Heads up David Foster Wallace fans. Yesterday, A24 Films released a trailer for The End of the Tour, James Ponsoldt’s upcoming film which stars Jason Segel as David Foster Wallace, and Jesse Eisenberg as Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky. The film is based on Lipsky’s 2010 memoir, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, which documents the five-day road trip Lipsky took with Wallace in 1996, just as Wallace was completing the book tour for his breakout novel Infinite Jest.
You might know Jason Segel from lighter and often hilarious comedy films like Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Knocked Up. When The End of the Tourhits theaters on July 31st, you’ll see him inhabiting a very different kind of role.
When you’re done watching the trailer above, you can see the real David Foster Wallace in a Big, Uncut Interview recorded in 2003. It makes for an interesting comparison.
Sexual violence in India has been in the spotlight ever since a 23-year-old medical student was gang raped and murdered on a bus in New Delhi in 2012. The crime was so flagrant and so brutal that the country recoiled in shock. Students and activists descended into the streets of Delhi to protest.
Filmmaker Ram Devineni realized just how entrenched the problem is in Indian culture when he spoke with a cop during one of those protests. As he told the BBC,“I was talking to a police officer when he said something that I found very surprising. He said ‘no good girl walks alone at night.’
The Indian government rushed legislation that would increase the prison term for rape along with criminalizing other crimes against women like stalking. Yet, a string of other high-profile rapes, including a few against foreign tourists, show that this is a continuing problem, one that wasn’t going to be solved with a few laws.
“I realized that rape and sexual violence in India was a cultural issue,” said Devineni. “And that it was backed by patriarchy, misogyny and people’s perceptions.”
So Devineni decided to try and change India’s culture with one of the most powerful weapons out there: art.
Inspired by Hindu mythology, Devineni and a couple collaborators created a graphic novel about Priya, a rape survivor who appeals for help to Parvati, the Goddess of power and beauty. By the end of the comic, Priya confronts her attackers while riding a tiger.
As a continuation of the project, Devineni created Parvati Saves the World, a similar story pieced together from some amazingly kitschy Bollywood epics from the 1970s. He described the project as being “like DJ Spooky’s remix of Birth of a Nation but this focuses on sexual violence.”
In the film, Priya once again appeals to Parvati after getting attacked, this time by the friend of a prideful king. When Parvati confronts the king, he tries to assault her. This is a bad move. Her husband is the God Shiva, AKA “the Destroyer,” AKA someone you really don’t want to tick off. As punishment, he brings fire and death on heaven and earth. Realizing that violence isn’t the answer, Parvati goes to Earth to become “a beacon of hope for oppressed women everywhere.”
You can watch Parvati Saves the World in three parts above. You can learn more about Devineni’s mission at The Creator’s Project.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
I’m not sure if it’s still the case today, in fact, I’m almost sure it isn’t, but in my day the ethos of an entire generation could be tidily summed up by reference to a handful of movies. Or at least that’s what we were led to believe, those of us who came of age in the early-to-mid 90s, when films like Richard Linklater’s Slacker (watch free online), Ben Stiller’s Reality Bites, and Kevin Smith’s Clerks achieved almost instant cult status as totems of middle class ennui—that of overeducated narcissists and directionless dreamers and cynics with serial romantic disasters and a gnawing sense of the dwindling returns on their heavy investment in cultural capital.
Of this ad hoc trilogy of 90s slackerdom, it’s Smith’s 1994 low-budget, black and white paean to the lives of low-wage convenience and video store clerks, their clueless customers, and a comic duo of stoned hangers-on that perhaps holds up best, and this is because the film’s comedy—ranging from gallows humor to gross-out slapstick to observational geekery—seems most grounded in the everyday experiences of real, absurdly bored, working stiffs everywhere. So it’s for the best that Smith decided not to finish the film with the original ending he shot, which you can see above. In it, the movie’s main character, Quick Stop clerk Dante Hicks, is killed in a robbery. The last image we see in this version’s harrowing dénouement is of his corpse, awkwardly wedged behind the Quick Stop counter.
It’s an ending that makes little sense tonally. Despite the movie’s detours into the macabre, it never gets serious enough to justify this kind of heaviness. As Mental Floss puts it, “the alternate ending to Kevin Smith’s breakthrough film turned a lighthearted vulgar comedy [see above] into a dark tragedy of Ingmar Bergman-ish proportions.” Actor Brian O’Halloran, who played Dante, thought as much. “I hated that ending,” Rolling Stone quotes him as saying, “I just thought it was too quick of a twist.” I guess it’s a good thing for Smith (and O’Halloran) that he finally agreed, since without the Clerks universe’s main character, there may have been no Clerks 2, for what it’s worth, though Jay and Silent Bob would certainly have gone on to their post-Clerks revenge.
