The Roundup is a weekly series which collates (and curates) news, feature articles, podcast episodes and other online curios associated with film.
News
- Nothing Lasts Forever, a once thought lost sci-fi comedy from SNL’s post-Albert Brooks short film maestro Tom Schiller, and starring Bill Murray and Dan Ackroyd, has been once more thrust into the public eye via a post from Dangerous Minds. Richard Metzger’s piece for the site walks you through the history of the film, embeds some of Schiller’s earlier shorts and then, of course, the full feature.
- The good folks over at Senses of Cinema have launched their new website alongside Issue 71 of their long-running film journal. Have a gander.
Features
- Salon have this interview with Joe Swanberg about the release of Happy Christmas in the US, which contains some interesting stuff about cinema audiences, low budget filmmaking in 2014 and his back-to-back film work with Anna Kendrick. An excerpt:
“But if I had had VOD back then, I really could’ve, as a young cinephile, participated in a bigger conversation. If the IFC and Magnolias would’ve been able back then to get me those movies, I would’ve happily paid the money to watch them on iTunes. But you know, it wasn’t really an option back then. But now the tradeoff is that theatrical releases are rarer and theatrical success is like a unicorn these days. There’s only a couple of indie movies a year that really manage to find that audience in the theaters.”
- Esquire have an interview with the perpertually ‘retired’ Steven Soderbergh, where he talks his new series The Knick, his Bolivian brandy importation business and why exactly it is that he left filmmaking:
“The bottom line when people talk about all the reasons, you know the biggest reason? It stopped being fun. It just stopped being fun. It really wasn’t. That’s a big deal to me. It may sound like “Why do you have to have fun to go to work?” I don’t know. I like to be in a good mood. The ratio of bullshit to the fun part of doing the work was really starting to get out of whack.”
- Senses of Cinema also have some great content in Issue 71, including a very interesting piece by Sam Littman on the Romanian New Wave and the theory that its uage of long takes are a reaction to the “formal and thematic rigidity that handicapped the cinema of his (their) youth”.
- The Lumière Reader alerted us to this one in their review of Albert Serra’s Story of My Death (like us, they loved it) – CinemaScope’s interview with Serra is nuts, and in the best possible way – a choice question: “The other day you said that your film is “unfuckable.” Can you clarify what you mean by that?”
Podcasts
- Over at Grantland’s ‘Do You Like Prince Movies?’ podcast, Alex Pappademas sat down for a 45-minute interview with Richard Linklater about Boyhood. Linklater is always an engaging interview and the mostly casual tone of the podcast makes this feel less like film dissection than a hang-out.
- In memory of the late Paul Mazursky (An Unmarried Woman, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice), Austin Film Festival’s On Story podcast have re-uploaded a discussion between Mazursky and screenwriter Steve Zallian (Moneyball, Schindler’s List) from a panel at the 2000 festival titled ‘The Writer Director’
Other
- It seems like everytime we do one of these Roundup posts we include something from FilmGrab but that’s just because they are doing such a crazily good job. This week, among other films, they posted some gorgeous stills from Walter Salles’ underrated Kerouac adaptation On The Road.
- While Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer split our staff, his DVD picks from the Criterion closet are uniformly excellent. And because we’re talking Criterion DVD picks, it gives us an excuse to plug Guy Maddin’s video, which is pretty delightful.
Tweet of the Week
It’s an outrage @rianjohnson wasn’t nominated for an Emmy. Hope that guy gets some good news soon.
— Sam Adams (@SamuelAAdams) July 10, 2014