Quentin Tarantino Explains How to Write & Direct Movies

in Film | October 1st, 2019

When Quentin Tarantino debuted in 1992 with Reservoir Dogs, and even more so when he followed it up with the cinematic phenomenon that was Pulp Fiction, the viewers most dubious about the young auteur’s cultural staying power dismissed his movies as elevations of style over substance. Whether or not Tarantino has converted all his early critics over the past 27 years, he’s certainly demonstrated that style can constitute a substance of its own.

Even many who didn’t care for his latest picture, this year’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, nevertheless expressed gratitude at the release of a lavish, large-scale film packed full of ideas, references, set pieces, and jokes — an increasingly rare achievement, or even aspiration, among non-Tarantino filmmakers. How does he do it? The Director’s Chair profile video above, and the accompanying Studio Binder essay by Matt Vasiliauskas, identifies the essential elements that constitute the Tarantinian style and Tarantinian substance.

In the video Tarantino discusses his process: “I was put on Earth to face the blank page,” to bring forth ideas from within and place them in new genre contexts, to write one line of dialogue after another and feel the surprise as the script takes turns unexpected even to him. Everything, from conversations to action scenes to expansive wide shots, plays out in his head before he shoots the first frame: “Before I make the movie, I watch the movie.” And like all auteurs, he makes the movie he wants to see: “I don’t think the audience is this dumb person lower than me,” he has said. “I am the audience.”

A filmmaker looking to follow Tarantino’s example must do the following: “Keep it personal,” using experiences they’ve actually had or emotions they’ve actually felt, even if they present them filtered through “crazy genre world.” “Structure like a novel,” with the willingness to break free of chronological order. “Think like an actor,” since you’ll have to work long and hard with them. Shoot “Hong Kong action sequences,” two or three moves at a time, so that you can organically change and incorporate what happens along the way. “Keep music in mind,” whether that means existing songs that evoke certain times, places, and moods, or original scores like that which Tarantino commissioned for The Hateful Eight from Ennio Morricone.

Morricone is best known for his collaborations with Tarantino’s hero Sergio Leone, and like Leone and “all directors working at the top of their game,” writes Vasiliauskas, Tarantino “uses the camera as his most powerful storytelling implement,” especially when shooting wide. “Whether it’s the Bride battling the Crazy 88 gang in Kill Bill or Django surveying a burned-out home, Tarantino understands the power of the wide-shot to not only create tension, but to utilize the environment in revealing the desires of his characters.” But he also gets serious aesthetic and emotional mileage out of extreme close-ups, crash zooms, and point-of-view shots from inside the trunk of a car (or period equivalents thereof).

Above all, this former Manhattan Beach video-store clerk “absorbs movies,” and has by his own admission stolen from more films than most of us will watch in our lives. But none of this makes predictable what Tarantino will draw from his real-life and filmgoing experiences and put on the screen next: “I should throw them for a loop,” he says in an interview clip included in the video. He means his audience, of course, but before he can throw us for a loop, he has to do it to himself. And whatever thrills and surprises Tarantino will, as we’ve seen over the course of ten feature films so far, thrill and surprise us even more.

How Quentin Tarantino Creates Suspense in His Favorite Scene, the Tension-Filled Opening Moments of Inglourious Basterds

The Films of Quentin Tarantino: Watch Video Essays on Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill & More

Quentin Tarantino Explains The Art of the Music in His Films

Wes Anderson Explains How He Writes and Directs Movies, and What Goes Into His Distinctive Filmmaking Style

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Proper Way to Eat Ramen: A Meditation from the Classic Japanese Comedy Tampopo (1985)

in Film, Food & Drink | September 25th, 2019

There is a right way to eat every dish, as an ever-increasing abundance of internet videos daily informs us. But how did we navigate our first encounters with unfamiliar foods thirty, forty, fifty years ago? With no way to learn online, we had no choice but to learn in real life, assuming we could find a trusted figure well-versed in the ways of eating from whom to learn — a sensei, as they say in Japanese, the kind of wise elder depicted in the film clip above, a scene that takes place in a ramen shop. “Master,” asks the young student, “soup first or noodles first?” The ramen master’s reply: “First, observe the whole bowl. Appreciate its gestalt. Savor the aromas.”

