The “blooper” reel above from the filming of Star Wars: Episode 4, we’re told by io9, is “brand new” footage. Brand new to us, of course. Discovered by a Redditor, it made the rounds yesterday and everyone pronounced it amazing. And so it is. Many scenes lack audio, making the humor all the more subtle. We get some line flubs, action scenes gone awkward, and the vintage early title below.
If you’re anything like everyone else I know who’s seen this (if you’re reading this—you likely are), you’ll watch the two and a‑half minute reel at least two or three times, if not more. And if you find yourself less than jazzed about the coming of Star Wars: Episode 7 (or about the existence of episodes 1–3), we’ll at least have the hundreds of new memes spawned by this ridiculous footage. As i09 says, “get to GIF-ing, people.” And get to writing dialogue for those silent scenes.
We know British filmmaker Christopher Nolan best today for directing the latest trilogy of Batman films, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises. His recent high-profile non-superhero hit Inception made an impressive, if brief, splash as a mainstream brainbender, which, for me, faintly echoed the thrill he sent through the world of crossover independent film with 2000’s backward-told Memento. Yet, if this doesn’t make me too much of an I‑liked-the-early-stuff-cliché, I still think of him most fondly for directing his 1998 feature debut Following, a 16-millimeter, black-and-white, $6000-budget tale of theft, impersonation, and identity shot on the streets of London. (One of the characters breaks into an apartment with a now-striking Batman logo on its door.) But even a project as small-scale as Following has a predecessor, Doodlebug, which you can watch above.
“The depths of insanity are explored by a man chasing something in his apartment with a shoe,” promises the video description of the three-minute Doodlebug. In the center of this shadowy, paranoid tale we have Jeremy Theobald, who would go on to star in Following (and appear as a Gotham Water Board Technician in Batman Begins). Nolan shot it back in his days studying English literature at University College London, a school whose film society he led and which he chose expressly for the availability of its cameras and editing gear. His early, handmade pictures have become even more fascinating to watch in light of his declarations in a DGA Quarterly interviewthat he far prefers shooting in film to shooting digitally, and that 3D technology hasn’t much impressed him. But he hardly disdains spectacle, and the article contains a good deal of talk about how he uses CGI and crafts action sequences. Over the years, Nolan’s core enthusiasms seemingly haven’t changed; even Doodlebug, especially by student-film standards,has some pretty cool special effects.
From fronting the Velvet Underground to putting out four solid sides of feedback noise to collaborating with Metallica on a semi-spoken word album based on the plays of Frank Wedekind, the late avant-rocker Lou Reed had a way of never working on quite what you’d expect him to. Easier said than done, of course, but Reed managed to sustain a long, always-interesting career and position in the culture by exercising that strength not just in music but in other forms as well. Above we have Red Shirley, a half-hour documentary film he made with Ralph Gibson in 2010. (Score provided by “the Metal Machine Trio”.) We get the premise up front, onscreen: “On the eve of her 100th birthday, Lou sat down with his cousin Shirley for a tête-à-tête.” Most nearly-100-year-olds have, presumably, seen a lot; Shirley Novick has seen even more.
“During World War I she emerged unscathed from Poland after her family’s house was hit by a dud shell,” writes the Wall Street Journal’s Nicolas Rapold in an article that also includes Reeds own’s reflections on his cousin and her thoroughly historical life. “At 19, she journeyed to Canada without her parents, thus escaping the fate of relatives during World War II. (‘Hitler took care of them,’ she curtly remarks in the film.)
Leaving Canada, which she deemed ‘too provincial,’ Ms. Novick joined thousands of immigrants in New York City’s garment industry. There, over the course of 47 years, her debate skills came in handy as an outspoken activist during union scraps. She would later join the 1963 civil rights march on Washington.” Snagfilms tags Red Shirley with the apt label “fascinating people,” but for a solid documentary, you also need a fascinated interviewer, and Reed fills that role. “The only other thing I would like to do is make a movie about martial arts,” Reed told Rapold. “Like, travel around to different teachers and tournaments, compare techniques and training.” That we’ll never see it now fills me with regret.
The film should be viewable in most all geographies, or so our Twitter followers tell us. (Our apologies if you’re not in one of them.) You can find Red Shirley permanently housed in our collection of 575 Free Movies Online.
We Wes Anderson-watchers have only just begun eagerly anticipating the The Grand Budapest Hotel, the director’s next live-action film staring Ralph Fiennes, F. Murray Abraham, and newcomer Tony Revolori (and featuring, need we even add, a certain Bill Murray). But seeing as it won’t appear in theaters until March of next year, we’ll for now have to busy ourselves with its trailer and various other pieces of Andersoniana. Among the most intriguing new items in this group we have a book called The Wes Anderson Collection, an in-depth examination of Anderson’s filmography built around a book-length conversation (think Hitchcock/Truffaut, albeit possessed of a different sensiblity, to put it mildly) with critic Matt Zoller Seitz. The videos here from his blog on RogerEbert.com adapt certain sections of the book on Anderson’s first five pictures: Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and The Darjeeling Limited.
