The Roundup is a new series which collates (and curates) news, feature articles, podcast episodes and other online curios associated with film.
News
- It’s rare for anyone to match the pure snark of The A.V. Club’s Sean O’Neal (although Saro gave it a red hot go), and his take on the Batman/Superman title saw him in fine form.
- Very late catching this one but doing some pre-SFF googling into Joe Swanberg’s Happy Christmas yielded this interesting THR article about indie filmmakers going back to 16mm film at Sundance this year
- The Marvel/Edgar Wright split is seeming less and less amicable as reports start to spill out. The update from Latino Review fans those flames.
Features
- Robert Lockard runs Deja Reviewer, a site focused essentially on comparing two films and pointing out glaring similarities between them. In addition to that, though, he occasionally writes longform essays, including one recently that argued that one of the reasons The Empire Strikes Back works so well is because its plot is “perfectly symmetrical”. His theory of a “cinematic chiasmus” is bound to be a little bit of a stretch but it makes for fascinating reading nonetheless.
- Grantland has given us two great recent reads – first up is Wesley Morris’ takedown of Ryan Gosling’s Lost River at Cannes, the second is an essay by Mark Harris about Marvel’s sprawling superhero franchise(s), in which it is adeptly noted that “entertainment that feels designed to be peripheral to larger entertainment isn’t that entertaining”.
Podcasts
- New York public radio station WNYC 93.9FM has brought Tribeca Film Festival (TFF) to those of us unfortunate souls who couldn’t transport ourselves to Tribeca. Exclusive podcasts of various panels and events with industry professionals have been supplied on WNYC’s website, including the Dolby Institute’s ‘The Art of Sound Design and Music’. This panel discussion sees music supervisor Susan Jacobs, sound mixer Skip Lievsay and Glenn Kiser of the aforementioned Institute discuss all things sound design and music composition for film, as part of a 3-part discussion series from the TFF supplemented by discussions on cinematography and editing. Despite being audio-only recordings, it is a stellar opportunity for those of us who were missing at the festival this year to gain some insight from industry experts – especially on an often overlooked and underrated area of film such as sound design.
- This week we found out (via Box Office Mojo) that Paul Thomas Anderson’s new feature Inherent Vice will be getting a December 12 release in the USA so we figured a PTA podcast episode was in order. Here is a great interview between PTA and Jonathan Demme, from the Austin Film Festival’s On Story podcast.
Other
- This Polish poster for the original 1954 Godzilla (designed by Alicja Laurman-Waszewska), was posted on Movie Poster of the Day
- Jean Luc-Godard’s “letter in motion” KHAN KHANNE sélection naturelle, made to formally decline Cannes president Gilles Jacob and artistic director Thierry Frémaux’s invitation to the press conference for Goodbye to Language, is well worth 8 minutes of your time. No subtitles, but Indiewire has posted the video and a translation here.
- One of the greatest what-if’s of cinema history is David Lynch being the original choice to direct Return of the Jedi. This video has been doing the rounds this week, presumably because it’s just plain funny to see the most contentious original Star Wars film be reworked for America’s most idiosyncratic director, but what I find amazing is how great the actual Jedi footage is revealed to be. Slow it all down and add some Spanish Roy Orbison and suddenly the Sarlac is hauntingly poetic, who knew?
- If you even remotely enjoy cinematography (read: everyone who likes movies), then you should be bookmarking FilmGrab, a site dedicated to high quality stills from interesting films. They’re now at over 500 films deep and you can sort by director, title, year and, most importantly, cinematographer. One of our faves? The still set from Xavier Dolan’s Heartbeats (Les Amours Imaginaires).
Tweet of the Week
If a $200 haircut and $900 shades were given lots of money to defecate on Detroit, the result would be Ryan Gosling’s directing debut.
— Wesley Morris (@Wesley_Morris) May 20, 2014