Behold the “jewels of fat glittering on its surface,” the “shinachiku roots shining,” the “seaweed lowly sinking, the “spring onions floating.” The eater’s first action must be to “caress the surface with the chopstick tips” in order to “express affection.” The second is to “poke the pork” — don’t eat it, just touch it — then “pick it up and dip it into the soup on the right of the bowl.” The most important part? To “apologize to the pork by saying, ‘See you soon.’ ” Then the eating can commence, “noodles first,” but “while slurping the noodles, look at the pork. Eye it affectionately.” After then sipping the soup three times, the master picks up a slice of pork “as if making a major decision in life,” and taps it on the side of the bowl. Why? “To drain it.” To those who know Japanese food culture for the value it places on aesthetic sensitivity and adherence to form, this scene may look perfectly realistic.

But those who know Japanese cinema will have recognized immediately the opening of Tampopo, the beloved 1985 comedy that satirizes through food both Japanese culture and humanity itself. In his review of the film, Roger Ebert describes the ramen-master vignette as depicting “a kind of gastronomic religion, and director Juzo Itami creates a scene that makes noodles in this movie more interesting than sex and violence in many another.” Not that Tampopo, for all its cheerfulness (Ebert calls it “a bemused meditation on human nature in which one humorous situation flows into another offhandedly, as if life were a series of smiles”) doesn’t also contain plenty of sex and violence. Walter Benjamin once said that every great work of art destroys or creates a genre. Tampopo creates the “ramen Western,” rolling a couple of cowboyish truckers (seen briefly in the clip above) into booming 1980 Tokyo to get a widow’s failing ramen shop into shape.

Through parody and slyer forms of allusion, Tampopo references cinema both Western and Eastern, and its cast includes actors who were or would become iconic: the student of ramen is played by Ken Watanabe, now known to audiences worldwide for his roles in Hollywood pictures like The Last Samurai and Inception. The master is played by Ryûtarô Ôtomo, a mainstay of samurai films from the late 1930s through the 1960s, who chose this as his very last role: the very day after shooting his scene, he committed suicide by jumping from the top of a building. (Itami would die under similar circumstances in 1997, some say with the involvement of the Yakuza.) Now that internet videos and other forms of 21st-century media are disseminating the relevant knowledge, we can all study to become masters of ramen, or for that matter of any dish we please — but can any of us hope to rise to the example of elegance, and hilariousness, laid down by Ôtomo’s final act on film?

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch 15 Films by Designers Charles & Ray Eames

in Architecture, Art, Design, Film | September 25th, 2019

If you’re reading this, chances are good that you live in the modern world, or at least visit it from time to time. But what do I mean by “modern”? It’s a too-broad term that always requires a definition. Sometimes, for brevity’s sake, we settle for listing the names of artists who brought modernity into being. When it comes to the truly modern in industrial design, we get two names in one—the husband and wife team of Charles and Ray Eames.

The design world, at least in the U.S., may have been slower to catch up to other modernist trends in the arts. That changed dramatically when several European artists like Walter Gropius immigrated to the country before, during and after World War II. But the American Eames left perhaps the most lasting impact of them all.

The first home they designed and built together in 1949 as part of the Case Study House Program became “a mecca for architects and designers from both near and far,” notes the Eames Office site. “Today it is considered one of the most important post-war residences anywhere in the world.” “Famous for their iconic chairs,” writes William Cook at the BBC, the streamlined objets that “transformed our idea of modern furniture,” they were also “graphic and textile designers, architects and filmmakers.”

The Eames’ film legacy may be less well-known than their revolutions in interior design. We’ve all seen or interacted with innumerable versions of Eames-inspired designs, whether we knew it or not. The pair stated their desire to make universally useful creations in their succinct mission statement: “We want to make the best for the most for the least.” They meant it. “What works good,” said Ray, “is better than what looks good because what works good lasts.”

