portrayals, but all of those comparison pictures use scenes in which Downey is portraying Chaplin’s Tramp. Without the iconic mustache and kohl-rimmed eyes, Downey actually doesn’t resemble Chaplin all that much. It doesn’t make the scenes in which Downey is playing Chaplin any less compelling than those where Downey is playing Chaplin playing the Tramp, because what truly makes Downey’s performance phenomenal is the little physical ticks and rhythms he gives Chaplin, whether he’s playing the Tramp or lighting a cigarette.

David Bowie as Nikola Tesla, ‘The Prestige’

Why He’s Here: The Prestige is far from a biopic, and Bowie’s Tesla only has a handful of scenes, but it is, in my view, among the most inspired and under-appreciated of casting choices in film history (yes, I realize this is a big statement), so I’m featuring it here nonetheless. In an Entertainment Weekly piece following Bowie’s death, director Christopher Nolan said that Tesla was a particularly challenging role to cast, and that he needed to find someone just as mysterious and other-worldly as Tesla. Ultimately he concluded that only David Bowie would do. The result? One of the most enigmatic rock stars of all time giving a scene-stealing performance as the enigmatic rock star of geek culture. If Nolan had managed to find a brilliant actor who looked the spitting image of Tesla, it still would have paled in comparison to the unique synergy of David Bowie’s persona and Tesla’s character.

A Brief History of Casting Talent Over Resemblance for Biopics was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Short of the Day

A breakdown with extreme consequences.

We’re going to finish this week with something really, really neat, and a filmmaking first. The short in question is called At the End of the Cul-de-Sac, and it comes from executive producer-writer-director Paul Trillo.

First let’s elaborate about that “filmmaking first” comment: this is the first short ever, Trillo says, to be shot in one take, from a drone, with dialogue. That’s right, the entire short was filmed by a hovering camera controlled by remote and zipping around a group of actors as they performed the scene. As if all that wasn’t impressive enough — and it very much so is, especially when you watch the short — the story at the film’s heart is a chilling social fable that would turn Shirley Jackson’s blood cold.

Without dipping into spoiler territory, the basic plot involves a man having a meltdown in the middle of a residential neighborhood as the residents debate how to handle him. That’s all you need to know, other than the film comes with a mature rating, so, you know, no kids.

And you might think that the production of the film would distract from its story, but the drone hovering like another observer among the cast and soaring above the scene to capture it from a god’s-eye-view perspective definitely enhances the particular judgmental and voyeuristic atmosphere of the film.

At the End of the Cul-de-Sac is a gripping, haunting, and subtle thriller with resounding emotional ramifications. You need to do three things: watch this immediately, then jump over to Trillo’s Vimeo page and check out the rest of his work including a making-of featurette, then hope he has more work coming, because he’s definitely a filmmaker to watch.

‘At the End of the Cul-de-Sac’ is a Frightening Fable and a Filmmaking First was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This week’s Big Idea pod is here with a discussion about the inception, sale, and future of One Perfect Shot.

In this week’s edition of The Big Idea, Neil sits down with One Perfect Shot founder and Shot for Shot host Geoff Todd to talk about the inception of the popular film twitter brand, the thought process that goes into picking Shots, our emotional connection to movies, and some listener questions. Then, at the end, they announce the newest addition to the One Perfect Pod channel.

Listen to the episode here.

Be sure to follow us on Twitter (@OnePerfectPod) and Facebook (facebook.com/oneperfectshot). Subscribe in iTunes, Stitcher, on TuneIn, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also follow host Neil Miller (@rejects) and guest Geoff Todd (@thegeofftodd). We’d very much appreciate your feedback, as well. Leave us a review on iTunes or email us: pod@filmschoolrejects.com.

The Inside Story of One Perfect Shot was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This month is packed with great television. A lot of our favorite shows are returning for new seasons and, in one special case, a resurrected series. Plus there are exciting shows and movies making debuts. That’s why we’re introducing a weekly guide to help keep track of everything worth watching, whether it’s on broadcast, cable, or streaming.

Here’s your breakdown, day by day (and all times Eastern), for April 9–15:

SUNDAY

Feud: Bette and Joan (FX, 10pm)

It’ll be difficult to top last week’s brilliantly paced Oscars-set episode, but by now we’re in for the homestretch of the story of Davis and Crawford. In this week’s episode, “Hagsploitation,” the two rivals are sought to reunite for a follow-up to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, and not to spoil film history, but we’re in for a look at the making of 1964’s Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte and presumably that means more screen time for Catherine Zeta-Jones as Olivia de Havilland. This is also the first episode not covered under our initial review of the series.

