Hear Bill Murray’s Favorite Poems Read Aloud by Murray Himself & Their Authors

in Film, Literature, Magazines, Poetry | October 10th, 2016

I’d be wary of any movie star who invites me to his hotel room to “read poet­ry” unless said star was doc­u­ment­ed poet­ry nut, Bill Mur­ray.

Ear­li­er this year, Leigh Haber, book edi­tor of O, The Oprah Mag­a­zine, reached out to Mur­ray to see if he’d share some of his favorite poems in cel­e­bra­tion of Nation­al Poet­ry Month. In true Mur­ray-esque fash­ion, he wait­ed until dead­line to return her call, sug­gest­ing that they meet in his room at the Car­lyle, where he would recite his choic­es in per­son.

Such celebri­ty shenani­gans are unheard of at the Chateau Mar­mont!

Murray’s favorite poems:

“What the Mir­ror Said” by Lucille Clifton

At the top of the page, Mur­ray reads the poem at a ben­e­fit for New York’s Poets House, adopt­ing a light accent sug­gest­ed by the dialect of the nar­ra­tor, a mir­ror full of appre­ci­a­tion for the poet’s wom­an­ly body. Clifton said that the “germ” of the poem was vis­it­ing her hus­band at Har­vard, and feel­ing out of place among all the slim young coeds. Thus­ly does Mur­ray posi­tion him­self as a hero to every female above the age of … you decide.

“Oat­meal” by Gal­way Kin­nell

Kin­nell, who sought to enliv­en a drea­ry bowl of oat­meal with such din­ing com­pan­ions as Keats, Spenser and Mil­ton, shared Murray’s play­ful sen­si­bil­i­ty. In an inter­view con­duct­ed as part of Michele Root-Bernstein’s World­play Project he remarked:

… it doesn’t seem like play at the time of doing it, but part of the whole con­struct of the work, and even though the work might be extreme­ly seri­ous and even morose, still there’s that ele­ment of play that is just an insep­a­ra­ble part of it.

“I Love You Sweat­h­eart” by Thomas Lux

Mur­ray told O, which incor­rect­ly report­ed the poem’s title as “I Love You Sweet­heart” that he expe­ri­enced this one as a vibra­tion on the inside of his ribs “where the meat is most ten­der.” It would make a ter­rif­ic scene in a movie, and who bet­ter to play the lover risk­ing his life to mis­spell a term of endear­ment on a bridge than Bill Mur­ray?

“Famous” by Nao­mi Shi­hab Nye

Alas, we could find no footage of Nye read­ing her love­ly poem aloud, but you can read it in full over at The Poet­ry Foun­da­tion. It’s easy to see why it speaks to Mur­ray.

via O, The Oprah Mag­a­zine

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bill Mur­ray Reads Poet­ry at a Con­struc­tion Site: Emi­ly Dick­in­son, Bil­ly Collins & More

Bill Mur­ray Reads Great Poet­ry by Bil­ly Collins, Cole Porter, and Sarah Man­gu­so

Bill Mur­ray Gives a Delight­ful Read­ing of Twain’s Huck­le­ber­ry Finn (1996)

Bill Mur­ray Reads Poet­ry at a Con­struc­tion Site: Emi­ly Dick­in­son, Bil­ly Collins & More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is open­ing in New York City in March 2017. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Some of Buster Keaton’s Great, Death-Defying Stunts Captured in Animated Gifs

in Film | October 6th, 2016

keaton-1

In the days of silent com­e­dy, jokes by neces­si­ty con­sist­ed of phys­i­cal rou­tines. Char­lie Chaplin’s mourn­ful expres­sions, slumped shoul­ders, and fun­ny walks imme­di­ate­ly come to mind, as well as his slap­stick bits and prat­falls. Just as mem­o­rable are the dare­dev­il, death-defy­ing stunts of Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, who com­pet­ed with each oth­er through­out their careers. The stone­faced Keaton “suf­fered most when the talkies arrived,” notes Jana Prikryl in The New York Review of Books, and “nev­er com­mand­ed the wealth or pop­u­lar­i­ty” of Chap­lin or Lloyd in his day.