When design “works good,” the Eames understood, it might be attractive, or purely functional, but it will always be accessible, unobtrusive, comfortable, and practical. We might notice its contours and wonder about its principles, but it works equally well, and maybe better, if we do not. The Eames films explain how one accomplishes such design. “Between 1950 and 1982,” the Eames “made over 125 short films ranging from 1–30 minutes in length,” notes the Eames Office site, declaring: “The Eames Films are the Eames Essays.”

If this statement has prepared you for dry, didactic short films filled with jargon, prepare to be surprised by the breadth and depth of the Eames’ curiosity and vision. Here, we have compiled some of the Eames films, and you can see many, many more (15 in total) with the playlist embedded at the bottom of the post. At the top, see a brief introduction the designers’ films. Then, further down, we have the “brilliant tour of the universe” that is 1977’s Powers of Ten; 1957’s Day of the Dead, their exploration of the Mexican holiday; and 1961’s “Symmetry,” one of five shorts in a collection made for IBM called Mathematica Peep Shows.

Just above, see the Eames short House, made after five years of living in their famed Case Study House #8. The design on display here shows how the Eames “brought into the world a new kind of Californian indoor-outdoor Modernism,” as Colin Marshall wrote in a recent post here on famous architects’ homes. Their house is “a kind of Mondrian painting made into a livable box filled with an idiosyncratic arrangement of artifacts from all over the world.” Unlike most of the Eames designs, the Case Study house was never put into production, but in its elegant simplicity, we can see all of the creative impulses the Eames brought to their redesign of the modern world.

See many more of the Eames filmic essays in this YouTube playlist. There are 15 in total.

How the Iconic Eames Lounge Chair Is Made, From Start to Finish

Visit the Homes That Great Architects Designed for Themselves: Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius & Frank Gehry

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood Examined on Pretty Much Pop #12

in Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | September 25th, 2019

Wes Alwan, who co-hosts The Partially Examined Life philosophy podcast with PMP host Mark Linsenmayer, joins the discussion along with PMP co-hosts Erica Spyres and Brian Hirt to discuss Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood in the context of Tarantino’s other films.

Wes thinks the film is brilliant, even though he’s not otherwise a Tarantino fan. How is this film different? We consider T’s strange sense of pacing, his comic violence, his historical revisionism, and casting choices. Is this a brilliant film or a fundamentally misguided idea badly in need of an editor?

Some articles we drew on:

“On the Troubling Subtext of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” by Jen Chaney
“A Battle For Creative Freedom: Why The Tarantino Backlash Is Bad For Hollywood” by Travis Bean
“Tarantino’s Gruesome Revenge Fantasies Are Growing More Puerile and Misogynistic” by Casper Salmon

Wes is working on a very long essay on this film that isn’t yet complete, but he’s written plenty of other long essays about the media and has recorded several episodes of his own PEL spin-off show, (sub)Text: Get it all here.

This episode includes bonus discussion that you can only hear by supporting the podcast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network.

Pretty Much Pop is the first podcast curated by Open Culture. Browse all Pretty Much Pop posts or start with the first episode.

by Mark Linsenmayer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

“Thou Shalt Not”: A 1940 Photo Satirically Mocks Every Vice & Sin Censored by the Hays Movie Censorship Code

in Film | September 24th, 2019

The history of Hollywood film before 1968 breaks down into two eras: “pre-Code” and “post-Code.” The “Code” in question is the Motion Picture Production Code, better known as the “Hays Code,” a reference to Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America president Will H. Hays. The organization we now know as the MPAA hired Hays in 1922, tasking the Presbyterian deacon and former chairman of the Republican National Committee and Postmaster General with “cleaning up” early Hollywood’s sinful image. Eight years into Hays’ presidency came the Code, a pre-emptive act of self-censorship meant to dictate the morally acceptable — and more importantly, the morally unacceptable — content in American film.

