David Bax, host of the consistently excellent Battleship Pretension podcast, writes on the dangers of the Netflix “all at once” TV model. For some shows, making an entire thirteen episode season available at once works. But some shows like Bloodline suffer from the format and treatment.
A deep dive over at BFI on Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic. There’s coverage of the film’s origin story, treatment of sex and race, direction, and its prophecies of the future.
Doesn’t get much better than Nico + slow motion as Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) gets off the bus in The Royal Tenenbaums.
Wonderful Grantland piece profiling Rueben Langdon, one of the film and gaming industry’s premier motion-capture stuntmen:
For the next 12 hours or so, Langdon, Toney, and Austin leap, tumble, and fall. Between takes, they discuss their beats: Who should punch where, how they should punch, how long a combo is too long a combo, and other sundries of performed battle. Occasionally, they shuffle to the sideline and pull out some action figures, modeling their moves the way 10-year-old boys might when daydreaming in their parents’ basement, before cartwheeling back into the volume like the real thing.
What emerges is the grace of chamber music, of movements that, when they fall, seem to fall exactly as they should, telegraphed by some higher balance and sense of symmetry.
The Dissolve’s Scott Tobias writes on key themes in Michael Mann’s crime epic:
And that’s the other side of Heat’s symmetrical relationships: There’s Cop and Crook, Pacino and De Niro, Order and Chaos. We can admire Neil’s skill, as Mann does, while understanding that the criminal life he’s trying to lead—disciplined, elegant, orchestrated with multiple exits and down-to-the-second timing—is a folly from the start. It’s folly to bring an untested, unstable con on the armed-truck job. It’s a folly to steal bonds from a sleazy hedge-fund manager (William Fichtner) and expect him to buy them back without consequence. It’s folly to open up his home and heart to a woman he’ll have to leave in 30 seconds if he feels the heat around the corner. And it’s folly to seek revenge when self-preservation is the most rational option. “A man got to have a code,” Omar says in The Wire, but having a code, as Neil does, and actually abiding by it are two different things. Sometimes, the plan goes out the window.
Art of the Title on the iconic opening to Spike Lee’s film, featuring a then largely unknown Rosie Perez:
But while Ann-Margret looks delighted as she belts out her musical farewell, Perez looks anything but. She is hard and strong and determined. She never smiles. This is because much of her on-screen anger was real. The shoot for Do The Right Thing’s opening took place on a soundstage in Brooklyn which had a concrete floor, and Lee insisted on numerous takes, encouraging Perez to continuously bring more intensity to her dancing. Her back went out, she injured her knees. By the time they wrapped, she was using crutches.
A very thorough breakdown of Iñárritu’s recent best picture winner at the Oscars; it’s structure, Steadicam continuity and the long take. Overall I walk away from the piece having more respect for the film than when I actually saw it (a technical and acting masterpiece saddled with some poor screenplay choices.)
Grantland contributor Mark Harris wrote an influential, well circulated essay on Hollywood’s increasing investment in superhero movies. I finally caught up with it this week; it’s incredibly pessimistic, but Harris makes a compelling argument.
Another year, another Indiewire roundup discussion with top cinematographers on their preferred shooting formats. If you think it’s a one-sided argument of digital always trumping film, think again. While it’s true nearly every DP interviewed shoots with mostly digital today, there’s an interesting nuance to their position, one that speaks highly of the natural warmth and grain inherant to real film.
One positive byproduct of the fairly unremarkable (in the eyes of most film critics) Unbroken from late last year: a few solid interviews with legendary DP Roger Deakins.