The Roundup is a new weekly series which collates (and curates) news, feature articles, podcast episodes and other online curios associated with film.
News
- One of the screenplays on the most recent Black List was Stephany Folsom’s “1969: A Space Odyssey, Or How Kubrick Learned To Stop Worrying And Land On the Moon.”, a film that plays with urban legend as much as Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter. Deadline reported this week that a staged reading of the script will be happening in LA, with the most interesting thing being who is playing Kubrick – Jared Harris of Mad Men and Igby Goes Down fame. What I’m trying to say is read this, think about how great Jared Harris is, then go watch Igby Goes Down. Underrated and underseen.
Features
- The Talkhouse is an interesting twist on both interview and essay, in which musicians wax lyrical about other artists and albums and filmmakers talk features tangentially related to their own. Considering SFF is just around the corner, we’ve found a piece written by Adam Leon, director of Gimme the Loot (a favourite from last year’s Possible Worlds Film Fest) on Gia Coppola’s Palo Alto. You can read that here and get tickets to see Palo Alto at SFF here.
- There is a regular column over at Movie Mezzanine by Kristen Sales called The Penny Pinching Cinephile, which looks at films available to stream for free online. It’s pretty fantastic, with the most recent post including Kelly Reichardt’s crazy-good Meek’s Cutoff and The Long Good Friday, starring the late Bob Hoskins. [Note for Aus. readers: these free films are US-specific, using Hulu et al.]
- Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars expired on Netflix US at the start of June, so some of us were in a rush to catch it. Related googling led to the ever interesting Art of the Title, where they have a piece on the Western title sequences of Iginio Lardan. Worth a read.
Podcasts
- Sideshow, a new offshoot of Studio 360 on PRI, is a podcast that looks an internet culture (at this stage, though, it’s a lesser and more novel TL;DR). A new episode focuses on some Twitter accounts linked to screenwriting, from the Seinfeld Today to the episode’s focus, Unfinished Scripts, a twitter account, from the mind of a UCB performer, which posts only the first page of truly terrible screenplays.
- Katrina Longworth has a podcast that’s only a few months old called You Must Remember This, which looks at Old Hollywood history. It’s a refreshing change amidst the film podcast landscape, utilising a Radiolab-esque approach in editing to craft a unique aural essay. Start with episode one, on Kim Novak (pictured above behind-the-scenes in Vertigo) and go from there.
Other
- Brought to our attention by archival legend LaFamiliaFilm over at Cinephilia & Beyond, Buster Keaton’s autobiography, My Wonderful World of Slapstick, is available for free over at archive.org
- Tony Zhou runs a series of video essays on Vimeo called “Every Frame a Painting”, in which he looks at film form. He started the series with 4:3 fave Mother (Joon-ho, 2009) but this week posted a great and accessible look at the visual comedy in the films of Edgar Wright, most effective when constrasting the way in which Wright uses film techniques to enhance comedic beats relative to many of his American counterparts.
- David Ehrlich’s tumblr, The Death of Cinema, brought to our attention this video of the first five minutes of 10,000 movies. Here’s the kicker, though, you can click through quadrants/sections of the video until it becomes possible to make out which each film is. Super cool rabbit-hole and exhibit of visual hooks in cinema.
- Late Night Basement, a live show in Brooklyn, recently had H. John Benjamin of Bob’s Burgers and Archer stop by, who dubbed over HAL in this clip from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. We never knew how much we needed this video.
Tweet of the Week
A Million Ways to Dianne the Wiest
— Jon Daly (@jondaly) May 30, 2014