I can’t say Scout Tafoya’s video essay defending Alien 3 won me over on that film based on memory; I found the tone and screenplay way too dark and nihilistic. But given what director David Fincher has done since, from Fight Club to The Social Network, makes me really want to rewatch this soon. It’s been over a decade since my last viewing.
Wonderful, true to life yet moving tribute to Walker over at Grantland, as written by Alex Pappademas:
Maybe it’s too big a leap to suggest that Walker’s death represents some larger symbolic dimming of the day for a certain kind of leading man — blue-eyed, surfy, fast-car-loving, born of the Newman/McQueen DNA line. So instead, let’s say Walker managed to occupy a space of diminished expectations with aplomb and even grace. He punched his weight. He’d started making serious-actor moves toward the end of his life — like coproducing the December 2013 release Hours, in which he plays a father struggling to keep his infant daughter alive on a ventilator during Hurricane Katrina — but wasn’t too good to endorse Davidoff Cool Water, a cologne that smells like a teenage boy who drives a cab.
The Dissolve’s Matt Singer:
We live in a world where immediacy and instantaneous access is the fundamental driver of commerce. Convenience certainly has its place, but expertise should still have one too.
Agreed; and up to now, as Matt points out, Netflix’s automated algorithm is no match for a smart video clerk.
Really enjoyed listening to Martinez talk about his thought process behind the Only God Forgives soundtrack in this interview with Slashfilm:
So what ended up happening is kind of this hybrid of several different ideas, one of which was The Day the Earth Stood Still. My favorite score of all time, but even as well as I know it, I can’t imitate it, nor would it have been appropriate. But the idea of something fantastic and something that was otherworldly was the quality we wanted to take from that score. I think at one point we liked the idea of the retro and fifties, but I couldn’t really nail that. So once again I failed in an interesting way.
Nice video feature where longtime critic A.O. Scott discusses his experiences reviewing and watching film. Always been a fan of his writing.
Scott Fennessey and Chris Ryan, writing for Grantland:
As a fine-arts student who got his start in the vulgar world of commercial directing and slick TV shows, he has always subverted expectations…Looking for the quintessential interstellar extraterrestrial adventure? Instead, take the most grotesque body-horror movie ever made. Scott’s movies are delivery systems for ideas, but they’re also Trojan horses — hulking, beautiful objects, meant to distract audiences while those ideas creep in, one soldier at a time, to take over your mind. It’s been an effective, unlikely strategy for the British-born filmmaker.
Some really great behind the scenes photos from Stanley Kubrick’s classic, courtesy The Overlook Hotel. Images discovered via David Chen.
Director Wong Kar-Wai shot Chungking Express in an unusually brief (by Wong standards) two month period while taking a production break from another film. The Dissolve‘s Keith Phipps writes about the movie’s history, plot, cinematography and more:
Though necessitated by circumstance, shooting faster and looser seems to have opened Wong up to new ideas. Yet, just as in the world of the film, there’s order within the chaos. Though made in an urgent heat, it’s a deeply considered, beautifully constructed film that captures the feel of a particular place at a particular time—and of characters of a particular age, specifically the age when it first becomes apparent that time only runs one way, even if the world seems to be eternally repeating itself.
There’s been many, many articles written since Gravity debuted on the cinematography and CGI involved in its production. But this extended feature over at FXGuide, with six videos and plenty of photographs, goes into more depth than I’ve seen elsewhere. I’m still amazed on how much they pulled off successfully in this film.
Great breakdown of the cinematography basics behind Breaking Bad over at The A.V. Club, as dissected by Scott Kaufman (expect spoilers through Season 5 part 1 in the full article):
Breaking Bad relies more heavily than most shows on what are called “tight singles,” or shots in which a single character occupies the majority of the frame in shallow focus. The background is usually out of focus because it’s unimportant—if you’re watching a show set in a coffee shop, you don’t need the background in focus to remember where the characters are—but in Breaking Bad, the relationship between the planes of focus (foreground, midground, background) typically matters.