keaton-2

Nonethe­less, as Tony Zhou demon­strat­ed recent­ly in his video essay series Every Frame a Paint­ing, Keaton has since become one of those film­mak­ers who are “so influ­en­tial that no mat­ter where you look, you see traces of them every­where.” His fram­ing crops up in Wes Anderson’s care­ful set-pieces; his “acro­bat­ics and stunts” in Jack­ie Chan’s action sequences; and his dead­pan demeanor in Bill Murray’s endear­ing sad-sack per­for­mances. Keaton was, said Orson Welles, “the great­est of all the clowns in the his­to­ry of the cin­e­ma.” In the silent era, that also meant he was the great­est of all the stunt­men.

keaton-3

“No silent star did more dan­ger­ous stunts than Buster Keaton,” Roger Ebert wrote with deep admi­ra­tion. Even Harold Lloyd’s ver­ti­go-induc­ing clock scenes in 1923’s Safe­ty Last used trick sets to lessen the risks. Keaton not only took on the full risk him­self in his most famous stunt scenes—many of which you can see in gif form here—he also “dou­bled for some of his actors, doing their stunts as well as his own.” In Steam­boat Bill, Jr. (1928, top), Keaton stands in the exact spot of an upper win­dow of the façade of a house that comes down around him. In his 1926 clas­sic The Gen­er­al, fur­ther down, he per­forms a jaw-drop­ping feat—using one rail­road tie to push aside anoth­er while rid­ing on the cow catch­er of a mov­ing loco­mo­tive.

keaton-4

Fur­ther up, in 1923’s Three Ages—the first film Keaton wrote, direct­ed, and starred in—he per­forms an authen­ti­cal­ly ter­ri­fy­ing stunt that gives acro­pho­bic view­ers instant chills. Just above, from the fol­low­ing year’s Sher­lock Jr., we see a sim­i­lar­ly heart-rac­ing feat as Keaton clutch­es a road­block gate and falls two sto­ries into a speed­ing car. And in 1928’s The Cam­era­man, below, he goes down with a tall col­laps­ing plat­form. Keaton’s visu­al com­e­dy was superb; “he’s air­i­ly nim­ble,” Char­lie Fox writes in a Cab­i­net essay on the silent star’s fall into alco­holism after the talkies left his career strand­ed; “Nobody else’s body yield­ed so smooth­ly to the sub­lime mind­less­ness that the best phys­i­cal com­e­dy requires.”

keaton-5

In just these few key scenes, we see how Keaton’s stunts stripped away what Prikryl calls the “sap­py, bla­tant slap­stick [he] dis­dained” in oth­er actors’ work (“I didn’t like over­act­ing,” he remarked). But part of the dry­ness of Keaton’s high-wire visu­al com­e­dy came from the fact that many of these scenes were unre­hearsed first takes, which “gave the action sequences a doc­u­men­tary fla­vor… because what was cap­tured on film was a bold attempt at some­thing real­ly dan­ger­ous or dif­fi­cult, not a prac­ticed slam dunk.”

In his lat­er years, Keaton’s career saw some­thing of a resur­gence after he beat his chron­ic drink­ing. “His job,” late in life, Fox writes, “became mak­ing quick appear­ances in unex­pect­ed places”—a Smirnoff Vod­ka ad in 1957, a brief role in Sun­set Boule­vard. “Always, in these lat­er per­for­mances, he arrives from and returns to a becalmed region of the past.” Per­haps nowhere was Keaton’s phys­i­cal expres­sive­ness put to more use in this peri­od than in a role which, in many ways, he found at least as chal­leng­ing as his ear­ly silent-era stunt­work: a 1965 col­lab­o­ra­tion with Samuel Beck­ett in the mod­ernist writer’s only for­ay into film (excerpt above): a short trib­ute to the silent era that is unsur­pris­ing­ly, “far more com­plex” con­cep­tu­al­ly than its fore­bears, but no less evoca­tive of the exis­ten­tial plight embod­ied by Keaton’s lone­ly, embat­tled-yet-sto­ic char­ac­ters.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Gen­er­al, “Per­haps the Great­est Film Ever Made,” and 20 Oth­er Buster Keaton Clas­sics Free Online