“The code sets up high standards of performance for motion-picture producers,” NPR’s Bob Mondello quotes Hays as saying at the Code’s 1930 debut. “It states the considerations which good taste and community value make necessary in this universal form of entertainment.” No picture, for example, should “lower the moral standards of those who see it,” and “the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.” There was also “an updated, much-expanded list of ‘don’ts’ and ‘be carefuls,’ with bans on nudity, suggestive dancing and lustful kissing. The mocking of religion and the depiction of illegal drug use were prohibited, as were interracial romance, revenge plots and the showing of a crime method clearly enough that it might be imitated.”

Serious enforcement of the Code commenced in 1934, and it didn’t take long thereafter for Hollywood filmmakers to start flouting it. “American film producers are inured by now to the Hays Office which regulates movie morals,” says a Life article from 1946. Indeed, “knowing that things banned by the code will help sell tickets,” those producers “have been subtly getting around the code for years.” In other words, they “observe its letter and violate its spirit as much as possible.” Atop the article appears an enormous photograph, taken by Paramount photographer A. L. “Whitey” Schafer, that “shows, in one fell swoop, many things producers must not do,” or rather must not depict: the defeat of the law, the inside of the thigh, narcotics, drinking, an “exposed bosom,” a tommy gun, and so on.

For 1941’s inaugural Hollywood Studios’ Still Show, “Schafer decided to create a novelty shot to satirically slap at the Production Code, the censorship standards of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Assn,” writes Hollywood historian Mary Mallory. “His satirical image, entitled, “Thou Shalt Not,” displayed the top 10 faux-pas disallowed by industry censors, who approved every photographic image shot by studios before they could be distributed.” When “outraged organizers pulled the image from the competition” and threatened Schaefer with a fine, he explained that “all the judges were hoarding the 18 prints submitted for the show.” Few of us today would feel so titillated, let alone morally corrupted, by Schafer’s image, but as filmmaker Aislinn Clarke recently demonstrated on Twitter, it may offer more pure entertainment value than ever.

(via @AislinnClarke)

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Wes Anderson Explains How He Writes and Directs Movies, and What Goes Into His Distinctive Filmmaking Style

in Film | September 23rd, 2019

“I do feel kind of like I’ve got my own style and voice,” Wes Anderson says in the Director’s Chair profile video above. Both his fans and his critics will take that as a vast understatement. Viewers in the former group can’t get enough time in his cinematic world, built out of places, costumes, fonts, cultural artifacts, and filmmaking techniques meticulously selected and arranged; viewers in the latter group see all those things as adding up to the same film over and over again. But the man who directed Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Grand Budapest Hotel knows exactly what he’s doing, as evidenced by interviews and clips of him in action. “Whatever is coming from my imagination is inspired by my background and my own psychology,” he says. “Without me controlling it or choosing to, I’m in the movies.”

In a Studio Binder breakdown of Anderson’s style, SC Lannom encapsulates what Anderson does as “direct-directing.” In other words, “laced throughout his films are nuanced production design elements and visual gags, but executed in such a deliberate manner that the viewer always ‘catches’ these little easter eggs that inform our mood.” His audience “knows what he wants them to know,” “sees what he wants them to see,” and “feels what he wants them to feel.” The average Hollywood hack might use this directorial superpower to formulaic and cynical ends, but Anderson goes his own way. “The Wes Anderson style is Wes Anderson himself,” Lannom writes. “A hard-working, thoughtful human who is focused on his imagination. His visuals are an extension of his own psychology. Anderson is those clothes, those Zissou Adidas, those record players… those memories.”

Growing up in Texas, Anderson first dreamed of becoming an architect, then a writer. Though he has ended up devoting his life to film, those early interests in mastering space and narrative clearly never left him — nor has the porousness between imagination and reality that characterizes childhood. “Wes Anderson tells stories from the perspective of a 12-year-old boy,” Lannom writes. “More specifically, he tells stories from his perspective as a 12-year-old. His films capture the essence of a board game or story book, and the world he builds in each film resembles a snapshot from his childhood.” So do the places that constitute that world, shot in symmetrical compositions by his longtime director of photography Robert Yeoman: “Even if he is using an established location, you get the feeling that the whole place was built for the film, and that is not done by accident.”

