Discover the Life & Work of Stanley Kubrick in a Sweeping Three-Hour Video Essay

in Film | April 6th, 2015

For at least fifty years, the work of Stan­ley Kubrick has con­sti­tut­ed an ide­al object of study for seri­ous cinephiles. Now that the tech­no­log­i­cal democ­ra­ti­za­tion of the past decade has allowed some of the most seri­ous cinephiles to become video essay­ists, that study has flow­ered into a host of mini-doc­u­men­taries close­ly exam­in­ing the tech­niques of all of film his­to­ry’s most scru­ti­niz­able auteurs. The sub­field of Kubrick-themed video essay­ism recent­ly reached a new high water­mark with film­mak­er Cameron Beyl’s five-part, three-hour Direc­tors Series study of the man’s life and work.

“Every liv­ing film­mak­er today works under the shad­ow of Stan­ley Kubrick,” says Beyl in his nar­ra­tion toward the end of the series. “His roller-coast­er ride of a career last­ed 45 years and spanned two con­ti­nents, leav­ing four­teen fea­tures and count­less inno­va­tions in its wake.

In mak­ing his films, Kubrick ulti­mate­ly want­ed to change the form of cin­e­ma itself. His explo­ration of alter­na­tive sto­ry struc­tures and new forms of expres­sion result­ed in sev­er­al ground­break­ing con­tri­bu­tions to the devel­op­ment of the craft itself.”

If you want to find out much more about the nature of those ground­break­ing con­tri­bu­tions, block out the time and watch Beyl’s analy­ses of each peri­od of Kubrick­’s career: the time of his ear­ly inde­pen­dent fea­tures (Fear & Desire, Killer’s Kiss, The Killing), the Kirk Dou­glas years (Paths of Glo­ry and Spar­ta­cus), the Peter Sell­ers come­dies (Loli­ta and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Wor­ry­ing and Love the Bomb), the mas­ter­works (2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clock­work Orange, Bar­ry Lyn­don, and The Shin­ing), and the final fea­tures (Full Met­al Jack­et and Eyes Wide Shut.)

The project leaves no aspect of Kubrick­’s mas­tery unmen­tioned: his painstak­ing research habits, his much-dis­cussed take-after-take-after-take shoot­ing method on set, his care­ful method of dis­cov­er­ing each film’s form in the edit­ing room, his eager­ness to incor­po­rate new tech­nol­o­gy into his pro­duc­tions, and his fin­ished pic­tures’ simul­ta­ne­ous embod­i­ment and sub­ver­sion of genre. It makes us ask the obvi­ous but seem­ing­ly unan­swer­able ques­tion: who’s the next Stan­ley Kubrick? But Beyl actu­al­ly has an answer, and one that has become the sub­ject of his next series, already in progress: David Finch­er. The direc­tor of The Game, Fight Club, and The Social Net­work has big shoes to fill —  or so he’ll real­ize even more clear­ly if he watch­es the Kubrick series him­self.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sig­na­ture Shots from the Films of Stan­ley Kubrick: One-Point Per­spec­tive

The Shin­ing and Oth­er Com­plex Stan­ley Kubrick Films Recut as Sim­ple Hol­ly­wood Movies

Lost Kubrick: A Short Doc­u­men­tary on Stan­ley Kubrick’s Unfin­ished Films

Napoleon: The Great­est Movie Stan­ley Kubrick Nev­er Made

Explore the Mas­sive Stan­ley Kubrick Exhib­it at the Los Ange­les Coun­ty Muse­um of Art

The Mak­ing of Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange

Ter­ry Gilliam: The Dif­fer­ence Between Kubrick (Great Film­mak­er) and Spiel­berg (Less So)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture as well as the video series The City in Cin­e­ma and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Listen to Bill Murray Lead a Guided Meditation on How It Feels to Be Bill Murray

in Film, Life, Philosophy | April 3rd, 2015

Pho­to by Gage Skid­more, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

How does it feel to be Bill Mur­ray?

Won­der­ful, pre­sum­ably. You’re wealthy, well respect­ed, and high­ly sought. Your ran­dom real world cameos bring joy to scores of unsus­pect­ing mor­tals.

Mur­ray’s St. Vin­cent direc­tor Ted Melfi cites his abil­i­ty to inhab­it the present moment:

He does­n’t care about what just hap­pened. He does­n’t think about what’s going to hap­pen. He does­n’t even book round-trip tick­ets. Bill buys one-ways and then decides when he wants to go home.

