Plus 11 More New Releases to Watch This Week on Blu-ray/DVD!

To watch James Gray’s The Lost City of Z is to be transported, in more ways than one, to a bygone time.

The film tells the story of British explorer Percy Fawcett, who at the turn of the 20^th Century embarked on multiple expeditions to find a fabled civilization in Amazonia. The tale is something of a departure for Gray, whose prior films have all dealt with crime and romance in his native New York. But Lost City’s unfamiliar locale and subject matter belie a deeper formal similarity to the rest of the director’s work; namely, a reverential commitment to classic style.

Though labels such as “classic” and “modern” are necessarily porous and post-hoc, one need only sit through a few minutes of Lost City to notice its dissimilarity to nearly everything else being made today. The film’s stately compositions and patient pacing resemble neither a blockbuster nor an indie flick. Its intensely earnest, goal-oriented protagonist would seem quaint in both a Marvel movie and an art film. Like Gray’s last film, The Immigrant, Lost City feels, at least superficially, like it could have been made forty years ago. In this sense, Gray is a filmmaker profoundly out of step with his time.

And yet much of Lost City also feels not only fresh but subversive. A setup that at first seems like the quintessence classicism’s problems (rich white male ventures into the uncivilized jungle) soon emerges as a subtle critique of colonialism. Fawcett’s obsession with discovering the lost city, which begins as an effort to restore family honor, morphs into a desire to prove his fellow Europeans wrong about the supposed backwardness of Amazonian tribes. His callous abandonment of his wife and children is treated honestly and unromantically. And at the film’s end, it’s Nina Fawcett’s emotions that are left to linger in the viewer’s mind.

Does this subtext undermine the film’s classicism? Hardly. As Gray puts it, “the pursuit of a classical narrative often opens up, not closes, but opens up avenues for greater complexity.” His work singlehandedly falsifies the postmodern notion that classical art’s problematic ideological underpinnings are best undermined by the wholesale scrapping of formal constraints. As many novelists and fine artists have discovered (and many “critical theorists” have not), the trouble with postmodern deconstructionism is that it effectively ends the conversation. What use is making meaning through art when the meaning-making enterprise is considered hopeless? By contrast, if one is committed to a certain level of craftsmanship, there is practically no limit to the variety of meanings one can make.

Gray summarizes his approach thus:

“With this movie, I wanted the story to be [not just] ‘explorer goes down to the jungle,’ but [also] what would it say when we talk about class, of course, and also gender, ethnicity? And what does it mean to be a civilized person, what does it mean to be civilized, what’s civilization actually mean?…So I thought all of this could emerge through a classical style.”

This effort to situate complex themes within the context of a classical narrative is not without precedent. For all the stylistic innovations of 70s cinema, most of the enduring films from that era were more revolutionary in content than in form. Directors like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, whom Gray idolizes, were not interested in dispensing with the techniques of classical Hollywood so much as expanding them to fit the changing ideological landscape. The Lost City of Z picks up where these filmmakers left off, dispensing with the bathwater of 70s male-dominance but retaining the baby of rigorous craftsmanship.

Gray has long been critical of modern cinema’s lack of craft, for which he blames big-budget excess and low-budget amateurism equally:

“Nobody knows how to write scripts. Go to the movies; they suck…Stories are almost quaint. There’s something backasswards about it. What I see is narrative laziness. I see it from the big movies and I see it from the art movies. I don’t see anything that I like, which is the middle. Not middle-brow, but the middle, where the film is subversive but it’s narrative.”

The notion that narrative stifles subversion goes back at least as far as Jean-Luc Godard, who famously quipped that a film “should have a beginning, middle, and end, but not necessarily in that order.” Godard’s innovations did much to break open cinematic form, but they lead to a premature foreclosure on the possibilities for subversion within the context of a narrative. Even Quentin Tarantino, cinema’s postmodern patron saint and an early Godard disciple, has always displayed a reverence for narrative craft – doubly so in his recent historical films. One of the reasons Tarantino’s many imitators have fallen short is that they’ve mimicked superficialities of his style (non-linear stories, reference-filled dialogue) without matching his narrative and thematic heft.

Gray, for his part, has always viewed narrative as a kind of delivery system for subtext. Though he admires Godard, Gray feels that this subtext can lose its weight when extracted from the context of a well-crafted story:

“If you make a film that is not narratively well told with emotion and elegance, which is the aim, is the alternative a kind of cinema essay of sorts? Well, maybe, and in Godard’s case, he did them brilliantly. But I’m not sure that gives us so much opportunity, or in Godard’s case it was because he believes in beauty and he’s also a genius. But there’s a level which, when we say exactly what we mean, the subtext stops mattering.”

Beauty and craft, for Gray, are ways of redeeming reality and enhancing our capacity to care about it.

As a relatively young art form, cinema has only recently become the subject of the doomsday lamentations that have surrounded literature and the fine arts for decades. Many blame technology and a general decline in taste for this development, but Gray would blame the loss of classic style. He considers the idea that filmgoers don’t want good stories anymore to be “totally elitist. If you feed people McDonald’s every single day and then one day you want to give them sushi…they’re gonna eat it and go, ‘what the fuck is that?’” The psychologist Steven Pinker mounts a defense for classic style from a different angle, noting that it conforms to basic features of human nature. “Ultimately what draws us to a work of art,” Pinker writes, “is not just the sensory experience of the medium but its emotional content and insight into the human condition.” The common refrain that the arts are declining, Pinker explains, tends to emerge when we stray from this purpose.

While it’s too soon to say that cinema has abandoned fidelity to the human condition, much modern filmmaking does lack the sincerity that characterizes Gray’s films and classic cinema generally. The heartfelt wonderment of Close Encounters or Star Wars has given way, on the blockbuster scene, to Marvel’s empty fluffiness and DC’s grim cynicism. Serious indie dramas have migrated to television, where a pared down visual style has allowed for excellence in storytelling craft. Much has been made of the death of the mid-budget film, and of the potential for services like Netflix and Amazon to bring it back. The fact that Amazon is distributing Lost City, as well as Manchester by the Sea and The Handmaiden, suggests that the mid-budget film may make a comeback. But it also suggests that, when the smoke clears from Marvel’s latest explosion, classicism may be what viewers crave.

A video appreciation of the action star we’ve always deserved.

Chris Pratt isn’t just the action star we need right now, he’s the action star we’ve always deserved. His characters have down-home charm in equal measure with good-natured braggadocio, they are as strong as they are vulnerable, capable as they are aloof, and dramatic as they are comedic. His swagger stumbles on occasion in the most likable of ways, and his weaknesses are a virtue for their ability to highlight his overwhelming humanity. He’s also, as I’m told by my wife, frequently, quite easy on the eyes. You add all that up, and what you get is a template for a prototypical A-list action star; but Pratt is more than prototypical.

Because he’s also a good man off-screen, one of faith who avoids the trappings and pitfalls of celebrity despite being one of the biggest movie stars on the planet. He’s a humble family man, and a man who wears his gratitude for his fortunes on his sleeve right next to his heart. He’s your neighbor, your buddy, your brother, your son, your dream boyfriend or BFF, an everyman we can all relate to, and a kind of success we can all aspire too: one that doesn’t overtake your best qualities, rather one that amplifies them.

Am I being hyperbolic and a tad bit heavy-handed? Probably, but Chris Pratt is a rarity, the kind of movie star that doesn’t come along just once in a blue moon, but once in a lifetime – a movie star whose success isn’t just a blessing to the industry, but to the community around him. I live in Washington State, where Pratt grew up, and when I hear about him on the local news, 9 ½ times out of 10 it isn’t about a movie he’s in, it’s about some way in which he has reached out with his time and/or resources to someone in need. In an era where we celebrate culture and those who craft it probably a little more than we should, it’s comforting to me at least to know that there’s someone in the spotlight willing to deflect it to worthier things.

This extreme likeability is what has made Pratt’s rise to superstardom so meteoric. From his first big role on the TV series Everwood to a third-tier supporting role on the first season of Parks and Rec that became a vital cog in one of the greatest comedy ensembles ever by series’ end, to his staggering big-screen success – which is still in its infant stages – we’ve cheered him on every step of the way not just because he’s good at his job and fun to watch, but because we legitimately want him to do well, we want him to win, it just feels like a good thing for everybody.

All this to say, watching the following supercut from Burger Fiction on Pratt’s evolution to now is like watching the highlight reel of the first act of a great American success story, and better yet, one that’s deserved.

A look at the end of love.

No matter what the circumstances, the end of every relationship is difficult. But it can be argued that the more bombastic or caustic the end of a relationship, the easier it is to deal with. Sure, you’ve been hurt, maybe even egregiously so, but in that hurt there’s a level of resentment that in some ways makes it easier to leave. On the other side of the coin, though, those relationships that aren’t torn apart by an event or a situation, the relationships that just fizzle out or fade away over time, can be the most difficult to walk away from, because you haven’t lost your love, you’ve downsized it to a level where it’s in both persons’ best interests to seek out something new.