Buster Keaton: The Won­der­ful Gags of the Found­ing Father of Visu­al Com­e­dy

101 Free Silent Films: The Great Clas­sics 

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Watch Soviet Avant-Garde Composers Create Synthesized Music with Hand-Drawn Animations (1934)

in Art, Film, Music, Technology | October 4th, 2016

The Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion not only rad­i­cal­ly reshaped social and polit­i­cal insti­tu­tions in the soon-to-be Sovi­et Union, but it also rad­i­cal­ized the arts. “The Romanovs, who ruled Rus­sia for 300 years,” com­ments Glenn Altschuler at The Boston Globe, used “cul­ture as an instru­ment of polit­i­cal con­trol.” As the Bol­she­viks swept away lum­ber­ing czarist elit­ism, they brought with them an avant-gardism that also sought to be pop­ulist and proletarian—spearheaded by such exper­i­men­tal artists as film­mak­er Dzi­ga Ver­tov, poet, futur­ist actor, and artist Vladimir Mayakovsky, and “supre­ma­tist” painter Kaz­imir Male­vich. While many of these artists were denounced as bour­geois obscu­ran­tists when the dog­mas of social­ist real­ism became their own instru­ments of polit­i­cal con­trol, for sev­er­al years, the nascent Com­mu­nist state pro­duced some of the most for­ward-think­ing art, music, dance, and film the world had yet seen.

That includes some of the first ful­ly syn­thet­ic music ever made, cre­at­ed by inno­v­a­tive meth­ods that pre­dat­ed syn­the­siz­ers by sev­er­al decades. We’ve like­ly all heard of the Theremin, for exam­ple, invent­ed in 1919 by Sovi­et engi­neer Leon Theremin. By the 1930s, oth­er inven­tive tech­nol­o­gists and com­posers had begun to exper­i­ment with oscil­lo­scopes and mag­net­ic tape, cut­ting or draw­ing wave­forms by hand to cre­ate syn­thet­ic sounds.

One avant-garde Sovi­et com­pos­er, Arse­ny Avraamov became inspired by the advent of sound record­ing tech­nol­o­gy in film. The process of opti­cal sound uses an audio track record­ed on a sep­a­rate neg­a­tive that runs par­al­lel with the film (see it explained above). After the devel­op­ment of this tech­nol­o­gy, writes Paul Gal­lagher at Dan­ger­ous Minds, Bauhaus artist Lás­zló Moholy-Nagy sug­gest­ed that “a whole new world of abstract sound could be cre­at­ed from exper­i­men­ta­tion with the opti­cal film sound track.”

Tak­ing up the chal­lenge after the first Russ­ian sound film—1929’s The Five Year Plan—Avraamov “pro­duced (pos­si­bly) the first short film with a hand-drawn syn­thet­ic sound­track.” One very short exam­ple of his tech­nique, at the top of the post, may not sound like much to us, but it pre­serves a fas­ci­nat­ing tech­nique and a look at what might have been had this tech­nique, and oth­ers like it, borne more fruit. Mono­skop describes Avraamov as “a com­pos­er, music the­o­rist, per­for­mance insti­ga­tor, expert in Cau­cu­sian folk music, [and] out­spo­ken crit­ic of the clas­si­cal twelve-tone sys­tem.” He was also the com­mis­sar of a min­istry set up to encour­age “the devel­op­ment of a dis­tinct­ly pro­le­tar­i­an art and lit­er­a­ture.” It’s not entire­ly clear how what he called “orna­men­tal sound” tech­niques fit that pur­pose. But along with inno­va­tors like Evge­ny Sholpo and Niko­lai Voinov—whose fas­ci­nat­ing exper­i­ments you can hear above and below—Avraamov showed that tech­nolo­gies gen­er­al­ly used to deliv­er enter­tain­ment and pro­pa­gan­da to pas­sive mass audi­ences could be manip­u­lat­ed by hand to cre­ate some­thing entire­ly unique.

The exper­i­ments of these sound pio­neers per­haps held lit­tle appeal for the aver­age Russ­ian, but they were enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly writ­ten up in a 1936 issue of Amer­i­can mag­a­zine Mod­ern Mechanix. “Voinov and Avraamov,” notes Gal­lagher, “briefly formed a research insti­tute in Moscow, where they hoped to cre­ate syn­thet­ic voic­es and under­stand the musi­cal lan­guage of geo­met­ric shapes. It didn’t last and, alas, closed with­in a year.”

via @WFMU/Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Dzi­ga Vertov’s Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Exper­i­ments in Sound: From His Radio Broad­casts to His First Sound Film

Sovi­et Inven­tor Léon Theremin Shows Off the Theremin, the Ear­ly Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment That Could Be Played With­out Being Touched (1954)

Eight Free Films by Dzi­ga Ver­tov, Cre­ator of Sovi­et Avant-Garde Doc­u­men­taries

