Breaking the fourth wall—also known as direct address—can have the same effect on a filmgoing audience. The compilation video above makes it clear that actors love it too. Breaking from convention can telegraph an unimpeachable cool, à la John Cusack in High Fidelity, or afford a veteran scenery chewer like Samuel L. Jackson the opportunity to turn the hog loose. It’s most often deployed in the service of comedy, but a stone-cold killer can make the audience complicit with a wink.
Screenwriter and journalist Leigh Singer pulled footage from 54 films for this mash up, and freely admits that time constraints left some favorites on the cutting room floor. What would you add, if you happened to have Marshall McLuhan right here?
Few living filmmakers have proven as able to spin their obsessions into cinematic gold as Quentin Tarantino. The most obvious of these spring from filmgoing itself — he’s reinvented and continues to reinvent so many of his favorite techniques from genre pictures of all eras and nations — but it doesn’t take an obsession with Tarantino to find others. His sweeping, often motormouthedly expressed ideas about violence in modern society will give film scholars plenty to write about for decades to come; those of baser interests might find some satisfaction tracking the director’s penchant for shots of women’s feet. And anyone who thrilled, early in Pulp Fiction, to John Travolta and Samuel Jackson’s conversation about what the French call a Quarter Pounder with cheese knows that he also must maintain a deep personal and professional interest in food.
Furthering this very specific subfield of Quentin Tarantino Studies, Dan Goodbaum has edited together the video above, which compiles images from notable food scenes in Tarantino’s work. (Grantland’s Zach Dionne catalogued twenty of them here.) Over it, we hear a segment from Elvis Mitchell interviewing Tarantino on his radio show, The Treatment. Mitchell, ace noticer of his filmmaking guests’ themes, tricks, and tics, mentions to Tarantino “how food is used for power in your movies.” We then see and hear about the meaning of, among other comestibles, the burger in Pulp Fiction, the nachos in Death Proof, the rice in Kill Bill Volume 2 , the strudel in Inglourious Basterds, and all the sweets (taken from Leonardo DiCaprio’s real eating habits) in Django Unchained. “When you watch Jackie Brown,” Tarantino says, “you want a screwdriver.” We see a shot of the drink, albeit dominated by Patricia Arquette’s feet. But that’s another video.
Alfred Hitchcock made so many timeless films, but Spellbound, alas, hasn’t held up quite so comfortably. Most of the problem has to do with its theme: psychoanalysis, which enjoyed a trendy moment in the mid-forties and may have attained enough relevance at the time to drive a plot, but now seems a rather weak engine. That era’s therapy craze swept up picture’s producer, old-Hollywood titan David O. Selznick, with such force that he personally asked the director to take it on as a subject. Hitchcock grudgingly agreed, setting the production gears turning on Spellbound. Selznick arranged for his own therapist to both act as the movie’s technical adviser and to cause Hitchcock a number of on-set headaches. So if Spellbound seems faintly un-Hitchcockian, we can chalk it up partly to Selznick’s psychoanalytic zeal, but some of the credit must also go to Salvador Dalí.
Hired to craft a dream sequence, the Spanish surrealist painter and filmmaker reportedly produced over twenty minutes of footage, four and a half minutes of which appear in the clip above. “I can’t make out just what sort of a place it was,” Gregory Peck mutters, reclined on the therapist’s couch, as the shot dissolves into his mind and into Dalí’s imagery. “It seemed to be a gambling house, but there weren’t any walls, just a lot of curtains with eyes painted on them. A man was walking around with a large pair of scissors, cutting all the drapes in half. And then a girl came in with hardly anything on and started walking around the gambling room, kissing everybody.” Surely those days offered no more ideal candidate for the job of realizing such a vision than Dalí. The lightly theremin-ed score comes from Miklós Rózsa, but Hitchcock didn’t like that either. Though the famously controlling auteur may have found his power compromised in its production, Spellbound does end up being a rare thing indeed in the history of cinema: dream sequences compelling enough not to put you to sleep.
To some fans of his not-exactly-a-sitcom Louie, Louis C.K. simply appeared a few years ago, fully formed and acclaimed by his peers as perhaps the most skilled, dedicated comedic craftsmen working today. But he does have a past, stretching back well beyond his voice role on the animated series Home Movies and his direction of the film Pootie Tang, and he has offered up entertaining fragments of it online. Above you’ll find his earliest known short film, Ice Cream. Begin watching this black-and-white meditation on the vagaries of disaffected twentysomething love in the nineties — one which opens in a convenient store, no less — and you’ll immediately think of Kevin Smith’s Clerks. But C.K. made Ice Cream in 1993, the year before Clerks came out, and it tilts in directions even Smith wouldn’t dare predict, ultimately arriving at a mariachi band-scored finale.
Just above, we have 1998’s Hello There. In four minutes, the film follows a catatonic-looking fellow (played by comedian Ron Lynch) wearing a poorly fitting suit and a cassette recorder around his neck as he makes his way through town. “Excuse me,” his machine says when he presses its play button, “do you have the correct time?” A bystander nervously answers. “Hello there,” his speaker blares to a bum dozing in a cardboard box, “is that a new hat? You are a good guy.”
As the morning continues, we come to understand that this eccentric is not the only one of his kind. Below you can watch that same year’s Brunch, which throws the verbally NSFW comedian Rick Shapiro into a sharply observed mid-morning huddle of pontificating senior citizens. These all come from Louis C.K.s official Youtube channel, and indeed, C.K. presciently made them in a form neatly suited to the Youtube era, just as Louie has proven an ideal artistic, intellectual, and financial fit for the modern cable television landscape.
Punk rock has died a thousand deaths in the West. Almost as soon as the mass media picked it up, punk split into several hundred subspecies and spawned other monoliths—post-punk, new wave, “alternative.” Given that history, it’s generally assumed—a couple generations of suburban mallrats aside—that the original movement flashed and failed, overtaken by keyboards and drum machines, corporate greed and narcissism. But that history is incomplete. As a recent Guardian headline proclaims, punk rock is “alive and kicking in a repressive state near you.” The cause célèbre of international punk is, of course, Russia’s Pussy Riot, three of whose members were convicted of “hooliganism” and sent to labor camps. But dissident punk scenes thrive under the radar in many other places hostile to dissent, such as Burma, Indonesia, and China.
And while the contemporary phenomenon of global punk makes for fascinating news stories, a new documentary, Punk in Africa, demonstrates that international punk rock is as old as the Western variety. It just never got the same press. In South Africa, shortly after the 1976 Soweto Uprising, multi-racial punk bands began to form, with names like Gay Marines, National Wake, and Screaming Foetus. Meeting and performing under the pall of Apartheid, these bands defied laws against racial mixing and braved constant harassment by police. As one member of National Wake says in the trailer above, “the vice squad would visit us, sometimes three times in one day.” He calls the racial territory the band had to navigate a “minefield.”
A lot of the Afropunk featured in the film is reminiscent of the meeting of black and white sounds and musicians in England, especially in bands like The Clash, The Beat and The Specials. Later African ska bands like Hog Hoggity Hog and The Rudimentals certainly carry on that tradition. But many of the bands profiled—from South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique—melded raw punk energy with African polyrhythms and distinctive local sounds and instrumentation. National Wake provides a good example of such hybridization. The live performance above even includes a drum solo—anathema to most Western punk rock.
Punk in Africa promises to add some necessary balance to the slew of punk histories that focus only on Britain and the U.S.. In the interview above, one of the documentary’s directors, Deon Maas, points out that the “punk thing in Africa” started virtually weeks after its U.K. cousin, first in imitation, then as a true movement in its own right. Like the international punk scenes burgeoning around the world today, it’s a movement that deserves to be heard.
How’s that New Year’s resolution going? You know, the one where you promised to make better use of your free time and learn new things? If you’re off track, fear not. It’s only April. It’s not too late to make good on your promise. And we can help. Below, we’ll tell you how to fill your Kindle, iPad, computer, smartphone, computer, etc. with free intelligent media — great ebooks and audio books, movies, courses, and the rest:
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If you’re an iPad/iPhone user, the download process is super easy. Just click the “iPad/iPhone” links and you’re good to go. Kindle and Nook users will generally want to click the “Kindle + Other Formats links” to download ebook files, but we’d suggest watching these instructional videos (Kindle –Nook) beforehand.