It’s this latter sort of dissolving relationship that is at the heart of Dan Marcus’ Closure, a 20-minute character study short film that deals with a couple (Kimberly Michelle Vaughn and Joel Reitsma) at the end of their relationship, though both are reticent to acknowledge and act on that ending.

As someone who, like a lot of you I imagine, has dealt with both kind of breakups mentioned above, I was instantly captivated by Closure and especially the earnest performances of its leads. Marcus has a storytelling ear expertly tuned to the frequency of human emotion and his actors inhabit their roles with a heartbreaking palpability. DP Tom Doherty does his part as well at conveying an intimate, interpersonal tale thanks to his lean and graceful cinematography.

It’s not an easy watch, emotionally-speaking, but the best films shouldn’t be, they should challenge your emotions, they should make you feel to a point you almost can’t take it. Closure does that, and you need to see how.

Claire Denis teams with Juliette Binoche for an uncharacteristically sunny search for romance.

The name Claire Denis and the word ‘comedy’ have rarely been associated. A master of modern French cinema, Denis has made her name telling stories of post-colonialism, repression, and in the case of Trouble Every Day, cannibalism. There is a thematic through line that runs through her films, and that is desire. Whether subtle or exterior, Claire Denis has continued to tell stories that depict characters in various stages of yearning. Therefore, her latest film, Let the Sunshine In, is not that much of an outlier. The film is a romantic-comedy; a sort of Woody Allen meets Nancy Myers by way of Claire Denis. This seems entirely unusual for the director, making Let the Sunshine In one of the festival’s most delightful surprises.

In their first collaboration, Denis casts French screen legend Juliette Binoche as Parisian lover Isabelle. Isabelle is a lover, rather than a woman searching for love. The film introduces Isabelle for the first time while she is in the midst of a sex act. She urges her partner to “hurry up,” yet does not seem to want him to leave. For Isabelle, love and sex are important; they are intrinsically tied though frequently corrupted by one another. Isabelle aches for the feeling that comes from connection romantically with another person. Sex is just a part of the package.

Throughout the film, Isabelle finds herself involved with multiple men. Each offers her different aspects of the ideal connection she is so desperately searching for. Her ex-husband, an actor, an art curator, and a smoldering man across the bar are just some of the partners Isabelle crosses paths with. With these men, Isabelle finds herself in a series of circular interactions; spending unbelievable amounts of time with her hand on the door handle of a car or in dawdling in an entranceway. She is trying, sometimes successfully, to preserve a moment before saying goodbye. These moments are often heartbreaking. Isabelle has her pick of suitors, yet she just cannot seem to capture what she thinks is love. Desperation is visible, yet Isabelle is unrelenting.

Binoche portrays the woman as a free spirit of sorts, able to embrace the moment and find humor in her struggles. For example, she seems drained sitting across from a colleague at a bar as he attempts to convince her that they are the perfect suited. As a song in diegesis ends, Etta James’ “At Last” begins. At this same moment, Isabelle catches the eye of a tall, dark stranger across the room. What follows is one of the many moments that show real beauty in Denis’ piece, as Isabelle dances slowly across the room before taking the mystery man in her arms.

Let the Sunshine In presents a new Claire Denis. While the film thematically aligns with the director’s oeuvre, I cannot help but wonder where her joyous sensibilities have come from. It is not unusual for the journeys of Denis’ respective protagonists to end in death, defeat, or heartbreak. This is not the case, nor the message of her latest film. The film’s title and final scene suggest a sort of happy-go-lucky attitude. Perhaps for the first time, Claire Denis seems to be saying that love is out there, and it’s our job to let it in. The result of Denis’ newfound embrace of the optimistic is one of the most emotionally rich films at Cannes. Let the Sunshine In showcases a beautiful performance and evolving mastery from one of French cinema’s greatest filmmakers.

Jared Leto is taking over a streaming service. There’s a lot to unpack here.

In the end, capitalism comes for us all, which is why the recent decision by arthouse/indie film streaming platform Fandor to shutter Keyframe, their digital magazine, was distressing but not particularly surprising.

Previously a home to some of the best video essays on the internet, the work of founding editor and master of the form Kevin B. Lee, Keyframe had been increasingly nudged toward more commercial subjects, which ultimately proved untenable. This is not the first time something like this has happened, and it will not be the last as long as the click is the sole measure of internet worth, and the means to get that click is universally considered to be the familiar. And if this were the entirety of the story, I would have done what I did, which is to sigh and say “I hope another outlet hires Kevin to make video essays for them, because he rules” without feeling the need to write a whole piece about it. But the saga took an unforeseen twist this week, one that warranted some words: Fandor hired Jared (fucking) Leto as “Chief Creative Officer.

First, “Chief Creative Officer” sounds like a cop who fingerpaints with donut crumbs, which would be a great Jared Leto character. Second, since you probably can’t get promoted to Chief of Police as that kind of cop (well, unless you’re Jared Kushner, so don’t rule it out entirely), “Chief Creative Officer” probably means something else. So, third, back to square one: what the fuck does it mean? Is he curating their film library, either in a hands-on fashion or some broader sense? If so, why him? Why Jared Leto, poetaster actor, sort-of musician? If it’s for name recognition then why pick someone whose most recent acts of note have been turning in the worst performance ever to win an Oscar in a cacklingly transphobic bit of solipsistic Method wank and, on his next job, being shitty to his Suicide Squad co-stars, who subsequently shunned him? As a PR move, it’s little better than hiring Jared Fogle.

Well, that last paragraph happened. But aside from any operatically vituperative feelings, one may have the particular Chief Creative Officer (and once you get done declaiming the phrase in a reverb-y old monster movie voice), the question arises of what exactly makes this a good business decision. If “Chief Creative Officer” is a paid position, this particular hire is not the cheapest one.

If it’s not, the PR issue mentioned above comes into play, and even among people who don’t hold an antipathy toward Leto the “why him?” element still holds. If, despite the clear conclusions drawn from the shuttering of Keyframe and the severing of ties with its staff, the impression Fandor wanted to make on investors was that they were looking to maintain their name-recognition as a longstanding destination for lovers of international and independent film, it would make sense to hire a “Chief Creative Officer” with at least some experience in that realm. If, as is apparent from the hire they made, the sought impression is one of an organization slouching toward the mainstream, it would have behooved them, not to be too indelicate, to ally themselves with someone more popular.

Taking a step back, the rationality of the decision may not matter at all, since the endgame, in this case, is to attract venture capital. And, with apologies for shattering anyone’s illusions, capitalism is not a rational system, and nor is it one that organically reacts to demand with proportionate supply. Capitalists, in the non-pejorative sense of people who possess capital, may believe themselves to be acting wholly rationally in their investments, but ultimately their decisions are based on their own squishy, emotional, hormonal whim.

For the “stick to movies” crowd, a ready example is the behavior of movie studio executives: think first of how many remakes and reboots there are of source texts that just so happen to totally coincidentally date back to executives’ childhoods. Then, consider how many of those movies turn profits. Then, out of that drastically smaller subset, consider how many of those movies make money for reasons wholly separate from the nostalgia value of the source text (a fancier way, for one example, of saying Baywatch is going to make whatever money it does from The Rock, with a potential boost in India from Priyanka Chopra, not from the vigor of the Baywatch brand).

The world of venture capital is an even more whimsical realm. Recently a bunch of people got massive amounts of VC funding to make a fucking $400 juicer with proprietary juice bags that you could squeeze with your hands. Venture capital cannonballs into money pits almost as stupid all the time, and it’s entirely because the venturers are acting on their whims, investing in people they have connections with. Capitalism is alchemy, only where your dad comes by and replaces the chunk of lead you’ve been casting spells on with a piece of gold, and then the Wall Street Journal congratulates you on being a powerful wizard.

All of this may seem to be getting a bit afield from the question of why the fuck Jared Leto just got hired by Fandor, but I think a proper embrace of the stochastic nature of existence is a healthy bulwark against excessive confusion, because it strengthens one’s ability to shrug stuff off and say “sometimes shit’s just weird, man.” And enough time watching sports, specifically post-game press conferences where the athlete is trying to get the reporter to fuck off, will keep the truism “it is what it is” (Aristotle’s “A is A” in much less oblique form) well in the front of one’s mind.

The only thing I’m sure of here is that I miss Fandor, and it still exists. Sort of.

The techniques and tricks of recreating the grindhouse era.

Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof typically falls into one of two categories for fans of the director: it’s either the worst film he’s ever made, or the most underrated film he’s ever made. I for one happen to fall into the latter camp, because I believe that for Tarantino, the undisputed master of cinematic homage, Death Proof is his ultimate tribute to movies and the closest he’s come to mimicking the genre that inspired him, namely the car-chase crime flicks of the 1960s and 70s like Vanishing Point, Two-Lane Black Top, Hot Rods From Hell, and Dirty Mary Crazy Larry.

