During the 1940s and 50s, Hollywood entered a “noir” period, producing riveting films based on hard-boiled fiction. These films were set in dark locations and shot in a black & white aesthetic that fit like a glove. Hardened men wore fedoras and forever smoked cigarettes. Women played the femme fatale role brilliantly. Love was the surest way to death. All of these elements figured into what Roger Ebert calls “the most American film genre” in his short Guide to Film Noir.
If you head over to this list of Noir Films, you can find 60 films from the noir genre, including some classics by John Huston, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang and Ida Lupino. The list also features some cinematic legends like Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson, and even Frank Sinatra. Hope the collection helps you get through the days ahead.
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The world now has another Dune film, and this time Warner Bros. is serious about a franchise, with at least one sequel planned and a prequel TV series in the works. With thousands of years worth of world building, the books by Frank Herbert and the world now being fleshed out by his son Brian Herbert with Kevin J. Anderson offer more source material than Star Wars for potential filmmakers to play with, but is this world anywhere near as fun?
Your hosts Mark Linsenmayer and Brian Hirt are joined by Brian Casey (brother of The Partially Examined Life’s Dylan Casey) and Three if By Space senior editor Erin Conrad to talk about whether this series is really adaptable to the screen at all, and we consider past attempts by David Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowsky (rather slighting the tedious TV version). Is the new version more successful? More feminist? Less colonialist?
Is the lore just too packed into the books to convey adequately? When Frank Herbert jumps forward 3000 years, is that a path that moviegoers will want to follow, even if familiar characters can still be present as talkative ancestral memories in new characters’ heads or come back as clones?
For points of comparison, we touch on not only Star Wars, but Outlander, Picard, The Orville, Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, Walking Dead, The Dark Tower, and more.
Some articles that fed into our discussion include:
One could argue that cinema audiences in the 1900s were less sophisticated than they are today. Marshaling the evidence, one might make an Exhibit A of Le Cochon Danseur (The Dancing Pig), a Pathé-produced silent short that showcases the figure of the title. “Apparently based on a Vaudeville act,” writes the Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey, “it sees a pig dressed in a fancy tuxedo attempt to seduce a young lady, who in turn rips off his clothes and forces him to dance despite his shameful nakedness.”
Just how deeply the original French audiences thrilled to these proceedings is lost to history; but then, so is the name of the film’s director. This aura of mystery made Le Cochon Danseur an object of fascination a century after its release. But that wasn’t the only factor in play: the design of the pig costume remains impressive today, let alone when considered by the presumed standards of 1907.
The filmmakers must have known this, since the film’s ending cuts — in a time when editing of any kind was a rarity in the cinema — to a close-up of the oversized porcine head expressing a well-articulated look of satisfaction.
We see the pig “flapping his ears, boggling his eyes, flailing his tongue, and chuckling evilly, bearing his sharp, scary teeth,” as the Villains Wiki puts it. “This implies that he possibly ate the woman and revealed himself to be a horrid monster.” It is this final sequence that has made the dancing pig “a popular Internet meme villain” over the past decade and a half. You’ve almost certainly spotted him once or twice, though probably not the colorized version seen in the restored and enhanced video at the top of the post. The original black-and-white film, the inspiration for so many memes and so many nightmares, appears just above.
“Somehow, I feel like I’m actually looking at a hellish human-pig hybrid, not just a 20th-century human in a 20th-century version of a mascot suit,” writes cinephile Tristan Ettleman in his own consideration of the picture. Perhaps Le Cochon Danseur has proven even more compelling to us fully connected 21st-century sophisticates than it did to its first viewers. Or perhaps it simply taps into a universal truth of existence: to paraphrase a much-quoted observation attributed to Margaret Atwood, giant anthropomorphic pigs are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid giant anthropomorphic pigs will eat them.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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.
A true cineaste, a friend once told me, will have the most eclectic “best of” list, forged from a deep love of cinema and an absolute confidence in their choices. There will be no looking at a Great Movies book, no consideration of public taste. They have not a care for legacies or film schools. That’s why this recently unearthed list of Stephen Sondheim’s favorite films is such a fascinating read.
The composer passed away last month at 91, having changed Broadway musicals from big and brassy popular fare into something that could tackle strange and experimental themes and stories yet be just as successful. He provided the lyrics for West Side Story and Gypsy, and then went on to a string of challenging hits: Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods, Assassins.
The subject matters he tackled were often dark and complex. He watched many of his musicals get the Hollywood treatment, occasionally wrote songs for cinema, and toyed with adapting several films for the stage, including Being There and Sunset Boulevard. So what must his film list be like?
Really odd, is the answer. The published list is in alphabetical order, and there are very few classics in there—Welles’ Citizen Kane, Bergman’s Smiles on a Summer Night, Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, and Kurosawa’s High and Low.
Conspicuously missing: other musicals.
“The only kind of movie that held no interest for me whatsoever was musical,” he told the New York Times in 2003. ”We’re talking about from the age of 10 to the age of 25. I knew the musicals because I would hear the songs, but I never went out of my way to see them. Not the fabulous Arthur Freed MGM unit, and it’s not that I thought they were bad. It’s what I loved were westerns. Melodramas, even romantic comedies. High drama.’’