All this makes Wes Anderson perhaps the most obvious living example of an auteur, the kind of director who, despite working with countless collaborators, nevertheless leaves an immediately recognizable aesthetic and narrative signature on all his films. Naturally, his list of influences includes many auteurs before him, like Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, and Jean-Luc Godard. And though “learning from Anderson is one of the most important things you can do as a filmmaker,” Lannom writes, “replicating his style is one of the more questionable things you can do as a filmmaker.” Far better, in other words, to make films that reflect the various forces that have shaped you, whatever those forces may be, than to make knock-off Wes Anderson movies. And how does Wes Anderson himself regard the concept of the “Wes Anderson movie”? “The more I think about it, the more confused I get.”

via uncrate

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Martin Scorsese Makes a List of 85 Films Every Aspiring Filmmaker Needs to See

in Film | September 19th, 2019

Image by “Siebbi,” Wikimedia Commons

Before the rise of institutional film schools—ensconced in university walls with all the formality that entails—those seeking to learn the craft did so by apprenticing themselves to studios and master directors, and by watching lots and lots of movies. If we take the example of some of the most interesting filmmakers working today, this still may be the best way to become a filmmaker. Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School, for example, forgoes the trappings of classrooms for a much more rough-and-tumble approach—and a direct confrontation with the medium. Kevin Smith dropped out of film school, as did Paul Thomas Anderson, spurred on partly by a love of Terminator 2. “My filmmaking education,” revealed Anderson, “consisted of finding out what filmmakers I liked were watching, then seeing those films.” It’s more or less how Quentin Tarantino learned to make movies too.

You could hardly do better—if you’ve decided to take this independent route toward a cinematic education—than apprentice yourself under Martin Scorsese. Or at least find out what films he loves, and watch them all yourself.

Last year, we featured a list of 39 foreign films the estimable director of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Hugo, Goodfellas (etc., etc., etc.) recommended to a young filmmaker. Today, we bring you a list of 85 films Scorsese referenced in the course of a four-hour interview he gave to Fast Company. “Some of the movies he discussed,” writes FastCo, “Others he just mentioned. But the cumulative total reflects a life lived entirely within the confines of movie making.” Shoot on over to Fast Company to read Scorsese’s commentary on each of the films below, and see an aesthetically pleasing version of his list over at MUBI as well.

Like I said, you could hardly do better.

Ace in the Hole
All that Heaven Allows
America, America
An American in Paris
Apocalypse Now
Arsenic and Old Lace
The Bad and the Beautiful
The Band Wagon
Born on the Fourth of July
Cape Fear
Cat People
Caught
Citizen Kane
The Conversation
Dial M for Murder
Do the Right Thing
Duel in the Sun
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Europa ’51
Faces
The Fall of the Roman Empire
The Flowers of St. Francis
Force of Evil
Forty Guns
Germany Year Zero
Gilda
The Godfather
Gun Crazy
Health
Heaven’s Gate
House of Wax
How Green Was My Valley
The Hustler
I Walk Alone
The Infernal Cakewalk
It Happened One Nght
Jason and the Argonauts
Journey to Italy
Julius Caesar
Kansas City
Kiss Me Deadly
Klute
La Terra Trema
The Lady From Shanghai
The Leopard
Macbeth
The Magic Box
M*A*S*H
A Matter of Life and Death
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
The Messiah
Midnight Cowboy
Mishima
Deeds Goes to Town
Smith Goes to Washington
Nashville
Night and the City
One, Two, Three
Othello
Paisa
Peeping Tom
Pickup on South Street
The Player
The Power and the Glory
Stagecoach
Raw Deal
The Red Shoes
The Rise of Louis XIV
The Roaring Twenties
Rocco and his Brothers
Rome, Open City
Secrets of the Soul
Senso
Shadows
Shock Corridor
Some Came Running
Stromboli
Sullivan’s Travels
Sweet Smell of Success
Tales of Hoffman
The Third Man
T‑Men
Touch of Evil
The Trial
Two Weeks in Another Town

