Now clos­ing in on 50 episodes, David Dut­ton’s 8‑Bit Cin­e­ma series for Cine­Flix cel­e­brates and cri­tiques the increas­ing video game qual­i­ties of action films. Or maybe it’s a nos­tal­gic do-over of a child­hood spent watch­ing great films turned into ter­ri­ble games and your favorite games turned into ter­ri­ble films. 8‑Bit Cin­e­ma imag­ines pop­u­lar and clas­sic movies turned into NES-era con­sole games, with the movie’s plot imag­ined as a “per­fect run,” as gamers call it.

Their ver­sion of Guardians of the Galaxy (watch it here) quotes Mega­man, Capcom’s 1987 hit game that is still spawn­ing sequels, and con­fines its action to a plat­form shoot­er, which, in a way, describes James Gunn’s film. (But dig that 8‑bit ver­sion of “The Pina Cola­da Song,” man!). The film adapts too well to a video game, and that may be its prob­lem.

Things get more inter­est­ing when Dutton’s cre­ative team tack­les films in the cult canon. One of their favorites, Pulp Fic­tion com­bines sev­er­al game gen­res: Dance Dance Rev­o­lu­tion for the Jack Rab­bit Slim sequence, side scrollers for the gun (and samu­rai sword)-heavy action, and more. But what 8‑Bit Cin­e­ma had to do was straight­en out Tarantino’s non-lin­ear nar­ra­tive, allow­ing the “play­er” to change char­ac­ters from Vince to Butch after their unfor­tu­nate meet­ing, and ditch all that won­der­ful dia­log. This 2 1/2 minute ver­sion quotes plen­ty of rare video games, just like Taran­ti­no quotes movies.

The Shin­ing is one of two Kubrick films the team has attempt­ed, the oth­er one being A Clock­work Orange. The Shin­ing one works bet­ter as Kubrick’s exam­i­na­tions of domes­tic vio­lence are ren­dered even ici­er (no pun intend­ed) through typ­i­cal vio­lent game­play, and tense con­fronta­tions between Jack and Wendy are reduced to emo­tion­less exchanges. The video ref­er­ences 1987’s Mani­ac Man­sion, appro­pri­ate­ly enough, which itself was a trib­ute to hor­ror movie clich­es.

Wes Anderson’s ship set from The Life Aquat­ic with Steve Zis­sou was designed much like a plat­form game, so the 8‑Bit Cin­e­ma team had an eas­i­er job with this one, and threw in ref­er­ences to Met­al Gear Sol­id to boot. Judg­ing from the com­ments, the 8‑Bit death of Ned still man­ages to pull the ol’ heart­strings, but the nar­ra­tive remains just as inscrutable.

The take­away here might be this: The bet­ter the film, the less it can con­form to the sim­plis­tic plots, puz­zle play, and point-scor­ing vio­lence that make video games fun to play. And while video games are undoubt­ed­ly a form of art, there’s a large gulf between them and cin­e­ma.

Cur­rent­ly Dutton’s crew man­ages one 8‑Bit Cin­e­ma short a month. For a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to put three min­utes of nos­tal­gic bliss togeth­er, check this out:

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills and/or watch his films here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

8‑Bit Phi­los­o­phy: Pla­to, Sartre, Der­ri­da & Oth­er Thinkers Explained With Vin­tage Video Games

The Inter­net Arcade Lets You Play 900 Vin­tage Video Games in Your Web Brows­er (Free)

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mas­ter­piece Stalk­er Gets Adapt­ed into a Video Game

When Amer­i­can soci­ety relin­quished cig­a­rettes, Amer­i­can cin­e­ma lost one of its most dra­mat­ic visu­al devices. You still see smok­ing in the movies, but its mean­ing has changed. “A cig­a­rette wasn’t always a state­ment,” wrote David Sedaris when he him­self kicked the habit. “Back when I start­ed, you could still smoke at work, even if you worked in a hos­pi­tal where kids with no legs were hooked up to machines. If a char­ac­ter smoked on a TV show, it did not nec­es­sar­i­ly mean that he was weak or evil. It was like see­ing some­one who wore a striped tie or part­ed his hair on the left — a detail, but not a telling one.”