Watch Russ­ian Futur­ist Vladimir Mayakovsky Star in His Only Sur­viv­ing Film, The Lady and the Hooli­gan (1918)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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H.G. Wells Pans Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in a 1927 Movie Review: It’s “the Silliest Film”

in Film, Sci Fi | October 3rd, 2016

metropolis-wells

When we watch Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis now, we see an aes­thet­i­cal­ly dar­ing land­mark work of sci­ence-fic­tion cin­e­ma. When H.G. Wells watched Metrop­o­lis back in 1927, the year of its release, he saw some­thing very dif­fer­ent indeed. “I have recent­ly seen the sil­li­est film,” wrote the author of The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine as an open­er for his New York Times review. “I do not believe it would be pos­si­ble to make one sil­li­er.”

Despite its giant bud­get, Metrop­o­lis gives “in one eddy­ing con­cen­tra­tion almost every pos­si­ble fool­ish­ness, cliché, plat­i­tude, and mud­dle­ment about mechan­i­cal progress and progress in gen­er­al, served up with a sauce of sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty that is all its own.” His­to­ry remem­bers Lang and Wells both as vision­ar­ies who looked, often with lit­tle opti­mism, to the future, but clear­ly they had a dif­fer­ence of opin­ion as to how that future would actu­al­ly play out.

The sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly-mind­ed Wells took the impres­sion­is­tic Metrop­o­lis lit­er­al­ly, tak­ing issue with — among oth­er things — how its air­planes “show no advance on con­tem­po­rary types”; its “motor cars are 1926 mod­els or ear­li­er”; its vision of a ver­ti­cal­ly strat­i­fied city look, “to put it mild­ly, high­ly improb­a­ble”; the appar­ent con­di­tion that the city’s “machines are engaged quite furi­ous­ly in the mass pro­duc­tion of noth­ing that is ever used”; and the sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty of its mak­ers, “who are all on the side of soul and love and such like.”

Metrop­o­lis opened to mixed reviews at first (some of which you can read here), but no con­tem­po­rary crit­ic could match Wells for sheer dis­dain. “Nev­er for a moment does one believe any of this fool­ish sto­ry; nev­er for a moment is there any­thing amus­ing or con­vinc­ing in its drea­ry series of strained events,” he wrote, steer­ing his point-by-point take­down to its con­clu­sion. “It is immense­ly and strange­ly dull. It is not even to be laughed at.”

Strong stuff, but the high­est form of film crit­i­cism, as the French New Wave would lat­er artic­u­late, is film­mak­ing. And so, in 1936, came Things to Come, anoth­er cin­e­mat­ic spec­ta­cle of the future, this one built to the osten­si­bly more plau­si­ble spec­i­fi­ca­tions Wells laid out as its screen­writer — that film itself just one more pre­de­ces­sor to the unend­ing series of dystopias, utopias, and every kind of future in-between to appear on the screen over the next eight decades.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read the Orig­i­nal 32-Page Pro­gram for Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis (1927)

Fritz Lang Invents the Video Phone in Metrop­o­lis (1927)

Things to Come, the 1936 Sci-Fi Film Writ­ten by H.G. Wells, Accu­rate­ly Pre­dicts the World’s Very Dark Future

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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A Complete List of the 533 Movies & TV Shows Watched on the International Space Station

in Film, Television | September 30th, 2016

nasa-movies

Image cour­tesy of NASA

To keep some mea­sure of san­i­ty, the astro­nauts liv­ing aboard the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion (ISS), some 220 miles above our plan­et Earth, make a point of unwind­ing. Accord­ing to NASA, the astro­nauts get week­ends off. And, “on any giv­en day, crew mem­bers can watch movies, play music, read books, play cards and talk to their fam­i­lies.” Ear­li­er this year, Pale­o­Fu­ture gave us a fur­ther glimpse into what astro­naut down­time looks like, when its edi­tor, Matt Novak, print­ed a Com­plete List of Movies and TV Shows On Board the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion. Acquired through a Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion request, the list is a cat­a­logue of every film and TV show in the ISS media library. As Matt notes, there are many clas­sics (e.g. Alfred Hitchcock’s North by North­west), “plen­ty of space-themed and dystopi­an sci-fi movies” (2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien and Blade Run­ner), and a help­ful serv­ing of com­e­dy (Air­plane). Below, you can find the first 100 items on the list. Get the com­plete list–all 533 movies and TV shows–at Pale­o­fu­ture.