Unlike films such as Kill Bill or The Hateful Eight, in which genre has been appropriated to fit Tarantino’s particular narrative style, Death Proof remains at all times firmly rooted in the grindhouse tradition, thanks not just to the narrative but to the various techniques QT employs – multiple lenses and filters, practical stunts and VFX, film stock et cetera – to instill a sense of temporal verisimilitude, the feeling we’ve stepped back in time not just to another era of film but another era of filmmaking.

I could sit here all day touting the virtues of Death Proof, but that’s not what you came for and anyway my FSR colleague William Dass has already done a great job of that,  so instead I’ll leave you with this video from Manuel Pochesci that examines the “unconventional stylistic techniques” Tarantino used to give Death Proof that sweet 70s cine-trash feel. What it reveals is an appreciation for grindhouse that goes beyond story or character, where QT usually ends his homage, and veers into the aesthetic, creating a more jarring but, ultimately I believe, a more successful mimicry.

The many strange cinematic portraits of the art life.

The pitch for Laurie Simmons’ debut feature, My Art, was that it would finally get it right. Not get the art movie right, as in all movies are art, as in everything is art if you talk about it long enough. But get the art movie right, as in that particularly ekphrastic genre of cinema about people who make art, the kind most of us are used to seeing behind the painted and oft-guarded lines of museum display. Simmons is most known, by the masses at least, as the mother of Lena Dunham, a woman who has achieved renown for Girls, that six-year autofictive project on the milieu of white millennial women living in New York. Simmons is also a well-exhibited photographer, of that scene that includes Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince.  The opportunity of My Art was twofold: to, like Girls, represent the particularities of a generation of artists that popular cinema had abandoned and, in doing so, finally present a view of the creative life divorced from the fantasia of the canvas, to give us a front seat at watching something that connected to actual art marketplace.

The subject is a persistent one in certain caverns of the cinematic imagination, albeit one that many are convinced is constantly done incorrectly. “So many films which have gotten it wrong come to mind,” prefaces David Frankel in his review of My Art in Artforum. Simmons, herself, has said that much of her motivation behind taking to the narrative imagination came from a frustration with the likeminded figures that populate it. To note: last month, Danièle Thompson’s Cézanne and I just finished its brief, if undistinguished, theatrical run to make room for Aisling Walsh’s Maudie, a study of the life of Nova Scotian folk painter Maud Lewis. Somehow, only one of these movies stars Ethan Hawke.

While generally about the dramaturgy of their subject’s lives—Cézanne and I is almost equally about novelist Émile Zola as it is Paul Cézanne—both movies insist on their connection to the aesthetics their subjects achieved renown for. A look at the movie posters testifies to this: Cézanne’s brushstroke-heavy mountaintops and Lewis’ primary color folksiness. What is promised and what must disappoint the likes of Frankel and Simmons is that movies such as these are unable to live up to that promise, that finding out about the depths of Cézanne’s feelings about some novel does not give us much of an entryway into understanding how the something like The Bather comes to emerge out of a milieu of impressionist noise.

This is partially an issue of the medium; movies cannot occupy the space of well-liked canvases any more than they can be squeezed out of tubes and minutely scraped into the correct and perfect corners of the canvas by Timothy Spall in his turn as the titular Mr. Turner. But the narrative of the artist, that thing of James Joyce’s imagination, that fictive ideal of free-spirited creativity, carries a cinematic appeal that guides the genre. Cue Julian Stallabrass: “If despite the small chance of success, the profession of artist is so popular, it is because it offers the prospect of labor that is apparently free of narrow specialization, allowing artists, like heroes in the movies, to endow work and life with its own meanings.”

The artist movie, then, validates the fantasy; to watch Ed Harris’ Jackson Pollock, in Pollock, turn blank canvases into recognizable images from magazines is enlivening entertainment, even if it fails to provide any insight into the work. We hear Marcia Gay Harden’s longsuffering Lee Krasner tells us that they are works of the utmost genius, ditto Amy Madigan’s Peggy Guggenheim and ourselves. The visual thrill of watching white space filled is catnip for the projection screen of our imagination. Robert Rauschenberg, for this reason, has yet to get the biopic treatment.

The retreat into the certainties of the painterly past (this current century has, so far bequeathed us titles such as Mr. Turner, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Goya’s Ghosts, Nightwatching and an upcoming animated film called Loving Vincent) underlines the popular insecurity with the contemporary art’s world’s move into conceptual space. Even the thieves in a heist movie like Danny Boyle’s Trance feel compelled to steal a Goya and not, say, a pricey Zeng Fanzhi. The lives of artists offer scripts a chance to celebrate the materially successful creative life, but most people are wary of what artists seem to have been doing for the past half-century or so. For all the ubiquity of Andy Warhol, there has yet to be a full biopic on the man who helped disassemble the individual creative enterprise of man-in-front-of-the-canvas. Mary Harron’s I Shot Andy Warhol comes closest, but it is not, at any rate, an admiring portrait. (And I’m also excluding the work of Jim Sharman, of Rocky Horror Picture Show-fame, who filmed a musical called Andy X: A 40 Minute Screen Séance with Andy Warhol a few years back that he explicitly called “a poetic exploration of Warhol…not a biopic.” Jared Leto is also supposed to play Warhol at some point but has, as of writing, not.) Other artists of the last century who have gotten the biopic treatment are figurative oil and acrylic acolytes like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O’Keefe.

Contemporary film and TV seem to view conceptual art with, at most, mild disdain

Films about fictional painters are another thing entirely, a genre that, per Wikipedia, is its own thing with no less than 74 volumes. Most of them, one notes, take up the storied subgenre that is the suffering comic book artist who wants to get laid (Chasing Amy) or end up in murder mysteries (Slam Dance). Movies about actual painters working in that nefarious art world are rarer; we get Gene Kelly’s loutish amateur in An American in Paris and another community of failed Parisian painters in Albert Lewin’s wartime curio, The Moon and Sixpence. But pickings become barer the closer to the contemporary scene we run toward. The art gallery is set-piece of many a New York adventure, but it’s often a place of absurdist caricature. In the lens of comedies like Louie and Broad City, we view them as outsiders, perpetrators of some strange shit.

A few interesting curious of the contemporary artist movie come to mind. No less than Martin Scorsese took on the gendered dynamics of the New York art scene in his chapter of New York Stories, an anthology film that also featured shorts by Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola. Titled “Life Lessons” and taking its romantic dynamics from a Dostoevsky short story, Scorsese pitted a well-established and bearded Nick Nolte as a latter-day abstract expressionist with dismissive opinions on Pollock opposite a struggling ex-girlfriend played by Rosanna Arquette, who has left him for a performance artist played by Steve Buscemi. While still thoroughly in the terrain of the painter filling canvases, Scorsese can capture the futility that occupies the artist unable to make meaning out off squeezed paint tubes. The creative process of Nolte’s late abstract expressionist is neither reverent nor farcical; he blasts Procol Harum and Cream at high volumes. Whether his work is legitimate genius or not is irrelevant, when Arquette, spots him at work, her gaze is locked in totally insular Scorsese-esque armor.

The narrative of a fictional painter offered Scorsese the opportunity to demonstrate a relationship between artist and spectator that feels authentic.

Another movie that featured Steve Buscemi as a minor figure of the New York art scene was James Ivory’s Slaves of New York,  an adaptation of  Tama Janowitz’s collection of short stories of the same, poorly aged, name. Ivory (he, of Jane Austen in Manhattan and Academy Award-winning adaptation of A Room with a View) is captivated by the allure of gallery openings and the arbitrary whimsy of what sells on the creative marketplace. The movie’s heroine, played by Bernadette Peters, is a designer of hats. They are not very great hats; they fall apart and have names like “Santa Clause Goes to Russia.” But not all art is great, after all, or can claim the noble aspirations that comes assumed with Pollock or Cézanne. Roger Ebert, in his half-star pan of the movie, chides:  “They want to use art as a way of obtaining success, which is more important to them than art will ever be.”

Art, as a real thing and an actual measure of obtaining success, is an omnipresent theme in Lena Dunham’s work. Her debut feature, which stars  Laurie Simmons as an artist who makes the movie’s titular Tiny Furniture, takes for its subject artists attempting to turn their creative projects into something that can lead to something else. A wacky YouTube star, played by Alex Karpovsky, enters the movie because he is looking to sell his brand to a TV network and Dunham’s character, too, spends much of the movie waiting to place a video she has made in an art gallery. Girls, too, would be interested in the mechanics of the culture industry: art galleries prominently featured in the show’s first few seasons and its patrons are not mocked so much as observed with a scalpel knife.