Also on Sunday:
American Crime S3E5 (ABC, 10pm)
Billions S2E8 (Showtime, 10pm)
Casey Anthony: An American Murder Mystery doc premiere (ID, 10pm)
The Circus (Showtime, 8pm)
Crashing S1E8: “The Baptism” season finale (HBO, 10:30pm)
Homeland S712 “America First” season finale (Showtime, 10pm)
Girls S6E9: “Goodbye Tour” (HBO, 10pm)

MONDAY

Better Call Saul (AMC, 10pm)

It’s been almost a year since we last saw Jimmy, Chuck, Kim, and Mike, so you might want to do a quick recap or re-viewing of at least the exceptional Season 2 finale before tuning in to see what happens next. And for fans of Breaking Bad (are there any Better Call Saul watchers who didn’t watch its predecessor?), the third season, which begins this week with “Mabel,” is bringing back a favorite character: Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito). We don’t know if he’ll be showing up right away, but fortunately that’s not the only reason we’re looking forward to this show’s return. We can’t wait for more intense interactions between the amazing central cast of Bob Odenkirk, Michael McKean, Rhea Seehorn, and Jonathan Banks.

Also on Monday:
Angie Tribeca S3 premiere “Welcome Back, Blotter” (TBS, 10:30pm)
Bates Motel S5E8 “The Body” (A&E, 10pm)
The Great War (American Experience) doc miniseries premiere (PBS, 9pm)

TUESDAY

Brooklyn Nine-Nine (Fox, 8pm)

Season four is back with an episode titled “The Audit,” which sounds more tax time appropriate than it is. Instead, the precinct is being audited to determine if it will be shut down. As for the fate of Gina, we’re supposed to get an answer to the midseason finale’s cliffhanger immediately into the new episode.

Also on Tuesday:
Deadliest Catch S13 premiere (Discovery 9pm)
The Great War (American Experience) part two (PBS, 9pm)

WEDNESDAY

Archer Dreamland (FXX, 10pm)

Last week, Archer returned at its new home, FXX, with the title Archer Dreamland. This eight-episode eighth season is set in a film noir-influenced 1940s Los Angeles and continues with this week’s second episode, titled “Berenice.”

Also on Wednesday:
The Great War (American Experience) part three (PBS, 9pm)

THURSDAY

Riverdale (CW, 9pm)

Molly Ringwald makes her debut as Archie’s mom on the wonderfully soapy comic book-based series, and that means the show should continue to be as great for its adult characters as its teen drama. If not better. The classic film-inspired title of this week’s episode is “The Lost Weekend,” making us wonder if the new character is an alcoholic. Meanwhile, our favorite young TV couple, jointly known as “Bughead,” gets a storyline involving a surprise birthday party for Jughead (Cole Sprouse) thrown by Betty (Lili Reinhart).

Also on Thursday:
30 for 30: One and Not Done doc premiere (ESPN, 9pm)
The Amazing Race S29E3 “Bucket List Type Stuff” (CBS, 10pm)
Sacred Cod doc premiere (Discovery, 9pm)
Scandal S6E10 “The Decision” (ABC, 9:01pm)

FRIDAY

Mystery Science Theater 3000 (Netflix)

Can you believe it’s been 18 years since MST3K went off the air? Can you believe it’s back? The cult classic series that lets you watch bad old movies through the heckling filter of one man and two robots in space has been revived thanks to a crowdfunding campaign and the resurrection specialists at Netflix. Fourteen new episodes will be available to stream featuring Tom Servo, Crow T. Robot, and new human host Jonah Ray, as well as fresh co-stars Patton Oswalt and Felicia Day, plus special guests. Look for our review of the revival ahead of its debut later this week.

Also on Friday:
The Man Who Knew Infinity cable network debut (Showtime, 8pm)
Sandy Wexler movie premiere (Netflix)

SATURDAY

Doctor Who (BBC America, 9pm)

Peter Capaldi begins his last season as the Doctor, joined again by Matt Lucas as Nardole (last seen in the 2016 Christmas special) plus Pearl Mackie as new companion Bill Potts (the first openly gay one) for a Dalek-centric episode called “The Pilot.” Showrunner Steven Moffat, who is also departing after this season, wrote this Season 10 opener.

Class (BBC America, 10pm)

Following the season premiere of Doctor Who, we’ll be checking out the American debut of this latest spinoff, which aired in the UK last fall. The show is set at Coal Hill Academy, meaning it’s a teen show as well as sci-fi, with a premise involving refugees from an alien war, one posing as a teacher and another posing as a student.

Also on Saturday:
Saturday Night Live Jimmy Fallon hosts with Harry Styles as the musical guest as the show starts broadcasting live coast-to-coast for the first time (NBC, 11:30pm ET/10:30pm CT/9:30pm MT/8:30pm PT)
Suicide Squad cable network debut (HBO, 8pm)

The Return of ‘Better Call Saul’ and ‘MST3K’ and More TV You Must See This Week was originally published in Film School Rejects on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.