Smith’s choice to keep it light also speaks to the spirit of the time—or the spirit of these filmed representations of the time, which are ultimately about a lack of resolution, a meta-lack of resolution, that becomes its own brand of tragicomedy. Clerks isloosely modeled on Dante’s vision of purgatory, but feels more like Samuel Beckett transposed to suburban New Jersey. The characters in Smith’s films forever live their lives in what post-hardcore band Fugazi so anthemically called the “waiting room”—the kind of place where, in the midst of a personal crisis, the most logical thing to do is debate the ethics of killing off independent contractors on Return of the Jedi’s Death Star.
The Clerks alternate ending appears on the 10th anniversary DVD of the film. You’ll probably agree the movie works much better without this fatally abrupt turn, but watching it gives us a glimpse of a world where death—always hovering on the edges of slackerdom—intrudes to break the spell of terminal inaction and emotional paralysis.
Cinephiles, if you have some spare time in the coming months and feel like watching, say, over 100 film noir movies from the Turner Classic Movie (TCM) vaults, then you will be delighted with Summer of Darkness, which will devote every Friday, from June through July, to 24 hours of noir classics and rarities. And suppose you’d like a reward, like a certificate that proves you not only watched those movies, but properly studied them? Well TCM has that covered too, offering a free nine-week course in “The Case of Film Noir” to run concurrent with the series. It’s free to sign up, and the course runs June 1 — August 4. Says TCM:
This is the deepest catalog of film noir ever presented by the network (and perhaps any network), and provides an unprecedented opportunity for those interested in learning more to watch over 100 classic movies as they investigate “The Case of Film Noir.”
For those who don’t have TCM, or even cable, don’t worry. The network promises to post links to online public domain films. Or, better yet, you could jump right into our collection of 60 Free Noir Films Online, which features public domain classics by Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, John Huston, and many more.
Have a hazy, dangerous summer and watch out for femme fatales!
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
From National Geographic comes this: A short timelapse film that lets you watch “the eerily beautiful growth of larvae into bees.” Shot by photographer Anand Varma, the mesmerizing video starts with the larvae of worker bees just hatching from eggs, then follows their maturation into adult bees. The video covers an 11-day process in one short minute.
As Zhou notes, comedies are boring these days. In movies like Bridesmaids and The Hangover, the camera oftentimes just records the actors riffing. The humor is almost entirely dependent on the dialogue. And while that might yield some yuks, in terms of moviemaking, these movies are woefully limited. Film is a visual medium after all.
Wright, on the other hand, is a terrifically inventive filmmaker who knows how to tell jokes visually. One of the reasons Shaun of the Dead and his other films are so damned funny is because he is able to cram jokes into moments where other movies would be content with just pushing the plot forward. “This is what separates mediocre directors from great ones,” says Zhou. “The ability to take the most simple, mundane scenes and find new ways to do them.”
Like Eisenstein and Ozu and just about every other cinematic master out there, Wright is keenly aware of not just what is in the frame but what is not in the frame. Unlike Eisenstein — who, let’s face it, is not funny – Wright knows how to mine the comic potential of the frame.
Zhou ends his spiel with a challenge to Hollywood directors out there. He rattles off eight things that Wright does with picture and sound that he would like other filmmakers to work into their movies.
1. Things entering the frame in funny ways
2. People leaving the frame in funny ways.
3. There and back again.
4. Matching scene transitions.
5. The perfectly timed sound effect.
6. Action synchronized to the music.
7. Super-dramatic lighting cues.
8. Fence gags
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
You may remember that when we featured the favorite films of Federico Fellini, the 8 1/2 director’s top-ten list included… well, 8 1/2. But then, no filmmaker before Fellini or after him has had quite the same sensibility, so if Fellini made the kind of movies he himself wanted to watch — and I suspect he made only that kind of movie — then we might wonder why his list didn’t include even more of his own work. And maybe we should wonder the same about this list of favorites from Luis Buñuel, the Spanish surrealist who started doing for vivid, dreamlike, and grotesque European cinema in the 1920s what Fellini kept doing for it until the 1990s:
I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932, Mervyn LeRoy)
At the top of the post, you can watch Buñuel’s number-one pick, Josef von Sternberg’s silent proto-gangster picture Underworld. Just above, you’ll find his number-nine pick, and the one he had a hand in himself: L’Age d’Or, the 1930 societal satire on which he collaborated with the Spanish artist Salvador Dalí. It came as the follow-up to their 1929 silent short Un Chien Andalou, a work widely recognized as the foundation stone of surrealist cinema (see also our post on both films), and it came with much greater ambitions.