My Art takes a similar interest in these machinations; Simmons begins her film at the Whitney and ends it in an art gallery, two self-conscious poles of the art marketplace. In between these destinations, Simmons staggers the creation of the movie’s art product. The product takes the form of some carefully studied reinterpretations of classic movie scenes; visual shorts that enact, say, the droogs of Clockwork Orange or the bad boy theatrics of Badlands. The relative smallness of this accomplishment feels interesting in itself, the ostensibly valuable product of the movie’s celebration of creative enterprise threaten to underwhelm. But maximalism is merely a style and not an ultimate good. Like Scorsese, Simmons is interested in the process as an exercise that comments on itself.

So, what does My Art say about, well, its art? It is unafraid to reveal itself as created amid emporiums of everyday trash; it is unafraid to show the art world as build of the same. There is nothing particularly sacred about its material nor its makers, Simmons’ assistants appear as merely neighbors, played by Robert Clohessy, John Rothman, and Josh Safdie. Parker Posey briefly appears. The narrative fixtures are the stuff of an old Ingmar Bergman movie, the Shakespearean comic adventure to a place outside ornamentation.

But the narrowness of their aim does not deter from the profundity of their vision, like Dunham’s use of the small-stakes comedy, what Simmons creates ultimately feels real and lived in. It feels like something you would see in New York somewhere and what could be more real than that.

Exploring the cinematography of David Lynch’s masterpiece.

In honor of Twin Peaks’ return this week, we thought we’d delve into the weird world of director David Lynch for the latest episode of Shot by Shot, the official cinematography podcast of One Perfect Shot and Film School Rejects, hosted by yours truly and OPS founder Geoff Todd.

Mulholland Drive was shot by DP Peter Deming, who is also the cinematographer behind Lynch’s Lost Highway as well as all 18 episodes of the new season of Twin Peaks. This makes him the visual architect of the latter part of Lynch’s career, a period characterized by darkness, strobing neon, garish images and distorted perceptions, and of which Mulholland Drive is the crowning achievement (to-date).

If this is your first listen to our 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. Check out our previous episodes:

• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Mad Max: Fury Road
• Silence
• Drive
• Shaun of the Dead
• Vertigo
• Fargo
• The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

Next week we’re talking about Steven Spielberg’s iconic classic Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Be sure to give us a follow so you can be kept up to date on new episodes and shows. We’re on Twitter and Facebook, and you can find your two hosts on Twitter as well: @TheGeoffTodd and @HPerryHorton.

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And a gallery of the shots featured in this week’s discussion.

“Charles has to pee, Logan takes him to the bathroom, Laura needs another quarter stuck in her kiddie ride.”

3:10 to Yuma was my first commentary listen from filmmaker James Mangold, but I decided two things immediately after it ended. First, it would not be my last of his commentaries, and second, he really needed to record one for his latest film too.

Keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary for…

Logan (2017)

Commentator: James Mangold (director/co-writer)

1. He and Hugh Jackman began thinking about a follow-up immediately after completing 2013’s The Wolverine, and they knew it would most likely “bring the curtain down on his character.” They both agreed that superhero films in general had grown repetitious and wanted to do “something different, something deeper.”

2. The first thought on the road to crafting the story here was “what is Wolverine frightened of? What is Logan afraid of?” They wanted his final story to be the thing that scares him the most, and after scouring the comics he realized there was no villain or end-of-the-world scenario that would unsettle Wolverine. “The answer that came to me was love. Love scares him, intimacy scares him, being dependent on others scares him, being vulnerable scares him.”

3. Early drafts had Logan (Jackman) and Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) living in an old Kentucky bourbon mill before being moved to the U.S./Mexico border.

4. He describes his initial sixty page treatment as “Little Miss Sunshine meets The Gauntlet.”

5. They were aiming for a “more natural vibe” with the film, and he mentions influences like The Wrestler, Paper Moon, and “a lot of ’70s films.”

6. One of the reasons the film is called Logan is because it’s about the man, not the “hero” who Logan’s tired of being.

7. He praises Boyd Holbrook‘s portrayal of Pierce saying “one of the things you can really do that hurts your film is encourage the actors to just act ‘evil.'”

8. He’s equally fond of Stephen Merchant‘s performance saying the actor makes it clear that Caliban has real affection for Logan and Xavier. More than that though, he likes the varied rhythm that comes with blending performers like Merchant into the mix.

9. They struggled after deciding Xavier would be kept in an old water tank because it felt impractical that Logan would go up and down a 200-foot ladder every time. They were playing around with a model “and then suddenly we just tipped over the model of the tank on its side with its legs sticking out like some kind of dead spider.”

10. Some people assumed Mangold’s interest in the R-rating was that he’d be able to increase the level and detail of violence, foul language, and sexual references, “and in many ways all those things were attractive.” His biggest reason for going this route though “was a little more complicated than that.” An adult-rated film means the studio won’t make an effort to market the film to children with Happy Meals and toy tie-ins, and “what does that mean to the filmmaker?” He says what it changes for the writers/director is that no one at the studio is reading the script on a marketing level and then dictating editing choices to ensure it plays well to kids. “The ideas of the film are allowed to be more sophisticated because you’re no longer having to pace up the movie, edit it faster, make it more charming or colorful for a nine year old’s attention span. The film becomes what I had hoped for which is a comic book film for adults.”

11. There was a risk that Laura (Dafne Keen) would come off as “ridiculous” onscreen. “Would anyone believe the power and intensity and ferocity of this little kid and her foot claws.” He credits her performance for overcoming all of those concerns and delivering something truly special and remarkable here.

12. The film was shot primarily in and around New Orleans with a month of exterior work filmed in New Mexico. They had lost Stewart to a stage production by that time though meaning they had to intercut footage shot previously into the big scenes where the crew escape from Pierce. He details one thirty second sequence as follows. “This is shot in New Mexico. New Mexico. Louisiana, two months earlier. New Mexico. Louisiana. New Mexico. Louisiana.”

13. He knew that the internet being what it is audiences would know by the time they saw the film that Laura is essentially “a mini Wolverine, so you build the film with this anticipation.”

14. There’s obviously stunt performers and doubles involved in Keen’s scenes, “but you’d be amazed how much of this stuff Dafne’s doing, even wire work was one of her favorite things.” He says most adults are tired of wire work almost immediately, but Keen was always wanting to do more.

15. His goal with Marco Beltrami’s score was to avoid the typical sounds of big summer blockbusters and comic book films. “I wanted a more ’70s feel, I wanted more a kind of thriller or detective movie score, a more intimate score, something that wasn’t trying at every moment to bring the London Philharmonic to bear on the action.”

16. He says CG and green screen work has “robbed movies of a kind of authenticity that I miss. The films always film oddly fake even though the effects work is often amazing.” Preach.

17. He pimps the black & white version (included on a second Blu-ray) saying “the idea of releasing a monochromatic version of this movie really was the very organic result of early stills that I was taking in production, some of which I was releasing on Twitter, and I was making them black & white, and I think it startled all of us because I think it’s conventional wisdom that audiences don’t like black & white, it seems old-fashioned. People responded so intensely to those stills that it occurred to us to try and make a black & white version of the film.” He credits cinematographer John Mathieson with shooting a film that works beautifully in color or b&w.

18. The secret videos shot by the nurse were meant to appear as if she could actually have shot them surreptitiously, but he acknowledges they grow more elaborate as they go on. “My hope being that you’re being drawn into the story that Gabriela (Elizabeth Rodriguez) is telling and less and less aware that the film-making and the cutting of her video might be a little beyond the level of your average nurse. Not that nurses can’t make great films.”

19. “One of the motifs of the movie is hands holding hands.” The shot of Laura looking at the casino mannequins first sets up the symbol of interlocked hands between a parent and a child as something she’s longing for.

20. He says George Stevens’ Shane is “a masterpiece of golden age American film-making.”

“The Great War is coming.” Also Winter. And Dragons. And horse-lord parkour.

HBO has finally released a full trailer for Game of Thrones season 7. This time around, it’s a trailer with actual footage from the show, not simply a group of main characters walking down hallways and sitting in chairs. It feels somewhat late in the game to be showing off the first substantial footage — the new season is only 8 weeks away — but this is Game of Thrones we’re talking about. Do they really have to show us anything at this point? If there were no trailer, would that dampen excitement enough to give watchers a reason to skip it? Nope. For hardcore fans, no trailer is needed.

For everyone else, this trailer serves as a nice catch-up as to what’s been happening in Westeros over the past 6 years. A reminder of where everyone is and where they’re headed. Chiefly, it reminds us that Cersei is on the Iron Throne and everyone is coming for her. That’s the framing device the HBO marketeers have chosen to open their trailer.

Let’s break it down in a mostly spoiler-free, book knowledge enhanced way.

1. The Lannisters are surrounded.

As Cersei (Lena Headey) explains in voice over, she and her brotherlover Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) may be seated at the heart of the Seven Kingdoms’ traditional power center, but they are surrounded by threats.