A stun­ning­ly good use of wealth and pow­er. If he were any­one but the inim­itable Bill Mur­ray, I bet we’d be seething with envi­ous class rage.

He devis­es the rules by which he plays, from the way he rubs shoul­ders with the com­mon man to the toll free num­ber that serves as his agent to indulging in cre­ative acts of rebel­lion that could get a younger, less nuanced star labelled brat­ty, if not men­tal­ly ill, and des­per­ate­ly in need of rehab.

As if Mur­ray needs any­one else to deter­mine when he needs a break. When his 1984 film adap­ta­tion of Som­er­set Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge failed at the box office, he grant­ed him­self a four year sab­bat­i­cal. He stud­ied his­to­ry and phi­los­o­phy at the Sor­bonne, became fas­ci­nat­ed with the Gre­co-Armen­ian mys­tic George Gur­d­j­eff…and learned how to avoid spook­ing the pub­lic by putting a light spin on a clear­ly trans­for­ma­tive expe­ri­ence:

I’ve retired a cou­ple of times. It’s great, because you can just say, “Oh, I’m sor­ry. I’m retired.” And peo­ple will actu­al­ly believe that you’ve retired. There are nut­ters out there that will go, “Oh, okay!” and then leave you alone.

But how does it real­ly feel to be Bill Mur­ray?

Relax­ing, appar­ent­ly:

…some­one told me some secrets ear­ly on about liv­ing, and that you just have to remind your­self … you can do the very best you can when you’re very very relaxed. No mat­ter what it is, what­ev­er your job is, the more relaxed you are the bet­ter you are. That’s sort of why I got into act­ing. I real­ized the more fun I had the bet­ter I did it and I thought, that’s a job I can be proud of. If I had to go to work and no mat­ter what my con­di­tion, no mat­ter what my mood is, no mat­ter how I feel … if I can relax myself and enjoy what I’m doing and have fun with it, I can do my job real­ly well. It has changed my life, learn­ing that.

When the ques­tion was put to him at the 2014 Toron­to Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val, Mur­ray led a guid­ed med­i­ta­tion, below, to help the audi­ence get a feel for what it feels like to be as relaxed and in the moment as Bill Mur­ray. Putting all jok­ing to the side, he shares his for­mu­la as sin­cere­ly as Mr. Rogers address­ing his young tele­vi­sion audi­ence. Don’t for­get that this is a man who read the poet­ry of Emi­ly Dick­in­son to a room­ful of rapt con­struc­tion work­ers with a straight and con­fi­dent face. Com­plete text is below.

Let’s all ask our­selves that ques­tion right now: What does it feel like to be you? What does it feel like to be you? Yeah. It feels good to be you, doesn’t it? It feels good, because there’s one thing that you are — you’re the only one that’s you, right?

So you’re the only one that’s you, and we get con­fused some­times — or I do, I think every­one does — you try to com­pete. You think, damn it, some­one else is try­ing to be me. Some­one else is try­ing to be me. But I don’t have to armor myself against those peo­ple; I don’t have to armor myself against that idea if I can real­ly just relax and feel con­tent in this way and this regard.

If I can just feel… Just think now: How much do you weigh? This is a thing I like to do with myself when I get lost and I get feel­ing fun­ny. How much do you weigh? Think about how much each per­son here weighs and try to feel that weight in your seat right now, in your bot­tom right now. Parts in your feet and parts in your bum. Just try to feel your own weight, in your own seat, in your own feet. Okay? So if you can feel that weight in your body, if you can come back into the most per­son­al iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, a very per­son­al iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, which is: I am. This is me now. Here I am, right now. This is me now. Then you don’t feel like you have to leave, and be over there, or look over there. You don’t feel like you have to rush off and be some­where. There’s just a won­der­ful sense of well-being that begins to cir­cu­late up and down, from your top to your bot­tom. Up and down from your top to your spine. And you feel some­thing that makes you almost want to smile, that makes you want to feel good, that makes you want to feel like you could embrace your­self.

So, what’s it like to be me? You can ask your­self, “What’s it like to be me?” You know, the only way we’ll ever know what it’s like to be you is if you work your best at being you as often as you can, and keep remind­ing your­self: That’s where home is.

via One Being

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

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

Bill Mur­ray Sings the Poet­ry of Bob Dylan: Shel­ter From the Storm

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

 

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Guernica: Alain Resnais’ Haunting Film on Picasso’s Painting & the Crimes of the Spanish Civil War

in Art, Film | April 1st, 2015

Note: You will hear sound 37 sec­onds into the film.