Neither Buñuel’s own directorial style nor the medium of cinema itself had quite found their form yet; those conditions produced a film that still retains many striking and even cutting qualities today, albeit not, perhaps, to the same degree that they caused contemporary right-wingers to toss ink at the screen and start brawls in the aisles. Watch the pre-1930 films on the list, like Battleship Potemkin and The Gold Rush, to understand what formed Buñuel’s cinematic sensibility; watch L’Age d’Or to understand why, when it comes to his own work, he prefers the early stuff.
Origin stories are all the rage these days given the ubiquity of superhero films and television series. But for all their smash-em-up spectacle and breakneck pacing, they generally feel overstuffed and disposable. As with the Age of Ultron, there is an age, every summer, of some Marvel or DC hero or other. Or all of them at once, at this point, in a perpetual onslaught. On the other hand, we still have the quietly ominous, thoughtful science fiction film, the offspring of Nicolas Roeg and Andrei Tarkovsky, in movies like Ex Machina. These come and go, some better than others, but also always with us. Different as these two types of films can be, in style and tone, neither would likely look and feel the way they do without Stanley Kubrick’s intensely introspective and profoundly epic 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The origin story of this incredible 1968 film begins on March 31, 1964 when Kubrick wrote the letter below to Arthur C. Clarke, proposing that the two collaborate on “the proverbial ‘really good’ science fiction film.” “I had been a great admirer of your books for quite a time,” writes Kubrick, and gives Clarke three “broad areas” of interest, “naturally assuming great plot and character.” Naturally.
“Clarke’s response,” writes BFI, “was immediately enthusiastic, expressing a mutual admiration.” Kubrick, Clarke told their mutual friend Roger Caras, “is obviously an astonishing man.” In his response to the director himself, Clarke wrote on April 8, ““For my part, I am absolutely dying to see Dr. Strangelove; Lolita is one of the few films I have seen twice – the first time to enjoy it, the second time to see how it was done.” The two met in New York and talked for hours, and from Clarke’s short story “The Sentinel of Eternity” was born perhaps the best “really good” science fiction film ever made.
Clarke would compare the differences between the story and the film to those between an acorn and an oak tree, according to Italian Kubrick site 2001Italia. After that meeting, the two would spend almost four years writing the screenplay together and envisioning the harrowing voyage to Jupiter that ends so tragically—and strangely—for the two astronauts left to experience it. It’s a collaborative success Kubrick clearly foresaw when he approached Clarke, but in his letter, above, with transcript below—courtesy of Letters of Note—he plays it cool, using the pretext of a telescope Clarke owned to slip in discussion about the film project. We are almost led to believe,” writes 2001Italia, “that the movie was an excuse” to discuss the gadget. But of course we know better.
Dear Mr Clarke:
It’s a very interesting coincidence that our mutual friend Caras mentioned you in a conversation we were having about a Questar telescope. I had been a great admirer of your books for quite a time and had always wanted to discuss with you the possibility of doing the proverbial “really good” science-fiction movie.
My main interest lies along these broad areas, naturally assuming great plot and character:
The reasons for believing in the existence of intelligent extra-terrestrial life.
The impact (and perhaps even lack of impact in some quarters) such discovery would have on Earth in the near future.
A space probe with a landing and exploration of the Moon and Mars.
Roger [Caras ]tells me you are planning to come to New York this summer. Do you have an inflexible schedule? If not, would you consider coming sooner with a view to a meeting, the purpose of which would be to determine whether an idea might exist or arise which could sufficiently interest both of us enough to want to collaborate on a screenplay?
Incidentally, “Sky & Telescope” advertise a number of scopes. If one has the room for a medium size scope on a pedestal, say the size of a camera tripod, is there any particular model in a class by itself, as the Questar is for small portable scopes?
Best regards,
Kubrick pursued his projects very deliberately and passionately, motivated by great personal interest. Though his films can feel detached and cold, and he himself seems like a very aloof character, the opposite was true, according to those who knew him best. Below, see a short video from The University of the Arts London’s Stanley Kubrick Archive profiling the way Kubrick went about choosing his films, best summed up by Jan Harlon, Kubrick’s brother-in-law and producer: “No love, no quality, and in Stanley’s case, no love, no film.”
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