From the East, an army led by Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) and her highest ranking Unsullied officer, Grey Worm (Jacob Anderson). Note the updated Unsullied tunics with the triple dragon broach. It’s as if the symbolism of three dragons might become very significant this season.

From the West, a dark vision of terror on the high seas. This is undoubtedly the fleet led by Euron Greyjoy (Pilou Asbaek), the swarthy uncle to Theon and Yara we met very briefly in season 6. The last time we saw Uncle Euron, he was getting started on building a fleet of 100 ships to chase down his niece and nephew before heading off to woo the Dragon Queen. He appears to be back and looking to pay the Iron Price for several things this year.

From the South, a sharpened blade. This could very well be the blade of a Dornish person. Yes, the Sand Snakes are still around. More on their whereabouts and companions later.

From the North, a murderous child. Arya (Maisie Williams) continues her post-Walder Frey life by traversing through the woods. Is she going North back to Winterfell? Will she go South to King’s Landing where more members of her infamous list reside? There’s a clue later in the trailer.

As if this geographic metaphor weren’t strong enough, it appears as if Cersei has commissioned the painting of a giant map. This works well in helping us locate her many enemies. Now I want one of these floor maps for my living room.

But The Mountain (Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson) is still hanging around, so it’s not all bad.

An existential examination of mise en scene as love story.

Every now and again I come across a video essay that’s a little different, either in source selection, approach, or both. The following video entitled “Spider-Man 2: How to Use the Two-Shot” by Jop Leuven for Love of Film is the latter such sort of video, one that takes an unassuming film like Sam Raimi’s 2004 sequel – not a bad film per se but never one that comes up for intense critical evaluation – and approaches it from an unexpected vantage: how the director uses mise en scene, specifically the shot-reverse-shot combo, to deepen the main plotline (Peter’s struggle with being Spider-Man) and the main subplot (the relationship between Peter and Mary Jane).

I’m going to let Leuven provide the details because a significant chunk of this video’s enjoyability – and there’s a lot to enjoy here – comes from his existential examination and deadpan delivery, but suffice it to say, the basic theory is that Spider-Man 2 isn’t just a love story between Peter and Mary Jane, it’s a love triangle between Peter, Mary Jane, and Spider-Man, the superhero being the obstacle between the people trying to get together. Raimi uses and removes the shot-reverse-shot based on where each character is in their emotional decision-making, keeping them in separate frames when they’re emotionally apart, and uniting them in frame in moments when they seem as though they might close this distance.

I love the hell out of this video, so much so I watched it twice in a row, something I never, ever do. There’s certainly a tongue-in-cheek humor to Leuven’s approach, but that doesn’t take away from the thoughtful, insightful analysis he’s providing; if anything it bolsters it and ensures you’ll keep thinking about it long after the lesson has ended. Stop what you’re doing and spend four minutes below, I promise it’s worth your time.

Nowadays, everything is done digitally – paying your bills, ordering goods, keeping up with friends and family, and even finding love. 11% of Americans have used a dating app or website to meet their significant other – yours truly included – and moving forward that number is only going to increase.

Online relationships today are commonplace, but remember back in the day, say around the turn of the 21^st century, when everything internet was still new and thus a little sketchy? If you were looking for love on the world wide web back then, it wasn’t something you advertised, in fact, it was a bit shameful, like there was something wrong with you, like you couldn’t hack it in the real world and thus had to retreat to the internet, which at the time was perceived as an amalgam of fantasy and reality where nothing could really be trusted.

This is the world and time in which Sean Buckelew’s charming and bittersweet animated short film Lovestreams is set. Taking place in the early 2000s, the film concerns two young folk who meet chatting on AOL IM – remember that? – and who develop strong feelings for one another despite never physically meeting. Their love develops digitally, which is where the film takes a turn into the fantastical, examining issues of connection – technological and emotional – identity, love, and artifice in the age of information.

Part nostalgia, part eulogy, and all touching, Lovestreams is for anyone who ever felt a connection they couldn’t entirely trust but desperately wanted to believe in; or, you know, all of us.

From the director of ‘White God’ comes the story of a Syrian refugee with some unique gifts.

White God premiered a few years back at Cannes and proved to be an acclaimed hit at the fest. What was most exciting was the emergence of a new talent, director Kornél Mundruczó, who tackled his native Hungary’s socio-political struggles through the eyes of a mixed breed canine named Hagen.

The kinetic and frenetic over-stylization might have turned off a few timid souls, but Mundruczó made his mark, put a stamp on the fest if you will, and many were anxiously awaiting his next cinematic step forward.

Two years later he is back at Cannes, this time in official competition, with the ambitious sci-fi religious epic Jupiter’s Moon. Clocking in at 122 minutes, the film follows Aryan, a Syrian refugee, trying to cross the border, who is shot multiple times by crooked border officer Laszlo, a demonically charged Szabolcs Bede Fazekas. Not only does Aryan survive, but he starts to levitate in the sky and discovers that he has some kind of miraculous power.

Nobody sees the levitation happen. Once Aryan plants himself back down to earth authorities find him and put him in a refugee camp where the film’s main protagonist, Dr. Stern (Merab Ninidze), notices the levitation again in full view. He is stunned. Although his heart can be in the right place, and he does seem to care for Aryan, Stern is corrupt and owes debt to a family of suitors, which leads him to sneak Aryan away from the camp and exploit him. He makes Aryan perform the miraculous feat to willing and paying customers in exchange for the refugee’s freedom and a reunion with his dad back home.

Tackling pertinently timely issues, the refugee crisis, and very silly ones, the levitation is supposed to be seen a religious miracle, Jupiter’s Moon feels like a superhero movie crossed with Mexican new wave cinema. The film will surely be one of the unique moviegoing experiences of the festival, I doubt we’ll see another film like it this or any other year, even if it is narratively inconsistent in both tone and execution.

The trafficking of Aryan’s “miracles” brings an almost quasi-biblical nature to the film, albeit one that feels forced and pretentious. Which can also be said of Mundruczó’s direction. A clear influence here seems to be Alfonso Cuarron’s Children of Men and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Birdman, and The Revenant” for that matter. In fact, the ambitious long take that opens the movie, one of many, has refugees caught crossing the water border and running for their lives and seems to be a direct riff on The Revenant‘s stunning opening sequence.

The movie doesn’t lack in ambition, always a good thing, but it also doesn’t seem to really find its own distinctive identity either. What does it want to be exactly? A superhero movie? A statement on the refugee crisis? A religious epic? Suffice to say that it probably wants to be all three, but that in turn makes for a messy, narratively incoherent ride. A good half hour could have been snipped to tighten the narrative’s construct, maybe then Jupiter’s Moon would have worked better. What we are left with instead is a film that has a collection of stunning sequences that don’t add up to much, which eventually leads to repetitiveness and an anticlimactic finale.

The HBO series never sugar coated truths about loss and death.

This article contains major spoilers for Six Feet Under. If you haven’t watched it yet… get on that.

In the opening moments of Twin Peaks: The Return, a slow-motion flashback portrays a young girl running through the schoolyard screaming after finding out that her classmate Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) was murdered. The new season of Twin Peaks immediately reminds us of the heartbreaking way the original series began — with intense grief that shook up an entire town. Twin Peaks’ pilot episode begins with the pale corpse of a young woman, then introduces us to each character as they find out about Laura’s death. Characters react with screams, tears, denial, anger, and disbelief. The show brutally plunges viewers into the characters’ grief, and throughout the series slowly portrays how their feelings of loss change over time.

The return of Twin Peaks reminds us of how brilliant the original series was for dealing with extremely difficult topics which people tend to shy away from talking about — specifically, how horrific it is to deal with death and loss, especially an unexpected and untimely death. HBO’s Six Feet Under premiered almost ten years after Twin Peaks, and followed in its footsteps by focusing on death and grieving. While both shows are steeped in dark humor and morbid subject matter, Six Feet Under is an incredibly different show than Twin Peaks. Where Twin Peaks veers towards melodrama, Six Feet Under tends towards everyday drama.

HBO

Six Feet Under zeroes in on a family whose livelihood depends on other peoples’ deaths. The show does not deal with one death, but with many, many losses — of strangers, family members, friends, children, elderly people, porn stars, teenagers, accidental deaths, suicides, murders, natural deaths, and so on. Each episode focuses on a different bereaved family as they plan their memorial services at the Fisher & Sons funeral home. The Fishers are in one of the most morbid businesses, but what the series shows us is that it is an incredibly important business. Six Feet Under reinforces the fact that death is a part of life, and everyone deals with it differently. The characters grow and change and are deeply affected by all of the losses they see at work, as well as those they experience personally. The show is so brilliant because it consistently portrays grief in an honest way, showing all the messy, painful, ugly, and horrible parts of losing someone, and the way people try to deal with incomprehensible deaths.