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

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

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

The Creepy 13th-Century Melody That Shows Up in Movies Again & Again: An Introduction to “Dies Irae”

in Film, Music | September 19th, 2019

The number of iconic scenes in cinema history can and do fill textbooks hundreds of pages long. Doubtless most of us have seen enough of these scenes to know the basic grammar of feature film, and to recognize the hundreds of references in movies and TV to classic cuts and compositions from Hitchcock, Kubrick, or Kurosawa.

Visual and narrative allusions might leap out at us, but music tends to work in subtler ways, prompting emotional responses without engaging the parts of our brain that make comparisons. Case in point, the videos here from Vox and Berklee College of Music professor Alex Ludwig demonstrate the widespread use of a musical motif of four notes from the “Dies Irae,” or “day of wrath,” a 13th century Gregorian requiem, or Catholic mass traditionally sung at funerals.

Of course, we know these notes from the iconic, oft-parodied Amadeus scene of Mozart composing the “Dies Irae” movement of his Requiem in his sickbed, as ultimate frenemy Salieri furiously transcribes. Once you hear the magisterially ominous sequence of notes, you might immediately think of Wendy Carlos’ themes for The Shining and A Clockwork Orange. But did you notice these four notes in Disney’s The Lion King, Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope, or It’s a Wonderful Life?

What about Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or Home Alone? Both Vox and Ludwig show how the “dies irae” theme appears over and over, cueing us to peril or tragedy ahead, orienting us to the terror and unease we see onscreen. For almost 800 years, these four notes have signified all of the above for Catholic Europe, as well as, Vox notes, soundtracking the supposed future day when “God will judge the living and the dead and send them to heaven or hell.”

The “dies irae” has permeated narrative cinema for almost as long as film has existed. The oldest example in Ludwig’s compilation comes from a 1927 score written by Gottfried Huppertz for Fritz Lang’s silent Metropolis. Ludwig also brings his musicological expertise to bear in Vox’s exploration of “dies irae” references. He sums up the net effect as creating a “sense of dread,” bestowed upon modernity by hundreds of years of Christian theology as expressed in music.

Film composers were only the latest to pick up the cultural thread of fear and threat in “Dies Irae.” Their work stands on the shoulders of Mozart and later composers like Hector Berlioz, who lifted the melody in his 1830 Symphonie fantastique to tell a story of obsessive love and murder, and a nightmare of a witch’s sabbath. Later came Franz Liszt’s 1849 Totentanz (Dance of the Dead) and Giuseppe Verdi’s 1874 Messa da Requiem, a very recognizable piece of music that has made its appearance in no small number of movies, TV shows, commercials, and temp scores.

Vox and Ludwig show the “dies irae” phenomenon in film to be a slow cultural evolution from the ornate, sacred pomp of medieval Catholic rites to the ornate, secular pomp of Hollywood film production, by way of classical composers who seized on the theme’s “sense of dread” but remained at least ambivalent about happy endings on the day of wrath.

Hear 9 Hours of Hans Zimmer Soundtracks: Dunkirk, Interstellar, Inception, The Dark Knight & Much More

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 9 ) |

Quentin Tarantino Explains How to Write & Direct Movies

The Proper Way to Eat Ramen: A Meditation from the Classic Japanese Comedy Tampopo (1985)

Watch 15 Films by Designers Charles & Ray Eames

Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood Examined on Pretty Much Pop #12

“Thou Shalt Not”: A 1940 Photo Satirically Mocks Every Vice & Sin Censored by the Hays Movie Censorship Code

Wes Anderson Explains How He Writes and Directs Movies, and What Goes Into His Distinctive Filmmaking Style

Martin Scorsese Makes a List of 85 Films Every Aspiring Filmmaker Needs to See

The Creepy 13th-Century Melody That Shows Up in Movies Again & Again: An Introduction to “Dies Irae”

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