The interview suggests a method to the list—these were films Sondheim loved but most had not seen; he would insist friends and collaborators watch them. That’s how he describes 1980’s The Contract, directed by Krzysztof Zanussi, a “movie of his I find so extraordinary, I want to share it with everybody,’’ he said.
Born in 1930, Sondheim’s favorite decade (by movie count) is his teenage years, from the fantasy of Michael Powell’s The Thief of Bagdad to the horror of Dead of Night. Later years are more scattershot, with Lynch’s The Elephant Man and Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap being stand-out choices. His 1990s selections, right up through the mid-2000s show his continuing interest in dark themes (Gus Van Zant’s school shooting mood piece Elephant), large novelistic intertwining narratives (John Sayles’ Lone Star) and complicated family dramas (Denys Arcand’s The Barbarian Invasions).
Sondheim fans will find much to chew over on this list, that is, if they’ve even seen most of them. My percentage is admittedly low, let us know yours in the comments.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
Much has been made in recent years of the “de-aging” processes that allow actors to credibly play characters far younger than themselves. But it has also become possible to de-age film itself, as demonstrated by Peter Jackson’s celebrated new docu-series The Beatles: Get Back. The vast majority of the material that comprises its nearly eight-hour runtime was originally shot in 1969, under the direction of Michael Lindsay-Hogg for the documentary that became Let It Be.
Those who have seen both Linday-Hogg’s and Jackson’s documentaries will notice how much sharper, smoother, and more vivid the very same footage looks in the latter, despite the sixteen-millimeter film having languished for half a century. The kind of visual restoration and enhancement seen in Get Back was made possible by technologies that have only emerged in the past few decades — and previously seen in Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old, a documentary acclaimed for its restoration of century-old World War I footage to a time-travel-like degree of verisimilitude.
“You can’t actually just do it with off-the-shelf software,” Jackson explained in an interview about the restoration processes involved in They Shall Not Grow Old. This necessitated marshaling, at his New Zealand company Park Road Post Production, “a department of code writers who write computer code in software.” In other words, a sufficiently ambitious project of visual revitalization — making media from bygone times even more lifelike than it was to begin with — becomes as much a job of traditional film-restoration or visual-effects as of computer programming.
This also goes for the less obvious but no-less-impressive treatment given by Jackson and his team to the audio that came with the Let It Be footage. Recorded in large part monaurally, these tapes presented a formidable production challenge. John, Paul, George, and Ringo’s instruments share a single track with their voices — and not just their singing voices, but their speaking ones as well. On first listen, this renders many of their conversations inaudible, and probably by design: “If they were in a conversation,” said Jackson, they would turn their amps up loud and they’d strum the guitar.”
This means of keeping their words from Lindsay-Hogg and his crew worked well enough in the wholly analog late 1960s, but it has proven no match for the artificial intelligence/machine learning of the 2020s. “We devised a technology that is called demixing,” said Jackson. “You teach the computer what a guitar sounds like, you teach them what a human voice sounds like, you teach it what a drum sounds like, you teach it what a bass sounds like.” Supplied with enough sonic data, the system eventually learned to distinguish from one another not just the sounds of the Beatles’ instruments but of their voices as well.
Hence, in addition to Get Back’s revelatory musical moments, its many once-private but now crisply audible exchanges between the Fab Four. “Oh, you’re recording our conversation?” George Harrison at one point asks Lindsay-Hogg in a characteristic tone of faux surprise. But if he could hear the recordings today, his surprise would surely be real.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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.
In the annals of surprisingly impressive IMDb pages, few can surpass that of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Despite having died a century before the birth of cinema, he has racked up and continues to rack up more composer credits each and every year. Many of these owe to the use of one piece, indeed one movement, in particular: the Lacrimosa from his Requiem, which contains the very last notes he ever wrote. “We should probably expect some of these uses to have a somber, funereal quality, and they do,” says Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, in the new video essay above. In Amadeus, Miloš Forman’s film about the composer himself, the piece accompanies a sequence showing “Mozart’s dead body being unceremoniously transported and dumped into a mass grave.”
The shortcomings of Mozart’s burial have surely been compensated for by the glories of his legacy. But that legacy includes all manner of uses of the Lacrimosa in film and television, both glorious and inglorious. Given its “sense of both suspense and inevitability, which is a unique and potent combo,” it typically scores scenes of violence and villainy.
“The repeated association of Lacrimosa with evil conditions us to think of evil when we hear it, to the point that filmmakers choose it as a kind of shorthand, drawing on our memories of its past uses.” Eventually this hardened into cinematic convention, ultimately becoming “such a trope that it works brilliantly for parody and satire too,” as in The Big Lebowski’s meeting of its two titular figures. (Note that the music becomes muffled when the Dude leaves the room, implying that Lebowski had actually put it on himself.)