“The Wes Anderson Collection is a book that was about twenty years in the making,” says Zoller Seitz in the book’s trailer. “When Wes and Owen Wilson got their short film Bottle Rocket into the Sundance Film Festival, I went to meet them at a burger joint in Dallas. We were playing pool together. I’m pretty sure Wes won. About three years ago, our paths crossed again, and the result was this book. I love Wes’ style. I think if he were a writer, he’d be somebody like a Hemingway, who doesn’t use a lot of adjectives. He takes various influences and turns them into something that’s uniquely his. There’s a charm, and a familiarity, and an easygoing quality to all his movies. His movies reward rewatching.”
Some complain that Anderson “just makes the same movie over and over again,” but given what the filmmaker has demonstrated of his command of cinema at this point in his career, you almost might as well also accuse Ozu of just making the same movie over and over again. “I think the detail-obsessed fetishists are really going to dig this book,” Zoller Seitz adds. If Anderson happens to count any of those among his fans, this book may well have a chance.
… Hold the phones. The final installments are now out, and we’ve added them to the post.
FreeVintagePosters.com offers “hundreds of high quality printable posters in advertising, travel, food/drink, art, movies, westerns, military, magic and much more.” You may have an interest in all those facets of human experience, but we imagine you’ll find especially appealing the site’s selection of high-resolution film posters, suitable for printing at home or elsewhere and hanging on walls in need of cinephilic flair.
You might, for example, choose to put up the original poster for George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story, which promises you a “Howl with Your Favorite Hollywood Stars” — Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, and James Stewart, in this case. Or if you prefer westerns to comedies, perhaps you’d like to print out one of the three available posters of 1971’s John Wayne-starring Big Jake, my favorite of which pitches the movie with a simple if odd equation: “Big John = Big Jake = Big Western.” (Note: you can watch 21 John Wayne westerns here.)
Though the site’s collection slants toward classic American films, it also has sheets used to advertise them abroad. Below you see the photocollage-like Japanese poster for Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot. And the lover of camp will find much to enjoy as well. Might I suggest Attack of the Crab Monsters? Whatever your taste, if you decide to head out to the print shop and commission a paper version of any of these image files in a larger size than you can print at home, do consult StandardPosterSize.net, which, true to its name, provides all manner of information on the various sizings of U.S. standard posters, metric standard posters, U.S. movie posters, and U.K. movie posters. If that sounds like a little too much hassle, you could always just download your favorite poster and set it as your desktop background. Before you sign off, make sure you check out our collection 575 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc. It’s something no cinema lover should miss.
Given the length of the average haircut, it surprises me that I don’t see more short films built around them. Tamar Simon Hoffs knew the advantages of the haircut-based short film, and she put them to use in 1982, during her time in the American Film Institute’s Directing Workshops for Women program. The Haircut’s script has a busy record executive on his way to an important lunch appointment. With only fifteen minutes to spare, he drops into Russo’s barber shop for a trim. Little does he expect that, within those fifteen minutes, he’ll not only get his hair cut, but enjoy a shave, a massage, a glass of wine, several musical numbers, romance real or imagined, and something close to a psychoanalytic session. He goes through quite a few facets of the human experience right there in the chair — minus the time-consuming “hot towel treatment” — and Russo and his colorful, efficient crew still get him out of the door on time. Hoffs knew the perfect actor for the starring role: John Cassavetes. What’s more, she knew him personally.
The connection came through her friend Elizabeth Gazzara, daughter of a certain Ben Gazzara, star of the The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, my own favorite Cassavetes-directed film. After reading the script, Cassavetes agreed to perform, “his only stipulation being that his co-stars must be entirely rehearsed and ready to go, so he could just come in and perform as if he really was the customer,” writes British Film Institute DVD producer James Blackford. “Even in a little film such as this, Cassavetes was still searching for those perfect moments that come from the spontaneity of early takes.” You’ll even laugh at a few lines, spoken by Cassavetes as his character begins to enjoy himself, that must surely have come out of his beloved improvisational methods. And we can credit the film’s surprising end to an even more personal connection of Hoffs’: to her daughter Susanna, frontwoman of The Bangles, then known as The Bangs. You can watch The Haircut on the BFI’s new DVD/Blu-Ray release of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, or you can watch it above.