Human­i­ty has endured a great many wartime atroc­i­ties since 1937, but to this day, if you think of an art­work born of one such event, you’ll more than like­ly still think of Guer­ni­ca. Pablo Picas­so’s large black-and-white can­vas, which he began paint­ing less than a month after the aer­i­al bomb­ing dur­ing the Span­ish Civ­il War of the small Basque town which gave it its name, ren­ders the hor­ror of sud­den, thor­ough destruc­tion in a way nobody had ever seen before, or has seen again since.

“When I vis­it­ed the town the whole of it was a hor­ri­ble sight, flam­ing from end to end. The reflec­tion of the flames could be seen in the clouds of smoke above the moun­tains from 10 miles away,” wrote The Times’ war cor­re­spon­dent George Steer, in the report that moved Picas­so to take on the sub­ject of Guer­ni­ca for the mur­al the Span­ish Repub­li­can gov­ern­ment had com­mis­sioned for the 1937 World’s Fair. “Through­out the night hous­es were falling until the streets became long heaps of red impen­e­tra­ble debris.”

In 1950, both Guer­ni­ca and Guer­ni­ca inspired an equal­ly haunt­ing short film of the same name [part one, part two] by Alain Resnais and Robert Hes­sens. In black and white just like Picas­so’s paint­ing, the pic­ture uses night­mar­ish cut­ting to com­bine imagery from Guer­ni­ca and oth­er artis­tic sources, a score by Guy Bernard, and the poem “Vic­to­ry of Guer­ni­ca” by Paul Élu­ard. “You hold the flame between your fin­gers and paint like a fire,” said the poet to the painter dur­ing their close friend­ship in the years after the bomb­ing.

Resnais, who would go on to direct such clas­sics of French cin­e­ma as Hiroshi­ma mon amour (anoth­er study of an after­math) and Last Year at Marien­bad, only just end­ed his long and dis­tin­guished film­mak­ing career when he died last year. But in 1950, his career had only just begun, his first for­ays into film hav­ing come in the form of short doc­u­men­taries on work­ing artists in the mid-1940s. Those led to a com­mis­sion to do one on the paint­ings of Van Gogh for a Paris exhi­bi­tion, which led to one on Gau­guin, which led to Guer­ni­ca. Clear­ly, Resnais had the ten­den­cy to unite the arts in his work from the very begin­ning, and many of his fans would say it served him well to the end.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A 3D Tour of Picas­so’s Guer­ni­ca

Watch Alain Resnais’ Short, Evoca­tive Film Toute la mémoire du monde (1956)

Pho­tos of Hiroshi­ma by Hiroshi­ma mon amour Star Emmanuelle Riva (1958)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture as well as the video series The City in Cin­e­ma and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hysterical Literature: Art & Sexuality Collide in Readings of Whitman, Emerson & Other Greats (NSFW)

in Biology, Film, Life, Literature | March 27th, 2015

With­out shame the man I like knows and avows the deli­cious­ness of his sex, 

With­out shame the woman I like knows and avows hers.

Thus spaketh Walt Whit­man in Leaves of Grass. 160 years after that poem’s pub­li­ca­tion, how might that most Amer­i­can of Amer­i­can Roman­tics react to the spec­ta­cle of an attrac­tive young woman plea­sur­ing her­self with his work, as an unseen hand beneath the table sur­rep­ti­tious­ly plea­sures her with the Cadil­lac of vibra­tors?

The peep­hole is much larg­er than it would’ve been in 1855. Hys­ter­i­cal Lit­er­a­ture was con­ceived as an online project in which each session’s fea­tured female par­tic­i­pant choos­es a res­o­nant text, then reads it aloud until a Hitachi Mag­ic Wand puts an end to her abil­i­ty to form coher­ent sen­tences.

Cre­ator Clay­ton Cubitt has com­plained that the orgas­mic ele­ment and the sta­tus of cer­tain celebri­ty par­tic­i­pants like come­di­an Mar­garet Cho  have pre­oc­cu­pied the press. His pref­er­ence is for view­ers to take a more holis­tic approach, view­ing the expe­ri­ence with some “mys­tery and mag­ic and ‘WTF.’”

Accord­ing­ly, let us focus upon some of the select­ed works:

Beloved by Toni Mor­ri­son

Sex­ing the Cher­ry by Jeanette Win­ter­son

The Necrophil­ia Vari­a­tions by Super­vert

Real­ly, no Anaïs Nin? I would’ve thought…

The most recent con­trib­u­tor to the series is also its old­est, 60-year-old Janet, below, who had to take leave of Whitman’s pal, Ralph Wal­do Emer­son, not once but twice in eight min­utes.