  1. 1941
  2. 12 Mon­keys
  3. 12 Years a Slave
  4. 2 Fast 2 Furi­ous
  5. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
  6. 2001: A Space Odyssey
  7. 21 Jump Street
  8. 24 (Sea­sons 1–8)
  9. 48 Hours
  10. 8 Mile
  11. A Christ­mas Car­ol
  12. A Christ­mas Sto­ry
  13. A Knights Tale
  14. A Man and a Woman
  15. A Night at the Opera
  16. A Night at the Rox­bury
  17. A Per­fect Mur­der
  18. A Prairie Home Com­pan­ion
  19. A Room with a View
  20. Absolute­ly Fab­u­lous (Series 1–3)
  21. Air Force One
  22. Air­plane
  23. Alias Sea­son 1
  24. Alien
  25. Alien 3
  26. Alien Res­ur­rec­tion
  27. Aliens
  28. All Good Things
  29. Along Came Pol­ly
  30. Always
  31. Amer­i­can Gang­ster
  32. Amer­i­can Sniper
  33. Amer­i­can Wed­ding
  34. An Amer­i­can in Paris
  35. An Arti­cle of Hope
  36. Ana­lyze This
  37. Anchor­man
  38. Anchor­man 2
  39. Ani­mal House (1978)
  40. Argo
  41. Armaged­don
  42. Around the World in 80 Days (1956)
  43. Around the World in 80 Days (2004)
  44. Arrow Sea­son 1
  45. Arsenic and Old Lace
  46. As Good as it Gets
  47. Austin Pow­ers Inter­na­tion­al Man of Mys­tery
  48. Austin Pow­ers The Spy Who Shagged Me
  49. Aus­tralia
  50. Avatar
  51. Baby Mama
  52. Back to Bataan
  53. Back to the Future
  54. Back to the Future Part II
  55. Back to the Future Part III
  56. Back­draft
  57. Band of Broth­ers Sea­son 1
  58. Bataan
  59. Bat­man For­ev­er
  60. Bat­man Returns
  61. Bat­tle for the Plan­et of the Apes
  62. Bat­tle of Britain
  63. Bat­tle­ship
  64. Beneath the Plan­et of the Apes
  65. Ben-Hur
  66. Bet­ter Call Saul Sea­son 1
  67. Bev­er­ly Hills Cop II
  68. Bev­er­ly Hills Cop III
  69. Big Bang The­o­ry (Sea­sons 1–8)
  70. Big Eyes
  71. Big Jake
  72. Bil­ly Jack
  73. Bird­man, or the Unex­pect­ed Virtue of Igno­rance
  74. Black Hawk Down
  75. Black Mask
  76. Black Swan
  77. Blade Run­ner
  78. Blaz­ing Sad­dles Blend­ed
  79. Blue Plan­et Frozen Seas
  80. Blue Plan­et Ocean World
  81. Blues Broth­ers
  82. Bob Newhart But­ton-Down Con­cert
  83. Body of Lies
  84. Brave­heart
  85. Break­ing Bad Sea­sons 1–6
  86. Brides­maids
  87. Bull Durham
  88. Cad­dyshack
  89. Cahill Unit­ed States Mar­shal
  90. Cap­tain Amer­i­ca: The First Avenger
  91. Cap­tain Amer­i­ca: The Win­ter Sol­dier Cap­tain Phillips
  92. Casablan­ca
  93. Cast Away
  94. Catch-22
  95. Celtic Woman Songs from the Heart
  96. Chance Are
  97. Char­i­ots of Fire
  98. Char­lie St Cloud
  99. Chil­dren of Men
  100. Chisum

Find the com­plete list of 533 films and TV shows here.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Astro­naut Chris Had­field Sings David Bowie’s “Space Odd­i­ty” On Board the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion

Every­thing You Want­ed to Know About Going to the Bath­room in Space But Were Afraid to Ask

If Astro­nauts Cry in Space, Will Their Tears Fall?

William Shat­ner Puts in a Long Dis­tance Call to Astro­naut Aboard the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion

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How the Coen Brothers Storyboarded Blood Simple Down to a Tee (1984)

in Film | September 30th, 2016

Sel­dom, in the films of the Joel and Ethan Coen, do char­ac­ters’ schemes go accord­ing to plan. You can watch it hap­pen all across their fil­mog­ra­phy: the baby theft in Rais­ing Ari­zona, the own-wife kid­nap­ping and ran­som in Far­go, the casi­no-vault tun­nel heist in The Ladykillers, the Com­mu­nist con­ver­sion of a screen idol in Hail, Cae­sar! But they’ve earned their enor­mous cin­e­mat­ic rep­u­ta­tion not just for their themes, but for the pre­ci­sion with which they con­struct movies around them; it some­times seems that the more dis­solute the char­ac­ters and ulti­mate­ly dis­as­trous the plot they fall into, the more care­ful­ly-made the pic­ture.