These two short films show Amer­i­can auteurs keep­ing the cin­e­mat­ic cen­tral­i­ty of the cig­a­rette alive well after its hey­day had end­ed. At the top of the post, you can watch Jim Jar­musch’s 1986 short Cof­fee and Cig­a­rettes, which stars Steven Wright and Rober­to Benig­ni sit­ting down for and talk­ing about those very same con­sum­ables. It began a long-term project that cul­mi­nat­ed in Jar­musch’s 2003 fea­ture of the same name, which com­pris­es eleven such cof­fee- and cig­a­rette-cen­tric short films (one of them fea­tur­ing Iggy Pop and Tom Waits, anoth­er fea­tur­ing Bill Mur) shot over those eigh­teen years.

While one might nat­u­ral­ly have met a friend specif­i­cal­ly to enjoy caf­feine and nico­tine in the mid-1980s, a decade lat­er the sit­u­a­tion had changed: only in Amer­i­ca’s seed­i­er cor­ners could you even find a cof­fee-serv­ing estab­lish­ment to smoke in. Paul Thomas Ander­son used this very set­ting to begin his career with Cig­a­rettes and Cof­fee below. Eschew­ing film school, he gath­ered up his col­lege fund, some gam­bling win­nings, his girl­friend’s cred­it card, and var­i­ous oth­er bits and pieces of fund­ing in order to com­mit this short sto­ry to film.

It worked: Cig­a­rettes and Cof­fee scored Ander­son an invi­ta­tion to the Sun­dance Film­mak­ers Lab, a set­ting that allowed him to adapt the short into his fea­ture debut Hard Eight. Like Cig­a­rettes and Cof­fee, Hard Eight stars Philip Bak­er Hall, a favorite actor of Ander­son­’s that he went on to use in both Boo­gie Nights and Mag­no­lia. The­mat­i­cal­ly, this tale of a group of low-liv­ing but in their own ways hard-striv­ing char­ac­ters all con­nect­ed by a $20 bill presages the themes that, in his pic­tures of high­er and high­er pro­file, he con­tin­ues to work with today.

And can it be an acci­dent that Ander­son has, in the main, set his films in past eras that not only accept­ed smok­ing, but expect­ed it? Jar­musch, for his part, seems to pre­fer milieus at increas­ing dis­tance from our every­day expe­ri­ence, amid urban samu­rai, assas­sins in for­eign lands, immor­tal vam­pires in Detroit, that sort of thing. So if these film­mak­ers want to keep using smok­ing, they have ways. I just hope cof­fee does­n’t fall out of style. That would bring about a world that, as a film­go­er and a human being, I doubt I’d be pre­pared to live in.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Paul Thomas Ander­son Dropped Out of NYU Film School in 2 Days; Stud­ied Lit­er­a­ture with David Fos­ter Wal­lace

John Cleese Stars in a Mor­bid­ly Fun­ny Anti-Smok­ing Cam­paign (1992–1994)

An Anti, Anti-Smok­ing Announce­ment from John Waters

Bertrand Rus­sell: “I Owe My Life to Smok­ing”

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture as well as the video series The City in Cin­e­ma and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

I hope Orson Welles got used to see­ing his name on top-ten-films-of-all-time lists. He became a main­stay as soon as crit­i­cal con­sen­sus declared his debut Cit­i­zen Kane prob­a­bly the most impor­tant motion pic­ture ever made, and some cinephiles give spe­cial notice to his sub­se­quent works, such as The Lady from Shang­hai, Touch of Evil, F for Fake, and — for true con­trar­i­ans only — The Tri­al. So what does a man whose projects appear on so many top-ten lists from crit­ics and oth­er film­mak­ers alike put on his own?

“I don’t like cin­e­ma,” goes one per­haps-apoc­ryphal Welles quote. “I like mak­ing cin­e­ma.” (Some­times-heard vari­a­tion: “I don’t like cin­e­ma unless I shoot it.”) But even if he actu­al­ly said and believed that, he still man­aged to put togeth­er the fol­low­ing list of favorites in the ear­ly 1950s, about a decade after hav­ing entered the film­mak­ing game but with most of the cin­e­ma he would make still to come:

1. City Lights (Char­lie Chap­lin)
2. Greed (Erich von Stro­heim, 1924)
3. Intol­er­ance (D.W. Grif­fith, 1916)
4. Nanook of the North (Robert Fla­her­ty, 1992)
5. Shoe Shine (Vit­to­rio De Sica, 1946)
6. The Bat­tle­ship Potemkin (Sergei Eisen­stein, 1925)
7. La Femme du Boulanger (Mar­cel Pag­nol, 1938)
8. Grand Illu­sion (Jean Renoir, 1937)
9. Stage­coach (John Ford, 1939)
10. Our Dai­ly Bread (King Vidor, 1934)