Cumu­la­tive­ly, these ses­sions make a mar­velous­ly frank primer for actors or direc­tors charged with cre­at­ing real­is­tic sex scenes. The dichoto­my of Hys­ter­i­cal Lit’s stag­ing ensures that things are fair­ly respectable above the waist, thus sat­is­fy­ing YouTube’s Com­mu­ni­ty Guide­lines.

Dar­ing female lovers of lit­er­a­ture should be advised that Cubitt seeks to include more women of col­or, old­er par­tic­i­pants, and non-Eng­lish texts. No word on who exact­ly is under that table. Drain your pent-up rivers by apply­ing here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read Fan­ny Hill, the 18th-Cen­tu­ry Erot­ic Nov­el That Went to the Supreme Court in the 20th Cen­tu­ry

This is Your Brain on Sex and Reli­gion: Exper­i­ments in Neu­ro­science

An Intro­duc­tion to World Lit­er­a­ture by a Cast Of Lit­er­ary & Aca­d­e­m­ic Stars (Free Course)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Quentin Tarantino Lists His 20 Favorite Spaghetti Westerns

in Film | March 26th, 2015

Like many film fans, I grew up famil­iar with the term “Spaghet­ti west­ern,” but I’d near­ly reached adult­hood before fig­ur­ing out what, exact­ly, Amer­i­ca’s most pop­u­lar Ital­ian dish had to do with Amer­i­ca’s once-most pop­u­lar movie genre. But even if they don’t know the spe­cif­ic def­i­n­i­tion of a Spaghet­ti west­ern, those who enjoy them know a Spaghet­ti west­ern when they see one. Ser­gio Leone’s A Fist­ful of Dol­lars, For a Few Dol­lars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; Ser­gio Cor­buc­ci’s Min­neso­ta Clay and Djan­go; Enzo Bar­boni’s They Call Me Trin­i­ty and Trin­i­ty Is Still My Name — if a pic­ture belongs in that com­pa­ny, nobody doubts it.

You’ll notice that all those direc­tors have Ital­ian names, and indeed, west­ern all’i­tal­iana, the Ital­ian equiv­a­lent of “Spaghet­ti west­ern,” sim­ply means “Ital­ian-style west­ern.” These Ital­ian-pro­duced tales of the law­less 19th-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can west, some­times fea­tur­ing fad­ing or ris­ing Hol­ly­wood stars (as with the young Clint East­wood, who would become iden­ti­fied with Leone’s “Man with No Name”), and often shot in the Span­ish desert, rode high from the mid-1960s to the ear­ly 70s, bring­ing a fresh sen­si­bil­i­ty and vis­cer­al impact which had for the most part drained out of the home­grown vari­ety.

Trust a genre-lov­ing auteur like Quentin Taran­ti­no (and one who made his very own Djan­go a few years back) to know Spaghet­ti west­erns inside and out. While even those of us who nev­er turn down the chance to enjoy a good Spaghet­ti west­ern might strug­gle to name ten of them, Taran­ti­no can eas­i­ly run down his per­son­al top twen­ty:

  1. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Ser­gio Leone, 1966)
  2. For a Few Dol­lars More (Ser­gio Leone, 1965)
  3. Djan­go (Ser­gio Cor­buc­ci, 1966)
  4. The Mer­ce­nary (Ser­gio Cor­buc­ci, 1966)
  5. Once Upon a Time in the West (Ser­gio Leone, 1968)
  6. A Fist­ful of Dol­lars (Ser­gio Leone, 1964)
  7. Day of Anger (Toni­no Valerii, 1967)
  8. Death Rides a Horse (Giulio Petroni, 1967)
  9. Nava­jo Joe (Ser­gio Corbucci,1966)
  10. The Return of Ringo (Duc­cio Tes­sar, 1965)
  11. The Big Gun­down (Ser­gio Sol­li­ma, 1966)
  12. A Pis­tol for Ringo (Duc­cio Tes­sari, 1965)
  13. The Dirty Out­laws (Fran­co Ros­set­ti, 1967)
  14. The Great Silence (Ser­gio Cor­buc­ci, 1968)
  15. The Grand Duel (Gian­car­lo San­ti, 1972)
  16. Shoot the Liv­ing, Pray for the Dead (Giuseppe Vari, 1971)
  17. Tepepa (Giulio Petroni, 1968)
  18. The Ugly Ones (Euge­nio Mar­tin, 1966)
  19. Viva Djan­go! (Fer­di­nan­do Bal­di, 1967)
  20. Machine Gun Killers (Pao­lo Bian­chi­ni, 1968)