Elsewhere, the Lacrimosa has been marshaled to evoke such emotions as loneliness, desperation, and reckoning — and even, in one of Puschak’s more recent examples, “the immense, unruly power of the social internet.” If such a phenomenon would be difficult to explain to Mozart himself, imagine showing him the television series The Good Fight, where “Lacrimosa amplifies the comedy of a scene in which the lawyers get their hands on Donald Trump’s alleged ‘pee tape.’ ” But Mozart obviously understood full well the underlying artistic principles at work: Amadeusalso depicts him composing the Dies Irae, another of the Requiem’s movements, whose melody he adapts from a thirteenth-century Gregorian funeral mass. Even in his time, the music of the past offered a means of heightening the feelings of the present.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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.
In its nearly eight-hour runtime Peter Jackson’s new documentary series The Beatles: Get Back offers numerous minor revelations about the world’s favorite band. Among the filmmaker’s avowed aims was to show that, even on the verge of acrimonious dissolution, John, Paul, George, and Ringo enjoyed stretches of productiveness and conviviality. Much else comes out besides, including that the catering at Apple Corps headquarters was miserable (amounting most days to toast and digestive biscuits) and that, even amid the excesses of the late 1960s, the Beatles dressed more or less respectably (apart, that is, from George’s occasionally outlandish choices of outer- and footwear). But it also lays bare exactly how they created a song.
The Beatles went into these sessions with little material prepared. All they knew for sure was that they had to come up with a set of songs to be recorded live, without overdubs, in order to “get back” to the simplicity that had characterized their process before such aesthetically and technically convoluted albums as Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. These they would then perform in a concert film. The whole project was undertaken with what Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield calls a “magnificent arrogance. In a way, that’s what helped keep them together, through all their ups and downs. Without that level of arrogance, there’s no way an adventure as admirably daft as Get Back could happen in the first place.”
Somehow, to the very end, that arrogance always proved justified. For much of Jackson’s Get Back, the Beatles appear to be just screwing around, cracking jokes, drinking tea and beer, and launching into abortive performances in cartoon voices. And that’s when everyone shows up. “Lennon’s late again,” says Paul in the clip above. “I’m thinking of getting rid of him.” But instead of nursing resentment for his unpredictable musical partner, he sits down and starts playing. His first chords will sound familiar to any Beatles fan, though they belong to a song that doesn’t yet exist. Paul then adds to his strumming a bit of mostly non-verbal vocalization, which soon coheres into a melodic line: we (and a yawning George) are witness to the birth of “Get Back.”
During the lifetime of the Beatles, Paul seems to have been the most productive member. Even since the band’s end half a century ago, music has continued to flow unimpeded from his mind, shaped as if by pure instinct. In that time it has become ever more well-documented that he motivated the group to work, especially after the death of their manager Brian Epstein in 1967. While Get Back attests to a certain overbearing quality in his attitude toward the other Beatles, it also shows how McCartney’s hardworking-yet-freewheeling example encouraged each of them to express his own particular genius. When George gets stuck on the end of a lyric, for example, he, too, simply sings whatever comes to mind. Hence the temporary line “Something in the way she moves / Attracts me like a pomegranate” — and we all know how that tune eventually turned out.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include 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.
Comedian Alasdair Beckett-King has a keen ear for entertainment tropes and subscribes to the belief that “putting too much effort into things makes them funnier.”
The result is a series of one-minute videos in which he spoofs the conventions of a particular genre or long running series, with perfect visuals, meta dialogue, and faithfully rendered performance styles.
Beckett-King put his London Film School training to use with this project during lockdown, spending “absolutely ages putting together something very tiny.”
Witness his take on every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which the captain of the ship, a Patrick Stewart doppelgänger and “vegetarian space socialist who is always right” negotiates with a “representative of a kind of iffy alien race not necessarily based on a specific human ethnicity.” As Beckett-King told Eric Johnson, host of Follow Friday podcast:
That one was very, very hard work because I had to do a CGI bald cap for myself because I have long, long flowing hair. I had to try and do an impression of Captain Picard of the Starship Enterprise… it’s not that good. There’s so much work that went into it.
Before I posted it, I was convinced I’d wasted my time. Then luckily it did quite well and people really liked it. People kept saying, “When are you doing Captain Picard again?” I’m like, “I’m not! because it took ages to do the bald head, and you’ve seen it now.” I think what’s nice about it though, is you get to try something, commit to it and then see if it’s funny afterwards. It’s quite like doing live standup.
(Beckett-King’s partner Rachel Anne Smith gets credits for the non-CGI costumes.)
Some other favorites:
Every Single Scandinavian Crime Drama: The killer could be anyone in Helgasund. That’s over seven people.
Every Single Spooky Podcast: The frozen soil was littered with what appeared to be discarded Casper mattresses and Bombas socks.
Every Single Spaghetti Western: Yeah, well your lips don’t synch…
Every Haunted House Movie: It’s the perfect place for me to quit drinking, finish my novel, and really come to terms with that deer we hit on the way over.
Every Episode of Popular Time Travel Show: Help us, Doctor. The intransigent Implacablons are poised to destroy us.
How Every Film Noir Ends: Talk your way out of a snub nosed pistol held at waist height.
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