Six Feet Under’s pilot begins with the death of Nathaniel (Richard Jenkins), the patriarch of the Fisher family. He is hit by a bus on Christmas Eve while driving his new hearse. Much like Twin Peaks, the episode introduces each character as they receive the news of Nathaniel’s death. The show establishes its understanding of loss immediately in how it portrays the differences between each family member’s initial reaction. Ruth (Frances Conroy) screams, falls to the floor and throws the telephone when she hears the news. Her immediate reaction is that of panic and fear, whereas middle child David (Michael C. Hall) reacts in his usual stoic way. David masks his pain under a straight face, as he feels obliged to be “the strong one” while everyone else in his family falls apart. Claire (Lauren Ambrose) has perhaps the strangest experience of learning about her father’s death — she is in the midst of hanging out with some druggie friends, and has just taken crystal meth when she hears the news. Claire’s reaction is that of confusion and disbelief. Nate (Peter Krause) was on his way home for Christmas, and perhaps has the most complicated feelings about his father. He feels guilty and confused because he left the family business to move to Seattle, and the unresolved feelings he had for his father begin to haunt him. At Nathaniel’s memorial service, Ruth breaks down and confesses that she was cheating on her husband, therefore her feelings about his death are more complex than anyone had assumed. This represents the brutal truth that sometimes relationships are messy and unresolved when someone dies. David also struggles with the fact that his father did not know that he was gay, and he continues to hide his sexuality from his family. His partner Keith (Matthew St. Patrick) attends the funeral, and David’s pain is furthered by the fact that he cannot be open about his identity at his most vulnerable time.

HBO

Nathaniel’s ghost appears to the characters throughout the series (beginning with the pilot), which is a common trope in film and television. Characters frequently see their deceased loved ones as apparitions and have conversations with them. The deceased usually comment upon the characters’ lives and perhaps provide them with advice or wisdom. Nathaniel haunts Nate all through the series, frequently criticizing him and condescendingly referring to him as “buddy boy”. The series constantly emphasizes the fact that Nate (and all the members of the Fisher family) has/have complicated feelings towards Nathaniel, and while some of them are negative, some are also positive and loving. Nate reflects on all of these complicated feelings as he interacts with his father’s ghost, sometimes sharing loving moments of camaraderie, and other times making snide comments at him. Even though ghosts may not appear to us in real life, this televisual trope acknowledges that our loved ones do not disappear from our lives when they die.

The show also emphasizes that there can be both negative and positive feelings leftover when someone dies and that over time one may have new realizations about the person they lost. Nate finds out information about his father that changes his perspective on him — for example, in “The Room” (season 1 episode 6) he finds out that his father accepted alternative payments from his clients in exchange for funeral services, and that he had a private room he rented out above an Indian restaurant where he went to spend time alone. This new information makes Nate feel closer to his father, although he also begins to wonder how well he really knew him. Just because someone has passed away, it does not mean they stop being a presence in our lives. The relationship Nate had with his father continues after his death.

Over the course of the series, the characters’ feelings about Nathaniel’s death change over time. The characters often speak about Nathaniel — sometimes lovingly, sometimes to lament the pain they feel about losing him, and other times to laugh about how much of a jerk he could be. His presence is always felt, especially since the characters carry on his legacy by devoting their lives to Fisher and Sons funeral home. The show beautifully portrays the interaction between the Fisher’s personal grief and the grief of each client who utilizes their services. Nate is reluctant to stay in California and run the business with David and Federico (Freddy Rodriguez), but after losing his father, he realizes how important it is to be there for people who are bereaved. It is a difficult and incredibly depressing job — not to mention, sometimes it is absolutely disgusting — but the Fishers, despite their flaws, want to help those in need as best as they can. Sometimes the clients are demanding, and sometimes they have strange requests — such as putting on an extravagant, theatrical performance that takes many days to set up as the mourners do in “Nobody Sleeps” (season 3 episode 4). In “An Open Book” (season 1 episode 5) the Fishers host the funeral for an adult film star, and many of the guests are eccentric porn stars. Ruth is initially shocked by the people in her home, but the family understands that everyone grieves differently, and everyone deserves to be remembered and celebrated when they die. The Fisher’s personal losses help them to be more sensitive and understanding with their clients.

HBO

The show frequently focuses on Nate’s changing opinions and thoughts on the grieving process. In the pilot, he comments on how in other cultures, the bereaved scream and cry and throw themselves to the ground in agony for months after losing their loved ones. He points out how in North America, people are awkward when dealing with loss, and frequently bury their feelings instead of letting them out. This comment is put into action when Ruth decides she wants to grab dirt in her hands to throw onto Nathaniel’s coffin, instead of gently sprinkling it on using a “salt shaker” container. Nathaniel commends her for this and joins in, noting that loss is messy and ugly and should be treated as such. Nate is often selfish, stubborn, and makes many mistakes in his life — but he constantly reflects on what it means to be alive, what it means to lose someone, and what it means to love someone. He changes and attempts to grow over the course of the series, and there is no better demonstration of this than how he deals with loss. He struggles, to be honest and open about his feelings, but he tries his best — when dealing with his father’s death, within his relationship with Brenda (Rachel Griffiths), finding out that he has a brain disease called AVM, and later on the loss of his wife Lisa (Lili Taylor).

The most horrific death of all comes in season 5, when Nate finally succumbs to his AVM and passes away. This represents the second major and unexpected loss for the Fisher family, but Nate’s death has an added layer of tragedy because he was so young, just beginning his life with Brenda and his daughter Maya (Brenna and Bronwyn Tosh). In “The Last Time” (season 2, episode 13), Nate undergoes surgery for his AVM and hallucinates that he has died. When Nate dies for real in “Ecotone” (season 5 episode 9), it seems as though it may be another hypothetical “death”, wherein Nate reflects on what life would be like for his family without him. This makes “All Alone” (season 5 episode 10) one of the most heartbreaking, tragic episodes of any TV show ever when it is revealed that Nate has truly passed away.

HBO

The episode shows each character as they numbly attempt to go on living immediately after losing Nate. David, Claire, Ruth, and Brenda all break down in their own ways. Claire smokes pot, cries a lot, and gets angry. Ruth lies on the couch and doesn’t move. Brenda refuses to try and number her pain in any way, refusing to drink alcohol because she doesn’t want to “take the edge off”. David begins to have PTSD-induced visions of the man who kidnapped him in “That’s My Dog” (season 4 episode 5) — Virginia Heffernan of the New York Times notes that following Nate’s death, David faces his own mortality more than ever, since he is now the eldest male in his family. This episode is one of the only times David breaks down and cries out for help, instead of attempting to hold things together. Nate’s death shakes him up so much that he cannot even try to be stoic. Federico speaks one of the most fundamental lines about Nate in this episode: “He had a natural sense of what to say to people when they were grieving.” Nate was not a perfect person, but his time at Fisher and Sons helped him to become a better, more sensitive person. Rico perfectly and pithily sums up Nate in this one line.

The title of the episode is taken from a line in the Nirvana song “All Apologies”, which ties into the episode. The song is heard twice in the episode, once when Claire has a flashback to Nate crying over Kurt Cobain’s suicide (Heffernan notes how charmingly Nate-esque it is to claim that Cobain was “too pure for this world”, and another time when Claire lies on her bed crying, remembering her dear brother. Claire listening to Nirvana in her room is one of my favorite scenes of the entire series. Having experienced a heart-shattering loss in my own life, I felt very close to Claire in that moment as I have found myself doing the same thing many times. Listening to music that reminds you of your lost loved one is one of the most cathartic and comforting things you can do when you feel sad.

Ariana Bacle at Entertainment Weekly wrote this beautiful article detailing how Six Feet Under helped her get through the loss of her brother. She writes that after her initial shock and horror at hearing the news, she tried to think of a TV show or movie where something similar happened to the characters. She makes the incredibly important point that having fictional characters to relate to in times of loss can be comforting — not simply because they are going through the same thing, but because we can see them onscreen going through all the ugly, messy, heartbreaking things that come with losing someone. In Six Feet Under, we see the characters as they cry, fight, embarrass themselves in public, make mistakes, and connect with others throughout their grieving processes. Six Feet Under shows all of the unexpected surprises that come with losing a loved one, and reinforces the idea that these things are normal. Six Feet Under immerses us in the fact that life is not always sparkly and beautiful, but it can be really terrible. There are always positive things and beautiful moments (babies being born, weddings, laughing about Nate’s embarrassing haircuts, Claire becoming a photographer), but things are often difficult. The comfort and feeling of solidarity that comes with sharing sorrow (even if it is with a fictional family) cannot be undervalued.