You can watch all the trail­ers of these Spaghet­ti west­ern mas­ter­pieces in the playlist above, cre­at­ed by The Spaghet­ti West­ern Data­base. Some may now strike you as dis­arm­ing­ly straight­for­ward about bal­ly­hoo­ing the excite­ment promised by the fea­ture they adver­tise, and you may find oth­ers sur­pris­ing­ly fun­ny and more self-aware. While I defy any­one to watch the entire playlist of trail­ers with­out want­i­ng to dive into this sur­pris­ing­ly lit­tle-explored tra­di­tion, noth­ing gets me quite as excit­ed about watch­ing a movie — old or new, sub­tle or schlocky, genre or oth­er­wise — as Taran­ti­no’s con­ta­gious cinephil­ia.

via The Spaghet­ti West­ern Data­base

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Quentin Tarantino’s Top 20 Grindhouse/Exploitation Flicks: Night of the Liv­ing Dead, Hal­loween & More

Quentin Taran­ti­no Lists the 12 Great­est Films of All Time: From Taxi Dri­ver to The Bad News Bears

Quentin Tarantino’s Hand­writ­ten List of the 11 “Great­est Movies”

Watch John Wayne Star in 25 Clas­sic West­erns: All Free Online

The Great Train Rob­bery: Where West­erns Began

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture as well as the video series The City in Cin­e­ma and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

How Akira Kurosawa Used Movement to Tell His Stories: A Video Essay

in Film | March 24th, 2015

The his­to­ry books say that there were three Japan­ese film­mak­ers to emerge in the 1950s – Ken­ji Mizoguchi, Yasu­jiro Ozu and Aki­ra Kuro­sawa. Nev­er mind that Mizoguchi and Ozu made many of their best movies in the 1930s. Nev­er mind that mas­ter­ful, inno­v­a­tive direc­tors like Mikio Naruse and Keisuke Kinoshi­ta have been unfair­ly over­shad­owed by the bril­liance of these three greats.

Mizoguchi was an ear­ly mod­ernist who by the end of his career made med­i­ta­tive movies about how women suf­fer at the hands of men. His mas­ter­pieces like Uget­su and San­sho Dayu feel like Bud­dhist scroll paint­ings come to life. Ozu, “the most Japan­ese” of all film­mak­ers, made qui­et­ly mov­ing dra­mas about fam­i­lies, like Tokyo Sto­ry, but did so in a way that dis­card­ed such Hol­ly­wood prin­ci­ples as con­ti­nu­ity edit­ing and the 180 degree rule. Ozu was a qui­et rad­i­cal.

Com­pared to Ozu and Mizoguchi, Kurosawa’s movies are noisy, mas­cu­line and vital. Unlike Ozu, he didn’t chal­lenge Hol­ly­wood film form but improved on it. Born rough­ly a decade after the oth­er two film­mak­ers, Kuro­sawa spent his youth watch­ing West­ern movies, absorb­ing the lessons of his cin­e­mat­ic heroes like John Ford, Howard Hawks and Frank Capra. At his cre­ative height, in the 1950s and 60s, Kuro­sawa pro­duced mas­ter­piece after mas­ter­piece. Hol­ly­wood would remake or ref­er­ence Kuro­sawa con­stant­ly in the years that fol­lowed but few of those films had Kurosawa’s inven­tive­ness.

Tony Zhou, who has made a career of dis­sect­ing movies in his excel­lent video series Every Frame a Pic­ture, argues that the key to Kuro­sawa is move­ment. “A Kuro­sawa movie moves like no one else’s,” Zhou notes in his video. “Each one is a mas­ter class in dif­fer­ent types of motion and also ways to com­bine them.”