This pat­tern began in 1984 with their first fea­ture, the Texas neo-noir Blood Sim­ple. Despite its rel­a­tive­ly small-scale pro­duc­tion (espe­cial­ly by the stan­dards of their peri­od piece-heavy recent work), it show­cas­es every ele­ment their fans love: the sense of place, the sharp dia­logue, the fas­ci­na­tion with “low” life, the dark humor, the atten­tion to detail.

No won­der, then, that it has now arrived in the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion, in an edi­tion which includes sup­ple­men­tary mate­ri­als like the com­par­i­son between the sto­ry­board and fin­ished scene above, fea­tur­ing com­men­tary from the Coens Joel and Ethan both, as well as direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy Bar­ry Son­nen­feld and actor Frances McDor­mand.

“There are direc­tors who are com­plete­ly com­fort­able extem­po­riz­ing on the set, and oth­ers who are not,” say Joel and Ethan, trad­ing off obser­va­tions. “Some direc­tors want to throw every­thing up in the air and just see where it lands; that’s real­ly how they work, fun­da­men­tal­ly, and get great results. We’re kind of the… oth­er end of the spec­trum. We’re more com­fort­able if we have a plan, even if we stray quite a dis­tance from that plan while we’re shoot­ing.” They seem not to have strayed at all in the par­tic­u­lar scene in this video, but their fil­mog­ra­phy boasts more than enough vital­i­ty to rule out the pos­si­bil­i­ty of com­plete, con­trol-freak­ish rigid­i­ty. All of it shows us how the best-laid plans of mice and men go awry — but only because the Coen Broth­ers lay even bet­ter plans first.

via No Film School

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Coen Broth­ers Put Their Remark­able Stamp on the “Shot Reverse Shot,” the Fun­da­men­tal Cin­e­mat­ic Tech­nique

Watch the Coen Broth­ers’ TV Com­mer­cials: Swiss Cig­a­rettes, Gap Jeans, Tax­es & Clean Coal

Tui­leries: A Short, Slight­ly Twist­ed Film by Joel and Ethan Coen

World Cin­e­ma: Joel and Ethan Coen’s Play­ful Homage to Cin­e­ma His­to­ry

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Watch John Malkovich Portray David Lynch and Lynch’s Famous Characters from Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks & More

in Film | September 29th, 2016

John Malkovich’s fil­mog­ra­phy includes not Wild at Heart but Places in the Heart, not Inland Empire but Empire of the Sun, not Mul­hol­land Dri­ve but Mul­hol­land Falls. This respect­ed actor, in short, has nev­er appeared in a David Lynch film, but he recent­ly demon­strat­ed that he could have starred in all of them — and can even por­tray the direc­tor him­self. In Psy­chogenic Fugue, Malkovich slips into a vari­ety of Lynchi­an per­sonas, from heroes like Eraser­head’s icon­i­cal­ly pil­lar-haired Hen­ry Spencer and Twin Peaks’ square­ly cof­fee-lov­ing Spe­cial Agent Dale Coop­er to vil­lains like Blue Vel­vet’s Frank Booth and Lost High­way’s Mys­tery Man, to even the Ladies Log and in the Radi­a­tor.

Those names, I assure film­go­ers not so up on their Lynch, will mean a great deal to fans, whether of the direc­tor or of the actor. Though both are Amer­i­can men of cin­e­ma, both of the same gen­er­a­tion, Lynch and Malkovich would at first appear to have lit­tle in com­mon: the for­mer, who’s made ten fea­tures in the past forty years, has spent his career div­ing deep­er and deep­er into stranger and more per­son­al (but ulti­mate­ly, some­how, acces­si­ble) psy­cho­log­i­cal waters, while the lat­ter, pro­lif­ic in his screen act­ing with almost 100 appear­ances to his cred­it, hops between huge­ly dis­parate per­son­al­i­ties, time peri­ods, and intel­lec­tu­al lev­els with­out seem­ing to break a sweat. But both of them do tend to attract the same descrip­tor: intense.