Heffernan writes that “All Alone” features various examples of poetry: Nirvana’s “All Apologies”, Claire’s Republican boyfriend Ted’s (Chris Messina) claim that Top 40 hits provide comfort in times of sadness, and the Rumi poem which Nate requests be read at his graveside (“Regarding him, say neither good nor bad”). Six Feet Under is one of the most unexpectedly poetic television shows of all time. Every episode provides a mediation on death, live, love, patience, growth, communication, and personal expression, while also being wickedly funny. Ariana Bacle sums up the show when she writes that “…you can’t get over a death, not one that rocks you to your core. You get through it. Six Feet Under didn’t just get this; it was made of this.” There may not be any other show that has ever dealt so openly or honestly with death and grieving, and its existence is incredibly comforting for anyone who has gone through a devastating loss.

The Pirates of the Caribbean series gets a much darker lead thanks to an obscure (and official) short film.

With the coming of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, it only seemed fitting that we at Film School Rejects do something for the occasion. Maybe a list of the series’s shots (you laugh, but they’re not bad) or an Insufferability Index for their protagonists. I decided on something a bit more esoteric. Yes, ignoring the blockbusters completely, I decided to look at the single short film in the PotC universe: “Tales of the Code: Wedlocked.”

“Wedlocked,” directed by James Ward Byrkit of Rango fame back in 2011 right after they’d filmed the second and third Pirates films back-to-back, is strange. I mean even in the scope of the Pirates of the Caribbean universe where Krakens, mermaids, and magic ship-shrinking magic exists, it’s completely bonkers. Not because of its wild acts of seafaring fantasy, but because it features Jack Sparrow selling two girls into sex slavery. No, I didn’t say Johnny Depp. I said, Captain Jack Sparrow. You know, the protagonist of these children’s films.

The plot of the short serves as a prequel to the first film while expanding upon the short auction segment of the original Disneyland attraction upon which the series is based. The section of the ride features pirates selling the weeping women of their pillaged town to the highest bidder: redheaded wenches are hot commodities and overweight women are just happy for the attention. Already not a great pick for inspiration.

Why this hasn’t been obsessed over by Pirates aficionados or Depp apologists seems to be because of its obscurity. The ten-minute film was “only included as a special feature in the US 15 disc 3D Blu-ray/2D Blu-ray/DVD + Digital Copy box set that includes Pirates 1–4,” according to Wikipedia. Even if you were to slog through all fifteen discs of that collection, there’s a very real chance that you would skip right over this odd piece of fan service.

But luckily for us, it is on YouTube:

The short begins with Scarlett (Lauren Maher) and Giselle (Vanessa Branch), known for their minor scenes in the movies where they slap Jack Sparrow, both preparing for weddings…to Jack Sparrow. They are, of course, upset when this truth becomes apparent, but they’re unable to focus on it long before a new problem arises. Sparrow hasn’t simply left them both at the altar, he’s sold them to an auctioneer.

That’s a bit more problematic than Sparrow mistaking “horologist” for “whore” in Dead Men Tell No Tales. We like to think of Sparrow as a harmless ragtag charmer who likes to steal, seduce, and stir up a bit of anarchy, but sex trafficking? The captain was never the most progressive towards women (he’s a pirate in pirate times for christ sake) but he’s also the hero of a Disney franchise. You’d think they’d want the similarities to Depp to stop at an obsession for gaudy headwear.

That said, aside from its poor choice in subject matter, this shortfalls into a trap many pieces of extended universe fiction do: over-explanation. It doesn’t erase the magic of the some of the wondrously weird mysteries of the first film, but it certainly misunderstands why those things won audiences over in the first place. It’s a bright, too-logical lighthouse beam through the entertaining mystique. We find out why Sparrow’s ship is sinking during his glorious introduction sequence during Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl and we find out why that one parrot guy got his tongue cut out. We also (if you haven’t caught it) found out why Scarlett and Giselle are so mad at Sparrow when they find him. Sex. Slavery.

There are some great actor tidbits here, including the cameo appearance of the excellent Dale Dickey (who helped set the tone of Hell or High Water as the film’s first bank employee) alongside two really game comedic performances from Maher and Branch (neither of whom, sadly, have done as high-profile work since), but that’s about all the film has to offer. The short isn’t badly directed or shot – it’s just gross. There are the most minor attempts to subvert the content, but it still remains something that’s better buried than treasured in the PotC annals.

How George Lucas relied on help from his friends to create Star Wars.

Today marks forty years that Star Wars has dominated movie culture, remaking the conception of fandom, the genres of science fiction and fantasy, and the very way movies are made and distributed in its own image. This is the only world anyone born after 1970 or so has ever known, and so for all of us the occasional reminder may be necessary that it was not always so, and that until shortly before its release Star Wars was a decidedly unlikely success. As in the story of an exceptional underdog becoming central to a triumph over steep opposition, the movie itself came to be as the result of singular inspiration, to be sure, but considerable group effort and luck.

Developing an interest in avant-garde and art house film in his late teens, George Lucas went on to formally study film as both an undergrad and graduate student, winning a scholarship from Warner Brothers that allowed him to choose a film to work on and observe. It being a transitional period for the studio, the one project that drew Lucas’ interest was Francis Ford Coppola’s musical Finian’s Rainbow. Coppola at the time was a minor cult figure among film students, owing not only to his garrulous charisma but to film schools still being a relatively new thing at the time and Coppola being one of the first alumni to make waves in Hollywood. Lucas was drawn to Coppola and became a friend and protege, with Coppola using the near-limitless prestige and industry clout he acquired from The Godfather’s success to help Lucas make American Graffiti, whose great success, in turn, gave Lucas the necessary access to studio resources to get Star Wars greenlit.

At that point, the principal obstacle was Lucas’ own struggles to communicate the story in his head through writing. Character names were giggle-inducing or unpronounceable. Entire plot points drowned in indecipherable proper nouns. Friends Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck were enlisted to help hone the script into shape. The production was fraught, with Lucas at loggerheads with his crew, who took his cerebral, taciturn affect to be arrogance, unbecoming in a director so young. Harrison Ford told Lucas, of the dialogue “You can type this shit, but you sure can’t say it.” The special effects, many of which had to be invented from scratch, took forever to finish. At a screening of a rough cut, Lucas invited several friends, including Brian De Palma and Steven Spielberg (Martin Scorsese was also invited, but canceled), to give feedback. De Palma provided a litany of notes, not sugar coated, that Lucas, though stung by De Palma’s candor, incorporated into the finished film. Among these was the crucial pairing of the phrase “The Force of Others” to, simply and eternally, the “The Force.”

The only person who thought Star Wars was going to be a hit then was Spielberg. The 1970s being famously (only slightly apocryphally) a time of dour, darkly lit genre deconstructions with unhappy endings, even Lucas’ closest friends thought his space movie for kids was doomed to failure. Spielberg, though, told anyone who would listen that it would be a massive hit (an instinct, it should be noted, that was instrumental in Spielberg going on to be the most consistently successful film director in American history). Lucas had been judging Star Wars to some degree against Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which, while it ended on a note of awe and wonder, took some very 70s paths to that ultimate destination, depicting an Everyman protagonist who abandons his family and ends up isolated from “normal” people. Lucas considered Spielberg’s film a more serious enterprise entirely and thus more likely to be a huge hit – a function, perhaps, of a certain competitiveness he felt toward Spielberg – and Star Wars to be a niche piece that would play only to kids, but Spielberg assured him that this was not the case. And lo, it came to pass, and Star Wars was the biggest hit of all time. (It should be noted that Close Encounters was not exactly lost to history.)

If there’s a point to all this, it’s that great feats are not accomplished alone, or in a vacuum. Star Wars began with George Lucas, and regardless of copyrights, it will always, to a degree, be his. But he shares possession with the friends and collaborators who shepherded it into being in the first place, and with everyone whose life Star Wars has touched in the many years since. We are all made of stars, and of Star Wars.

A video tribute to filmmaking’s surreal genius.

There is more than a bit of madness to the cinema of Alejandro Jodorowsky. Or so it appears to the sane.

In films like El Topo, Holy Mountain, and Santa Sangre the director pushes the borders of reality and imagination in unnerving, grotesque, and hallucinatory ways. There is no right-side up in his work, there is no safe zone or single perspective by which one can see their way through. Jodorowsky’s films are experiences, they are projected visions in the spiritual sense, the explorative hypotheses of one mind transmitted in shocking clarity to others. It seems mad to us, insane, these ideas Jodorowsky brings to life, but to the director they seem they opposite.

“People say I am mad,” he has said, “I am not mad. I am trying to heal my soul.”

Not only is that statement exclusionary in the most artistic of ways, it also reveals that what we perceive as filmic descents into madness are often times the director through his characters attempting to climb out of insanity. In a warped way, or rather a way that seems warped to us, Jodorowsky is seeking an end to madness by expelling it from himself onto the screen and in turn to us. It’s a divine infection, his work, and it carries with it an emotional resonance few other directors can boast.

In the below montage from Martin Kessler, the maddest moments from Jodorowsky’s oeuvre have been collected in an attempt to discern the method therein. It’s an elegant and gorgeous trip, and for newcomers to the director, a definite gateway drug to his work.