If Cit­i­zen Kane opened up the pos­si­bil­i­ties of cin­e­ma — and to get an idea of just how much influ­ence it has had from its release to this day, sim­ply watch any film made before it — the pic­tures Welles puts onto his list, in large part a clas­si­cist’s even in the 50s, gave cin­e­ma its form in the first place. If you plan on doing a self-admin­is­tered course in film his­to­ry, you could do much worse than begin­ning with the favorite films of Orson Welles — then mov­ing on, of course, to the films of Orson Welles.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to Eight Inter­views of Orson Welles by Film­mak­er Peter Bog­danovich (1969–1972)

Dis­cov­er the Lost Films of Orson Welles

Watch Orson Welles’ The Stranger Free Online, Where 1940s Film Noir Meets Real Hor­rors of WWII

The Hearts of Age: Orson Welles’ Sur­re­al­ist First Film (1934)

Orson Welles Explains Why Igno­rance Was His Major “Gift” to Cit­i­zen Kane

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture as well as the video series The City in Cin­e­ma and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Toward the end of 2013, we fea­tured a series of video essays by Matt Zoller Seitz on the films of Wes Ander­son. They first came out to accom­pa­ny The Wes Ander­son Col­lec­tion, the crit­ic’s cof­fee-table ret­ro­spec­tive of that auteur of whim­si­cal hand­craft­ed films’ career to date — to the date of late 2013, any­way. Even then, fans had already geared them­selves up in antic­i­pa­tion of the then-immi­nent release of The Grand Budapest Hotel, Ander­son­’s eighth and lat­est pic­ture, which at the moment has resur­faced in awards-sea­son buzz.

The dimin­ish­ing num­ber of you who have proven still imper­vi­ous to Ander­son­’s pecu­liar brand of movie mag­ic might, actu­al­ly, feel you’ve heard a bit too much about The Grand Budapest Hotel over the past year or so. What, pray tell, is the big deal? Here to answer that ques­tion, we have Zoller Seitz’s brand new video essay on Ander­son­’s tale of that tit­u­lar once-grand moun­tain hotel and the 20th-cen­tu­ry Europe of the imag­i­na­tion (even­tu­al­ly giv­ing way to the 20th-cen­tu­ry Europe of his­to­ry) that swirls around and through it.

“All of Wes Ander­son­’s films are come­dies,” says Zoller Seitz, “and none are.” Through­out the fol­low­ing fif­teen min­utes, he ana­lyzes exact­ly how, with The Grand Budapest Hotel, Ander­son climbs to the top of both of his per­son­al twin peaks of friv­o­li­ty and seri­ous­ness — or seri­ous­ness expressed through friv­o­li­ty, or vice ver­sa. In the direc­tor’s “most struc­tural­ly ambi­tious film,” we see not just lay­ers of com­e­dy and melan­choly but of his­to­ry, lit­er­a­ture, artistry, and anx­i­ety, all tied in with the Ander­son­ian char­ac­ters’ end­less quest to mas­ter their own sense of loss by mas­ter­ing the world around them — which Ander­son shows us, to a fuller extent in The Grand Budapest Hotel, than in any of his live-action movies before, with his own mas­tery of the world he and his col­lab­o­ra­tors cre­ate.

For anoth­er look into what this requires in film­mak­ing terms, see also “Here’s How Wes Ander­son Uses Mat­te Paint­ings in His Incred­i­ble Set Designs” by The Cre­ators Pro­jec­t’s Beck­ett Muf­son. That inter­view with Grand Budapest Hotel mat­te painter Simone de Sal­va­tore reveals, by look­ing at just one aspect of the whole, how much goes into the design of a Wes Ander­son pro­duc­tion. View­ers who love Ander­son­’s pic­tures, of course, love them in large part for exact­ly that, and even view­ers who hate them have to con­cede their impec­ca­bil­i­ty on that count. Both groups now have only to wait for this Sun­day to see how the Acad­e­my feels about it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Per­fect Sym­me­try of Wes Anderson’s Movies

A Glimpse Into How Wes Ander­son Cre­ative­ly Remixes/Recycles Scenes in His Dif­fer­ent Films

Watch Wes Anderson’s Charm­ing New Short Film, Castel­lo Cav­al­can­ti, Star­ring Jason Schwartz­man

Wes Anderson’s First Short Film: The Black-and-White, Jazz-Scored Bot­tle Rock­et (1992)

Watch 7 New Video Essays on Wes Anderson’s Films: Rush­more, The Roy­al Tenen­baums & More

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture as well as the video series The City in Cin­e­ma and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.