Nowadays, most of us who still religiously attend screenings of films by the most respected European directors of the twentieth century have circled the wagons: even if we far prefer, say, Fellini to Truffaut, we’ll more than likely still turn up for the Truffaut, even if only out of cinephilic solidarity. But in the fifties, sixties, and seventies — or so I’ve read, anyway — discussions of such filmmakers’ relative merits could turn into serious intellectual shoving matches, and even many of the luminaries themselves would evaluate their colleagues’ work candidly. At the Ingmar Bergman fan site Bergmanorama, you can read what the maker of The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and Persona had to say about the makers of movies like L’Avventura, Breathless, Vertigo, The Exterminating Angel, The 400 Blows, and Stalker.
Regarding Jean Luc Godard: “I’ve never been able to appreciate any of his films, nor even understand them… I find his films affected, intellectual, self-obsessed and, as cinema, without interest and frankly dull… I’ve always thought that he made films for critics.”
Michelangelo Antonioni, thought Bergman, had “never properly learnt his craft. He’s an aesthete. If, for example, he needs a certain kind of road for The Red Desert, then he gets the houses repainted on the damned street. That is the attitude of an aesthete. He took great care over a single shot, but didn’t understand that a film is a rhythmic stream of images, a living, moving process; for him, on the contrary, it was such a shot, then another shot, then yet another. So, sure, there are some brilliant bits in his films… [but] I can’t understand why Antonioni is held in such high esteem.”
Alfred Hitchcock struck him as “a very good technician. And he has something in Psycho, he had some moments. Psycho is one of his most interesting pictures because he had to make the picture very fast, with very primitive means. He had little money, and this picture tells very much about him. Not very good things. He is completely infantile, and I would like to know more — no, I don’t want to know — about his behaviour with, or, rather, against women. But this picture is very interesting.”
You’ll find more quotes on F.W. Murnau, teller of image-based tales with “fantastic suppleness”; Marcel Carné and Julien Duvivier, “decisive influences in my wanting to become a filmmaker”; Federico Fellini, the sheer heat from whose creative mind “melts him”; François Truffaut, with his fascinating “way of relating with an audience”; and Andrei Tarkovsky, “the greatest of them all,” at Bergmanorama. His comments on Luis Buñuel offer especially important advice for creators in any medium, of any age. He quotes a critic who wrote that “with Autumn Sonata Bergman does Bergman” and admits the truth in it, but he adds that, at some point, “Tarkovsky began to make Tarkovsky films and that Fellini began to make Fellini films.” Buñuel, alas, “nearly always made Buñuel films.” The lesson: if you must do a pastiche, don’t do a pastiche of your own style — or, as I once heard the writer Geoff Dyer (himself a great fan of midcentury European cinema) call it, “self-karaoke.”
“I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” There we have undoubtedly the most famous quote of what must count as one of Robert Duvall’s finest performances, and surely his most surprising: that of Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. As you’ll no doubt recall — and if you don’t recall it, minimize your browser for a few hours and make your way to a screening, or at least watch it online — Captain Benjamin Willard’s Conradian boat journey into the Vietnam War’s dark heart hits a snag fairly early in the picture: they need to pass through a coastal area under tight Viet Cong control.
Kilgore, initially reluctant to call in his helicopters to back up Willard’s dubious mission, changes his mind when he realizes that Willard counts among his own small crew famed professional surfer Lance B. Johnson. The Lieutenant Colonel, it turns out, loves to surf. He also loves to blast Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” from helicopter-mounted speakers. “It scares the hell out of the slopes,” he explains. “My boys love it.”
At the top, you can watch the fruits of Willard and Kilgore’s cooperation, an operatic napalm airstrike that takes the entire beach: not an easy thing to accomplish, and certainly not an easy thing to film. As anyone acquainted with the making of Apocalypse Now has heard, the production tended to turn as complicated, confusing, and perilous as the Vietnam War itself, but not necessarily for lack of planning.
At Empire, you can view the scene’s original storyboards and read alongside them a brief interview with Doug Claybourne, who on the film had the enviable title of Helicopter Wrangler. Arriving to the Philippines-based shoot (in “the middle of nowhere”), Claybourne found Coppola on the beach with a bullhorn, Martin Sheen just replacing Harvey Keitel in the role of Willard, choppers borrowed from President Ferdinand Marcos (who periodically took them back to use against insurrections elsewhere), a coming typhoon, and “a lot of chaos.”
But Coppola, Claybourne, and the rest of the team saw it through, achieving results even more striking, in moments, than these storyboards suggest. As for the unflappable Kilgore, well, we all remember him rushing to catch a tantalizing wave even before the fighting subsides. After all, to quote his second-most famous line, “Charlie don’t surf!”
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