Alejandro Jodorowsky, Mad Cinema of The Sacred Heart from Martin Kessler on Vimeo.

On the 40th anniversary of everyone’s favorite franchise, we look back in wonder at the fandom that keeps on giving.

40 years ago, a long time ago, our culture changed. Star Wars (later to be re-branded A New Hope, but dang it, it will always be just Star Wars to me) birthed a new level of relentless fandom that forever altered the economics of the Hollywood assembly machine. A society bogged down in political frustration and disgust, could no longer bear the weight of radically charged entertainment.

While Vietnam and the Nixon White House would produce some of the richest and morally motivated acts of cinema (Easy Rider, A Clockwork Orange, All The President’s Men, etc.), it would also make way for Disco and the never-ending Rocky franchise. We may have one-time delighted us in eating our vegetables, but from 1977 on, we wanted to simply gorge on ice cream. I’m not here to judge; I’m a rotund optimist permanently imbibing on the myriad of fan theory websites, and often contributing to the torrent we’re all currently drowning under. I love it.

You would not be reading this website without Star Wars, and I sure as hell would not be writing for it without, not only the film, but also the hundreds of action figures I’ve collected, the on-theme clothing I’ve garnished myself in, and the decade-old boxes of mildewed C-3PO’s cereal I currently have rotted away in the back of my closet (shhh! Don’t tell my wife!). While I am on board with your cineaste declaration that the 1970s produced some of the finest examples of the art form, and we are gearing up for another necessary wave of pointedly critical cinema, I am still a proud child of George Lucas.

For me, there was no life before Star Wars. In childhood, it shaped my every conscious and subconscious thought…Forget childhood, the Skywalker saga consumed most of my intellect well through my teenage years and into my early twenties. Then it was time to party like it was 1999 (cuz it was), and The Phantom Menace had me reconsidering all my previous life choices. What do you do with Jar Jar Binks in your life? How do you incorporate a metaclorian supplemented Anakin Skywalker into your complicated attraction for Darth Vader’s samurai tyrant? The reality is that I couldn’t deal with the prequels. And you certainly don’t want me sitting on your couch, and working out my impossible-to-shut-up-about feelings of despair here. We have The Force Awakens now; I need to leave the summer of 1999 to the past.

The true importance of Star Wars is how awesome, and addictive it is to unpack the cobbled mythology behind the storytelling. It is a gateway narrative that will lead you down a historical path littered with classical literature (Joseph Campbell, Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov), master filmmakers (Fritz Lang, Akira Kurosawa, John Ford, Ray Harryhausen), and B-movie icons (Flash Gordon, The Fighting Devil Dogs). Once you start poking around, you cannot stop, and before you can say “May The Force Be With You,” you’re relating the world’s religions through the superior wisdom of Yoda.

That Womp Rat hole was also the first excuse for a lot of us to delve deeper into the process of creation. Sure, the first man you look towards is George Lucas. But once you plow through the early efforts (American Graffiti, THX-1138) of this USC grad turned pop culture puppet master, and skim through his often reserved interviews in which he vaguely alludes to his inspirations, there is honestly not a lot of meat to chew on beyond the original trilogy.

Lucas is weirdly Lynchian in this fashion; he would much rather let his work speak for him than drone on in some late night talking head segment. When I was younger, this mild-mannered act would often infuriate, but my inability to infatuate over Lucas drove me to the unsung heroes of Star Wars.

The first behind-the-scenes maestro, a lot of us, gravitated towards was Ralph McQuarrie. A friend of a friend linked Lucas with McQuarrie, and after completing production on American Graffiti, the two partnered up to create the original concept designs for Star Wars. McQuarrie’s first completed painting depicted a

McQuarrie’s first completed painting depicted a Metropolis-inspired C-3PO wandering the Tatooine desert while the Swiss Army bot, R2-D2 trailed behind. This Threepio sports a beautiful, serene expression conveying a lost gaze of befuddlement, but is still waiting for Anthony Daniels to fulfill that barely tolerable personality. While the eventual creations would vary from these initial sketches, all of McQuarrie’s paintings contain the building block ingredients we’d forever obsess over. More importantly, the discovery of McQuarrie was also the discovery of a dozen other famous conceptual artists. From here I ventured into Syd Mead (Alien, Blade Runner), Frank Frazetta (Mad Max, Fire & Ice), and Disney’s Nine Old Men.

Ben Burtt was probably the biggest deep cut I encountered in my love affair with Star Wars. The most famous sound designer in the business cut his teeth on Paul Bartel’s Death Race 2000 but found his way into this tiny science-fiction film because of his association with USC. The very first sound effect he crafted for the film was that of the most iconic weapon in movie history. Inspired by McQuarrie’s drawings of the laser sword, Burtt’s lightsaber was born out of the projection booth. He recorded the interlock motor of the USC Simplex projector while it sat idle to capture the lightsaber’s hum. By accident, Burtt discovered that while walking by a television set with his microphone, the picture tube produced a buzz, and when combined with the projector effect, the tone of the lightsaber was born. To achieve an additional sense of movement, Burtt played that sound over a speaker then took another microphone, and waved it around against it. If he whipped the microphone, he would pick up the doppler shift, the pitch would change, and it created the sense of the lightsaber cutting through the air.  That resulting static charge of swordplay defines the swashbuckling adventure of the series.

Running down the rest of the production credits reads like a laundry list of talent that has fashioned every movie we’ve preoccupied ourselves with in the last 40 years. From the visual effects department arose Dennis Muren (E.T., Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, The Force Awakens), John Dykstra (Spider-Man, Godzilla, The Hateful Eight), Phil Tippet (Dragonslayer, Robocop, Starship Troopers), and Dan O’Bannon (Dark Star, Alien, Total Recall). Then you have a series of old hats making all these young whippersnappers looks so damn good. Gilbert Taylor was Roman Polanski’s go-to cinematographer at the time; having shot Repulsion, Cul-De-Sac, MacBeth as well as Hitchcock’s final film, Frenzy, and the genuine masterpiece that is Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Paul Hirsch was one of four editors to work on the film (including Lucas’ then-wife, Marcia Lucas who made time in the film when she wasn’t cutting Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York), and he has since gone on to assemble nearly every Brian DePalma film as well as Duncan Jones’ last two efforts.

Star Wars was a tremendous gift to us geeks. It was our creator as much as anything else. While space battles, galactic hustling, alien shenanigans, and sci-fi smooching was nothing new to cinema, the level of earnestness that George Lucas brought to the material was incredibly fresh. This was not kids’ stuff. Here was a space opera that took itself very seriously; fandom had been waiting on the fringes for someone to come along, and talk to them like adults. When the lines started to form around the blocks, we discovered that we were not alone. The time we’d spent engorging ourselves on books, movies and comic books was validated.

Our only rightful response to this validation was to give ourselves completely over to George Lucas and his legacy. Star Wars has shaped all of our lives whether we wanted it to or not. There is no going back. No matter how frustrated I may have gotten over The Phantom Menace, or how concerned I may be with the thrill being squandered by Disney’s yearly release schedule, I must bow down in respect to the life it has designed for me. I owe all my heroes to Star Wars. This is not a hobby, it’s an obsession, and I cherish it.

When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

Allow me to paint you a picture: it’s last Sunday night at 5:59 pm PST, t-minus 60 seconds before the first new episode of Twin Peaks in 27 years. I am, understandably, beside myself with nervous anticipation. I have no idea what’s about to happen or how I will react to it. Will I be elated? Disappointed? Confused? All the above?

Then it starts, and like a character lost in a fugue state all I can do is stare, jaw gaping but silent, for two solid hours as the dark beauty unfolds. And you know what I discover? Besides my fears evaporating like so much mountain mist, I mean? A lot of the time, Twin Peaks is staring back.

That’s because the first two episodes of the series’ return were chock-full of characters staring silently at one another or nothing, six minutes and 39 seconds-full, to be precise, as evidenced by the following supercut from Niko Nawalany, which gathers every single quiet look from the relaunch and edits them together into a deafening display of confoundment, wickedness, and ennui. This is typical Lynch, to take awkward, silent moments and prolong them, to force us to remain in the awkwardness until we can feel it ourselves. The spectrum of complimentary and contradictory emotions this conjures in we the audience – simultaneously, no less – is a prime facet of the perplexing state we can only call “Lynchian.”

If you haven’t seen the first two episodes of Twin Peaks’ third season, you might want to stay away from this until you have. Given the absolute lack of dialogue there aren’t any major spoilers herein, per se, but there are a couple of images that might lead you down a rabbit hole or two.

Twin Peaks: The Return airs on Sunday nights on Showtime. If you’re not watching it, you’re missing out on the biggest event in television history, and a brand-new tipping point for the medium. No big deal.

First seen at WelcometoTwinPeaks.com