The ver­sa­tile Malkovich also knows what it means to look inside him­self, hav­ing starred in Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich, which famous­ly includes a scene where every human being has turned into a ver­sion of John Malkovich. This minute-long trail­er for Psy­chogenic Fugue may remind you of that unfor­get­table view­ing expe­ri­ence, but if you want the full, twen­ty-minute ver­sion, it comes with only a ten-dol­lar dona­tion (accom­pa­nied by more good­ies at high­er dona­tion lev­els) to the David Lynch Foun­da­tion, which you can make at playinglynch.com. The fact that the mon­ey won’t go to fund anoth­er Lynch fea­ture may dis­ap­point some, but at least if he even­tu­al­ly decides to make a not just psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly but lit­er­al­ly auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal film, he’ll know exact­ly who to cast in the lead.

via Wel­come to Twin Peaks

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear John Malkovich Read Plato’s “Alle­go­ry of the Cave,” Set to Music Mixed by Ric Ocasek, Yoko Ono & Sean Lennon, OMD & More

Hear John Malkovich Read From Break­fast of Cham­pi­ons, Then Hear Kurt Von­negut Do the Same

David Lynch Directs a Mini-Sea­son of Twin Peaks in the Form of Japan­ese Cof­fee Com­mer­cials

A Young David Lynch Talks About Eraser­head in One of His First Record­ed Inter­views (1979)

David Lynch’s Sur­re­al Com­mer­cials

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Charlie Chaplin Finds Comedy Even in the Brutality of WWI: A Scene from Shoulder Arms (1918)

in Film, History | September 27th, 2016


A friend of the Roman poet Mar­tial once asked him why he went to watch lions devour slaves at the Col­i­se­um. “These are my times,” replied Mar­tial, “and I must know them.” Not every Roman enjoyed such bru­tal spec­ta­cles, and Mar­tial him­self per­haps least of all, but he regard­ed it as a duty as an observ­er and inter­preter not to spare him­self the awful sight that pleased so many of his fel­low cit­i­zens. Char­lie Chap­lin, too, knew his times, as evi­denced by pic­tures like 1936’s Mod­ern Times, which made light of indus­tri­al cap­i­tal­ism, and The Great Dic­ta­tor, his sharp 1940 satire of Nazism and fas­cism.

But the hor­rors of the pre­vi­ous World War gave him mate­r­i­al too, as you can see in this scene from the 1918 silent com­e­dy Shoul­der Arms, above: “There have been learned dis­cus­sions as to whether Chap­lin’s com­e­dy is low or high, artis­tic or crude,” said the con­tem­po­rary New York Times review of the film, Chap­lin’s most pop­u­lar to date, “but no one can deny that when he imper­son­ates a screen fool he is fun­ny.”

His screen fool, in this case, has enlist­ed in the “awk­ward squad,” and though boot camp gives him a hard time, the prat­falls he goes through when sent off to Europe even­tu­al­ly lead him to win the Great War almost sin­gle­hand­ed­ly. Alas, as with most of Chap­lin’s hap­less pro­tag­o­nists, his moment of tri­umph van­ish­es even more quick­ly than it came, and at the time of its pre­miere the real war still had weeks to go.

Before mak­ing the movie, Chap­lin him­self had doubts about the poten­tial for humor in the blood­i­est con­flict in the his­to­ry of mankind, but he must have ulti­mate­ly under­stood what all the most astute come­di­ans do: that com­e­dy and tragedy have always gone hand-in-hand. “Say­ing some­thing is too ter­ri­ble to joke about is like say­ing a dis­ease is to ter­ri­ble to try to cure,” as the par­tic­u­lar­ly astute Louis C.K. recent­ly put it — a man of our own comedic and trag­ic times, and one who cer­tain­ly knows them as well as Chap­lin knew his.

Find 65 Free Char­lie Chap­lin Films Online in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

via Red­dit

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Char­lie Chap­lin Gets Strapped into a Dystopi­an “Rube Gold­berg Machine,” a Fright­ful Com­men­tary on Mod­ern Cap­i­tal­ism

Char­lie Chap­lin Does Cocaine and Saves the Day in Mod­ern Times (1936)

Chap­lin Meets Incep­tion: The Final Speech of The Great Dic­ta­tor

When Char­lie Chap­lin Entered a Chap­lin Look-Alike Con­test and Came in 20th Place

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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