09.04.12 |
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David Fincher, interviewed by Art of the Title:
I was eight years old and I saw a documentary on the making of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid…It showed the entire company with all these rental horses and moving trailers to shoot a scene on top of a train. They would hire somebody who looked like Robert Redford to jump onto the train. It never occurred to me that there were hours between each of these shots. The actual circus of it was invisible, as it should be, but in seeing that I became obsessed with the idea of “How?” It was the ultimate magic trick. The notion that 24 still photographs are shown in such quick succession that movement is imparted from it — wow! And I thought that there would never be anything that would be as interesting as that to do with the rest of my life.
Read the whole interview, it’s great. Art of the Title also delivers their usual top notch video excerpts alongside the article text.
08.28.12 |
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Paul Thomas Anderson’s most mature work so far, There Will Be Blood stands as one of the most critically acclaimed films of the 2000s. This Press Play video has seven minutes of very solid critical analysis.
05.05.12 |
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The Denzel Washington as Malcom X and Anna Paquin in the club are my favorites of this set.
04.09.12 |
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Ian Grey, writing for Press Play:
To me, Rouge! Is a traditional musical, except with twice as many shots run at the speed of a trance remix. The Transporter is a Euro-trash version of a John Woo cartoon. And Friday Night Lights with graceful camera? Nope. Boring. We’d never be able to slink into those sizzling Texas mini-worlds on network time. And I’ve not yet mentioned Paul W.S. Anderson’s jaw-dropper of a surprise, Resident Evil: Afterlife, one of the greatest uses of multi-level geometry and spatiality in cinema I can recall seeing, where oneattack scene features twenty or so color-coded Milla Jovoviches attacking hundreds of color-coded bad guys, and it’s not even a high point.
Chaos, I think, has been evolving.
He’s got a point. Much maligned “chaos cinema” would technically embrace the Bourne films. And 28 Weeks Later. True, the ratio of bad to good films in the chaos canon is staggeringly high, but let’s not completely overlook what’s great.