Kuro­sawa had an innate under­stand­ing that there is inher­ent dra­ma in the wind blow­ing in the trees. Like Andrei Tarkovsky and lat­er Ter­rence Mal­ick, he liked to place human dra­ma square­ly in the realm of nature. The rain falls, a fire rages and that move­ment makes an image com­pelling. He under­stood that graph­ic con­sid­er­a­tions out­weighed psy­cho­log­i­cal ones – he sim­pli­fied and exag­ger­at­ed a character’s move­ment with the frame to make char­ac­ter traits and emo­tions easy to reg­is­ter for the audi­ence. His cam­era move­ments were clear, moti­vat­ed and flu­id. Zhou com­pares Sev­en Samu­rai with The Avengers. You might have thought that The Avengers was unin­spired and soul­less but after watch­ing Zhou’s video, you’ll under­stand why – aside from the sil­ly plot and char­ac­ters – the movie was unin­spired and soul­less. The piece should be required view­ing for film­mak­ers every­where. You can watch it above.

And below you can see anoth­er video Zhou did on Kuro­sawa, focus­ing on his 1960 movie The Bad Sleep Well.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch Kurosawa’s Rashomon Free Online, the Film That Intro­duced Japan­ese Cin­e­ma to the West

David Lynch Lists His Favorite Films & Direc­tors, Includ­ing Felli­ni, Wilder, Tati & Hitch­cock

Andrei Tarkovsky Cre­ates a List of His 10 Favorite Films (1972)

Stan­ley Kubrick’s List of Top 10 Films (The First and Only List He Ever Cre­at­ed)

Lis­ten to François Truffaut’s Big, 12-Hour Inter­view with Alfred Hitch­cock (1962)

Aki­ra Kuro­sawa & Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la Star in Japan­ese Whisky Com­mer­cials (1980)

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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Touching Story Behind Paraguay’s Landfill Orchestra: Now Told in Film, and Soon a Book

in Film, Life, Music | March 23rd, 2015

Back in 2012, I first told you about the amaz­ing youth cham­ber orches­tra from Cateu­ra, Paraguay. The fam­i­lies from this small impov­er­ished town, locat­ed along­side a vast land­fill, can’t afford many lux­u­ries — like buy­ing instru­ments for their kids. But what they lack in mon­ey, they make up for in inge­nu­ity and good spir­it. The short doc­u­men­tary above gives you a glimpse of their touch­ing sto­ry, show­ing how cre­ative lead­ers in the com­mu­ni­ty fash­ioned instru­ments with their own hands, turn­ing oil cans into cel­los, and alu­minum bowls into vio­lins. Watch them in action:

But why stop with the short sto­ry, when you can get the longer sto­ry. Last week, a full blown film called Land­fill Har­mon­ic pre­miered at the SXSW Film Fes­ti­val 2015. And now the film (see a short trail­er here) will be screened at select­ed film fes­ti­vals while the pro­duc­ers try to find a dis­trib­u­tor who can bring the pro­duc­tion to a wider audi­ence. And, in anoth­er piece of good news, Simon & Schus­ter announced that it plans to pub­lish a pic­ture book about the Recy­cled Orches­tra. Look for Ada’s Vio­lin: The Sto­ry of the Recy­cled Orches­tra of Paraguay in March 2016.

You can watch Land­fill Har­mon­ic at the fes­ti­vals men­tioned below. To keep tabs on future show­ings, fol­low this Face­book page.

  • New York Children’s Film Fes­ti­val March 21, 2015
  • Envi­ron­men­tal Film Fes­ti­val DC March 25, 2015
  • TIFF Kid’s Film Fes­ti­val April 10 – 17, 2015

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A Mesmerizing Supercut of the First and Final Frames of 55 Movies, Played Side by Side

in Film | March 19th, 2015

On his Vimeo page, Jacob T. Swin­ney frames his pret­ty remark­able super­cut with these words:

What can we learn by exam­in­ing only the first and final shot of a film? This video plays the open­ing and clos­ing shots of 55 films side-by-side. Some of the open­ing shots are strik­ing­ly sim­i­lar to the final shots, while oth­ers are vast­ly different–both serv­ing a pur­pose in com­mu­ni­cat­ing var­i­ous themes. Some show progress, some show decline, and some are sim­ply impact­ful images used to begin and end a film.

Below the jump, you can find a com­plete list of the films used in the super­cut, some released long ago (Dr. Strangelove), some more recent­ly (Bird­man). It was while watch­ing Gone Girl in the cin­e­ma that Swin­ney first came up with the idea for the clip. He start­ed “by choos­ing movies that pos­sessed either very sim­i­lar or very con­trast­ing opening/closing shots.” Then, he adds, “I decid­ed to expand a bit to include films that show a sto­ry of sorts with just the first and final shots. Basi­cal­ly, if an open­ing and clos­ing shot stuck with me, I includ­ed it.” You can find more videos by Swin­ney over on Vimeo.

(more…)

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast