When a Modern Director Makes a Fake Old Movie: A Video Essay on David Fincher’s Mank

in Film | October 6th, 2022

As of this writ­ing, Mank is David Fincher’s newest movie — but also, in a sense, his old­est. With Net­flix mon­ey behind him, he and his col­lab­o­ra­tors spared seem­ing­ly no expense in re-cre­at­ing the look and feel of a nine­teen-for­ties film using the advanced dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies of the twen­ty-twen­ties. The idea was not just to tell the sto­ry of Cit­i­zen Kane scriptwriter Her­man J. Mankiewicz, but to make the two pic­tures seem like con­tem­po­raries. As Fincher’s pro­duc­tion design­er Don­ald Gra­ham Burt once put it, the direc­tor “want­ed the movie to be like you were in a vault and came across Cit­i­zen Kane and next to it was Mank.”

Cin­e­maS­tix cre­ator Dan­ny Boyd quotes Burt’s remarks in the video essay above, “When a Mod­ern Direc­tor Makes a Fake Old Movie.” After estab­lish­ing Fincher’s sig­na­ture use of com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed imagery to cre­ate not large-scale spec­ta­cles but rel­a­tive­ly sub­tle and often peri­od-accu­rate details, Boyd explains the exten­sive dig­i­tal manip­u­la­tion involved in “aging” Mank.

Fincher’s artists added clouds, dust, “the gleam of vin­tage lamps,” grain and scratch­es, “lat­er­al wob­bling,” and much else besides. The cin­e­matog­ra­phy itself pays con­stant homage to Cit­i­zen Kane’s then-ground­break­ing angles and cam­era moves, even employ­ing “old-school tech­niques that dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy and a decent film bud­get have made increas­ing­ly obso­lete” such as shoot­ing day-for-night.

And yet, as most of the com­ments below Boy­d’s video point out, the result of these con­sid­er­able efforts falls short of con­vinc­ing. Maybe it’s all the shades of gray between its blacks and whites; maybe it’s the smooth­ness of every­thing, includ­ing the cam­era moves; maybe it’s all the mod­ern act­ing. (As the New York­er’s Richard Brody puts it, “Our actors are of their time, and can hard­ly rep­re­sent the past with­out invest­ing it with the atti­tudes of our own day, which is why most new peri­od pieces seem either thin or unin­ten­tion­al­ly iron­ic.”) If any film­mak­er could over­come all these chal­lenges, it would sure­ly be one with Fincher’s back­ground in visu­al effects, fas­ci­na­tion with Old Hol­ly­wood, and noto­ri­ous per­fec­tion­ism. For all its suc­cess in oth­er respects, Mank proves that one can no more make old movies than old friends.

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Makes Cit­i­zen Kane a Great Film: 4 Video Essays Revis­it Orson Welles’ Mas­ter­piece on the 80th Anniver­sary of Its Pre­miere

How Did David Finch­er Become the Kubrick of Our Time? A New, 3.5 Hour Series of Video Essays Explains

Fight Club Came Out 20 Years Ago Today: Watch Five Video Essays on the Film’s Phi­los­o­phy and Last­ing Influ­ence

David Fincher’s Five Finest Music Videos: From Madon­na to Aero­smith

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Why Predator — A Discussion of the Film Franchise on Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #133

in Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | September 29th, 2022

width=

Thanks to the new film Prey by Dan Tra­cht­en­berg and Patrick Aison, we now have six films (start­ing with 1987’s Preda­tor) fea­tur­ing the dread­locked, cam­ou­flaged, infrared-see­ing race of alien hunters who have appar­ent­ly been fly­ing around col­lect­ing our skulls for 300 years.

Thank­ful­ly, the new film is good, and adds to the recent spate of Indige­nous-cen­tered media, with its young, female Comanche pro­tag­o­nist tak­ing on evil French bison-killers, her sex­ist peers, and a moun­tain lion, in addi­tion to a rel­a­tive­ly low-tech ver­sion of what many com­ic books have called a Yaut­ja.

We talk about what makes for a good Preda­tor film, the appeal of the mon­ster (and when in the films it gets revealed), the pac­ing of the films, the music, direc­tion, effects, humor, social com­men­tary, and more.

A few of the arti­cles we con­sult­ed includ­ed:

This marks the first episode of Pret­ty Much Pop sea­son three, where Mark Lin­sen­may­er’s recur­ring co-hosts will by default ten­ta­tive­ly be those you will hear today: Phi­los­o­phy prof/entertainment writer Lawrence Ware, novelist/writing prof Sarahlyn Bruck, and ex-musi­cian, ex-phi­los­o­phy grad stu­dent, and now ex-research man­ag­er Al Bak­er. The var­i­ous con­vo­ca­tions of musi­cians, come­di­ans, et al, will still hap­pen too, but will at least alter­nate with some per­mu­ta­tion of that core group.

Hear more Pret­ty Much Pop. Sup­port the show and hear bonus talk­ing for this and near­ly every oth­er episode at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by choos­ing a paid sub­scrip­tion through Apple Pod­casts. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Revisit Louise Brooks’ Most Iconic Role in the Too-Sexy-for-Weimar Silent Film Pandora’s Box (1928)

in Film | September 22nd, 2022

“There is no Gar­bo, there is no Diet­rich, there is only Louise Brooks.” — Hen­ri Lan­glois

On this side of the 20th cen­tu­ry, it’s hard to imag­ine a time in cin­e­ma his­to­ry when Louise Brooks was­n’t an inter­na­tion­al silent icon, as revered as Diet­rich or Gar­bo. But the actress with the unmis­tak­able black hel­met of hair near­ly end­ed her career for­got­ten. She gave up the indus­try in 1938, after refus­ing the sex­u­al advances of Colum­bia Pic­tures boss, Har­ry Cohn. “Brooks left Hol­ly­wood for good in 1940,” Geof­frey Mac­nab writes at The Inde­pen­dent, “drift­ed back to Kansas where, as a fall­en Hol­ly­wood star, she was both envied for her suc­cess and despised for her fail­ure.”

She would move to New York, work briefly as a press agent, then on the sales floor at Saks Fifth Avenue, after which, as she wrote in her auto­bi­og­ra­phy Lulu in Hol­ly­wood, her New York friends “cut her off for­ev­er.”

Her two most leg­endary films, made in Berlin with Ger­man direc­tor G.W. Pab­st, were crit­i­cal and com­mer­cial fail­ures only screened in heav­i­ly-edit­ed ver­sions upon release. Most of her silent Hol­ly­wood “flap­per” come­dies were deemed (even by Brooks her­self) hard­ly wor­thy of preser­va­tion. It would take lat­er crit­ics and cinephiles like Ken­neth Tynan and Hen­ri Lan­glois, famed direc­tor of the Ciné­math­èque Française in 1950’s Paris, to res­ur­rect her.

By 1991, Brooks was famous enough (again) to war­rant a hit New Wave anthem by Orches­tral Maneu­vers in the Dark, who intro­duced a new, young audi­ence to Pan­do­ra’s Box in their video (top) cut togeth­er from scenes of Pab­st’s film. Pan­do­ra’s Box (see the trail­er above) com­bines two plays by Frank Wedekind in a con­tem­po­rary sto­ry about Berlin’s sex­u­al­ly free atmos­phere dur­ing the Weimar era. Brooks plays Lulu, a seduc­tress who lures men, and even­tu­al­ly her­self, to ruin. “In her Hol­ly­wood films,” writes Mac­nab, “Brooks had been used (in her own words) as a ‘pret­ty flib­ber­ti­gib­bet.’ With Pab­st as her direc­tor, she became an actress.”

As Brooks was redis­cov­ered (learn more about her in the doc­u­men­tary below) and achieved a sec­ond round of fame as an essay­ist and mem­oirist — so too were the films of Pab­st, who also direct­ed Brooks in Diary of a Lost Girl. Both films had been shown in trun­cat­ed ver­sions. Pan­do­ra’s Box, espe­cial­ly, caused a stir on its release, upset­ting even Weimar cen­sors. Ger­man crit­ics were unim­pressed and audi­ences object­ed to the cast­ing of the Amer­i­can Brooks. (Its Amer­i­can release sub­sti­tut­ed a hap­py end­ing for the film’s down­beat con­clu­sion, Mac­nab notes, “one of the strangest death sequences in cin­e­ma: creepy, erot­ic and with a per­verse ten­der­ness.”)

Accord­ing to Charles Sil­ver, film cura­tor at the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art, “audi­ences of 1928 were not ready for the film’s bold­ness and frank­ness, even in few-holds-barred Weimar Berlin,” a city Brooks described with her usu­al can­dor:

… the café bar was lined with the high­er-priced trol­lops. The econ­o­my girls walked the street out­side. On the cor­ner stood the girls in boots, adver­tis­ing fla­gel­la­tion. Actor’s agents pimped for the ladies in lux­u­ry apart­ments in the Bavar­i­an Quar­ter. Race-track touts at the Hoppe­garten arranged orgies for groups of sports­men. The night­club Eldo­ra­do dis­played an entic­ing line of homo­sex­u­als dressed as women. At the Maly, there was a choice of fem­i­nine or col­lar-and-tie les­bians. Col­lec­tive lust roared unashamed at the the­atre. In the revue Choco­late Kid­dies, when Josephine Bak­er appeared naked except for a gir­dle of bananas, it was pre­cise­ly as Lulu’s stage entrance was described by Wedekind: ‘They rage there as in a menagerie when the meat appears at the cage.’

Despite the film’s ini­tial fail­ure, in Berlin and in the char­ac­ter of Lulu, Brooks had found her­self. “It was clever of Pab­st to know,” she wrote, “that I pos­sessed the tramp essence of Lulu.” A fierce­ly inde­pen­dent artist to the end, she reject­ed the opin­ions of crit­ics and audi­ences, and heaped praise upon Pab­st and “his truth­ful pic­ture of this world of plea­sure… when Berlin reject­ed its real­i­ty… and sex was the busi­ness of the town.”

You can pur­chase a copy of Pan­do­ra’s Box on DVD, cour­tesy of Cri­te­ri­on.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Extreme­ly Rare Tech­ni­col­or Film Footage from the 1920s Dis­cov­ered: Fea­tures Louise Brooks Danc­ing in Her First Fea­ture Film

10 Clas­sic Ger­man Expres­sion­ist Films: From Nos­fer­atu to The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari

Enjoy the Great­est Silent Films Ever Made in Our Col­lec­tion of 101 Free Silent Films Online

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

How The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari Invented Psychological Horror Film & Brought Expressionism to the Screen (1920)

in Film, History | September 14th, 2022

Even if you’ve nev­er actu­al­ly watched The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari, you’ve seen it. You’ve seen it through­out the cen­tu­ry of cin­e­ma his­to­ry since the film first came out, dur­ing which its influ­ence has man­i­fest­ed again and again: in Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis, Dario Argen­to’s Sus­piria, Ter­ry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Tarsem Singh’s The Cell, and Guiller­mo del Toro’s Night­mare Alley — not to men­tion much of the fil­mo­gra­phies of auteurs like David Lynch and Tim Bur­ton. These are just some of the films ref­er­enced by Tyler Knud­sen, bet­ter known as Cin­e­maTyler, in the video essay above, “Dr. Cali­gari Did More Than Just Invent Hor­ror Movies.”

“A case can be made that Cali­gari was the first true hor­ror film,” writes Roger Ebert. In ear­li­er cin­e­mat­ic scary sto­ries, “char­ac­ters were inhab­it­ing a rec­og­niz­able world. Cali­gari cre­ates a mind­scape, a sub­jec­tive psy­cho­log­i­cal fan­ta­sy. In this world, unspeak­able hor­ror becomes pos­si­ble.”

The tech­niques employed to that end have also con­vinced cer­tain his­to­ri­ans of the medi­um to call the pic­ture “the first exam­ple in cin­e­ma of Ger­man Expres­sion­ism, a visu­al style in which not only the char­ac­ters but the world itself is out of joint.” Knud­sen places this style in his­tor­i­cal con­text, specif­i­cal­ly that of Ger­many’s Weimar Repub­lic, which was estab­lished after World War I and last­ed until the rise of the Nazis.

Polit­i­cal­ly unsta­ble but artis­ti­cal­ly fruit­ful, the Weimar peri­od gave rise to a vari­ety of new artis­tic atti­tudes, at once enthu­si­as­tic and over­whelmed. “Where­as impres­sion­ism tries to depict the real world, but only from a first glance or impres­sion instead of focus­ing on details,” Knud­sen says, “expres­sion­ism tries to get at the artist’s inner feel­ings rather than the actu­al appear­ance of the sub­ject mat­ter.” Hence the bizarre sets of Cali­gari, whose every angle looks designed to be max­i­mal­ly uncon­vinc­ing. And yet the film is entire­ly faith­ful to its par­tic­u­lar real­i­ty: not the one occu­pied by Weimar-era Ger­mans or any­one else, but the one it con­jures up in a man­ner only motion pic­tures can. 102 years lat­er, The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari remains a haunt­ing view­ing expe­ri­ence — and one expres­sive of the sheer poten­tial of cin­e­ma. You can watch it above.

Relat­ed con­tent:

10 Great Ger­man Expres­sion­ist Films: From Nos­fer­atu to The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari

What Is Ger­man Expres­sion­ism? A Crash Course on the Cin­e­mat­ic Tra­di­tion That Gave Us Metrop­o­lis, Nos­fer­atu & More

Vir­ginia Woolf Watch­es The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari & Writes “The Cin­e­ma,” a Sem­i­nal Attempt to Under­stand the Pow­er of Movies (1926)

From Cali­gari to Hitler: A Look at How Cin­e­ma Laid the Foun­da­tion for Tyran­ny in Weimar Ger­many

How Ger­man Expres­sion­ism Influ­enced Tim Bur­ton: A Video Essay

How Ger­man Expres­sion­ism Gave Rise to the “Dutch” Angle, the Cam­era Shot That Defined Clas­sic Films by Welles, Hitch­cock, Taran­ti­no & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

RIP Jean-Luc Godard: Watch the French New Wave Icon Explain His Contrarian Worldview Back in the 1960s

in Film, History | September 14th, 2022

For almost forty years, we’ve been los­ing the French New Wave. François Truf­faut and Jacques Demy died young, back in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry; Hen­ri Colpi, Éric Rohmer, and Claude Chabrol fol­lowed in the ear­ly years of the twen­ty-first. The last decade alone saw the pass­ings of Chris Mark­er, Alain Resnais, Jacques Riv­ette, and Agnès Var­da. But not until yes­ter­day did la Nou­velle Vague’s hardi­est sur­vivor, and indeed its defin­ing fig­ure, step off this mor­tal coil at the age of 91. Jean-Luc Godard did­n’t launch the move­ment — that dis­tinc­tion belongs to Truf­faut’s The 400 Blows, from 1959 — but in 1960 his first fea­ture Breath­less made film­go­ers the world over under­stand at once that the old rules no longer applied.

Yet for all his will­ing­ness to vio­late its con­ven­tions, Godard pos­sessed a thor­ough­go­ing respect for cin­e­ma. This per­haps came from his pre-auteur­hood years he spent as a film crit­ic in Paris, writ­ing for the estimable Cahiers du ciné­ma (an insti­tu­tion to which Truf­faut, Rohmer, Chabrol, and Riv­ette also con­tributed). “It made me love every­thing,” he says of his expe­ri­ence with crit­i­cism in the 1963 inter­view just above.

“It taught me not to be nar­row-mind­ed, not to ignore Renoir in favor of Bil­ly Wilder.” A con­trar­i­an from the begin­ning, the young Godard dis­dained what he saw as the for­mal­ized and intel­lec­tu­al­ized prod­ucts of the French film indus­try in favor of vis­cer­al­ly crowd-pleas­ing pic­tures made in the U.S.A.

“We Euro­peans have movies in our head, and Amer­i­cans have movies in their blood,” says Godard in the 1965 British tele­vi­sion inter­view above. “We have cen­turies and cen­turies of cul­ture behind us. We have to think about things. We can’t just do things.” To “just do things” is per­haps the prime artis­tic desire dri­ving his oeu­vre, which spans sev­en decades and includes more than 40 fea­ture films as well as many projects of less eas­i­ly cat­e­go­riz­able form. But this went with a life­long immer­sion in clas­si­cal Euro­pean cul­ture, evi­denced by a fil­mog­ra­phy dense with ref­er­ences to its works. The weight of his for­ma­tion and ambi­tions took a cer­tain toll ear­ly on: “I’m already tired,” he says in a 1960 inter­view at Cannes, where Breath­less was screen­ing. Did the per­ma­nent rev­o­lu­tion­ary of cin­e­ma sus­pect, even then, how far he still had to go?

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to Jean-Luc Godard’s Inno­v­a­tive Film­mak­ing Through Five Video Essays

How the French New Wave Changed Cin­e­ma: A Video Intro­duc­tion to the Films of Godard, Truf­faut & Their Fel­low Rule-Break­ers

Jean-Luc Godard Takes Cannes’ Rejec­tion of Breath­less in Stride in 1960 Inter­view

How Jean-Luc Godard Lib­er­at­ed Cin­e­ma: A Video Essay on How the Great­est Rule-Break­er in Film Made His Name

Watch Jean-Luc Godard’s Film­mak­ing Mas­ter­class on Insta­gram

RIP Jean-Paul Bel­mon­do: The Actor Who Went from the French New Wave to Action Super­star­dom

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Two Women in Their 90s Recall Their Teenage Years in Victorian 1890s London

in Fashion, Film, History, Video - Politics/Society | September 6th, 2022


Mud everywhere…and where there wasn’t mud, there was fog, and in between was us, enjoy­ing our­selves. — Berta Ruck

Berta Ruck and Frances ‘Effy’ Jones were teenagers in the 1890s, and while their rec­ol­lec­tions of their for­ma­tive years in mud­dy old Lon­don are hard­ly a por­trait of Jazz Age wild­ness, nei­ther are they in keep­ing with mod­ern notions of stuffy Vic­to­ri­an mores.

Inter­viewed for the BBC doc­u­men­tary series Yesterday’s Wit­ness in 1970, these nona­ge­nar­i­ans are for­mi­da­ble per­son­ages, sharp­er than prover­bial tacks, and unlike­ly to elic­it the sort of agist pity embod­ied in the lyrics of a pop­u­lar dit­ty Ruck remem­bers the Cock­neys singing in the gut­ter after the pubs had closed for the night.

“Do you think I might dare to sing [it] now?” Ruck, then 91, asks (rhetor­i­cal­ly):

She may have known bet­ter days

When she was in her prime

She may have known bet­ter days

Once upon a time…

(Raise your hand if you sus­pect those lyrics are describ­ing a washed up spin­ster in her late 20s or ear­ly 30s.)

The 94-year-old Jones reach­es back more than 7 decades to tell about her first job, when she was paid 8 shillings a week to sit in a store­front win­dow, demon­strat­ing a new machine known as a type­writer.

Some of her earn­ings went toward the pur­chase a bicy­cle, which she rode back and forth to work and overnight hol­i­days in Brighton, scan­dalous­ly clad in bloomers, or as Jones and her friends referred to them, “ratio­nal dress”.

Ruck, pegged by her head­mistress as an “indo­lent and feck­less girl”, went on to study at the Slade School of Art, before achiev­ing promi­nence as a best­selling romance nov­el­ist, whose 90 some titles include His Offi­cial Fiancée, Miss Million’s Maid and In Anoth­er Girl’s Shoes.

We do hope at least one of these fea­tures a hero­ine resent­ful­ly brush­ing a skirt mud­died up to the knees by pass­ing han­som cabs, an impo­si­tion Ruck refus­es to sweet­en with the nos­tal­gia.

As the British Film Institute’s Patrick Rus­sell writes in 100 British Doc­u­men­taries, the Yesterday’s Wit­ness series, and Jones and Ruck’s episode, in par­tic­u­lar, pop­u­lar­ized the oral his­to­ry approach to doc­u­men­tary, in which the direc­tor-inter­view­er is an invis­i­ble pres­ence, cre­at­ing the impres­sion that the sub­ject is speak­ing direct­ly to the audi­ence, unprompt­ed:

The series’ mak­ers suc­cess­ful­ly resist­ed any temp­ta­tions to patron­ize or edi­to­ri­al­ize, and aimed at sym­pa­thet­ic curios­i­ty rather than nos­tal­gia. The two women tell their sto­ries flu­ent­ly, humor­ous­ly, intel­li­gent­ly — offer­ing con­sid­ered ret­ro­spec­tive com­ment on their generation’s assump­tions, nei­ther sim­ply accept­ing nor reject­ing them…Unlike text­books, and oth­er types of doc­u­men­tary, films like Two Vic­to­ri­an Girls gave the youth access to the mod­ern past as pri­vate­ly expe­ri­enced. 

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Winnie the Pooh Went Into the Public Domain, and Someone Already Turned the Story Into a Slasher Film: Watch the Trailer for Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood and Honey

in Books, Creativity, Film, Video - Arts & Culture | September 2nd, 2022

Deep in the Hun­dred Acre Wood

Where Christo­pher Robin plays

You’ll find the enchant­ed neigh­bor­hood

Of Christo­pher’s child­hood days…

Those sweet­ly sen­ti­men­tal lyrics were penned not by A.A. Milne, cre­ator of Win­nie-The-Pooh but rather the Acad­e­my-Award win­ning song­writ­ing team of broth­ers Robert and Richard Sher­man, who also penned the scores of Mary Pop­pins, Chit­ty Chit­ty Bang Bang, and The Jun­gle Book.

If you are under the age of 60, chances are your con­cept of Pooh, Eey­ore, Piglet, Kan­ga, Roo, Owl, Rab­bit and Tig­ger is informed by Win­nie the Pooh and Hon­ey Tree, the 1966 Dis­ney car­toon that launched a suc­cess­ful fran­chise, not E.H. Shepherd’s charm­ing illus­tra­tions for the 1926 book, Win­nie the Pooh, which entered the pub­lic domain this year.

This means that Milne’s work can be freely repro­duced or reworked, though Dis­ney retains the copy­right to their ani­mat­ed char­ac­ter designs.

Jen­nifer Jenk­ins, direc­tor of the Cen­ter for the Study of the Pub­lic Domain at Duke Uni­ver­si­ty, told the Wash­ing­ton Post that the bulk of the inquiries she field­ed in the lead up to 2022’s pub­lic domain titles becom­ing avail­able had to do with Win­nie the Pooh:

I can’t get over how peo­ple are freak­ing out about Win­nie-the-Pooh in a good way. Every­one has a very spe­cif­ic sto­ry of the first time they read it or their par­ents gave them a doll or they [have] sto­ries about their kids…It’s the Ted Las­so effect.We need a win­dow into a world where peo­ple or ani­mals behave with decen­cy to one anoth­er.”

Ummm…

Judg­ing by the trail­er for their upcom­ing live action, low bud­get fea­ture, Win­nie the Pooh: Blood and Hon­ey, Jagged Edge, a Lon­don-based hor­ror pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny, is not much inter­est­ed in Ted Las­so good vibes, though they do man­age to stay with­in the lim­its of the law, equip­ping a black clad Piglet with threat­en­ing tusks, and dress­ing the tit­u­lar “sil­ly old bear” in a red shirt that doesn’t exact­ly scream Tum­my Song.

More like Texas Chain­saw Mas­sacre.

Pro­duc­er-Direc­tor Rhys Frake-Water­field whose as-yet-unre­leased cred­its include Peter Pan’s Nev­er­land Night­mare and Spi­ders on a Plane told Vari­ety that “we did as much as we could to make sure [the film] was only based on the 1926 ver­sion:”

When you see the cov­er for this and you see the trail­ers and the stills and all that, there’s no way any­one is going to think this is a child’s ver­sion of it.

Here’s hop­ing he’s right.

The trail­er traf­fics freely in slash­er flick tropes:

A biki­ni clad young woman relax­ing, obliv­i­ous­ly, in a hot tub.

A hand held cam­era track­ing a des­per­ate, and prob­a­bly doomed, escape attempt through the woods.

Unnerv­ing warn­ings writ­ten in blood (or pos­si­bly hon­ey?)

The child­ish scrawl on the sign demar­cat­ing the 100 Acre Wood is both faith­ful to the orig­i­nal, and unmis­tak­ably sin­is­ter.

Equal­ly dis­turb­ing is the let­ter­ing on Eeyore’s home­made grave mark­er. (SPOILER: as per Vari­ety, a starv­ing Pooh and Piglet ate him…and appar­ent­ly dis­card­ed a human skull near­by.)

The “enchant­ed neigh­bor­hood of Christo­pher’s child­hood days” has gone decid­ed­ly down­hill.

Direc­tor Frake-Water­field paints Pooh and Piglet as the pri­ma­ry vil­lains, but sure­ly the col­lege-bound Christo­pher Robin deserves some of the blame for aban­don­ing his old friends.

On the oth­er hand, when a col­lege-bound Andy tossed his beloved child­hood play­things in a give­away box at the begin­ning of Toy Sto­ry 3, Buzz and Woody did not go on a mur­der­ous ram­page.

As Frake-Water­field described Pooh and Piglet’s devo­lu­tion to Huff­Post:

Because they’ve had to fend for them­selves so much, they’ve essen­tial­ly become fer­al. So they’ve gone back to their ani­mal roots. They’re no longer tame: they’re like a vicious bear and pig who want to go around and try and find prey.

An inter­view with Dread Cen­tral offers a graph­ic taste of the vio­lent may­hem they inflict, even as Christo­pher Robin, as clue­less as a biki­ni clad inno­cent in a hot tub, bleats, “We used to be friends, why are you doing this!?”

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, the film’s tagline is “This Ain’t No Bed­time Sto­ry.”

View pro­duc­tion pho­tos, if you dare, here.

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Her alle­giance has long been with the 1926 ver­sion. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

What’s Enter­ing the Pub­lic Domain in 2022: The Sun Also Ris­es, Win­nie-the-Pooh, Buster Keaton Come­dies & More

Hear the Clas­sic Win­nie-the-Pooh Read by Author A.A. Milne in 1929

The Orig­i­nal Stuffed Ani­mals That Inspired Win­nie the Pooh

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Kino Lorber Puts Online 75 Free Films

in Film | September 2nd, 2022

Even cinephiles who know lit­tle of the busi­ness of film dis­tri­b­u­tion will have devel­oped asso­ci­a­tions, how­ev­er uncon­scious, between cer­tain pre-fea­ture cor­po­rate logos and the exhil­a­rat­ing cin­e­mat­ic expe­ri­ences that tend to fol­low. What sort of pic­ture comes to mind, for exam­ple, when you read the name Kino Lor­ber? Per­haps doc­u­men­taries on such com­pelling sub­jects as New York Times street-fash­ion pho­tog­ra­ph­er Bill Cun­ning­ham or gone-viral Win­neba­go pitch­man Jack Reb­ney; per­haps inter­na­tion­al genre spec­ta­cles of recent years like Ana Lily Amir­pour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night or Hélène Cat­tet and Bruno Forzani’s Let the Corpses Tan.

Then again, your own taste in Kino Lor­ber-dis­trib­uted movies may run to the likes of Good­bye to Lan­guage, Jean-Luc Godard­’s 2014 med­i­ta­tion orig­i­nal­ly screened in 3D — or Derek Jar­man’s auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal last tes­ta­ment Blue, which plays out entire­ly on a sol­id field of the epony­mous col­or.

These are just a few of the more than 75 films now avail­able free to watch on Kino Lor­ber’s Youtube chan­nel. (Note that the actu­al num­ber of view­able films may vary depend­ing on your loca­tion.) Span­ning var­i­ous eras, gen­res, ori­gins, and forms, togeth­er they offer a sense of the niche Kino Lor­ber has carved out for itself dur­ing its 45 years in busi­ness so far.

You may spot an old favorite on Kino Lor­ber’s Youtube chan­nel, but the greater joy of explor­ing it lies in dis­cov­er­ing films you missed the first time around. Gabe Klinger’s Por­to, for instance, went prac­ti­cal­ly unseen despite its evoca­tive vision of the title city and posthu­mous show­case of acclaimed actor Anton Yelchin. Boast­ing a cast of Phoebe Cates, Brid­get Fon­da, Tim Roth, and Eric Stoltz, Michael Stein­berg’s Bod­ies, Rest & Motion screened at Cannes as an Un Cer­tain Regard selec­tion back in 1993; sure­ly the time has come for its reap­praisal as a dis­til­la­tion of Generation‑X ennui. Even Tai­ka Wait­i­ti once made less­er-known movies in and about his native New Zealand. Thanks to Kino Lor­ber, his fans can can watch Boy, which launched him on the jour­ney that has made him one of the most glob­al­ly pop­u­lar direc­tors alive. See the com­plete playlist of films here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

365 Free Movies Stream­ing on YouTube

Watch 70+ Sovi­et Films Free Online, Cour­tesy of Mos­film, the Hol­ly­wood of the Sovi­et Union

Watch Free Cult Films by Stan­ley Kubrick, Fritz Lang, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi & More on the New Kino Cult Stream­ing Ser­vice

Watch Hun­dreds of Pol­ish Films Free Online: Fea­ture Films, Doc­u­men­taries, Ani­ma­tions & More

The Atom­ic Café: The Cult Clas­sic Doc­u­men­tary Made Entire­ly Out of Nuclear Weapons Pro­pa­gan­da from the Cold War (1982)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

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