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We have here a page out of Stanley Kubrick’s notebook, which Lists of Note—the sister site of Letters of Note, always a favorite of ours here at Open Culture—posted as a collection of alternative titles for Dr. Strangelove. The list includes Dr. Doomsday, The Doomsday Machine, Dr. Doomsday and His Nuclear Women, Don’t Knock the Bomb: these ideas came not from an interfering studio, but from Kubrick’s own mind as he worked his way toward the most suitable name. You can see him getting closer; while this page doesn’t include the film’s final title, Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, it does include Dr. Strangelove’s Bomb, Strangelove; Nuclear Wiseman, and the Gibsonian-sounding The Passion of Dr.Strangelove. I myself will always wonder how Dr. Strangelove’s Secret Uses of Uranus would have played, but when you deal with cinematic craftsmen as detail-oriented and reputedly “perfectionist” as Kubrick, you know that their driving desire to get things right extends all the way to their titles and beyond.
This holds just as true for Alfred Hitchcock. Alone in the Dark, Behind the Mask, The Dark Tower, Without a Trace, all possible titles for the movie we now know as Vertigo. When Hitchcock’s San Francisco psychological thriller recently topped Sight and Sound’s critics poll of the greatest films of all time, it surely did so for cinematic merits having nothing to do with its name.
But would a Vertigo by any other title feel quite as fresh and gripping today, 55 years after it first came out? This goes especially for the pre-threadbare titles I rattled off above, which only account for four of 47 of the suggestions Paramount Pictures executive Sam Frey pitched to Hitchcock, including Deceit, Deceitful, and, for good measure, Deception. You can read all of them below, or at Lists of Note. I quite like The Face Variations, but Hitchcock knew his project most intimately, and thus knew that Vertigo it had to be.
With 1994’s Clerks, Kevin Smith opened up the floodgates for independently produced, micro-budget, dialogue-intensive, cursing-intensive movies by, for, and about a certain stripe of feckless Generation‑X twentysomething. These pictures showcased more aggressively foulmouthed (but, in their way, more energetic) versions of the overgrown kids and/or stalled adults whose meandering lives Richard Linklater had dramatized in Slacker three years before. (Watch Slacker online here.) Clerks hit when I hadn’t yet grown out of comic book-reading pre-adolescence, though I do remember becoming aware of Smith’s work from an ad on the back of, yes, a comic book. The page advertised Mallrats, Smith’s big-budget Clerks followup; in its corner posed a pair of smirking young longhairs. “Snootchie bootchies,” read an inexplicable voice bubble emanating from the thinner of the two. I had to know: who were those guys? The zeitgeist now recognizes Jay and Silent Bob, the outwardly dumb but startlingly wise drug dealers played by Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith himself, as having stolen Clerks’ show. (You can watch one of their finer moments in Mallrats above.)
Smith used the characters in Mallrats as well, and went on to write them into subsequent movies likeChasing Amy, Dogma, and of course Clerks II and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, their presence unifying all these stories into one coherent reality. Cinephiles argue over whether Smith has delivered on his promise as a director, but some fans think the man has found his true voice as a podcaster. Today, on his own podcast network, he hosts a staggering array of shows, including SModcast, SMoviemakers, Hollywood Babble-On, and Fat Man on Batman. Jay and Silent Bob Get Old (Web — iTunes — RSS feed) reunites the 42-year-old Smith and the 38-year-old Mewes for regular conversations about adulthood, fame, and struggles with sobriety (in Mewes’ case) and weight (in Smith’s), always featuring the most vulgar jokes imaginable. If you haven’t caught up with these guys since the nineties, have a listen to their podcast’s so-very-Not-Safe-for-Work first episode above. They’ve even got back into character for Jay and Silent Bob’s Super Groovy Cartoon Movie, which begins its roadshow across North America on April 20.
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